Feed the Birds

Posted on 03/12/2024 by Grumpa Joe

It might be my imagination that thousands of birds are seeking food at feeders this fall. Flocks of hundreds swarm through the skies in swooping aerial gymnastics and land near a feeding place. I poured a pound of sunflower seed into the backyard feeder this morning. As I write this, flying critters like English Sparrows, Chickadees, House Wrens, Gold Finches, and some that I don’t recognize are staging themselves in the adjacent juniper shrub, waiting for an opportunity to fly in and join the party. I read somewhere that when birds feed like crazy it is because a storm is coming and they are stocking up to survive the atrocious weather; it is called a “feeding frenzy.” I enjoy feeding them and recognize that with the nasty twenty degree(F) weather we are experiencing they need all the help I can give them. Like all things the cost of seed has skyrocketed and my pockets are not as deep as they were a year ago.

Numerous birds feed from the feeder
Three squirrels feed off the ground below the bird feeder

This experience with the birds is not unlike the swarms of immigrants crossing our borders to escape unhealthy conditions in their home countries. Like the birds, we feed and house them, and unless they can find work and earn a living, we must continue doing so. We can’t just put them in a motel for a week and feed them once, hoping the problem disappears. They are hungry every day. The problem, as I see it, is that these immigrants will cost me a lot more than a fifty-pound bag of sunflower seeds every two or three weeks. Feeding a few birds and or immigrants is not the same as feeding swarms of them. How do we deal with the problem?

One answer is to send them back home, but they left home because they were unhappy. We should not be concerned about their level of happiness as long as they are not starving and have shelter. Our so-called broken immigration system was carefully drafted to give the country time to assimilate new people into our culture. What is broken is the law. It is being broken daily by those who supposedly should be enforcing it.

I agree that the world has a shrinking population problem, but I also remember that not long ago people were going crazy about overpopulation. The cry was for abortion, birth control, and various schemes dedicated to keeping the planet from being ruined by too many people. Hell, China went so far as to adopt a one-child law, and they vigorously enforced it. If a Chinese couple wanted a second baby and defied the rule, they might suddenly learn that they no longer had a job or an apartment. The law worked so well that the government soon learned that there would not be enough people to care for the elderly. Now, China is panicking and encouraging more babies to be born. Except, the young people who are in the child bearing years have learned that having babies is expensive and also hard work. Without saying it, they are sending a message to the CCP to go pound sand. It is their problem, they created it, and it is theirs to deal with.

The shrinking population has also affected the USA. Like the CCP, our ruling leaders have decided to solve the problem by importing new people from countries where young people still like to have babies. Instead of doing this correctly by changing the laws to increase our population through immigration, they decided to open the borders and let the world in. I believe that the entire world population would immigrate to the USA if we were dumb enough to allow it.

Recently, I sponsored an immigrant to come to the USA. Except they were already here. It so happened that they came no matter what or how. I hired an attorney to help me make things legal. The process took three and a half years, about ten thousand dollars, and the immigration department required untold numbers of forms to be completed (I-130, I-131, I-485, I-601, I-765, G-28, I might be wrong, but I assume there are continuous form numbers to fill in all the gaps in between those I used. That would imply that there are well over a thousand forms in the immigration system all dealing with very specific cases.) . The forms are all in English but unintelligible because they are in the language of Immigration Services, and only those people trained in that system understand them. We also had three face-to-face interviews during which the immigrant was interrogated relentlessly. Thankfully, we hired an language interpreter to work with us so the questions could be answered lawfully. Many of the questions they asked were already answered in writing as they were directly from the forms submitted. It was obvious to me that they were trying to trip up the immigrant with answers different from those on the form.

Yes, the system is very hard to deal with, but our lawmakers made it that way. Any time a new case arrived that the standard forms couldn’t address, they revised the form to accept the case or invented a new form. Each form has a number. In our case the form numbers ranged from one hundred and thirty to seven hundred and sixty-five. Immigration officers must use the forms exactly as written. They must assure that the immigrant has answered the question validly, if not, the application is denied. .

