I intended to put together a simple little post about the recent Pew Research Center report on the shrinking middle class, then I waded into the data. This is going to take more time and thought. So for now, here’s a summary of some interesting things happening in the world.
From the Southern Poverty Law Center: A very long and yet still incomplete account of white supremacist terror attacks in recent years
From the Washington Post: How mass transit options transform a neighborhood
From the Texas Tribune: Texas remains the national leader in number of uninsured citizens. And also, of course, in LIBERTY.
From the Washington Post: Vegetarian diets are not necessarily more “green”
From Quartz: A fun realization dawns on everyone who attempts any real genealogical research – Everyone is your cousin
From Aeon: On a related note, what should geneticists do when they uncover a family secret?
And since we’re on a role and many of us have some serious family time approaching, this PBS program with Dr. Henry Louis Gates called Finding Your Roots stumbled over both of those issues. The new season starts in January.
From the New York Times: Here’s a little sample of the controversy the show has inspired already. Some of those episodes are pretty tense.
Chris Ladd is a Texan living in the Chicago area. He has been involved in grassroots Republican politics for most of his life. He was a Republican precinct committeeman in suburban Chicago until he resigned from the party and his position after the 2016 Republican Convention. He can be reached at gopliferchicago at gmail dot com.
GOPLifer 
There’s a really great essay (“Men At Work”) on the Aeon homepage. The essay talks about how work ties into the masculine self-image, and how the erosion of economic opportunity for working-class males has affected their outlook. This is something Chris has touched on several times, but the essay adds a personal perspective that is quite powerful.
Politics and the stone-age brain:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/donald-trump-2016-evolutionary-psychology-213444?o=0
I’m definitely an abberation, I dig nuance and acknowledge complexity.
The article about genetics and “misattributed parentage” was interesting, but rather old news. This is a problem that human geneticists have been dealing with for 30 years, since the earliest, painstaking, mapping of human genes. This article shied away from disclosing how frequent this problem is, but the data suggests that for 5-10% of us the guy we give ties to on Father’s day is not actually our biological father. Yikes!
I did 23-and-me a couple of years ago (when they could still do the disease prediction stuff). They still send me periodic emails announcing a new relative match, usually in the 3rd-5th cousin range. Then one day I got one saying they had a new match, “predicted relationship: father.” Fortunately, his identity was not a surprise.
“This article shied away from disclosing how frequent this problem is, but the data suggests that for 5-10% of us the guy we give ties to on Father’s day is not actually our biological father. Yikes!”
I’m reminded of a paper a friend and lab mate of mine gave to some of the summer student volunteers to study. It focus was tracing the Black branches of the Jefferson family tree (by DNA analysis of living descendants), but it also found a few of those “who’s your daddy?” surprises. His lesson on that -people are often lying bastards.
JG, your story is nicely ambiguous, like the start of a good novel.
Here’s a little preview of what life will be like under 8 years of the 2nd Clinton Administration. A nuisance opponent is running at less than 30% nationally seven weeks prior to the start of the primaries. The Clintons decide it would be a good idea to kneecap him: http://patrickokeefe.org/2015/12/bernie-sanders-dnc-ngp-van/
Clinton and Harding* in ’16!
*(Tonya, not Warren G.)
Jeff Gillooly as Sec of State
No doubt about it–the DNC hired a real loser for their computer vendor. But I don’t buy the premise that the Sanders campaign is the victim here, unless one were to believe that Hillary went to their campaign headquarters, held a gun to their heads and forced the unlucky staffers to download sensitive info from her campaign. Maybe you do believe that. It seems that some Republicans will believe any cockamamie thing if the Clintons are involved.
Anyway, all’s well that ends well. The Sanders campaign threatened to sue the DNC, so Debbie W-S declared that they had learned their lesson, and restored their access to their files. So now we can all go back to watching the far more interesting shenanigans on the Republican side. Pass the popcorn…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-threatens-to-sue-dnc-if-access-to-voter-list-isnt-restored/2015/12/18/fa8d6df8-a5a2-11e5-ad3f-991ce3374e23_story.html
On the plus side, maybe someone will actually tune in to the Dem debate tonight to see the fireworks show.
This sort of crap is exactly why us non-GOPers hope your sort of ideas for reforming your party take root. It’s good that the DNC is resolving this, but the fact that it happened at all bugs me. Just like the e-mail thing bugs me- not because I think any secrets got leaked, or that there’s this BENGHAZI!!! smoking gun, but Hillary’s whole attitude and the clumsy way she dealt with it. But what am I gonna do, vote for Ted Cruz? We need some sanity and competence in BOTH parties, so that neither can take support for granted.
Speaking of Ted Cruz, have a look at his new ad. This is not a joke.
http://www.ijreview.com/2015/12/496995-you-should-watch-the-parody-christmas-ad-ted-cruz-is-about-to-play-during-snl/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=video-social-mobile-bar&utm_campaign=Sharing
OMG! He just prostituted out his own children for political purposes. That can’t be real, it is like the bad singers on the talent shows. You know they don’t have any real friends, if they did they would tell them not to do it, you suck and have no talent. Instead they let them make a fool of themselves for the whole world to see.
Read the comments, one woman is complaining about making only$60 thousand a year and her insurance cost $400 a month. She does not grasp why it is so much when her renters insurance and car insurance is so much cheaper.
“OMG! He just prostituted out his own children for political purposes.”
Yep, she’s Daddy’s little girl!
Non Houstonians probably won’t get the joke. It’s too complicated and sordid to explain….
Chris – You do understand that pointing out the racist actions of racists makes you the real racist because of reasons.
Greetings Turtles! Now where would we be without circular logic…..besides not lost.
Good grief, Texan! That’s supposed to be secret!
It’s a weird thing to be so terrified of having ancestors that owned slaves that you would go to almost any means to keep it a secret. That said, I recently overheard an older colleague talking to a couple of others, including one black lady, about how her ancestors owned slaves “but they were practically like family. My white ancestor worked in the fields with them.” I could almost hear the black lady’s eyes rolling.
Hi Anse
If you ever get into the ancestor thing you rapidly discover that you are descended from a mass of black hearted villains
Two reasons
The villains have more descendants
The occasional “nice person” among your ancestors doesn’t do anything noteworthy so there is no information on him/her
The result is that the pirates, murderers and other villains are the ones that feature the most prominently in your family tree
Looking forward to your view if the middle class shrinkage. It’s important.