Why I Hate Bill Collectors

Some years ago, I fell on some really bad financial times. Pretty much my whole world caved in on me, and I was receiving nonstop phone calls from bill collectors trying to get any last dime they could out of me. I was out of work and had no savings, yet that never mattered. They wanted any nickle they could get out of me. After I started working again, they continued to hound me, and I started paying them off one by one, and avoiding the others until I could afford to pay off the next one. What I discovered is that no how sanctimonious they act, many of them as massively corrupt. I had one that was collecting for an old charge card I had. I negotiated a large settlement, and I gave pretty much my whole savings at that point to pay it off. That should have been the end of it. But it wasn't. A few months later, a NEW creditor contacted me, demanding payment for that charge account. It appears the original credit collector pocketed the money and then sold the account to another collector. This happened to me a second time with another bill collector. Finally, I paid off the bulk of my debt, but I avoided collectors like the plague. Still do.

Well, recently I moved to South Korea. Well, in doing so, there are some companies that refused to stop doing business with me. Like Comcast. I phoned them, telling them I had disconnected my cable and services when I left. Did everything on the phone and in person. They still have me connected to an apartment I haven't been in since October of last year. Pretty good chance they've now utilized a bill collector to come after me because I refuse to pay them, even though I called back EACH MONTH trying to get them to cancel that account. I finally just gave up.

Got a call today from a bill collector. It was one of those recorded calls from a company I've never heard of before (meaning someone "bought" my debt from some unknown debt I probably have from a company that I stopped doing business with, had disconnected on my own, but refuses to stop doing business with me because they realize that if you keep harassing someone over and over, they might just be stupid enough to pay them money, even though everything should have been canceled correctly at the time of disconnect).

Talk about a way to ruin a day, not that it's all that great a day either as it is now 19 days past the date my paycheck is due and there's no sign it's ever going to be paid.

The thing is: When you talk to a bill collector, they don't really talk to you. I used to try talking to the ones that were trying to charge me a second time, and it's like talking to a girlfriend you're trying to break up with, who keeps trying to figure out when the next date is. You tell them you already paid it, and within a few seconds, they're asking how you want to pay it: Credit card? To me, bill collectors are like parasites that you can't get rid of because no matter what you say to them, they refuse to believe it. When you finally do convince them you're already paid, that's when they sell the debt to another collection company, and you have to start all over again.

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Those little things in life

Being in South Korea and not being from South Korea often gives one the opportunity to think about a lot of the little things in life, the things that you grew accustomed to but miss now that you no longer have access to them. Lately, for reasons that might be obvious to some, I've been thinking a lot about things that I wish were here but just aren't. Since I can't have them, and quite possibly may never see them again, I thought I'd take a few moments in what may be one of my final posts to talk about some of them.

1. First, diet Dr Pepper. Yep, that beverage is probably my favorite beverage ever. I found I was ocassionally able to find it on the blackmarket here in Itaewon, but other than that, you can't buy it here. You can buy regular Dr Pepper, but I hate regular sugar sodas (or corn syrup sodas, if you buy them back in the states). Finding diet Dr Pepper has been an epic quest all on its own. I finally gave up and just realized I would have to go without. Unfortunately, the closest replacement is Coca Cola Zero, and it tastes a lot like battery acid, without that refreshing battery acid taste.

2. College-ruled lined paper. Never thought I'd miss that. They have paper here that feels like I'm in kindergarten again trying to write for the first time. Why they can't sell mass amounts of regular lined paper, I don't know. Oh, you can buy a notebook with lined paper in it, but loose sheets of paper, which I love to write with can't be found. Or if you do find it, it's really funky looking.

3. Computer software. Unless you're a fan of Starcraft, finding ANY title in Korea is almost impossible. The solution is to buy it online, so you can buy it off of Steam (the Valve network). But if you're not in the USA, Steam doesn't give you anywhere near the selection you can buy there. I've been itching to play Sid Meier's Civilization 4: Colonization ever since I heard about it being released, as I was a huge fan of the old Colonization. Can't get it here. At all. Same thing happens with a lot of software titles. Part of the problem is that so many people in Korea pirate software. But the ones they punish are the ones who would actually pay for the games.

