Monday, February 13, 2012
Which Population in the 1000 Genomes Project Samples Has the Most Neandertal Similarity?
The Tuscans have the highest level of Neandertal similarity of any of the 1000 Genomes Project samples. They have around a half-percent more Neandertal similarity than Brits or Finns in these samples. The CEU sample is slightly elevated compared to Brits and Finns as well.
It is tempting to interpret these differences as a north-south cline in Neandertal ancestry. I wouldn’t jump too quickly on this idea, because Holocene population movements in Europe are now known to have covered up or erased a substantial fraction of the Upper Paleolithic gene pool. If we have a bonus of extra Neandertal ancestry in southern Europe, we need to explain how that cline persisted across subsequent history. Still, the difference is statistically very strong and deserves some explanation. Likewise, the populations within East Asia have some differences in Neandertal similarity.
Obamacare Amicus Brief Filed
The Supreme Court can save America from an out of control Congress this session! The Court has accepted and will review Liberty Legal Foundation’s Amicus Brief in the Health and Human Services v. Florida anti-Obamacare litigation. Rather than argue about whether the individual mandate goes “too far” under current Commerce Clause precedent, we argue that the Commerce Clause was grossly misinterpreted under the 1942 precedent of Wickard v. Filburn. We urge the Court to correct a 70 year mistake and overturn Wickard v. Filburn.
Our brief proves the link between Wickard and uncontrolled growth in the federal government. We show that the Court’s elimination of Constitutional limits on Congressional authority have left Congress unable to control itself. Wickard was a direct cause of exponential growth in federal spending, decreased faith in Congress, shocking growth in federal regulations, and loss of freedom in America. Our brief proves these points by citing the government’s own statistics.
The statistics are shocking. They include a 15,474% increase in per-citizen annual federal spending and a 26,586% increase in national debt. There are 16 times as many federal regulations as there were at the time of Wickard. The number of Federal agencies have increased from 97 in 1942 to 529 today. All of this started immediately after the Supreme Court’s Wickard decision.
We remind the Court of the drastic shift Wickard represented by reviewing what the legal standard was for the first 150 years of our nation’s history. Our brief then explains why every court that has reviewed the individual mandate has been unable to find reasonable limits on Congressional authority under Wickard: BECAUSE THERE ARE NONE! We then show the Court how it could easily return to pre-1942 limits on Congressional authority.
Without your support the Court would not have heard this argument. Every other party is arguing whether or not the current Commerce Clause precedent allows Congress to impose the individual mandate. Without YOU, the argument would have ended there. Now the Supreme Court has been reminded that it needs to fix a 70 year old mistake. It has been SHOWN that Wickard destroyed America.
As you read our brief imagine what would happen if this Court returned to its pre-Wickard understanding of the Constitution. States, not Congress, would decide what regulations were appropriate for agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and most service industries. Congress would once again be limited to the powers granted to it by the States. As we concluded our brief, we reminded the Supreme Court that it now has an opportunity to correct a devastating mistake. It has the authority and duty to do so.
Thanks to you the Court now has an opportunity to save America from an uncontrolled Congress and the crushing debt they have created. Thanks to you the Court has been shown exactly what it needs to do.
Please download and forward our amicus brief, your amicus brief, to everyone you know. Thank you for supporting Liberty Legal Foundation.
In Liberty,
Van Irion, Co-Founder
The killing-for-organs pushers
Another that should be a parody.
If you want to see where our culture may next go off the rails, read professional journals. There, in often eye-crossing and passive arcane prose of the medical intelligentsia, you will discover an astonishing level of antipathy to the sanctity of human life — to the point now that some advocate killing the profoundly disabled for their organs.
Case in point: “What Makes Killing Wrong?” an article published in the January 19, 2012 edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics. The authors argue that death and total disability are morally indistinguishable, and therefore harvesting organs from living disabled patients is not morally wrong.YouTube Dad who shot daughter's laptop says he got visit from authorities
Via The Feral Irishman
STANLY CO., N.C. —
A local father who captured worldwide attention after posting a YouTube rant about his daughter is now making local city leaders mad.
Tommy Jordan, from Stanly County, got mad after his daughter complained about doing chores on her Facebook page.
In the video, Jordan pulls out a gun and shoots his daughter’s laptop.
The video received more than 21 million views in four days.
“Pay you for chores?” Jordan said in the video. “Are you out of your mind?”
The former Marine wrote on his Facebook page that Child Protective Services officials came to his home in Stanly Co. on Saturday and interviewed him and his daughter — separately — after viewers of the video called with concerns about his actions.
He said the police also stopped by.
Neither authority decided to pursue anything against Jordan.
“The police by the way said ‘Kudos, sir,’ ” Jordan wrote. “How’s about those apples? Didn’t expect THAT when you called the cops did you?”
"Who is the real threat to America: Janet Napolitano or Islamic terrorists?"
Via NC Renegade
Gellately had already published a book on German anti-semitism before the First World War and was doing research in a German archive when a librarian alerted him to a collection of Gestapo files—19,000 of them—that Nazi officers had not had to time to burn before the Allies arrived.
"I started to read these files about all the victims in just one region of Germany that the Gestapo had processed," Gellately says. "It would have taken a large force of secret police to collect information on so many people. I needed to know just how many secret police there really were. So I asked an elderly gentleman who would've lived through those times, and he replied, 'They were everywhere!'"
That was the prevailing myth.
"But I had evidence right there in my hands that supported a different story," Gellately explains. "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."
Barack Obama: In the Footsteps of Twentieth Century Despots
How many times will the American people have to be hit over the head before they understand that Barack Obama is the most corrupt, dictatorial, and ideologically driven president in American history? That his entire being and psyche are devoted to transforming the country not only into a socialist utopia, but into a nation permanently governed by a radical oligarchy?