Looks Like A bad Shoot...Might Not Be

St. Louis:

An off-duty officer who lives nearby heard the commotion, grabbed his service pistol and headed to the scene to assist his fellow officers. He arrived as the other officers were carrying out the arrest.

The other officers ordered the off-duty officer to the ground, then recognized him as a fellow policeman and told him to stand up and walk toward them.

As he approached, another officer arrived and shot the off-duty officer in the arm, “apparently not recognizing” him, police told the Associated Press...

The shooter, a 36-year-old officer who has been on the force for eight years, told investigators he had feared for his safety.

In this case, the "I was afraid for my life" doesn't look like it's going to pass muster. Whether the officer "recognized" the off duty officer or not, he had just gotten on scene. He did not know the current situation and therefore took it upon himself to fire at a man. Had he said something along the lines of "I feared for the lives of my fellow officers because it seemed like someone was approaching them with a gun", it would have made more sense. But to, as the report says, pull up, get out and start shooting, the whole "I was afraid for my life" story becomes verysuspect.

That there is no claim of the officer trying to find out who the "strange man" was or to instruct said man to stop, put hands up, or anything that would have informed him of the situation suggests negligence.

The Reasonable Doubt Argument:

I predict that should there be a criminal proceeding, the defense will say that the officer arrived and saw a person who fit the general description of the suspects at large get up from the ground. He would say that when he saw this "suspect" get up he thought that the person was attempting to effect an escape and/or harm the officers. So fearing that the suspect was armed and would shoot any or all of them, he fired his weapon.

It is highly unlikely that any charge requiring criminal intent will be charged and if they are, they will be unable to prove criminal intent. I'd not even waste time on such a charge.

If there is a civil case filed, the argument will be the same BUT since the burden of proof is "more likely than not" (51%) it will probably be the same argument. The key will be when the officer arrived and what he did and did not know at the time.

Never Suck Up To The Left

Even though Trump did this:

He still gets this:

Lesson: Do not suck up to the left. They hate you. Period.

Republicans Ought To Be Very Worried About GA district 6...And Elsewhere

While there has been a lot of victory lap running and DNC taunting a long term view of GA 6 should have Republicans very worried. The linked page and this linked page shows why: In 2000 Republicans carried the district 75% to 25%

In 2002 it was 79% to 20%

In 2004 there was no organized opposition

In 2006 Republicans won 72% to 27%

In 2008 It was 68% to 31%. Possibly the first inkling of trouble.

Skip 2010 where Democrats gave no organized opposition and we see 2012 where Republicans got 64% to 35%.

by 2016 the Republicans were at 61% with Democrats polling near 40%.

This special election saw Republicans drop to an all time low of 51%. With an outsider Democrat pulling near 50% of the vote. Republicans ought to be shitting in their pants. When your rival has gone from a low of "no contest" to nearly 50% of the votes. You have a near terminal case of cancer. While the DNC may be feigning being upset about the "massive loss", the fact is that policies they favor have a long term consequence of making areas that are historically hostile to them competitive. Remember, Democrats win by changing the demographics of a location. Once they have done so, generally speaking, they don't give it up. California is a stellar example of this. Democrats even have a legal way of keeping themselves in power: They have the two top vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, head to the general election. Since Democrats essentially run the state, it gives them a situation where Republicans are essentially shut out of certain offices. I'm sure the rule sounded good on paper.

So yeah, Democrats have lost a bunch of special elections. The way I see it, it was an expensive exercise in finding out how much scale tipping remains to be done in target areas. 'Cause clearly Democrats are not going to change their policies.

The Mass Denialism of Black America: The Castile Example

Steve Sailor wrote a piece on Slate's latest puke on police and black people. Steve's point on his piece was the "whitening" of Yanez. But I think Slates' piece is worth further dissection. I will say though that for many black people, including myself a lot of people that Anglos don't consider white, WE consider white. White being a relative term. But that's another topic altogether.

So let's dissect Mr Bouie's MANY mistakes.

