Governments around the world like to pretend they’re doing something about global warming, but for all the talk about renewables, 80% of the world’s energy is still derived from fossil fuels. Lots of petroleum-producing countries, and oil industry in this one, want to keep it that way. Their latest victory came at the UN’s COP28 conference, where a new draft of their core agreement has dropped language calling for the phase-out of fossil fuels. It doesn’t really matter – lofty statements from confabs of poobahs haven’t done jack squat to solve the problem so far, and that wouldn’t change no matter what the language said – but it shows that these leeching motherfuckers aren’t willing to let opponents have even moral victories.
A Texas woman who tried to get a court’s permission to abort her malformed fetus left the state for the procedure shortly before the state Supreme Court ruled that doctors, not courts, must make medical decisions. Left unsaid: The courts will prosecute any doctor who might perform it, and the courts will not clarify the vague language of the law. This is by design – if any abortion might be illegal, none will be performed. Now we wait to see if adulterous piece of shit AG Ken Paxton will try to prosecute her.
As is happens, the GOP is sick motherfuckers all the way down. SCOTUS surprisingly passed on the opportunity to strike down laws making gay conversion therapy illegal, which prompted a whining minority opinion from serial vacation-taker Clarence Thomas, who insists letting therapists torture gay teens constitutes free speech. And those teens are then free to try suicide at double the rate of other teens. Freedom, baby!
Defenders of Israel’s assault in Gaza have a lot to answer for. Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, found that more than 60% of the casualties in Gaza were civilians, the highest rate of civilian deaths in any conflict of the past two centuries. “Never again” must mean something different in Hebrew.
Here’s a story with an important lesson: Don’t listen to the whiners. When Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney proposed a soda tax, people cried and moaned as if water were being rationed. Guess what? It’s six years later, and in the city’s just-concluded mayoral race nobody even mentioned it, perhaps because it’s brought in $480 million since its passage. The same thing would have happened with a gasoline tax if our political class had grown the balls to enact one.
The floor’s yours.