Sad Stories

Posted on 10/02/2023 by Grumpa Joe

It has been too long since I last posted. I am determined to write something interesting today, at least interesting to me. I have so many subjects to write about that now I am confused about which to select. The China balloon, or the last book I read about human trafficking, or about Joe Biden’s lame State of the Union address, the earthquake in Turkey, or my last Lions meeting.

The one excitement within our Lions club is that we are re-starting our vision screening program for kids. We first began in 2016 and were gaining momentum when COVID-19 hit and we had to stop. Up to that fatal time, we had screened 2100 kids ages 2-5 and found 75 that needed a visit to an eye doctor. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the goal is to find the needles. Lions believe that all kids should have the same starting point in school. If one or more kids have vision problems they will be at a disadvantage among their peers. To level the playing field it is our goal to find the disadvantaged and to urge them to get help. Thankfully, most of them do. There are some parents who will rush to the eye doctor after getting our results, and then there are others who are skeptical, and choose to wait for the child to grow out of the problem. We even learned about an Optometrist who sent a child home declaring that he was too young and that his eyes were still changing. We can only do so much.

Lions KidSight Vision Screening

The latest book I read is “The Great Escape, A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America,” by Saket Soni. All I will say is that this story made me ashamed that I am an American. The treatment that was extended to these men from India was unbelievably atrocious. All they wanted was to use their skills as welders. The agents who recruited them used the lure of getting a Green Card. The Green Card is the ticket to migrate into the country. I know it doesn’t come easy nor quickly, nor cheaply. I have been working with US Immigration to get a green card for Lovely. To date it has been two years, a bushel basket full of money, and too many forms all of which end with one’s signature and fine print that says lying on these forms is a federal offense punishable with jail. Yet these recruiters dangled the carrot of the Green Card in front of hundreds of welders to get them to come to the USA. The charge for this service was twenty thousand US dollars. The author tells of the personal hardships they went through to get that much money together. Most times the family sold their home to sponsor a son. Other families put the condition of marriage on the son before they would allow him to go.

Human Trafficking

The saddest thing about this scam was that the perpetrators didn’t give a damn about the workers. They lived in primitive cramped barracks, fed rotten food, worked long hours without breaks and were not allowed to leave the guarded compound in which they were trapped. An even sadder story began when the men, led by a Community Organizer, escaped the compound as a group to protest their enslavement, and the US Government treated them just as badly. Once I began reading this story, I could not put the book down. I had to know the final outcome.

I rushed home from the Lions Board meeting just so I could hear President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. He didn’t disappoint me he merely blamed all problems of the Republicans and promised to spend trillions of dollars more on nothing projects. I have listened to politicians proclaim that money is needed for rebuilding our infrastructure, and then the money is spent but not a single road or bridge is rebuilt. Same-old, same-old bullshit is fed to the masses who eat the lines with relish.

I thought for sure President Joe would take a shot at the balloon to make some points with the voters, but he procrastinated long enough to let the spyloon pass over the entire country before he shot it down. The reason he gave for not doing it while it passed over Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas was that the debris would be harmful to us on the ground. Evidently none of our military advisors or the president have ever been to that part of the country before or they would know that it is the safest place for debris to fall because the populations of those states is near zero. Instead he waited until the balloon got pictures of every military base in states all across the continent. I guess these same people who never saw these states don’t believe that the pictures could be downloaded to China before he finally wasted a missile on it.

The Real Reason Joe Shot Down the Chi-balloon

Finally, the Lions Clubs International Foundation is asking the one hundred and fifty million Lions from all over the world to send money to their disaster relief fund to help the people of Turkey and Syria who have been killed in and displaced by the massive earthquake that collapsed their cities. That is even sadder than the story about the hundreds of welders from India who were enslaved within the one country in the world that believes in freedom and liberty.

Turkey, a Five Story Pile of Rubble

Filed under: Book Review, family, Government, Immigration, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Taught Hatred

Posted on 25/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe

During World War Two I was taught to hate the Japanese. It didn’t matter that I never knew a single person of Japanese heritage, but the teaching was effective. I learned to hate Japan and Japanese people. At the time we had limited sources for news, mainly newspapers delivered to the house, or newsreels at the movie houses. Our regular paper was the Sun-Times dropped on our porch every day. I delivered the paper myself to many neighbors. Although we didn’t go to the movies often, but when we did, we saw government screened images of the war before the featured film. I would have been five or six years old at the time. Mom and Dad didn’t go to the movies often, so the film images of war that I saw were limited. The headlines on the newspaper featured large scale photos of war with large bold print proclaiming battles. Inside, the stories added wordy pictures of the carnage that went on. Whatever it was, I don’t really know, but I was seeded with a lifetime hatred for all things Japanese.

