The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Imagine donating a kidney...not after you checked a box on your driver's license form and you are dead ...but when you are alive! What an amazing gift to humanity. It reaffirms my faith in the goodness of people when I read stories about such things.

But as usual the aggressively stupid mandarins that increasingly inhabit every level of officialdom have decided that what works well needs to be changed...Chesterton's Fence anyone?

And as much as I would like to blame the current cultural insanity of "DEI" (DIE?), it seems as though this is probably just a chaotic and stupid change in the system for the sake of doing something...anything...to justify their phony balony jobs and pretend that their vast intellects will be sufficient to overcome actual experience and data and real-world results.

In other words...liberals!

Kidney Transplant Controller Wants To Distribute Human Organs Based On 'Equity'

If someone donates one of their kidneys and later needs a new one, should they go to the top of the transplant waitlist? Yes, say good people. Yes, say normal people. Not anymore, say the bureaucrats in charge of the transplant waitlist. Instead, they say it’s time for a “more equitable approach.”

Currently, the people at the top of the kidney transplant waitlist are people who have donated one of their organs to someone else (living donors), young children who are a great biological match with an organ, and patients who are very hard to be matched with any organ. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is a private non-profit that holds a contract with the federal government to run the transplant waitlist, and they want to change that. UNOS wants to remove these “hard boundaries” in favor of a new system that erodes the protections for living donors.

A report commissioned by UNOS envisions a drastic reduction in prioritization for living donors — going from the current virtual guarantee of getting a new kidney to a slight bonus on the waiting list — equivalent to as low as 10 percent of the total prioritization score. This policy would betray those who have already donated an organ and discourage others from donating in the future. They are pushing this policy even though their own research shows that changing from the current policy will not reduce death rates but lead to a higher rate of failed kidney transplants in the first year after surgery.

Radical transformation might sound exciting and effective, but in reality it rarely works. A sober, calculated, data-based approach to complex problems is usually the way to improve them, and the hubris of dorm-room intellectualism is anathema to these sorts of changes. The Law of Unintended Consequences is a bitch, and these people are arrogant enough to think that they can consider all of the possible consequences and manage them...with their brains!

They can't.

Sure, it sounds boring: basing changes on observation and data and experience. And it is. But just ask the thousands of sufferers of kidney disease how they feel about this stupid manipulation of a functioning system. My guess is that they would prefer boring.

There are lots of boring people in our culture's history. The most boring of the lot is a man named Norman Borlaug. He did plodding, tedious research into disease resistant wheat that also was high yielding. Yup...that will put you to sleep at a cocktail party!

But he was one of the titans of the 20th century. His work has saved billions of people from starvation. Pretty impressive, and far more important than flash-in-the-pan crackpots whose work is more self-aggrandizement than substantive.

The development of Western culture could not have happened without the gradual shift toward scientific analysis, rational thought, and data and experience-based decisions. When we base our decisions on other things; race, ethnicity, subjective concepts of "equity," we risk destroying what has taken 2,500 years to create.

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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