I was at the bookstore just before Christmas, when book on the Young Adult table caught my eye.

Before anybody gives me guff, there are some books that are listed as YA fiction that are very good.  The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix is out-fucking-standing, and the Raven Cycles by Maggie Stiefvater is also exceptionally well written.  The world-building in these novels is far better than in a lot of adult fiction.

But I digress…

The book that I saw was called Internment and the cover art featured a girl with a “Resist” hat and an Islamic crescent behind barbed wire.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Here is the summary of the book:

Internment by Samira Ahmed is a young adult novel about the forced detention of Muslims in America. Set in a dystopian alternate universe described by the author as “fifteen minutes in the future,” Internment is a response to the growing Islamophobia sweeping the globe. The story begins with a recently elected president introducing Muslim Registry and Exclusion Laws while creating a “model camp” called Mobius. The site for the construction of Mobius Camp is near the notorious Manzanar War Relocation Center, an internment camp used to imprison Japanese-Americans during World War II. The anti-Muslim climate shifts quickly from burning books written by Muslims to a curfew for Muslims to Muslims losing their jobs based on their religion to, finally, the passing of a law that rounds up all Muslims and places them in internment camps.

Layla Amin, the novel’s protagonist, is a high school student recently suspended from school for kissing her boyfriend in public. Her father, a former college literature professor, is accused by local police of writing seditious material. His books of poetry are among the books by Muslim authors that are burned at the beginning of the novel. The family is forced onto a train, taken to an internment camp, and tattooed with ID numbers. Throughout the novel, there are parallels made to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany as well as to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Once inside the internment camp, the family are monitored by security cameras, drones, and searchlights. Razor-wired electric fences surround their FEMA-styled trailers. The director of the camp implements a divide-and-rule method of controlling the internees. This method involved separating the Muslim groups by race, nationality, and ethnicity, intentionally dividing them to prevent any organized uprisings. Layla seeks out members from each of these communities to create a unified front against the internment camp director.

Layla and her allies—her boyfriend, David; Ayesha; Soheil; and a sympathetic security guard named Jake—are determined to expose the human rights violations of the camp. She organizes a rebellion among the young people of the camp…

Let’s take this apart, shall we?

Set in a dystopian alternate universe described by the author as “fifteen minutes in the future,” Internment is a response to the growing Islamophobia sweeping the globe.

Really?  Were Muslims rounded up after 9/11?  After the Fort Hood shooting?  The Chattanooga recruiting center shootings?  San Bernardino shooting?  Charlie Hebdo shooting?  The Nice truck attack?  The 2017 and 2019 London bride stabbings?  The 7/7 bombings?  The Pule Night Club shooting? The mass sexual assaults at New Year’s eve in France?

How about the most recent Pensacola Naval Air Station shooting?  We didn’t even round up all the Saudi military personnel in the US and ship them home.

I think the Pulse shooting is still the most offensive.  Because after the smoke cleared and before the bodies were even buried, the Disarm Hate campaign managed to rewrite that from a shooting committed by a Muslim who was pledged loyalty to ISIS, to being the fault of Christian Conservatives who don’t like to see two men kissing.

If we’re 15 away from something, entering the Muslims isn’t it.

The anti-Muslim climate shifts quickly from burning books written by Muslims to a curfew for Muslims to Muslims losing their jobs based on their religion to, finally, the passing of a law that rounds up all Muslims and places them in internment camps.

So… doing what the Democrat President FDR did, with the help of a Chief Justice FDR appointed.  I love how the Left can acknowledge Korematsu but can’t ever take credit for it.

Layla Amin, the novel’s protagonist, is a high school student recently suspended from school for kissing her boyfriend in public.

What?  It seems to be the biggest problem facing Muslim girls isn’t a Republican government stopping them from kissing their boyfriends but having Muslim men whose advances were spurned throw acid in their faces.

Her father, a former college literature professor, is accused by local police of writing seditious material. His books of poetry are among the books by Muslim authors that are burned at the beginning of the novel.

My incredulity is peaking.

Right now, the most dangerous thing to do on campus is to say something that is pro-conservative or pro-Israel.  That makes angry Leftists burn things on campus.  Colleges love to book anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist speakers.  The most Left-leaning campuses will even let Students Set Up Shrine to Palestinian Terrorists, deliver eviction notices to Jewish students, and have a week-long orgy of Jew-hatred masquerading as a “Palestinian rights” event.

The family is forced onto a train, taken to an internment camp, and tattooed with ID numbers. Throughout the novel, there are parallels made to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany as well as to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

This is amazing, considering the amount of Holocaust denial or downplay in the Islamic world, even by Muslim members of the US Congress, with Iran hosting an annual cartoon contest on the subject, and the common opinion among Muslims that the Jews made up the Holocaust for sympathy to get Israel.

This method involved separating the Muslim groups by race, nationality, and ethnicity, intentionally dividing them to prevent any organized uprisings. Layla seeks out members from each of these communities to create a unified front against the internment camp director.

