This'll Do A Lot of Good

According to Reuters, there are some people in the space business who want the U.N. to take the lead in preventing asteroids striking the Earth. Measures will include intense periods of negotiations with the asteroids, inspections by the International Asteroid-Earth Agency (until the asteroids kick out the inspectors), and corrupt trade arrangements which allow U.N. officials to enhance their collections of space rocks.

Meanwhile, on the Ecumenical Front

The Times of London has published a story about leaked Anglican-Catholic documents laying out a possible path to reunification between orthodox Anglicans and Rome. While I am encouraged by the partial repair of the Anglican-Roman Catholic schism on the whole, it seems a shame that this reunion is being driven by schism within the Anglican Communion and that the radical elements within the Anglican Communion are driving it to suicide by changing fundamental teachings on issues of faith and morals (ordination of active homosexuals, the blessing of homosexual unions, etc.). The pursuit of Christian unity should be driven by the desire to see Christ's prayer in John 17 that all Christians be one, not in an attempt to avoid being dragged over the edge of a cliff by those who would subjugate eternal verities to progressive ideology. In other words, I would rather see a reunion between London and Rome than see Rome gather up the survivors as London wrecks itself on the shoals of fashionable ideology.

Still, I can't possibly imagine any Pope plunging the Roman Catholic Church into the sort of crisis in which the Anglican Communion now finds itself. Homosexual acts have always been considered immoral by the Roman Catholic Church, and as defender of the deposit of faith as defined by Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium, no Pope would ever knowingly sanction any practice that undermined the Church's teaching on this matter. This means the ordination of those known to be active homosexuals will never receive official sanction (even if many bishops have turned a blind eye, with disastrous consequences from which the Church has yet to recover), nor will the blessing of homosexual unions (never mind polyamorous relationships). The Church must rest upon eternal verities (indeed The Eternal Verity), else she will surely founder and sink. And by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, it is the Pope who strives to ensure that the three-fold cord of Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium binds the people of the Roman Catholic Church to Christ, the bridegroom, and through Him, to God the Father, Creator of all things and their Foundation.

He's Doing What?!? I'm Confused

Hugo Chavez is planning to solve Venezuela's growing inflation problem by simply "lopping three zeros from the currency." At best, this move won't make the situation worse (sort of like waxing your car in an attempt to fix its busted radiator). If something costs $5.00, lopping a couple of zeros off the currency doesn't alter the cost of the item. It only makes yesterday's $5.00 worth $.05 today.

Of course, if people conduct their financial transactions with cash, this means the value of a bill is worth, in this case, 1,000 times what it was. Thus, people are richer, and the problem is solved, right? Wrong. Money, like everything else in economics, is subject to the law of supply and demand. Lopping three zeros off the currency effectively increases the money supply by 100,000%, and the value of money will adjust until supply equals demand (i.e. prices will shoot through the roof until the situation looks the same as it did before but is really 1,000 times worse).

To prevent prices skyrocketing, Chavez is looking to implement and enforce price controls, but as the story notes, this will lead to decreased supplies of goods and services. In addition artificially low prices will artificially raise demand. The combination of artificially low supply with artificially high demand will lead to widespread shortages of goods and services as demand far outstrips supply. As a result, Venezuela will have the worst of both worlds: lots of worthless money they can't spend on anything, at least officially. I'm sure the black market will do quite well.

As Alberto Bernal says of Chavez in the article, "He has a funny understanding of the problem."

GM Needs More Problems

Apparently, GM is in preliminary talks with Daimler Chrysler to see about purchasing the Chrysler Group from Daimler. In the short term, this strikes me as being a bad idea. Both GM and Chrysler are struggling and having to lay off workers to cut costs. GM acquiring Chrysler would only exacerbate this problem as redundant personnel (and possibly redundant infrastructure) would have to be eliminated, while GM would have to spend large amounts of money to make Chrysler's systems compatible with its own. If the situation is managed well, things could work out in the long run, but GM has enough of its own problems without having to worry about Chrysler's as well.

I expect GM's executives realize this and don't really expect anything to come of this.

Too Cool, Man

It would appear that an international team of astronomers has devloped a way to indirectly map dark matter.