This process was very much different than the one that was in place when my parents arrived on Ellis Island in the nineteen twenties. I must give our country credit for allowing over 1.4 million immigrants into the country lawfully every year. There is not another country in the world that is as generous with its immigration quotas. It is just in the last few decades that we have lost it and have decided to break our own rules. The existing system is generous to a fault. It is designed to let good healthy people in, and to give the country time to allow the newcomers to culturally assimilate, learn the language, find jobs, and housing. What we did over the last four years was to allow as many people into the country to make a new city the size of New York literally, over night.

Finally, I recommend that if you have kids, grandkids, nephews, nieces, advise them to become lawyers specializing in immigration law. They will have lifetime employment. Secondly, I urge you to feed the birds.

Filed under: Birds, Garden, Immigration | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Traffic

Posted on 21/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

The word traffic raises my ire. There are many kinds of traffic, like automobiles, the internet, telephone, accidents, etc. Automobile traffic is the one that gets my nostrils flaming. Thirty-two years ago, I moved to Frankfort because the traffic around my home in Alsip was too heavy. I was a bike rider then and commuted to work by bicycle. Ten miles of pedaling was a healthy challenge every morning., and a hazard in the evening hours on the way home.

This morning, Saturday, I enjoyed the pleasure of driving Lovely to the mall so she could shop without me hanging around her every step. I was amazed by the number of cars on the road. When I first moved to Frankfort in 1991, US 45, also known as LaGrange Road was a lonely two-lane country road. The drive to Orland Park Mall was a joy. This morning, the traffic was heavy, with three lanes of traffic streaming steadily northward toward the mall. There was an especially heavy number of NASCAR wannabes inserting themselves in and out between lanes, recklessly cutting drivers off and endangering themselves and the rest of us in the process. Of course the towns in between have all grown Frankfort is up to twenty thousand, Tinley Park is over 100,000, and Orland Park is most certainly over 100,000. Many of these people have arrived by migrating from Chicago, and Indiana. Chicago is a jobs magnet, and the suburbs are their housing.

This drive got me thinking about Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 50,000 recently inundated with another 20,000 new people. Using a simple ratio, I calculated that for Chicago to appreciate the same extent of hardship, the city of 2,600,000 would have to absorb 1,040,000 new people overnight. Then, I rememberd that Chicago is a convention town. They often have several conventions in town at the same time and can house hundreds of thousands of people in the many hotels. But they couldn’t provide permanent homes for that many people without pushing them into the surrounding suburbs. Even then, the place would be overflowing with tents-camps all around the county. No doubt the weekend people-shot-count would increase. Some Chicagoans are reluctant neighbors even to people they know.

The drain on services would be heavy. The city would be hard-pressed to hire more social services clerks to fill out forms for new residents, and help would only arrive once they had the proper infrastructure to handle the crowd. As the years pass, the tent cities will become permanent, and the auto auctions will be short of used junk cars as the new residents will buy them up and begin driving to their jobs as dishwashers and grasscutters. The city council will be flooded with complaints from the original residents claiming that the local hospitals, like Stroger, County, Rush, University of Illinois, and Northwestern are all going bankrupt because of the flood of new patients coming to their ERs with new diseases they have never treated before. Why is it that the immigrants only become visible in hospitals? How could it be if they come with ailments from countries where healthcare is free?

Just yesterday, I was amazed when I had to take Lovely to Rush Hospital for an MRI that her foreign-speaking doctor ordered for her. Lovely can speak enough English to get by, and she needs help understanding the English words from another mouth. However, she has the luck of the Irish and always encounters a nurse or technician who speaks one of the foreign languages she grew up with. When we checked in at the MRI place the nurse detected her accent within a minute and asked if she spoke Polish. Of course Lovely speaks Polish. That ended her reliance on me. The nurse walked her to the MRI waiting room and inserted a line for use in injecting a contrast to make a better picture. A very attractive red headed technician arrived and within a few seconds she began speaking Russian with Lovely, and that totally ended my job as interpreter and demoted me to driver.

What amazes me is that every hospital or clinic we visit has foreign language interpreters on call to help doctors get the answers they need to diagnose. When a bill arrives from an insurance company, there is always one or more pages with instructions informing a foreign language speaking person of their rights. The instructions are usually one or two sentences, but these same instructions are repeated in many different languages filling two sides of a sheet of paper. Many of the languages use alphabet that are unrecognizable to me, like Russian, Greek, Chinese, and Arabic, and who knows where these countries are and what language they speak. What ever happened to the Ellis Island immigrants who were faced with only english speaking clerks checking them in. It doesn’t matter, we let them in and the government tells them they have rights now.

