“Muwaji’s Law” against Child-Killing in Brazil

Last updated on: June 7, 2018 at 8:24 pm By Gene Veith

As we blogged about before, Brazil is attempting to outlaw the practice of some indigenous tribes of killing children whom they think are bad luck–children born of single mothers, babies with blemishes or handicaps, twins, etc. But anthropologists are up in arms trying to block the legislation on the grounds of moral and cultural relativism, claiming that the law would be an imposition of western culture on indigenous people. The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson has some more details on the story.

The effort to stop the killings is called “Muwaji’s Law,” after the name of a woman who did not want to kill her child and ran away from her tribe. A group of Christian missionaries helped her. They formed an organization to stop child-killing and lobbied for Muwaji’s Law, which has passed the Brazilian lower house and is being considered by the Senate.

But the Brazilian Association of Anthropology is saying that Muwaji’s Law is among “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, which were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.”

But Muwaji did not want to kill her child! Individuals do not always go along with what their culture dictates. Culture can be oppressive, as other postmodernists keep reminding us. Davidson tells another heart-rending story about a tribe whose elders ruled that a two-year-old who had not yet learned to walk or talk should be killed.

Her parents committed suicide rather than carry out the order. So the job fell to her 15-year-old brother, who dug the hole–the killings in this tribe are carried out by burying the children alive–and he even knocked her out with the flat of his machete. But then he couldn’t go through with actually killing his little sister. So it was up to the grandfather, who shot her with an arrow, but she still survived! The grandfather felt so bad that he tried to commit suicide too, but ended up just taking her into the jungle, where–somehow still surviving–she lived for three years.

The five-year-old was found by a missionary family, who took her in, cared for her, and eventually adopted her. Whereupon the public prosecutor’s office took aim at the missionaries by forbidding non-indigenous people from entering the tribal lands! The consulting anthropologist said the missionaries ‘stood in the way of the realization of a cultural practice filled with meaning,’

Davidson tells of similar practices in other tribal societies, including a remote tribe in India. Which calls to mind the much-broader practice in India at one time of burning the dead man’s wife on his funeral pyre. Would the anthropologists object to putting a stop to that? The British colonialist government did so. An Indian objected that “this is our culture!” Whereupon the British officer said, “And it is my culture to hang men who kill women.” Cultural imperialism, to be sure, but this is one case in which the women of India are appreciative.

Davidson concludes his article, No, Amazon Tribes Should Not Be Allowed to Kill Their Children, by observing that supposedly advanced Westerners are doing the same thing. He cites Iceland’s extermination of Downs Syndrome children in the womb, sex-selection abortions among Indian immigrants, and our current “abortion on an industrial scale.”

“From a moral perspective, there is of course no difference between the ways of the Suruwaha and the denizens of London and Reykjavík,” he writes, “with the exception that the Suruwahans aren’t kidding themselves about what they’re actually doing, and to whom, and why.”

Photo: Tribal children in Brazil by Gabriel Castaldini [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

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Monday Miscellany, 4/21/25

Last updated on: April 21, 2025 at 7:30 am By Gene Veith

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The Pope has died. Illinois Bill Would Restrict Homeschooling. And Poland’s Per Capita Economy to Surpass Japan’s.

The Pope Has Died

Pope Francis has died. The 88-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church died this morning at 7:35 a.m. Italian time, 1:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

After nine days of mourning, a conclave of the world’s cardinals will meet in Rome to elect a new pope. The 115 cardinals qualified to serve as electors will start casting their ballots until one candidate receives two-thirds of the vote.

The big question: Will the new pontiff continue Francis’s liberalizing ways or be part of the traditionalist revival in which today’s church is showing its most growth?

Go here for the eight leading candidates, according to Vatican observers.

Illinois Bill Would Restrict Homeschooling

The state of Illinois is considering a bill that would severely regulate homeschoolers at the threat of jail time. Some of the provisions also would also affect private Christian schools.

Here is a summary of what the bill, currently before the state legislature, would do. Referring to the required state registration of both private schools and home schools, Roy S. Askins and Molly Lackey report in the LCMS Reporter:

This registration requires of the school, among other things, “assurances of compliance … with federal and State laws regarding health examination and immunization, attendance, length of term, and nondiscrimination.” It also includes a provision for curriculum review of the school by the local education board. . . .

