Why do we have toes?

Toes eh?

After bumping my foot into a scrappy computer on the floor and experiencing the appropriate pain I starting thinking about evolution and why the hell we humans still have toes. What is the point of toes?

According to evolutionary theory, natural selection not only weeds out the weak and infirm, but it also tends to preserve characteristics that are truly beneficial to the evolution of those organisms. If six fingers were really a beneficial mutation most men and women would be six-fingered, and the same goes for three or four fingers. However, for me, this seems very arbitrary. Why five? And if toes really are so great, why are they made so fragile and easy to break?

The easy answer is: who the fuck cares! Or, perhaps; because we do.

But according to most scientists humans are primates, a group of animals that was initially adapted to living in trees. When you are a tree dweller it is advantageous to have a grasping ability on all your limbs. However when human ancestors left the trees they became more adapted to running on the ground. Part of this adaptation expressed itself through shorter toes. This adaptation was advantageous because running on the ground was more important to the early human lifestyle than climbing in the trees. Unless you are a creationist or feel that the Annunaki story offers a more compelling background, this explanation seems very feasible.

However, this doesn’t really explain why no other form evolved or why the number is five. For me it seem highly improbable that five out sticking easily to break limbs stuck to us throughout the ages without evolution discarding it with lots and lots of bumping-into-things events. And even if our current evolutionary situation, historically speaking, hasn’t lasted that long, when will we see another evolved human with zero toes? It is not that hard to imagine that a life more suited for desk dwelling and computer typing will sooner or later discard attributes no longer needed. Toes should be one of the first things to go since they are in the way of cables and we don´t really need to run anymore.

This will not happen overnight and its very likely that humans has colonized space long before this evolution takes effect. However it may give us a clue how a potential “humanoid” creature beyond the stars visiting our planet will look like. Wouldn’t such an Alien be without limbs all together?

In the evolutionary process the basic body plan does not change unless two things happen. First, a genetic trait has to appear (through mutation or through a novel recombination of established traits) that allows for the change. Therefore, all vertebrates will have five toes unless they possess a "gene" for fewer toes. Second, that gene must somehow confer an advantage on those who have it. Is ‘not bumping into things’ a big enough advantage for a non-toe human to evolve? Probably not, but all in all, with running only being for athletes, it is not unthinkable either.

So remember were you read it first; twenty-eight thousand years into the future we will have less or no toes at all. I cannot wait for this to take place, much easier than to actually clean the floor…

Fools of April, May and all other months

What would life be without practical jokes? Introduce a Gregorian calendar and some people will refuse to abide the new dates, which is funny in its own right, and then others can throw feces at or in other ways mock the unbelievers. Fast forward 500 years and a great pastime have been created from a seemingly harmless change of a calendar.

The jokes of the ages have varied in degrees of funniness. Sometimes a funny man with hilarious solutions to problems emerges and wackiness ensues. We have seen this many times, and if you ask people most would probably agree that the antics of the 1920’s and 1930’s that lead to the War of the Pranksters - part II - that was topped off with the novelty figure Adolf is by far the highest form of comical relief.

As funny as the holocaust, Napoleonic conquest, murderess conquistador and religious fanatics may be, they are still not really up there with what I, personally, find funniest of all time.

You see over time people should have learned something, but they haven´t. The same problems over and over again, being handled in the same way over and over again. People drink, smoke, or fuck too much? Bann, tax or forbid it – the unison answer of every government since the dawn of man. Economic turmoil? Blame the neighbor, the Jews, the Muslims, black people and then start wars – the unison answer of every government since the dawn of man.

On topic after topic, in response to each problem, solutions are old, very old. If you know our history, nothing of today will surprise you. This is of course hilarious repetitive stuff, nightmarish sure, but still hilarious.

