[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
For years we have been flying Africans to America and placing them in hundreds of US towns and cities, and President Trump’s State Department will continue that trend as its number one refugee admissions priority!
The UN asked the US to take in 50,000 Congolese over 5 years and we are doing just that!
Frankly, as I said just yesterday if Africa doesn’t soon slow its population growth and get the Islamic extremists under control, Africa is going to sink first Europe, and then us under the weight of millions of needy (mostly unskilled) people in the not too distant future.
Based on current trends, Africa as a whole is projected to double in [population] size by 2050. Between 2050 and 2100, according to the United Nations, it could almost double again.
(from 1 about 1.3 billion in 2018 to over 4 billion in 2100!)
Yikes! See the Africa ticking (time bomb) population clock, here.
Trump to prioritize Africa…..
cover fy19 report
Although the US State Department has announced a greatly lowered refugee cap (30,000) for the coming fiscal year which begins this coming Monday! the administration will place a priority on Africans according to the just released ‘Report to Congress’ that explains why the President is setting the level where he is.
This year it is a slimmed-down version of a report I have handy for FY16 (Obama’s last full year) which is 71 pages. The Trump report, at a mere 39 pages, does not go in to the great detail that Obama’s did.
I encourage serious students of the US Refugee Admissions Program to read it (LOL! I haven’t read it all yet, but I will!) because it is a very useful educational tool even if it is discouraging.
Here (below) is a screenshot of the Trump priorities. At least we can cheer about the dramatic slowdown in the Near East and Asia (where most of the Muslim countries, besides Africa, are found).
And it is an improvement on Obama’s last full year when he set the ceiling for Africa at 27,500 and came in at 31,624!
By contrast, from 1 Oct 2017 to 1 Sept 2018 (11 months of the fiscal year), Trump admitted 9,007 Africans. But, what on earth makes anyone in the Western World think we can save Africa by serving as their population pressure valve.
There is no way, even if we wanted to, to take enough refugees to keep up with their exploding population growth.
Let’s look at the DR Congolese
Anne Richard and then UNHCR Antonio Guterres who is now Secretary General of the United Nations. By the way, Trump is still without an Asst. Secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration
I reported here in 2013 that then Asst. Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, Anne Richard, told the UN (told UNHCR Guterres) that we would ‘welcome’ to America 50,000 UN Camp-dwelling Congolese over 5 years.
I just checked Wrapsnet and although we were bringing these people prior to FY14, since Richard’s announcement we have admitted 45,667 from that fiscal year up until today.
(In fact, from FY08 to the present day, we have admitted 56,106 from the DR Congo.)
And, by the way, I checked numbers for this month and in a little over 3 weeks we admitted 684 DR Congolese refugees, followed by Burma (290) in second place. In case you are wondering, most Congolese are not Muslims but there are a few in the flow to your towns and cities.
So by my calculation we have 4,333 DR Congolese to go to fulfill a promise we never needed to make!
But, do not hold your breath that it will end at 50,000 because our track record is that we just keep taking them long after the supposed cut off number has been reached—see Burmese, Bhutanese and Somalis for starters!
Endnote: I did a quick check and am not seeing anything about prioritizing persecuted white South Africans. Let me know if you see any mention.
Monday a big day for refugee contractors, expect more stories like these….
What is Monday? It is the beginning of the federal fiscal year. It is the first day of FY19. It is the day when the writing will be on the wall for many refugee resettlement offices around the country.
Dumb way to run an organization! Did no one in the refugee industry ever question a business model where some non-profits are 97% and up federally funded?
Why? Because in 1980 Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 in to law and set up a house of cards that needs to fall now. Originally (supposedly!) designed as a public-private partnership, the federal government and ‘humanitarian’ non-profit groups were to share equally in the costs of admitting tens of thousands of refugees to the US each year.
But, over the years, because Congress has been so remiss in overseeing the program (the Rs want cheap labor!), those non-profit groups (aka federal contractors) have gotten fat and confident (like Aesop’s grasshopper) on ever larger amounts of federal funding and too lazy to raise sufficient amounts of private money to see them through if for any reason the number of paying clients/refugees declined.
(An aside: The inability to raise enough private money is also indicative of the fact that there isn’t enough interest by average Americans in financially supporting the program in the first place.)
So here we are with one story after another about what Monday will bring to dozens of resettlement contractors around the country.
From Austin, Texas we learn that a Catholic contractor—Caritas—is closing its refugee program.
EXCLUSIVE: As refugees dwindle, Caritas will end resettlement program
Since 1974, the organization has helped thousands of people fleeing war or persecution find a new life in Austin. But after 44 years, Caritas is ending its refugee resettlement program and as of Monday, it will no longer serve new refugees.
“It’s really a tragedy that this program has to go away,” said Jo Kathryn Quinn, executive director for Caritas.