Shortly, after WW II ended the United States became involved in the Korean conflict. This time I was a teen ager and went to the movies regularly. Again, the brainwashing about Koreans who vaguely look like Japanese began. I still hadn’t met anyone who was of either Japanese or Korean ancestry.

It wasn’t until I went to the University of Illinois that I began to meet people of different races. There was a large population of Chinese, Indians (from India) and a few Iranians. Many of my professors in engineering classes were from India. That is when I finally began to see different people as people and not as war. It turned out that one of them was an Iranian named Dark Mirfahkrai. We became fast friends and I once asked him if he would stay in America after he graduated. He explained that he pledged his allegiance to the Shah and felt a moral obligation to return to his homeland. I learned that foreign people were not much different than I was. I did dislike foreign teachers only because I couldn’t understand what t hey said. Their pronunciation of English was horrible. But thanks to the quiz-classes that were a part of the lectures I survived. Most of these were led by upper class men who were headed for Master Degrees.

When I entered the working world another source of input crept into my life. There were always story’s about how our major industries were being lost to the Japanese. My fellow workers were often very vociferous about companies that raced to leave America for cheap labor in Korea and Japan.

In the nineteen sixties we were invaded by Japanese car companies with cute economy cars that were considerably cheaper than USA made product, namely, Nissan and Toyota. Nissan was so afraid to market a Japanese sounding car that they didn’t put their real name on the product. Datsun was really Nissan, and stayed Datsun for a number of years. I fell in love with a cute little Toyota Corolla station wagon, and bought one for less than eighteen hundred dollars. The VW Bug was priced at that and I was tired of the problems I had with mine so I opted to change.

Owning that little car is what caused me to develop a deep seated hatred for Japan and all things Japanese. Up until the Toyota I owned cars for a minimum of eight years, I sold the Corolla after two years and during those twenty-four months it spent six months in the dealer service department. That is when I coined the phrase “Jap-Crap.”

About that time I met my first real bona-fide Japanese person. Mike Fujimoto was Council Level Boy Scout volunteer. His name was well known throughout the Chicago Area Council and he was a true Scouter. I attended several of his training sessions and he turned my thinking around about Japanese. He was American born of Japanese migrant parents, just like I was American born of Hungarian parents. He was in scouts to give his son the best possible experience he could have, as was I. I didn’t hate Japanese people as much after I met Mike, but I did hate Japanese cars and their shitty quality. I never even looked at a Japanese car for forty years after that. My kids, on the other hand, would not buy American. I had friends at work who bragged about their great experiences with Honda and Toyota, but I stayed firm. What finally got to me is when my Assistant Chief Engineer Hank told me he had to take his Honda in for service at 140,000 miles to replace the gas filler tube. I finally relented and bought a Toyota Avalon sixteen years ago and I still love it. Everything still works, and there is no rust anywhere, and it still runs great, and I now love Jap-Crap.

This brings me to the real reason I am writing this story. I just finished reading “Bridge to the Sun” by Bruce Henderson. It is about American born Japanese men who joined/or were drafted to fight in WW II. It has totally erased my hatred for Japanese Americans, and Japanese people. I learned that these people should be commended for putting up with fighting two wars simultaneously, first was WW II against the Japanese, and second the racist hatred they endured from their own people, us, me.

Filed under: Biography, Immigration, Manufacturing | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Stupid Is As Stupid Does-#220923

Posted on 20/09/2022 by Grumpa Joe

America the land of the free is led by the most idiotic people on the face of the planet. I am an American, first generation Hungarian. My parents came to America in the early nineteen twenties, they paid for their transport, found places to live, and jobs. They followed the rules and became citizens by learning the language, the civic process, fulfilled the residency rule to live here for five years, they met, married, and had four kids, I am number three. My older brothers learned English in grade school. I am a supporter of immigrants and immigration.

