He had two kidneys, so he gave away one

Dylan Matthews, a writer for Vox news, donated a kidney to someone he didn’t even know.  He’s unusual, but not unique.  He knows at least two other people who’ve done the same thing.

He said he was inspired by his Christian upbringing and the teaching of Jesus, that if you have two coats, you should give one to someone who has done.   He had two kidneys, so he decided to give one to someone who had none.

People who suffer renal failure have only a short time to live, and that involves a painful treatment called kidney dialysis.   A kidney transplant can extend their lives for 10 years or more.

He in fact helped save four people, not just one.   The person who received his kidney had a relative who was willing to donate his kidney, but was not a good match.   So the relative agreed that, if someone else donated a kidney, to donate their kidney to someone else.

The second recipient also had a relative who was willing to donate in an exchange, and so did the third.   So Matthews in all added 40 or more years to the lives of strangers.   That is, they were strangers at the time he made his decision.  Now they have a strong bond.

She uses dance to help repair her brain

Clara Ooyama, once a corporate lawyer for Eastman Kodak Co., suffered serious impairment of brain function as a side effect of chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer in 2006.

Over a two-year period, she lost basic mental capacities, including the ability to read and to multi-task.   Her doctor sent her to a brain rehabilitation clinic, but she was dismissed because she was too-high functioning.

With heroic determination, she worked to rebuild her neural pathways.  She at first worked six to eight hours a day on the controversial Lumosity brain training exercises, carefully keeping note of mental speed, memory, flexibility and ability to pay attention.

In 2013, her husband Steve Searles reached out to the Expressive Arts program of the Hochstein School of Music and Dance here in Rochester, N.Y.    Instructors helped her use dance and music as a way to do multiple tasks and hold multiple thoughts at the same time, and to integrate mind and body function.

“It’s going to be okay”

“It’s going to be okay.”  He told her this as he watched the engine continue to burn.  He told her this as he watched it fall from the plane.  He told her this as the fuel lines became exposed, fire overtook the aircraft, and the plane pitched downward.  He told her this knowing that every single person on that plane was about to die.

Click on the text and read the rest.

The ending may surprise you.  It surprised me.

Hat tip: Avedon’s Sideshow

One-legged bicycle messenger in New York

This video is from 2006.  I’d like to think this guy is still around.

Click on The Hard Math of Two Wheels and One Pedal for background by Dan Barry in the New York Times.

Hat tip to kottke.org.

Julian Assange: a profile in courage

The United States and British governments treat Julian Assange like the ultimate terrorist threat.

Members of the London Metropolitan Police, wearing Kevlar vests, surround the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange has taken refuge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  They occupy the front steps and entrances, they occupy street corners nearby, one police officer occupies a room in a building adjoining Assange’s room.  Chris Hedges, a journalist and former war correspondent, said the Metropolitan Police spent the equivalent of $4.5 million in surveillance of Julian Assange just through January 31.

Behind the United Kingdom government is the power of the U.S. government.  A dozen government agencies are working on the Julian Assange case.  They have waged economic warfare and cyberwarfare to try to shut down Assange’s WikiLeaks operation.  They interrogate and try to recruit WikiLeaks supporters every time they pass through a U.S.-controlled airport.  Assange’s lawyers believe that Bradley Manning, who leaked confidential government information to WikiLeaks, could plea bargain for a reduced sentence by testifying that Assange solicited the information.

A secret grand jury in Arlington, Va., reportedly has handed down a sealed indictment of Assange.  Hedges reported that the Department of Justice is mounting a major effort on this.  It spent $2 million this year alone for a computer system to handle Assange prosecution documents.  The U.S. Congress in 1989 authorized the federal government to seize anyone, anywhere in the world, who is accused of a crime under U.S. law, even if this is done in violation of international law or the law of the country concerned.

I read a lot about the partisan divisions in the U.S. government, but Democrats and Republicans, the so-called liberals and the so-called conservatives, are united in their desire for the U.S. government to capture Julian Assange.   If this happens, Julian Assange can look forward to spending the rest of his life in the equivalent of the Soviet Gulag.

