Below the fold is a request for someone to dig out something Marx-related from their university library for me.

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The director of “UCLA’s Willed Body Program”:http://www.healthcare.ucla.edu/Handbook/program.asp?version=5619&programid=600, Henry Reid, has “been arrested”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41469-2004Mar8.html for “illegally selling human body parts”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/09/national/09BODY.html?ex=1079413200&en=d8a6ff9aa2dd0c6b&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE from perhaps as many as 800 cadavers. A second man, Ernest Nelson, has also been arrested and charged with receiving stolen goods. Nelson “claims”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3545025.stm that he routinely showed up hacksaw-in-hand at UCLA, with the full knowledge of the Program, and left with knee joints, hands and other body parts. UCLA officials describe Nelson and Reid as a pair of criminals operating without the knowledge of the University. The practice came to the attention of other administrators when Nelson wrote a letter to UCLA demanding $241,000 compensation for body parts he had been forced to return after UCLA banned transfers of cadavers to people or organizations unaffiliated with the University.

Exchange in human goods is a topic “near and dear”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/vita.php3 to all my major organs. At the moment, I’m trying to write the conclusion to a book about some aspects of it. Over the past twenty years or so in the United States, a very large and complex system of tissue procurement and distribution has grown up, mostly to service the demand created by new medical technologies. Some of these, like heart and kidney transplants, enjoy broad public support. Others, like the use of “processed cadaveric skin”:http://www.lifecell.com/healthcare/products/alloderm/index.cfm for “lip enhancement”:http://www.facialworks.com/cosmeticsurgery/alloderm/ and “penis enlargement”:http://www.drwhitehead.com/phallo_allo.html, “bone screws”:http://www.local10.com/mia/health/kristisgoodhealth/stories/kristisgoodhealth-20001227-080607.html for orthopedic surgery or “cadavers in automobile crash tests”:http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/rulings/80g/80gii.html are less well known.[1] With the exception of the plasma market in the U.S., almost all solid organs and human tissues come from voluntary donors. The increasing demand for body parts has led to a lively debate (going back to the 1970s) on whether some kind of market in human body parts is a good idea. Although this is a very important question, in my view debate about it misses a lot of what’s really interesting about actually-existing systems of exchange. The wide range of empirical variation in rates of blood and organ donation across countries, and within the U.S., for example, complicates the simple contrast between giving and selling that underpins arguments about markets for organs. So does the terrific amount of cultural work that goes into maintaining the viability of organ donation, on the one hand, and real markets for things like human eggs, on the other.

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I thought I’d said my last word on voting systems, but it’s a topic that’s hard to exhaust. The comments thread to Brian’s latest post raised the notion of Approval voting in which you cast a vote for all candidates of whom you approve, the candidate with the largest number of votes being elected. I suggested that “the appeal of approval voting is mainly to people who can see the inadequacies of plurality (first past the post) but are worried about the supposed complexity of preferential” and the site linked above, with its frequent references to simplicity, supports this view.

I now want to make a stronger point. Approval voting is, for nearly all purposes, dominated by the “optional preferential” system, in which voters can list in order all the candidates whom they wish to give any support, leaving the remaining candidates unranked. In effect, optional preferential is an approval voting version of the single transferable vote system, with the desirable property that voters don’t have to give any support to candidates they dislike. Given the data from on optional preferential ballot, it would always be possible to implement approval voting by disregarding the rankings given by voters, but its hard to see when this could ever be desirable.

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“Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_02_29_dish_archive.html#107851564542206172:

bq. THANK GOD FOR KRAUTHAMMER: Charles Krauthammer has never written a dumb column, to my knowledge. Even on emotional subjects such as civil marriage, he brings to the debate a calm reasoning that wins the respect of his opponents as well as his supporters.

See “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56315-2004Feb19&notFound=true, “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A37125-2003Dec4&notFound=true and “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A17610-2003Nov27&notFound=true for a few recent examples of the calm reasoning that Krauthammer’s opponents value so much. And then file this one along with the crackpottery of the bloke who was trying to convince us all a few months ago that Steven Den Beste was the Nabokov of the blogosphere.

