December 06, 2002
The gift of life.
John Costello was able to supply the name of the child mentioned by Joanne Jacobs below, the girl conceived in order to save her older sister: Marissa Ayala was conceived to save Anissa.Here are several stories from Time magazine about such living-to-living transplants. (The accounts had a doubly strange air for me because a great many of the people involved have similar names: Marissa, Anissa, Alyssa who lived and Alyssa who died.) Not all the decisions would be easy to make:
"What if a couple conceives a baby in order to obtain matching marrow for another child: and what if amniocentesis shows that the tissue of the fetus is not compatible for transplant? Does the couple abort the fetus and then try again? "and, even harder:
"Tamas Bosze, a Chicago bar owner, was told that only a marrow transplant could rescue his son Jean-Pierre, 12, from leukemia. The boy's only potential donors were twin half-siblings born out of wedlock to the father's former girlfriend. Bosze sued the woman in an attempt to compel her to have the children tested for tissue compatibility. She refused, and a court upheld her decision. Last November, Jean-Pierre Bosze died."
Some hard choices there. But getting back to the original situation, that shared by Zain Hashmi and Anissa Ayala, I think it is clear. Give them their chance. Babies are conceived for much worse reasons.
I don't know if this next thing is connected or not, and I will deliberately refrain from trying to find out, as should you who reads this. But a Google search for "Marissa Ayala" threw up these pictures which the young artists were clearly happy to show on the internet. To find the one by a child called Marissa Ayala, scroll almost to the bottom. I don't know how common a name it is; perhaps there are hundreds of Marissa Ayalas. But I find myself hoping it is the same girl. She does not sound as if her life is a burden to her. Next to her picture of the family starting their festive meal under the decorations she has written:
"We celebrate new Year on the 31 st of December. I have supper at home with all my family. We wartch T.V and we eat grape."It took me ages to learn to spell "watch", too.
Dispatches from the frontier.
My husband spent a memorable few seconds yesterday travelling at speed down the motorway in his car. Sideways. While acting, as he put it, "as a hood ornament for a lorry."Life's rich tapestry, eh? No one was hurt and we are fully insured, but it's all a bit of a bleah. I am now stuck home waiting for a loan car and a tow-truck to take our poor little Fiesta to hospital and possible euthanasia. I had been planning to go to London and stock up on presents, not to mention meeting Brian Linse who is in London at the moment.
My husband said an interesting thing about his thoughts while being carried along. He didn't pray. He didn't think of his family. He's a teacher and he spends some of his time saying and even more time thinking, "Stop that! You're doing something stupid." And that's what he tried to convey telepathically to the driver of the lorry.
December 05, 2002
"Five or six years ago (if memory serves), a California couple's daughter desperately needed a bone marrow transplant. I think she had some form of leukemia. The parents' bone marrow couldn't be used. So they had a baby, hoping to save their daughter's life. There was criticism at the time: Were they using the baby? Etcetera. As it turned out, the baby's blood was a good match for her older sister. The transplant was performed. Both children are doing well, and the parents are delighted they have two living children instead of the alternative, one dead child."
Shark blog
has a general theory of left-wing justice. It's a little harsh to say this of all left-wingers; I'd really prefer to describe this as "idiotarian justice" - but by eck it's true of some I could name.
Mrs Jenkins speaks.
Mrs Jenkins, you will recall, is the Japanese woman kidnapped by North Korea, who while there married a US soldier who deserted in 1965, and is now - this is the woman, not the soldier - being held in Japan while Japan demands that her husband come to Tokyo for his own good, which he says he daren't do for fear of arrest, while what either of them want for their two children, still held in Korea, or indeed what they want themselves is unclear. Confused? It's a bit sick to say this, but I can't help picturing Mrs Jenkins as an oriental version of Jessica from Soap.
So why does
America have such a high murder rate? It was higher back in the days when American and British gun laws were similar, and it has stayed higher, though declining. I expect it will cross over our rising rate during the next two decades.So after all that, I'm going to sound like Michael Moore. It may have something to do with the fact that America was conquered from the Indians in the relatively recent past, and that the conquest was a struggle - not a walkover as it was in Australia. Other high-crime societies such as Mexico, the Philippines, the Balkans and South Africa also have a history of difficult conquest (or failed conquest) in the last four centuries. Russia, too, sort of.
