The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board I serve, is looking for an energetic person dedicated to academic freedom to fill the newly created post of faculty liaison. A job description is here.
For those who want a better credit card deal, Postrel family friend (and Dynamist weblog advertiser) "Mycroft" has some suggestions, especially for gas guzzlers like him. And if you're sick and tired of getting 50 million credit card solicitations in the mail, you can now opt out at this site run by the major credit bureaus.
The National Kidney Foundation is behaving reprehensibly, especially given its mandate. When I first got interested in organ donations, I naively thought that the foundation would be in the business of doing everything possible to encourage kidney donations. I was terribly wrong. The group vehemently, and successfully, opposed a bill that would have allowed tests of incentives for organ donors. (CEO John Davis brags here, scroll to second item.)
So determined is the NKF that kidney donors should never, ever, in any way be compensated for their organs--no matter how many kidney patients current policy kills--that the organization is now trying to stamp out public discussion of the idea. When they heard that AEI is planning a conference on the subject for June 12, they wrote a letter to AEI president Chris DeMuth suggesting that the conference shouldn't be held. The letter from NKF chief Davis (PDF available here) opens:
The officers and staff of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) were surprised to learn that AEI has scheduled a forum entitled "Buy or Die: Market Mechanisms to Reduce the National Organ Shortage" that will be held on June 12, 2006. We agree that there should be open discussion of all reasonable approaches to increase organ donation, and that the shortage of organs for transplantation deserves greater attention by policy makers. Nevertheless, we believe that the concept of financial incentives has been adequately debated for 15 years, begining with the National Kidney Foundation's 1991 workshop on "Controversies in Organ Donation," and culminating in the definitive Institute of Medicine (IOM) report that was issued late in April 2006. We don't see how an AEI forum would contribute substantively to debate on this issue. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, "We'd like to maintain our monopoly on the policy debate, so please shut up."
Keep in mind by way of context that there are 66,000 Americans on the waiting list for kidneys and that if every single person in the country agreed to be a post-mortem kidney donor, that would only double the supply of cadaver kidneys to about 13,000 a year, since a relatively few causes of death allow for organ transplants.
For more background on the policy debate, see previous posts here, here, and here. Marginal Revolution blogger and GMU economist Alex Tabarok takes a detailed look at incentives here.
Dan Drezner says no to those cloying, annoying ESPN ads.
CNet's Esoterica blog reports on a computer printer made from Legos. Ho hum, you say? Anyone can make a printer from Legos? Yeah, but check out what the printout is made of.
This LAT article by Reed Johnson starts out as sarcastic fluff, but analyzing the cultural significance of Eva Longoria eventually leads to some valuable insights--the sorts of things that should be blindingly obvious to anyone actually living in contemporary American culture but that are too often obscured by various political blinders. Here's one:
This phenomenon of inhabiting more than one culture simultaneously, without feeling a sense of conflicted loyalties, differs in important ways from Chicanismo, the political-cultural movement that arose among Chicanos (people of Mexican descent born in the United States) in the 1960s. Chicanismo was a survival strategy for members of a minority group struggling to get along in a society that treated them as third-class citizens. By necessity, its supporters felt, Chicanismo often took an aggressive stance of resistance toward mainstream U.S. culture.
The new dualism favors assimilation over resistance. Rather than being grounded in identity politics, it's being fueled by technology and the free flow of goods, ideas and talent across an increasingly open and globalized border. This border is not merely a physical place. It exists on the airwaves and in cyberspace as well, in big urban centers and remote pueblitos.
Its influence is especially evident among Mexican Americans and other Latino American youth, who are seeing themselves reflected not only in TV, movies and books but on millions of individual MySpace.com pages. They're wearing LeBron James jerseys, but they may root as hard (or harder) for El Tri, the Mexican national soccer team, as for the U.S. squad in the upcoming World Cup.
Despite an off-putting lead, the whole article is worth reading.
The folks who decided that mailing bricks to Congress is a good way to lobby against immigration picked an ironic symbol. Who exactly do they think builds America's brick walls? Have they been to a construction site lately?
Real invaders don't build buildings. They blow them up.
UPDATE: This Fortune article estimates that "up to 40 percent of new-home construction in the U.S. is being done wholly or partly by undocumented immigrants," possibly as much as 80 percent in Texas. Referring to Latino immigrants, legal or illegal, one contractor says, "If for any reason we lose that work force, you're going to see the time required to build a house double or triple and the cost of new homes increase 30 to 40 percent." And don't even think about remodeling.
Alex Massie, the Washington correspondent for The Scotsman, writes:
Like you, I'm disappointed Anne Applebaum is leaving the WaPo. Media Bistro's line, "We hear that it is largely due to her husband having taken a new job in a different city" is unintentionally amusing.
Um, yes, Radek Sikorski does indeed have a new job in a different city. He's currently serving as the Polish Defence Minister. Given that until recently he was prominent at AEI. I'd have thought a DC media blog would have known this.
I suppose with David Ignatius still in Paris the Post may feel it can't have two Europe-based op-ed columnists. Sad however, to see her go.
Like the folks at MediaBistro, I'm sorry to hear that Anne Applebaum is leaving the WaPost. She's a serious historian with a lively mind and a great devotion to human freedom. It's insulting to her talents and unique voice to say, as MediaBistro does, that "Most sad of all, however, is that Applebaum's departure leaves the Post's editorial/opinion pages virtually female-free." (They actually categorize her with Ellen Goodman.) And Charles Krauthammer is just there to represent the disabled, I suppose.
Oh, I just noticed the MediaBistro poster's name: Patrick Gavin. A man. I guess we all look alike to him.
I've been busy updating this site. The article archives now include all my articles from the NYT, Forbes, and D Magazine, as well as my other features. I've also updated the my list of forthcoming speaking appearances, two of which are this week.
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