Police officers like the killer of Philando Castile have an unbeatable defense when their victims are black: They were scared.

No. Not really. As I discovered long ago during the Sean Bell trial the actual key here is mens rea. Criminal intent. Officers are assumed and presumed to not have mens rea. After all, if you are taking on the job of enforcing and upholding the law you are unlikely to have a criminal mindset. Not that there aren't persons of criminal minds who see police work as a means to skirt the law, but generally speaking, the average cop on the beat is not an undercover crook. Hence it is near impossible to stick any charge that requires criminal intent as a requirement. Hence why police are rarely charged much less convicted of things like murder.

So mens rea is the first high hurdle. The "scared" argument comes after that and as we shall see, it is highly relevant and not just for black people.

If an officer believes someone could imminently cause serious injury or death—or if he fears for own his life—he can shoot. And when the victim is black, that fear is often all it takes to avoid official sanction.

Actually every person in America has the right to shoot, stab, maim or inflict any other harm they deem necessary to prevent imminent serious injury or death or fears for his own life. What is actually "new" in America, historically speaking, is that civilians have been disarmed often leaving police as the only persons with ready access to a weapon. As mentioned before, the difference between a civilian and a police officer is the presumption of lack of mens rea.

Fear, for example, is why Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in the killing of Philando Castile. The day after the shooting, he attested to it in an interview with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state investigative agency. “I thought, I was gonna die,” said Yanez, recounting the seconds after Castile had alerted him to the presence of a weapon in the vehicle.

For the jury that heard Yanez’s testimony, the officer was right to be afraid, even as his dashcam footage depicts a polite and compliant passenger. After the trial, a spokesman for the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association affirmed Yanez’s fear. “We can’t see inside the vehicle and, most importantly, we can’t feel officer Yanez’s fear,” Andy Skoogman told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Well yes and no. As we saw from the dashcam, Yanez asked Castile to stop reaching three times before the shooting began. How many times do YOU need to be told to not reach for something? This isn't compliance. Compliance is stop reaching for whatever the fuck you're reaching for when told to stop reaching.

But going futher, we are to think that Yanez's fear was unreasonable. It is because the driver is black rather than the reaching. Yet how many police have been shot by people who "reached for a weapon"? Bouie seems to think these things don't happen.

This same credulous acceptance of the narrative of fear is why Officer Betty Jo Shelby was acquitted in the killing of Terence Crutcher (she was “fearing for her life”); why a grand jury declined to charge Officer Timothy Loehmann in the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old (he “had a reason to fear for his life”); and why a jury deadlocked in the case of Michael Slager, a South Carolina police officer who shot and killed Walter Scott during a traffic stop (he felt “total fear”).

Credulous. I'm certain that Bouie has years of police experience to tell police what is and is not "credible". But lets run this down:

Terence Crutcher, high on PCP was not following directions when he was shot.

Michael Slager was assaulted by Walter Scott as Scott was fleeing after having been apprehended. Scott also did not follow directions to stay in his vehicle.

Tamir Rice is the one case listed that I think was a storm of bad circumstances. You had a kid with a play gun that looked real. A call to police about a kid with a gun pointing it and video of an officer who basically got out shooting. There was no time for Rice to follow directions. So I'm mostly with Bouie on that one but the others show the clear pattern in most of these shootings: Not. Following. Directions.

And now comes the slavery angle:

The latter would fit our history. Before the Civil War, Southern whites held a pathological fear of slave revolts, despite lauding slavery as a “positive good.” That fear led slaveholding states to create patrols, made up of white men in the community, who would enforce slave codes, with legal authority to capture runaways, interrogate enslaved people, and punish them if necessary. Scholars see these slave patrols as one forerunner to modern police departments, “the first uniquely American form of policing,” writes Katheryn Russell-Brown in The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions.

