Ok, I'll hop on this Elizabeth Warren/Native American testing bandwagon (gently and non-politically).

I've been a @23andMe customer for a while, and have followed their ancestry updates closely.

All is more or less as expected....except for this bit about Native American.

The family is almost completely composed of Spanish peasants (from various regions) who emigrated, along with a massive wave in the late 19th-cent./early 20th-cent., to Cuba back when it was a booming economy (richer than Spain's) and worth emigrating to (Communism killed that).

Also, the native population of Cuba was annihilated early on---was the first place the Spanish colonized after all. Having a native background in Cuba would be like having the same in, say, Massachusetts, particularly if you're (say) mostly Irish. Just really, really unlikely.

(Note: the North African/Arab background is less mysterious. The Iberian peninsula was part of the Muslim world for centuries. It would be odd *not* to have some Arab/Middle Eastern background coming from Spain. Given the family is mostly from Northern Spain, it's small though.)

I have a Spanish passport, have been back to the ancestral villages in Spain, seen the church where my grandmother was baptized, my grandfather told me stories about growing up as the child of Spanish colonists in rural Cuba. The native bit just clashes with all the family lore.

Very interesting new report about how America's economic geography has changed since the great recession: https://t.co/l3YE4WzgKx

Short version: Places with lots of skilled workers are doing great, other places aren't. But more people are moving to the former, which is good.

And here are cool interactive maps to go along with the

Report is via @LettieriDC, who is doing great work on struggling places.

A bit of good news: People are moving from economically bad places to economically good places, though probably too slowly.

Rural America continues to languish.

1. Let's talk about Albanians. No, not THOSE Albanians, in the Balkans. The Caucasian Albanians, the pre-Turkish inhabitants of the land now known as Azerbaijan. 🇦🇿

2. Yeah, I know, there's also an "Iberia" there, which should cause even more confusion (with Spain), but let's focus on "Albania".

3. This ancient church in the village of Nij (or Nic), just south of the Caucasus Mountains, belongs to the Udi people, a Christian minority in Azerbaijan descended from the area’s pre-Turkic Caucasian Albanians. 🇦🇿

4. Nearby are the ruins of the Caucasian Albanian capital of “old” Gabala (Qebele), where I was given a personal tour by one of the resident archeologists (just for showing up). 🇦🇿

5. Only a very tiny portion of the extensive site has been excavated. “Every place you dig,” the archeologist told me, “you will find artifacts.” This whole field is a city waiting to be uncovered.

So a husband cheats by mistake and in return the wife cheats too but ends up pregnant, So who tore the family apart?

(EXCERPT) Here are the first excerpts to be published from my forthcoming 450-page, 1,650-endnote book PROOF OF COLLUSION. More excerpts will be released each Monday until the book's November 13 release. I hope you'll RETWEET and consider preordering here: https://t.co/ZJsnHcVwGi

2/ Each of the 14 chapters in the book is divided into three sections: Summary, Facts, and Annotated History. Summary and Facts sections are present tense; Annotated Histories are past tense. Endnote numerals follow sentences, with the endnotes themselves at the back of the book.

3/ There are zero tweets from this feed in the book. The book is written in the style of a government report, chronologically ordered. The timeframe covered by the book begins in 1987 (Chapter 1) and quickly moves to a month-by-month analysis of Trump's campaign from June '15 on.

4/ The book's 1,650 endnotes comprise about 2,000 total citations. The number of media outlets cited in the book is in the hundreds, and includes reliable media institutions from around the world. The number of people discussed is so large that we'll have to put the Index online.

5/ This book is the public record of the public investigation into Trump-Russia collusion. That means it's composed of the best investigative reporting done on this topic—including any leaks directly from Congressional and DOJ/FBI sources that were later published in major media.