If passed, the Homeschool Act would require all homeschooled children in the state of Illinois to be registered with the public school district in which they reside. Parents would be required to provide documentation that includes the child’s name, date of birth, grade, home address and parent or guardian’s name and address.

The bill states that the purpose of the documentation and reporting is to track the number of homeschooled children in Illinois, as well as to “reduce vulnerabilities to abuse and neglect” and ensure that children “receive a safe and sufficient education.” Furthermore, the “homeschool administrator” (the parent or guardian teaching the child at home) would be mandated to annually document and submit a list of curricula used, examples of learning materials used or developed by the child, and the parent or guardian’s assessment of the child’s academic progress.

Failure to comply will result in the child being considered truant, with attendant penalties and fines.

The penalty for truancy is 30 days in jail, plus a $500 fine, with repeated incidents leading to removal of the child from the home.

The bill is currently stalled in the statehouse, but its sponsor says it is “very much alive.”

The proposal has drawn a great deal of opposition. That includes, significantly, black families who have long been the victims of public schools. Molly Parker and Beth Hudsdorfer of Capitol News Illinois quote a black pastor who testified against the measure:

“I am here today as somebody who grew up in Chicago public schools,” [Rev. Chris] Butler said. “I am here today sitting next to somebody who taught in Chicago’s public schools. And we too have grown up, and we too have something to say about the education that we received, and it is why people in our generation have stepped up and said, we must do something different.”

He argued that any regulation would impede minority families from homeschooling to escape failing public schools.

For updates check with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

Poland’s Per Capita Economy to Surpass Japan’s

Back in the 1980s, Japan was hailed for its industrial policies and its corporate management, becoming the model that the rest of the world, including U.S. business schools, yearned to emulate. But in the 1990s, the Japanese economy began to slide, due to debt, deficits, bubbles, and government intervention.

Though Japan still has the world’s 4th largest economy by Gross Domestic Product, after the U.S., China, and Germany, its per capita GDP, that is the share of that wealth by person has been going down.

By 2026, Japan will be surpassed in that category by Poland! Formerly under the heel of Soviet Communism, Poland went all in for free market capitalism. Dominic Pino gives the numbers:

Poland’s GDP per capita was $12,810 in 1990. That was roughly the same as Brazil’s and over $4,000 behind Mexico’s. Japan’s was almost three times higher, at $35,306. In 2023, the most recent year with available data, Japan’s was $45,949 and Poland’s was less than $2,500 behind, at $43,585. A gap of over $30,000 per person, gone in one generation. According to the IMF, Japan’s economy slightly contracted in 2024, and projected growth is around 1 percent in 2025 and 2026. Poland grew at nearly 3 percent in 2024, and projected growth is greater than 3 percent in 2025 and 2026.

Pino credits the leadership of economist Leszek Balcerowicz for the new democracy’s decision to unleash the free market, as opposed to the government-driven “industrial policy” route that Japan chose and that the U.S. is now playing around with.

Concludes Pino,

As late as the early 1990s, it was still fashionable to believe that Japan was going to inherit the earth as a result of its industrial policy. Imagine explaining to someone then that in your lifetime the average Pole would become wealthier than the average Japanese. Be skeptical of industrial policies, and never underestimate the power of markets.

The United States could learn from Poland.

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On Multiculturalism

Last updated on: January 19, 2025 at 6:20 pm By Gene Veith

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We blogged about the scandal in the UK of Pakistani sex gangs preying on working class white girls and how law enforcement and the media often ignored these crimes for fear of being considered “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

British commentator Douglas Murray took up the question of how this happened. He writes about it in The Free Press in an essay entitled The Dangers of Multiculturalism.

“There are some terrible things that society wants to deal with,” he writes, “and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.” That narrative, he says, is the “doctrine of multiculturalism.”

In an era of mass legal and illegal migration, most developed countries have tried some form of this doctrine. But in Britain it runs especially deep. “Strength in diversity” was the mantra of modern Britain, as it has been of Justin Trudeau’s Canada, among other ailing Western states. Any story that runs against the narrative—and threatens to bring the cathedral crashing down—has to be suppressed.