Whoah whoah whoah. Why are we taking a trip back to the 1800s? This is the usual "woke" bullshit that is exemplified by KRS One's little line: Officer, Officer, officer, overseer! Look, if you're in 2017 talking about slave patrols like any of you have seen a cotton plantation, much less worked on one, you are a damn and total fool.

Later, in the early 20th century, fear of black criminality would shape the laws, institutions, and even geography of America in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwest. In his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that, in Chicago, both European migrants and “old-stock native-born Americans” often felt a “powerful bond of racial solidarity,” including a “shared fear of blacks as criminals.” White city dwellers “believed that African Americans were violent and deviant” and “sought various public policy measures to seal themselves off from them.”

Here's the thing. Here's the question Bouie doesn't want us to ask: Were these fears founded? I'd have to quote a whole lot more of the article but this question is THE question. I have shown conclusively(1), with data (2) that black crime, particularly murder and non-fatal assaults is way out of proportion to the population of black people. In some cases things such as shootings would drop by 80-90% if black people simply were not present.

This may come to a shock to many black people but there are places in America where murders haven't happened in 50 years. Where the only assault is domestic abuse. Where if your car is broken into while parked at home, it's likely to be someone from far away. In other words, this fear of the black criminal is not some figment of white people's imagination. It is real. They are finding this out in Sweden. They are finding this out in France. They are finding this out in Germany.

Now does this mean that most black people are criminals? Absolutely not. In fact 90% of us are NOT. But that 10%? They are fucking it up for the rest of us. Hiding our heads in the sand and denying this will not help. When a cop pulls you over, you should remember that that 10% has put a flag on you. If you want to behave like one of the 10% when you're pulled over, well don't be surprised when you too find yourself underground or having lead pulled out of you.

Work Begins On Tallest Sky Scraper in Africa....Built By Chinese

I remember a long time back when I was on Facebook and Twitter. Someone posted something to the effect of all the modern buildings in Africa. The pictures were meant to prove that "Africans build shit like everyone else". What I did not know at the time was that much of the "new" stuff being built in Africa were financed and built by outsiders (non-Africans). Here we have yet another example

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta recently laid the foundation stone for what will be the tallest building in Africa in the Upper Hill neighborhood of Nairobi. Construction is underway at the development site, and slated for completion by December 2019.

Not for nothing but I think dealing with the horrific conditions of certain slums should be a higher priority. But that's just me. But back to the point:

The Pinnacle has heavyweight backing in the shape of Dubai-based investors Hass Petroleum and White Lotus Group, which are ploughing around $200 million into the project.

As soon as I saw "lotus" I thought. Chinese. Annnnnnd:

he contract to build the towers has been awarded to China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC), which is among the world's largest construction firms and has delivered a string of major projects including the African Union headquarters in Ethiopia and the Beijing National Aquatics Centre.

Yes, the African Union headquarters was built by the Chinese.

"Whatever happens in other parts of the world can happen in Africa as well," says Abdinassir Hassan, chairman of Hass Petroleum and managing director of the project. "Nairobi is a hub for East and Central Africa. Why would we go anywhere else?"

Yes, but in other parts of the world, the native population generally has the money and the expertise to do these things for themselves.

Why The Castile Jury Went The Way It Did

I'll admit I was kinda surprised at the verdict in the Castile case. I wondered what the jury was presented with that the general public did not know about. Here it is:

You see the three times that Castile was asked to not reach in his pocket before officer Yanez even unholstered his weapon? That's called reasonable doubt. As soon as the first request to not reach was made, Castile should have stopped moving. In fact, Once he announced that he had a gun he should have asked the officer how he wanted to proceed.

This Wouldn't Pass The Jury Duty Test

This investigation of Trump has reached epic proportions of foolishness. I have been critical of so called "special prosecutors" and the like since I cast a questioning eye on what happened to Bill Clinton. For those not old enough (or informed enough), Ken Star was appointed as a special prosecutor or independent investigator due to the alleged illegalities involving Whitewater. In that case there was a Savings and Loans investigation in which the Clintons were seen as witnesses. Whatever you may think of the Clintons, there was at least the cover of an actual criminal proceeding of actual criminal acts by somebody. The problem was that Bill Clinton was impeached not because of an actual finding related to Whitewater but because Bill lied when asked about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. This is the problematic part.

