Among the most insufferable do-gooders are those in the healthcare profession, who believe their high social status enables them to redesignate their extreme liberal views as medical ethics. One serious area of disengagement from normal morality is their belief that criminals (including prisoners and illegal aliens) should receive organ transplants. Not only are these procedures very expensive, there are never enough donated organs to supply the need, so every organ given to a criminal means a law-abiding person does not get one.

One recent example was a 21-year-old illegal alien about to receive her fourth liver transplant: Million-Dollar Mexican Medical Moocher. In 2003, illegal alien teen Jesica Santillan received two sets of heart-lung transplants after her parents smuggled her into this country for free medical care. The surgeon at Duke University Hospital inserted a heart and lungs with the wrong blood type, and she died after the second set failed to remedy the mistake. (Interestingly, the parents refused to donate the salvageable organs they had received.)

A couple days ago, the LA Times reported scandalous organ transplants for known foreign criminals: Four Japanese gang figures received livers at UCLA. The article noted that in each year between 2000 and 2004, “more than 100 patients died awaiting liver transplants in the greater Los Angeles region.”

Here is today’s update about the surgery done for yakuza criminal Tadamasa Goto:

A powerful Japanese gang boss who received a liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center donated $100,000 to the Westwood hospital shortly after the surgery, The Times has learned.

A plaque dated November 2001 at the entryway to a seventh-floor surgery office reads, “In grateful recognition of the Goto Research Fund established through the generosity of Mr. Tadamasa Goto.”

UCLA confirmed the amount of the donation Friday. Law enforcement sources say Goto, 65, is the leader of the ruthless Goto-gumi gang. He received a transplant at UCLA in July 2001, The Times reported Thursday. He made his donation less than three months later. [...]

“If you want to destroy public support for organ donation on the part of Americans, you’d be hard pressed to think of a practice that would be better suited,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
[After livers, cash to UCLA, LA Times, May 31, 2008]

Yep, the big fear is that the suckers will quit signing up to donate their organs. It would kill off the golden goose for elite specialists who do transplant operations.

For some PC MD BS, see DukeHealth’s Jesica Santillan: What We Learned. (Of course there is no mention of her immigraton status.)

One of the sad facts of organ transplantation is that there are simply not enough organs available to save everyone who needs a transplant. Because too few Americans become organ donors, 17 people die every day waiting for transplants that never happen.

See, it’s Americans’ fault again!

And if you have an organ donation card in your wallet, give serious thought to tearing it up.

VDARE likes to poke fun of Mark Krikorian and the Center for Immigration Studies for “triangulating” immigration policy somewhere between National Review Online and VDARE.

Their Eugene Katz Award For Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration have often been a bit heavy on the NRO side of the triangle and raised a few of our eyebrows. For example, In 2003 they gave the award to Joel Mowbray for his reporting in National Review on the Saudi visas. Mowbray was not there to accept the award, so National Review immigration John Miller accepted it with a note from Mowbray who indicated that he does “not agree on the key question of immigration levels.” Last year Ramesh Ponnuru gave a speech.

I’m happy to say that there is absolutely nothing to criticize about this year’s awards. Both the speaker and the award recipient—William McGowan and Heather Mac Donald respectively—were excellent choices.

MacDonald has done more than anyone to expose the pathologies of the Hispanic underclass with her pieces in City Journal that expose the depth of immigrant gangs, the lack of “Hispanic family values,” as well as issues like Mexico’s meddling in America’s immigration policy and other topics that few conservatives would tread. She spent the majority of his speech going after Open Borders conservatives like Jason Riley and Linda Chavez who believed in the “Myth of the Redemptive Hispanics” who would save America through their Catholic family values. She found it particularly odd that many conservatives are willing to talk about social pathologies among the African Americans, but not Hispanics—a point that I’d like to address at length in a future column.

The opening remarks were made by William McGowan, the author of the invaluable Coloring the News. McGowan has not written much about immigration and I was pleasantly surprised at how hard-hitting some of his speech was. For example, he said that there was a ethnic conflict of interest with the large number of Hispanic journalists. He also made the exact same observation I made at the VDARE blog about the NY Times’ failure to note that virtually all the corrupt border patrol agents were Hispanic.

