Links - 7th February 2019

Immigration: Survey Shows Alarming Lack of Integration in Germany - "Of all the immigrant groups in Germany, the southern Europeans from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, who made up the first wave of so-called "guest workers" who came to Germany after World War II, have done best in terms of integrating themselves.The so-called Aussiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, most of whom who came to Germany in the 1990s, are the biggest single group of immigrants, and they have also done relatively well. Their sons and daughters are making good use of the education system and the proportion of them with higher education degrees is greater than that of the general German population. But immigrants from Turkey, the second biggest immigrant group in Germany making up almost 3 million people, are very poorly integrated. They come last in the Berlin Institute's integration ranking and the difference between them and the Germans is greatest -- they are worse educated, worse paid and have a higher rate of unemployment. And it doesn't make much difference how long they've been living in Germany... There are two sides to integration. In the ideal case there's a majority that welcomes the immigrants and the minority that wants to become part of its new homeland.But many Turks who came to Germany as guest workers decades ago didn't want to become part of German society, they wanted to earn money there and return home after a few years. That didn't happen, though. The Turks stayed on, but it seems that their original attitude hasn't changed. They formed ghettos and didn't establish much contact with Germans, and all that made it harder for their children to find a place in German society. According to one recent survey, two-thirds of immigrant children still can't read adequately at the end of their fourth year in school... Author Serap Cileli, herself the victim of a forced marriage, says: "Faith plays a major role in the failed integration of Turks."... Bassam Tibi, co-founder of the Arabian Organization for Human Rights, says it's impossible for Muslim immigrants ever to truly integrate under these conditions. "No democracy can allow the inferiorization of women""
This suggests that cultural similarity improves the outcomes of immigrants, so ideally you would have more such immigrants
And that despite all the headlines about how immigrants contribute more to their host countries than locals, some immigrant demographics actually do worse

FACT CHECK: Did Al Gore Predict Earth's Ice Caps Would Melt by 2014?
Even Snopes agrees that Al Gore sexed up his claims

Al Gore's 'nine Inconvenient Untruths' - "Al Gore's environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth contains nine key scientific errors, a High Court judge ruled yesterday. The judge declined to ban the Academy Award-winning film from British schools, but ruled that it can only be shown with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination."

Al Gore's Predictions Of Doom Scramble His Message - "For one thing, I thought sea levels would have risen 20 feet by now thanks to the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland. Al Gore claimed that this would happen in the "near future," but thankfully, we've been spared so far. In fact, sea levels seem to be rising at maybe three millimetres per year. Twenty feet is over six thousand millimetres, so at this rate, we wouldn't even be halfway by the year 3017... "The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus" and would only happen "after, and over, millennia."... The judge had other problems with the film's claims. For instance, the film speaks of global warming "shutting down the Ocean Conveyor," by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to Western Europe, among other things. But the judge said it was "very unlikely" that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, although it might slow down, based on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Again, though, so far so good, as NASA found in 2010 that there had been no significant slowing over the previous 15 years, and in fact that the Ocean Conveyor "may have even sped up slightly in the recent past."... None of this is to say that climate change is not an issue worth addressing, that it won't require adaptation and innovation in the coming decades. It is and it will. But is it an impending catastrophe? Is it a concern that should outweigh, for instance, efforts to help the poorest parts of the world rise out of crushing poverty through the use of cheap and efficient fossil fuels? In trying to answer these kinds of questions, we need reliable information of likely costs and benefits. "Misrepresentations of research," which Al Gore seems all too fond of, are the opposite of helpful."

UN Climate Panel: Emissions Must Fall Rapidly by 2030 to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change
I've set a calendar reminder for 2030. But in 2030 the year will have been pushed out, just like the timeline for nuclear fusion

People Made to Pay More Money Forget About Climate Change - "Global-warming activists predicted that Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change would claim innocent lives. Trump pulled out over a year ago, and the death toll from the American snub stands at zero. In France, however, violent protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to mitigate climate change have killed one person and injured 227... people—not just Americans—care deeply about melting ice caps and rising sea levels only under specific circumstances. Namely, when they can be blamed on the greed and stupidity of their political enemies. They find that they suddenly care a lot less when addressing climate change means shelling out a few extra euro cents... “We no longer know what kind of car to buy, petrol, diesel, electric, who knows?” said one protester interviewed by the Guardian. “I have a little diesel van, and I don’t have the money to buy a new one, especially as I’m about to retire. We have the feeling those from the countryside are forgotten.”... The protestors, known as gilets jaunes, for their signature yellow vests, enjoy 79-percent support among the French working class"

New data shows US hate crimes continued to rise in 2017 - "there appears to be a correlation between the rise in targeted racially divisive social media ads and a near contemporaneous rise in hate crime"
Interestingly in 2016 there were more than twice as many hate crimes against Muslims than Jews. And whites were the third most targeted victims
Presumably "targeted racially divisive social media ads" are wrong but stirring grievances with identity politics is a good thing