It’s extraordinary how quickly the blogosphere has become a significant channel for political donations; Atrios has raised “$25,000 in five days”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_07_atrios_archive.html#107879845206303065 for the Kerry campaign. I’ve no doubt that this will be a big issue of debate at the blogging panel that Dan Drezner and I are organizing for the APSA meeting this September. My spur-of-the-moment impression – to the extent that this favours one side, it’s going to favour the Democrats. Regardless of whether the blogosphere tilts left or tilts right (your guess is as good as mine), the most-read blogs on the liberal-left side of the spectrum are much more closely aligned with the Democratic party apparatus than the blogs on the right are with the Republican machine. They also have the precedent of MoveOn, and of the Dean movement to build on. Rightbloggers, even the ones who support the administration, tend to self-identify as libertarians rather than Republicans, and maintain a little distance from the formal aspects of the Republican party. I could be wrong, but I don’t see Glenn Reynolds hosting appeals for donations to the Republican National Committee, let alone Eugene Volokh. Andrew Sullivan might have up to a month or so ago, but not today.

How big a deal this is remains to be seen; my guess is that its consequences will be significant, but not enormous. Where it will have an impact is in terms of the agenda-setting power of the few bloggers who can and will raise large amounts of cash for the cause. If Atrios can keep on getting people to donate that kind of money, the powers that be in the Democratic party are going to start taking him quite seriously indeed. Especially if the FEC starts cracking down on soft-money contributions to 527s. Developing, as they say.

Last week it was the “apparently unjustified firing”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001447.html of a Professor at Penn State Altoona. This week it’s the suspension of “two professors at Southern Mississippi”:http://volokh.com/2004_03_07_volokh_archive.html#107879035707294419, again for what looks like no good reason. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria “has more”:http://www.hnn.us/blogs/entries/3981.html, with links to various commentaries. Here also is “a news story”:http://www.printz.usm.edu/termination.html from the student paper found via “a blogger”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/ who knows more about the situation on the ground. Looks like there’s been “some”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000753.html “student”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000752.html “reaction”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000750.html to the suspensions, together with “criticism”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000749.html from benefactors and a “vote of no confidence”:http://scott.littlemeanfish.com/blog/archives/000746.html from the USM faculty senate. (Hat tip: “Matt Weiner”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000137.html.)

My friend Rob Reich has just told me the very sad news that Susan Moller Okin died last week. Her book, Justice Gender and the Family, had a major effect on political theory, and helped produce the turn to the intimate that has happened in the last decade or so: an agenda setting achievement. I have been meaning for some time to blog about one of her arguments, but today is obviously not the day for that. I met her only once myself, but was impressed on that meeting by how the quality of the work I have admired for so long was matched by the quality of the personality I met — something one does not always find. An obituary will appear in tomorrow’s edition of the Stanford Report. (UPDATE: the full Stanford Report obituary is now online here.) Here is the press release:

Susan Moller Okin died of unknown causes last week at the age of 57. Okin was Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and professor of Political Science at Stanford University. At the time of her death she was on leave with a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Chris’s post about “the ENO production of Rheingold”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001476.html reminded me of why I don’t know anything about Wagner’s music. When I was a graduate student, I invested a substantial chunk of my income in a pair of season tickets to the Met, with half-decent seating. You got a set program of opera over the course of the year. We had a great time. Then came the Wagner week. I forget which opera it was. Die Walküre I think — anyway, the one where the guy stumbles into the forest hut, falls in love with the girl, and upon discovering she’s his sister sings, delightedly, “Such wonderful news! Our children will therefore be of the purest blood!” or words to that effect.

As soon as we got to our seats we knew something was wrong.

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“Caoine”:http://caoine.org/mt/archives/2004_03.php#002966 is feeling remarkably generous. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember “Peter Unger”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/unger/ did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.

In what appears to be an attempt to defuse some of the controversy, NEWSWEEK has learned, White House officials have privately signaled to the commission that Bush will not rigidly stick to the one-hour time limit. When time is up, Bush won’t walk out if there are still more questions, an aide said.

That was his plan? After sixty minutes with two members of his own party, whom he appointed to investigate 9/11, he was planning on turning his back and walking out on them? [UPDATE: The co-chair is a Democrat appointed by Daschle. Sorry about that.]