4. Microwave pizza. All you can find are really ridiculous types of pizza that no human should ever eat. Lotte Department stores sells a microwave gourmet cheese pizza that I found for 8,000 won (about $6.50). I bought one. A week later, it was 9,500 won. A week after that, it went to 11,500 won. It's not worth the price. I can buy take out (there's a Pizza Hut a few blocks from me that charges 13,000 won for a tiny cheese pizza, and there's a Pizza School outlet a little further away that charges 7,000 won for a pretty nice sized pizza, except for some reason they put corn in it).

5. Dishwashers. I hate doing dishes. Really hate it. You can't find a dishwasher here. There might be some in some obscure place, but who knows where?

6. DVDs. I mean regular ones that aren't pirated. There's one store in the CoEx mall that sells some tv seasons on dvd, but there are very few selections available. I miss walking into a Best Buy and having every DVD I've ever wanted right there in front of me, AND cheap.

7. English language phones. Preferably an iPhone. I have a cell phone that I can't use other than to receive calls. Can't figure out how to access the net with it. I think you can. Can't figure out how to send a text message because I still have no idea as to what key I press to mimick the space bar. Tried everything. Finally gave up. Also, I receive nonstop spam messages in Korean on this phone. Either someone is trying to advertise some sex service to me, or Jack Bauer is trying to tell me that I have to stop Magabe Buwato from setting off a nuclear explosion in LA. So far there hasn't been a nuclear explosion in LA, so I'm thinking the texts have been about sex services. Sorry, Jack.

8. A heater in English. I still don't understand what settings I have it on. I asked two Korean women I work with to take a look at a scan of my heater console, and they "guessed" that I should turn two nobs on the console, meaning that even if you are able to read the language fluently, you still haven't a clue how to operate the stupid thing.

9. A solid bed. I am using a bed with a mattress that has what feels like spikes sticking out of it. Complained about it. No one cares. Can't figure out how to replace it because even if I had the money to buy a new mattress, NO ONE understands that I need it delivered. Even if I speak in FLUENT KOREAN, they act like I'm speaking Swahili to them. God, I hate this stupid language. And I hate their beds. Or at least this one.

10. Eggo syrup. They sell Eggo Waffles at Costco. Not syrup. Not sure why. The syrup is Korea was designed by some evil criminal mastermind who uses it to keep his soldiers in line ("if you do not do as I say, I will make you consume the Korean syrup from Emart").

11. A TV guide that actually explains what's on Korean television. Instead, you get a remote control and about 200 or so channels to continuously click through, knowing you'll never find anything to watch because 40 percent of the channels don't register.

Anyway, that's my rant for right now. As I'm now 2 weeks and a day into not having been paid, AND having to work....

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I really don't know what to do

Without going through the usual chronic complaining, I'm not sure what to do right now. My boss hasn't paid me in two weeks, and he keeps saying he's going to pay me in a few days, those few days pass, and there's no pay. It's like living with a roommate on drugs who keeps promising to produce his share of the rent, but you suspect he's never going to do it.

So I don't know what to do. I'm still working every normal day, but I'm just not getting paid for it. I'm being promised pay, but I'm not being paid. And here's the rub. I can't stop working because if I do, I'm in breach of contract, and I can then be fired and am required to pay back the airfare to come here. Immigration doesn't side with the foreigner here, ever, even though the contract indicates that I'm supposed to be paid. If I'm in breach of contract, all sorts of things can happen immediately, which includes being kicked out of my apartment and ordered to leave Korea immediately, which means there'd be zero chance of ever getting any of the back pay owed to me.

So, like I said, I don't know what to do. The other teachers (all Korean) are all about to quit. They're getting really frustrated, and I won't be all that surprised if I go into work tomorrow and I'm the only one there teaching.

