NEWS RANT: Sperm count crisis and how more free time makes you happier.

Ok so every so often I like to take either a story or a few stories from the news and give my 2cents on them. Ok so the first bit of news I am going to get into is the fact that several sites announced that due to sperm counts dropping one day the human race could become extinct. Now obviously I think there is a fair degree of shouting and screaming going on here in order to try and make people rush to read the news so lets look at the facts here. Major studies have shown that Sperm counts have plummeted by nearly two-thirds since the 70s with experts blaming modern living for damaging male fertility.
Scientists claim that chemicals in plastics, pesticides, poor diet, smoking and obesity are all harming peoples sperm counts.

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reviewed 185 studies involving 43,000 men.
There findings indicated that men in Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand have seen their sperm concentration fall by 52 per cent in the past four decades. Apparently though men in South America, Asia and Africa have been unaffected.

''Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species''Dr Hagai LevineHebrew University of Jerusalem

 Ok so am I worried at all about the future of mankind, well not really at least not as far as sperm counts and fertility issues go. We already have so many people having kids that they dont really want or need, the world is quiet frankly over populated and I think most of the issues we have are down to over population, if the population shrinks then it would only actually help the world to carry on and well less people less plastics and such will be needed, also I am a big fan of Jurrasic Park so I strongly believe the quote ''Life will find a way''.

The second piece of news I want to talk about is the fact that there was a study in to what makes you happier time or money. To put it simply this study showed that if you used money to free-up time rather than either buying junk with it or just hoarding it you could increase your happiness. In all honesty this didnt suprise me in the slightest, partly because I used to work like 70 hours a week at one point and have no time to myself at all and I was miserable and partly because I was always told a certain gem of advice when I was younger and thats''Be careful how much you work because the one thing you cant buy with the money you earn is more time'' Now it might sound like thats saying that working in general is a waste of time but I dont mean that at all nor did the people who said it to me what they were trying to tell me is that the pursuit of money is not everything and you shouldnt spend all of the time you have trying to get ahold of it at the expense of hobbies and loved ones and other things you can spend your time on.

So basically in the experiment that was done individuals reported greater happiness if they used £30 to save time. So how do you use money to save time well they did it by doing things like paying other people to do chores for them. Psychologists have basically argued that one of the major things which stresses people out is worrying over lack of time and that this leads to lower well-being and also contributes to anxiety and insomnia. It was apparently shown in the study that if you used the money to gain yourself free time it actually helped you a lot more than trying to use your money to buy things such as films or alchol. I could have gone in to this story in a lot more depth but as a person who has gone from a long hours career into a part time job in an effort to better manage my mental health I found this news very intresting and while I am not suprised to read the findings of this experiment I do hope that this makes some people stop and think about how they live there life and manage there own mental health.

So does anything tie these two stories togther? Well they are both about health be it physical or mental, I think both of them just go to show that we as people are not really doing very well when it comes to managing our own health, we concentrate to much on money work and industry and we forget the simple pleasures in life, if everyone just took a little bit more time out to stop and smell the roses I think things would be a little bit better for everyone overall.

A bit about the Media and certain stories in it, how I feel about them, the media and freedom.

I had sat after hearing a report on the radio thinking that I would write a piece about the news issue that had been raised, but then when I did some research into it I found out that the story being talked about wasnt a current issue it was in fact something that happend around 4 years ago. Then I was again listening to the radio latter when they annoucned a news story which I really did not think was news worthy at all, apparently the child of the singer Adele calls her a bum head. This made me stop and think about how the actual media itself is crazy. It makes news out of things that are not news at all and are in fact just bits of random celebrity dribble while also dragging up events that happend ages ago again and again when there is very little happening. Then when something dreadful actually does happen they drip feed you all of the details piece by piece sometimes with acompanying photos and videos which are sometimes far more terrfying than the horror films or video games that the same media has screamed will ruin are children by showing them gore and mayhem that they shouldnt really be subjected to. The media seems to want a free pass to titilate its viewers/readers/listeners with ghoulish delight by giving your fear center a little tickle while also trying to take the moral high ground.

Still in this post I want to both my feelings on the media as well as my feelings on some of the stories that have recently been in the news, I dont promise all of these stories will have recently happend, I just want to talk about things that have been in the news in the last few days (although unlike the mainstream media if something is old I will point this out).

So to start Home Secretary Aber Rudd has demanded that Whatsapp must allow security services to access users’ messages in the wake of the Westminster terror attack. Ms Rudd said it was “unacceptable” that the security services were unable to see messages sent by terrorists. The problem here is though that it is basically a polotician saying that they should be able to spy on the people they represent. Yes right now she just wants to look at what proven terrorists have communicated through online services but its a slippery slope, the next step would be to look at the communications of suspected terrorists. Then after this they could widden the definition of terrorist up to the point where anyone who disagrees with anything the goverment says can have there deepest most secret messages looked at just incase they have said anything they can possibly be punished for. I think the simple truth is that the government needs to be denied some powers in order for its citizens to have freedom, if you strip away basic freedoms like the freedom to have private conversations then your trying to take away peoples right to disagree with the status quo and in the words of Yoda ''that path leads to darkness''.

I suppose I should go back to the old news story. I said at the start of all of this that sometimes something that happend a long time ago is reported as if it just happend. Well in this case it was a 4 year old story in which a man who had murderd someone had got a sex change on the NHS and gone into a Women's prison as he was now a Woman. My instant response to the story was that the man commited this criminal act as a man, was tried and found guilty as a man and therefore should serve his sentance as a man. I thought that he should loose his rights as a person for killing a person, for breaking the rules of society, after all he had killed someone and had taken there rights away from them alone with there life.

If you look at my oppinions on the two above stories then you will see that on the one hand I am wanting the goverment to let people be free to have there own oppinions yet I am also wanting criminals to loose there rights, it could be argued that I am controdicting myself. This is not the case though, what I am really saying is that I think people deserve to have there own freedom and oppinion up until the point they prove they dont deserve it, but the thing I fear is that those in power will use criminals and extremists as an excuse to take away everyones rights, they will use our fear of these things to take away our freedoms under the illusion of protecting us.