What is Julian Assange’s crime?  What makes him such a threat?  What he has done is to break the wall of secrecy which makes possible the “disposition matrix,” “signature strikes,” “extraordinary renditions,” “enhanced interrogation” and all the other secret Orwellian activities of government.  If he is guilty of revealing secret information to the enemy under the Espionage Act, it is only if the U.S. government regards the American people as its enemy.

The remarkable thing is that, with all this power arrayed against him, Julian Assange is not afraid.   The powers-that-be are afraid of him.  He is not afraid of them.  Trapped in a corner, he continues his work, to make known what the world’s governments want to hide.  To the extent that freedom and democracy survive the next few decades, he will be regarded as one of our era’s greatest heroes.

Click on The Death of Truth: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange for Hedges’ full report and links to the interview.

The most dashing French count I ever heard of

Robert de la Rochefoucauld, a French count who died May 8 at the age of 88, was in the French Resistance during World War Two, and led an adventurous life thereafter.  He lived like the hero of a Rafael Sabatini novel, who would be played by Errol Flynn in the movie version.  His obituary in the London Telegraph is full of paragraphs like this.

En route to his execution in Auxerre, La Rochefoucauld made a break, leaping from the back of the truck carrying him to his doom, and dodging the bullets fired by his two guards.  Sprinting through the empty streets, he found himself in front of the Gestapo’s headquarters, where a chauffeur was pacing near a limousine bearing the swastika flag.  Spotting the key in the ignition, La Rochefoucauld jumped in and roared off, following the Route Nationale past the prison he had left an hour earlier.

And this.

Robert de la Rochefoucauld

He faked an epileptic fit and, when the guard opened the door to his cell, hit him over the head with a table leg before breaking his neck. …  After putting on the German’s uniform, La Rochefoucauld walked into the guardroom and shot the two other German jailers.  He then simply walked out of the fort, through the deserted town, and to the address of an underground contact.

And this toward the end.

When detectives arrived to question La Rochefoucauld, his wife told them: “Don’t try to lock him up. He escapes, you know.”

Click on Count Robert de la Rochefoucauld to read the whole obituary.

Hat tip to kottke.org.

A real life action hero

Hideaki Akaiwa

A Japanese man named Hideaki Akaiwa, whose wife and mother were missing in the earthquake and tsunami, found scuba gear somewhere, jumped into the tsunami and rescued them.  Having shown it could be done, he then devoted himself to rescuing members of the public.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Akaiwa said he was at work a few miles away when the tsunami hit, and he rushed back to find his neighborhood inundated with up to 10 feet of water. Not willing to wait until the government or any international organization did, or did not, arrive to rescue his wife of two decades — whom he had met while they were surfing in a local bay — Akaiwa got hold of some scuba gear. He then hit the water, wended his way through the debris and underwater hazards and managed to reach his house, from which he dragged his wife to safety.

“The water felt very cold, dark and scary,” he recalled. “I had to swim about 200 yards to her, which was quite difficult with all the floating wreckage.”

With his mother still unaccounted for several days later, Akaiwa stewed with frustration as he watched the water recede by only a foot or two. He repeatedly searched for her at City Hall and nearby evacuation centers.

Finally, on Tuesday, he waded through neck-deep water, searching the neighborhood where she’d last been seen. He found her, he said, on the second floor of a flooded house where she’d been waiting for help for four days.

“She was very much panicked because she was trapped with all this water around,” Akaiwa said. “I didn’t know where she was. It was such a relief to find her.”

Click on For one quake survivor, self-help in the face of seeming helplessness for the complete report in the Los Angeles Times.

Click on Badass of the Week: Hideaki Akaiwa for an illustrated tribute to his heroism.

An antidote for self-pity

I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

Click on Look at Yourself After Watching This for an illustration of this proverb.

I thank my sister-in-law, Sandy Ebersole, for e-mailing me the link.