Boy, that moment would look great on a National Review commemorative plate. Can you imagine such a scene? I can.

IMAGINING SUCH A SCENE

A play in one act

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Thanks to “Michael Brooke”:http://michaelbrooke.com/ , I’ve been reading “Adam Yoshida”:http://www.adamyoshida.com/ ‘s surreal rantings on and off for the past few weeks. They really are marvellous, although “today’s speculation about whether John Kerry was a KGB sleeper”:http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004_03_01_archive.html#107872548628430079 may in fact be a coded message that Yoshida himself is a deep-cover satirist for the left. Sample quote:

bq. If one picture emerged of George W. Bush, in 1970, of raising his arm in what vaguely appeared to be a Nazi salute, the media would cover it for weeks. Why, then, has no one in the mainstream media probed John Kerry’s ties to an evil which, at the very least, is the equal of Nazism?

Why indeed? And why doesn’t “TechCentralStation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/index.html hire this guy?

I don’t have much to add to Brad de Long’s take on this MSNBC story asserting that Bush stopped plans to bomb the camp of terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi because

the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

This assertion is sourced to unnamed “military officials”, and may be hard to verify, but if true it would surely constitute grounds for impeachment, as well as a conclusive refutation of the case for the Iraq war.

“Juan Non-Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_03_07_volokh_archive.html#107867124871611745 opens an interesting line of inquiry: which political ideology has the best music? I’m torn on this. Juan leads with his chin, describing “Rush”:http://www.rush.com/ as “arguably the most prominent libertarian band of all time.” _Arguably?_ Who else is in the running here? Clint Eastwood singing “I Talk to the Trees” in “Paint Your Wagon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002PEY/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/? Was “Ayn Rand”:http://www.villainsupply.com/miscevil.html, like L. Ron Hubbard, a “great composer”:http://www.scientology.org/html/en_US/l-ron-hubbard/professional-dozens-fields/artist/composer/ on the side? The irresistible image is of a phalanx of airborne Libertarians screaming up the Potomac in surplus “Hueys”:http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Rotary/Huey/HE11.htm fitted with “tactical nuclear weapons sourced on Ebay”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001478.html, while Rush’s “‘Freewill'”:http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Freewill-lyrics-Rush/88C8D6AD95B2BD4E48256BBF0032C460 blares from speakers bolted to one of the choppers.

But the question seems a bit underspecified. For instance, conservatives in general might claim the whole tradition of western classical music for themselves, while quietly ignoring the fact that, throughout history, your common or garden conservative can reliably be found bemoaning the appalling quality of serious music since the year _n_ — 75, for all values of _n_. Those on the left, meanwhile, will have to work hard to distance themselves from the output of the troops of the “Folk Song Army”:http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/thefolks.htm. Perhaps we should be asking which are the best _explicitly political_ songs. A related question is which country has the best National Anthem. France edges it, I think, over South Africa (too long) and the United States (too hard to sing). _God Save the Queen_ is clearly the worst, a judgment made compelling both by the anthem’s non-existent musical merits and the fact that English fans would rather sing a “spiritual”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/singers/sfeature/songs_swing_l.html written about an exhausted, enslaved people longing for the sweet release of death.

Brad de Long picks up my post on opportunities and outcomes (see also this crossposting with further discussion), in which I argued that the achievement of meaningful equality of opportunity in a society with highly unequal outcomes would require extensive government intervention to prevent the development of inherited inequality, and says that I’m falling into Irving Kristol’s trap, which he describes, accurately enough, as

an ideological police action designed to erase the distinction between Arthur Okun and Mao Zedong, and delegitimize the American left.

I agree that many people, particularly critics of social democracy like Kristol ,use the outcome/opportunity distinction in a dishonest way. This is particularly true in the American context, since anyone honestly concerned with the issue would have to begin with the observation that the United States performs just as badly on equality of opportunity (as measured by things like social mobility) as it does on equality of outcome (see the book by Goodin et al, reviewed here for one of many demonstrations of this). So if Kristol were genuinely concerned about equality of opportunity he’d be calling for at least as much intervention as the liberals and progressives he’s criticising.

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