Bookworm Beat 10/22/18 — the Honduran invasion edition and open thread

This Bookworm Beat is about more than the slo-mo Honduran invasion, but that figures largely here, hence the post’s title.

Bookworm Beat Honduran InvasionA round-up of ideas and information about the Honduran invasion. When thousands of military age men threaten to storm your border, there’s only one proper description: “an invasion.” All that other stuff — economic migrants, refugees, huddled masses — is euphemism intended to obscure the reality that inherently dangerous people [i.e., military age men and men from terrorist-supporting and non-Latin American countries] are announcing loudly and clearly that will ignore American sovereignty and invade our country.

I don’t doubt that women and children are sprinkled throughout this horde to make good television when Trump (God willing) stops them at the American border but, again, that’s not the bulk of the group. Instead, those women and children will find that, just as the Palestinians like to place children front and center for maximum propaganda impact when Israel finally fights back against deadly provocation, so too are these women and children unwitting tools in the Leftist war to destroy American sovereignty.

As it happens, we don’t need to guess what this invasion will look like. First, we saw a trial run with the children’s invasion on Obama’s watch, an invasion that came complete with diseases, MS-13 and other criminals, and a new cohort of anchors for chain migration. We’ve also seen the adult version play out in Europe over the past three years and it has, at best, strained Europe’s economy and, at worst, led to sexual assaults on women and children, increased property crimes, murders, racially-based violence, and terrorism.

Immigration should be based upon the capacity and desire of the receiving country, rather than the demands of those unfortunate enough to be residents of countries distinguished by corruption, theocratic dictatorships (that the immigrants want to bring with them), and economic failing. If these military-aged young men want to improve life, let them turn back home to Honduras and take a stand against crime and corruption there, rather than bringing those society-destroying vices here.

One of the things that may have struck you is that those young man are moving at a bizarrely rapid clip. Could it be that they’re not marching at all but are getting a little help? Why, yes it could:

However many trucks are working the convoy now, they’re going to need more — while Mexico made some ineffectual efforts to stop the original invasion at its own borders, that failure has emboldened others to join:

New estimates cited by El Universal, a Mexican newspaper, say the caravan now has 14,000 people, many of them already in Mexico while others still wait. {Emphasis mine.)

Another thing that someone found noteworthy is the clothes these “spontaneous” refugees are wearing:

And then there’s the flag under which they’ve chosen to march, as well as the flag they’ve chosen to burn:

(As always, the Daily Mail has a great gallery of photos, showing the marching mob’s testosterone, child pawns, and violent impulses.)

Again, this is not a “migrant movement.” It is a full-fledged, planned invasion of a sovereign nation.

Moreover, as Don Surber notes, an invasion of this size, complete with transportation and publicists, is bigger than George Soros funding it by his lonesome (although I’d be very surprised if he were not involved):

Caravan adults will work for under-the-table wages that are off the books. This allows them to collect welfare. Their employers don’t have to pay the 7.65% employer match to payroll taxes or provide health insurance.

Illegal aliens can live in America working for less than minimum wage if it is off the books. That is because they still collect welfare and get Medicaid in addition to their untaxed pay.

They do better than legal citizens who make minimum wage.

The Chamber of Commerce does not want to stop this because it provides cheap labor.

Mexico does not want to stop this because so many illegals send lots of money home.

This is why other nations, nominally allies, allow the caravan to head north.

[snip]

This is a well-financed caravan aimed at using women and children to hide the real intent of this movement. Corporate interests are with cheap labor. Conservatives only fool themselves if they think George Soros is alone in this venture.

Wolf Howling contends (and I agree) that those Americans funding this enterprise need to be found, arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for extended periods of time.

By the way, if any Leftist says to you “but Posse Comitatus,” ignore him or her because that person is ignorant. The Posse Comitatus Act exists to prevent a president from using the military against Americans. It cannot possibly be extended to prevent using the American military to protect Americans from an external invading force.

I’ll wrap up with Trump’s tweets on the invasion:

I hope Trump means it about cutting off funds to the countries allowing this to happen (something Roger L. Simon thinks, as I do, will benefit these same countries by forcing them to address their internal failings) — and I hope he has the balls and the spine to do what it takes to block this invasion at the border.

Trump is no totalitarian, says one who knows. Arthur Chrenkoff was someone I followed religiously during the early years of the Iraq War, because he was one of the smartest bloggers out there on the subject. A long time ago, though, he signed off, saying that he had found himself a great full-time job that precluded blogging.

