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 »

E Pluribus Unum

Posted on 30/05/2021 by Grumpa Joe

“Out of many is one,” is the motto of the United States of America. Lately my thoughts have been on immigration because of the reading I am doing and also because I now have a genuine immigrant for a life partner. The United States is froth with success stories of people who went through monumental hardships to get here just to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities afforded by our country. Of late, we have been deluged with stories about people crossing into the country illegally. Our country has laws and we like to say we are a country of laws, and for the most part we try to obey them all. Every law has consequences, break one and find out what it is. Most laws can be bent depending on who has broken it, and what relation he has with those in power. The powerful can bend, break, ignore, any law if it means advancing his fortune or position in the world. If you are a poor unconnected schlub like me you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Honduran migrants take part in a new caravan heading to the US with Honduran and Guatemalan national flags in Quezaltepeque, Chiquimula, Guatemala on October 22, 2018. – US President Donald Trump on Monday called the migrant caravan heading toward the US-Mexico border a national emergency, saying he has alerted the US border patrol and military. (Photo by ORLANDO ESTRADA / AFP)ORLANDO ESTRADA/AFP/Getty Images

What we see going on today is a gross mismanagement of immigration law at our southern border. Rules are being broken every minute of every day and no amount of policing seems to be able to control the flow. Of course much of the current control is window dressing to convince the rest of us that the administrators are doing something. Bullshit, they are looking up into the sky while waving them in. I know I sound ruthlessly unmerciful, but I am one of the people who believes in rule of law. Mostly because I have never found myself in a position to have to defend myself against the same.

Our history of laws controlling immigration goes back to the days of our first president George Washington. Since then there have been several iterations trying to control the flow of people. Each time the laws get more and more complex and each time they get more confusing. The result is that we have reached a quagmire that may only be corrected with a rest. In other words a complete cleansing of all immigration laws to be replaced by new laws which better define the twenty-first century demands. The trouble is that not a single politician has the balls to sponsor such an action. Currently, there are so many people in our country that have gotten here by by-passing the official government procedure that, it near impossible to play catch up. To wipe the slate clean which is an action people like to call amnesty is the only answer I ever hear. The problem with amnesty is that is evokes the ire of every red blooded citizen especially those who came as immigrants legally. Politicians both win and lose on this one. the result is a stalemate, and nothing advances.

The radical left uses this situation to advance the spread of communism in the country. The more people they can get into the country and onto the public dole, the sooner the country will go bankrupt and a dictator will be necessary to take control. I don’t know about you, but the thought of being controlled by the likes of someone like Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Pot Pol, Xi Jinping, Nicolas Maduro, or the fat man of North Korea Kim Jong-un makes me want to puke. I’d sooner want to duke it out with guns and eliminate the entire population that thinks in that direction. Thats what happens in dictatorships. That his why Stalin and Chairman Mao killed millions of their own people to get the message across that it was their way, or a bullet to the back.

Yes, we are a nation of laws and we are a nation of immigrants, but there are limits. I believe we must allow immigration to continue but lawfully. We should base the number of people we let in on our ability to assimilate them. We can’t just let the entire world population flood into North America and turn us into a dung hole overnight. That is a sure fire recipe for disaster and the ruination of the land of opportunity. I would sooner take the countries that people are fleeing and make take them over as U.S. territories so they could be controlled by our system and thus open the doors of opportunity within the geographic location of the population.

Whenever I think this way I remember that Puerto Rico is one such an experiment. It is not a state yet, but a territory free to operate under our system. They are a dung hole already on the cusp of bankruptcy because of a heavy reliance on left wing democrats who like to spend freely, and to tax the constituency even heavier. The result is a two class system of very rich haves and the very poor the have nots. Without a middle class which our Republic relies upon to survive.

