Month: September 2022

The Not Fake News Update, 28 September 2022

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!!! And, for everyone in the continental United States, we’d like to wish you a very pleasant good evening. Unless you’re in Florida, that is, in which case we’d like to wish you something very well-anchored to hang onto until the storm passes.

That’s right, folks: Hurricane Ian has hit Florida with near-Category 5 winds. This is the 551st hurricane known to have impacted Florida, the most heavily hurricane-hit state in the United States, and is expected to do several billions of dollars worth of damage. Which, of course, nobody could possibly have predicted would ever happen; not in a million years. Thus, it has made the front page.

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I’m Glad You’re Offended

EDITORIAL

It is not the purpose of The Not Fake News to insult or belittle. We are not here to denigrate anyone. At most, we describe people in as accurate a manner as is practicable.

Recently, Patton Oswalt appears to have pissed of Breitbart with part of his comic bit, which they interpret as him calling anti-vax Trump supporters as “…backward, racist, sexist, homophobic dips**ts”. His response is that he literally said the exact opposite, and the truth of the matter is, I neither know nor care. I enjoy Patton’s work, but sometimes he’s a jerk just to be a jerk.

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Russian Mobilization: What The Analysts Are Missing

“Vladimir Putin can call up all the troops he wants, but Russia has no way of getting those new troops the training and weapons they need to fight in Ukraine any time soon.”

So says Brad Lendon, CNN’s chief military affairs analyst. He’s not alone in his opinion. Other well-known commentators and military logistics experts have said much the same, pointing to the massive equipment losses suffered by Russian forces and chronic shortages of ammunition and supplies.

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If EVs Were Economical…

Before we start on the topic at hand, let me tell you a little bit about Rep. Lance Gooden (R, Texas), who represents part of Dallas and a lot of suburbs to the east of that fine city. He’s a local boy, and best I can tell his people have been in Texas at least since it was part of Mexico.

He’s called his voting record “the most conservative in Congress”, and his district, the Texas 5th, is so strongly Republican that Democrats often don’t bother to run; his toughest opposition may well be the local Libertarians. His church is so conservative that they don’t believe in musical accompaniment. He’s worked tirelessly in support of local businesses and against government waste, voted to repeal the Iraq War Authorization, and was one of over a hundred Congressmen who signed onto an amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, an attempt to overturn the latter state’s 2020 election results that was dismissed by the Supreme Court.

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Para Bellum

Igitur quī dēsīderat pācem, præparet bellum.

Vegetius, Epitoma De Re Militari, Book III preface

It’s always a surprise how little we truly know about what we think we know, which only makes sense: You don’t get very far if you begin on the presumption that you’re wrong. Proceeding on invalid, partial, incorrect, or incomplete information is a survival trait. There is no practicable method for knowing everything you’ll need to know before you begin, so instead humanity has learned to persevere against the impossible, adapting on the fly. It is at once a marvelous talent and terrifyingly dangerous flaw.

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