That is why so many elements of British society, from much (though not all) of the media, to local councillors, the police, and many (though again, not all) members of Parliament, had to try to make the story disappear. Many people actually told victims and their families that their accounts of abuse could not come out because it would cause tension in their communities and risk social cohesiveness. And so a great evil was allowed, under the guise of doing good. Which is how evil often manifests.

The United States certainly has citizens from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In Houston, driving to Memorial Lutheran Church where my son-in-law is pastor on Westheimer Road, I counted over twenty different ethnic restaurants in just a few blocks. In addition to the usual Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Thai restaurants, there were Ethiopian, Assyrian, Caribbean, Pakistani, Peruvian, Brazilian, Argentinian, Nigerian, Peruvian, and more and more. I think that’s very cool and I’d like to try them all.

It seems to me, though, that in order to appreciate all of these cultures, we must get rid of “the doctrine of multiculturalism” as it has been applied in the West for the last several decades. Postmodernists invoke “multiculturalism” as an argument for relativism. All cultures are different, we are told, and they all have different values. You believe the way you do because of your culture. Other cultures have their own beliefs. There is nothing that is true for everyone. What you think is real is culturally determined. To think your culture has the only truth is to be ethnocentric. Instead, we need to embrace human diversity and be multicultural.

The irony is that the only culture that believes in relativistic multiculturalism is contemporary European-American elite culture. Ethiopians, Assyrians, Caribbean, and the other ethnic groups represented on Westheimer Road don’t think that way. Multiculturalism doesn’t actually say that all cultures are equally valid; rather, it says that all cultures are equally wrong.

Actual cultures believe in moral values, and those moral values actually are quite similar across cultures. UK authorities who tip-toe around enforcing the laws against sexual abuse so that they can’t be accused of Islamophobia perhaps don’t realize that Islam opposes sex outside of marriage, and that their associating Islam with these crimes and protecting Muslim perpetrators is itself patronizing and ultimately racist. One of the problems of immigrants from conservative societies is that when they come to the West, their young people are met with overwhelming sexual temptations that they never faced in the old country. Our culture, or perhaps better our anti-culture, is the outlier. We need to change our climate of permissiveness for everyone.

Multiculturalism as relativism can never bring harmony between people of different cultures. It can only sort people out into incompatible tribes, often–since the postmodernist view of culture reduces it all to power struggles–tribes that war against each other.

What we need to accept people of different ethnicities and cultures is not relativism but universalism. That is, the notion that human beings, for all of our variety, have things in common. We all have families that we love, similar kinds of problems, experience the same suffering, share the same pleasures. When our bodies aren’t working right, the same kind of medicine helps us no matter what culture we are from. Back to Westheimer Road, we can even enjoy each others’ restaurants, and do so without the multiculturalist worry that we are committing “cultural appropriation.”

Part of our common humanity is the need for a strong sense of right and wrong, the need for law and order, and the need for spiritual meaning.

Illustration: Feast of Flavors via StockCake, Public Domain, CC0 1.0 Universal [AI generated, not by the author]

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Monday Miscellany, 6/24/24

Last updated on: June 20, 2024 at 12:56 pm By Gene Veith

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U.S. Navy is engaged in its most intense combat since World War II. Biden kills the petrodollar, along with American economic dominance. And a state buys ads against pro-life clinics.

U.S. Navy Is Engaged in Its Most Intense Combat Since World War II

Did you realize that the American navy is engaged in what is being described as “its most intense combat since World War II“?

Carrier Strike Force 2–consisting of the Dwight Eisenhower aircraft carrier, three cruisers, and four destroyers–is in the Red Sea fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who are supporting Hamas by attacking commercial and naval vessels in a major trade route. From their bases in Yemen, the Houthis are launching waves of missiles and drones, while our navy is trying to shoot them down.

The attacks are relentless, night and day. Carrier aircraft and ship-based antimissile systems have been shooting down most of the incoming missiles, but the pressure is constant and the American sailors and airmen are exhausted. An Associated Press story quotes some of them:

“I don’t think people really understand just kind of how deadly serious it is what we’re doing and how under threat the ships continue to be,” Cmdr. Eric Blomberg with the USS Laboon told the AP on a visit to his warship on the Red Sea.

“We only have to get it wrong once,” he said. “The Houthis just have to get one through.”. . .