Why was there even a question about Bill and Monica? What bearing did it have on Whitewater? None. The Whitewater investigation was allowed to grow in scope way beyond it's intent and became a means of hurting a president that Republicans didn't like.

Today we have a far more blatant and brazen act of political assassination. Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have made it clear they want Trump out of office. In sane times such blatant partisanship would sink any so called "independent investigation" because such partisans cannot be trusted to act objectively. If we recall, this entire "investigation" started out as investigation into Russia interference but has now morphed into "obstruction of justice". How you can claim obstruction of justice when there is no criminal investigation (or civil investigation) ongoing in which someone has been properly served is beyond me.

Of course the claim is that by firing Comey, Trump "obstructed justice" because Comey was investigating Russia. Lets take the argument on it's face. If a District Attorney decides to not prosecute a criminal case against a suspect, is that obstruction of justice? If a State's Attorney tells his underlings to not press a case against an individual and to drop charges, is that obstruction of justice or is that the person using their legal powers of discretion? If it is use of legal powers of discretion, then Trump has not "obstructed justice". Trump, as chief executive has the power to ultimately decide who in the justice dept. does what. Congress of course is free to to whatever it wants under it's own constitutionally provided powers. But this is not even the worst of it.

Those of us who have done jury duty knows that when we are subject to questioning to get onto a jury we are asked many questions. The purpose of these questions is generally to weed out those who may be prejudiced for or against the parties involved. So for example, if the case involves a police officer and you are married to a police officer it is likely you will be removed from the jury pool. It's not that you're a bad person, it's just that the court has to eliminate even the appearance of prejudice. We know that Comey used his "memo" (which, as of this writing has not been delivered to congress) in order to get an investigation of Trump started. This is a clear partisan motive. This very statement is reason enough to have this farce stopped immediately. This is clearly not about alleged criminal activity, it is about politics.

Worse though the people involved in the investigation have ties to Hillary Clinton and the DNC. If this was a potential jury, these people would be removed. Again, this doesn't mean they are bad people. This doesn't mean they are incompetent. This means it looks bad and when it comes to investigations the investigators shouldn't have any kind of appearance to "have it in" for the target.

But speaking of obstruction of justice, why hasn't such charges been leveled at Clinton? We know that she purposely had data removed from phones and servers. THAT is obstruction. This is on top of the removal of classified information from govt. servers. Comey himself said that she was negligent. Negligence is covered under the relevant statute. If Trump can be merely investigated for exercising his lawful power to fire the head of the FBI for any reason he chooses. Hillary should be in jail right now and Lynch should be cooling her heels in there with her.

But again this is something we would expect in a sane world and sane government. But we don't have that.

Because That's The Mission?

Saw this at UNZ:

To many students, the announcement amounts to cultural sterilization, an effort to turn the most interesting, diverse, and accepting dorm into another haven for aspiring doctors and engineers.

I dunno, but isn't the purpose of going to MIT to be a doctor (medical or other) and/or engineer? It's almost as if a growing portion of the current student body (and faculty) think the purpose of these schools is to be one big self-esteem booster by allowing and and everything left of right to be done.

What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?

So yesterday I saw a report on Arstechnica that stated:

The scope of the attacks was so broad, Bloomberg reports, that in October of 2016, then-President Barack Obama directly called Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin on the "cyber-hotline." The cyber-hotline "red phone" was set up in 2013 by Obama and Putin as part of an effort to reduce the risk of a "cyber incident" escalating; Obama used it to present evidence of the attacks and warn Putin that the intrusions could trigger a larger conflict between the US and Russia.

Now this, if true is a big deal. Therefore we MUST go to the original Bloomberg article.

In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter.