The Islamic world is disastrously tribal.  Most of the violence in the UK right now is Muslim on Muslim from different nationalities or tribes.  The reason Israel has remained undefeated in war is that the Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians,  Lebanese, and others hate each other so much, they can’t unite long enough to kill the Jews.  Tlaib and Omar might consider each other sisters but interred Somalis and interred Iranians are not going to work together for a red second.

Layla and her allies—her boyfriend, David; Ayesha; Soheil; and a sympathetic security guard named Jake—are determined to expose the human rights violations of the camp.

Did I miss when the Left-wing media was defeated and didn’t start screaming about this from the very beginning?

She organizes a rebellion among the young people of the camp…

With the help of all those anti-gun Leftist young people.

I think the most honest statement came from this review in Bookriot:

THE EVENTS OF INTERNMENT ARE ALREADY A REALITY FOR MANY UIGHUR MUSLIMS.

Reports of deaths and disappearances are widely documented by the families of those who have been detained for no other reason than practicing a faith that the state wants to criminalise.

This is the Leftist Islamic version of The Handmaid’s Tale.  The Left loves to say that The Handmaid’s Tale is “happening in real life.”  This is what they say America will become if we don’t give Planned Parenthood a half-a-billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding.  What they refuse to admit is that the IRL Handmaid’s Tale is happening in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian territories.  They can’t admit it.

So the IRL Internment is happening in China, the country the Left is in the process of kowtowing itself to for money and out of ideological approval.

Everything in the summary of this book is the opposite of reality.

Really, if this book is 15 minutes in the future, it’s the Muslims and Leftists rounding up the Zionists and MAGA hat wearers for political reeducation.

But no one likes to admit that they are the oppressor, it feels much better to be the victim.  When you can’t be the victim, you make it up.

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – A man who was coming home early from work one day in November arrived to find his entire house ransacked.
“As soon as I opened the door, the carpet was messed up and everything was in shambles,” said Nick, who opted not to show his face on camera or provide a last name.
The crooks were in and out in less than 30 minutes, stealing 13 guns, Nick said.

…

“Every door was open,” Nick said. “The back door was pried open. Then I went to check my safe and sure enough, it was gone.”
The 13 guns had been tucked in the safe.
Nick had owned them ever since he was a teenager.
And the crooks managed to take the entire 400-pound safe, which damaged Nick’s floors in the process. (Bold are mine)

13 guns stolen from Broward man’s home

Time is the biggest ally of a crook.  You give him time and he will manage to defeat your security, specially if it is not layered. The article suggests that the crooks may had had insider’s knowledge which does not help either.

Good news: Modern security is getting cheaper. WiFi cameras and alarm services are getting more and more affordable which help add layers pf security and make your house less palatable to attack.  Remember, we are not make things impossible for the burglars but we are making other less safe houses, a better choice than ours.

We are appealing to their laziness and thirst to stay away from jail.

From The Hill:

Congress reaches deal to fund gun violence research for first time in decades

Federal agencies will receive $25 million from Congress to study gun violence in a government spending deal reached by House and Senate negotiators — a major win for Democrats who have long pushed for dedicated funding to research the issue, a source told The Hill.

“Democrats have broken the ban on funding for the first time in decades,” the source said.

The deal includes $12.5 million each for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health to study gun violence and ways to prevent it.

Before you start running around like your hair is on fire, remember that the CDC did a study on gun use in 2013 and came to this conclusion:

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.

The data came down on the pro-gun side so the study was buried like it had dirt on the Clintons.

No think about what the data is coming out of Baltimore.  Baltimore is the 4th most dangerous city in America.  The homicide rate in Baltimore has shot up to record highs, on par with the rate in 1993 at the zenith of the crack epidemic.

When we dive into those numbers, we see something that a lot of Conservatives and those of us in the gun community already expected:

2017 homicide data provide insight into Baltimore’s gun wars, police say

About 86 percent of the victims and 85 percent of the 118 suspects identified by police had prior criminal records. And about 46 percent of victims and 44 percent of suspects had previously been arrested for gun crimes, the data show.

Of the guns used, the “overwhelming majority of them are going to be illegally possessed,” said T.J. Smith, a police spokesman.

Smith said the numbers, from the department’s annual homicide analysis, support what the department has been saying: that “the weapon of choice for bad guys in Baltimore is the handgun,” that “repeat violent offenders” are routinely behind the violence, and that often, “today’s victim is yesterday’s suspect, and today’s suspect can be tomorrow’s victim.”

The average homicide victim in Baltimore in 2017 had 11 previous arrests on his record. About 73 percent had drug arrests, and nearly 50 percent had been arrested for a violent crime. About 30 percent were on parole or probation at the time they were killed, and more than 6 percent were on parole or probation for a gun crime.

So overwhelmingly, both the perpetrators and victims of gun violence in Baltimore had previous arrests and convictions for drug and gun crime and were killing each other with illegally obtained guns.