Most likely unaware of Peter Brimelow’s criticism of CIS’s triangulation, McGowan praised the early anti-immigration progressives for “triangulating” (his word) between the open borders libertarians of the day and the Nativists.

CIS will post the transcript next week on their website. Let’s hope that they continue to lean more towards Heather Mac Donald and further away from Ramesh Ponnuru.

From Science Blogs:

99% Genetic? Individual Differences in Executive Function Are Almost Perfectly Heritable

[ , Cognitive Neuroscience ]
Posted on: May 13, 2008 10:54 AM, by Chris Chatham

Your ability to control thought and behavior relative to your peers - a set of capacities known as “executive functions” - is almost entirely genetic in origin, according to a newly in-press paper from Friedman et al. Over 560 twins completed tests to measure fundamental components of these executive functions, and the results were analyzed in terms of how similar identical twins performed to one another relative to fraternal twins (all twins in the study were reared together). Astonishingly, the results show that the variance common to all executive functions is correlated roughly twice as much between identical twins as between fraternal twins, and that individual variance in executive function falls directly in line with what would be expected from a perfectly heritable trait.

(more…)

Dennis Mangan points to a WSJ article on a new behavioral economics study in which college students in 16 cities around the world played a positive sum game in which everybody benefited if nobody freeloaded.

Not surprisingly, players in all countries chose to give up some money to punish freeloaders. The difference was in how the freeloaders reacted to being punished. In prosperous countries, the cheaters tended to respond to punishment by mending their ways. In the more uproarious countries, however, the bad guys just got mad and hit back.

Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone’s benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand. …

Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players–and to give up a token themselves to do it.

“They didn’t believe they did anything wrong,” said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.

Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.

“The question is why?” said Harvard political economist Richard Zeckhauser.[Revenge of the Freeloaders Study Finds Culture Influences Reaction To Reward, Rebuke, By Robert Lee Hotz, May 30, 2008 ]

This is not a big surprise. The Swiss, for example, have been playing positive sum games among themselves for centuries–If we all, no matter what language we speak, get together and defend our country from invaders, we can all live in peace and prosperity.

In contrast, lots of people around the world, like Jared Diamond’s pal in New Guinea who got 30 people killed in order to avenge his uncle’s death, seem to enjoy negative sum games–what I call the “I’ll See You in Hell” Syndrome after what movie villains say when, finally thwarted by the good guy, they start the self-destruct timer on their volcano lair.

Really, the only unexpected result here is Seoul. This may be related to a strain of knuckleheadedness visible among the young in South Korea, who engage in possibly the world’s largest and certainly best organized riots. The multitudinous South Korean riot police, dressed in Orc-like uniforms, don’t attempt to prevent riots like other countries’ wussy riot police–their job, instead, is to go out and do battle with the rioters. And a good time is had by all.

The National Football League requires all draft prospects to take the 12-minute Wonderlic IQ test, but it’s not clear how much, if any, predictive value it has.

Here’s a little study of quarterbacks who entered the league from 2000 to 2004 by IQ (21 = 100) versus yards passing, which shows a strong positive relationship.

On the other hand, is yards passing the best dependent variable? And there are some arbitrary cut-offs involved. What do you do with all the quarterbacks who have barely gotten to play at all? There are quite a few drafted quarterbacks in the data table with 120+ IQs who have barely gotten into an NFL game.

I wouldn’t be surprised if teams keep an eye out for Brian Griese-types–smart quarterbacks who aren’t that physically talented–and keep them around in case injuries wipe out the top two quarterbacks and they need to plug in a warm body who has memorized the playbook and won’t throw too many interceptions. In non-emergency situations, you can use them as quasi-assistant coaches in the meantime, having them do clipboard-associated chores. The smarter ones won’t rebel as much at not getting any glory and will be working hard mentally to learn the game so they can become coaches later on. And they’re not likely to go to prison for dog-fighting.

Or maybe the NFL uses the Wonderlic for purposes of negotiating contracts? “This kid got 6 right out of 50 and he’s being represented by his uncle. Nobody in that family will know “net present value” from a hole in the ground, so let’s offer them a $10 million dollar contract with $9 million deferred until 2040. They’ll think they’re going to be rich.” (Dennis Rodman signed that kind of deal with the Chicago Bulls once, where he got $100,000 per year for 30 years–of course, that annual $100k might be what’s keeping Rodman living indoors at present.)

