On this date in 1307, a dawn raid was launched on the Knights Templar by King Philip IV of France, leading to the capture, torture, and execution of hundreds of innocent men. Philip was later named “the Fair”, but for his looks rather than his sense of justice.
Since that day, a lot of things have happened, most not newsworthy. Here are a few of the more recent events that you might have missed due to 24-hour news masquerading as disaster porn:
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…or is it just me?
I mean, seriously: There’s a new COVID variant; monkeypox and a deadly flu are now going around; ebola is making a comeback. Russia in Ukraine is retreating, but on the other hand tactical nukes. Trump’s in the headlines; last time that happened, he became president. There’s hurricanes, floods, famine, plague, earthquakes, tsunamis, and you just know there’s about to be a volcano erupting somewhere, right?
This is worse than that Billy Joel song. When does it all end?!
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Whenever there’s a war on, the vast complexities of the whole wide world become suddenly simple. There’s Our Side over here, and Their Side over there, and Their soldiers are trying to kill Our soldiers; and so, They are The Enemy. If Our soldiers didn’t fight back, they’d get killed, and worse they’d get other people killed; and so it would be cowardice, or even rank treachery. There’s a time for questions like Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong, and that time is not now, because right now there’s someone with a gun and he’s trying to shoot you, and the best you can do is react; thinking will distract you, and that sort of thing will get you killed.
So even posing the question, “Which side is the right side, really, when you come right down to it?” when you’re at war is a form of treason; it’s Letting Your Side Down.
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“Look at a map! Russia definitely invaded!”
“But Ukraine has Nazis!”
– from a Twitter conversation
The first lesson a sane human might draw from witnessing the above exchange might be: Don’t go on Twitter. That’s a perfectly reasonable solution, and further observation will confirm that, yes, Twitter is full of terrible people taking out their bad days on one another. So far so good.
(more…)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.
(more…)I don’t usually do live reviews, but this place is worth it. (Plus, nobody’s complaining about my laptop, which is pleasant.)
The. Best. Crab. Cake. that I’ve ever had in my life. Bar none.
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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.
(more…)“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.
(more…)The Queen is dead. Long live the King.
Enough about that. Let’s talk about a few of the things you might have missed while the headlines were dominated by the shocking news that a near-centenarian monarch passed away quietly.
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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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The Not Fake News 
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