Angered by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sided with a Connecticut city that wanted to seize homes for economic development, a group of activists is trying to get one of the justices who voted for the decision evicted from his own home.

The group, led by a California man, wants Justice David Souter's home seized for the purpose of building an inn called "Lost Liberty Hotel."

They submitted enough petition signatures — only 25 were needed — to bring the matter before voters in March. This weekend, they're descending on Souter's hometown, the central New Hampshire town of Weare, population 8,500, to rally for support.

"This is in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party and the Pine Tree Riot," organizer Logan Darrow Clements said, referring to the riot that took place during the winter of 1771-1772, when colonists in Weare beat up officials appointed by King George III who fined them for logging white pines without approval.

State Rep. Neal Kurk, a Weare resident who is sponsoring two pieces of eminent domain legislation in New Hampshire, said he expects the group's proposal to be defeated overwhelmingly.

"Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system," Kurk said. "You don't go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments."

The firm has left its old offices and sublet grander quarters from New York's Davis Polk & Wardwell. Two weeks after he got the money, Constantine gathered the firm together in those offices and handed out checks. An employee in the mailroom got $50,000. So did a paralegal who had worked for the firm for a single year. ("She practically gave up a year of her life. She must have billed 3,000 hours," says Constantine.)

As for himself, Constantine won't say how much he got. And while he's careful to play down the importance of money -- "Before I got this fee, I had everything I needed. I don't need a hell of a lot more now," he says -- there have been changes. Constantine bought his wife a 1921 Steinway grand piano, for example. Also, she recently left her job as general counsel of News America Marketing, a subsidiary of The News Corp. Limited, and is looking for something new. Perhaps teaching, or something in the nonprofit world, taking a pay cut made possible by Visa. [Law.com]

The material abundance and individual freedom that is the hallmark of capitalism rests on upon the ethics of self-interest, but today perhaps no code of morality is more misunderstood and maligned. In a profound yet easily accessible text, Craig Biddle demolishes the conventional wisdom that holds sacrifice as a moral ideal and offers a compelling alternative.

Through examples drawn from today's headlines, historical analysis and the examination of leading intellectual thinkers, Loving Life clearly demonstrates that morality is a matter not of divine revelation or social convention or personal opinion—but, rather, of the factual requirements of human life and happiness. Biddle shows how a true morality is derived logically from observable facts, what in essence such a morality demands, and why it is a matter of pure self-interest.

Loving Life exposes the baseless nature of the various moralities that call for human sacrifice and lead to human suffering and shows how a true morality is derived and implies—personally, socially, and politically. With clarity and elegance, Biddle demonstrates the principles, values, and virtues that are essential to human life and happiness; and he defines and defends the social and political conditions that are required for people to live together as civilized beings.

I do not know Mr. Clements; I can speak nothing to his intelligence or character. But as a political scientist, I can speak to his judgment: there was no point to his candidacy. It was, truly, an exercise in futility. Clements had zero chance of beating Gary Coleman, let alone winning. Yet by running, Clements made the classic libertarian error—he placed political activism before political philosophy.

I refer here to their odd, pompous, self-important, silly habit of offically "breaking" with people who were once in the fold but who start to think for themselves. But I guess, like Muslims, it's worse to be a former Randian than never to have been one at all. As Rush (another favorite group of young Randians) say, "For you the blind who once could see/The bell tolls for thee".

The more I read Objectivists (sic) trot out their ridiculous stock phrases, the more I realize this aspect of the philosophy is really inapplicable to the real world. Who talks like that? Who even thinks like that? Who goes around talking about "psycho-epistemology" or saying their husband is their "top value"? What the hell is a "top value"? Jeez. In my view, this cliched, robotic reasoning is useless and off-putting.

Under legal pressure, a rural school district Tuesday canceled an elective philosophy course on "intelligent design."

A group of parents had sued the El Tejon school system last week, accusing it of violating the constitutional separation of church and state with "Philosophy of Design," a high school course taught by a minister's wife that advanced the notion that life is so complex it must have been created by some kind of higher intelligence.

In a settlement, the district agreed to halt the course at Frazier Mountain High next week and said it would never again offer a "course that promotes or endorses creationism, creation science or intelligent design."

"This sends a strong signal to school districts across the country that they cannot promote creationism or intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, whether they do so in a science class or a humanities class," said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represented the parents. [AP]

A long-simmering disagreement within the environmental community over a plan to build a massive wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., is now boiling over into a highly public quarrel.

The four-year-old battle started heating up last summer when Greenpeace USA staged a demonstration against well-known eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's been an outspoken opponent of the proposal for a 130-turbine wind-power project in Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow portion of Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod. Kennedy -- a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and a pioneer in the waterway-protection movement -- was on a sailboat for an event with the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which opposes the wind project. A Greenpeace vessel cruised up alongside with a banner that read, "Bobby, you're on the wrong boat" -- a stunt that was part of a larger Greenpeace campaign pressuring Kennedy to change his mind on the development.

In mid-December, Kennedy, wanting to explain his position to critics and the public at large, published an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times in which he argued that the wind farm would mar a precious seascape, privatize a publicly owned commons, and damage the local economy.

That, in turn, prompted about 150 environmental advocates -- including global-warming authors and activists Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, Bluewater Network founder Russell Long, and youth leader Billy Parish -- to circulate a letter asking Kennedy to reconsider his position. "We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency," it read. "Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do."

Signers of the letter also included "Death of Environmentalism" authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, who made the quarrel far more personal -- and nasty -- in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle last month. They called on Kennedy to step down from his position at NRDC, and took a swipe at his famous family by criticizing "the privileged patricians of a generation for whom building mansions by the sea was indistinguishable from advocating for the preservation of national parks or big game hunting in the wilds of Africa."

Kennedy shot back this week with his own opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, calling Shellenberger and Nordhaus's attacks "dishonest vitriol."

Environmentalists believe that they are protecting a "thing" called the environment from human intrusion and destruction. Issues such as drilling in the Arctic refuge fit well with these ideas of nature and human intrusion and thus become totemic battles for the environmental movement. The controversy over the Cape Wind project is much harder to fit into the categories either of intrusion or nature and hence leaves many environmentalists paralyzed.

Nantucket Sound is not a pristine wilderness. It is among the busiest shipping channels on the East Coast and is surrounded by heavily populated communities. Cape Wind, at worst, constitutes a relatively minor intrusion upon this already developed landscape. Yet Cape Wind is a project that is vitally important to address arguably the greatest of all human intrusions upon nature, global warming. The crisis results when environmentalists such as Kennedy fail to distinguish between their personal use of the landscape and the ecological issues at stake.