Had I been paying attention, I would have seen that Chrenkoff is back (although I hope he continues to have his great job) and that his blogging is as intelligent as ever. That last is obvious from his wonderful post entitled Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience — you have no effing idea what you’re talking about, which is based upon his youth in communist Poland:

So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,

To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,

To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President (that’s you Rosie O’DonnellSarah Silverman, Congressman Steve Cohen and others),

To the celebrities and commentators, from Michael Moore to former security officials like John Brennan, who think the United States is on the brink of dictatorship,

To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler,

[snip]

you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.

Please read the whole thing. It’s very enlightening.

Speaking of totalitarianism, doctors are on the march again. Many doctors are Leftists. This is because all doctors are college graduates and all colleges have become propaganda factories for Leftist ideology. That’s why so many doctors are on board with the idea that pediatricians, as part of the health check they conduct on their patients, need to find out if Mom and Dad are exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Having integrated that notion of political activism into the mental circuits of doctors, Leftist doctors  now have a new crusade. Per the New York Times, Doctor’s Should Tell Their Patients To Vote:

A prescription for democracy — not something you get at your average doctor’s visit — is increasingly on the minds of medical professionals these days.

The goal of doctors and nurses is, of course, to improve the health of our patients. We treat the immediacies of illness — antibiotics for pneumonia, inhalers for asthma — but good health requires much more than medications. We have to think about lifestyle: what our patients eat and how much they exercise. But a healthy lifestyle requires adequate housing, so some health centers are now helping homeless patients find a place to live and asthmatic patients rid their homes of mold. And in a country like ours, without universal health care, helping our patients stay healthy means that we have to be concerned about whether they have health insurance.

Suddenly, like Dr. Virchow, we are recognizing that our purview extends to the entire structure of our society and that politics is, as he put it, “nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Political decisions that affect insurance coverage, access to medical care, housing, minimum wage, immigration law, water sources — just to name a few examples — exert medical effects that are comparable with those of major diseases. Just ask the people of Flint, Mich.

What’s hilariously funny about the above-quoted opinion piece is that it argues (of course) for voting Democrat. As you think about that, please think about the fact that:

  • Flint is an entirely Democrat-run city
  • San Francisco has more fecal matter on the streets than some Third World countries, which is a manifest public health risk.
  • Southern California has massive typhus and hepatitis outbreaks.
  • The illegal immigrants flooding America’s southern border for the past ten years (at the Democrats’ request) have brought with them the wonders such as drug-resistant TB, chicken pox, hepatitis, scabies, chagas, and all sorts of ailments that had been pretty-much tamped down in modern America.

If doctors really want to improve their patients’ health through the ballot box, they’d better tell their patients to vote for Republicans.

I refuse to get outraged by the Lefts’ outrage. Not only am I engaging in the rectification of names when it comes to the “caravan that’s actually an invasion,” I’m also completely on board with Kurt Schlichter’s rectification of outrage. Or, as he says,

This may shock you, but I care less that a bunch of foreign barbarians killed a foreign barbarian supporter in a foreign country than I do about illegal alien foreign barbarians here in America killing Americans. A lot less.

This is yet another example of my – and perhaps your – shameless wrongthinking. I reject the elite’s fussy paradigm of Things That We Must Pretend Matter. I will stubbornly exercise my right not to get exercised over yet another outrage ginned up by people who are determined to manipulate me. It just ain’t happening.

[snip]

In the current convulsion, our moral and intellectual betters who make up our glorious elite are in a fake frenzy because Third World thugs are acting like Third World thugs. That Khashoggi guy was a journalist, damnit! Journalists are special! He wrote for the Washington Post, so he matters…not like that Kate Steinle girl, who was just some American who got in the way of a bullet fired by an illegal alien who the elite ensured was not deported. Everyone get mad, and then let’s cut loose our ally Saudi Arabia, which happens to be the long-term policy goal of the same liberal elite pushing this crisis. Weird how that works.

Oh, and how dare you mention that Khashoggi cavorted with Hamas and al-Qaeda types and generally loved radical Islam and hated America.

I’m not pro-chopping up political opponents, which I only feel the need to state because some willfully obtuse lib jerk is going to claim my refusal to freak out over bad people acting exactly like bad people act means I support chopping up political opponents.