One reoccurring topic in movies and literature is that mankind holds the key to its own destruction. Although true, the way authors, directors and movie producers interpret this is totally wrong. In their world nuclear war, the scam of manmade global warming and a high level of immorality (too much drinking, smoking and fucking) can bring forth the end. This notion is enhanced by nutty spokespersons of religious beliefs such as idiots believing in a super-zombie Jew that could walk on water or morons screaming the name of a child molesting desert-dwelling trickster every morning from minarets. Keep the sheople scared and the masters of pranks can, time and again, create famine, financial calamities and wage war against a neighboring sheople on the basis of a joke.

If such repetitive jokes are brought forth almost on a daily basis, who cannot laugh at it? Maybe gang raped women in Afghanistan or hospitalized children in Iraq have a hard time to laugh, and maybe the tens of thousands dying every year in pointless wars don´t really die with a smile, but in general it is hard not to stand in awe over the funnies constantly added to the annals of man.

However, out of all the hilariousness we´ve seen so far I am a firm believer that the funniest time of all is happening right now.

Let me give you a short recap.

During decades of building a global structure in favor of banks, financial institutes and large political entities things have gone into overdrive during the last couple of years. Never before in the history of man has so much money flown from commoners to banksters and oligarchs. Remember what they said when the first part of the crisis struck? Back then we needed to save mankind from a looming depression through borrowing shitloads of money, print trillions of more useless notes, and throw it all at ”the too big to fail’s”. Essentially transferring the wealth of the many and the wealth of the future over to the few and already rich. The cash that didn´t go to scheming suits sitting in dark rooms stroking a white cat went to government black-hole projects of the same type we´ve seen so many times before.

Since they didn´t actually fix the problems, and since the underlying fundaments are still the same this ”solution” didn´t really work. And so, hilariously enough, they are today introducing austerity measures and heightening taxation while still printing and borrowing shitloads of money. And, again, wealth is transferred from normal people over to those that rule. The biggest robbery in history was followed by the third biggest scam (after Global warming and religion) in history which in turn has built the biggest sand castle in history. The deck of cards waiting to be toppled over by history’s biggest financial tsunami has reached the moon while our masters of despair try to impose more restrictions.

This is funny shit.

You haft to understand that the hundreds of trillions of derivatives, that the hundreds of trillions of debt and the trillions of freshly printed notes have created a situation that will obliterate all that we know, and we will crash so hard that it will dwarf anything you can imagine.

There are only three things keeping the wheels going right now.

Firstly all that fictitious money floating around is making markets, governments and everyday fools believe all is dandy, or close to it.

Secondly the entities above us mortals are doing everything they can to hide the problems – and they do this by making sure we compare useless currencies with other useless currencies, and by using bought and paid for spin-doctors to cable out false information every hour.

Thirdly they use the fake, and totally useless, notion of GDP to play charades. China is building entire cities no-one lives in, the US is fighting war after war, European countries keep borrowing from each other, and pretty much every country on the planet is lying about their debts and income. All to keep GDP up and create a false respiratory breathing that will only have one single effect; increase the height and size of the deck of cards and so increase the disaster.

They say we shouldn´t mind the man behind the curtain, and I firmly believe that most within the Powers That Be don´t know what they are doing, they are just following a recipe that has been tried before.

As before when similar antics have been ushered we can actually predict what comes next. And we don´t need to go back that far in history to see what this entails. Minor crisis’s of the 1970’s and late 1990’s may give you a clue, but if we go back to that funny period of Adolf you´ll see a more accurate fallout - albeit the level of problems and so the level of pranks are much bigger today. Also the stakes are much higher today with not only a global economy but also much more destructive weapons available to all.

So on this day, when joke after joke are thrown around, keep some of that laughter for what awaits us. I promise nothing has been funnier. The world as we know it is about to turn upside down, and although this sort of coincide with the Mayan calendar (calendar again eh?) it’s not a sudden apocalypse that oracles have predicted, it’s just a normal event in the history of man, just a lot worse...