Good news?

I received word today from the Director of Forensics at the University of the Pacific. I have been accepted into UOP. He also told me that it's pretty certain I will be offered a TA position as well. Well, unless my continuous inquiries into the situation haven't scared him away already. So, in a few weeks I will be finding out for sure if I will be allowed to begin attending grad school at UOP in communications beginning at the end of August of this year.

On another subject, I had the second interview with the federal investigative services for an investigative position in Monterey, California. The organization is national but I would be working in the Monterey field office. The interview went off smashingly. This is one of those times I thank the heavens for a vibrant personality because it definitely went over well. Now, all I have to do is hope that the final determination is a yes, and then I will need to pass the extensive background check (won't be the first time I've been through that), and then I will be in very good shape to begin training before reporting to Monterey.

So, I guess you could say this is good news. I'm just always so careful about counting my chickens until they hatch.

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Some updates

Had my performance evaluation at work
Things turned out okay. I've never really been all that into having performance evaluations at work. Never really cared. But everything seemed to be okay. I'm currently in the process of configuring a database at work, and it's far more work than I expected. It's pretty much overwhelming everything else I'm doing at the moment.

Women can be strange
I created a personal ad on Craigslist for the Grand Rapids area, and I have had about five responses. For some bizarre reason, all five are married. I've gone over my ad a number of times but can't see any reason why I'd ONLY be attracting married women. It just seems odd that when I state that I don't play games and I'm monogomous, that is interpreted as "he might like me cause I'm already married." Again, Reason #77 why I don't understand women.

Writing in hiatus mode
I guess it has something to do with my feeling that I'm in a transition state (to where or what, who knows?) but I haven't had the desire to do any writing whatsoever. My novel THE AMERIAD is with an agent right now, but there's no guaranteeing she's going to accept it for representation. It's like the writing industry has become so much harder these days, mainly because it's become so easy to get published the wrong way. Everyone claims to be a writer, and with vanity presses, anyone can be without going through the long term process of publishing. It also means zero sales and a false sense of believing one is a successful writer. But it also means getting published the old fashioned, established way appears almost impossible in comparison to the old days. In the old days, bad writers would give up and move on. But with the false sense of success they get from vanity presses, they stick around and they crowd the real publishers who now hae to treat everyone as a novice because they're overwhelmed with submissions from people who send a first draft of their first novel, convinced it should immediately make them rich.

It becomes very frustrating for those who have stuck it out long term back in the days when success took a completely different route. It's this mentality that garnered the response from a colleague who told me that I should consider myself a success because I've finished novels, not because I've published, and that success itself is in the eye of the beholder. It's this kind of crap that makes it even harder to justify I'm a writer. It's not a feel good thing to me. It's an occupation I want to be working in for the rest of my life. For me, the IRS determines if I'm a successful writer, not Dr. Phil.

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How to solve the whole Iraq thing....

One thing I'm getting really tired over is the whole "hypocrisy" argument where one side says that it's okay when their side does something because the other side did it first, and anyone complaining is just being hypocritical. We see this with the whole Iraqi situation, and it was recently explored again when Cheney changed his tone about the insurgency, stating that it might not be as over as he first indicated. I am getting so tired of the "well, Clinton did it" or "You attacked Clinton, too" arguments that keep us bogged down in useless bantering. But this is my rant about hypocrisy. So, let's visit that.

Saying "hypocrisy" is the adult way today of saying "he started it". I'm not even saying they're wrong for pointing it out. However, I find it a weak argument to substantiate a higher point, almost as if saying "I know you are, what am I?" is a GREAT argument.

