So it turns out that I am an idiot. Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice says so, and that means it must be true.

He spoke to the Federalist Society and said:

"That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break."

"But you would have to be an idiot to believe that," Scalia said. "The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.""

This is the Scalia who argued that filing a habeas corpus petition where the defendent was first held was wrong-you have to file it in the district where he is now being held. Now, this is idiotic, and is a rather clear violation of the Constitution saying something, in this case:

"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

This is a useful ruling, since now you can't file a writ of Habeas Corpus unless you know in which secret torture chamber the prisoner is currently being tortured.

Justice Stevens dissented

"The Defense Department first took custody of Padilla in New York, not in South Carolina. All the proceedings concerning Padilla’s detention as a “material witness” took place in New York. Padilla’s attorney wasn’t informed that he had been moved to South Carolina until after she filed the habeas corpus petition in New York. “If jurisdiction was proper when the petition was filed,” wrote Stevens, “it cannot be defeated by a later transfer of the prisoner to another district.”

Do you get that? The prisoner was moved after his attorney filed habeaus corpus. After. What a fun merry go round of liberty has been created.

Idiot? Me? I don't thinks so.

But on more interesting topics... This is a stunning quote.

"When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. The great attraction of libertarian thought lay in its deductive power. The hope was that you could axiomatize the system and sort of render social problems amenable to a set of principles that yielded necessary or deductive truths. That vision certainly fired my early academic life... Essentially, as I have gotten older and maybe a little bit wiser -- which why that 30 years really start to matter -- I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content." Richard A. Epstein, "Skepticism and Freedom"