Ellis Island Medical Inspection

About six years ago, I met and became friends with a lady from a former USSR bloc country who came to America via a slightly unrecognized procedure. Over a thirty year span she applied for a visa at the US embassy multiple times to visit her aging aunt in New Jersey, and was denied each time. No reason was given. Demoralized, she answered an ad in a local newspaper in her home town which guaranteed entry into the United States. Her follow-up got her an airplane ticket and entry into America. For the past twenty years she has been looking over her shoulder and living in fear that an immigration officer will find her.

A couple of years ago I agreed to sponsor her to gain legal status. She hired a lawyer and has spent over ten thousand dollars and filed numerous immigration forms through her attorney. At this time her application is two years old and she has not yet received her “Green Card.” Those with a Green Card have status within the country to apply for an identification card, a social security number, and it opens many doors of opportunity to an immigrant. It also allows the immigrant to travel between America and their home country, and be allowed to return. Imagine my exasperation when I read a news article about the US giving current illegal immigrants an automatic green card. I lost it. I should have advised this lady to fly to Mexico and to then walk across the border to gain an automatic green card without a lawyer, and without spending an exorbitant amount of money.

California Border Crossers

I have decided to write a letter to my Congressman and Senators to enact legislation to wipe out every law on the books. If we are not going to follow the laws why should we even have them, to protect the politically elite? Let’s just stop kidding ourselves and do the job right. Stop the nonsense and fire all the police, judges, courts, law makers, and anything even remotely connected to laws. The people of this country can take care of themselves. But beware, many of us would most likely decide that politicians are also no longer necessary. At the rate we are going it will only be a matter of years before we re-enter the Neanderthal age of lawlessness where the only thing a man had to worry about was giving his family food, shelter, and protection from predators.

The people of the United States and Europe have all lost the meaning of life. We are fighting Mother Nature. Every species of mammal, reptiles, aquatic, insect, what-ever, exists to survive. That means they procreate. What we have chosen to do is to selfishly deny procreation to the point of needing to import people from other places to survive.

Liberals are so worried about the planet, global warming, and extinction that they have decided to stop it with hair-brained schemes to save us. At the current rate of population growth the white race will be extinct in three hundred years, at the current rate of global warming the earth has about three hundred years before we even have to consider it a problem, in about three hundred years we will use up all fossil fuels and the air will only contain man-made radioactivity, and not all that nasty stuff we get from fossil fuels. The ultimate hypocrisy of the left is using the argument that they want to save the planet for our kids and grandchildren yet they support abortion, and not having kids. As Forest Gump so famously said “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Filed under: Biography, family, Immigration | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Too Big to Work

Posted on 15/04/2022 by Grumpa Joe

For the first time in the history of this blog the blogger took a month off from writing. It feels good. The time has come, however, that I must resume posting. Today I am overloaded with ideas and the result is I’m confused. There is nothing worse than a writer who has a confused mind. I hope today’s result turns into something worth your time to read.

Lovely and I are beginning to settle down to a more normal life. In the past month she and I had to prepare for an Immigration interview. For those of you like me who have never had to face off with Uncle to answer a seemingly unlimited number of questions dealing with your personal life, I can only say that it is intimidating. At the same time Lovely had to renew her passport, which in itself is not a big deal, except she decided to keep my name, and to change it on her passport. The passport is easy, changing the name is a little bit more complicated. All of it involved searching for birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce decrees, and a new marriage certificate. Still pretty simple except that foreign governments don’t want documents in a language different than theirs. This has forced me to get proficient at finding interpreters, and the meaning of the word “Apostille.”

Add to this pressure a decision by Lovely’s grandson to accept our invitation to come and live with us. After spending three years clearing my home of unnecessary stuff I find myself absorbing the grandson’s stuff which includes the stuff of his recently deceased father who lived in a three bedroom house with a two car garage loaded with stuff. There were days in the past month when I didn’t have the energy to drag myself into bed at night.

Since the tension of passing the point of knowing that Lovely will not be deported is over life has become a little easier. I can deal with moving stuff, but dealing with the Department of Homeland Security-US Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services leaves me a bit frazzled. When I hear the words “our immigration system is broken” I now kind of understand what they are talking about. One question just keeps coming into mind over, and over, why did we allow it to get this way?