Further:

That idea would obsess the Obama White House throughout the summer and fall of 2016, outweighing worries over the DNC hack and private Democratic campaign emails given to Wikileaks and other outlets, according to one of the people familiar with those conversations.

After the Obama administration transmitted its documents and Russia asked for more information, the hackers’ work continued. According to the leaked NSA document, hackers working for Russian military intelligence were trying to take over the computers of 122 local election officials just days before the Nov. 8 election. [my underlines]

So according to this reporting, as soon as July of 2016 and as late as "days before" Nov 8, the Obama administration apparently KNEW of "Russian hacking". What did Obama tell the public during this time?

Here's Obama on August of 2016:

Obama ridiculed Donald Trump's recent suggestion that the election system could be rigged, called on the candidate to act like a president since he's soon to be briefed on confidential information and implied that he didn't believe the billionaire businessman could be trusted with America's nuclear codes...

Of course the election won't be rigged. What does that mean?" Obama said, struggling to disguise his contempt. "If Mr. Trump is suggesting that there is a conspiracy theory that is propagated across the country, including in places like Texas where typically it is not Democrats who are in charge of voting booths, that's ridiculous. That doesn't make any sense."

Did Obama or anyone else know, in AUGUST about this alleged Russian activity? Lets' assume he did not. Lets move forward.

Here's a report from the NY Times dated Oct 18 2016:

At a news conference in the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Obama said, “I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place.”..

...it fell to Mr. Obama to rebut Mr. Trump’s assertions. The president did so with obvious relish.

There is no evidence, he said, that a presidential election has ever been rigged. He said there was little indication that it could be, given that elections are run by state and local authorities, with people from both parties supervising polling sites and ballot counting.

Mind you Obama was referencing charges that internal election rigging could occur, BUT Obama said directly that "there is no evidence of a presidential election ever being rigged and that there was "little indication that it could be"

Well this is either a flat out lie or Obama did not know at this time of the alleged Russian hacking.

Here's a later report from after the election:

“Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added...

The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see “any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day.” The administration said it remained “confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out.” It added: “As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”

We know this is after Obama phoned The Kremlin, because Bloomberg says so. So Obama is purposely not telling the public what he allegedly knows. Why? The reason given back then was that to discuss the scope of what they "knew" would have influenced the election. Now I suppose the argument is that publishing this information helps to depose Trump who was elected under what they told the public was a fair election.

Now personally I'm not buying into the entire Russian hackers argument. We already know that intelligence agencies can and do create code and mount operations that look like some other agency. I also believe that Putin is using this US "own goal" of public discrediting of their own election to bolster his own image. The elected officials in Washington and elsewhere, both Republican and Democrat are doing far more damage to the US "democracy" [sic] with their so called "resistance" than anything Putin could have dreamed up while high on LSD.

A Time To Rethink

If you have followed this blog from its inception (a very long time ago), you will note that I used to be left of center. I'm probably still a bit left of center but consistently test as a moderate. These days, to be moderate is to be considered a Nazi. I don't exaggerate. In some cases I had changes of positions. Why? Because I decided to be honest and challenge the things I believed. That is, I looked at the data and realized that the things I believed were simply not supported by the facts. I could not in good conscience continue to advocate for things I knew to not be the case just because said evidence was "bad" for black people. Furthermore, I could not simply be silent on the matter(s). Understand, there are a lot of people who know full well that their ideologies are based on bullshit and rather than be honest, they simply stop speaking on the subject and hope nobody notices. This is particularly the case when people are PAID to believe in and speak on the thing they know to be bullshit. I think the the professors at Evergreen are at such a crossroads. A second (only 2 eh?) professor has spoken out and I want to look at that:

My most rewarding teaching experiences have been when my mostly left leaning students have prompted me to examine my own views on controversial issues.

This is a serious problem IMO. In my opinion it is teachers that should be prompting their students to examine their own views on controversial issues. If teachers, particularly at a supposed institution of higher education, are being challenged by their students, rather than by their peers, then I think there is a problem here. While new students will bring in ideas and experiences because they live in a different generation and time, the bedrock principles shouldn't be challenging.

