Midweek Memes

Don't Touch the Chicken!

I’ve been meaning to circle back to what’s going on with my husband’s visa case to come to America for a while. The one thing I am sure of is that I need help and advice.

Officially my husband Ka received a visa denial letter which is dated December 30, 2024 but which I am sure I did not receive until the early evening of December 31 (New Year’s Eve. It’s almost like they were hoping I did not notice it with that date. And this was not a time difference thing as Las Vegas is 15 hours behind Thailand and I was in Sin City with my daughters and mother at the time).

It states simply that his visa is refused based on Section 212 (a) (1) (A) (ii) which is Applicant Lacks the Required Vaccines. His visa is waiver eligible, but since my case has been kicked back to the State Department and an AI chatbot which is useless, I have not been able to determine too much. Many visa denials are section 221 (g) but this is not. The main page helpfully informs me that the State Department on average processes most immigrant visa waivers of ineligibility within 33.5 months (Only three more years, then?) with an average waiver approval of between 70% to 80%. So sure. Let me submit my extra $1000 or so to some lockbox in Nebraska somewhere right away.

I have not done much of anything with this because I am not sure how to proceed forward. The return of my husband’s grand mal epileptic seizures beginning with one on March 13 had me musing over a clear pattern I have seen over these past five plus years of dealing with his case. What I am wondering is if it is intentionally being done by immigrant visa officers as part of some psychological profiling. I’ll call it don’t touch the chicken training. It’s similar to, but perhaps a bit crueler, than Lucy’s perpetual holding out the football for Charlie Brown.

Many years ago, when I was with my first husband Oh, we had three puppies who were staying with Mar, my mother in law, at her modest little Pai Yang house. Mar had a lot of backyard free roaming chickens as many Thai people do in the area. Oh showed me the proper way to train a dog to never touch the chickens.

He waited until one of the puppies was showing a playful interest in some chickens especially in the smaller baby chicks. Then he would catch a chick, place it right in front of the puppy’s nose and try to get the dog to show an interest in it again.

“You want this? You want this? No!” As soon as the puppy made any moves towards the chick he would smack it harshly and painfully on its snout often with a bamboo branch. The poor pup would often howl and wail painfully after this, crawling into a corner with its tail tucked between its legs. He would repeat this process a few times as necessary until the pup would not so much as glance at a chicken.

I thought this was very cruel, but I must admit it was highly effective at keeping the dogs from bothering chickens as they grew up. I am sure their old dog Snow White had gone through similar training. A baby chick could literally land on her as she slept and she would just growl and stand up and move to another spot. You couldn’t get those dogs to even ever think of chasing chickens.

In thinking back to January of 2020, when I started by inquiring to the US Embassy about making an emergency immigrant visa petition for my husband due to his epilepsy, a similar pattern has emerged. We were already opposed to vaccines then, but I was hopeful that I could make a medical waiver based on Ka’s seizures. It usually starts with the US Embassy friendly and informal, with requests for evidence. The things provided are not sufficient, but they assure me that somebody is working on the case. They request more things in quick succession, sometimes confusing, expensive, hard to procure, or overlapping with something I had already provided. But at this stage I am in near daily contact with what seems to be a live human being who is sympathetic to my husband’s immigrant visa.

Faster! Faster! They seem to be prodding me. You’re almost there!

Often I become frustrated at some point and begin asking for a timeline on the visa that I can make arrangements around. But the big do not touch the chicken no no is if I in any way express frustration or plead for sympathy regarding the difficulties of forever arranging life plans according to the whims of bureaucrats. Another missed child’s birthday or graduation, another year of “All I Want for Christmas is You,” another empty bed in a perfectly good house. Another otherwise unnecessary trip around the world because I miss my kids but also hate sleeping without my husband. It gets difficult.

That’s when the bamboo pole is smacked across my snout. Good cop turns to bad cop. I get terse “fuck you talk to the hand” type of replies that kick the visa process back to the State Department or the Department of Homeland Security or ICE or Bumrungrad Hospital or God only knows who. Denial, Delay, backlog, our office is closed for the bioweapons rollout and talk to the AI chatbot follows on from this.

I guess long story short is that Ka’s visa process then interests me as much as cutting off my pinkie finger with a tin can top. Trust in the process going anywhere is in negative numbers. It does not matter anymore if I am targeted through him for my dissident views, or if I pissed off a few specific people in power somewhere in there while the rest are cheering for me. It doesn’t even matter if this was all just related to epically bad timing with Covid combined with bad politics at the worst times. It could be because me and Ka were raised by wolves and thus don’t know how to pick up the subtle social cues necessary to know where to go to find sympathetic doctors, police or visa officers at the time we need them. It could be a voodoo curse for all I know.

Ka does not speak regarding politics, either in the US, Thailand or elsewhere. But he did laugh a lot at this meme…

He thought this one was interesting and told me the Thai names of both aliens and angels…

Memorial Day has come and passed, with all of the usual fanfare. I have military in my family dating back to the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to WWII to Korea to Vietnam. They didn’t seem all that keen in either me or my brother signing up for the war on (or of?) Terror. War is racket, indeed, but how do you honor those whose lives were sacrificed without somehow playing politics to those with no skin in the game and ever rising stock portfolios?

I suppose my problem with laws is partly with their uneven enforcement. People are still dying suddenly and yet the best they could do is limit Covid jabs to those over six months old who are somehow deemed healthy? My guess is most of those antivaxxers avoid the hospital like the plague already.

Probably a five

I have been reading about the dollar decline and the idea that tariffs are a last minute attempt at Chapter 11 restructuring. But that had me thinking about the whole where have all the people in China gone thing. What if there’s a EMF type of weapon that is being silently deployed?

Now why would they do that? What better way to absorb liabilities into assets than to kill people off?

I will send sympathy for any victims here, but I am still not sure of they are more than out of Central Casting. I stopped reading on this one after a few comments that the suspect, who routinely posted blatant antisemitic content, then somehow boarded a plane with a gun and booked to attend this Museum Event. I can’t even get epsom salt on a plane, in a still sealed package, without a one hour search…

I wonder who this crazy antisemite was. Checks notes. Former Prime Minister of Israel:

I think that a lot of this noise I’m hearing lately is either trollbots or paid sponsorships. It’s all thought terminating cliches with no nuance or distinction. I was on Quora and noticed an actual honest question regarding why the Trump Adminstration is deporting so many people who didn’t break the law. The response to this was universally negative.

“They broke the law! They came here illegally!” It seemed like dozens of voices chimed this in unison to this poor lady. It felt like trollbots with no nuance, but probably affected that poor person very negatively. It’s all shaking the jar.

My mother in law was also an “undocumented person”. It was during a time when Laos was collapsing and one of her brother’s died from a US placed landmine (Not in combat. Just on a road). She went to Thailand over the Mekong River to sell vegetables and met Father Sukwan. The Laotian government erased the identity of many of its citizens, which was rediscovered on her going back there in 2013 and 2017. She was a truly undocumented person.

So sure. She was living in Thailand for 50 years and had four children and her husband, but let’s all take her back to where she came from because she broke the law. Can you not see how retarded and cruel that would have been?

Obviously a different standard should apply for say someone deported three times with multiple criminal convictions in the US already or who is collecting $5K a month from an NGO plus a free hotel stay. These are all common sense baselines.

There are too many laws already. They trip over each other, confuse and strangle and cancel out each other sometimes, and largely seem to be enforced by what the latest trend is. This is not rule by law.

It’s might makes right…and might, unfortunately, sides with evil it seems.

Buy me a ko-fi