Sad!
Report: Seventeen sufferers missing after gang attacks Monrovia quarantine centre and reportedly takes contaminated material.
An Ebola quarantine centre in Liberia has been looted by a gang who reportedly took bloodstained sheets and forced 17 patients to flee, raising the chances of the virus spreading.
The attack happened at a unit in the West Point area of Monrovia late on Saturday. Rebecca Wesseh, who witnessed the attack, told the AFP news agency on Sunday that the gang were mostly young men armed with clubs.
Wesseh said she heard the attackers shouting anti-government slogans and insisting there was “no Ebola” in Liberia. “They broke down the door and looted the place. The patients have all gone,” she said.
Wanting to know your ancestry is a powerful motivator that many DNA testing companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com have exploited for great profit. But apart from individual curiosity, genetic studies into our ancestry also offer the ability to peer into the history books, offering a DNA time machine, and a unique window into the history of civilized people.
Now in the largest study of its kind conducted so far, researchers at 23andMe and Harvard University have published the results of a genetic analysis of ancestry among the American people.
The study itself is quite impressive, conducted with 160,000 people who agreed to allow their data to be used anonymously for research purposes when they submitted their DNA for analysis with 23andMe. Such huge sample numbers, which are “an order of magnitude bigger” according to an author of the study, allows for a much more thorough analysis than ever before, helping the authors produce a detailed geographical map of ancestry in the United States. Three major population groups considered in the study: African-Americans, European Americans and Latinos.
Broadly, the genomic analysis found that on an average the African American genome was 73.2 percent African, 24 percent European and 0.8 percent Native American. Latinos as expected had significantly more Native American ancestry with the average Latino genome being 18 percent Native American, 65.1 percent European and 6.2 percent African.
With respect to European Americans, the percentages are much more different than African Americans or Latinos, with European American genomes being 98.6 percent European, 0.19 percent African and 0.18 percent Native American. In general, the numbers seem to agree with what one would expect given the history of American colonization by Europeans and their interactions with African and Native Americans.
Detailed percentages of ancestry in the various geographical regions showed relatively wide variations in the ancestry which seem to corroborate historical events.
What are the social implications of this study? The title of Carl Zimmer’s New York Times article on the research “White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier,” seems to suggest that the genetic data show that racial divides have significantly blurred as populations have mixed
In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter.
“We use these terms — white, black, Indian, Latino — and they don’t really mean what we think they mean,” said Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study.
Razib Khan at the Unz Review, has a different view however (emphasis his):
What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population.
Steve Sailer, a long time writer on race and ethnicity, also writing at the Unz Review, agrees with Khan, with some quick back–of–the envelope calculations to show how…
…whiteness in modern America turns out to be not very murky at all. These findings of 0.19 percent black and 0.18 percent American Indian are tiny numbers.
Think about your family tree back nine generations ago, which would mostly be in the 1700s. You have 512 slots in your family tree nine generations ago (two to the ninth power). The 23andMe numbers suggest that for the average white American, 1 of your 512 ancestors nine generations ago was black and 1 of 512 was Native American.
Here’s another way to think of it. If the average self-identified black is 73.2 percent black and the average self-identified white is 0.19 percent black, then the average black in America is 385 times blacker than the average white. That doesn’t seem very murky to me.
* If you want to do something for your grandchildren, buy land and plant hardwoods on it. They will reap the gain.
Israel’s population has increased more than ten times since 1949. The population density is close to Haiti’s. And yet, oddly, they have far more trees now than they did then, hundreds of millions more trees. And their country is half desert. Memo to Africa: Apparently one may also plant trees.
Interestingly before the Nazis decided to kill the Jews off in Europe, at one point they considered sending them all to Madagascar.
* One of the successes of US immigration policy is ending Haitians arriving by boat. They used to arrive in droves in the 1990s by boat not any more and the situation is arguably worse today in Haitian than it was the 90s.
* I believe that Madagascar is a microcosm of what the world will become. We had a chance, albeit a small one, to escape the Malthusian collapse of our globe. But we dithered it away with post-modernism, feminism and its ilk.
We provide for the mass reproduction of people incapable of providing for themselves other than through crude resource exploitation. Simultaneously, we decrease the fertility of those intellectually capable of defeating scarcity.
It’s a recipe for disaster. We will all be long dead before this comes to pass, but it’s still depressing.
* Promoting birth reduction in Africa is controversial. Al Gore, notably did exactly this to limited effect. Even Bill Gates, giving out massive amounts of aid and medicine to reduce death rates in Sub-Saharan Africa advocated reducing birth rates and widely spread birth control options.
Much of the left, doesn’t want a population explosion in Africa. Normal black Americans, have zero interest in increased immigration from Africa.
* Trees convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. Trees provide habitat for animals and understory plants. Dead trees help build the soil. Trees provide a variety of renewable resources (of much higher value than firewood/charcoal).