I would like to think that students have also benefited from being exposed to the occasional “redneck” perspective in the classroom and on field trips.

You would think but clearly for a significant population of students and faculty/staff have not benefitted from such exposure. I would hazard to guess that because these contacts are relatively brief rather than something they have to live with. I would hazard to guess that for a lot of these students, dealing with the rednecks are considered "oh here we go with THOSE people today" kind of attitude.

Many of the farms we visited were my clients, who always looked forward to the annual visits by Evergreen’s “strangely dressed students with piercings and tattoos” that seemed to be much more inquisitive and insightful than their land-grant university counterparts.

I have worked on farms and dealt with "country folk". They are generally quite welcoming of people and generally friendly. They respect people who are competent, even if they are "strange" and are generally not two faced.

I believed that I had found the antidote to the ever increasing disease of polarization and identity politics that has been dividing our rural and urban populations.

Now Evergreen has taken from me the medicine needed to cure the illness.

You thought. I wonder, has this person not noticed the changes that were going on before then? Is he implying that the students just woke up one day feeling like everything is racist? And if the students could wake up in such a way how did Evergreen take the medicine away? I think Everygreen itself is a part of the problem.

the college is now contributing to the vilification, paranoia and irrational rhetoric that fuels hatred and violence. The antidote has now become toxic.

I agree that the college is contributing to vilification and paranoia but I believe that the college has been systematically and structurally creating students and faculty who vilify and create paranoia. This stuff doesn't happen overnight.

It is about a collection of professors that are so blinded by their advocacy, that they cannot fathom different viewpoints.

No, this collection of professors who passed "go", collected their $200 and are now persons who indoctrinate. Their letter shows that they are not interested in discussion or scholarship, they wish to pronounce what is and isn't acceptable and punish those who refuse to stay in line.

I recently met with a student who was angry that she was told to shut up at a student rally, based solely on the amount of pigment in her skin. She did not comply, and was called a racist. I asked her if this bothered her. She said: “No, because I am not racist.”

It should bother her. In fact, that is why she was angry. Faculty and Staff and admin of Evergreen should find it unacceptable that they are graduating students who think that the appropriate response to trying to stifle dissent is to call someone racist. Seriously.

To the faculty, too afraid to speak out: I urge you to walk toward the fire. After all, if this brave student is a bigot, then I guess I am too. They are just words. You will not lose your job, but you might lose your dignity.

Evergreen should be bothered that they have created a climate in which faculty and staff, who should be the adults in the room, are afraid to speak freely. And again, this did not happen overnight. I guarantee that this is a culmination of slowly eroding right of free speech. And yes, unless the faculty are tenured they very much risk losing their jobs. Staff members have even less protections than teaching faculty.

This morning was the first time that I was actually nervous coming to campus. Not because of threats of white supremacists, but because I was worried that someone on campus would think that I might be one of them.

You know, maybe, just maybe so called "white supremacists" are not the real and immediate problem.

Newest Data on Egyptians

So there has been a report in the journal Nature on the genetic makeup of some mummified remains in a part of Egypt. Not a few commentators have been using this report to assert that Egyptians were white, some to the extent of “nordic”. However; those of us familiar with Egypt wouldn’t be surprised by the findings in Nature. Let’s discuss. First we have this in the abstract which is important:

in the first millennium BCE Egypt endured foreign domination leading to growing numbers of foreigners living within its borders possibly contributing genetically to the local population. Here we present 90 mitochondrial genomes as well as genome-wide data sets from three individuals obtained from Egyptian mummies.

This is well known, even among the pro-black “hotep” crowd. No one has ever claimed that Egypt was 100% black with absolutely no one else living there. Indeed Egypt was the place to be during it’s time so we expect to find all kinds of people there.

The samples recovered from Middle Egypt span around 1,300 years of ancient Egyptian history from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period. 

