US State Department Googles Canadian Nikolai Pedersen

We do not get a lot of visitors around JAWL (as lamented on earlier posts). However when we get such esteemed guests as the United States Department of State, we tend to get excited. 

Apparently someone in the State Department googled Nikolai Pedersen today. As you might recall Nikolai is the 85 year old Canadian farmer whose farm sits on the Canada/US border and whose lane way runs on the US side. See the recent article from the CBC here. 

Right after 911 the US border patrol started harassing Canadians living in cross border towns and in Nicolai's case actually cut off Canada Post from delivering his mail. See the problem is that there is road without a border crossing that runs from Canada through the US to Nicolai's farm house back in Canada. The border patrol stopped Canada Post from using this road and said they would have to go through the border crossing a considerable number of miles away. And of course have the Canada Post truck searched.

The CBC ran a Fifth Estate piece a couple years ago that included other examples of US harassment. Anyway all that died down until early March this year, when the US border patrol was back and cut the road off to all traffic including Nicolai's daughter. 

As reported here at JAWL in March and of course the CBC (sorry it was actually a rip off from the CBC), the new harassment is a joint operation between the Mounties & US border Patrol. However there seems to be a discrepancy between the goals and length of the harassment. The Mounties claim it is a temporary situation dealing with drug running, but the US border patrol calls the crackdown the "beginning of a long-term enhanced security effort on the border." 

Of course this could be good news for Nicolai. McKay might be calling in a chip from Condi and she is just catching up on the story, before she ends the harassment. Or it could mean that they are preparing to send him off to Cuba. Could go either way with these two working on it.

Anyway, today the US State Department googled on old Nikolai and they ended up visiting JAWL. Of course the article they linked to was titled "American Idiots". 

I feel like such a shit. 

In an effort to make amends, I would like to offer the following recommendation or tip per se. When you do a Google search of more than one word in a particular order and particularly in the case of a name, put quotation marks around the search words. It streamlines your search and saves valuable time (your open search found every nikolai and every pederson or 176,000 hits. By using quotations for a more targeted search, you get 1,860). Now you have more time to search for more 85 year old Canadians, or check out what other resources, time and money your eight years of fear mongering is fucking wasting.

There, now I feel better.