Eminent Domain Update

Despite the fact that the petition to build a hotel on the site of Justice Souter’s home in Weare, NH, originated as a publicity stunt, it’s not taken as just a joke anymore. Beverly Wang reports:

… in a state where people fiercely protect their right to local control over land and government, many said the nuisance is Souter’s just deserts. A recent University of New Hampshire poll reported 93 percent of state residents oppose the taking of private land through eminent domain for private development.

“It’s something you really don’t want to screw with around here,” said Charles Meany, Weare’s code enforcement officer.

He thinks the hotel idea is “ludicrous” and doubts whether Clements will be able to satisfy requirements to prove the economic necessity of building a hotel on Souter’s land.

But Clements has his share of local supporters, including David Archambault, who runs a go-cart track near Souter’s home.

“What this is doing I think is wonderful, because he’s getting a point across to all these people that they’re getting too much power,” Archambault said.

Robin Ilsley, who makes syrup on a family farm about two miles from Souter’s place, thought the justice brought the controversy on himself. “It was a pretty stupid ruling,” she said.

Even her mother, who watched Souter grow up, is unsympathetic.

“I like David very much, but I don’t like his ideas,” said Winnie Ilsley, 77, who runs a doll museum at her farm. “I just don’t think it’s fair,” she said of the New London decision.

And the hotel?

“Let ’em build — but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” she said.

Sounds like a challenge to me!

(Hat-tip: Chrenkoff)

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Lomborg Sets Priorities

Lomborg debates Pope of the Sierra Club in Foreign Policy. (From A&L.) His conclusion:

No matter how much money we raise, we should still spend it wisely. If investing in cookers is more cost effective than windmills, we should do the cookers first. It really isn’t more complicated. Advocacy groups understandably want to focus on headline–grabbing issues, such as mercury, mangroves, and global warming. But when we emphasize some problems, we get less focus on others. It has been hard to get you to say what the world should not do first. Such a strategy is, naturally, less charming. But if we really want to do good in the long run, it is more honest to put those terms on paper.

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Diversions

Lileks apologizes for his incoherence. Garrison Keillor bathes in his. (Keillor doesn’t seem to realize humor requires a certain level of coherence – it needn’t be high, but it can’t be quite this low.) Manalo analyzes sockless fashion (which perhaps Robin Givhan would like – then, perhaps, not; without knowing the sockless one’s political allegiance such decisions become difficult). Meanwhile, Plame begs the press to stop respecting her privacy at Beautiful Atrocities. Muir shoots the Kennedy fish(23) in the Cuba barrel & recovers nicely.(25-26)

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Let Patients Decide

Face transplants are a great idea if someone can make them work.

Someone is trying.

The “ethicists,” part of whose problem is hubris and another part is conflict of interest (they have an incentive to promote their own role as decisionmakers), scoff:

“This idea needs more evaluation. What we do know either can’t be quantified or the risks clearly outweigh the benefits,” said Karen Maschke, the associate for ethics and science policy at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in Garrison, N.Y. “Look, a lot of science is boosterism.

“People always think they’re going to be cured by new treatments and life will be normal again, but that’s usually not the case.”

But the creative surgeon has the right idea:

Dr. Siemionow disputes the notion that facially disfigured patients should not be allowed to decide the risks, asking, “How can people who are normal decide for burn victims ‘This is not right for you’?”

The patients know their own interests best. They should be the ones who decide what procedures, and risks, to subject themselves to.