I can't just get another job. I'm on an E-2 visa, which means the place that brought me over here pretty much owns me for the duration of my time here. If I'm to find another job, I'll have to find it in another country, and that means having to do all of the paperwork which could take months, which I don't really have.

My only other option is to go back to the states, and even though a friend has offered to help me get back, I don't have any options when I get back home. I don't have a job. I don't have a place to stay. I don't like to freeload on people, and I don't really have a family I can turn to either.

And what a time to be without options. The economy is collapsing, and now I have to start trying to figure out how to get back to the states and make positive moves? Hell, I don't even have my degree yet because UOP is so fucking dysfunctional that who knows when that is ever going to happen.

I'm starting to think I may just have to end things here in Korea. Was thinking about it back in the states some months back. Perhaps this is the sign I was waiting for. It's not like I really have all that much to look forward to anyway.

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Living in a life of uncertainty

One thing people tend to know about me is that I like things to be quite conservative. I don't mean politically. I mean so that my Tuesday seems a lot like my Monday. Stability is good. Anarchy, except as a conceptual government, is not.

Anarchy has been the state of things lately. When I arrived to South Korea, I had medical problems I couldn't control. Lots of anarchy. Finally got it all under control. Conservative again. Anarchy defeated.

Then the economy went kind of nuts. Lots of future anarchy. Thought I'd just ride it out and worry about those sorts of things when I get back to the states. Well, that never really works. So now I'm having to deal with it.

Haven't been paid in two weeks now. In other words, pay is two weeks late. Keep being promised a paycheck, but that's all I have received: Promises. The other staff receives the same guarantees. Everyone is somewhat on edge. No one is really upset at each other, but everyone is frustrated and thinking about jumping ship. People are looking for new jobs. Everyone except for me.

Why not me? Well, because I can't. I'm here on an E2 visa, which means that I am obligated to the company that sponsored me, even if that company has no money to pay me. I can't just up and take another job here. My only real option is to somehow convince by boss that he's not going to ever salvage his business and give me a letter of release, and then I can theoretically look for another job. Theoretically. Immigration changes its mind on this twice a day. And that also has a lot to do with which person in immigration you talk to. NOTHING is standardized here. There is no certainty. Just organized anarchy. Not good.

So, my other option available is to leave the country. That sucks big time because I don't have a job lined up anywhere. The US is going through crap right now, so there's lots of economical anarchy there. I'd be leaving a bad situation to a horrible situation. At least I have a home right now. Well, for the moment. Next month, who knows what I'll have.

I could go to another country, but that requires finding a job there. The visa application processes for most countries takes months. You don't just jump on a plane and start a job. Getting to Korea was a nightmare of a process. Going somewhere else would just be that much more difficult.

So, I'm sort of sitting here wondering if things are going to get better. I don't know. I have no idea. I can't plan for anything. And I can't do anything about my situation to make things better. I have a hard enough time holding a conversation with the clerk at the convenient store where I buy food. A few weeks ago, THAT was my difficulty. Now, it's gotten much worse, and I'm trudging through, hoping things get better. If not, who knows what will happen?

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Heath Ledger and the Concept of Political Projective Recollections

By now, most of the world knows Heath Ledger won the supporting-actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the Joker in the blockbuster "The Dark Knight." Ever since his overdose of prescription drugs last year, the hype behind Ledger's portrayal had all but guaranteed his receipt of the Oscar. It was such a given that if he had not won, I could imagine large groups of people in "Knight's Tale" garb marching on the battlements of Academy Awards Headquarters and reinacting the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England.

So, I guess you're anxiously anticipating my agreement or disagreement with this decision, like a television junky waiting on another episode of a show cancelled for lack of ratings. Well, unlike the networks, I am not here to disappoint. Just to confuse.

You see, I think he definitely deserved the Academy Award but like John Kerry who was for it before he was against it, I also think he shouldn't have received it. I know it's blasphemous to say this, but if he never died, I doubt the Academy ever would have taken him seriously.

