Archive for June 2005
WASHINGTON - A divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where economic growth often is at war with individual property rights.
The 5-4 ruling - assailed by dissenting Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as handing "disproportionate influence and power'' to the well-heeled in America - was a defeat for Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They had argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.
As a result, cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.
I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls
Hey, oh, way to go, Ohio...
"Firefly made its debut on Fox in 2002 but was canceled before the end of its first season. The Sci Fi Channel will air all 15 existing episodes, including the three that never made it to TV, starting on Friday, July 22."
Whedon: We will rule over this time slot, and we will call it... "This Time Slot".
Fox: I think we should call it... "your grave!"
Whedon: Ah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
Fox: Ha ha HA! Mine is an evil laugh...now die!
"Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, calls the new Christer offensive a drive toward 'theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country,' adding that 'e-mails to the FCC are more worrisome to me than boycotts' in terms of their chilling effect ."
...
It's curious that this word [fascism] should re-enter domestic politics at the same time we are not only fighting actual religious fascists, but are embroiled in a controversy over the mistreatment of the tome they regard as their instruction manual. [...] I suspect Mr. Kaplan subscribes to the fashionable notion that people who email the FCC to complain when a sitcom uses the Eucharist as a running gag ? literally ? are part of the dark bolus of god-bothered maniacs. Fanatics. Wild-eyed nutbombs who want to unite the world under the rippling banner of God Uber Alles first, and have the miserable sectarian wars after the secularists are dead. James Dobson, Osama ? are not both filled with terrible certainties? Is not an email campaign to bring down a TV show the metaphorical equivalent of bringing down a skyscraper? Granted, a writer who jumps from a cancelled show usually lands on his feet. But they have a certain poetic symmetry, no?
No.
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."