MICHAEL MEDVED AT PRAGER U: What’s the Truth About the First Thanksgiving? (Video.)

NEWS I CAN CERTAINLY USE: Type of alcohol determines whether you become merry or maudlin.

HO-HO-HO: 500 German Police Arrest Six Syrian ISIS Fighters Suspected of Christmas Market Terror Plot.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Turkey’s Erdogan takes on financial markets again. And may lose, again.

Erdogan triggered a slump in lira assets this week by reviving his long-standing criticism of conventional central banking, namely, that policy makers should cut interest rates — rather than raise them — to stem soaring inflation.

That approach didn’t work in January 2014 when the central bank eventually had to more than double borrowing costs to stem a flight of foreign cash. As the lira plunges toward a record-low of four to the dollar, traders say he’ll be pushed into a corner again if he wants to avoid alienating the very investors he needs to sustain his economy.

“Nobody genuinely believes that high interest rates cause inflation, this is populist rhetoric from Erdogan. I’d be very surprised if he himself believes it,” said Paul McNamara, a London-based fund manager at GAM UK, which sold all its Turkish holdings months ago. “The lira is going to keep falling until we see tighter money.”

As James Carville quipped 25 years ago, upon discovering the limits even the White House faced going up again free markets, “I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

THE ISLAMIC STATE’S BLOODY DEFEAT IN MOSUL

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Internet Had Already Lost Its Neutrality: Even while the FCC was more strictly regulating, a few powerful companies took control of what we see and don’t.

The internet will be filled today with denunciations of this move, threats of a dark future in which our access to content will be controlled by a few powerful companies. And sure, that may happen. But in fact, it may already have happened, led not by ISPs, but by the very companies that were fighting so hard for net neutrality.

Consider what happened to the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi publication, after Charlottesville. One by one, hosting companies refused to permit its content on their servers. The group was forced to effectively flee the country, and then other countries, too, shut it down.

Now of course, these are not nice people. Their website espoused vile hate. But the fact remains that what they were publishing was not illegal, merely immoral, and their immoral speech was effectively shut down by a small number of private companies who decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read. And what is to stop them from expanding this decision to other categories, forcing the rest of us to conform to Silicon Valley’s idea of what it is moral and right for us to see?

Fifteen years ago, when I started blogging, it was common to hear that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” You don’t hear that so often anymore, because it’s not true. China has proven very effective at censoring the internet, and as market power has consolidated in the tech industry, so have private firms.

Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear, and read.

In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day. Is this a problem? I think it is.

I do, too.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela pumps below OPEC target.

The South American country’s oil output hit a 28-year low in October as state-owned oil giant PDVSA struggled to find the funds to drill wells, maintain oilfields and keep pipelines and ports working.

Venezuela’s oil production, which has been falling by about 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) a month since last year, is on track to fall by at least 250,000 bpd in 2017, according to numbers reported to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as US sanctions and a lack of capital hobble operations.

Some OPEC members expect the fall to accelerate in 2018, reaching at least 300,000 bpd, OPEC sources said. At a recent internal OPEC meeting, Venezuelan officials were asked to give a clearer picture of the country’s declining output.

“A lot of questions have been raised by Saudis and others to the Venezuelans to present a real picture on the production status and decline,” one of the sources said.

I had been assured that socialism leads to plenty.

JUDGING BY HER ATTITUDE TOWARD MEN, SHE AND HER VAGINA WILL GET TO HAVE LOTS OF QUALITY ONE-ON-ONE TIME TOGETHER: My Vagina Is Terrific. Your Opinion About It Is Not.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Pre-Thanksgiving News Round-Up and Much, Much More.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Sex, lies & excuses: Partisan madness on predators. I don’t know why you would expect anything else from our political culture.

THEY DID NOT HAVE RELATIONS WITH THAT JEWISH NATION: Saudi FM denies kingdom has relations with Israel.

HONESTY, EVENTUALLY: Uber concealed cyberattack that exposed 57 million people’s data.

Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers were accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card details, trip location info or other data were taken, Uber said.