Unfortunately, that's how the Academy is every year. Remember Lord of the Rings? How about Star Wars or any other superhero movie or animated film?

Let's start with the obvious, Lord of the Rings, which received practically every Oscar it was nominated for after its third installment. Not one actor, actress, supporting actor or actress was even nominated. So many great performances. No recognition. Rewind two years to the first installment when Sir Ian McKellan was nominated for his brilliant portrayal as Gandalf. Instead, the award was won by Jim Broadbent in "Iris". To completely rub it in that year, the best original song should have been Enya's "May It Be" from Lord of the Rings, if not for the fact that Enya had to write the verses in actual Elvish. Instead, Randy Newman got it as one of those "we really should have awarded you years ago" nods for "If I Didn't Have You" from "Monsters, Inc.", a song I should point out that was sung at the Academy Awards by wannabe Muppets.

Star Wars? Special effects, good. Music, good. Costumes and make-up, good. Real movie awards? Sorry, the Academy doesn't reward science fiction.

Put up any superhero film, and the Academy scoffs at it. You can get one of the techie awards, but none of the serious ones.

Animated films? That Wall-E was not even considered in anything but the children's table is a sign of this process.

Which brings me back to superhero films. No one ever takes them seriously. That Heath Ledger was even nominated was amazing until you actually start to think about what happened.

I'd be willing to argue that Ledger might have received the nomination, but it was his death that cemented his award. And I completely understand those who disagree with me, saying he would have deserved it anyway. And I agree with them. But I also don't think he would have won. He would have achieved popular support from rabid fans, but little to no recognition from the Academy.

Before his death, I heard almost nothing about Ledger's Joker. There were a few comments here and there, but when he died a word of mouth campaign began that argued how great of a portrayal he had made. I watched the movie. He was that great. But how great he was perceived was a direct result of the word of mouth campaign that never abated. I personally believe a lot of the traffic that made its way to see this movie was because of the hype behind Ledger. The rest of the actors were great, too, but you heard nothing about them. Everything has been about Ledger.

So what does any of this have to do with politics, as is hinted at in this article's title? The answer is: Everything.

One of my major pet peeves with political science is the usage of bad science. The type of bad science I'm talking about here is where the "scientists" knows the results of a social phenomenon and then backtracks to pretend that outcome was predictive. They do it all of the time, and it drives me nuts. It's like watching the dollar drop 15% of its value and then writing a predictive paper that indicates that a year ago you could predict the dollar would drop 15%. No, you couldn't. You're armed with knowledge of the present that wasn't available in the past. It's the weakest type of science there is: Predicting what already happened. I like to call this process projective recollections. No, no one else calls it that, mainly because they generally don't have a problem with the situation.

Which brings me back to Heath Ledger. People say he would have won the Oscar regardless of whether or not he died. That is a projective recollection. He won, so therefore lazy scientists predict he would win based on already knowing he did.

But we're dealing with untested variables here. What if he had not died? Would word of mouth have spread? Would people have cared as much as they did about Ledger winning? Would the Academy award a still-living actor with their highest achievement for playing a comic book supervillain? It didn't happen for the many fine actors before him. And it didn't happen for Jack Nicholson, who played the exact same part as Ledger in a role that critics defined as one only Jack Nicholson could ever play.

It should at least give one reason to think.

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The world lost a great educator: Diether H. Haenicke passed away on Sunday

When I was working at the Opinion Editor at Western Michigan University, I wrote a few articles that made me very proud. But nothing made me more proud than when I would get a personal note from Dieter Haenicke, commenting on how much he appreciated the work I put forth on a particular article he felt would benefit the student body. When I wrote something that made him laugh, he would write and tell me that, too.

I had the personal fortune of taking a refresher course in German from Professor Haenicke. He had a great presence in classes where he taught, and he was one of those few educators who you could tell really cared about actually imparting knowledge to others. There are a few teachers over the years I have patterned my own style on, and he was definitely at the top of that list.

