“While a severe migrant uptick did occur circa 2015, the influx rapidly declined to earlier levels. As economist Bryan Caplan has noted, “total arrivals from 2014 to 2018 came to less than 1 percent of the population of the European Union (E.U.). Many European countries—most notably West Germany during the Cold War—have swiftly absorbed much larger inflows in the past.” By early 2019, the European Commission officially declared an end to the “migration crisis.””
…
“For a sense of the scope of the fake scare, visit HOAXmap, an internet project constructed in 2016 to track rumors about refugees in Germany. The map currently features 496 rumors in the country and in nearby German-speaking nations.
In early 2018, the German paper Der Spiegel ran its own study of 445 alleged refugee rapes in 10 German states, as reported on Rapefugees.net. One-third of the incidents were filtered out because they were duplicates, broken links, or law enforcement was unaware of the purported crime.
Of the remaining 291 cases, 24 claims were false, others were “less dramatic” than rape (i.e., groping) and 29 percent of cases could not be confirmed or denied. One-third (95) involved refugee suspects. Of 57 actual rape cases, 26 involved refugee suspects, with 18 cases resulting in convictions. Each incident is serious and to be condemned. But the facts don’t support fears of epidemic levels of social breakdown caused by migrants.
Unfortunately, it is easy for people to believe rumors when the rumors match already-held fears, such as the West’s historical mistrust of foreign migrants. Real horrific events like those in Cologne make it even easier to suspend skepticism about similar—but fake—cases. But the apparent chasm between truth and rumor means we need to abandon salacious anecdotes, and instead focus on hard data before presuming there is a crisis that demands a response.”
…
“A Pew survey from mid-2016 showed 46 percent of Swedes believed “refugees in our country are more to blame for crime than other groups.”
But crime trends there remained steady or declined both before and after the migration explosion”
…
“The migrant wave’s effect on Germany’s crime rates had also been negligible, as revealed in a series of analyses of local police data from early 2016. For example, a “large majority” of refugees who are registered never show up in police records. Those from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are rarely in criminal statistics. In Cologne, for example, only five of 1,100 (under 0.5 percent) registered Syrians were in trouble with the police between October 2014 and November 2015.
The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) concluded in 2015 that, “on average, refugees commit as many or as few crimes as the local population.” From 2014 to 2015, the refugee population increased 440 percent, while the number of refugee crimes committed rose only 79 percent, according to the BKA. Here, there wasn’t even a correlation: While offenses increased significantly in early 2015, offenses stagnated in late 2015, precisely when “most refugees arrived in Germany.” The BKA concluded that the “vast majority of asylum-seekers [commit] no offenses.”
By 2018, although 44 percent of Germans felt less secure than they did in recent years, their government announced that crime was at a quarter-century low, while Germany’s migrant population was at a record high. As of 2019, the total number of crimes kept falling while the migrant population kept rising.
This does not mean migrants never contribute to Germany’s criminal issues. Indeed, certain immigrant areas reported significant gang problems. Moreover, North African nationals registered high criminal activity relative to the rest of the population. No doubt German law enforcement needs to take notice of these issues. But it would be a mistake to conclude from these specifics that the broader Middle Eastern migrant wave is the problem, when crime rates from certain Eastern European nationals who aren’t normally considered part of this wave are also relatively crime-prone, while nationals from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are relatively crime-free. Rather, the overall picture is clear: Migrants were not a special criminal problem in Germany.”
…
[Sweden]: “”the number of reported rape offences has increased by 34 per cent over the last ten years (2009-2018)” because the definition of rape was legally expanded. In 2013, just before the latest European migrant wave, the definition was “expanded to include cases where the victim reacts passively.” An earlier legislative change in 2005 meant that “certain acts which were previously classified as sexual exploitation are now classified as rape.” These include sex with persons who are asleep or intoxicated.
The changing definition of rape maps much better to the data than do refugee numbers”
…
“When it comes to terrorism, neither migrants nor migration are the dominant part of the problem. They could, however, be part of the solution to extremist threats, especially threats from the Middle East. If the American experience is at all transferable to Europe, welcomed and assimilated Muslims could be an asset that would strengthen Europe’s security and reduce radicalism.”