It seems like with all the money involved, somebody should make up a quarterback specific cognitive test rather than rely just on a standard IQ test like the Wonderlic. I’ve played quarterback for a handful of plays in six on six flag football, but I was quickly yanked because I was clearly overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of following four receivers while dodging the pass rusher. Compare quarterbacks to baseball pitchers. The physical demands aren’t that different–a tall guy with a strong arm–but pitchers can concentrate on one thing at a time, with just a little bit of multitasking for checking the baserunner’s lead at first.

The QB brain test would involve things like memorizing plays and tracking multiple receivers and defensive linemen simultaneously–the military probably has a "situational awareness" test for fighter pilot applicants that could be adapted.

You could validate the test at summer camps for elite high school quarterbacks, where you can get a big sample size, and then track them at the camp, in high school, and then in college.

Modern Western culture, dominated as it is by status striving among whites to score points off each other by most fervently embracing “The Other,” has largely become dependent upon a tiny handful of Others to say the things that need to be said.

From the Daily Mail:

Bishop says collapse of Christianity is wrecking British society - and Islam is filling the void

By Sean Poulter and Niall Firth

The collapse of Christianity has wrecked British society, a leading Church of England bishop declared yesterday.

It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.

In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of ‘endless self-indulgence’ that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.

In a blow to Gordon Brown, he mocked the ’scramblings and scratchings’ of politicians who try to cast new British values such as respect and tolerance.

The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the ’social and sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.

He said Church leaders had capitulated to Marxist revolutionary thinking and quoted an academic who blames the loss of ‘faith and piety among women’ for the steep decline in Christian worship.

Dr Nazir-Ali said the ‘ newfangled and insecurely founded’ doctrine of multiculturalism has left immigrant communities ’segregated, living parallel lives’.

Christian values of human dignity, equality and freedom could be lost as the way is left open for the advance of brands of Islam that do not respect Western values.

The Bishopric of Rochester is one of the ten most powerful positions in the Church of England.

Dr Nazir-Ali’s attack on the decline of Christianity appears to put him in the opposite corner to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and many of his fellow bishops.

But he holds some views in common with the Church’s other widely-heard and popular prelate, Ugandan-born Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York.

Over the past six months, Dr Nazir-Ali has made a number of criticisms of Islam and its influence.

Among them have been charges about the spread of no-go areas for non-Muslims and worries over the impact of new mosques.

Last weekend he was one of just three bishops who backed a move in the Church’s parliament, the General Synod, to encourage the conversion of Muslims to Christianity.

His latest attack once again criticises Dr Williams’s backing for sharia law, saying that ‘recognising its jurisdiction in public law is fraught with difficulties, precisely as it arises from a different set of assumptions than the tradition of law here’.

Dr Nazir-Ali detailed his arguments in an article in the newly-launched political magazine Standpoint.

The bishop, himself an immigrant from Pakistan in the mid-1980s, admitted that he might be thought the least qualified person to discuss British identity. But he quoted Kipling: ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’

The bishop said ’something momentous’ had happened in the 1960s. He quoted historians who point to a cultural revolution in which women ceased to uphold or pass on the Christian faith and to the role of Marxist revolutionaries.

Dr Nazir-Ali pointed with approval to a finding that ‘instead of resisting this phenomenon, liberal theologians and church leaders all but capitulated.

He said: ‘It has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we now find ourselves.’ In the place of Christianity there was nothing ‘except perhaps endless self-indulgence’.

The bishop said the consequences were ‘the destruction of the family because of the alleged parity of different forms of life together, the loss of a father figure, especially for boys, because the role of fathers is deemed otiose, the abuse of substances (including alcohol), the loss of respect for the person leading to horrendous and mindless attacks, the increasing communications gap between generations and social classes - the list is very long.’

Another result, he said, was that immigrants had been welcomed, not on the basis of Britain’s Christian heritage, to which they would be welcome to contribute, but by the ‘newfangled and insecurely-founded doctrine of multiculturalism’.

Back in 2005, I wrote a VDARE column about why the white working class in the U.S. has lower crime rates than their distant cousins in the white working class in Britain. Stronger Christianity in America was the first explanation.