He had a great sense of humor. He was never consumed by his own importance. He served as WMU's president from 1985 to 1998, and during 2006 he served as the interim president while they were searching for a new leader. And even though he was an emeritus professor and their former president, he continued teaching, continued commenting on issues that were important to him concerning the university, and you could actually see him wandering the campus because education was not just a job to him, or something you turned off when you punched the clock.

According to an alumni email I received, I was informed he passed away on Sunday from complications from a head injury he received during a heart attack in December.

He will be missed by many who knew him and many more who never got that chance.

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Why I Lost Faith in Political Science

I've been meaning to write this for some time, but I never really had the time, so I thought I would finally get around to doing it.

A few years ago, I changed my field completely from political science to communication. Whenever people asked me why, I would often say that it was because political science was interested in large movements of statistical data, whereas communication was more about the specific acts of communication between individuals. Well, that's somewhat true, although there are variations in both sciences that offer alternatives, but for the most part, that's generally how it is. But that's really not the reason why I abandoned political science for communication.

It was political science itself that caused me to realize I'd never be able to answer the questions I had within that discipline. You see, political science has taken a direction since the 1960s that puts it more into a self-reflective paradigm where its members are scared to death to appear to not be doing science that they are going around creating science for the sake of creating science rather than creating science for the sake of answering questions. Most disciplines borrow from other disciplines, and we all accept that. Political science borrowed punctuated equilibrium from biology. Communication borrowed identity theory from sociology and psychology. Each made these concepts their own, so much that they might not be recognized by the original discipline. I was fine with that. However, at some point political science became so engrossed in wanting to appear scientific that it stopped being very relevant.

I was taking a course on Congress from a professor at Western Michigan University when I realized that political science was finished for me. BS (the professor) was all about making science out of political science, and he loved his data files. It was all about manipulating those data files and then publishing his results. This was also the first time I came across the dirty tactic where professors latch onto the work of their students and then sign onto the project so that they can up their publication numbers; that's one of those incest-like behaviors of academia that I've never really found myself to be very comfortable. It's one thing to have a student approach a professor and want to write a paper with that professor, but when a professor acts like a vulture and scavenges off of grad students for material, that just seems so wrong. But that's for another essay, I guess.

Anyway, what I started to discover at this time is that political science has been overrun by the desire to publish material that comes from massive survey data. National Election Studies, student evaluations, and all that sort of tripe is used to make major inferences in the discipline. Every major election is followed by tons and tons of published reports about what scientists have found based on the question and answer sessions at polling booths by science-thinking professionals. And then a bunch of people across the planet keep making connections based on whatever statistical process they think to question in their research. If the numbers don't give them the results they expected, they change the variables, or they manipulate the way they question the variables. At least until they get the results they desire. In other words, we're not a bunch of scientists curious about finding something out, but we have a theory and we use the data to prove it. And then we publish it. And then we continue to publish about it, regardless of whether or not it's really true. We all have heard the joke about statistics (99% of all statistics is made up), but we keep accepting it as canon that it's good information. And we keep publishing it over and over again, and it makes major careers out of people who then call themselves scientists, because they can claim to use mathematics as part of their academia research.

In the 1950s, after World War II, the Ford Foundation sort of changed political science as we know it. In order to receive those elusive grants that were coming from the foundation, you had to show that you were doing "science". The hard sciences, like physics and biology, had an easy time because they were doing actual science. The softer sciences, like sociology and political science, had a much more difficult time doing the same thing. They had to make their social experiments look more scientific, and one of the ways they did it was to start using a lot of statistical information because that looks and sounds very scientific. But statistical data is very misleading. Let me explain why.

There are two types of statistical data. One is hard data, and the other is survey data. The first is actual science. Things happened, they were recorded, and you can use that data to explain natural phenomena. An example is one I did early in my career. I gathered data for a ten year period to display how many violent revolts took place in the world, and I categorized them by the amount of violence that occurred (deaths, financial GDP losses, etc.). I then compared that to the types of governments, the amount of legislation that took place in those areas, the education levels of areas in those countries and the countries at large. I tracked a few other variables I had to gather. I then plugged them into a statistical formula to eventually surmise a few things, such as "as more legislation occurs in a yearly period in countries with low to mid levels of education, they tended to suffer more violent outbursts". There were a bunch of other findings, but that's the basic style of what I was trying to do.