I feel for Springfield, Ohio. They have a huge cross to bear, but as good Christians, they want to do it. My kudos to them.

Filed under: Biography, health care, Immigration, Society | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Divided We Fall

Posted on 07/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

This is one of those days when I don’t have anything to write about. So, I’ll resort to beginning with words that might not make sense at the start but may mean something by the time I finish. When I experienced my greatest readership a few years ago, I was writing opinion pieces about Obama. At the time, I thought he was a born-in-Africa communist dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and pretending to love this country. Today, I am quite certain that he is a communist born in Kenya. He was hell bent on implementing his communist father’s proposal to redistribute the wealth of America, and dividing the country into hate groups. The President of Kenya hired him, and promptly fired him when Daddy Obama began to propose his plan to take from the rich to feed the poor.

The hate groups BO tickled into functioning were not just black vs white, they were Muslims against Christians, queers against straight, Europe against Russia, the world against China, etc. the list is endless. There is more division in America today than there has ever been among peoples of the world since the beginning of time. He couldn’t accomplish the deed while in office illegally, so helped steal the last election from Trump, his greatest enemy, for a candidate that he himself believes to be a dimwit. He knew he could control the dimwit from within the depths of the Deep State bureaucracy.

During his presidency, Obama was afraid he might be exposed as a charlatan if he pushed the radical left too hard to bankrupt America. In walks the dimwit, who immediately erased every positive move Trump made while in office, he ignored all existing laws, and proceeded to open the border to allow millions of unvetted immigrants to cross. The dimwit then bussed, flew, and transported them to unidentified cities across the country and assured them that America would care for them with free stuff. At the same time, dimwit began a deep-state war against Trump to ensure that his innovative ideas to save the country will never happen. In effect, Obama granted himself a third term as president.

We all know that Obama was elected under the guise of affirmative action. We needed a black president to cool the 20 percent of the population that feels they need a savior to lead them to the promised land. The promised land where they can live happily ever after, stealing people’s stuff and shooting each other at will. I feel sorry for the blacks who live righteous lives, and I despise the blacks who are spoiling life for their brothers and sisters. Obama and dimwit will label me a racist for saying that.

We are a nation with our heads in the sand regarding placing blame where it belongs. The powers that be ignore that the lousy education system is the result of teacher unions that are more interested in making a fortune for doing nothing than in taking responsibility for poor educational outcomes. The Congress is responsible for drafting and passing stupid laws creating a culture of black families without fathers. Congress is responsible for never repealing stupid laws only making them more stupid by amending them with more complicated twists, turns, and loop holes. Congress is also responsible for abdicating to the lobby industry all responsibility to write laws. Congress, then fills the lobby written laws with pages full of porky earmarks that help them get re-elected. When will the common man be allowed to lobby a congressman to write laws that make sense and might even work? The DOJ must be renamed to the Department of Injustice for dividing law against order.

Our government does not work the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. For one thing, I’m positive that George Washington and his cabinet did not envision the mess we have brought upon ourselves. The first immigration law was passed in 1892 and has been enhanced, improved, and complicated at least ten more times since its inception. The number of people working for all the immigration services has changed from 180 in 1891 to about 320,000 in 2024. Politicians love to blame every problem at the border on our “broken” immigration system. The problem as I see it is that they have so much help and so many conflicting policies that they are tripping over themselves trying to get the job done.

My personal experience with immigration came when I offered to help an immigrant who has lived in America for over twenty years but is not considered ‘legal’. I couldn’t live with that, so I made it my responsibility to get the immigrant processed as quickly as possible. To date, it has cost nearly ten thousand dollars, and it has been three years in the making, but still no Green Card. There is no estimate for how long the process will take. Most of the cost is for processing fees. The excuse I get is that the Law makes the immigrant responsible for the cost of his becoming ‘legal’. I see a future in this racket for immigration attorneys who specialize in understanding the laws and its loopholes. And there are loopholes a many. In trying to understand how complicated the system is I have visited the USCIS website many times and have learned that there are over 500 different forms that pertain to the laws with provisions for loop holes in each. Depending on an immigrant’s specific situation decides which form is used to use. After examining several of them I learned that the government is paranoid about anyone telling a lie on a form. Each form has a half page codicil of fine print explaining the penalty for lying on an application. Most penalties are jail, deportation, and/or fines.

