Elizabeth Warren releases her DNA test.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Both of them are bad picks, you won't see a Californian senator win a national election in the current climate, the whole 2016 election was a show of middle America rejecting coastal ideals. You could stack the deck with celebrities, tv talk show hosts and sports stars and all it did was fuel the sentiment of a divided country further.

Donald Trump, New York Billionaire* whose biggest contribution to the rust belt working class has been a 0.5% tax break. Meanwhile he's expanded rights of big businesses and the amount of money they save from 20-40% tax breaks

Yep, real rejection of coastal elite ideals there... totally... not being sarcastic at all...

*alleged

[Northern Goblin]

I don't share your opinion in the number of potential swing voters.

Reason you didn't see them last election, is because they didn't vote at all.

- - - Updated - - -

Donald Trump, New York Billionaire* whose biggest contribution to the rust belt working class has been a 0.5% tax break. Meanwhile he's expanded rights of big businesses and the amount of money they save from 20-40% tax breaks

Yep, real rejection of coastal elite ideals there... totally... not being sarcastic at all...

*alleged

Yes because Hollywood actors were clamouring up to make a video about how terrible a candidate his opponent is, while New York late night was singing his praises and ridiculing his opponent and anyone who'd vote for them.

That's what the people in the rust belt saw, and Trump played the victimhood card to a T.

[Mormolyce]

Yes because Hollywood actors were clamouring up to make a video about how terrible a candidate his opponent is, while New York late night was singing his praises and ridiculing his opponent and anyone who'd vote for them.

That's what the people in the rust belt saw, and Trump played the victimhood card to a T.

They always play the victim, you can't fail to call out their despicable actions because it might upset them. Obviously that's what they want, everyone being too afraid to call them on their ridiculous shit. Lord knows it's indefensible on its own merits.

[Northern Goblin]

They always play the victim, you can't fail to call out their despicable actions because it might upset them. Obviously that's what they want, everyone being too afraid to call them on their ridiculous shit. Lord knows it's indefensible on its own merits.

Course spin always happens, and politicians paint themselves in the best light. Trump managed to weaponise victimhood at the height of 2016 populism.

[Mormolyce]

Course spin always happens, and politicians paint themselves in the best light. Trump managed to weaponise victimhood at the height of 2016 populism.

He just regurgitated the talking points that the far right fringe has been inundating these gullible schmucks with for decades. Don't give him too much credit.

And reminder, the net result was him getting fewer votes than his opponent.

[Dontrike]

Has Trump paid up ye....AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, I couldn't finish that without laughing. Trump owes so much many to so many people he's probably legally owned by someone at this point.

[Felya]

Yes because Hollywood actors were clamouring up to make a video about how terrible a candidate his opponent is, while New York late night was singing his praises and ridiculing his opponent and anyone who'd vote for them.

That's what the people in the rust belt saw, and Trump played the victimhood card to a T.

Trump gets a pension from Screen Actors Guild. He is quite literally a crisis actor... see current riots in California and the bowling green massacre as examples.

Trump is literally the opposite of what his support claims to want...

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...y-2018-midterm

[Levelfive]

I'm sure the people reliably parroting Republican lies won't read this, but for those not fact-averse and curious about the "whiter than most Americans!" bullshit ("no Native American DNA!" bullshit unpacked more here):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.ab7610af3aa6

"After being egged on by President Trump, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released the results of a DNA test Oct. 15 that indicated that she had a Native American ancestor.

The results — which identified Native American DNA from six to 10 generations ago — were immediately misinterpreted.

It started with a Boston Globe report, which initially indicated that the test showed she was at best 1/32nd Native American and possibly just 1/512th Native American. After confessing twice to a math error, the Globe corrected the numbers to 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American. That would translate to between 98.44 percent and 99.9 percent not Native American.

The RNC then issued a news release directing reporters to a 2014 New York Times report that said “European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.” So it sounded like Warren had less Native American DNA than the average European-American.

We even issued a tweet along these lines (at a moment when the Globe still indicated the range was between 1/32nd and 1/1024th):

But it turns out reporters and politicians are not very good at understanding genetics. So we will set the record straight, after reviewing the results in detail and consulting with genetics experts.


The Facts

Warren’s DNA was sequenced and analyzed by a group led by Carlos Bustamante, a well-regarded Stanford University geneticist. Researchers studied a fraction — far less than 1/1000th — of Warren’s DNA, and then compared it to the DNA of 148 people from Finland, Italy, Spain, China, Nigeria and North and South America. Additional comparison was done with 185 individuals from Utah and Great Britain.

As one might expect, the vast majority of Warren’s DNA — 95 percent — indicated European ancestors. But five genetic segments were identified, with 99 percent confidence, as being associated with Native American ancestry. The largest segment identified was on Chromosome 10.