“It is every single day, every single watch, and some of our ships have been out here for seven-plus months doing that,” said Capt. David Wroe, the commodore overseeing the guided missile destroyers.

They have been going through this for seven months! The British navy is also patrolling with the Americans.

In one engagement, F-18s from the carrier and fire from the ships shot down 18 explosive-laden drones, two anti-ship cruise missiles, and one ballistic missile. But the Houthis have sunk two commercial cargo ships and have shut down traffic in the Red Sea by 50%.

The Navy has bombed and fired missiles at the Houthis, who have shot down a number of our Reaper drones. But reportedly the Biden administration is limiting the response. I’ll quote the Associated Press story:

Officers acknowledge some grumbling among their crew, wondering why the Navy doesn’t strike harder against the Houthis. The White House hasn’t discussed the Houthi campaign at the same level as negotiations over the Israel-Hamas war.

There are several likely reasons. The U.S. has been indirectly trying to lower tensions with Iran, particularly after Tehran launched a massive drone-and-missile attack on Israel and now enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.

Trying to lower tensions with Iran, which is supplying and providing logistical support for the missiles being fired at our sailors? In hopes that this will make them stop their development of nuclear weapons? I don’t understand.

Biden Kills the Petrodollar, Along with American Economic Dominance

Fifty years ago, the Saudis made an agreement with the U.S. to use the dollar as the medium of exchange for the global oil industry. All nations used the “petrodollar” to buy and sell oil, cementing America’s economic dominance.

But this month, due to the Biden administration’s antagonism to the oil industry, a mismanaged diplomatic dispute with the Saudis (the world’s second biggest oil producer after the U.S.), and global worry about America’s national debt, the Saudis announced that they will now drop the petrodollar, requiring payment in their own currency, the riyal. Whereupon the world’s biggest oil importers, China and India announced that they would begin converting their currency to riyals instead of dollars.

Daniel Turner comments:

Among all the news stories that matter, few rank higher than this. It’s bigger than President Trump and Hunter Biden’s convictions, bigger than jobs reports and inflation numbers, and perhaps even bigger than the southern border crisis. The end of the petrodollar is the end of the United States as the world’s lone superpower.

The petrodollar led to the dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency, used to trade other commodities and stabilizing the global economy. Turner suspects that this role will eventually be assumed by the Chinese yuan.

Jessica Marie Baumgartner says that another factor in the de-dollarizing of the global economy has been the proliferation of America’s sanctions against Russia and other countries, forcing the large countries in the “BRICS” alliance–Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa –to use their own currencies instead of the dollar in trading with each other.

A State Buys Ads against Pro-Life Clinics

Massachusetts has launched a million-dollar ad campaign, funded by taxpayers, to discourage women from going to pro-life clinics.

The state is buying time on social media, radio, and billboards in an effort to persuade women to go to abortion clinics instead. The Christian Post quotes the governor:

“In Massachusetts, we are committed to protecting and expanding access to safe and legal abortion,” Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said in a statement.

“That includes protecting patients from the deceptive and dangerous tactics that anti-abortion centers often use to stop people from accessing comprehensive reproductive services,” she continued. “This campaign is an important way to provide accurate information so residents can make informed decisions about reproductive care that are right for them.”

The ads go on to give contact information for abortion providers.

Abortions are legal in Massachusetts, which has extremely permissive laws in its favor. In line with the “pro-choice” ideology, women can make the “decisions about reproductive care that are right for them.”

So why is the state weighing in to influence that decision? It isn’t enough to let women choose one way or the other. Rather, the state is spending taxpayer money–including presumably a share paid by taxpayers for whom abortion is abhorrent–to prevent them from accessing pro-life efforts to help them should they choose to keep the baby and to point them to clinics that will profit from killing the baby.

What interest does the state have in not only legalizing abortion but promoting it? If it’s “the woman’s choice,” why is the state trying to influence that choice? If the goal is helping women make “informed decisions,” why isn’t pro-life information–which a woman is free to accept or not–permitted?

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Monday Miscellany, 6/10/24

Last updated on: June 3, 2024 at 4:10 pm By Gene Veith

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Setbacks in the artificial intelligence revolution. The internet comes for Amazon tribes. And pro-life protesters get long prison terms.