Kurt’s point about avoiding the wrong types of outrage is why I’m blogging about a Honduran invasion but am not blogging about the Khashoggi story — which is an Iranian/Turkish narrative that our anti-American media gleefully pushes in hopes of destroying our ally, Saudi Arabia.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Saudi kingdom is a totalitarian Muslim nightmare and that it destructively pushed Wahabbism around the world. Having said that, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so the fact that Saudi Arabia aligns itself with Israel and the U.S. against Iran’s pursuit of world domination is something that matters more to me than the death of an al Qaeda loving, Muslim Brotherhood loving, antisemitic, anti-American, anti-Israel Saudi spook. Also, I haven’t forgotten that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, is trying pretty darn hard to drag his kingdom back from the sharia abyss.

(As an aside, I have read and highly recommend Kurt’s recent book, Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy. I’ll definitely review it, but first I want to write a post reviewing Mike McDaniel’s and SENTINEL’s superb License to Kill: The Murder of Erik Scott. There’s an order to these things, after all, so look for the reviews in the coming week.)

Corey “HimToo?!” Booker. Somehow the media is un-outraged by the fact that a gay man has raised a very credible rape claim against New Jersey Senator Corey “Spartawuss” Booker:

(You can read the documents more easily here.)

Under the standard that Spartawuss himself advanced, the gay sexual assault claim is true and the burden is on Spartawuss to rebut it with absolute, irrefutable proof that it could not have happened. But as I noted above, the media seems singularly disinterested in putting Spartawuss on the hot seat.

I happen to find credible the underlying contention that Booker is gay — not that there’s anything wrong with that. And I mean it: There’s nothing wrong with Booker being gay. There is something wrong, though, with him pulling a Hillary and pretending he’s not.

Will Hillary run again? And is there something even scarier than Hillary out there? I think if Hillary’s alive in 2020 (which seems iffy given her ongoing health problems), she’ll run again. If she is alive, of course, she won’t be the Walking Dead candidate. Instead, she’ll be the almost-a-Zombie candidate, driven to run because there’s nothing else in her head.

Michael Goodwin goes one further, saying that Hillary will have to run, because she’s still the intellectually bankrupt Democrat Party’s last, best hope:

In fact, shutting her up might push the party even deeper into the wilderness.

Implicit in the charge that Clinton is the problem is the assumption that others are the solution. It’s a fair point — until you try to name any Dem who has a better shot at serving as the party’s leader, uniting it around a message and potentially defeating Trump in 2020. After all, that’s the job that is vacant.

Goodwin then goes on the list the various Dumbo-crats shuffling around in the pre-election corral: Corey “HimToo?!” Booker, Kamala “the Slut” Harris, Kirsten “I will do anything to win” Gillibrand, and many more familiar names. Goodwin however forgot the most dangerous Democrat: Michelle Obama.

Despite Michelle’s periodic gaffes about never being proud of the country, she managed to keep her nose clean during Obama’s time in office, the media adores her, and women’s magazines spent eight years priming American women to accept her. She’s articulate, vicious, and a guarantee of Obama’s and Jarrett’s third term. I fear her.

Here’s one who can’t win. Michael “Creepy Porn Lawyer” Avenatti has repeatedly asserted that he can win against Trump in 2020. By doing so, Avenatti has also made it obvious that he’s bat guano crazy.

The recent $4.85 million judgment against him is only the tip of Avenatti’s financial iceberg. A remarkably in-depth post at The Daily Beast details Avenatti’s high-flying lifestyle, along with his consistent pattern of defaulting on debt obligations, including child support and taxes:

Both the Eagan Avenatti law firm and a shuttered Seattle coffee chain, which Avenatti says he no longer owns, owe millions in unpaid taxes and judgments, according to court documents and filings with local recorder’s offices.

Tax liens filed in Orange County also show that Avenatti has personally owed at least $1.2 million in federal taxes on top of the corporate debts. One lien, filed in February 2018, was for $308,396, while another filed in August 2015 showed a balance of $903,987. The Daily Beast did not find records showing the liens were released, but Avenatti claims both debts were “fully paid.”

As you read the article, you’ll see that those serious financial defalcations are only the beginning.

Remember: Democrats are not democratic. One of the things you might have noticed about my blog is that I never write “Democratic Party.” I always write “Democrat Party.” Not only is the latter the correct official name for the party, the former is a misnomer, as there’s nothing democratic about a party that throws Electoral College votes to its chosen candidate, rather than the people’s (stupid) choice. Moreover, this is a party that has two tiers: the all-powerful elites at the top and the mob at the bottom. Again, nothing democratic about it.

And you know who else gets that the Party has a naming problem? Donald Trump. Yup. Listen:

It’s not the weapon, it’s the culture. In Israel and Switzerland, every adult is trained to use arms, and both countries have citizens who rarely commit violent crimes, especially gun crimes.