More Muslim Rabble-Rousing

This time in Britain. It would appear that living in a multicultural society also produces contempt for that society.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Apparently not. In a piece for The American Conservative, Steve Sailer reports on Professor Robert Putnam's finding that racial and ethnic diversity erodes social trust and cohesion. That this is the case shouldn't be that surprising. There are two groups* people tend to trust most: their family and their friends. To a lesser extent, we trust those who seem to share certain beliefs with us, value similar things, engage in similar practices, and take part in similar traditions. To a lesser extent, we trust those who something look like us. In short, we tend to trust people with whom we have things in common, and the more we share in common with someone, the more likely we are to trust him. We can identify with these people, see where they're coming from. If we're concerned about being stabbed in the back, we can pick up signs of betrayal the more familiar we are with the person in whom we have placed our trust.

On the other hand, if we have no real experience or common tie with a person or a group, we have no basis for placing or trust in said person or group. Furthermore, absent a necessity of some sort (e.g. having some common task to perform, being in a desperate situation, etc.), there is no reason to attempt to forge the sort of bond that will lead to trusting someone. This is simply human nature, and it's not going to change.

Still, this is not the whole picture. The United States has always been racially and ethnically diverse, yet by and large racial and ethnic minorities (religious ones, as well) have eventually been able to assimilate into American society.** Why is this the case? Sailer offers the following to explain why ethnic minorities have been largely able to assimilate into American society:

The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history’s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.

Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun’s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia’s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria’s border with the Slavs and Magyars.

Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the “long civic generation” that reached its peak in the 1940s and ’50s.

There is a good deal of truth in this, and I don't disagree with it per se, but I think Sailer misses something important (though he does touch on it in a slightly different context). The United States is governed by the rule of law, before which all are equal. Thus, there is built into the very fabric of American culture the notion that good citizenship is determined by adherence to the law and the willingness to defend the American Constitutional order, not by your culture of origin or who your relatives happen to be. The United States is a meritocracy, not a class-based or ethnically-based society. You are defined by what you do, not from whence you came. Thus, Americans have traditionally been culturally conditioned to resist the natural human inclination to mistrust anyone sufficiently different, provided the minimum baseline of acceptance of the traditional American beliefs in meritocracy and the rule of law.

Sailer sets this in direct contrast with the situation in Mexico, where trust does not extend beyond the extended family. This is of pressing concern because of the large numbers of illegal immigrants in the United States who are from Mexico, as well as those who will continue to come across. With as many as 12 million illegal immigrants on the United States today, most of them from Mexico, and living and working in the American Southwest, they have established large enough enclaves where they have little need to interact with Americans outside of work. This separation is reinforced by the language barrier between Americans who speak English primarily and Spanish-speaking Mexicans. Sailer sums up the situation this way:

While no more than 12 percent of L.A.’s whites said they trusted other races “only a little or not at all,” 37 percent of L.A.’s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks.

Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinos’ failure to tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos. As columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: “In Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.”

Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family, Los Angeles’s millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little contribution to local civic and artistic life. L.A. is awash in underemployed creative talent who occupy their abundant spare time putting on plays, constructing spectacular haunted houses each Halloween, and otherwise trying to attract Jerry Bruckheimer’s attention. Yet there is little overlap between the enormous entertainment industry and the huge Mexican-American community.

In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I found just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While it’s a journalistic cliché to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as “vibrant,” they aren’t.

Some of this lack of social capital is class-related—Miami indeed has a vibrant Hispanic culture, but it’s anomalous because it attracts Latin America’s affluent and educated. In contrast, Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of America’s future because it imports peasants and laborers.

What does this mean? If the Mexican population continues to grow at anything like the rate it has been, it will lead to a bi-cultural society with the Americans and the Mexicans staring tensely at one another across the walls of their cultural enclaves. America's civic culture will decline even faster as trust among her citizens declines still more, and the state will attempt to step in and fill the void that once was filled by America's vibrant civic society. In short, the state will assume massive new powers in an ill-fated attempt to preserve public order. Just like what's happening in Britain, if not quite as bad.

*The two groups need not be mutually exclusive.

**To a large extent, the great exception had been Black Americans. At least in part, this stems from the fact that the same rule of law that enables other racial and ethnic minorities to assimilate into American society was used to prevent Black integration into American society, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow and other similar laws.

From President Bush's Mouth

According to the Associated Press, the government may have the authority to open private mail without a warrant under certain circumstances. According to Andy McCarthy, this has always been the case. As Andy McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor, I'm willing to take his word for it. Still, there's nothing unusual about news outlets blowing stories out of proportion. What is unusual about this story is the mind-boggling stupidity of the opening paragraph.