“The Virginia Senate last week passed a comprehensive police reform package that would prohibit the use of no-knock warrants and chokeholds in the majority of cases and make it easier for departments to decertify rogue cops. One thing was noticeably absent, though: a ban on qualified immunity.
Qualified immunity makes it exceedingly difficult to sue public officials when they violate your rights, as it requires that any alleged misconduct be outlined almost identically in a previous court precedent. The doctrine has come under fire from all sides of the political spectrum. In June, Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), joined by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and several other Democratic members of Congress, introduced a bill in the U.S. House that would have abolished qualified immunity (though it has not received a vote and will likely die without one).”
…
“But Virginia Democrats’ decision to punt on the issue puts them more in line with moderates in the Republican Party—a testament to the power of the law enforcement lobby.”
…
“DeBoard might gain new perspective on that if she were to talk to the mother of the 10-year-old boy who was shot in Georgia by sheriff’s deputy Matthew Vickers, who received qualified immunity. Or the parents of the 15-year-old boy on his way to school who was shot in Los Angeles by Officer Michael Gutierrez, who received qualified immunity. Or the man who had a police canine sicced on him—after he had surrendered—by two cops who both received qualified immunity. Or the men who allegedly had $225,000 stolen from them by two officers, executing a search warrant, who both received qualified immunity.
The latter case epitomizes the mental contortions required by the legal doctrine. A unanimous panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote that “although the City Officers ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong, they did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment.” In other words, officers need case law text to tell them stealing is bad.
Advocates like DeBoard present an apocalyptic vision of a world without qualified immunity, one in which officers go bankrupt from frivolous civil suits and leave the force in droves. That’s not a vision based in reality. For one, losing qualified immunity is not equivalent to losing a lawsuit. It simply provides someone with the right to bring such a suit in front of a jury—a right the American public is technically still guaranteed under federal law. And in the case that a public servant does lose a suit, the municipality nearly always foots the bill.”
“Arson, vandalism, and other acts of rioting have accompanied many of the anti-police-brutality protests around the country. But since this violence is often adjacent to protected First Amendment activities, law enforcement’s response needs to be careful, targeted, and proportionate. We should try to stop the violence and vandalism, but peaceful protesters shouldn’t be unjustly punished or otherwise dissuaded from exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.
By encouraging prosecutors to be as punitive as possible, Barr appears to be taking the exact opposite approach. His suggestion that they dust off sedition laws should alarm all civil liberties advocates.”
“”From the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists baffled by the disease’s ferocity have wondered whether the body’s vanguard virus fighter, a molecular messenger called type I interferon, is missing in action in some severe cases. Two papers published online in Science this week confirm that suspicion. They reveal that in a significant minority of patients with serious COVID-19, the interferon response has been crippled by genetic flaws or by rogue antibodies that attack interferon itself,””
“Vast research shows that, while subsidies might prop up the direct recipients, governments that subsidize harm their economies overall. That said, in the name of national security or geopolitical concerns, these principles may sometimes be traded off against other concerns.
But this doesn’t mean that all subsidies should get a free pass. There must be a concrete strategy behind the effort to use subsidies in this way. For instance, China mostly operates in lower-income nations. If Ex-Im is serious about competing with China, that’s where its loans should be going, rather than continuing to finance foreign borrowers in rich countries such as Italy, France, or the United Arab Emirates, where they’re served well by a commercial banking market.
Ex-Im’s recent annual conference was full of bold statements about fighting China as mandated by Congress during the agency’s reauthorization process back in December 2019. Unfortunately, despite much bluster from its leadership, there’s been no fundamental change in the way Ex-Im operates or in which companies Ex-Im extends financing to with taxpayer backing.”
…
“the Export-Import Bank’s failure ultimately lies with the policymakers who believe an agency that has been devoted to serving well-connected companies for so long would actually change.”
“The Abraham Accords, signed September 15, formally normalized Israel’s relationship with both Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. While geopolitical concerns have dominated both the substance of the accords and media coverage of the deal, the signatories also pledged a “common interest in establishing and developing mutually beneficial cooperation in the field of exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes,” which may include “joint programs, projects, and activities.