‘Lean In’ Has Been Discredited For Good - "Barbara Ehrenreich tweeted: “Thanks to Sheryl Sandburg, this is the end of corporate feminism. Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.” ... America has started to sour on tech’s empty idealism in all its forms. Silicon Valley executives shield their own kids from the very products earning them billions, while the underclass they promised to connect keep clicking... Conservatives trumpeted Kellyanne Conway for being the first female to successfully run a presidential campaign, and Cindy Hyde-Smith, recently in the news for making a public hanging joke, for her potential as the first woman to represent Mississippi in either chamber of Congress. When critics skewered Gina Haspel for her record on torture, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, tweeted, “There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.”"
Among other things, liberals are unhappy when the feminist playbook is used to support women they don't like, i.e. feminism isn't even about advancing women - just some women

Do Parents Make a Difference? A Public Debate in London - "Plomin made it clear he wasn’t claiming genetic differences accounted for all the differences in how children turn out. He estimated that genes explain about half the variance when it comes to the Big Five personality traits, with the environment accounting for the other half. However, that doesn’t mean nurture is as important as nature. The salient environmental inputs are not those things we normally think of as “nurture,” such as parents and schools. Rather, what matters, according to Plomin, are random, serendipitous events—what he refers to as the “non-shared” environment and which are, by definition, non-systematic... Parenting matters in the sense that how parents behave affects their children’s well-being in the moment, if not over the course of their lifetimes, and we have a duty to look after our children and make sure they’re happy, at least while they’re under our care. It also matters in the sense that it affects what will be among the most important relationships of our lives. Finally, he acknowledged that parents have an important role to play in helping children discover and cultivate those talents that they’ve been genetically endowed with... Terrible parents—those guilty of extreme neglect or abuse—can have a long term, negative impact on their children... The research showing large epigenetic effects in humans, particularly that relating to transgenerational inheritance, is pretty sketchy and more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be drawn. (There’s a Twitter account called @EpigeneticsBs that monitors some of the more outlandish claims made on behalf of epigenetics.) In general, he said, the behavioral genetics studies showing that parenting effects are small are based on large samples, have been replicated numerous times and are being corroborated by work being done in molecular genetics. The parenting studies in developmental psychology, by contrast, are, for the most part, based on small samples, confounded by genetics and have proved hard to replicate"

News Flash: Jews Are 'Apes And Pigs.' So Why Is Egypt's Morsi The Elephant In America's Newsrooms? - "the sitting president of Egypt -- the world's 15th most populous nation -- was exposed for calling Jews "apes and pigs." And he did it in a TV interview (in Arabic) in 2010, less than two years before he took office.Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn't. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report. Not the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today. Etcetera. And therein lies a story, which this column can only begin to skin open here... Surely, if the president of virtually any other country in the world had defamed an entire people in such a way -- only a couple years before they got the top job, to boot -- it would have at least gotten a few column-inches. Yet Morsi gets a free pass... The New York Times rarely touches this stuff. In fact, a harshly critical mega-report about the newspaper’s Middle East coverage was recently released by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). The Times can't be too happy about it. "The failure of the New York Times to cover the hate indoctrination leads the pack, in a way," CAMERA's head Andrea Levin told me yesterday. "The fact that they deem it to be so unimportant helps to lay down that news decision for others as well. And, to us, it's one of the greatest derelictions in current news coverage of the conflict." Most would agree that, even in the internet age, the Times is still the leading agenda-setter for major media. It is, after all, the best paper around, a true wonder-of-the-world. But it does seem to avoid covering Islamist incitement against Jews (and Christians) like the plagues... "Well-meaning journalists have told me that exposing this kind of stuff is serving the enemies of peace. I think quite the contrary. You don't serve peace by cover-ups. Only by exposure.""
Presumably fetishising about all of Israel's alleged and trivial wrongs doesn't serve the enemies of peace

The Economics and Policy of Illegal Immigration in the United States - "Illegal immigration benefits employers and unauthorized immigrants while it puts downward pressure on U.S. wages. However, according to this report by University of California, San Diego Professor of Economics Gordon Hanson, illegal immigration’s overall impact on the U.S. economy is small. The modest net gain that remains after subtracting U.S. workers’ losses from U.S. employers’ gains is tiny; and if one accounts for the small fiscal burden that unauthorized immigrants impose, the overall economic benefit is close enough to zero to be essentially a wash"
Conflating legal and illegal immigration to claim that illegal immigration is good is sneaky

National Union of Students 'Will Go Bankrupt by April' - "The National Union of Students held crisis talks last night as internal documents reveal the organisation is set to go bankrupt within five months. Their £500,000 overdraft facility provided by the Co-Op expired on 5th November and is “this is not being renewed”. In the context of a damning internal review of short-term cash flow, the NUS held a “Strategic Conference” where suggestions raised included making up to a third of staff redundant, putting restrictions on travel and subsistence, and doing away with full time student officers... Student officers have responded to the proposed fiscal restraints by mounting anti-austerity campaigns to prevent cuts, or any reduction in scope of the organisation, and have begun referring to the organisation’s £3 million deficit as “alleged.”"
When you think feelings are reality