Showing posts with label passports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label passports. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Watching The Detectives


I’ll never believe that there’s not a human mind behind the bots. Bots are but tools, and tools can never exceed their function. Granted, this human mind behind it all may be fallible. It might be benign or outright evil. The information gathering on American citizens that is taking place as we speak is unprecedented. The soon-to-be required disclosures of moneys contributed to political candidates by anyone in one's employ before one can be considered for a government contract is just one such example. Another is the proposed questionnaire for people who are applying for a passport. (Who, but the very young, can possibly remember every job one has ever held and one's boss’s name and telephone#; the addresses of every place one might ever have lived; details about family members; people present at one’s birth, etc.?)

If you can’t fill it out, you might be denied a passport. If you fill it out wrong, you can go to jail. It’s all at the bot’s discretion (or so they’d have you believe). What is the purpose of all this information gathering? For one thing, it may make you aware that you yourself aren’t all that sure about your own birth. How then can you be so sure about the birth of another? So let’s just declare everybody that’s already here ‘legal’, and the immigration problem is solved, even without having to resort to using bad-ass words like ‘amnesty’. It also conjures up visions of 'Berlin' walls (to keep people in).

I have nothing but contempt for our present leadership. Republicans don’t have a clue of what they’re up against – or they’re complicit.

There are bots at work on Facebook too. I find, any comment I try to post using the names ‘Obama’ or ‘Soros’ is immediately scrubbed from the site. The bots know their job very well. But there’s someone behind it all who tells them what to do.

‘After the next great war, the picture of Obama’s swearing in (as U.S. president) will be the second one – not the first – the one that does not include the Bible’. – censored by FB.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Friday, February 4, 2011

Being There


It has been duly noted that once again we seem to be on the wrong side of things. We’re supporting a rag-tag army of assorted leftists and Islamic radicals, and throwing Mubarak - a U.S. ally - under the bus (so to speak); that, for all our efforts to help lift the Egyptian people out of the tyranny of what essentially amounts to (we are told) U.S.-sponsored poverty, we are inadvertently abandoning them to another kind of tyranny - one of Islamic fundamentalism which would likely put Israel - another so-called U.S. ally - at risk, as well as the Suez Canal, a major shipping lane (primarily for oil) which is likely to affect even Europe - more U.S. ‘allies’ - adversely.

Nobody asks why the people of the Middle East are in perpetual poverty, despite untold billions pumped in by the West (for oil). Nobody asks why conditions for Muslims in India continue to be markedly worse than they are for Hindus (and others), despite government efforts to give them every possible advantage.

Perhaps we haven’t exactly thought it through all that well; perhaps we haven’t considered all the implications of embracing shariah and treating it on par with what our own sacred texts espouse. Perhaps we thought that by siding with a seemingly ‘popular’ movement all else would fall into place; and we would be loved as we’ve never been loved before.

Such miscalculations are easy to make. Carter miscalculated Iran and we’re still paying the price. They still hate us. But he meant well. At least, we think he did.

We’re also giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in the current situation. We seem to have forgotten his stance on the Iranian popular uprising a year or two ago. We seem to have forgotten his stance when Honduras went through its constitutional travail, as well as so much else that has been plaguing us domestically since this man assumed power. We’ve refused to connect the dots.

I still remember as a child, the seemingly endless wait at restaurants for the waitress to bring our food was made tolerable by the table mats I was given. The ‘connect-the-dots’ game was always a part of it. The game was relatively easy. The dots were always numbered; and I knew my numbers. I knew what order they came in. Yet, I would always hesitate to start, trying to predict before-hand what figure would ultimately emerge.

Today, connecting-the-dots seems to have become a lost art. While it’s true that the dots are no longer numbered, they are self-explanatory nonetheless. We have been reading the newspapers, after all. We can remember what has happened previously and in what order it happened. We have seen enough of it to know what is likely to happen next - and afterwards…

Still, we act like every day is a new day. All events are random and unexpected. Obama has been in office two years - and unpleasant things have happened and are continuing to happen. Where is all this ‘hope and change’ thing taking us?

While all our problems have been attributed to Obama’s inexperience (including, of course, his constant hectoring of Israel to mind its ways), a pattern seems to be emerging.

Heads of state are beginning to notice and draw conclusions. While we gnash our teeth, seemingly finding ourselves at the mercy of unrelated events, our enemies are beginning to take liberties. Our friends are beginning to distance themselves. Our economy is going to the dogs. Our ‘fixes’ only seem to be making things worse. And throughout it all, our government media tells us that all is hunky-dory; that we are doing just fine; and that the light at the other end of the tunnel is straight ahead (under the inspired leadership of Imam Obama).

Things are falling apart. Despite removing ‘mother’ and ‘father’ terminology from U.S. passport applications and replacing it with gender neutral verbiage (‘parent one’ and ‘parent two‘), junior Obama is finding that it still takes either Mom or Dad to drive the fambly (sic) sedan.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/