The other type is survey data, and that's where you question a lot of people and try to make some type of statistical connection in the data, like "how does education reflect whether or not someone feels good about a particular political figure". To me, this kind of data is somewhat useless because I've never been a fan of the opinions of people because I don't believe people really know what they believe. It's like the mass communication theory that states that people are influenced by media because they think their friends are influenced by the media, but they don't think they are personally influenced. The theory shows that they are obviously mistaken about themselves and right about how they feel about their friends. The fact that they might be mistaken about their friends never seems to creep up into the literature, and that sort of interpretation is why survey data is such a problem for me. People interpret it as they desire.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, and it reminded me of this. She's worried about her data efforts because others have suggested that using another command in the statistical program might achieve different results. That's where we're so focused on the "how" rather than the "what" or "why". Scientists aren't doing the statistical work anymore by hand, which means that the software has become so complicated that they may be making mistakes just because they don't have every proper button pushed when running the data. I had someone try to tell me that once in a statistical data set I was running, and I asked what are the implications of that "other" command he was discussing. He said he didn't know, but that he learned about it from another professor. I'm not kidding about this. I asked if the calculus was still correct, and he had no idea there was even calculus involved. For my friend, I would just like to say: Continue doing what you've been doing, unless someone can prove to you otherwise that your data manipulation is an error FOR A SPECIFIC REASON.

This has gotten me to the point where I don't do data manipulations now unless I understand the science behind what I'm doing. I've been to conferences where I realize that's not the case with others because I'll ask such a simple question based on the mathematics involved, and they stare at me as if I just asked the location of the abominable snowman.

For the record, I don't do survey research anymore. I abhor it and have no faith in it. To be honest, I don't care what people think (the ones you survey). I care what people do, what people say and how they carry out what they intended. For projection projects, I now use what I call an iterative approach, involving computer modeling. This is a complicated way to say I use a computer to continue to throw the same independent variable at the dependent variable and then reverse it for effect. I see things over massive periods of time, involving tens of thousands to millions of iterations, to see how things effect based on continuous influence. An example is the Friendship Over Time (FOT) Theory. Rather than focus on one attempt at communication, I focus on change over time as two entities share something in common over generations, until the results start to approach each other (people become a lot more alike as they share common behaviors), and then use that as an additive process to other behaviors to explain why friendships grow over time between nations, or devolve.

I'd probably like to use this process to challenge a lot of political theory, but to be honest, I don't feel welcome in political science anymore, so I have to find my own place in the sphere of science, even if I don't know where that is yet.

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Important lessons I've learned from watching television

They say television is not informative. Well, I have learned important things from watching it. Such as:

1. Terrorists obviously need lots of sleep because as they approach the 24th hour of being awake, they start to make really stupid mistakes. (--24)

2. Every police department has about 6 people of all races, sexes, and creeds who do 99% of all the crime-stopping in their jurisdiction. (all police shows)

3. The FBI never solved a crime involving mathematics more difficult than addition before allowing the brother of an FBI agent to start working for them as a part time gig. (--Numb3rs)

4. Asian can't tell the differences between separate Asian races, and all of them can pass for Japanese. ("Samurai Girl")

5. Most criminal trials are won by a lawyer who spent the previous night searching law books for a ruling or strategy no one remembers or ever heard of before (--Law & Order, Eli Stone)

6. The most dangerous criminals are ALWAYS moved by a truck in the middle of the night on very deserted roads, especially if there is a risk that someone might threaten to break them out of police custody. (--too many police shows to count)

7. I will never be haunted because ghosts only haunt very beautiful women who are so beautiful they would never, ever date me, and thus, I'd never see these ghosts. ("Ghost Whisperer")