Setbacks in the Artificial Intelligence Revolution

The metaverse was supposed to replace, for all practical purposes, the actual universe. Didn’t happen. Virtual reality was supposed to supplant actual reality. Didn’t happen. We have been seeing even bigger hype now for Artificial Intelligence, which is said to be so revolutionary that it will make white collar jobs obsolete, impact every area of our lives, and maybe even take over the world.

Will AI prove to be another impressive high-tech innovation that fizzles, or at least has far less impact than expected? Probably not. As my techie friend keeps telling me, it will get better. But right now, the massive investments in AI are facing problems.

Christopher Mims tells the story in his Wall Street Journal article The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam with the deck “The pace of innovation in AI is slowing, its usefulness is limited, and the cost of running it remains exorbitant.”

The article is behind a paywall, but here are some of the problems, from a business point of view, that Mims describes. In general, he says, despite all the money being poured into the technology, improvements are slowing. Plugging in ever-more data has resulted in better performance, but there is a limit to the amount of data that is available. Engineers have tried to make progress by using AI to generate “synthetic data” for AI, but that isn’t working.

Also, contrary to expectations, AI hasn’t resulted in increases in productivity, much less reduced payrolls. This is because companies need to hire someone to check the AI-generated information, due to the phenomenon of “hallucinations” (wrong answers that AI keeps presenting as factual, which as I’ve blogged about happens virtually every time I’ve tried to use the technology). To get better results, companies need employees with the special skill of constructing AI prompts, which adds someone else to the payroll. While many companies are now using AI, they are mainly using it to help workers, not replace them.

And the technology is super expensive. Nvidia, which makes chips for AI, is certainly doing well, showing the huge amount of investment being made in the technology. But the returns are much less. Last year, AI developers, says Mims, spent $50 billion on chips, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.

Furthermore, says Mims, “the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it. That’s because AI has to think anew every single time something is asked of it, and the resources that AI uses when it generates an answer are far larger than what it takes to, say, return a conventional search result.”

Concludes Mims,

These factors raise questions about whether AI could become commoditized, about its potential to produce revenue and especially profits, and whether a new economy is actually being born. They also suggest that spending on AI is probably getting ahead of itself in a way we last saw during the fiber-optic boom of the late 1990s—a boom that led to some of the biggest crashes of the first dot-com bubble.

The Internet Comes for Amazon Tribes

The Marubo people live deep in the Amazon rainforest. It takes a week to reach their villages of huts, and their way of life has not changed for hundreds of years. But now they have high-speed internet.

Brazil has made Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet system Starlink available to hundreds of remote jungle tribes.

A story in the New York Times, The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes, tells the tale. It chronicles how after only nine months, the Marubo, after resisting the modern world for generations, are now struggling with teenagers hooked on screens, social media gossip, violent video games, misinformation, scams, and pornography. For all of its benefits, the technology that has ravaged advanced Western cultures is now ravaging theirs.

The story includes a priceless quotation that sums up how just about everyone in the world feels about the internet:

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village’s maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. “But now, things have gotten worse,” she said.

She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. “Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” she said. “They’re learning the ways of the white people.”

Then she paused and added, “But please don’t take our internet away.”

Pro-Life Protesters Get Long Prison Terms

The Biden Administration is throwing the book at Pro-Life protesters.

A 30-year-old woman, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to 57 months in prison–nearly five years–plus three years of supervised release after being convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and conspiracy against rights. She and other protesters had blocked the entrance to an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., back in 2020.

Others at the protest were also given long prison terms: Jonathan Darnel (34 months), Herb Geraghty (27 months), Jean Marshall (24 months), and Joan Bell (27 months).

See How Much Jail Time? Here Is a List of Prison Sentences to see how these sentences for trying to save the lives of babies line up with other crimes. Manslaughter, for example, will get you a sentence of 5 years. So will robbery with a deadly weapon. Kidnapping will send you in the slammer for 36 months.

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Monday Miscellany, 3/4/4

Last updated on: February 28, 2024 at 10:51 pm By Gene Veith

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Who gets to have free speech? Rejecting a church ad for “religious indoctrination.” And the illegal immigrants from China.

Who Gets to Have Free Speech?