My question is this: how many years will it take to:

1.) Find ten million people who have entered the country in the past three years without the necessary paperwork?

2.) How long will it be before these people achieve legal status?

While we await the answer to those questions Congress, no doubt, will spend its time drafting new revisions and laws to make the processing more complicated. They will then spend endless hours on TV news programs explaining how these new laws make us more secure than the previous law did.

Hopefully, I fulfilled my promise at the beginning by delivering final words that make sense.

Filed under: Conservative, Government, Immigration | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

A New Year

Posted on 04/01/2024 by Grumpa Joe

It is the fourth day of the new year, and I realized I still need to post something. I didn’t make any resolutions because I would only break them. Instead, I am getting up earlier and heading for my workshop sooner. My latest intarsia work is coming along, but I haven’t been inspired to name it yet.

I am in a phase of work where patience is an absolute necessity, and I lose it after a couple of hours. Today was a perfect example. I began to lose interest, and my back ached from standing. I removed my apron and headed for a nice, comfortable chair. I want to visit my daughter this afternoon and make a pot of beef stroganoff before tipping the vodka and changing chairs. The daughter’s hip is healing well. The screws holding her hip bone together have been removed, and she is walking with assistance. She is still a long way from coming home.

The news about current large sanctuary cities all crying to Uncle that they don’t have resources to pay for housing new migrants is disturbing to me. Whatever happened to live up to the sentiment expressed by the poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . .” ? It seems to me that we love to recite these words whenever we speak about accepting immigrants into the United States. Very often, it is by guys like me whose parents were immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. When it comes to helping immigrants, we often forget we are wearing big-boy pants and zipp up the purse in our pockets. I admit that I support immigration that follows the immigration laws of the USA, but I don’t support migrants coming into the country illegally. The rules were enacted for valid reasons: migrants need time to assimilate into the population, migrants need time to find jobs to support themselves, and migrants need housing, food, and safety. We, the people, prefer that migrants allowed in are healthy and not bring diseases with them. We lawfully admit one million new people every year. The current President has violated his oath of office to defend and honor the Constitution by adopting the open borders policy. He has deliberately exposed himself to impeachment. Over six million migrants have crossed the border into America since he has been in office. In his term, the law has allowed three million people in, but he has allowed an additional six point two million more. No wonder the mayors of Sanctuary cities are protesting. The government is quietly shipping these migrants around the country and dropping them off to fend for themselves. The receiving cities often are not even aware of what is happening. The governors and mayors of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, all border states with points of entry, are overwhelmed by the influx of strangers invading their cities. For example, El Paso, Texas, with a population of 680,000 people, receives as many as sixty thousand new people each month, or ten percent. Imagine if your town had ten percent more new people every month. In my town of Frankfort, it would mean adding 2000 new migrants monthly. When I moved here thirty years ago, the population was at 4000, and now it is up to 20,000. There has been a constant growth of new neighborhoods, shopping centers, schools, and services added all along the way. The only way we could house two thousand extra people every month is to take them into our homes. We do not have a surplus of housing. Tent cities would be another way to accept them. We, too, would be crying Uncle for money to provide their needed services

When I began writing this article, I intended to criticize the sanctuary cities that are crying that they don’t want any more migrants. Now, I have convinced myself that they have a point. If they get new people in proportion to their population, they will be overwhelmed, and if the faucet stays on, they will all go bankrupt. Assimilation in these numbers will be a dream rather than a reality. Migrants will cluster together to form neighborhoods that the rest of the population will fear entering. Most likely, new cities will be formed to deal with the situation, and we will no doubt encounter situations similar to that of Israel and Palestine scattered all around the country.

This problem will take decades to solve, but it may take centuries if we don’t close the borders and deal with the inclusion of six million more people in so short time.

Filed under: Conservative, Government, Immigration | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Transforming America

Posted on 15/11/2023 by Grumpa Joe

During 2007-2016, my one goal was to bash Obama at every chance. I even published a book of my cartoons and editorial opinions titled “Nightmares from Obama.” When I first listened to Mr. Smooth, I suspected he was a political charlatan. He was definitely a word master. His ability to say many things and make them sound logical and essential was masterful. The one promise he kept declaring during his campaign was that he wanted to transform America. He never, once, told us what he wanted to transform us into.