Back in the nineteen seventies I often debated with myself trying to solve the issue of using capitalism to solve world problems. Back then, labor unions in the USA were huge, but we were a manufacturing economy. In order to compete with the new upstart economies in Europe and Asia we needed cheaper labor, but the unions would not hear of it. There are only two ways to solve this conundrum I thought. Either we lower the wages of our work force, or we raise the wages of the rest of the world. It seems that lowering the wages of our work force is the direction our congressional leaders is taking us. They can’t do it by getting unions to negotiate lower wages, so the new tactic is to import people from very poor regions, who can live on a few dollars a day, to fill the jobs that union people will not take. The end result is the struggle we see happening today. Poor people are flooding the borders to get the jobs that we can’t afford to take. Eventually, these poor will succeed in lowering the cost of labor. High paying unions job will still exist, but not in the numbers needed to give all of our middle class people work. The idea is to force them to take what is available by competing with those who know how to live on a dollar a day. It is not going too happen.

This combination photo shows the cover image for “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants” by George W. Bush, left, and a photo of former President George W. Bush. Crown announced Thursday that the book will be published March 2. It includes 43 portraits by the 43rd president, four-color paintings of immigrants he has come to know over the years, along with biographical essays he wrote about each of them. (Crown via AP, Left, and AP)

The book I’m reading is titled Out Of Many, One. Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” It is by George W. Bush our former president. He has selected 43 immigrants to paint portraits of, and to feature in a short life story vignette about their reasons for immigrating. There isn’t a single story without a happy ending. Yes, these are sterling examples of how people can succeed in our country. The problem is that for every one of these success stories there are probably a million that haven’t achieved a level of success. Too much immigration without the time needed for these people to assimilate is not going to work in our favor. Not everyone has the self motivation to get up from a failure and to keep trying again and again. Too many will opt for the short route to feeling good by taking drugs or alcohol. They might have done better had they had coaches pushing them hard to succeed. Instead we do things like our war on drugs to solve the problem. We all know how that works. It made the cartels stronger and they developed ta strong market for drugs by outwitting our drug enforcement efforts for decades. The end result is we make drugs legal, so they are easier to get, and then we stop sending drug abusers to prison. We tax the drugs and remove the prison cost so the state wins big time. The immigration problem continues.

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Sorry Joe

Posted on 23/10/2020 by Grumpa Joe

Last night’s debate felt rather long. Probably because the debaters tried to keep from talking over each other. I can’t proclaim a winner, but I can proclaim a loser. I thought Joe Biden did well in his ability to keep things together, and he was well rehearsed, but I had major issues with his arguments which I will elucidate below:

