THIS COULD HAPPEN PRETTY MUCH ANYWHERE: North Carolina county under curfew after power station attack, FBI investigating. “Residents of a central North Carolina county faced a second night of freezing weather without power on Sunday after vandals opened fire on two electric substations in what authorities called a ‘targeted attack.’ A motive for the Saturday night damage spree wasn’t clear, said Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields. Due to outages, schools will be closed Monday and potentially longer. Sunday church services and a well-known golf resort were disrupted. The incidents were being investigated by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, Fields said. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Twitter that she had been in contact with Duke Energy Corp, which owns the substations, and the Department of Energy was working with other agencies to investigate and respond.”

TRUMP’S CALL FOR REGIME CHANGE: Too Early and Too Late. The “cabal” has already violated the norms, but it’s too late to do anything about their actions, and also too early. Trump’s misjudgment of the timing is not a mark in his favor.

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: Linus Van Pelt Banned from Community Theater For Reciting Bible Verse. “‘It’s a classic case that shows the dangers of Christian Nationalism,’ said FBI Agent Peter Corrum.”

A MARS-SHATTERING KABOOM: Megatsunami swept over Mars after massive asteroid hit the Red Planet.

MERRICK GARLAND WON’T BE PROSECUTING THEM, THOUGH: More Federal Issues for Twitter as FEC Commissioner Reveals Filing from Previous Management Denying It Worked With Democrats.

YES, HALF THE PEOPLE WITH “SCIENCE IS REAL” SIGNS IN THEIR YARDS SEEM TO BELIEVE IN CRYSTALS AND MANIFESTATION: Massive Global Study Shows Belief in Witchcraft Is More Abundant Than You Might Think.

WELL, YES: Scientist Who Worked at Wuhan Lab Claims COVID Was a Man-Made Virus.

Like Elon Musk’s revelations about Twitter, it’s nothing we didn’t already know, but this is confirmation.

A GREAT GIFT: So I ordered this EFAYCRR Steampunk Table Lamp and it’s really cool. I love the light it gives off with these vintage light bulbs. Highly recommended. (Bumped)

HMM: Mapping the hidden connections between diseases. “With advancing age, millions of people live with multiple conditions—sometimes referred to as multimorbidity—and the proportion of people affected in this way is expected to rise over the next decades. However, medical education and training, health care delivery, clinical guidelines and research have evolved to focus on one disease at a time. The Academy of Medical Sciences and the UK Chief Medical Officer (CMO) have recognized this problem and set out a challenge of investigating which diseases co-occur in the same individuals and why.”

IT’S NOT THE YEARS IN YOUR LIFE, IT’S THE LIFE IN YOUR YEARS: Jonathan the tortoise, oldest living land creature, celebrates 190th birthday.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Armed Citizen Chronicles: Veteran Holds Fleeing Felon Until Cops Arrive at Georgia Food Bank.

ENDORSED: Toyota May Give the Land Cruiser Another Run in the U.S.

READER FAVORITE: MyPillow Premium Bed Pillow 2 Pack. #CommissionEarned

FIGHT THE POWER: How Chinese netizens swamped China’s Internet controls: Citizens protesting zero-COVID policies proved smartphones can help fuel mass action. “The country’s government has tried to strike a balance between embracing technology and limiting citizens’ power to use it to protest or organize, building up wide-ranging powers of censorship and surveillance. But last weekend, the momentum of China’s digital savvy population and their frustration, bravery, and anger seemed to break free of the government’s control. It took days for Chinese censors and police to tamp down dissent on the Internet and in city streets. By then images and videos of the protests had spread around the world, and China’s citizens had proven that they could maneuver around the Great Firewall and other controls.”

SALENA ZITO: Wines and mines in the Mon Valley. “When you think of river towns like Monongahela or Donora or Monessen, you think about hard-working men who toiled in factories or coal mines to provide for their families, or the women who scrubbed down the walls and baseboards daily to keep their humble family homes clean from the dirty air. The Ripepi family has been there, as grocers and as owners of a mining company — and now as owners of a winery perched above those Mon Valley cities that kept so many generations fed, clothed and moving up and out to test out the durability of the American dream.”

AT AMAZON, Epic Deals. #CommissionEarned.

OH, I DO: A hard winter looms for Americans’ energy bills and wallets. Blame Biden.

A BIT LATE, BUT GOOD: U.S. health officials to test wastewater around the country for polio.

RACISM TO BLAME FOR FIRING OF LIBERAL MSNBC HOST TIFFANY CROSS, CLAIMS WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST:

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah blamed racism for MSNBC’s abrupt firing of Black weekend anchor Tiffany Cross earlier last month.

In a Friday column, Attiah argued that Cross’s ouster was a “a reminder that the rug could be pulled out from under [Black journalists] at any time.”

She added that it was a “bad look” in a time when “attacks against Black educators, authors and journalists are increasing across the country.”

Fair enough. Why is NBC such a cesspit of racism?!

‘WEAPONIZATION OF LONELINESS’ IS A MUST-READ: Periodically, a book comes along that is essential reading in order to understand a particular period or movement in history. James Burnham’s “Suicide of the West” in 1964 for the inevitable decay of modern liberalism and Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times” for the spread of totalitarianism in the 20th century come immediately to mind.