England used to have legal guns while maintaining a low crime rate. Now England has no guns, and London has banned all sharp objects including screw drivers, but the knife crime rate continues to escalate in both frequency and intensity:

The number of stabbing victims with life-threatening injuries treated by specialist trauma doctors has increased by 34% in two years, according to NHS figures obtained by the Guardian.

Doctors are also reporting an increase in the severity of attacks, with victims increasingly arriving in hospital with multiple puncture wounds

“Previously we used to see one or two wounds per victim. Now we are frequently seeing multiple wounds, five or sometimes 10 stab injuries on a single patient”, said Dr Ross Davenport, a consultant trauma and vascular surgeon at the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel, east London

Figures from nine of the NHS’s 11 regional major trauma centres in England that treat adults and children show that they dealt with 1,697 victims of serious knife crime in 2015-16 but 2,278 in 2017-18 – up 34.2%. Cases involving adults have risen 37%, whereas under-18s have jumped by 24.4%.

At King’s College hospital in London, the number of adults treated for knife wounds rose from 249 in 2015-16 to 406 last year. The capital’s three other major trauma centres also saw big increases over the same two-year period.

Other cities have also seen the same trend. At Southampton general hospital, cases have almost doubled in the past two years, with the number of adults rising from 68 to 134 and under-18s from seven up to 13.

Hospitals have also treated more child stabbing victims. At the South Tees trust, they rose from 10 in 2015-16 to 26 last year; and from three to 12 at Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital.

English culture had become non-violent over the centuries. In the last 20 years, though, the English have imported violence — and now they’re stuck with it (pun intended). Or as Brendan O’Neill says about Britain’s “moral cowardice”:

Britain is a country where a politician putting his hand on a middle-class woman’s knee causes more outrage than the sexual abuse of scores of working-class girls by men from Pakistani backgrounds.

It’s not the weapon, it’s the culture.

The Left’s sick, sick culture. Despite his NeverTrump monomania, Kevin Williamson is still a brilliant cultural commentator. His insights are clearly on display in The Witches of Bushwick, which takes as its starting point Leftist witches who want to make Justice Kavanaugh “suffer”:

Dakota Bracciale, owner of the [witch][ shop, tells Newsweek: “We know the system is broken, and the people in charge need to be taken down by any means necessary, magical or otherwise. . . . This is basically Antifa witches — we’re coming for these people’s throats.”

Question: Does that sound like a disagreement about politics to you?

Occasionally, our friends on the left do us the favor of making plain that which conservative critics have inferred about their ranks: that they are intellectually unserious, that they are damaged, that they are high on rage, that they have made a religion of politics.

[snip]

Bracciale: “We will never stop, we will never be silenced. There are a lot of angry people who are righteously filled with rage that are going to take back our country.”

“Righteous rage” is the great addiction of the moment — not opiates, not nicotine, not sugar — and it is a very tough habit to kick.

[snip]

The witches of Bushwick are not resolved that Justice Kavanaugh has erroneous views about constitutional interpretation — they are resolved that he must suffer.

Suffering was the secondary aim of the smear campaign launched against Kavanaugh by Senator Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats during his confirmation hearing: If the primary objective (defeating Kavanaugh’s nomination and delaying another until Democrats are in a better position in Congress) could not be accomplished, then at least the Democrats could pursue the secondary objective: using any means necessary, magical or otherwise, to inflict suffering on Kavanaugh — and on his wife, on his children, on his friends and colleagues — as a warning to future nominees, a strong disincentive for leading legal minds to forgo the relative ease and affluence of a top-flight legal career for the relatively low pay, drudgery — and, now, obligatory and systematic slander — of public service.

All that rage ends in a very ugly, profoundly un-American place.

Those people need a reminder about what makes America great (h/t Seraphic Secret):

Another one of Norway’s Greatest Generation bites the dust. Looking at today’s Norway, it’s hard to imagine that it was once pro-American and that it once had a cohort of moral young people dedicated to liberity. Bruce Bawer has written a lovely elegy honoring that generation, especially Joachim Ronneberg, who helped prevent Hitler from going nuclear during the war (literally) and who just passed away at 99 years old.

Funny or horrifying? You decide. This short video of women (in Spain? Latin America?) flexing their political muscle is definitely NSFW.

A flowery coda to my Japan trip. Two days after I got back from Japan, I followed a link (and I don’t remember where I found the link) to an article about Japanese floral arrangements for funerals. Needless to say, they are stunning.

By the way, if Japanese culture fascinates you, you should check to see whether your local television carrier offers a show called Cool JapanI can’t recommend it enough as a wonderful way to catch up on all things Japanese.