[….]
For the past two years, Caritas has seen a sharp decline in the number of refugees arriving in Austin, and the development has made the program “financially unsustainable,” Quinn said. Between 2010 and 2016, Caritas resettled an average of 576 refugees each year. Since last October, Caritas has resettled 151 refugees, but the nonprofit has not received any new refugees since April.
“Having zero refugees arrive in two months was unheard of for us,” Quinn said. “It was the final alarm bell that told us that we couldn’t continue this way.”
[….]
In June, Caritas’ board of directors voted to close the program at the end of the fiscal year at the recommendation of the nonprofit’s executive leadership.
When fewer refugees arrive, less federal money comes in to support them as well. Refugees receive a one-time amount of $1,125 from federal funds for resettlement needs, including housing and food, said Adelita Winchester, Caritas’ director of integrated services. Caritas would supplement federal funds with about $1 million annually in philanthropic donations,Winchester said. [The reporter has missed an important piece of information. The refugee gets $1,125 and Caritas gets another $1,125 for themselves per refugee.—ed]
“We didn’t have any excess philanthropic dollars to shift to aid this program,” Quinn said.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 04 September 2018 09:36.
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza died at age 96 (at a meeting in 2010. Photo: Luca Giarelli CC-BY-SA 3.0).
Medium, “The man who tried to catalog humanity”, 2 Sept 2018:
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza chased Darwin’s dream of a tree of humankind
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, known simply as “Luca” to generations of human geneticists, died this week at age 96. More than any other human geneticist, Cavalli-Sforza believed in the potential of genes and culture together to trace humanity’s origins. In the course of his work, he pioneered new ideas and models that brought together these two distinct areas of science.
Like most scientists, many of his ideas would turn out to be wrong in the details. But his work helped form the foundation of our current knowledge of human genome variation across the world.
In 1991, Cavalli-Sforza wrote an essay for Scientific American that explained the course of his life’s work to that point. He recollected a time as a young man when he worked in the Cambridge laboratory of Ronald A. Fisher, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory.
“I started thinking about a project so ambitious it seemed almost crazy: the reconstruction of where human populations originated and the paths by which they spread throughout the world.”
From his start working with microbes this idea was quite a massive leap. But he chose a lucky moment to enter the field of human genetics. During the 1950s, the nascent field was starving for data on how human variation connected to inheritance. New approaches were about to provide such data, along with new opportunities to understand the evolution of recent populations.
Anthropologists understood human variation by looking at traits like the shape of the skull. Such traits could be examined with complicated math, but geneticists needed simpler systems to start to unlock how human genes might vary. Some of the earliest-known examples of Mendelian inheritance were genetic disorders, and while these were very important, they were also very rare, meaning that they could not be broadly informative about normal human variation.
But a handful of traits, many of them invisible variations like blood types, likewise showed a Mendelian inheritance pattern. Postwar geneticists developed ways to test people for these traits, making it feasible to sample distant populations, at first by typing blood or carrying out simple tests like the ability to taste the bitter chemical phenylthiocarbamide, and later with electrophoresis of proteins in the laboratory.
These variations became known as “classical markers”. All of them obeyed Mendel’s laws of inheritance, making it possible for geneticists to use mathematics to understand how their frequencies might change over time. Geneticists traveled to the four corners of the globe, gradually building maps of the frequencies of blood types and other classical markers. No one really knew how old the blood groups were, or how long ago the differences between human populations might have arisen. But they could see big differences: Some populations had almost no type B blood, for example, while other populations had quite a lot of it. Until the 1980s, classical markers would remain the state of the art evidence of human genetic variation.
Cavalli-Sforza first made his mark in his native Italy, traveling to villages in the Parma Valley to sample blood. He worked to understand how inbreeding within these small towns was connected to the slight differences in frequency of blood groups. With several coworkers, he scoured church records of marriages and births, tracing the times when people moved between villages as well as the number of children they had. Tracing these multiple lines of evidence, he could show that consanguineous marriages, or inbreeding, were the main drivers of genetic differences between these small towns. In doing so, he provided some of the earliest evidence that humans were still being affected by genetic drift, the random change in gene frequencies that happens in small populations.
Cavalli-Sforza realized that if genetic drift could explain the gene frequencies in small Italian towns, it might have affected humanity over a much deeper past. Genetic drift was a force that over long periods of time tended to drive populations slowly apart, inexorably diverging in gene frequencies. Applied to a group of populations over long periods of time, genetic drift would form a tree.
It was during this period that Cavalli-Sforza began collaborating with the statistical geneticist A. W. F. Edwards, developing ways to reconstruct evolutionary trees from gene frequencies. The statistical methods used measures of distance, computed from the frequencies of several genes across populations, and they generated a new picture of human origins.
