TV News LIES

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of apparent natural causes Saturday on a luxury resort in West Texas, federal officials said.

Scalia, 79, was a guest at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, a resort in the Big Bend region south of Marfa.

According to a report, Scalia arrived at the ranch on Friday and attended a private party with about 40 people. When he did not appear for breakfast, a person associated with the ranch went to his room and found a body.

It's been a heckuva week or so for Science lately:  Watching as black holes merged, observing gravitational ripples and waves, proving correct more of Einstein's theories...

That was just for openers.  We also learned that electrons in the metal graphene can behave like a liquid -- a real first -- and that the explanation for the Yellowstone supervolcano may need to be revised.

Plus, it also looks like Earth might have been formed by the collision of two early bodies -- and, for good measure,  hundreds more galaxies have been discovered playing peekaboo behind our own Milky Way.

There have been major scientific downsides recently as well:

An Indian man is believed to be the first person killed by a meteorite;
The European Space Agency says after 60 hours of operation after a jarring landing,  it's now bidding farewell to its Philae comet lander after no response; and
An Alaska woman says her 6-year-old Happy Meal refuses to decompose.

There have also been developments somewhere in the middle:

Scratch-and-sniff posters have been hung in NY subway cars, to give riders an olfactory break from the environs;
LA's mayor has recorded an R&B video to alert residents of a road closure; and
A city in Switzerland has cancelled plans to allow a silent disco to carry on all night long.

More...

Cleaning up Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which suffered catastrophic meltdowns after an earthquake and tsunami hit in 2011, may take up to 40 years.

The crippled nuclear reactor is now stable but the decommissioning process is making slow progress, says the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, better known as TEPCO.

After a scan of the majestic shoreline called humanity on some days, it's no wonder some of us swing around and paddle back out to sea, sometimes at great speed, perhaps harboring hunches we were simply all at sea to begin with, or, maybe, that we hadn't put in enough time yet, practicing the Dead Man's Float.

On our deregulated, tea-bagged, and GOP-sandbagged beaches,  there are seldom enough lifeguards handy, especially when you really need one -- like when your muscles tense up, you feel the undertow pulling you down, and panic sets in, just from a fleeting second's accidental  consideration of "Trump" and "launch codes" in the same thought.

In a landmark discorvery, ripples in space and time first hypothesized by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago have been detected, with scientists suggesting that the observation of these gravitational waves could now open a new window for studying the cosmos.

The researchers said they detected gravitational waves coming from two black holes —extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein — that orbited one another, spiraled inward and smashed together. They said the waves were the product of a collision between two black holes 30 times as massive as the Sun, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth.

"It's not every day that you see a nation's leader not only fall on his sword, but, then, take the time to pick up a pike, mount it securely to the wall, back up, and then charge into the tip of that sharpened spear as well, and at full speed" said a well-known and respected host during an equally recognizable organization's news discussion program.

And this was only the beginning of the program.  Even more ladles of steaming, chunky, even luxurious, honesty were being promised, in the run-down of guests and topics for discussion.  The tape was never aired, of course, for a host of obvious reasons, and some oblique ones, too.

Over the last five years, perhaps no elected official in the country has been more aggressive in placing limits on voting and registration than Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

He authored a provision that created a two-tiered voting system under which some Kansans could cast a ballot for their president but not their governor or any other statewide official. On Jan. 15 a Kansas district court judge struck down the measure, calling it a violation of the state’s constitution and sharply rebuked Kobach, writing, “No such authority exists at all … to encumber the voting process as he has done here.”

Today, we'll take a rest break from the Sham- (I mean) CAMpaign Trail of Shame, Pain, and Champagne, where psychotic breaks from traditional Reality are the unexceptional rule.

It's difficult to believe, all right -- here we are, standing around, and we're NOT talking about the latest app to put everything Candidate Braindrool says on your Facebook's speed-dial-Insta-Twitter-Text-Mail-Fax-Forwarding option!

So, it's Trump and Bernie in New Hampshire.  Sure thing.  How's the family?  Looks like snow...