Like most people, I get a lot of unwanted calls on my mobile phone.  (I get them on my landline, too, but I don’t want to lose credibility with younger readers by mentioning that I have one.)  In the last week or so, a new feature appeared on my android phone.  If the phone thinks the caller is illegitimate, it gives me the option to have Google screen the call.

Google answers the call and recites the message that the owner of the phone is using Google to screen calls.  It invites the caller to state his/her name and the reason for the call.  Without fail, the caller ends the call without leaving a message.  It’s a terrific service that appeared out of nowhere.  If Google wants to skew my search results in exchange, I think it’s a fair trade.  In fact, it’s pure gain to me, since they were skewing search results anyway.

Unfortunately, a scam caller got through to me about an hour ago.  I was in my car. I didn’t want to take my attention off the road to see who was calling and to hit the “screen call” button if needed.  Instead, I accepted the call through my car’s Bluetooth.

The caller was a young-sounding woman who told me she was calling from H-P.  My service contract was about to expire and she wanted to run a check on my laptop while it was still under contract.  I no longer have an HP laptop and I never had a service contract, so there was no question this was not a legitimate call.

I thought I would try to meet the caller on her own terms.  It’s the season when we should reach out to our fellow pilgrims upon the surface of the earth.  I told her that I had a strict limit of two scam calls per day.  Unfortunately, two other people had gotten to me before she had.  I told her that if she would like to call back tomorrow, I would be happy to take her call and let her try to scam me.

I had expected her to step back.  She had entered my car by placing a mask between us.  By putting a second mask into the scene, I had expected, or perhaps I had only hoped, that we could both put our masks aside and have a good laugh over her earnest attempt to open and then empty my wallet and my cheerful parry.

Instead, she doubled down.  She assured me that this was not a scam, that her only purpose was to ensure the continued efficient operation of my HP laptop, and that my best course was and would continue to be to allow her to walk me through the HP-tested procedures for maintaining the health of my computer.

I thought that this was not playing the game.  She had been found out.  She ought to have put down the mask and shared a laugh.  Instead, she continued to try to scam me.  For a second time, I invited her to call back tomorrow – early, before the other scammers make their attempts.  She told me she was going to cancel my HP service contract and hung up.

I wish her no ill will.  We all must find a way to put food on the table.  A Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season to her and, more importantly, dear reader (without whose continued support I would be forced to shutter this blog), to you.

A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with a cashier at my local QFC as she scanned my purchases.  When she got to a bottle of wine – an amusing little Chianti – she asked me if I had ID.  I reached the legal drinking age half a century ago.  I realized that she was using humor to dilute the drudgery that comes with handling other people’s food purchases for eight hours a day.  I pointed out to her that there are hundreds of professional comedians out of work.  I asked her, out of respect for them, to stop cracking jokes for free.

If I were on similarly friendly terms with John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States, I would have made the same point to him after he pronounced that, contrary to President Trump’s claim, there are no Obama judges, Bush judges, Clinton judges, or Trump judges.  In his view, all members of the judiciary are equally conscientious in applying the law fairly and without bias.

He must know it’s not true.  It is true that some judges, originalists and textualists, are prohibited by their creed – if they are true to it – from manipulating their analysis to reach a pre-determined result.  That is not to say that they don’t slip from time to time; but when they do, they are departing from principle.  But an activist judge is acting according to doctrine when he or she interprets a statute or constitutional provision to achieve a desired result.  They are taught from an early stage that achieving those results is their purpose in judging.

Surely that philosophical difference explains why so many immigration cases come to the Ninth Circuit, which has a well-earned reputation for activism.  It isn’t a coincidence that advocates for open borders prefer to start their cases in that circuit.  They may know something that the Chief Justice wants to deny.

But he need not look that far afield.  He knows from personal experience that his criticism of the President’s complaint is unfair.