A signing statement attached to postal legislation by President Bush last month may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. The White House denies any change in policy.

This is ludicrous. A measure becomes law when it is included in a bill passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President, or if passed by a 2/3 majority in each house of Congress following a Presidential veto. Signing statements carry no force of law whatsoever. They never have, and without a Constitutional ammendment, they never will. This is the stuff of School House Rock, and the fact that an error this obvious should slip passed reporters and editors either out of ignorance or out of a desire to make the story read a certain way calls into question the ability of the Associated Press to be a reliable source of news.

Good News from Afghanistan

A major Taliban leader has reportedly been killed. Military implications aside, the greatest thing about this story is the denial by a Taliban spokesman.

We strongly deny this. He is not present in the area where American forces are claiming to have killed him," commander Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by telephone.

"The American and NATO forces from time to time make such false claims. It's just propaganda against the Taliban."

The fact that Akhtar Mohammed Osmani is not present where he was supposedly killed in no way refutes the claims of the American military as his body could have been removed from the scene. Of course, the fact that he is not present is only meant to be considered if we fail to be convinced by the fact that Khan is strongly denying Osmani's death, as opposed to simply denying it. If he had been on tv when making his remarks, he probably would have pointed his finger sternly as well. "The Americans . . . did not . . . drop . . . a bomb . . . on that man's car. Mullah Osmani."

Outrageous on So Many Levels

The Brussels Journal has a brief post on the increasing freqeuncy of rapes of Oslo women by Muslim immigrants and the disgraceful response of Norwegian authorities. Probably the most disgraceful part of the reaction of one Unni Wikan:

Two out of three charged with rape in Norway’s capital are immigrants with a non-western background according to a police study. The number of rape cases is also rising steadily. Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, in 2001 said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

Now, it is true that men are sexually drawn to the sight of the female form and the sight of certain female body parts, and it is also true that if women dress so as to limit the amount of skin they show, particularly in certain areas, and limit the extent to which they accentuate certain body parts, it will lessen the amount of unwanted sexual attention they receive from men. However, it in no way follows that women dressing more modestly is the key to addressing Oslo's rape problem, even if it helps (so would granting citizens the right to keep and bear arms). The fact of the matter is that a man who will rape a woman simply because she is provacatively dressed does not belong on the streets of a free society. For the sake of maintaining an orderly society and for the protection of the general public, it is the responsibility of the state to remove those who would perpetrate these unspeakable acts from the general public and to lock them away for long periods of time.

Still, questions remain. Why do Muslim men rape native Norwegian women who are provocatively dressed, and what does it mean to say a woman is "provocatively dressed"? As to the second, I can't be sure of this, but I suspect to be dressed "provcoatively" is to be wearing less than the full traditional female Muslim garb (i.e. her head is uncovered). That leaves the question of why this happens. Three possibilities occur to me. The first is that these Muslim men are driven so crazy with lust by even the uncovered head of a woman that they cannot restrain themselves from immediately engaging in sexual intercourse with the object of their lust, whether or not the woman consents to it. The second possibility is that they are of the opinion that these women are dressing like whores (not necessarily an incorrect opinion) and thus deserve to be treated as such. The third possibility is more disturbing. It is possible that these Muslim men are raping Norwegian women in an effort to bring coerce a change in how Norwegian women dress. Indeed, it is possible that they are doing so with the approval, if not encouragement of radical imams. If the first is the case, these men belong in prison because they only know how to behave as animals, not as human beings. If the second is the case, these men belong in prison because they have neither regard for the rule of law nor the inherent dignity of man. Just because a woman dresses like a whore, it does not mean she deserves to be treated as one. If the third is the case, then not only should the rapists be imprisoned, but the imams encouraging this should either be imprisoned or deported for inciting violence.

This situation is not something to be papered over or accepted in the name of multiculturalism. It is a direct challenge to the rule law and to the inherent dignity of the human person. Norway should take such steps as are necessary to bring this problem to an end, including imprisoning the rapists for long periods of time (at least 20 years with no possibility of parole), and permit their citizens to carry conealed weapons in public. One of the most vital human rights is the right to self-defense, and a people deprived of the ability to defend itself is a people that will find itself subject to oppression from violent factions seeking to increase their power, in this case, radical Muslim men using violence to force a free society to adopt its values. And on the purely practical level, I'd be willing to bet that many of these Muslim men who are tempted to rape "provocatively dressed" women would think twice if they thought there were a pretty good chance it would get them shot.