“While the vast majority of the individual’s ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago,” the report said.

Here’s where the reporting went off course. The report said that Warren had 10 times more Native American ancestry than the reference set from Utah, and 12 times more than the set from Britain. The report also said that the long segment on Chromosome 10 indicated that the DNA came from a relatively recent ancestor.

Those are significant findings. But reporters focused on the language indicating a range of between the sixth to 10th generation. That raised the prospect of an ancestor amid hundreds of great-great-great-etc.-grandparents. The image below of eight generations (256 ancestors), via the UC Davis genetics lab, indicates how the generations quickly expand (red is for female and blue is for male). It shows an even distribution, with each successive ancestor contributing equally to the DNA of an individual.

Generations evenly distributed. (Coop Lab, University of California Davis)

But ancestors do not contribute genetic material equally over time. Here’s the image of 11 generations of ancestors by genetic material they contributed to a particular individual. Some ancestors contribute a lot — while others nothing at all. In other words, as you go back in time, the number of your ancestors keeps increasing but not nearly as fast as the number of genealogical ancestors. Look closely at the sixth generation, and you will see some strong contributors of genetic material — and many weak ones.

How genetic material actually travels through generations. (Coop Lab, University of California Davis)

The most important point is this: The results in Warren’s DNA test are static. The percentage of Native American DNA in her genome does not shrink as you go back generations. There could be one individual in the sixth generation — living around the mid-1800s, which is similar to Warren family lore — or possibly a dozen or more ancestors back to the 10th generation, which would be about 250 years ago. Her results are consistent with a single ancestor, however.

(Note: Bustamante did not have access to Native American DNA because of mistrust in the community that DNA results could affect tribal identity, so he relied on samples of indigenous people from Mexico, Peru and Colombia — populations in the Americas with high native American genetic ancestry. There is research showing that using these groups as references is accurate when differentiating between genetic ancestries at a worldwide level. But no tribe for Warren could be identified, only that she had an ancestor or ancestors descended from indigenous people.)

This basic error in understanding the test results was compounded by the RNC’s reference to the 2014 New York Times article, which was about a genetic profile of the United States, based on a study of 160,000 people drawn from the customer base of 23andMe, a consumer personal genetics company. With reporters believing that Warren’s genome was only as little as 0.01 percent Native American*, the article’s line that “European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American” made it appear as if Warren’s sample was even smaller than that of the average American. (*Note: an earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to the high end of range, 1.56 percent.)

Not so. Remember we said that the Bustamante study said she had 10 times more than the individuals from Utah? That’s the relevant statistic, indicating that her claim to some Native American heritage is much stronger than most European Americans.

In fact, the 23andMe study used a different methodology, so it cannot be compared to the Bustamante report. Moreover, the reference to an average “European-American” is misleading, because there are wide variations in the genetic makeup, with the vast majority of European Americans having no Native American ancestry. The small percentage of European Americans with more than two percent Native American ancestry are concentrated in a handful of states, such as North Dakota, New Mexico and Louisiana. But the majority of European Americans in the study have zero.

Mike Reed, the RNC spokesman who circulated the Times article, said in response: “The bottom line is Elizabeth Warren has, at most, a minuscule amount of Native American heritage and it is obvious she had absolutely no right to claim minority status while climbing the professional ladder to the Ivy League.”

The test results certainly have not won fans in the indigenous community.

Kim TallBear, associate professor at the University of Alberta, said the “very desire to locate a claim to Native American identity in a DNA marker inherited from a long-ago ancestor is a settler-colonial racial understanding of what it is to be Native American.” In an email, TallBear said that Native Americans' own definitions of legitimate Native American or tribal identity focus not on long-ago ancestors identified through a test but are based on a living community: “close social and biological relations of people one can name, indeed people one probably knows (huge LOL here) — one’s family, community, and tribe.”

The Pinocchio Test

We are not trying to defend Warren’s decision to release the test, just to set the record straight about what the test shows. The media bungled the interpretation of the results — and then Warren’s opponents used the uninformed reporting to undermine the test results even further. We fell into this trap as well, and were too quick to send out a tweet (now deleted) that made an inaccurate comparison. We should have not relied on media reporting before tweeting.

Warren’s Native American DNA, as identified in the test, may not be large, but it’s wrong to say it’s as little as 1/1024th or that it’s less than the average European American. Three Pinocchios all around — including to our tweet."

[draynay]

Trump owes so much many to so many people he's probably legally owned by someone at this point.

I wonder who...

[Spectral]

And no dirt on her [Kamala Harris] most importantly.

People don't talk about it much now, but the Willie Brown affair could potentially become a lot more interesting if she's in a national election. By contrast, Warren would be squeaky clean if she'd drop this stupid crusade to prove that she's damned near 1% Native American.