8. Enemy military personnel are never taught to "cook" a grenade, so there is never any risk that an enemy soldier might pull the pin on a grenade, count 3 seconds and then throw it so that it explodes upon impact, always giving me the opportunity to pick up their grenade and throw it back at them so it explodes on them instead. (--almost standard for every war show)

9. Computers are so easy to hack, and the government employs super tech geeks who spend all day doing nothing but hacking computers by pressing random buttons on their computer keyboards, rarely even using the mouse. (--24, Torchwood, Chuck, and so many others that I've lost count)

10. Every cop has that "one" case that got away, but fortunately, something will happen that will allow that cop to finally close that case for good. (--police show fodder...happens all the time)

11. Only really beautiful people work for the government and police departments. If someone ugly works for them, that person is even more popular than the beautiful people.

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Peace in the 21st century using the Friendship Over Time Theory

The article about Obama's olive branch to Iran and how they brushed it off:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.073ba2ee2f1f00668848a4655420fedc.411&show_article=1

This whole Iran thing is yet another reason why I believe the west needs to pursue a different strategy of achieving peace with the rest of the world. The old strategies really aren't working, yet we keep trying them over and over in hopes that the next time will be better than the last time. Friendship or sanctions can only go so far as a diplomatic strategy towards people who see the United States and the west through a kaleidoscope of images that have a lot of historical baggage attached (like supporting the Shah, overthrowing democratic governments to support dictators who will support the US against the USSR, and other such moves that have damaged the US's reputation with those nations or people). The thing is, and this is what people just don't seem to grasp, is that while the United States HAS matured a lot since those days of the 1950s and 1960s, yes, there is still some work to be done, and no, Iraq didn't help the image any.

But with a new president, part of the problem we have to face is that Obama holding his hand out is still going to be seen as the same arm that connected to Bush, Clinton, Bush Senior, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon. I personally believe we may have turned a huge corner here, but the rest of the world isn't going to see that until a lot of steps are made to change international perception.

The United States needs to pursue a generational approach to peace-making in the world instead of trying to achieve things overnight. That's been our problem for so long now. We keep trying to get immediate results with other nations when dealing with nations that have been harboring attitudes that have existed over centuries. We've pretty much obtained all of the friendships we're going to get with immediate result seeking strategies. Now, we have to start focusing on long-term peaceful efforts with nations that have no reason to want to be friendly with us. To keep referring to countries as enemies of peace or an axis of evil, is never going to lead to long, sustaining peace with those people. Unfortunately, we don't get immediate results with them, so we automatically declare them as lost causes.

Look at Cuba as an example. There is absolutely no reason the United States should not pursue automatic friendly relations with this country. A tit for tat policy would do everything to produce friendship between the United States and Cuba. They'd be suspicious and act counter to friendship in the beginning, but sustained efforts at actually producing friendship would eventually thaw the hatred that exists between the leaders of these nations. The people don't hate each other. Americans have no hatred for Cubans. And I doubt Cubans hate Americans. However, because one man, Castro, went against the US decades ago, we refuse to have diplomatic relations with this country. And then a whole bunch of political people have made any future attempt at friendship politically impossible. A simple tit for tat strategy would produce immediate friendship that would grow over time. We start by opening up doors to their ambassadors, stating we recognize Cuba and will allow them to trade with our nation on standard international trade agreements. It would start slow, and it would stall several times. But eventually, with sustained policies to make it a positive experience, it would start to escalate towards friendlier relations. All that would have to be eliminated is the hostility talk and the sanctions we keep putting on people we perceive as enemies because we don't know how to deal with people in any way other than black and white terms.

