The Missing Link: May 2006 Archives

MARCH was National Kidney Month. I did my part: I got a new one. My good fortune, alas, does not befall nearly enough people, and the federal government deserves much of the blame.

Today 70,000 Americans are waiting for kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which maintains the national waiting list. Last year, roughly 16,000 people received one (about 40 percent are from living donors, the others from cadavers). More are waiting for livers, hearts and lungs, which mostly come from deceased donors, bringing the total to about 92,000. In big cities, where the ratio of acceptable organs to needy patients is worst, the wait is five to eight years and is expected to double by 2010. Someone on the organ list dies every 90 minutes. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Until my donor came forward, I was desperate. I had been on the list only for a year and was about to start dialysis. I had joined a Web site, MatchingDonors.com, and found a man willing to give me one of his kidneys, but he fell through. I wished for a Sears organ catalog so I could find a well-matched kidney and send in my check. I wondered about going overseas to become a "transplant tourist," but getting a black market organ seemed too risky.

Paradoxically, our nation's organ policy is governed by a tenet that closes off a large supply of potential organs — the notion that organs from any donor, deceased or living, must be given freely. The 1984 National Organ Transplantation Act makes it illegal for anyone to sell or acquire an organ for "valuable consideration."

In polls, only 30 percent to 40 percent of Americans say they have designated themselves as donors on their driver's licenses or on state-run donor registries. As for the remainder, the decision to donate will fall to their families who are as likely as not to deny the hospital's request. In any event, only a small number of bodies of the recently deceased, perhaps 13,000 a year, possess organs healthy enough for transplanting.

The verdict is in: relying solely on altruism is not enough. Charities rely on volunteers to help carry out their good works but they also need paid staff. If we really want to increase the supply of organs, we need to try incentives — financial and otherwise.

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Counterintuitive But Persuasive

Joel Kotkin thinks high gas prices are good for suburbia. (Hat Tip Instapundit)

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May 12, 2006

Pro-Choice to a Fault

This is creepy.

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A Good Combo

Instapundit + Jonah Goldberg = good blog post.

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Google Trends

The International Herald Tribune has a cool story about Google today:

Google lifted the veil this week on one of its best-kept secrets: which nations search for what?

Who looks up democracy most avidly? Who seeks out Allah or Christ most faithfully? Who types in "drugs" or "sex" most frequently?

No country's secrets are spared.

Pakistanis look up "Danish cartoons" more avidly than anyone, according to Google. They also lead the rankings for "sex" - with their neighbor and nuclear rival India seldom far behind.

"In Pakistani society, sex is a taboo," said Fatima Idrees, a project manager at the Pakistani affiliate of the Gallup International polling agency, adding that "curiosity and availability of the Internet may cause such behavior."

The site introduced Thursday, Google Trends, measures how often particular phrases are searched for from computers in individual countries and cities. It short-lists the places with the highest absolute number of searches for, say, "cat food." Then it picks the top 10 or so based on which places look up "cat food" much more than they do other things - for instance, "dog food."

The Google Trends site is likely to generate a mix of consternation, embarrassment and laughter around the world. While Google stresses its efforts to protect individuals' privacy, the new site does nothing to protect the collective privacy of nations, if such a thing exists - the right of the British to conceal that they look up "handcuffs" most often, or the right of China's leaders to hide that Mandarin ranks second only to English as the language used to look up "democracy," or the right of other officials to hide that Arabic-speaking users rarely look up "democracy."

"This is a fascinating project, effortlessly offering a glimpse into regional and cultural habits and differences that are otherwise nearly impossible to reproduce," said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University.

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May 11, 2006

On Writing

Jane Galt doesn't like David Foster Wallace. As you'll see in the comment to her post, I do!

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May 09, 2006

3 Cheers for Morocco

Joel C. Rosenberg:

As Osama bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continue to breathe their murderous threats against Christians and Jews, and attempt to incite Muslims around the world to annihilate the U.S. and Israel, another Muslim leader made the rounds in Washington last week offering a radically different vision.

Topping his agenda were under-the-radar peace talks with Israel, religious classes to teach Imams the history and virtues of the West, and dramatic new initiatives to build ties to Rabbis and evangelical Christians.

Were Dr. Ahmed Abaddi merely a soft-spoken, gentle-mannered professor of comparative religion in his native Morocco, his views would certainly be welcome, but not particularly newsworthy. However, Abaddi is actually in a position of some influence. As Morocco’s Director of Islamic Affairs and senior advisor to King Mohammed VI, he is responsible for overseeing his country’s 33,000 mosques. And he’s not just talking about a new approach to Muslim relations with the West. At the direction, and with the blessing, of his King, Abaddi has already taken a number of concrete—and controversial—steps.

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May 07, 2006

Censorship Envy

The Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent post up on "The Catholic Church, the da Vinci Code, and Censorship Envy":

As senior Conspirator Eugene Volokh has warned, one of the dangers of censoring "offensive" speech is "censorship envy." If one group is given the power to suppress speech offensive to it, others are likely to press harder to get the same privileges for themselves. As Eugene points out in the post linked above, many of the European Muslims who sought to suppress the Mohammed cartoons were partly motivated by the fact that many European countries ban Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic speech.