Yes, I ought to be in bed.
December 04, 2002
Will Warren
of Unremitting Verse is retiring. I tried to think of a way of putting that in rhyme. But I couldn't. Will could have, but instead chose to take a very graceful leave of us in prose.
God and Caesar.
At the Libertarian Alliance Forum Kevin Carson made two good points about Josephine Quintavelle's views. The first I had thought of already:"I don't think these parents are very likely to view their new child as a mere convenience or an organ bank. If anything, the opposite is likely to be true. Both the parents and the brother will be conscious of a lifelong debt that can never be repaid."The second is devastating:
"And speaking of Quintavelle, it's really odd to hear a self-described pro-life person making the statement "Only Parliament can decide these things." If you'd expect anyone to understand the difference between God and Caesar, it would be surely be a pro-lifer."
What is wrong with this picture?
Simon Jenkins blithely repeats the notion put about by Michael Moore that you can always leave your door open in Canada. This review by a Canadian, though generally favourable, observes:"Granted he did test out his theory by jiggling a few unlocked doorknobs in a comfy middle class Toronto neighbourhood and even went so far as to include a shot of what he presumed was a typical Toronto-area ghetto. Why he didn’t venture a few blocks south of the Alliance Atlantis headquarters to Regent Park where he could have gotten a picture of what a real housing project looked like, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was all he could do to show his appreciation to the Canadian film company giant that helped bankroll the film’s production."
"Mr Moore", Simon Jenkins says admiringly, "is a reporter who not only asks “what?” but also “why?” Others say that Mr Moore is a reporter who not only asks "what?" and "why?" but "why should I be constrained by trivia like the truth?" Spinsanity's reviewer, hardly right wing, didn't think much of Bowling for Columbine. Ben Fritz says:
"And readers who uncritically accept those "facts" -- along with a number of other egregious and sloppy distortions -- will be duped. Good satire also should be grounded in fact. Regrettably, Moore gets his facts wrong again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites shows that lazy research is often to blame.""In a blatant misrepresentation, he states: "We're number one in budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP)." When Moore wrote his book last year, the United States was running a budget surplus, as it had for the previous three years. "
This review is unabashedly anti-left wing, but agrees with the previous one that the film is full of lies and errors. One of the most egregious is one of omission. Moore's portrait of Canada at peace with itself has no mention of Canada's own mass killing, the 1989 massacre of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.
Even the film's title, it says, is wrong. They skipped bowling.
(Original Times link spotted by Jim Bennett.)
LATER: It's Canada+guns day for me. By coincidence a Samizdata reader sent a Canadian National Post article to that blog. It was about the unbelievable expense of Canada's new gun registration system. He added in passing that "I can say that, in Toronto, there was a series of gang related shooting in October where every weekend (for a month) different gang members ended up dead in different parts of the city." Read more here, including the comments.
An honest reply.
Paul Wright replies to an open letter from the father of one of those murdered in Bali.This theme keeps coming up. We must treat those bereaved by crime or disaster with decency and courtesy. But that does not make their opinions right in every case.
LATER: Sigh. If the link doesn't work, go to TANSTAAFL and scroll down.
I know, I know.
Online polls aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. But isn't interesting that the Guardian's online poll right now has 61% against the firefighters' strike?
Connections and Contradictions.
There's a wide ranging and thoughtful essay on the value of blogs, Miss World, the French state's attitude to polygamy, and wife-beating capitalist chic at Body and Soul.I'd like to bounce back with a few points in defence of capitalism. The anti-capitalist part of the essay is not at its core, but being pro-capitalist is fairly close to my core, so that's why I'm going to focus on that aspect.
On sweatshirts and sweatshops. I think that the sweatshop has liberated more women than any law passed in living memory. It takes around two or three generations of sweatshops to go from the ancient pattern of peasant subsistence farming, with its characteristic grinding toil for women, to, well, Taiwan. In 1945 Taiwan was poorer than the Sudan. Now I read somewhere that the Taiwanese goverment felt it necessary to run a campaign against obesity.
