Dissident Veteran For Peace: Elizabeth Warren's Latest 'I'm an Indian' Salvo

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Monday, October 15, 2018

Elizabeth Warren's Latest 'I'm an Indian' Salvo

The mainstream media is abuzz about Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) latest salvo in her battle to validate her claim to American Indian ancestry. Out of curiosity, I had a look at the report Warren commissioned from a "famous geneticist", i.e. Carlos Bustamante, PhD.

A few things that I haven't seen discussed in the mainstream media stand out to me. First, the Bustamante report has no discussion about how it was verified that Warren provided the sample that was tested and how the chain of custody was maintained and verified.

Second, it is curious that Bustamante does not more specifically identify the segments he used to conclude that the results of Warren's test "strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor". He merely speaks of "five genetic segments", averaging 5.8 centiMorgans long (with the longest being on chromosome 10). Bustamante says the entire human genome is 3,595 centiMorgans long.

Finally, check out the image below from the Bustamante report. Notice anything major missing?

If your answer was "only the most populous continent on earth" then you get a gold star. Yes, Asia is missing, and since most geneticists believe American Indians descend mainly from early Asian immigrants to the Americas then inquiring minds wonder what that scatterplot would look like if Asians had been included. And how did Bustamante decide that the "five genetic segments" in Warren's putative DNA aren't from long ago admixture with an Asian ancestor—a Hun or Magyar, perhaps?

Labels: Indians, politics, science, White folks