28.6.05

From the desk of Goodman Todd

Freestar Media, LLC is planning a hotel on property that is currently the residence of Supreme Court Justice David Souter. If approved by the board of Aldermen for the town of Weare, New Hampshire, Souter's home will be demolished and replaced with "The Lost Liberty Hotel," housing the "Just Desserts Café" and a small museum with a permanent exhibit on the loss of liberty in the U.S.

The town has gained this power of eminent domain for private development after the Supreme Court's decision in "Kelo v. City of New London, CT"

Guest rooms in the "Lost Liberty" will be provided with a free copy of "Atlas Shrugged" in lieu of a Gideon Bible.

23.6.05

The Private Domain is Eminent
(or "Some U$es are More Public than Others")

"Justice O'Connor, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.

Over two centuries ago, just after the Bill of Rights was ratified, Justice Chase wrote:

"An act of the Legislature (for I cannot call it a law) contrary to the great first principles of the social compact, cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority ... . A few instances will suffice to explain what I mean... . [A] law that takes property from A. and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it." Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386, 388 (1798) (emphasis deleted).

Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Accordingly I respectfully dissent."

16.6.05


,
originally uploaded by whileseated.
The beginning of the end

15.6.05

Darth Vader Replica Helmet - $900 at Target.com

If this were $39.95, it would be in the "unlikely to be fulfilled" section of my wishlist. But you know what... nevermind. This one has "flawless form, unlike any previous Vader helmets, which were hand-sculpted." and I'm pretty sure I'd rather have the flawed form, even if only on the "unlikely to be fulfilled" section of my wishlist.

- via Gizmodo.

9.6.05

Truman's middle initial

Truman did not have a middle name, but only a middle initial. It was a common practice in southern states, including Missouri, to use initials rather than names. Truman said the initial was a compromise between the names of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp(e) Truman and Solomon Young. He once joked that the S was a name, not an initial, and it should not have a period, but official documents and his presidential library all use a period. Furthermore, the Harry S. Truman Library has numerous examples of the signature written at various times throughout Truman's lifetime where his own use of a period after the 'S' is very obvious."

- from the article on Harry S. Truman at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

8.6.05

A Tale of Two Missing Persons

Natalee Holloway
age: 18
vanished: May 30, 2005
last seen: leaving a nightclub in Aruba with three men
home: Mountain Brook
reward: $75,000 total
investigated by: FBI, Aruban Police, family, thousands of volunteers.
support: private donations, free hotel in Aruba, McWane Corp. private jet, donated airfare, massive prayer lists
media: nonstop national media coverage

Nancy Lewis
age: 47
vanished: May 18, 2005
last seen: leaving for work at 3:45 AM
home: southwest Birmingham
reward: $2000 (now $12,000)
investigated by: Birmingham police, friends and family.
support: friends, co-workers and family
media: four or five local newspaper articles, sparse radio PSA's

Update: The Birmingham Post-Herald has picked up on the comparison.

2.6.05

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Human Events Online, a "National Conservative Weekly" since 1944, discommends the following books as the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries:

1. Karl Marx and Freidrich Engel's The Communist Manifesto (1848): "envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners."
2. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925-26): "Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany"
3. Mao Zedong's Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966): " 'It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism...' wrote Mao."
4. Alfred Kinsey's The Kinsey Reports (1948): "designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy."
5. John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916): "encourage the teaching of thinking skills...helped nurture the Clinton generation."
6. Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867-94): "He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government."
7. Betty Frieden's The Feminine Mystique (1963): "disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood...a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life."
8. Auguste Compte's The Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-42): "theoriz[ed] that the human mind had developed beyond 'theology'...through 'metaphysics'. to 'positivism', in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.
9. Freidrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886): "argued that men are driven by an amoral 'Will to Power'...The Nazi's loved Nietzsche."
10. John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936): "When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy."

Honorable Mentions: Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb; Vladimir Lenin's What Is to be Done' Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality; John Stuart Mill's On Liberty; B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity; Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence; Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life; Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species; Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization; Sydney & Beatrice Webb's Soviet Communism: A New Civilization; Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa; Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed; Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth; Sigmund Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Charles Reich's The Greening of America; The Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth, and Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man.

Stay away from these books. They will injure your fragile mind. They are all available (for now, anyway) from the bookseller of your choice.