I've been wondering how to put this for a while, just because of the sensitive topics involved.
The Facts
Saturday evening, Someone severely damaged power substations in Moore County, NC. Whoever did it used small arms fire, likely garden variety hunting rifles, to do the damage. As a result, power went out for the vast majority of the county.
The outage began at 7PM. Just as an 18-and-over drag show was beginning at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines, right in the middle of Moore county.
Moore county is a collection of small communities west of Ft. Bragg's training areas. It's more or less the only seriously inhabited areas between ft. Bragg and I-74. Figure just under 100,000 people.
The county sheriff claimed that whoever did it "knew exactly what they were doing and knew exactly what this kind of damage would do."
The FBI is investigating as possible terrorism.
The Conjecture
Apparently there's been an online hatemonger that's been pulling some "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" against said drag show.
The investigators so far claim to have not found any direct links between the drag show and the attack on the substations. And since they do this for a living and have more evidence than I do, I'm going to underline that in big bold letters.
That said,
One substation I could write off as drunk rednecks or dumbass teenagers.
Two is suspicious.
Two happening just as the curtain goes up on an already threatened drag show?
My eyebrow is officially raised.
Ergo, I'm going to write the rest of this with the assumption that it was a targeted attack on the drag show.
The bad
It looks like the county's power isn't going to be restored until later today.
The big reason being that some components were damaged beyond repair.
And replacement parts are hard to come by.
As it turns out, America's civil infrastructure is about as reliant on last-minuite delivery as our commercial infrastructure, thanks to several decades of incentivizing such things. And I dunno if you've looked at our supply chains lately, but they're kinda fucked up.
The attack on those substations was very easily done and would be very easily to scale up.
Doing that kind of damage used no more than four people.
Imagine what fifty or a hundred people scattered throughout a region could do.
And how swiftly what replacement parts were available would dry up.
The Good
If we're assuming that whoever did this was going for some kind of guerilla campaign against drag shows, they fucked up big time.
The number one rule of an insurgency is that the local populace has to be on your side. Otherwise, you can't do shit.
If the goal was to stop a drag show in a theater that seats just over 350 people?
Then they achieved it by cutting power to 90,000 people. For a week. In December.
Yeah, Moore county is solidly red politically.
And yeah, North Carolinians on the whole aren't too thrilled when some assholes with Bitterness Studies degrees from the left coast start telling them that they're better judges of what their children should be learning than they are.
And they really don't like it when they get accused of being terrorists for the crime of being active and concerned parents.
However,
Like most people of all political stripes, they're mostly concerned with doing their jobs, caring for their families, raising their children and living their lives like everybody else.
And some jackwagons made them cold and miserable for a week to shut down a drag show that didn't even let anyone under 18 in the door in the first place.
Any support they had from the locals, they pissed away.
Not gonna say how they could have been more effective, as I'd rather not offer constructive criticism to any terrorist readers of mine. But I will point out that this is what they fucked up.
Which leads me to the second good thing:
Someone's gonna blab. And they're gonna get caught.
I can believe that four guys managed to take out both substations, police their brass, and vanish without leaving traces easily enough.
What I don't believe is that Bubba, Cooter, Skeeter, and Tumbleweed could pull off something like that AND manage to keep their mouths shut at the same time.
There's only 12K people in Southern Pines. That's an "everybody knows your business" town.
Someone's gonna blab.
Maybe one of them. Maybe a nosy neighbor. Maybe a curious ex. But someone is gonna speak up.
And then Bubba, Cooter, Skeeter, and Tumbleweed are gonna find out how lonely cell structure is when yours gets compromised.
Take care of yourselves out there.
The Facts
Saturday evening, Someone severely damaged power substations in Moore County, NC. Whoever did it used small arms fire, likely garden variety hunting rifles, to do the damage. As a result, power went out for the vast majority of the county.
The outage began at 7PM. Just as an 18-and-over drag show was beginning at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines, right in the middle of Moore county.
Moore county is a collection of small communities west of Ft. Bragg's training areas. It's more or less the only seriously inhabited areas between ft. Bragg and I-74. Figure just under 100,000 people.
The county sheriff claimed that whoever did it "knew exactly what they were doing and knew exactly what this kind of damage would do."
The FBI is investigating as possible terrorism.
The Conjecture
Apparently there's been an online hatemonger that's been pulling some "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" against said drag show.
The investigators so far claim to have not found any direct links between the drag show and the attack on the substations. And since they do this for a living and have more evidence than I do, I'm going to underline that in big bold letters.
That said,
One substation I could write off as drunk rednecks or dumbass teenagers.
Two is suspicious.
Two happening just as the curtain goes up on an already threatened drag show?
My eyebrow is officially raised.
Ergo, I'm going to write the rest of this with the assumption that it was a targeted attack on the drag show.
The bad
It looks like the county's power isn't going to be restored until later today.
The big reason being that some components were damaged beyond repair.
And replacement parts are hard to come by.
As it turns out, America's civil infrastructure is about as reliant on last-minuite delivery as our commercial infrastructure, thanks to several decades of incentivizing such things. And I dunno if you've looked at our supply chains lately, but they're kinda fucked up.
The attack on those substations was very easily done and would be very easily to scale up.
Doing that kind of damage used no more than four people.
Imagine what fifty or a hundred people scattered throughout a region could do.
And how swiftly what replacement parts were available would dry up.
The Good
If we're assuming that whoever did this was going for some kind of guerilla campaign against drag shows, they fucked up big time.
The number one rule of an insurgency is that the local populace has to be on your side. Otherwise, you can't do shit.
If the goal was to stop a drag show in a theater that seats just over 350 people?
Then they achieved it by cutting power to 90,000 people. For a week. In December.
Yeah, Moore county is solidly red politically.
And yeah, North Carolinians on the whole aren't too thrilled when some assholes with Bitterness Studies degrees from the left coast start telling them that they're better judges of what their children should be learning than they are.
And they really don't like it when they get accused of being terrorists for the crime of being active and concerned parents.
However,
Like most people of all political stripes, they're mostly concerned with doing their jobs, caring for their families, raising their children and living their lives like everybody else.
And some jackwagons made them cold and miserable for a week to shut down a drag show that didn't even let anyone under 18 in the door in the first place.
Any support they had from the locals, they pissed away.
Not gonna say how they could have been more effective, as I'd rather not offer constructive criticism to any terrorist readers of mine. But I will point out that this is what they fucked up.
Which leads me to the second good thing:
Someone's gonna blab. And they're gonna get caught.
I can believe that four guys managed to take out both substations, police their brass, and vanish without leaving traces easily enough.
What I don't believe is that Bubba, Cooter, Skeeter, and Tumbleweed could pull off something like that AND manage to keep their mouths shut at the same time.
There's only 12K people in Southern Pines. That's an "everybody knows your business" town.
Someone's gonna blab.
Maybe one of them. Maybe a nosy neighbor. Maybe a curious ex. But someone is gonna speak up.
And then Bubba, Cooter, Skeeter, and Tumbleweed are gonna find out how lonely cell structure is when yours gets compromised.
Take care of yourselves out there.
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