Third World women may hate it working in sweatshops, but they hate it less than what they had before. Once the Wal-Mart trainer factory down the road opens its doors, bride-burnings and female infanticide are on the way out. When companies cheat or exploit their workers it is legitimate for concerned customers to boycott them, although I hope they will send someone to talk to the workers first and see what they want given local conditions, just as it is legitimate that companies with a better record should attempt to raise sales by boasting of their relative virtue. And both these things do happen, which takes me to my next point: one of the factors I love about capitalism is its incentives to create and maintain your good name. Likewise one of the things I hate about socialism and statism is that it erodes incentives to respectability. How does wife beating get to be chic? It certainly went on in the London or Los Angeles of 1900* but it was considered disgraceful. What's changed? I'd say that one major thing that has changed is that a man's living no longer depends on his good name. That allowed the cult of the barbarian to resurface. The cult is ever-present in humanity but had been held down in the west by an overlay of chivalry. The gangsta-chic meme (as we can call the latest incarnation of this ancient devil) has been percolating upwards through the income levels ever since.
The author of this weblog, Body and Soul, is Jeanne D'Arc. (Sometimes she hears strange, insistent voices that come from invisible people and say oddly compelling things. But if they bother her she turns off the radio.) She sent me a kind e-mail a while ago. Why can't I either reply to e-mails efficiently or ignore them without guilt?
*Whether wife-beating went on then at a greater or lesser rate than at present is also interesting. I suspect, following Charles Murray's Losing Ground, that the problem is worse now, despite the indifference of the police a century ago, for the same basic reason, namely welfare.
She should patent her own body.
Perhaps that's the only way the woman described in Stephen Pollard's post "They're my medical notes, so why can't I have them?" is going to get some control over - or even sight of - her own medical notes.The hospital couldn’t care less. Its response is classic: "We are sorry that Ms Lawrence is unhappy with the information in her medical notes, but . . . hospitals have a policy not to alter medical records." Well that’s OK then. They have "a policy". It might be the wrong policy. It might mean treating patients with contempt. But, heh, it’s "a policy". And as such, it is utterly typical of the NHS’s attitude to its customers — a patient is just a patient (if only they wouldn’t get in the way of the efficient operation of the consultant’s research), a policy — well, just that, a policy. No matter that it might destroy your life; no matter that it operates against your interests; no matter that it embodies a complete disregard for the rights of you, the patient and the NHS’s wagepayer — it’s a policy, OK?
My kids do that. I tell them not to dance in their socks at parties. "Shoes or bare feet," I screech, waving ruined socks in front of them. "Do you know the cost of socks? Well let me tell you, next time you do that, you are going to find out." But the soul of a juvenile sock-abuser is deaf to all decent shame. "We always do that" or better yet "Everybody does that" is considered quite sufficient explanation and justification. I could teach them the word "policy" and set them up for comfortable careers in the NHS.
Of course, there is no reason to suppose that NHS spokesmen are in themselves particularly juvenile or complacent. They act that way because it is a strategy well-adapted to their environment. Stephen Pollard goes on to say, explaining why lawyers or doctors despite their many faults would never dare to institute a policy of never changing their records:
They provide a service to me, the customer. If I don’t like what I receive, I can take my business elsewhere. The only choice I am given over the NHS is to pay my taxes or go to prison.
The NHS is, in theory, owned by all of us. But as we long ago learnt with other nationalised industries, the larger the theoretical pool of owners, the smaller the influence they exercise.
I can't ever seem to link to individual posts in stephenpollard.net. Never mind. They're all good. He ought to be on my blogroll. Let's look and see if he has already mysteriously appeared there. Yes, he has.
It still astounds me that the first time his name as a columnist ever really sunk in, a year ago, I was terribly, terribly scathing. Anyone can have an off day, and we'll draw a veil over which one of us it was.
December 03, 2002
Canada
won't ban Hezbollah. Canada will ban the Canadian affiliate of Magen David Adom who provide ambulances to Jew, Christian and Muslim alike. Because they have stars of David on the sides, presumably.
Ever-helpful,
Alice Bachini offers anti-globos yet more diurnal strategies for offering grovelling apologies for being alive and having fun:Eat Nothing Day
Say Nothing Day (that's one to look out for)
Think Nothing Day
Do Nothing Day (resists urge to lay into the poor hard-done-by firemen yet again)
Hear Nothing Day (in honour of deaf people)
See Nothing Day (to demonstrate unity with blind people)
Achieve Nothing Day
May As Well Not Even Exist Day
I'm pro-life.