  1. Sorry Joe, but your plan for COVID-19 response is about the same as closing the barn door once the horse is out of the barn. All I heard is that your plan is to make all of us wear masks all of the time. Have you forgotten that the previous administration(like you and Obama) had run the Federal stockpiles of strategic personal protective equipment dry? Many of President Trumps reactions were in response to limiting the PPE to hospital personnel. There just wasn’t enough to go around for we the people. I call that a failure of the Obama administration to live up to his oath to protect the American people. Have you forgotten that hospitals were over burdened and there were no respirators in the federal warehouses? Trump had to round up manufacturers to make them. All of this took precious time which your plan no longer has to worry about. The same holds true for vaccines. During your administration there was a threat of a pandemic from the swine flu. Vaccines were being developed but stopped since the virus died off. Couldn’t your former plan have continued vaccine development as a step to avoid pressure in the future like now?
  2. Sorry Joe but your plan of Obama Care for all you can keep your plan if you like it is a giant lie. It was true right up until the insurance companies told us that we had to cancel our existing plans to get into the super new one you rushed through Congress to get approved. When we tried to re-up for insurance we were told we had to go for the Obama Care. Of course you brag about getting 22 million people health care who never had it before, but what about the forty million people who now couldn’t afford health care any more? Don’t they count?
  3. Sorry Joe but you argue that the economy was coming back, really? With the anemic less than one percent growth in GDP it would only take another twenty years to get to where Trump took us.
  4. Sorry Joe, but don’t get me started on clean energy. I don’t see filling every field in America with wind mills and solar panels as a rational or economic way to get to clean energy. Your plan to phase out fossil fuels to ramp up to meet demand with wind and solar is true, Except the ramp up time period will take as long as it takes to exhaust the world of good rich fossil fuel (maybe one or two thousand years). Beside that, scientists have already determined that with today’s technology, wind and solar does not have the capacity to meet our current demand much less our future needs. As far as building 50,000 charging stations for electric vehicles your are short. It will take three, four, or five time as many to keep America rolling. Don’t ever mention the environmental damage that will be done by making and charging all those batteries. In my opinion the Audubon Society is not making a large enough stink about the loss of birds to those whirling windmills batting them out of the sky.
  5. Sorry Joe but when it comes to foreign affairs when was the last time your previous administration created an alliance with Jews and Muslims? Its my recollection that you and your boss only knew how to kiss muslim ass to make friends. Or how about getting our allies mad at us for asking them to begin paying the bill for America saving them during WW 2?
  6. Sorry Joe, but your plea to me to that Trump doesn’t stand for what America was built upon is a bunch of political theater. America was built upon the idea that we have freedom and liberty to live without chains to earn a living. America was not built upon the idea that we the people should earn that living and then pay a huge fraction to you the governing to spend it the way you think is right and proper. Trump stands for exactly what our forefathers intended. His policies are all directed toward giving us all the freedom to earn as we please.
  7. Sorry Joe, when you speak of civil rights you are talking through the side of your mouth. The infamous Civil Rights Act that you and Donna Brazille so proudly proclaim is the heart of America is solely responsible for the slaughter of thirty million black babies since it’s inception. When Nancy Pelosi was asked about it she proudly exclaimed that without abortion we would have to deal with a lot more welfare. Is that what our country was built on that black babies will all grow up to go on welfare?
  8. Sorry Joe, but babies in cages that you and Obama built are also the result of your policies toward immigration. It is also the result of forty years of neglect by Congress to insist of enforcement of existing laws. Last I checked you were a part of the Congress for those years. With the lax border law enforcement we have created a need to do something with twenty million good people whose only crime was to sneak into the country to make a better life for themselves. Where were you all those years Joe? Why didn’t you give them a path to legality and citizenship?
  9. Sorry Joe, but your arguments on global warming don’t make any sense. None of the global warming arguments make any sense. The United States has the best air and water in the world, short of Antartica. What do you propose to do with a carbon tax scheme? Will all that tax money be directed toward countries like China, and India to take care of their dirty air? Why should we be made to pay for the sins of other countries. I was in shock last month to learn that China is now the largest producer of automobiles in the world. Not only have they surpassed US production they have beaten us by three times (28,000,000) as many cars a year. Does a single one of them have a catalytic converter? How about emission controls? Has the country legislated or decreed that auto companies meet clean air standards? Do they even know what clean air standards are? How about Chinese power plants? Are they all solar and wind? No? Why not? Oh, I get it you are not in charge over there so let the U.S.A. pay for it to happen. We will keep paying to clean up our air while the global winds will continue to bring us more polluted air from around the world. I ‘ll be happy to pay a carbon tax when the rest the of countries in the world meet or beat our current levels.
  10. Sorry Joe, but raising taxes is not a good way to go. It is the opposite of what our founding fathers built the country on. I think is was an unfair tax on tea that kicked off the revolutionary war because the original Americans were being taxed to death to pay for the King’s sins.

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WOW! A New United States

Posted on 27/01/2019 by Grumpa Joe

WOW! Where do I begin? There are too many topics to discuss and I’m too old and tired to write about all of them. Before I go to the topic I selected let me just say I hope the kid who stood his ground against the crazy Indian beating his drum sues and breaks the backs of every one who falsely accused him of starting the mayhem. The fake news thing is getting way out of hand. As I’ve stated before this is a war and fake news is another weapon being used.

