Okay, Wilson. It’s time to get this show on the road. Yeah, you know from the Times of Israel article that I am not in Israel. I got turned back at the border and have been in Amman, Jordan ever since. And the adventures just don’t stop coming. I haven’t really been sure of how to go about framing everything, and am not 100% sure of what I want to say about what is happening here just yet, as everything is going on right now. Normally we get the benefit of hindsight when trying to make meaning out of the things that happen to us. I don’t have that yet. I don’t even know about whether I should be posting more blogs on the Times of Israel or here. I have chosen to do so here in order to be able to maximize the weirdness I portray, as things have gone over the top strange.
Another thing that has come up is that normally, when writing about true people and events, in the interest of telling the raw truth, one has to be ready to dime out the villains in the story. When writing about things that are currently ongoing, though, there runs the risk of needing to “dime out,” or portay as a villain, people with whom I am currently relating, and even on whom I currently depend. That can cause the story to trickle out more slowly, as I always want to give someone the benefit of the doubt before demonizing them, or at least wait until I know the story is good and done so that, out of pure self-interest, I don’t end up burning too many bridges.
But contrary to the above, some of this stuff is just too funny not to tell right here, right now. I don’t know if this story I am about to tell you is funny or not. It’s just the simplest one of the stories that are currently ongoing, and looks not to have any impact on things moving forward.
So upon arriving in Amman, I started to go about doing what I could getting into Israel by the time my course started. Yeah, the same course was I accepted to back in 2022 that was supposed to start in October of that year. When I couldn’t get my student visa in Mexico City, I moved the date to February 27 of this year, and planned on taking it after my bicycle tour. Yeah, Wilson, I know it’s already early March. Yeah. I’m still in Amman. But I will tell you about the course and everything in another blog post. That one is sure to be the mother of all comedies. But I want to start off with something simple and boring and done. So hold up.
I went to the Israeli consulate in Amman and found that they don’t issue long-term visas. They have a company there who does all their visa applications for them.
This corporation said that they did not process long-term visas. They only dealt with short-term visas for Jordanians entering Jordan, but I am an American, and Americans don’t need short-term visas, so they don’t process short-term visas for Americans. They told me that I needed to have someone in Israel obtain entry authorization to Israel. This actually did square with what I learned from the consulate’s website.
Going with what I heard from the Raizing Group and saw on the embassy website, I made contact with the Population and Immigration Authority in Israel, who told me that the only way to interact with them was through their website, and they normally got to things a month later. This was around mid-February, and I was looking to get into the course by February 27th. And don’t forget, Wilson, the internet seems to hate me. I have complained about the functioning of my electronic devices going as far back as from my days with Chaz in 2019, and I blogged about it as recently as my stay from in Pompei. My e-mails tend not to get answered, Wilson. Online applications tend to get rejected with no explanation. Putting in an online application and waiting a month was not going to get me anywhere.
So I would need to get some help expediting things. My rabbi friend that I talk to pretty regularly mentioned the idea of getting a lawyer. I was skeptical when made that recommendation given what happened with the appeal of my deportation decision back in early 2022. However, I thought that really all I needed was a lawyer to get through some red tape quicker than I could do on my own. Or quicker than I could through a friend. I do have a few friends left in Israel, Wilson, and I am in a degree of contact with them. I aim to be doing some blogging about that at some point. In this case, however, asking a friend to go through all this hassle for me seemed a little out of place if I could just pay a lawyer a small fee to use what knowledge or contacts he had to get my applications toward the top of the pile and handled properly. So I went ahead and called one.
So up until now, Wilson, this post has hardly been worthy of a post from the 1# ex-monk Jew wannabe meth head prophet of Facebook, Reddit, and all the internet. It has basically just been a case of a bureacratic runaround. But things do get more interesting when the lawyer comes into the picture.
Yeah, it was the same lawyer from 2022 and the appeal. Remember in my post The Plot Thickens I decribe these guys not responding to e-mails or to phone and thinking something was strange with that, wondering if they were intentionally avoiding me and if such behavior could have had something to do with some conspiracy pertaining to the van Ouwerkerks. Well, this time I made contact via Facebook with one of the members who actually did respond and offered me a paid consult. 760 shekels or about $200 for an initial consult. Usually those are free.