I am old enough to remember Fidel Castro’s rise to become the Cuban leader. He, too, was famous for his speeches, smooth talk, and promises. Barack emulated Fidel in too many ways. For one thing, Fidel kept his intentions a secret during his campaign. When he finally achieved success, he released his real intent to turn Cuba into a communist state. Obama never came out to declare what he wished the USA to become, but it was clear that he was overly sympathetic to Muslims and Socialists. Even the church he attended was a sign of his leftist leanings.

The internet was loaded with articles about Obama’s Kenyan birthplace, which should have disqualified him from being president, but behind him was an organization that kept those facts away from the public. Before he ran for President, his meteoric rise within the Illinois state government was a tip-off. When he was elected State Senator, the ink was still wet on the ballots when the press asked him if he would run for president. How can someone so obscure rise to the highest position in the land without the backing of many influential people who saw him as their political messiah?

One story that was printed then disappeared almost immediately had Obama visiting the Man’s Country, a gay bathhouse with Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel. His affinity for men is supported by reports from Hawaii, where he was raised and mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying communist. Obama’s Kenyan father eventually returned to Kenya and was given an elite government job. During his tenure with the Kenyan president, the father promoted the idea that Kenya adopt a plan to redistribute wealth. The Kenyan president was wise enough to reject the plan and demoted the father to a menial position. My point is that many clues were pointing at Obama’s transformation plans. If only the press had the balls to follow up and investigate his past. Instead, they chose to become hypnotized by his slick delivery of words that made him sound educated and presidential.

Obama’s cabinet controlled the narrative. They suppressed the need for the press to investigate by putting government-drafted news articles into their hands. Again, the press, whose job is to seek the truth, slept on the job by taking what was handed to them, thus avoiding the need to work. If ever there was a “fake news” distributor, it was Obama.

The whole reason I am telling all of this is that since Biden has been president, Obama has been invisible, that is, until the last couple of months when he suddenly became a voice again. As Biden sinks in the polls, it has become clear to Obama that his puppet Joe will not be president again. What, then, will Obama do to retain his hold on the testicles of the US Government? Whoever that might be, the new man could quickly shelve Obama and his ideas forever.

Congress, the Supreme Court, and Legislative branches cannot fix our problem. The one thing they can’t do anything about is the bureaucracy. Obama infiltrated the bureaucratic agencies with progressive democrats who gladly continue to over-regulate within their non-elected agencies to bypass the Constitution and make things impossible to control. I also believe the entire Bureaucracy should be disbanded (drain the swamp) to reset the government. Whatever chaos and confusion resulting from this action will be worth the benefit. The Lobby industry will be upset, and the cost of doing business will be reduced and confusing until Congress can legislate out the confusion. A significant benefit of draining the swamp is that it will give Congress something worthwhile to do again. They now pass laws to provide the lobbyists with what they want.

Here is what I want:

  1. Banish Obama to Kenya, where he can become King and rule his people.
  2. Disband every Bureaucracy, and begin with a clean sheet of paper.
  3. Put Joe Biden to pasture at one of our best and most comfortable Federal Prisons.
  4. Limit spending on National Campaigns for President, Senate, and Congress to Fifty million dollars. That gives candidates one million dollars per state to spend on campaigning.
  5. Forbid stipends from outside interests to any government member while in office. They get paid enough for what little they do.
  6. A set of national guidelines for elections. The States can pass election laws if they meet the federal guidelines. Define voter eligibility
  7. Winners of National elections must be announced within 24 hours of the vote.
  8. Charge any country that we support with armaments for the stuff we send them
  9. Support only our staunchest allies with military help.
  10. Rewrite our immigration laws:
  11. a. Open all borders to allow free passage in or out / OR
    • b. Reset immigration laws to make them simple and manageable with a limit on the number of people that can enter based on what can be assimilated into the population and the economy.
  12. Settle national abortion based on what is morally correct. Define the moment of conception as the instant the sperm makes it into the egg.
  13. Add Capitalism as the only system the economy will operate under
  14. Prohibit Socialized medicine within the Constitution.

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

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