Now, for what I want to talk about. Democrats and never Trumpers played right into Trump’s hand with their reaction to his agreement to suspend negotiations until after the government reopens. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi reacted as expected, i.e. “he caved,” “I hope he has learned a lesson from this,” etc.

What I see is a President who is genuinely trying to solve a serious problem and is trying everything in his power to solve it. He tried to get the democrats to negotiate by shutting down the government. The Dem’s didn’t budge and he saw the hurt put on the precious government workers with all of their job perks and Cadillac insurance plans, and vacations were getting by missing a single paycheck. He changed his demand of money for a wall to trading a wall for DACA. Then he changed it to I’ll take a down payment for the wall and give you DACA. The Dem’s remained steadfast in their resolve to forbid him the wall. Nancy demanded that Dem’s would not come to the table unless the government re-opened. Okay, so let’s try that. We’ll see how it works out. My guess is that Trump will have to use another strategy to get the wall. What he wants is not selfish like the offer the Dem’s put forth, it is simply to do what his job description demands that he do, protect the country and the Constitution.

In the meantime, the Swamp organized a major bureaucracy to call in sick. The Air Controller Union mysteriously decided not to work for free, and three major airports stalled in traffic. Remember when President Reagan fired air-controllers for not doing their jobs? I do. The country survived. Trump’s mistake is in not playing hardball with those government workers who refuse to work. Controllers are not losing their pay, it is merely being delayed. My eyes are gushing alligator tears for these poor people and their union oligarchs. The country went through eight years of reduced air traffic during the great recession and not a single Controller lost his job as a result. I wish I could say the same about all of my friends who were laid off because their company sales dropped to half of what it was before Obama transformed us into greatly confused people.

Every democrat who is solidly against giving Trump his request to build a wall is on record as being in support of the wall. The wall is a way to control people flooding in at a rate we cannot absorb. President Obama’s solution was to load the flood on airplanes and fly them to undisclosed locations in the middle of the night. I am sure the immigration laws do not approve of secretly moving illegals into the country. Who cares about laws anyway? The only ones who care at this time are those who want to use laws to damage Trump. Does the word impeachment strike a bell?. Whenever a law puts a democrat in jeopardy, the law becomes invisible like the hypocrisy of the Department of Justice’s treatment of Hillary on her many violations. They won’t even listen to an argument, she is totally innocent of any wrong doing. The Justice Department is a huge sanctuary for democrat politicians.

Politicians are taking the wrong approach to solving this problem. One idea I have not heard discussed yet is this: Annex Mexico and the eight Central American countries as states in the USA. We need workers, and the people of these countries want to come here. Our companies wouldn’t have to negotiate complicated trade deals to get cheap labor, and politicians would be in heaven with all the new voters they could control. The border will be open and movement between the Americas would be totally unfettered. There would be fewer flags burned because they would be burning their own flag when doing so. We will build a short wall similar to the one in China between Panama, and Columbia at a cost much less than that of the wall between Mexico and the USA. Mexicans would be in heaven since they will in effect be regaining the land they lost during the Mexican-American war. Mexican drug cartels will be happy since their cost to market will be much less. The DEA will be elated at the prospect of taking on the Cartels with early morning raids in FBI style. Democrats will piss themselves with delight over inheriting so many more corrupt towns to control using the Richard J. Daley system of rule. (Actually, I think our upper 48 state democrats will learn some new tricks from their lower nine counterparts.

One problem I have with annexing this many new states is the design of our flag. How would we arrange the stars to expand the field to fifty-nine and still look good?

My conclusion is that the border wall will be completed and paid for by 2020, and the democrats will be taking full credit for it even though there won’t be a single vote from them to approve it. They will still be holding their breath and stomping their feet in anger hoping to stop Trump from doing what is right for America.

