:Reasonable Force

Supreme Court Justice David Souter may get to experience the business end of his ruling, along with Justices Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kennedy, that broadened the “public use” stipulation of the Fifth Amendment to effectively allow private property to be seized for any reason for which some public benefit can be posited.

WorldNetDaily reports that “private developer” Logan Darrow Clements is seeking to have Souter’s home town of Weare, New Hampshire, seize the justice’s home under eminent domain for the purpose of building a hotel that he claims will serve as a monument to the erosion of liberties in America.

According to a statement from Clements, the proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, “featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America.” Instead of a Gideon’s Bible in each room, guests will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” the statement said.

Clements says the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site – “being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.”

That idea deserves an audio accolade.

Even though Clements says he only needs three votes out of five Selectmen to get rolling (well, that and some funding) I would be stunned if it actually happened. What sort of pressure do you think one of these robed tyrants can bring to bear on the local level? Not so much directly, I would imagine, but there are surely parties with much at stake in upcoming Court decisions who would be more than willing to dispatch persons of questionable character to umm… discourage certain undertakings.

In the Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby quotes a son of one of the New London homeowners ousted by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

‘These five justices,” Mike Cristofaro told me, ”I hope someone looks at their property and says, ‘You know, we could put that land to better use — why don’t we get the town to take it from them by eminent domain.’ Then maybe they would understand what they’re putting my father through.”

Here’s hoping, Mike.

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(hat tip: Drudge)

I find myself not believing this even as I link it. According to this report from Australian news service News.com.au, scientists in Pittsburgh have ended all life processes in dogs by replacing their blood with a near-freezing salt solution and successfully revived them with no ill effects after three hours.

Duing the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs’ body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.

Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.

Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery. The dogs are brought back to life by returning the blood to their bodies,giving them 100 per cent oxygen and applying electric shocks to restart their hearts.

Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.

This work is being performed at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research, but as of this writing their website only contains older information about their suspended animation program which brought subjects back after two hours, but with brain damage.

The Australian report claims they hope to be conducting trials on humans “within a year.”

The questions raised by this are profound. For one thing, if a human being can be brought back after showing no brain activity for hours… what does that mean for determining at which point to end life support for a family member for whom there seems no hope?

To get a little more bizarre in my thinking, assuming that humans do respond as well to this procedure as the dogs seem to have, is it possible that the soul could depart during suspension leaving an empty husk for something else to fill?

Sounds fanciful, doesn’t it? Shades of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.”

Then again, maybe we’ll just be able to save a lot of lives and solve the problem of human travel beyond our inner solar system. Should be interesting either way.

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I don’t know anything about rap/R&B singer Nick Cannon except that he is apparently popular enough to get an unabashedly pro-life video played on MTV. I’m not particularly a fan of much of this music either. I just found myself moved to tears, however, by the lyrics to Cannon’s song “Can I Live?” played on his website.

The song is purported to be autobiographical and describes how Cannon’s mother walked out of an abortion clinic and allowed him to see life.

(Hat tip: Evangelical Outpost, Apologia Christi)

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Andrew McCarthy at NRO addresses the call by some in the media for an apology from advocates for the life of Terri Schiavo in light of the recently released autopsy report.

E.J. Dionne, Matt Lauer, and the rest of the mainstream media vanguard are in high dudgeon. The autopsy report is finally out on Terri Schiavo, and they want to know: Where is the apology? A better question would be: Are they kidding?

After this tone-setting introduction, McCarthy sets out to debunk the revisionist version of the debate, being spun today as purely a matter of whether or not there was any possibility for Mrs. Schiavo’s recovery. He does this by refocusing the attention on precisely what the issues were when the courts held Terri’s life in their hands; that it was incumbent on the court making such momentous decisions to precisely ascertain her condition and the credibility of the claim that she had expressed a desire to be allowed to die in such a state absent any documentation to that end, and with a clear conflict of interest on the part of her husband.

The scientific facts about massive brain damage being trumpeted today, which — as Dionne’s own newspaper concedes do not even establish that Terri Schiavo was in a PVS — were not important to the media and the right-to-die lobby back then. All that mattered was that Terri Schiavo’s life was not one that they thought worth living. Whether or not it had technically been reduced to a PVS was beside the point. Whether or not Terri had even thought about, much less made a knowing and intelligent judgment about, the choice between life and death was beside the point. Terri was a grisly car-wreck. They just wanted her off the road and out of sight — no need to know what happened, and why, and whether anything could or should be salvaged.

So now, months later, long after it mattered, the autopsy is out and it indicates what we already knew: Terri was profoundly brain-damaged. She may or may not have been in a PVS — to this day we don’t know. Yet, the “right-to-die” forces are waving the autopsy report triumphantly, saying: See, see, see — she was PVS, just like we said! Well, leaving aside that the autopsy does not confirm the diagnosis, if scientific exactitude about the degree of brain injury is important now, when she’s dead, why wasn’t it important then? Why was there only rebuke for those who insisted there was virtue in a society’s being sure before life was snuffed out? The answer is simple: Because to the right-to-die people, the accuracy of the PVS diagnosis was never central; what mattered was giving effect to the purported “choice.”

Oh, and on that score, one other thing: When does the “autopsy” on Terri’s choice come out? It doesn’t. We are stuck with a record that should trouble serious people: no living will, and some self-interested witnesses (mainly husband Michael, by then pulled by the ties of a new family) who suddenly remembered years after the fact that Terri supposedly made some passing remarks about not wanting to be maintained in extremis. Is it any wonder all the talk is now about the extent of brain damage, as if that had been the only issue?

The full article can be read here.

Here are a few excellent posts on this from JackLewis.net:
Statement from Terri’s family

Medical experts dispute autopsy findings

Also worth reading is this response to the autopsy from www.blogsforterri.com illustrating how the autopsy report has been distorted by pundits.

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See if you can find any moral ambiguity in this statement by South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk from an article at TerraDaily:

“Human cloning is not only ethically outrageous and medically dangerous, but technically impossible as well,” said Hwang, who last year created the world’s first cloned human embryonic stem cells.

To clarify, Hwang didn’t create cloned human embryonic stem cells. He and his team cloned human embryos which were destroyed in order to harvest the stem cells.

So, absent more research into Hwang and his positions, I’m struggling to understand his basis for declaring human cloning “ethically outrageous.” What, after all, is human cloning beyond the cloning of embryos with which the good doctor seems quite comfortable for the purposes of stem cell harvesting?

This article is a poor one, from Agence France-Presse, in that it doesn’t make any attempt to explain that apparent discrepancy, or why Dr. Hwang views human cloning as an impossibility, at least for the next hundred years.

One comment he makes about “bumping into a cloned human being” suggests that he is envisioning 6th Day-style replication of individuals, but this isn’t made clear.

At any rate, to refocus on his somewhat fuzzy ethical ideas, while Hwang is quoted as condemning “human cloning” on ethical grounds (again, without distinction of what he means in contrast to his own work), he is dismissive of those who decry the unethical nature of cloning human embryos in order to destroy them and harvest their stem cells.

“I believe I’m doing what I should do as a scientist,” Hwang said, declining to enter into a debate on concerns raised by pro-life activists and religious groups about the destruction of human embryos in embryonic research…

He said that ethical and religious concerns would be outweighed by the medical benefits obtained from the research. [emphasis mine]

How many damnable practices could that statement be used to justify?

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