Ho-koš-po-koš pr-de ko-koš i-ma jed-na mod-ra rje-ka

Prije pola stoljeća svijet je još uvijek bio dobri stari svijet u kom se znalo kako šta funkcioniše i šta je čija zadaća. Uslijed nepostojanja globalne informatičke mreže čeljad je saznanja o svijetu dobijala putem škole,

zatim putem medija, te putem zanimljivih a beskorisnih sadržaja kao što su umjetnost i kultura, mada ni običnoj i profanoj zabavi ne bi bilo pošteno oduzet tu edukativnu dimenziju. Kultura, umjetnost i zabava podučavale su čeljad onome za šta škole nisu imale vremena kao i onome

što nije bilo od suštinskog značaja za pravilnu izgradnju proletera, inokosnog poljoprivrednog proizvođača i poštenog inteligenta.
Tako je Mak Dizdar morao napisati svoju čuvenu pjesmicu u kojoj je objasnio gdje se nalazi Modra rijeka. Pošto se u nas poezija ipak više piše nego

što se čita, ta je korisna informacija ostala nepoznata većem broju čeljadi, pa su zato Indeksi odlučili uglazbit Modru rijeku i tako informaciju o njenoj zemljopisnoj lokaciji učinit dostupnom širokim radnim masama. Mi smo onda svi naučili tu pjesmicu i mogli smo u svako doba

dana i noći, pa čak i nakon četiri do šest ispijenih piva, ko iz topa ispucat sve što znademo o Modroj rijeci. A znali smo uglavnom dvije stvari.
Pod jedan smo znali da se ona nalazi iza gore iza dola iza sedam iza osam i još huđe i još luđe preko mornih preko gorkih preko gloga

1. Politics has always been to some degree the art of making people forget. Let's face it all politicians are liars to one degree or another. Some are really good liars others aren't so good at it.

2. The biggest advantage that politicians and those that practiced politics had over the years is the lack of long term memories of the population.

3. Most of the population simply are too busy or too unfocused to remember what a politician says from day to day. A free press was suppose to be our memory. They failed.

4. This lack of focus is why we have political campaigns to a large degree. It gives the population a chance to focus on the politicians in a more limited time period to pick the "best" person for the job.

5. Politicians over the decades have taken this lack of memory and focus by the population to come to the conclusion that the people are stupid. This is not the case. It's much more about apathy than stupidity.

Ethnic Crime Families Provoke German Crackdown:
Criminal clans of Arab and Kurdish origin clash violently in Berlin and broaden their sway in #Germany. My report via @WSJ

On a rainy morning in a cemetery last month, Berlin’s hidden underworld briefly emerged from the shadows. It was the funeral of a gang enforcer who got shot eight times as he took his wife and children for a stroll in a popular park. @WSJ

His funeral drew nearly 2,000 mourners from across the country. Scores of police officers watched as bearded, beefy men in tracksuits and crew cuts filed by. Older men were ferried to the graveside in luxury cars with dark-tinted windows. @WSJ

Security officials, politicians and researchers say Germany's burgeoning ethnic crime clans represent an immediate security concern as well as a warning about what can happen when migrants fail to integrate into their host societies. @WSJ

Some of the families stuck by tribal and Islamic codes of justice, spurning the state & its laws, a government study found. Insulated from society, governed by their own rules and hierarchies, several such families turned into criminal enterprises @wsj

Theresa May will make a statement to the House of Commons on Brexit negotiations after 3.30pm today.

Theresa May's spokesman: "The EU continues to insist on the possibility of a customs border down the Irish Sea. This is something the House of Commons has already rejected and is unacceptable to the prime minister."

Asked if Theresa May is still confident of securing a Brexit deal this week, her spokesman replies she is "confident of securing a deal this autumn."

Check out what I got today. You can tell it's something weird as fuck just from the box...

So this is a FISK ... thing.
It's a floppy disk fax machine! You can fax floppies to other people who have these things.

Apparently you can connect it to external drives, computers, or printers?

So I'm gonna do more research into this thing and how it works, but while I'm here, some of the other stuff I got today. Some 3.5" floppy disks. Single sided, double density ones! These were some of the very first 3.5" disks and basically nothing used them.