President Obama, in his 2010 State of the Union address, criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.  The nine justices were sitting in a row in their accustomed places in the middle of the House chamber.  A group of Democratic senators and congresspersons were sitting behind them and immediately jumped to their feet, jeering and clapping.  The President looked on, chin elevated, eyes gleaming.

I recall the Chief Justice’s facial expression and body language at that moment.  He wasn’t enjoying the experience.  However, he did not criticize President Obama, then or later.  Instead, he internalized the political message that the President delivered that evening.

While the case testing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was under consideration by the Supreme Court, proponents of the statute kept political pressure on the Chief Justice.  Senator Schumer emphasized how unfortunate it would be for the reputation of the Supreme Court if it were to oppose the popular will on such an important matter.  Nice little court you have here.

A central issue in the case was whether the power granted to Congress to regulate interstate commerce was broad enough to support a statutory requirement that each individual who was not otherwise covered purchase health insurance.  The Chief Justice might have noticed – everyone else did – that the four justices appointed by Democratic presidents thought that the commerce clause justified the statute.  The five justices appointed by Republican presidents, including the Chief Justice, disagreed.

The Chief Justice upheld the statute under Congress’ taxing power.  When the Act was under consideration by the Congress, its proponents emphasized repeatedly that the financial penalties built into the law were not taxes.  During briefing and argument, the government at no point asked that the  Court to uphold the Act as a tax.

The Chief Justice cannot expect anyone who remembers those events to believe that he examined the law, the facts, and the Constitution and made an objective decision without any reference to political issues or to the Court’s reputation.  He did what he had to do to avoid another public airing of grievances by the President of the United States.

He did it again when the statute came in front of the court a couple of years later.  Recall that the statute was written to create financial penalties for states that did not establish health insurance exchanges.  Those states would not receive subsidies available to states that complied.  This was a feature of the statute favored by its architects.  Even so, many states refused to establish exchanges.  The Treasury adopted regulations that allowed the federal government to take the place of the states that failed to set up exchanges.  That action raised a Constitutional issue because the Constitution prohibits the expenditure of funds from the Treasury except pursuant to a Congressional enactment.  Once again, the Chief Justice acted as the blue pencil editor, revising a statute after the fact to make it say what the Executive told him it needed to say to achieve the Executive’s purposes.

You may think that the result he reached is the right one, the one best for the country.  Fine.  At the same time, you would have to agree that he didn’t put on a blindfold and do justice without fear or favor.  He acted to protect the institution he heads from attacks by a political operation that did not intend to go quietly if he ruled against them.

I am bothered by his craven surrender to a political threat but I am disgusted by his outrageous claim that neither he nor any of his colleagues in the judicial branch would ever do such a thing.

In the 1930s, early in the National Socialist reign, the German government enacted the notorious anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws.  These statutes stripped German Jews of citizenship, subjected them to countless humiliations, and were a step on the road to the Holocaust.

The urge to deal categorically with Germany’s Jewish population left open the question how to determine whether any particular individual was a Jew for purposes of the statutes.  The Germans counted grandparents.  An individual’s treatment varied depending on how many Jewish grandparents he or she had.  The scoring system was like golf.  Lower scores were better.

Other laws required proof of “Aryan” descent if an individual wanted to enter public service by joining the SS.  A candidate had to prove that all his ancestors were Germans back to the days of Frederick the Great in the mid-eighteenth century.

The white South faced a similar classification question in the Jim Crow era.  They needed a way to decide which water fountain any particular light-skinned person could use, which part of the streetcar that person could occupy, and so on.  While they adopted the principle that “one drop of African blood” would put an individual in the back of the bus, in practice they looked to great-grandparents.  If you could point to eight white great-grandparents, you could sit in the front of the streetcar.

