DL Open Thread: Sunday, April 14, 2024

Pretty Much All You Need To Know About Iran’s Attack On Israel.   Looks like everybody, except perhaps Israel, wants to de-escalate the situation.  I honestly don’t understand why Israel struck the Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria.  Here’s hoping this ends the back-and-forth for now.

Looks like Biden has told Netanyahu to ‘take the win’:

President Biden told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a call on Saturday that the U.S. will oppose any Israeli counterattack against Iran, a senior White House official told Axios.

Biden and his senior advisers are highly concerned an Israeli response to Iran’s attack on Israel would lead to a regional war with catastrophic consequences, U.S. officials say.

Dog Bites Man: OJ Simpson Never Paid A Penny To Families Of Nicole Brown Simpson And Ronald Goldman.  Did he have Trump’s lawyers?:

More than 25 years ago, O.J. Simpson was found liable in civil court for the deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, her friend, and was ordered to pay more than $33 million to their families.

They have yet to recover the damages.

While it is still unclear where things stand with the Brown Simpson family, the Goldman family said its pursuit will not end despite the death of Mr. Simpson on Wednesday. David Cook, a lawyer for Fred Goldman, Ronald’s father, said in an interview on Saturday that he could not elaborate on their plans to acquire the money, but that “the judgment will be pursued as before.” In a previous email, Mr. Cook said that Mr. Simpson “died without penance.” Mr. Goldman could not be reached for comment.

Here’s how they got what little money they did get:

Of the total, according to court documents filed in 2022, the Goldman family had received from Mr. Simpson around $132,000.

It was unclear if that figure reflected money from the auctioning of Mr. Simpson’s memorabilia, including his Heisman Trophy, which went toward the damages. Proceeds from the book Mr. Simpson wrote, “If I Did It” — in which he described, in hypothetical terms, how the brutal stabbings of Ms. Brown Simpson and Mr. Goldman might have occurred — also went toward the damages.

Betcha you forgot that Simpson wrote a book about the murders couched in hypothetical terms.  I did.

The Energy Industry’s Five Biggest Disinformation Tactics.  I know you’ve heard this before, but tell the Big Lie over and over again, back it up with likely billions in advertising,  this is what you get:

Swayed for 30 years by fossil fuel industry propaganda, the media has been as likely to unknowingly amplify falsehoods as they were to bat them down. It’s only in recent years that more journalists started to shy away from “both-sides-ing” the climate crisis – decades after scientists reached an overwhelming consensus on the scope of the problem and its causes.

The good news is that while the fossil fuel industry’s PR tactics have shifted, the stories they’re telling don’t change much from year to year, they are just adapted depending on what’s happening in the world.

When politicians talk about how much it will cost to act on climate change, for example, they almost always refer to economic models commissioned by the fossil fuel industry, which leave out the cost of inaction, which rises with every passing year. When politicians say that climate policies will increase the cost of gas or energy, they count on reporters having no idea how gas or energy pricing works, or how much fossil fuel companies’ production decisions, not to mention lobbying for particular fossil fuel subsidies or against policies that support renewable energy, impact those prices.

Today’s Must-Read.

What do you want to talk about?