Scalia To Graduating Class: Human Species Is 5,000 Years-Old

Antonin Scalia is a United States Supreme Court Justice (1982-present) unfit to hold the position.

Notes Jeffrey Tayler in Salon: "Last week, Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a commencement speech at an all-girls Catholic High School in Bethesda, Maryland. He warned the assembled, 'You should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented. Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were."

This was Scalia in his element, openly displaying an ignorance of science and a perverse embrace of religion, demonstrating his delight of playing the troll, more significantly the corrupt troll.

Scalia made headline a few years back when he told Jennifer Senior of New York Magazine that Scalia believes "hell" is real, and so is the "Devil," but He/It doesn't possess people "very much anymore ... because he’s smart ... [and] got wilier." (Mal Contends)

That's Scalia for you, unpredictable and usually incoherent, ever the ideological troll who becomes petulant when the Court doesn't embrace Scalia's crazy animus towards gays, women, Democrats and other segments of humanity held in disfavor by the Republican Party.

As America awaits the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell—whether the five GOP justices decide to invalidate and ultimately eviscerate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)—no doubt Scalia is enjoying himself playing with another segment of America whom Scalia and the GOP hold in disfavor, The Uninsured: Adam and Eve never had healthcare, why should Americans get it?

Antonin Scalia: Devil, Hell Are Real; Wily Satan Affects Human Affairs

Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, has long appalled thinking Americans for his brand of authoritarian, incoherent jurisprudence.

Scalia is a bigot, a troll, so it is no surprise to read in Scalia's meandering thoughts on metaphysics and evil in Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine interview that Scalia believes in hell, the Devil who is both "smart" and who "got wilier" in his evil engineering project still to be accepted and put into production in human affairs.

Want to know why Scalia votes the way he did in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Bush v. Gore (2000)?

Because Scalia is a goof.

An excerpt from Jennifer Senior's interview with Scalia in New York Magazine:

Scalia ... When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy.

Senior (NY Mag) You believe in heaven and hell?
Scalia: Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?

Senior (NY Mag) No.
Scalia: Oh, my.

Senior (NY Mag)Does that mean I’m not going?
Scalia:  [Laughing.] Unfortunately not!

Senior (NY Mag) Wait, to heaven or hell?
Scalia: It doesn’t mean you’re not going to hell, just because you don’t believe in it. That’s Catholic doctrine! Everyone is going one place or the other.

Senior (NY Mag) But you don’t have to be a Catholic to get into heaven? Or believe in it?
Scalia: Of course not!

Senior (NY Mag) Oh. So you don’t know where I’m going. Thank God.
Scalia: I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, 'Who am I to judge' He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?

Senior (NY Mag) Can we talk about your drafting process—
Scalia:  [Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.

Senior (NY Mag)You do?
Scalia: Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

Senior (NY Mag) Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
Scalia: If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.

Senior (NY Mag) Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
Scalia: You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

Senior (NY Mag) No.
Scalia: It’s because he’s smart.

Senior (NY Mag) So what’s he doing now?
Scalia: What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

Senior (NY Mag) That has really painful implications for atheists. Are you sure that’s the ­Devil’s work?
Scalia: I didn’t say atheists are the Devil’s work.

Senior (NY Mag) Well, you’re saying the Devil is ­persuading people to not believe in God. Couldn’t there be other reasons to not believe?
Scalia: Well, there certainly can be other reasons. But it certainly favors the Devil’s desires. I mean, c’mon, that’s the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place. He used to be all over the New Testament.

Senior (NY Mag) Right.
Scalia: What happened to him?

Senior (NY Mag) He just got wilier.
Scalia: He got wilier.

Senior (NY Mag) Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
Scalia: You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

Senior (NY Mag) I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it.
Scalia: I was offended by that. I really was.

Fascism as American as Apple Pie

Our Vietnam War Marine veteran friend has another typically fascinating piece out at Veterans Today, Background to Tyranny: Bush Family Terror Ties Decades-Old.

The roots of American authoritarianism are long and deep. From Gordon Duff:

Does the following sound crazy? It's not crazy. Just history that is impolitic to report.

In 1934, the Bush family helped organize a military attack on Washington in order to install a Nazi government. Sound outlandish? It is American history. It is call 'the Business Plot (BBC).'

Conservative 'think tanks' still spend millions to edit this from our history books. Sites are taken off the internet and Wikipedia is still erased, even decades later.

Would two rigged elections, a mysterious 9/11 attack, torture and totalitarian rule be surprising if Americans were allowed to know their own history?

Stephen Walt's 'The threatmonger's handbook'

From Walt' s How to Scare Your Fellow Citizens for Fun and Profit.

One reason Americans exaggerate security fears is the existence of an extensive cottage industry of professional threatmongers, who deploy a well-honed array of arguments to convince us that we are in fact in grave danger. (The United States is hardly the only country that does this, of course, but the phenomenon is more evident here because its overall strategic position is so favorable). Debunking these claims is easier once you know the basics, so I hereby offer as a public service.

Obams Is a True Believer, Says Michael Goodwin

Michael Goodwin's piece in the New York Daily News this morning is a ridiculous knock that Obama is to be feared because the public is behind him and Obama is eloquent and confident.

Typical of rightwingers Goodwin just wants to smear; that it has no grounding in fact or evidence is besides the point. Nor is it important that Goodwin likes to quote from books that he hasn't read. Good enough for the Daily News.

Goodwin borrows from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements by insisting that Obama is a scary "true believer" because he seems so well-spoken and confident.

One has to believe that Goodwin never actually read Hoffer's book that popularized a serious domain of social-psychological research in the 1950s that tried to explain why people would do stupid things like join fascist movements and align themselves unthinkingly with authoritarians.

The true believer is a fanatic. He has no intellectual curiosity, no sense of history, and no need to critically examine any aspect of the ideology or the authoritarian to which he assigns himself, and certainly no need to read the book from which he cites. Writes Goodwin:

It's too early for Obama to back up all his claims, but midway through his compelling press conference on Wednesday night, after he had asserted a list of accomplishments, I scribbled the words 'The True Believer' in my notebook.

After only 100 days on the job, our talented new President shows no signs of doubt.

He is a follower who can be found jumping from one crazy movement - NAZIism, Communism, Nationalism - to another.

Considering this uncontroversial thrust of Hoffer's work, are we then to assign the term "true believer" to Obama as an unthinking follower or an authoritarian?

Goodwin doesn't even try to make the case.

- via mal contends