I thought of these laws the first time I saw a TV commercial for Ancestry.com.  A fellow wearing stereotypical Bavarian clothing – short pants with suspenders, knee-high woolen socks, needing only a string of sausages tumbling out of his pocket to complete the ensemble – tells us that “growing up we were German.”  He sent his DNA to Ancestry.com and learned “we weren’t German at all.”  His ancestors came from Scotland.  The final shot shows him in full Highland regalia.  He tells us, “I traded in my lederhosen for a kilt.”  Wurst came to worsted.

A woman who “had no idea” she was 25% Native American now surrounds herself with Southwest-style pottery as a way of finding out more about “my heritage”.  Another who learned that about 25% of her DNA came from Nigeria ordered a green hat from that nation to celebrate the new-found connection.

I am waiting for the installment where a resident of Chicago, a lifelong fan of the Cubs, learns that ten of her 64 great-great-great-great grandparents came from St. Louis and none from Chicago.  Does she now become a fan of the Cardinals, to get in touch with her heritage?

When Ancestry.com and its competitors analyze the geography of our DNA, the gregarious, wandering ways of our species are bound to produce surprises.  The O’Sullivans whose great-grandparents came from County Cork can have an Italian or an Indonesian forebear eight or ten generations back just as easily as the Mahathir family from Malaysia can learn that an eighteenth-century missionary from England or Portugal developed closer relations with the host population than was apparent to the other members of his Bible study class.

Which brings me to Senator Elizabeth Warren.  She has long insisted that she is descended from Cherokees, that her parents had to elope because the white side of the family objected to the match with an Indian.  This belief proved helpful to her career when she applied to join the faculty of the Harvard Law School.

Half of the Harvard Law School faculty are themselves graduates of that distinguished institution.  The other half were educated at prestigious law schools ranked among the five to ten best in the US.  How did it happen that Harvard took to its hearth Elizabeth Warren, a graduate of the non-elite Rutgers Law School and the co-author of those works of profound scholarship “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan” and “The Two-income Trap”?  The answer: She presented herself as a Native American.  The Harvard faculty guide identified her that way in the 1990s as did forms that the University of Pennsylvania – her employer before Harvard — filed with the federal government.

The arrangement was exposed a few years back when she first ran for office, earning now-Senator Warren the nickname “Fauxcahontas”.  President Trump is holding back when he refers to her merely as “Pocahontas”.

Both Harvard and Senator Warren denied that her identity as a Native American had anything to do with her selection.  Still, the ridicule stung.  Senator Warren has responded with the report of a DNA test that shows that six to ten generations ago she had an ancestor who was – not Cherokee – but an indigenous resident of the western hemisphere.

These DNA results can help us to sharpen our thinking about ethnicity.  If we assume that Senator Warren is eight generations removed from her indigenous ancestor – splitting the difference between six and ten – and if we allow 25 years per generation, then that ancestor was born sometime round about 1750.  Let’s label that child “AOI” for Ancestor of Interest.  The AOI had at least one great-grandchild.  That would take us to about 1825, at 25 years per generation.  The AOI’s great-grandchild had at least one great-grandchild of his or her own, who would have been born around 1900.  That person is Elizabeth Warren’s grandparent.  After the AOI, everyone in the line is of European descent.

That last statement requires some refinement.  If you go back eight generations, you have 256 ancestors.  (Each individual in the chain has two parents.  Two to the eighth power is 256.)  We can picture 256 empty boxes on a family tree waiting for us to fill in the names.  But there may not be 256 distinct individuals to place in those boxes.  The same individual may appear multiple times.  That’s because some ancestors at the 256 level may have descendants who married each other.  Depending on the culture, marriages between second or third cousins (or even first cousins) are not uncommon.  And in any culture, some couples will marry without knowing that they have a common ancestor from four, five, or more generations earlier.

The logic of this point becomes self-evident as you take your imagination back in time.  At 25 years per generation, we are 30 generations removed from roughly 1250 A.D.  If you don’t allow for cousin marriage, you have over a billion ancestors from that era.  (2 to the 30^th power is more than 1,000,000,000.)  But there weren’t a billion people alive on earth in 1250 A.D.  The descendants of the comparatively small number of humans alive in 1250 produced our seven billion contemporaries by finding cousins to keep company on long summer evenings.