This dynamic is clearly at work in the efforts of some Catholic leaders to ban the Da Vinci Code. As Cardinal Francis Arinze, one of the chief advocates of banning The Code puts it, "[t]here are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking. They will make it painfully clear to you." The Reuters article where this quote appears notes that the Cardinal was referring to Muslim calls for censoring the Mohammed cartoons. He and at least one other cardinal "asserted that other religions would never stand for offences against their beliefs and that Christians should get tough [too]."

The cardinals are arguing that, if Muslims have the right to ban speech offensive to them, so too should Christians. Just as the Muslims previously made the same argument with respect to Jews! The rapid spread of "censorship envy" makes it all the more important to crush this vicious dynamic at its roots - by denying EVERY group the power to censor its critics. It is true that some of these critics are more offensive than others. Certainly, Holocaust denial is far worse than anything in the Da Vinci Code. But "censorship envy" ensures that such distinctions are unlikely to deter the spread of repression once it has begun.

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A Fighting Faith

Andrew Klavan says we need more war movies:

Since the '60s, we have had, it seems, an endless string of war movies, from "Dr. Strangelove" to "Syriana," in which the United States is depicted as wildly aggressive and endlessly corrupt — which, in fact, it's not; which, in fact, it never has been.

In taking our self-examining ethos to these extremes, we have lost a kind of wisdom, wisdom that acknowledges the complexity of human life but can move through it to find the simple truth again. While assessing the intricate failings of our moral history, many of us have lost sight of the simple truth that the system that shapes us is, in fact, a great one, that it has moved us inexorably to do better and that it's well worth defending against every aggressor and certainly against as shabby and vicious an aggressor as we face today.

Not only have we lost this kind of wisdom, but I think that a handful of elites — really only a handful of academics, journalists and artists — has raised up a golden counterfeit in its stead. With this counterfeit wisdom, they imagine themselves above the need for patriotism; they fantasize they grasp a truth beyond good and evil, and they preen themselves on a higher calling than the protection of our way of life. And all the while they forget that they imagine and fantasize and preen only by the grace of those who fight and die and stand guard to secure those freedoms that our system alone guarantees.

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United 93

George Will on United 93:

The message of the movie is: We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war's front, because in this war the front can be anywhere.

The hinge on which the movie turns are 13 words that a passenger speaks, without histrionics, as he and others prepare to rush the cockpit, shortly before the plane plunges into a Pennsylvania field. The words are: ``No one is going to help us. We've got to do it ourselves.'' Those words not only summarize this nation's situation in today's war, but also express a citizen's general responsibilities in a free society.

(Hat Tip Instapundit)

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May 06, 2006

Smile, You're on Candid Camera

Part of getting serious about homeland security is jumping on ideas like this one.

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May 05, 2006

Why We Must Stop the Darfur Genocide

TNR wants to stop them:

A willingness to use hard power abroad must not become a willingness to use it wildly. But if you are not willing to use force against genocide immediately, then you do not understand what genocide is. Genocide is not a crisis that escalates into evil. It is evil from its inception. It may change in degree if it is allowed to proceed, but it does not change in kind. It begins with the worst. Nor is its gravity to be measured quantitatively: The intention to destroy an entire group is present in the destruction of even a small number of people from that group. It makes no sense, therefore, to speak of ending genocide later. If you end it later, you will not have ended it. If Hitler had been stopped after the murder of three million Jews, would he be said to have failed? Four hundred thousand Darfuris have already been murdered by the Janjaweed, the Arab Einsatzgruppen. If we were to prevent the murder of the 400,001st, will we be said to have succeeded?

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Never Again

Charles Krauthammer:

When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?

(Hat Tip Instapundit)

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May 04, 2006

"France Wants Moussaoui Back"

Captain's Quarters has the story.

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Is There a Clash of Civilizations?

Robert Kagan:

If it is true that liberalism is not a Western phenomenon—and I agree that it is not—why don't we see more Muslim leaders, intellectuals, and opinion-makers pressing for it?

Go here for related thoughts from Kagan and Amartya Sen.

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May 03, 2006

Let Him Rot Then

Al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui will spend the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks after a federal jury rejected the government's four-year quest to secure his execution for the deadliest terrorist strike on U.S. soil.(link)

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan:

How removed from our base passions we've become. Or hope to seem.

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might say we are showing a great and careful generosity, as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit. Maybe it's not good we lose it.

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Reason #462 That Libertarians Don't WIn Elections

Blogger Amber is arguing that public sex should be legal.(Hat Tip Instapundit)

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He Said She Said

It is every woman's nightmare to be raped, and every man's nightmare to find himself in this situation. That's what makes cases like the one involving the Duke Lacrosse Team so difficult to judge, and it's what makes adopting laws to protect rape victims -- and men falsely accused of rape -- so difficult.

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May 01, 2006

Next They Came for the Brothel Owners...

A faction of European Muslims is continuing to use violence to bully around their neighbors.

We'll one day be sorry we let them get away with it.

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Mr. Colbert Goes to Washington

Steven Colbert gave quite a controversial speech/comedy routine in front of the president.

The Missing Link

May 16, 2006

You Can't Handle the Truth

May 15, 2006

The Lesson of Flight 93

A Good Question

Even Cooler Than the Original

Who You Gonna Call?

On Organ Donation