It seems like going soft on drug dealers, reducing sentencing, and “ending mass incarceration” makes for good Progressive talking points, but actually increases the homicide rate.

If this is the data from Baltimore, how much do you want to bet that the data is similar in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and every other blue City where crime is going up?

I really don’t think that the Democrats are going to like it if the CDC comes out and says that the Progressive policies on criminal justice reform are causing the bodies to pile up.  Such a study will probably disappear faster than the girls that could swear that Bill Clinton was at Jeffry Epstein’s rape island parties.

The one thing we need to be concerned about is these studies being conducted by partisan hack “researchers.”

I don’t think we have anything to fear from unbiased studies.  We just have to make sure that the studies are conducted honestly.

From Texas Monthly:

‘It’s Not Who We Are’: Jill Biden Visits the Refugee Camp in Matamoros

On Sunday, former second lady Jill Biden donned a pair of calf-high rubber boots and trudged through thick, muddy fields littered with hundreds of tents and tarps in the Matamoros refugee camp across the border from Brownsville. She was there to bring Christmas cheer to the estimated two thousand migrants, mostly Central Americans, who are idling across the border as a result of the Remain in Mexico policy. Biden helped serve tamales with beans and rice, and later handed out Christmas toys to migrant children.

“It’s not who we are as Americans,” Biden said after spending more than two hours at the camp. “We are a welcoming nation, but that’s not the message that we’re sending at the border. We’re saying, ‘Stop. Don’t come in.’”

Jill Biden is the wife of Joe Biden, the current Democrat front runner for Presidential candidate in 2020, and potentially the next First Lady of the United States.

One expects that everything she does now is calculated to help her husband’s campaign.

So if she was going to spread Holiday cheer in a way that would increase Joe’s electability, what do you think she would do?

Serve Christmas dinner to troops overseas in Iraq or Afghanistan?  If there were security issues there, she could have at least gone to visit troops in South Korea or Germany.

Maybe she could have served Christmas dinner to some of Los Angeles’ 58,000 homeless people.

She could have visited police officers who were working Christmas eve.

Those all make sense if you are the Republican candidate’s wife.

For the Democrats, you go to Mexico and serve dinner to the people who are trying to enter the United States illegally by taking advantage of our asylum laws.

This really gives you an idea of who the Democrats prioritize.

I was gifted the box by a kind reader (Thank you very much once again) and the wife ordered to go under the tree till Christmas. So, as promised, I am doing the review today.

This is the box.

The specs according to Hornady are:
Dimensions: Interior: 9.75”x7.5”x2.25” Exterior: 10.25”x8”x2.75”
16 gauge steel housing and a 1500 Lb 3 foot steel cable. It comes with two tubular keys in a little pouch I forgot to take a picture.

It is about 6 pounds so it is heavier than the less expensive offerings out there and the impression you get is of a one solid box.

As you can see, a full size pistol has no problem fitting in the foam-covered interior and notice the two solid locking points:

This is the lock from the inside with what I presume is an anti-tampering shroud:

The view of the anchoring cable with the box anchor in place. It is stronger that I thought it would be.

One complain I have read about other boxes is the hinges. They are usually tacked by three points per side and might be an eventual weak point which can be cracked with a sharp hit. In this box, the hinges appear to be integral to the box itself, no welding, no rivets.

Hornady claims that the box meets TSA Airline Guidelines for firearms storage and I could very well see that.

Verdict: It is a very good box in my opinion…as long as you remember it is not a proper safe but an anti-theft delay device for the opportunistic, “untooled” burglar. Anybody with the right tools and time will break into anything deemed safe.

The package came with the NSSF’s “Own it? Respect it. Secure it” shield of project Childsafe. And yes, it will be a good box to keep small children from accessing the gun.

It is going in my truck. No argument there.

I had doubts about joining in the chorus of people leaving condolences to anybody. I thought they would be diluted by the repetition and “sameness”: They don’t.

Each comment left here or in Facebook or tweeter and emails felt very needed and appreciated.

You guys helped us very much and the missus and myself want to extend our profound thanks.

And she is gone. December 25th 2019, 07:43am.

She was a child of the Spanish Civil War and the truly backward customs of the era. She ran from the sheer poverty of a Spain post Civil War and WWII that made many like her emigrate to other places She also survived Cuba under both Fascism and Communism and all she built in Venezuela was swallowed again by Communism. Let’s say she hated both of the sides and managed to pass that gene to me.

But she lived he last almost two decades in the US, with her son and “daughter” (She always called my wife “her daughter” which sometimes made for embarrassing moments during introductions) as free as she could be. Made friends with people who did not speak the same language and above all she lived in peace. Whereas in Venezuela she ended up living behind tall compound-like walls topped with razor wire and barred windows, the only thing between her and the street here was the pane of glass on her window.

She loved us deeply, she lived fully and she died painless. In the end, is something we all should aspire to when the time comes. I am sure she is now with dad making sure he is well dressed and well behaved up there. Kinda sorry for pops though, his vacation in Heaven is over.