It's commonly taken to mean "against abortion", and despite being a controversial term most people of all opinions have no trouble understanding how the phrase arose. But how this woman, Josephine Quintavelle, gets to be described as "pro-life" is beyond me. A child called Zain Hashmi has the potentially deadly blood disorder thalassaemia. His parents want to carry out some procedure involving genes and bone marrow to produce a sibling who can donate cells from his or her umbilical cord to save Zain. They seem respectable people who clearly love the son they already have. There is no reason to suppose that they will not also love Zain's new brother or sister. True, they will use a part of his or her genetic material to help Zain; and they must perforce do so before the child is old enough to consent. But that does not imply - in fact it is fantastic to suggest it does imply - that the parents will therefore only see the new child as a thing to be used. Josephine Quintavelle is launching a court action to stop them. She believes that only Parliament can decide these matters.Please, nobody assume that I am blind to the worrying aspects of recent developments in reproductive science. I don't want Larry Niven's SF stories of organleggers to come true. Same goes for Lois McMasters Bujold's stories involving clones created to serve as organ reserves for their masters. Closer to home, I do have qualms about the consent of children being assumed. Also, the growing ability of parents to irreversibly manipulate the physical form of their children raises all sorts of spectres, although it could also confer great benefits. Maybe I'll write about all these issues in the future, although judging from the fact that I still haven't got round to doing my promised essay on abortion, that future may be farther off than the clones.
Just for today, though, I'd like to stick to one point. Zain Hashmi is likely to die. His parents want to make his early death much less likely by bringing a new life into the world. Josephine Quintavelle wants to stop them, because she believes that reproductive ethics should be under democratic control. She believes Zain's much increased chance of premature death is a price worth paying to preserve democratic control, fearing worse consequences than the death of one child if it is lost. I hope I have not misrepresented her opinion. But whether you like or hate it, it has nothing to do with any possible intepretation of the words "pro-life".
She's back.
The resurgent Letter from Gotham has up a reply to a post by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax. Read both.
December 02, 2002
ADDED LATER: He's planning to give it away. Nice chap. And the Janes-related names almost generate themselves; look for "Janes' Fighting Words".
In a minute I'm going to have to surrender this computer to my son in fulfilment of a promise to give him an uninterrupted session on an educational computer game that provides most useful preparation for future life, at least for those of the coming generation whose career plans involve fighting worms armed with Uzis who say "victory" and "oh-oh" in cute squeaky voices. But before I go I'd like to say that the paper version of the Telegraph is just ace today. There is an article by Alan Judd on the right to armed self- defence that is remarkable not so much for anything it says as for the fact that it is an article on the right armed self-defence spread bang over the centre-page of Britain's biggest selling quality paper. And there is a bitterly splendid article by Neil Collins on the number of rail lengthmens' lives that are likely to be sacrificed on the altar of safety. It's more dangerous to work on the railway track than to be a fireman. I'm saying this all from memory as it was my friend who had the paper (I'm far too cool) and she's gone off home. I tried to link to the articles but couldn't, one hopes because so many other people are reading the good word. You may fare better than I. It's certainly worth your while to try at http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/
Okay, gotta go.
ADDED LATER: Here's the Alan Judd article: "We must be allowed to defend ourselves against burglars." and here's the Neil Collins article: "Spending billions to make railways more dangerous."
Islam, Peace, and why I love my referrer log.
BoW is on my permalinks for a reason, and I'd have found this Blogs of War post on the phrase "Islam is a religion of peace" eventually. But that beautiful Bravenet software let me find it right now.Seriously, read it. Guaranteed non-mushy, yet also non-racist. Teases out all sorts of points that I had known without knowing, such as this one:
It seems to me that, far from being an attack directed at Muslims, the ironic use of "religion of peace" is actually a slap at George W. Bush and others who, no doubt with the best of intentions, have employed the banal phrase to avoid confronting or acknowledging a manifest reality: that the wickedness of those who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11 is inextricably enmeshed with the wickedness of the ideology of the perpetrators, their apologists, their fellow travelers, and their clandestine supporters; and that the ideology arises not out of a void, but from a variety of religious extremism that is propagated by some of our "allies" in the Middle East and their spokesmen and beneficiaries at home.
Get real.
An Editorial in USA Today tells critics who act as if they think the greatest danger to civilization is Harry Potter and Victoria's Secret to put their energies to more productive use.