But yeah, I did want to give you that little bit of information. The strange avoidance of e-mail and phone calls from the lawyer at the end of last year was apparently not a part of any conspiracy. It was just “coincidence.” I put that word in quotes because of the idea of synchronicity that I keep piping and the idea that the law of probability is in many cases a myth that has no bearing on reality whatsoever. Over these next few posts, Wilson, I am going to demonstrate that there is just no such freaking thing as the law of probability at all. But sure, we can start with the fact that getting Israelis to call me back is a very difficult thing to arrange, and that this is a phenomenon that seems to transcend the notion that they are all involved in conspiracies with Dutch Christians that don’t like me.
Out of sheer curiosity, I paid the shekels for the consult. You can get an Israeli to call you back for $200, it seems. Now I was stressed because of the time crunch, but of course they had to reschedule the consult a couple of days. Once we got to the consultation, the lawyer I spoke to had no knowledge of my having been a previous client. She also had not read any of the e-mails that I had sent previously, which included that Times of Israel article that explained my entire travel history with the state of Israel.
She mentioned that normally the university would handle visa issues with the Ministry of the Interior. Yeah, the whole Population and Immigration Control Authority thing was apparently utterly irelevant. The lawyer said she would put in an application with the Ministry of the Interior, but that it would take a month to get an approval. Then I asked how much the ordeal would cost. Wilson, I am going to need to to strap yourself into your chair. And you’ll want to have two double whiskey shots beside you when I tell you the price. She wanted $5,000.
The lawyer wanted $5,000 and a month to put in an application with the Ministry of the Interior to enter Israel to go to the class I was accepted to. This was just to enter and go to the class. So if I left Israel and wanted to come back another time for another reason, I would have to pay another $5,000? There was no talk of actually fixing my entry record at all. Nobody seemed to care that I had a judicial opinion from an Israeli judge that contained lies from the Border Control Organization. Remember, they told me I could just apply with them to enter any time I wanted to enter Israel. The judge’s opinion said there was no need to question the Border Control Agent’s decision to deport me in 2021 because I could just apply with them at any time. I also had a document from a Border Control Agent in 2023 saying that I was being turned back at the border because of domestic security concerns, and I had a voice recording from that same border agent saying that I was not a domestic security concern. In other words, I have a stack of papers not letting me into Israel containing every kind of lie imaginable, but nobody cared about that. I was just supposed to pay $5,000 and wait a month for an answer about entering Israel for a course that was going to start in two weeks.
And remember how the appeal went, Wilson? They charged me $3,000 for a case that ended up costing them $6,000 and in the end got me an opinion from the judge denying my petition that contained every kind of lie imaginable. But nobody seemed to know or think anything about any of that. Actually fixing my entry record was not on the table. Exposing the lies of the Border Control was not on the table. It was just going to be $5,000 and a month to put in an application with the Ministry of the Interior to enter that one time for that one purpose.
Now Wilson, getting a visa for Mexico with an attorney costs about $30. My stepfather and I got permanent residency in Mexico for $500. Of course I don’t even bother with visas or residency issues in Europe. I just assume that I can go if I want to go, and if I want to stay or need to stay, I can stay. I know a lot of people have issues going to or staying in certain countries, but usually those people want to go to those other countries because they want to earn money. I have my own wage and don’t think about that, and in general nobody has given me any problems entering their countries. They just assume I am going to spend my money there. I don’t have a criminal record, so there is really no reason not to let me enter. But most countries are not Israel.
At the moment, Wilson, I just don’t have the $5,000 available, and I would have to arrange something with my parents to front me some money until I could free up some of my own. I do this pretty often with my folks, actually. I’m financially independent, but my folks have more money than I do, and when it comes to moderate sums I’ll make little “I’ll pay you back by payday” kind of deals, and every once in a while when it comes to small sums they’ll just flat out give me some hundreds of dollars for this or that just in the interest of being cool parents that support the kinds of things I do. “Don’t worry about paying that back, Jonathan, we support this thing. It’s nothing. We love you.”