Both Israel and the United Arab Emirates have thriving space programs. The Israeli Space Agency, founded in 1982, has launched a number of satellites—most notably, in 2019, the Beresheet Lander to the moon. Co-designed and built by the Israeli companies SpaceIL and Israeli Aerospace Industries, Beresheet was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and made it all the way to the Moon for less than $100 million dollars.
Unfortunately, the Beresheet lander crashed into the lunar surface due to a mechanical error. Still, the fact that the Israeli Space Agency was able to get that close is significant. The only other nations who have been able to get that close to the lunar surface are the Americans, the Chinese, and the Russians.
The Emirati space program is significant too. Currently rocketing its way from Earth to Mars is the Al-Amal (Arabic for “Hope”) satellite, which launched in July. It is expected to arrive in February, when it will begin to investigate Martian weather patterns.
It is too soon to know how the accord will affect the two space programs. But on August 17, before the Abraham Accords were signed, Israeli Minister of Science and Technology Izhar Shay said that cooperation was “imminent” and that “[t]he infrastructure is there for the commercial engagements for the sharing of know-how and mutual efforts.””
“This August was California’s warmest on record (as it was for five other states as well), setting the stage for the extraordinary streak of extra-large fires burning now. Five of the current fires are in the 20 largest wildfires in the state’s history: the August Complex (the largest blaze in state history as of Thursday), the SCU Lightning Complex, the LNU Lightning Complex, the North Complex, and the Bear Complex. As their names hint, these are megafires that gained size and strength when smaller fires combined into unified blazes.
The heat wave that preceded this terrifying swarm was not a blip. The weeks of arid, hot air that crisped out the forests and shrubs now aflame are part of a familiar pattern of extreme weather events: the climate crisis accelerating right in our faces.
As the climate heats up, many other states in the West, including Oregon and Colorado, are seeing larger, more devastating fires and more dangerous air quality from wildfire smoke. But California is at particular risk, both because its increasingly volatile weather may bring more droughts than other states and because it has more people and more buildings.”
…
“California’s forests and shrublands have been subjected to wildfire pretty much forever; fire is a natural part of many of the state’s ecosystems and the Indigenous peoples of California set controlled burns to manage the landscape. What’s different now is that the season is getting longer, it’s gotten harder to manage the forest, and the fires are on average getting bigger and more destructive.
“Climate change is amplifying fire behavior and fire size,” Alan Ager, a researcher at the US Forest Service who studies how to manage wildfire risk on federally managed forests and other lands, told Vox in 2019. “Fire can travel larger distances” than in the past because there’s more fuel.
The basic recipe for a monster 21st century wildfire is this: Take hot air and no rain and moisture evaporating from trees, shrubs, and soil. After a series of these long, expansive, hot, dry spells, trees and shrubs will be transformed into ideal tinder to feed a fire. The bigger the area affected, the more available fuel. All you need then is a spark, which could come from a power line failure, a cigarette, or a firecracker.”
…
“The second factor making the state more fire-prone is poor forest management.
…
“And in the early 2000s, park rangers practiced a certain form of forestry management — prescribed burns, clearing brush, remediating clear cuts. But it fell out of favor as an increasingly large, paramilitary fire brigade took over. “As rangers joined up with the ranks of better-paid firefighters,” Arax writes, “their numbers dwindled to maybe 250, even as the number of firefighters inside the [Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] jumped to 7,000.”
Firefighters put out fires; they don’t do prescribed burns. But consistent fire suppression only increases the amount of dry, flammable material.”
…
“California also has a housing crisis, born largely of the fact that wealthier urban residents refuse to allow more housing to be built in urban areas, near jobs. Consequently, as more residents stream into the state, the price of existing urban housing stock rises and development sprawls outward. More and more of that development is being pushed into the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI), where wildfires are more frequent and more difficult to fight.”
…
“Add all this together — increasing heat from global warming, several years of unusually high winds and low humidity, poor logging practices with fewer preventive burns, more people living on forested ridges and hills in remote, fire-prone areas — and the result is disaster.”