Second, and conversely, the DNA from some of those 256 ancestors may not have made it to the person whose DNA sample is being tested.  Some ancestors’ DNA drops out over time.  To illustrate the point, suppose that of the 256, ancestor number 195 and ancestor 124 produce a child.  Picture their genes as playing cards.  Number 195 contributes 50 diamonds and 124 contributes 50 clubs.  We shuffle the cards to produce a child whose genetic heritage is 100 cards, half diamonds and half clubs.  When that child produces her child, she will send 50 cards into the mix, as will her mate.  There is no guarantee that the cards she sends will be 25 diamonds and 25 clubs.  She might send 20 diamonds and 30 clubs.  There is a fresh random shuffle every generation.  A card that fails to make it to the next generation is gone forever.  As time goes by, the contribution of distant ancestors becomes smaller and smaller.  At the tenth generation, there is only a 50% chance that a particular individual among the 1,024 ancestors at that distance will have any DNA in the donor of a given sample.

That tells us that Senator Warren may have Native American ancestors whose DNA didn’t make it into hers.  Equally, the AOI may have had ancestors who were not themselves indigenes but whose DNA didn’t make it to the AOI’s generation.  The fraction of a percentage point of indigenous western hemisphere genes that the Senator’s DNA analyst found could be masking a Native American ancestry two or four times (or more) larger than what was found, or two or four times (or more) smaller.

The point of going into all of this is not to pick on Senator Warren but rather to point out the prevalence of some genuinely racist thought that seems to survive without comment.  Somehow, people who become red with stammering rage when a non-Mexican wears a sombrero grant a pass to claims that come straight out of the Jim Crow playbook.

The great majority of the 256 or so individuals wandering the earth in 1750 whose descendants include the junior Senator from Massachusetts likely traced their ancestry to Britain, Ireland, northern and western Europe.  Yet, the Senator’s focus is on one individual from Peru or Colombia who happened to catch the eye of another Warren forebear.

Is it not ridiculous to claim that you are – take your pick – Maori, Mayan, Irish, Arab because out of the many ancestors who began to beget you 250 years ago, one was a member of that ethnicity?  But even if your membership in an ethnic group is based on well-documented evidence and stronger numbers, it is beyond ridiculous to claim that your ancestors’ DNA gains you a political credit or that someone else’s nets them a political debit.  It might make perfect sense if you are trying to fit in with your contemporaries in Germany in 1938 or Mississippi in 1920, but it’s utterly antithetical to the principle of equal natural rights on which American governance was founded.  Your natural rights are not derived from your racial, ethnic, religious, or national identity.

The viciousness of the Nuremberg/Jim Crow classifications, the silliness of the Ancestry.com advertising, and the DNA-as-resume-enhancement approach of Elizabeth Warren all have one thing in common.  They want us to believe that we are who we are because of the group we belong to, and further that the group we belong to is identified by the genes we carry.  An interest in one’s ancestors is healthy, but it becomes an illness when a person claims special status because of his or her ancestors’ supposed superiority or, conversely, their documented status as victims.

Ancestry.com notwithstanding, kilts and lederhosen, pottery and millinery are not the products of the DNA that code our individual characteristics.  Your genes will influence physical traits like height and coloration.  Undoubtedly, they contribute to personality, cognitive ability, and behavioral dispositions.  But your genetic heritage does not determine whether you will wear a kilt or a toga or a set of brass rings to stretch the length of your neck.  If you think that the genes of an ethnic group determine their culture, if you think that a person’s DNA defines him or her, haven’t you accepted the premises of Nuremberg and the Jim Crow South?  The idea may wear a smiley face instead of a snarl, but it’s the same thought.