Most unkind of me but

I’m sure #BlackLivesMatter organisers will get …. right….on…..this…..

*crickets*

Anthony Robinson? Someone’s shot Baldrick?

And shot him with his daughter? Launched her out of a trebuchet at him? Seems sadly appropriate.

Yep, BoM4. I’m more shocked by “Unlimited digital access free for 1 month.”

“In film captured by a dashboard camera, a dark saloon car pulled alongside the crossing before a hand holding a gun emerged from the passenger window and shot Mr Robinson four times.”

A dark saloon car, you say? Did the camera pick up the tone of the hand holding the gun? I would have thought that might also be relevant.

Obviously a white hand inside a dark glove.

Driving a luxury car.

New York police have released video footage of a man shot dead on a pedestrian crossing while holding the hand of his seven-year-old daughter amid a nationwide surge in gun violence.

This is not a bug, it is a feature. And it isn’t “nationwide”; it’s concentrated in parts of large urban areas populated primarily by African Americans.

When you are given political control of a population – by that population – that has lived with violence, drugs and unemployment for decades, and has not asked for change in any meaningful way, then the appropriate conclusion to draw is that violence, drugs and unemployment are not important political issues to that population.

It’s not like anyone in NYC didn’t understand who and what Bill DeBlasio was by the end of first term… Yet they voted him back in for a second term. Democracy is giving NYC what it voted for, and it’s giving it to them good and hard.

Why is anyone shocked? This is a gang hit and gangs figure out routines and hit at that point. Anthony walks his kid to school every day? That’s where Anthony is going to get hit. The guy is in some way involved in the narcotics trade. Gangs don’t do hits for fun.

I don’t think you can really infer that from the video. It might have been a “gang hit” but it might have been someone mad at him for a diss on social media or because he showed up to a party uninvited or whatever.

A lot of murders in the ghetto happen because of really trivial personal grudges. It’s mostly not about gang kingpins directing hits or defending drug dealing territory.

Interesting discussion here:
https://www.city-journal.org/gun-violence-policing

Andrew C
July 8, 2020 at 3:29 pm

From what I’ve seen on The Wire, being a drug dealer in the US is not a bad life. Lots of money and loose women.

You must have watched a different wire. Because what I saw were people living mostly subsistence lives, earning minimum wage *plus* the liklihood of getting shot in the face. Only a small number of criminals made a comfortable living.

“ You must have watched a different wire. Because what I saw were people living mostly subsistence lives, earning minimum wage *plus* the liklihood of getting shot in the face. Only a small number of criminals made a comfortable living.”

Freakonomics did a chapter on this:

https://freakonomics-review.weebly.com/why-do-drug-dealers-still-live-with-their-moms.html

@BiND there is a charity in Manchester that helps gang kids and as part of their outreach they get minor street level drug dealers to work out their hourly rate of pay, apparently shocks them every time and is a good incentive to making them change their lifestyle.
Perhaps not surprisingly the founder of the charity has been slammed for not fully supporting BLM and bending the knee.

@Ummmm
“Slammed” – Sacked

Charity boss Nick Buckley MBE has stood by his comments criticising the Black Lives Matter organisation after his views cost him his job

White man loses his job because he made a justified comment about the BLM. Yet black Cambridge professor Gopal tweets a comment “white lives don’t matter” and not only does she keep her job but she gets a promotion

It’s whites not non-whites who face discrimination

Hang on – isn’t most Neanderthal DNA found in Europeans, and none in sub-Saharan Africans?

Sounds likely given that the Neander Tal (valley) is in Germany.

What @Pcar has got wrong is looked at the abstract, noticed that South Asians and Europeans are mentioned in the abstract, saw that Europeans had a lower percentage than South Asians, and concluded “Whites have fewer incidence of them”.

But if you read the actual paper it’s clear that Europeans and South Asians were mentioned in the abstract because they were the two groups with the highest proportions, not because Europeans had a low proportion but the exact opposite!

What the paper (though this is all pre-print, pre peer review etc so usual need to be cautious applies – I’ve no idea how good this paper is but in the fields I do know well there are some appalling low quality on biorxiv) actually says about this very specific genetic region apparently associated with COVID risk is:

“The genetic variants which are associated with severe COVID-19 on chromosome 3 (chr3: 45,859,651-45,909,024, hg19) are all in high linkage disequilibrium (LD), i.e. they are all strongly associated with each other in the population (r2>0.99), and span 49.4 thousand bases (kb) (Fig. 1B). A haplotype of such length could be due to positive selection, to an unusually low recombination rate in the region, or to that the haplotype entered the human population by gene flow from Neandertals or Denisovans that occurred some 40,000 to 60,000 years ago (Sankararaman et al. 2012). Positive selection seems unlikely at least under current conditions when the odds ratio for respiratory insufficiency upon SARS-CoV-2 for heterozygous carriers of the haplotype is 1.70 (95% CI, 1.27 to 2.26, Ellinghaus et al. 2020). The recombination rate in the region is not unusually low (0.53 cM/mb, Kong et al. 2002). We therefore investigated whether the haplotype may have come from Neandertals or Denisovans.

The previously identified lead risk insertion variant (rs11385942) (Ellinghaus et al. 2020) is present in all 33 DNA fragments covering this this position in the Vindija 33.19 Neandertal, a ~50,000-old-old Neandertal from Croatia in southern Europe (Prüfer et al. 2017). Of 14 single nucleotide variants in the 1000 Genomes Project that are in high LD (r2>0.99) with the insertion risk variant in Eurasian populations, 12 occur in a homozygous form in the Vindija 33.19 Neandertal (Fig. 1B). Four of these variants occur the “Altai” as well as in the Chagyrskaya 8 Neandertals, both of whom come from the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia and are ~120,000 and ~50,000 years old, respectively (Table S1) while none occur in the Denisovan genome. Thus, the risk haplotype is similar to the corresponding genomic region in the Neandertal from Croatia and less similar to the Neandertals from Siberia….

Among the individuals in the 1000 Genome Project, the Neanderthal-derived risk haplotypes is almost completely absent in Africa, consistent with that gene flow from Neandertals into African populations was limited and probably indirect (Chen et al. 2020). The Neandertal haplotype occurs in South Asia at a frequency of 30%, in Europa at 8%, among admixed Americans at 4% and at lower frequencies in East Asia. The highest frequency occurs in Bangladesh, where more than half the population (63%) carries at least one copy of the Neandertal risk variant and 13% is homozygous for the variant. The Neandertal variant may thus be a substantial contributor to COVID-19 risk in certain populations.”

@RichardT

My Post was rather tongue in cheek and to some extent bait for MBE

imo the Nean genes are a small factor. The higher non-white vulnerability is due to many genetic factors, diabetes propensity and Vit D production being two