“Administration officials are facing an October 1 deadline to confer with members of Congress over what the refugee admissions cap should be for the next fiscal year, as required by law. Last year, however, the administration didn’t hold that meeting until October 5 and it wasn’t until November 1 that it announced the new cap, which was set at 18,000 — the lowest since the refugee program was created in 1980 and down from 110,000 when Trump took office.”
…
“Joe Biden, the party’s presidential nominee, has pledged to take in up to 125,000 refugees in the year after he takes office and increase admissions “commensurate with our responsibility, our values and the unprecedented global need.””
…
“Former President George W. Bush briefly cut the number of refugees admitted after the 9/11 attacks, but even then the limit was set at 70,000.
But the bipartisan consensus on maintaining a robust refugee resettlement program began to unravel after the Paris terror attacks in late 2015, said Yael Schacher, senior US advocate for Refugees International, when suicide bombers — reportedly sanctioned by the Islamic State — killed 130 civilians in explosions and mass shootings throughout the city.
There was speculation that one of the attackers was a refugee, one of 5.6 million Syrians who have been displaced since 2011 by the still-ongoing civil war. It was later confirmed that all of the perpetrators were citizens of the European Union. But the rumors were enough to spark a panic about Syrian refugees and start a movement at the state level to cut back US admissions of Syrian refugees and resettlement efforts more broadly.
Governors from 31 states, all Republican but for New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, said in 2015 that they no longer wanted their state to take in Syrian refugees. In 2016, Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, also tried to prevent refugee resettlement agencies in his state from getting reimbursed for the cost of providing social services to Syrian refugees.
But states didn’t have the legal authority to simply refuse refugees; that’s the prerogative of the federal government. Pence ultimately had to back down after a federal court ruled against his decision to withhold the reimbursements.
Trump, then campaigning for president, stirred up more fear, suggesting that Syrian refugees were raising an army to launch an attack on the US and promising that all of them would be “going back” if he won the election. He said that he would tell Syrian children to their faces that they could not come to the US, speculating that they could be a “Trojan horse.”
When Trump eventually took office, he delivered on his promise to slash refugee admissions from Syria, suspending refugee admissions altogether from January to October 2017. From October 2017 to October 2018, the US admitted only 62.”
“In the 24-page report and a seven-page supplement, Murphy alleges four main incidents of wrongdoing by his superiors at the agency:
That then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen repeatedly, and perhaps knowingly, exaggerated the number of suspected terrorists crossing the southern border into the US in official documents and sessions with lawmakers — despite having been briefed numerous times by Murphy that the numbers she was citing were not accurate.
That DHS acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told Murphy to alter an intelligence report detailing the high levels of corruption, violence, and economic problems in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to make those countries look like safe destinations for migrants, a judgment that would aid Trump’s restrictive asylum policy.
That DHS acting Secretary Chad Wolf, at the request of White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, ordered Murphy to “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”
That Cuccinelli and Wolf at different times instructed Murphy to modify domestic terrorism threat assessments to downplay the threat from white supremacists and add information on the prominence of violent left-wing groups like antifa “to ensure [the assessments] matched up with the public comments by President Trump.””
…
“A word of caution: Multiple people familiar with Murphy’s time at DHS told me he’d often engaged in the same kind of behavior he now accuses his superiors of doing, namely altering assessments to fit the administration’s policies. In addition, news reports in late July revealed that Murphy’s office had been compiling “intelligence reports” on journalists and protesters in Portland, Oregon.
Murphy fiercely denies those allegations, but shortly after the reports were published, he was demoted from his position and reassigned to an administrative support role. Some people I spoke to said Murphy’s whistleblower report is “definitely” meant as retaliation against his superiors for his demotion.
His credibility, then, is somewhat suspect.”
…
“two sources I spoke to confirmed one of the claims in Murphy’s complaint: that National Security Adviser O’Brien directed DHS to minimize intelligence reports on Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election and instead focus on interference by China and Iran.”
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21428525/climate-change-west-coast-fires-cause-charts