I see a new profession being formed in the USA. Actually, it is already in business, i.e. Immigration Lawyers. What I really see is that the need for people who can negotiate the too many forms and loop holes contrived over years of Congressional band-aids correcting the system will require a complete annihilation of the USCIS and every law regarding immigration. A new sheet of paper is necessary and the law should be limited to one page.

As an example, one of the last requests an immigrant in this process has to complete is Form I-693. I downloaded form I-693 and it is thirteen pages long. After reading it, I concluded that it is not even good toilet paper. Those pages merely explain that an immigrant must have inoculations for various diseases. That information can be stated on a half a page. Most of the boiler plate deals with the ramifications of falsifying information, and how long one will spend in federal prison if he does so. The USCIS can save a lot of money, and make things simpler by removing paragraphs stating what kind of trouble you will have if you falsify any bit of information on a form. Every form, and there are thousands of them, contains threats to lock you up. Getting back to I-693, the final result is a medical form completed by a registered Civil Surgeon declaring you are disease free and inoculated. The CS must sign it, date it, and seal it in a number ten envelope, and the immigrant must present this sealed report to the immigration officer conducting the interview (more like an interrogation). The initial application is a many page questionnaire which is completed at home, and sent in. The interrogator has the form with your answers in front of him during the interview. He asks the same questions that the immigrant has already answered, and is merely waiting to trip up the victim with an answer that is different. The idea, I suppose, is to determine if the victim can be prosecuted for falsifying his answers.

Here is my prediction on the matter of fixing immigration law in the USA, it’ll never happen. The bureaucracy is too large and the backlog of thousands of immigrants now being shuttled across the border illegally will take a thousand years to fix. I am in favor of a complete amnesty only if it comes with a totally new and streamlined immigration process, but Congress doesn’t have the balls to do the work.

If we as citizens of the USA want to have a great government we must decide to eliminate every unnecessary bureaucracy, and there are many of them. It boils down to asking ourselves what good does a specific bureau do for us? If you are honest with yourself you will realize that each and every department invented by government to make our lives better are doing the opposite. The cost of paying millions of employees to sit and invent forms is too great to support.

Filed under: Biography, Conservative, family, Immigration | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Osama Was Right

Posted on 11/09/2021 by Grumpa Joe

Osama bin Laden was correct when he stated that the United States doesn’t have the stomach for war and that we would lose interest before long and quit. On this anniversary of 9/11 we have witnessed a retreat from Afghanistan that we didn’t like. Our President wanted a quick and complete withdrawal which he accomplished. Twenty years ago we as a people had developed a hatred for Muslims but today I sense a different attitude. At least from our leaders I sense a softening attitude, one of forgiveness and back pedaling.

The Muslim world has never been one to live amicably alongside the Christian world. I remember my grandfather who was born in Hungary 1876 told me stories about how the Hungarians always wound up driving the Ottomans out of Europe. They have not stopped trying. They now use a new approach using population growth s the weapon. In countries like France they are succeeding and they will succeed in the USA also. Muslims are not hung up on birth control and abortion as the caucasian world is. Their current plan is to migrate into a country and then to populate, populate, populate. They have control over their women and thus the poor lady’s cannot say boo about their plight. The males use their four wife limit to the fullest and populate, populate, and populate. Eventually, they will out number caucasians and take over peaceably.

Only the anxious Muslims need to go to war. They are too impatient to do it by population control. they would rather do it by subjugation. Thus we have the likes of ISIS, Taliban, and Al Queda to deal with. Their thrust is to take over by intimidation, killing, and war. It has taken us twenty years to forget the threat of 9/11 and the loss of so many lives, but we have. Even today, the anniversary day there is little being said about the Muslim threat to the world. In the meantime we continue to squander our wealth and resources trying to convince them to accept capitalism and democracy as the way. What we should have been doing, and should do in the future is to squander our resources on never ending bombs that will put an end to the entire scourge. In my gardening world we try not to use radical warfare against the evil weed, but there comes a time when we are forced into using Roundup as the method of eradication. Even with the use of chemicals like Roundup there is always a survivor. It may take a couple of years for it to happen but the survivors again begin spreading around the yard to take it over.

In my world I have learned that if I keep doing the same thing over and over again without a positive outcome that I have achieved the definition of insanity.

We have reached that point with Islam.

Filed under: family, Government, Immigration, Islam | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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