It is important to note here that Egypts ages are broken up into Old Kingdom, Middle kingdom, New Kingdom and then Roman period. The remains discussed in the piece are from the last period of Egypts history. To put this into context, imagine that in the year 6000 someone dug up remains of the US and found the population of 1990s Harlem, NYC and asserted from those findings that NY and indeed the entire United States were typically African.

Right.

Secondly, the geographic location puts these individuals in Middle Egypt and closer to the delta region rather than upper Egypt. This is important since one would expect that Egyptians in upper Egypt would/could be more like the persons in Nubia and Ethiopia rather than those closest to the sea and Arabia (which was a part of ancient Egypt at points in it’s history). Hence I find the following statement suspect:

Our analyses reveal that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times.

Rather it should say “ancient Egyptians in the middle region during the new kingdom...” because that is what they studied.

First a quick primer on Egypt. Egypts Old Kingdom is the age of the Pyramids (2613-2180) BCE.

Secondly Upper Egypt

is quite close to Nubia and is in what we now call Sudan (The black land). I’m quite certain that no one considers the Sudanese to be European by any stretch of the imagination. One cannot discuss the genetic make up of “ancient Egyptians” and not discuss upper Egypt.

We can see from the article that the mummies are located far away from upper Egypt (Luxor for reference in Upper Egypt)

So we can argue that not only is this set of mummies not representative geographically, but also chronologically.

I want to stress here that I am not discussing or critiquing specific DNA results or techniques. I am wholly unqualified to do so. This is an argument about representation. I will say however, that the “discovery” that Yorubas are not represented in the gene pool of these mummies puts the last nail in the coffin of those persons who like to claim that West Africans are somehow the descended of some “Asiatic black man”. Enough of that nonsense. Carrying on:

The archaeological site Abusir el-Meleq was inhabited from at least 3250BCE until about 700CE and was of great religious significance because of its active cult to Osiris, the god of the dead, which made it an attractive burial site for centuries2.

This means that the area was inhabited by persons prior to the unification of the two lands under Menes. This also means that the mummies under study were no earlier than 1550 BCE. A nearly 2000 years after the unified Egypt came into existence. Again, I would ask whether we would see the current population of America and state with any sanity that because we see all these different races of people here now, that it must have been that way in 1776. Indeed the authors themselves state as much:

 However, we note that all our genetic data were obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt. It is possible that populations in the south of Egypt were more closely related to those of Nubia and had a higher sub-Saharan genetic component, in which case the argument for an influx of sub-Saharan ancestries after the Roman Period might only be partially valid and have to be nuanced. Throughout Pharaonic history there was intense interaction between Egypt and Nubia, ranging from trade to conquest and colonialism, and there is compelling evidence for ethnic complexity within households with Egyptian men marrying Nubian women and vice versa51,52,53. Clearly, more genetic studies on ancient human remains from southern Egypt and Sudan are needed before apodictic statements can be made. [my underlines]

Many reviewers apparently missed this point. Also:

Our genetic time transect suggests genetic continuity between the Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Abusir el-Meleq, indicating that foreign rule impacted the town’s population only to a very limited degree at the genetic level. It is possible that the genetic impact of Greek and Roman immigration was more pronounced in the north-western Delta and the Fayum, where most Greek and Roman settlement concentrated43,55

Which is what I have been saying from the beginning.

I believe what we have here is twofold:

1) The writers themselves used language that implied that Egyptians were not “Africans”. Indeed by the accompanying charts their claim appears to be that they are using the term “sub-Saharan African” to mean “West and South African” genotypes. Which none of us should be expecting.

2) Writers, particularly those with rightward affinities and perhaps white identitarian types, didn’t read the actual Nature article or did not understand what they were reading and thought the study was representative of the entirety of ancient Egypt.

I’m also going to suppose that not a few black outlets will not report on this article because they think it says what it doesn’t. That or there will be an attempt to dismiss the article as a whitewash. Such head burying will help nobody.