Delaware Liberal

DL Open Thread Monday, Dec. 11, 2023

Cynics might consider a UN climate conference a study in hypocrisy – thousands of people burned fossil fuel flying to a desolate stretch of sand atop a petroleum patch so they can emit a lot of hot air pretending to do something about global warming. Oil-rich nations, though, see it as an existential threat. Reuters got hold of a letter from OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais urging countries to reject any deal targeting fossil fuels, such as the one calling for their “eventual” phase-out. Russia and Saudi Arabia are particularly against it, so I’m guessing their languages lack a term for “It’s just talk.”

Talk can be dangerous, though. Truthfully answering a question about campus censorship has cost the University of Pennsylvania president her job. As the Palestinians in Gaza have learned, the beatings of the people who criticize Israel will continue until their morale improves.

Cowardly blowhard Donald Trump rage-tweeted that he won’t testify again in his fraud trial. Media treated this as important news because to them it is – without Trump, they’re nothing.

If you wonder how and why the GOP turned to Donald Trump, well, just look at the roster of incompetent boobs looking to replace him. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the lamest scary monster the political media could produce, is so desperate for voters, any voters, that his equally noxious wife went on Fox News and told out-of-staters to take part in their caucuses. This isn’t a good look for a guy who made up his own Election Security Police Force to stop Black people from voting.

People who watch Fox News probably think the country is in the grips of a shoplifting epidemic, and all it took was a little prompting. OK, a lot of prompting:

After looking through a video database of Fox programming over the last five years, Media Matters found a very small number of retail theft mentions between 2019 and 2020 — just 35. Since 2021, however, there has been a huge spike — at least 1,575 mentions of retail theft. The coverage was particularly widespread in the fourth quarter of 2021, the group noted.

I’m saving the “Well, duh” stories for the bottom of the stack. For example, it’s unsurprising that abortion clinics in states that haven’t banned them have seen a record surge in out-of-state patients.

Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that a good deal of the “inflation” in the U.S. should actually go by the less-flattering term “price gouging.” A new report shows that a good bit of the rise in prices – not all of it, but a good bit – consisted of companies raising prices well above the rise in costs. I guess the report authors are too genteel to call it what it is.

The floor’s yours.

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