Supreme Court is hearing a case that could overthrow the laws of Florida and Texas that would prevent social media companies from censoring people’s speech on their platforms. The question is whether such laws violate the social media companies’ free speech.

The Wall Street Journal editors believe they do, arguing that state governments should stay out of the business of regulating private companies’ editorial decisions. But the paper also prints a contrary opinion, which brings up another aspect of the question: the government pressuring social media to censor speech it doesn’t approve of. The author of the op-ed piece, Philip Hamburger, says “only when common-carrier antidiscrimination rules are applied to the platforms will the federal government be fully precluded from imposing censorship through them.” (The court will later take up another case, Murthy v. Missouri, which deals directly with that issue.)

He comments:

It’s only recently that Americans have needed a remedy against censorship. The government once couldn’t actually suppress speech; it could only punish the speaker, and for this it had to go to court. The government once had to go to court to charge a particular defendant with seditious libel or some other offense and prove its accusation. Now, the government can simply pressure or induce the dominant social-media platforms to suppress speech en masse. That approach doesn’t merely punish speakers; it snuffs out speech. And it places the onus of going to court on the censored individuals.

Part of the question is how to construe social media companies. Are they a “common carrier,” like telephones? No one censors what you are able to say on your phone. Or are they a “publisher,” in which case the freedom of the press to publish or not publish what they want would kick in.

Rejecting a Church Ad for “Religious Indoctrination”

Hulen Street Church in Fort Worth wanted to publicize its new Thursday night service. So it put together a 22 second ad and posted it on Facebook and Instagram. The church took the next step of deciding to advertise on the streaming service Hulu.

But Hulu turned down the ad, giving this explanation:

“[I]t was determined that your ad was rejected for failing to adhere to our advertising polices regarding religious advertising, specifically citing Religious Indoctrination due to asking viewers to attend Thursday services.”

Inviting people to attend a church service is defined as “religious indoctrination”–presumably because teaching and maybe even evangelism may occur–and so is out of bounds!

The Illegal Immigrants from China

When we think of the immigrants pouring across our southern border, we think of Mexicans and citizens of other Latin American countries. But at the San Diego sector border, there are more Chinese nationals coming over than Mexican.

Since the new fiscal year started in October, some 21,000 Chinese citizens have been encountered by border control agents, second only to Colombia, with 28,000. Mexicans are in third place with 18,000. Then comes Brazil with 8,700, and Ecuador with 7,700. Other immigrants have come from Turkey, Guinea, India, Guatemala and Peru.

Why are they coming? To escape communism? That would be a good reason, though the way to do that is to go through the legal channels as so many Chinese-Americans have done. That it’s easier to go to Mexico and just cross our porous border is a testimony to our immigration crisis.

Are they coming to escape communism or are they sent by communism for some nefarious purpose? I wonder if there is a connection to the Chinese involvement in the marijuana industry, both the legal and the illegal variety. According to an article on the subject,

Much is still unknown about Chinese-funded cannabis cultivation — including whether the money is coming from groups with connections to the Communist Party, and how much of the cannabis produced through Chinese-funded grows stays within the U.S. or leaves the country. It’s also not clear how deeply involved Chinese organized crime syndicates are in American cannabis cultivation.

The article says that in Oklahoma, of the 7,000 growing operations, 3,000 have been flagged for suspicious activity. Of those, 2,000 are owned and operated by Chinese nationals.

Oklahoma allows medical marijuana, though anyone can get a license by just claiming a need, with little regulation for growers and dispensaries, but the marijuana must be grown in the state and it’s illegal to send it elsewhere, but that is clearly happening.

When I lived in Oklahoma, just outside our small, rural community, marijuana-growing compounds were patrolled by Chinese guards carrying AK-47s. The workers were Chinese, but they never appeared in the community. They didn’t leave the compound to go to the grocery store, shop at Walmart, or anything else. We suspected that they weren’t allowed to. There has been at least one murder by a Chinese owner of one of his employees. All of this has the hallmark of organized crime, the dreaded “triads,” which, however also have ties to the Communist Party.

Why does our government allow citizens of an adversarial nation to enter illegally and to set up these kinds of businesses? The Chinese are also buying up farmland, including around American military bases. Why are they doing that? And why is our government letting them?

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