At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers $100,000 to delete the data and keep the breach quiet. Uber said it believes the information was never used but declined to disclose the identities of the attackers.

How do we know the hackers deleted Uber’s stolen data?

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR MORE THINGS TO KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT: Forget about global warming, North Korea, race relations or giant metal robots who want to steal your medicine. The New Yorker has found a historian/researcher who claims that “that there are probably around two thousand serial killers at large in the U.S.” The Daily Mail summarized the story with a Rogue’s Gallery of serial killers.

This comes two days after Newsweek published a spurious and much-ridiculed article noting that both Charles Manson and Donald Trump “used language” to “attract followers.” Imagine that. If Newsweek really wants to freak out their readership, they should publish a follow-up reporting that there are approximately two thousand Donald Trumps at large in the U.S.

**UPDATE** Newsweek removes reference to Trump, saying that “An earlier version of this story did not meet Newsweek’s editorial standards and has been revised accordingly.” 

**UPDATE 2 ** Newsweek still has original headline up on their Twitter feed…for now.

DETROIT FREE PRESS: Conyers Must Go.

AS WE SUSPECTED: Fusion GPS paid journalists, court papers confirm.

Newly filed court documents confirm that Fusion GPS, the company mostly responsible for the controversial “Trump dossier” on presidential candidate Donald Trump, made payments to three journalists between June 2016 until February 2017.

The revelation could be a breakthrough for House Republicans, who are exploring whether Fusion GPS used the dossier, which was later criticized for having inaccurate information on Trump, to feed anti-Trump stories to the press during and after the presidential campaign. The three journalists who were paid by Fusion GPS are known to have reported on “Russia issues relevant to [the committee’s] investigation,” the House Intelligence Committee said in a court filing.

But the recipients’ names, the amounts, and purposes of those payments were either redacted from the documents that Fusion GPS filed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia or were not disclosed.

I want names. As journalists are always telling us, the public has a right to know.

SHINE IT BRIGHTER: Conyers Settlement Shines Light on How Congress Handles Sexual Harassment.

Mr. Conyers on Tuesday said he settled the complaint to avoid litigation. He added he would cooperate with any further investigation in the House. News of the settlement and that it was related to a sexual-harassment claim surfaced Monday.

“I expressly and vehemently denied the allegations made against me, and continue to do so,” he said in a statement.

Tuesday afternoon, the House Ethics Committee announced it had “begun an investigation and will gather additional information regarding these allegations.” The committee keeps its investigations confidential and said it won’t make further public statements “pending completion of its initial review.”

The revelation adds to the sexual-misconduct claims that have been aired in recent months against powerful men in politics as well as in media and entertainment.

PLUS:

That’s a lot of swamp to drain.

THE HILL: Poll: Only 22 percent of Minnesotans say Franken should stay in office.

THE HILL: Political media engulfed by sexual harassment crisis.

AHEAD OF HIS TIME: Andrew Breitbart to leftists, 2012: “Stop raping people!”

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: Emetic of the Liberal Elites: Built up anger of abused liberal women finally breaks through, enabled oddly enough by Trump’s defeat of Hillary.

CREEPY: Google collects Android users’ locations even when location services are disabled. “Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card? Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.”

Silicon Valley has gone from friendly to creepy in record time.

PRIVACY: Is the Government Waging an Out-of-Sight Fight With Apple on Encryption?

The upshot is that, even as the FBI battles with Apple in public over iPhone encyprtion, other agencies like the NSA may be forcing Apple to break its encryption in secret through Section 702 orders. Even though Section 702 orders are notionally aimed at foreigners, there are numerous loopholes that can sweep in Americans.

The over-arching issue raised by EmptyWheel is not whether citizens should have the right to deploy unbreakable encryption (there are good arguments on each side), but instead that the government may be settling the debate in secret. The issue of encryption is too important to be stuffed into secret court proceedings. Let’s hope the Justice Department finds a way to debate this in the open.

I don’t trust Jeff Sessions enough to have that hope.