Democrats = Liberalism = Progressivism = Democratic Socialism = Communism = Equal Misery for All

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My Take on Separation

Posted on 27/06/2018 by Grumpa Joe

Whenever I have watched news on TV this past week the number of Americans who are undercover communists has sickened me.. Author of the book Rules for Radicals is sitting in hell watching his minions practice his principles. Saul Alinsky laid out the exact methods being exercised by revolting Americans on the streets of America today. It is no secret that Obama used the Alinsky’s principles, but Obama’s methods were better camouflaged.

When I see protesters spewing vile bile at Federal border security people it enrages me, and I think to myself what a failure of upbringing these protesting people had. Where are the grandparents of these separated children? Why did they not speak up when their progeny disappeared in the night leaving helpless grand-babies into their care? If that was my kid leaving my grandkids behind I would have seared his/her ass with rhetoric he never heard me say before. Yes, I would have revolted. You don’t have the fun of making babies, and then abandon them to your relatives just so you can wander off to a better life. What kind of parent does that? “Oh” you say, “one that wants to make a better life for his kids.” Have you ever thought about what kind of life the kid has being raised by step parents? Will they even know you when you finally reunite? Will you recognize your own kids when you finally send for them? What kind of parent pays someone a huge fee to bring their kid over a treacherous journey into a boiling cesspool of crazies protesting America’s terrible policies? How do we know that the people you chose to care for your kid didn’t sell them to a child trafficker just to get rid of the responsibility you left them with?  What was the problem with taking them with you? Oh, it is too dangerous for them to go with you, but it isn’t dangerous at all to allow some stranger to bring them to you later when you feel more secure.

Our immigration laws are so stupid it is hilarious to watch Homeland Security try to follow them. No doubt these laws evolved over the years into what they are today. Diligent-lazy (oxymoron) Congressmen, anxious to fix a problem, probably took major shortcuts to write attachments to the existing behemoth. The result is law that is totally unmanageable. What are we doing about it? Nothing because it is too politically charged to risk tackling the problem with a fresh approach. Why is it so charged? It is my observation that Democrats, and RINO’s who pine for open borders and no laws are at the crux of it all.  This group simply wants the world to return to the state it was in a thousand years ago, or perhaps even ten thousand years ago; think about that. People were free to roam wherever they wanted to go, and they could catch and kill what-ever or who ever to eat without any consequences. My logic tells me that these democrats merely want to return to the Neanderthal age. Let me remind you that slave keeping was a common reward of that age. When captured alive you became either a slave or a meal.

My opinion is that loving, compassionate parents don’t leave their kids behind.

On the matter of separating kids from parents who choose to border-jump as a family I have a slightly different take. If a strange family entered my house without my permission with the intention to stay, I will first ask them to leave, if they don’t turn and run I will give them the option to beat the spray of pellets that will leave the end of my shotgun at a very high-speed.

On the subject of caging children I am less stringent. Why not just let all the babies and kids roam freely once they cross. Let anyone who comes in contact with a child take them and care for them. Well, you said don’t cage them. Placing a child in custodial care is the same as caging. In either case the kid has no parent, and you force him to live under house rules. What would the liberals do?  If the child is with his parent and the parent is a felon and must be incarcerated then send the wife and children with him to prison. If a child arrives without a parent in the charge of a stranger, make the stranger be responsible. The parent allowed this stranger to walk a thousand miles with the kid, why not allow him to care for him while being processed? I suppose the liberals would set up a new bureaucracy for the purpose of caring for these kids. In this system each kid would be assigned to a degreed government paid psychologist who would room with the kid until the process ends.  All would live in an air-conditioned dorm room and choose to eat from a carefully designed menu based the country of the kids origin.

At this time President Trump is using some good psychology on us. By taking a hard stand on enforcing the existing laws he has enabled many shortcomings of immigration law to surface. These shortcomings will aid in defining problems that Congress can solve with new immigration law. That is, if congress will take the time to exercise the brains of its members and not bow to the response from lobby groups that have waited for this moment to present a package ready to go for a vote. The first way is hard, but the second way is easy. The hard one gets us a law that might work, the second way gets them elected without any effort. Which will it be?

 

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