I also got this book: AutoSim, the Marketing Laboratory.
It's some software to help you sell cars, apparently! it was weird and cheap, so I got it. I'll of course image it.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADD HOLLYWOOD STYLE TITLES TO YOUR HOME VIDEOS?
NOW YOU CAN!

This is the Sima ScreenWriter, a device for putting titles on your home videos.

The back

It's apparently from 1992, and takes a CR2032 battery

The very minimalist IO panel. composite in, composite out, power and a switch.

#Merkel’s Allies Hit With Worst Election Showing Since 1950 in Bavaria:
Poor showing for the Christian Social Union and Social Democratic Party raises questions about the German chancellor’s shaky coalition. My report via @WSJ

A twin blow to Merkel’s rule: CSU battered & junior coalition partner SPD dropped into single-digit territory in #Bavaria for the first time since WWII. SPD now under grassroots pressure to end coalition as some members say it's eroding popular support:

This month’s elections in Bavaria and Hessen will certainly have an impact on national politics and on the reputation of the chancellor, Wolfgang Schäuble, the CDU speaker of parliament, said this week. “They could bring big changes.”

The election showed that the CSU’s strategy of confronting #Merkel because of her immigration policy had failed to stop the ascent of the AfD, even though the party scored below its national average in opinion polls. AfD now in 15 of 16 state parliaments.

The CSU's harsher anti-immigration rhetoric and internal quarrels pushed many voters to the Greens. This could embolden Merkel allies who say Green surge is evidence that the CDUCSU future lies in her centrist brand of conservatism.

1/Here is a thread about climate change that's going to make a lot of people mad.

Basically, America, on its own, has a LOT power to stop climate change than almost anyone admits.

2/China now emits far more CO2 than the U.S. It emits almost as much as Europe and the U.S. combined.

3/In fact, even this huge disparity dramatically understates the degree to which China is in the driver's seat of climate change.

China, being still much poorer than us, has much more room to grow its economy. Hence, the emissions gap will only grow larger.

4/This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: The battle to halt climate change will be won or lost in China.

America's power - and thus, the power of American politicians, activists, businesses, etc. - to save the planet from climate catastrophe is very marginal.

5/This is just a fact. But it's an uncomfortable one for a people like Americans who are used to thinking that the world lives or dies at their command.

Thus, I see many Americans desperately trying to preserve the illusion of control with respect to climate change.

A thing which I unironically and enthusiastically believe which is unpopular among smart people of my acquaintance: financial engineering has in the recent past and present contributed substantially to human welfare. We should hope to see more of it.

Maybe more geeks need to meet someone who says “My job is teleporting value across time and space.”

Financial engineering is sort of a squishy term. I don’t primarily mean payments infrastructure or financial rails, although both of those involve substantial engineering.

I mean more “We took a thing and performed some alchemy, and now have a new thing.”

Except instead of alchemy it is generally quite a bit of math, a huge amount of contract law and due diligence, often an impressive amount of ops work, and a dusting of technology that web devs would recognize as such.

The elections in Bavaria show that the German political system, which has long seemed reasonably stolid, is in enormous flux at the moment.

A thread with four lessons. (Just wait till you get to Number 4! 😉)

1) Don’t let anyone fool you: The elections show that populist sentiment remains strong. The CSU ran its most hard right campaign in decades. The AfD gained ten percent. And the Free Voters are also deeply conservative, and especially critical of the government’s refugee policy.

Together, this means that strongly right-of-center parties have taken about two thirds of the vote.

Anyone who tries to sell that as a success for the liberal left is kidding themselves.

2) For a long time, it looked as though the troubles of broad social democratic parties that once commanded ~40% of the vote were sui generis.

That narrative is certainly confirmed today, with the SPD in single digits.

But...

...it now also looks as though center-right parties that once commanded ~40% of the vote will keep declining.

This is the CSU’s worst result in history. It comes at a moment when its sister party, Angela Merkel’s CDU, at 26%, polls worse than at any point since the 1950s.