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Why the average person has given up on trying to make a difference

Years ago, when the AIDS scare was just beginning, and people had no idea what this disease really was, I was studying genetics in college. At the same time, I was double majoring in archaeology, because I was fascinated with both subjects. Realizing the implications of this disease, I formulated a theory of how to trace back the virus to Patient Zero, the first case of someone with the disease, and then eradicate the disease by following its original mutations. I turned in the theory to my professor at the time, not knowing she was actually one of the main people instrumental in forming one of the first AIDS Conferences for the city. A few days later, she asked me if I would speak to a number of doctors who were interested in my particular theory. So, I went to this little informal gathering before the conference, and I was asked a bunch of medical questions, involving T-cell counts, and other such medical inquiries that were relevant to the AIDS crisis at that time. I answered all of the questions to the best of my ability, and they all seemed impressed with the direction I was taking with this conversation. Then, one of them asked me where I received my medical degree. I was dumbfounded, because I figured my professor would have at least informed them of my actual status, that I was really only an undergraduate, studying genetics and cell biology. When I informed them of this, they immediately wanted no more to do with me, thanked me, and that was the end of that. The AIDS crisis bloomed and exploded after that. Twenty years later, I read in a journal that someone was actually thinking of attempting to eradicate the HIV/AIDS virus by a method very similar to the one I presented; the only caveat was that so much time had passed, the investigator did not think it would be possible to trace the disease to Patient Zero.

Why am I bringing this up thirty years later? Well, because it keeps happening to me, and it is really depressing me. During the Reagan Administration, I had a plan for fixing the problems with our intelligence gathering assets, which I projected would cause serious problems for dealing with harder to pinpoint subjects, like the growing phenomenon of terrorism, which was limited at that time to splinter groups in Western Europe and student radicals in former authoritarian nations. I received a glossy photograph of Reagan as a response, thanking me for supporting his administration. That was pretty much it.

Years later, I had an idea to fix the economy of Michigan, using an advanced method of game theory that I was manipulating using a pretty simplistic interpretation of computer modeling. I received a message back from the state’s national senator, thanking me for supporting her stance on fossil fuels. I’ll be honest; to this day, I still don’t know what her stance is on fossil fuels, so I’m not sure how I was supporting her.

Unfortunately, this has been a pattern in how representatives of our government tend to respond to the common constituent. It’s like invoking Rousseau, when he argued that democracy only works during the election, but rarely after the ballots have already been counted. The politicians only seem to need you when they need votes; after that, the constituent is a roadblock and irrelevant.

Recently, I completed a theory for sustainable world peace, which a colleague and I have titled “Friendship Over Time”, or the FOT Theory. It involves several disciplines, some advanced game theoretic mathematics, and a result that can easily be obtained without having to be an analytical genius to handle the implementation. In other words, carrying out the peaceful project is easy; I did the math so the implementation could be easy.

My colleague and I, both communication scholars from the same institution, sent this theory to the Obama people during the 2008 campaign, explaining this is change that could make a serious difference. No response. None. Not even a glossy photo or a thank you for supporting his fossil fuel policy.

We presented the theory at a national communication conference, and people showed sincere interest. It was different from anything they’d seen before, and it actually causes people to think. Unfortunately, we don’t think that much anymore. We keep trying to do things the old way, hoping that unlike the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a better result), we might be successful if we keep doing the same international moves we’ve always done. Yet, we don’t get better results. We end up with more enemies and more people who we have to categorize as people who hate us for whatever reasons we can think of to fill in the blanks. Rather than moving towards peaceful co-existence, we move towards sustainable lack of hostilities that can change at a moment’s notice.

This is why the average person gets really frustrated with politics and trying to make a difference. I have been trying to make a difference for most of my adult life, and I’ve discovered that I might have been better off just trying to make a profit off of gullible people and exploiting those who didn’t know better. Because that’s what so many other people do, and they’re seen as successful, and even worse, they become powerful enough that those are the people to whom the rest of the country listens. It’s almost as if the one who screams the loudest, but has the least to say, is the one who gets the most attention. And we reward that.

Personally, I’m about to give up. I don’t see that anyone really cares for solutions to the bigger problems in the world. Instead, I see a lot of people who are more interested in pretending to focus on those problems without actually doing anything about solving them. We’ve become very good at rewarding reactive politics and shunning preventative actions.
With that being the case, is it all that surprising that people have given up on trying to make a difference?

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