Justice Scalia: What's So Terrible About Torture? It Works On TV!

• At least Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia isn't in a position to make important decisions that affect people's lives, or this might be a tad disturbing:  

  Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says torture -- depending on the circumstances, like if a nuclear bomb was planted in Los Angeles -- isn't necessarily off limits. [...]

  "I think it is very facile for people to say 'Oh, torture is terrible,'" he said. "You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people.

  "You think it's an easy question? You think it's clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?"

  Yeah, if you posit that situation that has never actually happened in real life but only on that craptastic teevee show that has apparently been the basis of our intelligence-gathering programs for the last decade or so ... well, then, maybe Scalia has a point. Only stupid people think torture is obviously terrible. Smart people like Scalia have watched enough fictional characters torture Bad Guys once a week -- to save America, god bless -- so really, how can you definitively say we shouldn't torture people in real actual life too? Huh, dumb liberals? (He especially does not care for the "self-righteousness of European liberals.")

  And in case you are not sufficiently grossed the eff out by Scalia explaining how torture is not necessarily a bad thing, he also told a HI-larious joke, which we're pretty sure was not intended to be a joke at all, about chicks and how they spend a lot of money on make-up so we should stop whining about campaign finance reform. Ha. Ha. ha.

• Police are getting kind of touchy about people getting kind of touchy about police killing people:

  Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins made a bold statement while taking the field on Sunday, and the head of the Cleveland Police Union is demanding an apology.

  While running out of the tunnel at FirstEnergy Stadium, Hawkins wore a shirt that read, “Justice for Tamir Rice - John Crawford.”

  The president of the Police Patrolman Union, in a brilliant public relations move, issued a statement that it's "pathetic when athletes think they know the law" and demanded an apology from the entire "Browns organization." That should go over well.

• Our oceans are filled with garbage, just not quite as much as scientists thought:

  A new study on the amount of plastic pollution floating around the world's oceans found a lot of garbage but fewer small particles than researchers expected, raising new questions about how litter is interacting with the environment. [...]

  They estimated that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing 269,000 tons, is distributed across the ocean. While that's a lot of trash, researchers found only one-hundredth as many sand-size particles as their models had predicted.

• Men are dumb. It's science:  

  Males apparently accounted for 88.7 percent of Darwin Award winners during this time span, a result the (all-male) authors wryly offer as evidence in support of "male idiot theory" — "the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things."

• Here's The Real Truth about the Golden Globes from our friends at Happy Nice Time People:

  Modern Familydidn’t get nominated for any Golden Globes, and I likeModern Family.Therefore, the entire awards ceremony -- if not the entire awards season -- is bullshit. (That’s how the internet works, right?)

  Clearly this is all a liberal plot to destroy America. I mean, who cares what the Hollywood Foreign Press thinks anyway?

  Hollywood = evil.

  Foreign = evil.

  Press = evil.

  And they get to tell us what we should watch on television!! What happened to the First Amendment? This is what happens in Obama’s America. R.I.P. Freedom, 1776-2014.

  Let’s take a look at the dreck these foreigners are trying to push on us.

• In case you wanted to know everything there is to know about the Christmas tree industry:  

  On a cool spring day in 2004, a chicken in Oregon pooped. Ten years later, you strap a Christmas tree to the roof of your car.

  The span between that hen and your living room is filled with a decade-long process to plant, grow, harvest and ship one of 6.4 million Christmas trees reaped each year from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the Christmas tree capital of the world. The system involves hundreds of people, most of whom work for one very short and intense period of the year, every year.

  Your tree has a complicated backstory, one that includes daredevil helicopter pilots, 18-hour days battling Oregon sleet and, of course, the fickle hibernation habits of squirrels.