From Cavalli-Sforza 1966, “Population structure and human evolution.”
Here, the branches of humanity came into focus. American Indians, Asians, and Oceanians on one broad branch, Europeans and Africans on the other.
The tree looks very different from our understanding today, which places African populations as the most diverse elements of humanity, not a minor twig. It is worth noting why Cavalli-Sforza’s early trees turned out to be wrong. Blood groups were first discovered and studied in people of European descent, meaning that African variation was not fully included by looking at the traits that vary in Europe. These five loci in particular include several that reflect natural selection, especially the Fy, or Duffy, locus, which approaches fixation in many sub-Saharan populations. Today, using whole genome sequences, it is clear that the deepest branches of human population trees are African.
But more important, the tree illustrates an enormous limitation of the classical markers. The frequencies of a few genes simply do not provide enough information to tell when and how much mixture may have happened among the populations. Cavalli-Sforza, drawing upon his work in the Parma Valley, and later work with Pygmies in central Africa, was willing to assume that migration and mixture were rare. In his model genetic drift, not gene flow, was the main force driving human evolution. Natural selection happened, too, but with patterns that might be recognized by comparing to the predictions of genetic drift alone.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 17 August 2018 16:35.
Ancient Origins, “When Your Ancestral Forefather Is a Mummy: 19 Descendants of 5,300-Year-Old Ötzi the Iceman Identified In Austria”, 4 July 2017:
Those who are lucky enough to have well-kept family records may be able to trace their history back several generations. Some can even track family connections going back a few centuries. But what if you were told that you are a descendant of a Stone Age man that was brutally murdered around 5,300 years ago? Such is the case for 19 males in Austria, who are known through DNA testing to be descendants of the famous Ötzi the Iceman mummy.
The well-preserved remains of Ötzi were found by German tourists in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy in 1991. Scientists thought the body, which showed evidence of head trauma, belonged to a fallen soldier from WWI but they were shocked when tests revealed that the mummy dates back to 3,300 BC. His body is in remarkable condition, considering its age, and still contains intact blood cells. Scientists were even able to determine the exact nature of his stomach contents, revealing that his last meal was deer with herb bread, wheat bran, roots and fruit.
A DNA analysis revealed very precise details about Otzi’s health condition at the time of his death. He was at high risk of atherosclerosis, was lactose intolerant and is the earliest known human with Lyme disease. But one of the more surprising findings of the analysis is that Ötzi has 19 known descendants that are still alive today. Scientists could track the descendants based on a specific genetic mutation present in his DNA.
“There are parts of the human DNA, which are generally inherited unchanged. In men, this lies on the Y chromosomes and in females on the mitochondria. Eventual changes arise due to mutations, which are then inherited further,” said Walther Parson, the forensic scientist who carried out the study. “This is the reason why we can categorize people with the same people into so-called haplogroups.”
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 17 March 2018 06:26.
After beginning the “hang-out” with some faintly vulgar discussion of the process by which he’s fathered a child or two - a discussion apparently occasioned by a hit piece done by a Jewish writer at The Daily Beast, accusing him of nefarious natalist strategy with a “Hispanic woman”..
JF’s interaction and negotiation with the chats and “superchats” demonsrates the social consruction of knowledge - e.g., of the White race, in answer to questions, interlocutive by nature, as to who and “What is White?”
Jean-François Gariépy engages in social construction of the White race, though there is nothing wrong with that and although he might not be fully aware that he’s doing that…
For example:
43:59 (JF)...science, we’re doing science! Colby M: ‘superchat’ question, 2 dollars U.S. - “but are Italians White?” (JF sighs) They are ...Italians, you know, they’re ah, it’s like you can draw the line, you can exclude Italians if you want, but you would exclude me (JF). Because you know what I am? You guys don’t know right? You guys don’t know but I am essentially a Basque. I descend from the Basque. And so, if you cut-out Italians, you cut out the Basques, you cut out a great section of the French population; (shrugs) it’s your choice but it seems to me like its a restrictive definition. Then your White race would essentially be English people. You might even actually kick the Russians out.
45:32 (JF): Look at this. If you kick the Italians, well, ok, you could get the French, the Russian, the Basque in a group, and you still could kick the northern Italians specifically. Personally, I think that you’re better (better off) if you just include all of these in the White race.
Some really funny comments - ‘Eva Braun’: “We must secure the existence of nord-cucks.”
JF’s interaction and negotiation with the chats and “superchats” demonsrates the social consruction of knowledge - e.g., of the White race, in answer to questions, interlocutive by nature, as to who and “What is White?”
cover fy19 report
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza died at age 96 (at a meeting in 2010. Photo: Luca Giarelli CC-BY-SA 3.0).
From Cavalli-Sforza 1966, “Population structure and human evolution.”