[Levelfive]

People don't talk about it much now, but the Willie Brown affair could potentially become a lot more interesting if she's in a national election. By contrast, Warren would be squeaky clean if she'd drop this stupid crusade to prove that she's damned near 1% Native American.

Republicans are giddily championing the most corrupt scumbag "in history"--lol at the left being required to run a "squeaky clean" candidate.

[Spectral]

Republicans are giddily championing the most corrupt scumbag "in history"--lol at the left being required to run a "squeaky clean" candidate.

No one's required to do much of anything, but it's certainly an advantage to be able to promote someone on the basis of their honesty and integrity if you can find someone in politics that actually exhibits those qualities.

[Levelfive]

No one's required to do much of anything, but it's certainly an advantage to be able to promote someone on the basis of their honesty and integrity if you can find someone in politics that actually exhibits those qualities.

We've established it's utterly meaningless.

[Grapemask]

People don't talk about it much now, but the Willie Brown affair could potentially become a lot more interesting if she's in a national election. By contrast, Warren would be squeaky clean if she'd drop this stupid crusade to prove that she's damned near 1% Native American.

Well for starters, as the WaPo article pointed out, "1%" is mostly just a misunderstanding of genetics. But taking a single DNA test and releasing a single video to respond to the president and his base's relentless, near-daily obsession with a factoid about her history that she herself has spoken little of isn't much of a "crusade."

[Spectral]

Well for starters, as the WaPo article pointed out, "1%" is mostly just a misunderstanding of genetics.

It really isn't a "misunderstanding". It's a simplification that's useful if the goal is basic understanding of genetics. Of course, the actual number is between ~0.1%-~1.6%, but there's nothing wrong with using 1% as a rough approximation.

But taking a single DNA test and releasing a single video to respond to the president and his base's relentless, near-daily obsession with a factoid about her history that she herself has spoken little of isn't much of a "crusade."

Filming a video about it is pretty bizarre when the obvious move is to just say, "OK, so I'm basically not Native American in any meaningful way, but it was an old family story and I thought it was cool, so I ran with it". Which, oddly, used to be basically what she said (or at least what she started saying once she was a candidate for office). If she drops it now, it's just a silly one off, but actually defending that test as good evidence that she's actually Native American in any meaningful sense would be a pretty hilarious effort in futility.

[Levelfive]

She claimed she has Native American ancestry; she's provided evidence she does--quibbling about "well what percent" and pretending now there's suddenly some arbitrary "meaningful" standard is a transparent admission you guys were wrong and she's right. Glad that's out of the way. Next.

[downnola]

We've established it's utterly meaningless.

I dunno, Ray Moore's demise in a solid red state shows that it there is an advantage in not being a total shit heel. Trump benefited from Clinton being an untrustworthy and unlikable person. The result of an election between two dishonest hacks is that you end up with a dishonest hack.

[Levelfive]

I dunno, Ray Moore's demise in a solid red state shows that it there is an advantage in not being a total shit heel. Trump benefited from Clinton being an untrustworthy and unlikable person. The result of an election between two dishonest hacks is that you end up with a dishonest hack.

That's why Democrats run all three branches of government. In any case, the argument isn't actually in favor of a dishonest shitheels, it's to point out the ludicrousness of voters--Republicans in particular, who have established they don't give a ripe flying rat's ass, and considering how close Moore came to winning backs up my point better than yours--talk about how Democrats just have to run someone with an unblemished past. It should make those few Republicans with any conscience left laugh out loud.

[lockedout]

It really isn't a "misunderstanding". It's a simplification that's useful if the goal is basic understanding of genetics. Of course, the actual number is between ~0.1%-~1.6%, but there's nothing wrong with using 1% as a rough approximation.

Read this article and get back to me about her being native American.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...tive-americans

"Bustamante, however, didn't compare Warren's DNA against Native Americans who live in the continental U.S., citing cultural reluctance to submit to DNA tests. Instead, he used recent samples from other countries whose populations presumably share a lineage during human settlement of the Americas about 15,000-25,000 years ago."

[Levelfive]

Read this article and get back to me about her being native American.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...tive-americans

"Bustamante, however, didn't compare Warren's DNA against Native Americans who live in the continental U.S., citing cultural reluctance to submit to DNA tests. Instead, he used recent samples from other countries whose populations presumably share a lineage during human settlement of the Americas about 15,000-25,000 years ago."

I've already linked two separate articles that address this specifically and how genetics work in general. It's almost as if I predicted Trump supporters--who never ever concern themselves with what's true or factual in their seemingless bottomless quest to debase themselves in defense of their cult leader's chronic lies--would ignore it. In any case, asked and answered.