She’s in, but I’m sure she had some reservations.

Elizabeth Warren officially kicks off her Presidential campaign.

6 thoughts on “She’s in, but I’m sure she had some reservations.

  1. I probably should stop beating this dead horse, but I saw this guy on the news today about a rally the Region One Aboriginal Business Association of Alberta was holding in favor of the oil and gas industry.

    This is the President of the Association, Shawn McDonald:

    He looks like a completely white person to me. So, since your argument seems to be based on that Elizabeth Warren couldn’t have thought she was a native, because she looks white, there are actually a fairly large number of aboriginal people who don’t look aboriginal.

    1. Warren’s appearance was just a throwaway joke, and not the basis of any argument. But she is, without a doubt, the single whitest-looking person on the planet Earth, possibly excluding Conan O’Brien.

      The basis of my argument is that nobody in Warren’s family had any idea who the NA ancestor might have been. It was nothing but a family legend. (And we now know it was too far back to be remembered by anyone Warren ever met, or for that matter, anyone ever met by anyone Warren ever met.) As far as I know, she STILL has no idea who the ancestor might be.

      Interestingly, Warren’s DNA test shows the same % of Native American DNA as my girlfriend, whose ancestors are all recent (20th century) European immigrants. We are all completely baffled by that result. If accurate, it means that one of Cathy’s parents is likely to be something like 4% Native American, even though all of their own ancestors were born in Italy, Norway or Germany. Bizarre! Her dad (the Italian side of the European ancestry) is still alive at 95. It might be fun to test him, if we can persuade him. I think the explanation must lie in her Norwegian grandmother. The nomadic Saami people wander through northern Scandinavia, and I suppose they must intermarry with Euro-Vikings now and again. They probably have a DNA connection to Native Americans, although I do not know that for a fact.

      I’m assuming that, unlike Warren, ol’ Shawn McDonald knows of and can identify the person or persons that make him part of the First Nations. (I wonder if he is related to the famous horse breeder Vern McDonald, who also hails from those same parts. I hate to make that assumption because so many people in Canada are named McDonald.) It is also possible that Shawn is NOT a member of the First Nations at all, but his wife is, which therefore makes his business owned by a member of the First Nations. And finally, we’ve seen only that one tiny pic of Shawn. We have no realistic idea what he really looks like.

      But, as I noted, if you think Warren has a realistic chance to become President, this is your chance to become rich, because you can still get 25-1 odds.

      1. The usual DNA tests aren’t all that accurate when it comes to race. I’d venture to guess that is the most likely explanation for the percentage.

        1. Possibly. Although my 23andme test, I can say, is extremely accurate, given that I know exactly where my ancestors came from, back four generations, and their test reflected that perfectly.

          I suppose it might be easier when the heritage, like mine, has no complications at all.

          On the other hand, the very same test results, downloaded from 23andme and submitted to MyHeritage.com, came back with utter gibberish – from the very same data! So I’d say the problem is not with the testing, but with the databases and the interpretation based on those databases.

      2. 1.You can expand the pictures of Shawn McDonald in Linkedin.

        2.I’ve seen Shawn McDonald in a video, and he is white. His wife being native would not make him eligible:

        “Our association ensures that all Full Members are qualified by at least 51% Aboriginal ownership and are local to the Region One area.”

        3.It’s a complete stereotype that all natives look ‘red.’

        As for Elizabeth Warren, I don’t know what she believed about her supposed native heritage in the 1980s. There is a consistency to her stating that she thought she was of native heritage, and I think she is a fundamentally honest person.

        1. The web sites on Canadian law say that a married couple are legally a single entity, so if his wife was a native American, the business would be 100% owned by a member of First Nations. In such a case, if they divorced, he would have to agree to give his wife 51% of the company rather than the legally-mandated 50%, assuming they cared to maintain that status. Of course, we don’t know if that is the case. Shawn may himself be a certified member of First Nations. But none of that really matters. As I pointed out, my comment about her looks was just a throwaway joke. She is not just white in appearance, but the single whitest person on the planet, possibly excepting Jim Gaffigan.

          We obviously have a major disagreement on this point: “I think she is a fundamentally honest person.” I say that cannot possibly be true because any claims she has to ANY native american ancestry were based on a legend of an ancestor nobody could specifically recall (and we now know to have been from around the time of the American Revolution) – so even the claim to have a

            trace

          of NA blood would have been tenuous and unsupportable – but to make the outright claim that her race was Native American, when she knew the closest possible connection was minimal, even assuming the family legends were 100% accurate, was just an outright lie. As I mentioned, the only other possible assumption is that she is utterly stupid, and I think it is safe to assume that she is not, which leads me to the only other possible explanation – that she is simply a liar. Now almost anyone will lie when they have something important to gain by doing so, but to lie on some survey marked “for statistical purposes only,” when she had nothing to gain, indicates to me a person who has very serious problems. When a person lies with nothing to gain, that is the precise definition of a pathological liar.

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