But honestly, Wilson, I just could not justify even asking them. The whole circumstance seemed like a message from God to me not to even try this venue of solving my problem. The lawyer wanted a sum of money inconceivably greater than I had imagined just to process an application that I had considered getting a friend to do for me for free. The lawyer mentioned that the University should do this kind of thing, I presume for free. The lawyer had charged me a bunch of money before to do a whole bunch of work to basically accomplish nothing for me. And finally, the lawyer didn’t really think about actually fixing my long-term problem. If I were a millionaire, I could justify throwing away another few thousand dollars for good measure. I am not a millionaire, however.
You know how often I complain about Satan nickeling and diming me of my ducats so I can’t cause him as many problems as I would if I had more cash in the bank. This was clearly another case of that, only on a fairly large scale.
The episode ended with yet another observation about the intersection of finances and the internet. When I made my initial consultation appointment, I actually screenshotted the “Payment cucessful!” screen that you get when yo make a payment online. The reason I did that was none other than that I am absolutely paranoid about the internet at this point. I take a Murphy’s Law approach. If my payment can get lost, it will. Well, after the consult, one of the clerks sent me an e-mail asking for a screenshot of the payment! They couldn’t find the payment I had made for my $200 consult! And I actually had one! If I had been a normal person, the ordeal would have been a huge headache. I would have had to spend a day figuring out how to prove I had paid them. I never did that kind of thing before in my personal life before having so many internet and device problems over the last few years that have spun out of control over these last months as I try to go to Israel. Well, the internet tried to lose my payment, and the lawyer couldn’t find it, and I was only saved by the fact that I took a screenshot, so I wouldn’t have to go through the headache of retracing everything and finding the payment again so I could take screenshot to give them.
I sent them the screenshot, and that’s the last time I have talked to them. So what is to learn from this, Wilson? This is just a case of bureacratic runaround, right? Well, there are some nuggets in here. Concerning your interest in the larger story, the lawyer doesn’t seem to be involved in any kind of conspiracy with the van Ouwerkerks or anyone else. In the prior post about that, I looked for a naturalistic explanation about why the lawyer didn’t answer e-mails or phone calls. It had to be because of the van Ouwerkerks or because I was a spy or something like that, remember, Wilson? Well, it was just “coincidence.” That in itself is worth something when “coincidence” involves the coin coming up tails 99 out of 100 times. Our minds look for patterns in things reasons behind things. I am not saying that there is no reason for them not responding to me, but it doesn’t seem to be naturalistic one. If there is a reason behind this, it must be something supernatural.
Now from there, looking at the supernatural reason behind things, well, I could just say the law office was possessed by the devil. I already did that kind of thing while portraying Israeli Border Control as being possessed by demons way back in 2021. I don’t want to discount that sort of supernatural understanding, as there are such things as demons, and they do influence human activity. I am certain of this. However, this isn’t a case where I was dealing with some particular jackass. I had worked with these people before. Nobody was cruel to me. If any demons were at play it would just be that someone may not have realized a better way to help me than charging me $5,000 for a standard visa application.
So yeah, while demons influence me, influence others, etc, this seems to be a scenario of supernatural experience better explained along the lines of “God just doesn’t want you to do this, Jonathan. That’s why he is making all of these terms so crappy,” or something like, “the universe just doesn’t want this to happen,” if we are going to present supernatural activity pantheistically or panentheistically.
So this experience with the laywer seems to have been some kind of a little hint from beyond. Yeah, I know I am ultimately glorifying and spiritualizing what people the world over call “the bureacratic runaround.” However, I did want to keep you abreast of my situation concerning entering Israel and my course. And I did want to answer that old question from my old post about whether my lawyer was avoiding me for some naturalitic reason. But finally, and I do hope you found at least this one thing interesting, Wilson, that this method of warding me away from using a lawyer involved a freaking five thousand dollar payment for something that I could have only conceived of costing a few hundred dollars in any reasonable circumstance, and that cost was issued in an environment of absolutely zero confidence of having any sort of success whatsoever.
This is the least psychedelic, least weird experience that I will be writing you about, Wilson. There are other things going on here that are just mindblowing. Depending on how they turn out will determine whether I will write about them and how I will describe them. But for now, I’m just content with illustrating that this case of dealing with bureaucracy constitutes something of a supernatural event for me. $5,000 to process a visa application?That doesn’t happen in the natural wold. Spiritual events are afoot.