Neither of those classics were the first products of their authors, both of whom were well-established as heavyweights in their respective fields. “The Weaponization of Loneliness” is, however, Stella Morabito’s first effort and it is a sterling one that is essential reading for anybody who hopes to grasp at the deepest levels why the decline of individual liberty and freedom of thought and belief has so accelerated in recent decades.

Morabito’s subtitle captures the heart of her analysis: “How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide and Conquer.” As Morabito explains in her introduction:

“Americans have long sensed tyranny creeping into their lives. The disquiet hovered in the background for a long time, though most couldn’t put their finger on it. When signals surfaced — such as anti-speech codes written into federal law in the 1990s allegedly to curb hate — we tended to shrug them off.

“After all, wouldn’t acceptance of the code simply mean we were promoting civility over hate? It was too frightening to believe those speech codes could really lead to direct attacks on freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

“Other indicators of a new kind of authoritarianism multiplied over the course of decades, usually with the claim they were needed to ensure justice against racism or sexism. In the 1980s, multiculturalism took root, then morphed into identity politics and intersectionality.”

We all felt queasy about these trends, but, outside of those on the Right who pay particular attention to such issues and developments, for the most part we kept quiet. The signals kept coming but from so many different quarters — the campuses, Big Media, politicians in both parties, the corporate world — it was difficult to put a comprehensive label on it that succinctly conveyed the threat to the general populace.

Morabito observes that when a 2020 Cato Institute poll found 62 percent of the respondents admitting they held political views they feared to express in public, loneliness, isolation and alienation were advancing steadily and at an accelerating pace.

Then came Covid, the Pandemic and the seeming triumph of Wokeism.

“The whole Woke Revolution took controlled speech a giant leap forward by compelling speech, as with pronoun protocols that applied heavy penalties for ‘misgendering’ someone. All such agendas also carry a heavy dose of hostility against anyone who might disagree and enlisted social media mobs to enforce that demonization,” Morabito writes.

Totalitarianism at its root is the same regardless of when or where it manifests, but there is a unique quality to the Woke version that Morabito profoundly elucidates in a way that is imminently accessible to anybody with the slightest wisp of concern about where this country is headed. It is indeed essential reading for the present generation for the sake of those coming.

POLITICO DROPPED OBSESSION WITH PAUL PELOSI ATTACK AFTER ELECTION WAS OVER:

After a total of ELEVEN Paul Pelosi assault  stories appearing in the October 29 edition of Politico in which the alleged assailant, David DePape, was portrayed (with scant evidence) as a MAGA Republican for whom GOP officials were expected to apologize for, the sum total of these stories once the midterm elections were safely past dwindled to the extent that for the past couple of weeks, there has been no follow-up on the investigation of how this attack unfolded.

What makes it more curious is that after their October 31 attack upon conservatives for questioning the official account of the assault, there has been complete silence from Politico on the retraction of an NBC story and suspension of the reporter, Miguel Almaguer, for revealing that Paul Pelosi answered the door on the night the police arrived.

* * * * * * * *

Exit question: Will anyone in the press pull back Paul Pelosi from his current nonperson status and investigate why the post-election suppression of the assault story after having hyped it so heavily before the election?

No. It was a modified limited hangout for the DNC-MSM prior to the midterms, and served its purpose. Old news — let’s move on to what is important now.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Why the Media Makes Musk a Villain but Lets SBF Off Easy.

“YEEZY COME, YEEZY GO:” Regret your Kanye West tattoo? This studio will remove it for free.

Do you have a Kanye West tattoo you now regret? A tattoo-removal studio in Britain is removing body art inspired by the rapper – and it won’t even charge you for it.

“We’ll remove your Kanye tattoos for free,” London-based Naama Studios announced on Instagram last month as Ye, the rapper and music mogul formerly known as Kanye West, was condemned over a string of antisemitic statements made publicly in recent months.

In a play on the rapper’s name, the tattoo parlor even came up with a slogan for its service: “Yeezy come, Yeezy go.”

In one tweet, which has since been deleted, Ye said he would go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE,” an apparent reference to Defcon, the U.S. military defense readiness system. He also propounded false claims about George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.

“We understand that tattoos can be triggering for some people and not everyone can afford to remove their tattoos,” the company told The Washington Post in an email Thursday. It noted that one of the people who took them up on the offer said she was being trolled for her Ye-inspired tattoo.

The store said several people have contacted it in recent weeks to have their Ye tattoos lasered off – a procedure that can cost up to 2,000 pounds (about $2,400).

“When you have a tattoo inspired by someone you admire and they start making headlines for all the wrong reasons, it’s not exactly something you want to wear on your sleeve,” Naama said.

But why would you do that in the first place? As Theodore Dalrymple once warned, the tattoo parlor is “the refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always the right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.”

Similarly, Ayn Rand didn’t write The Return of the Primitive as a how-to guide.

HOLIDAY DEAL: BEDSURE Sherpa Fleece Throw Blanket. #CommissionEarned