I would love to see the argumentation in this country rise above grade school tactics, but they haven't. That's one of my many reasons for believing why we're in such trouble domestically in dealing with each other. People have mastered the first level of complaint dialogue without ever realizing argumentation can be raised to the second level (involving a chess analogy of argumentation with lots of thought about consequences rather than checkers where forward thinking is two or three levels ahead, at most). We're stuck in first level checkers for converation in this country. That's what sells on the pundit channels, and that's what the majority of America is listening to. This is why people can honestly believe that supporting either the Democrats or the Republicans IS a solution when in fact both sides are equally responsible for the mess we are dragging ourselves into. Neither side DARES to make a second level argument for the rational fear that NO ONE will understand that there are longer term consequences for actions we take today.

When I complain about Bush and Company, it's because I perceive their solutions to longer term issues to be unexplored. But the irony of the situation is that those criticizing the Bush team do it from the same one dimensional level that Bush and team are focusing on. When I was against the war, I was against it because I didn't believe the American people are capable of handling a long occupation of Iraq; that's exactly what people are NOW discovering. That was second level analysis, something so few people were willing to invest in. Unfortunately, the Democrats don't have a second level solution to the first level problem we're now in (the insurgency went from second level to first level because it's NOW happening). We keep looking for immediate solutions and we're never going to get them. That's why I get so pissed off whenever a conservative comes along and gives an argumentative question of "well, what would you do to fix it?" Which means: "Okay, we screwed it up, but you're not any better if you can't figure out how to fix what we screwed up." It's like "I burned down our house due to being stupid, but I don't exactly seeing you come up with anything better than rebuilding the same house, the same thing I'm doing right now. By the way, you can't hold me accountable for burning down the house, because your only solution has been to rebuild it."

That's the problem with first level analysis, and that's why we're not going to win the insurgency problem in Iraq. We're still thinking tactically in a strategic environment. Until that changes, it's not going to get any better.

Okay, lego boy, so what would be a solution? Well, stop calling each other names, stop relying on your power base to back up stupid decisions, and let's do this: (unfortunately, it requires the Republicans IN power to take the first move)

1. Actively engage the Democrats in the rebuilding process of Iraq. Stop making it about us or them in American politics. Explain that a bipartisan grouping is going to forge a long-term building process that benefits the US, Iraq, the Middle East and the rest of the world. It's not about more money being spent, but about how to engage the rebuilding process. To do this, you hold very transparent meetings between both parties so that this is one country developing this, not the Republicans and not the Democrats. It will require sacrifice on the Republicans in the beginning, but if they held to this, the Republicans would practically secure their power for the future for longer than going it alone will ever do.

2. The Democrats would have to be invited over and over again until they realized this is a serious attempt at bipartisan behavior. It wouldn't happen overnight, but it would happen eventually as the only response would be to continue to complain. Little by little, the complainers will have less and less of a power base as more Democrats become part of the solution instead of the alternative to not having one.

This could work, but the only thing that would derail it are two things:

1. The Republicans never even try.
2. The critics continue to be allowed to control the conversation. We're really good at complaining in this country. It's becoming its own power base already. It can overwhelm us, and may already have.

Unfortunately, neither side will embrace this to begin with and it will never happen. Both sides will nitpick (or just ignore it), and we end up in a situation that continues to deteriorate until we are forced to pull out not because we couldn't win, but because we gave in to irrational partisanship and fear.

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Chopped the beard

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It doesn't get any more true than this....

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A reason why academics are often considered liberal

There's a constant complaint going around these days about how academia is all filled with liberals that are spewing their liberal ways and opinions about everything under the sun. This argumentation is a main point of a lot of conservative deconstructivism that is used in the pundit media, even if it is a bit self-serving rather than explanatory. It is pretty easy for a conservative pundit to point at academics and say "liberal" because quite often that is exactly what kind of scholarly work that is being represented. And then the condemnations are that much easier.

But what is really happening here? Are academics pushing forth a liberal "agenda" or is there something else occurring? It might help to actually bring out the meanings behind conservatives and liberals. A generally accepted terminology for the two (if you're not Ann Coulter or Al Franken) is that liberals advocate radical (quick) change to perceived problems while conservatives advocate slow, incremental change, if any, to potential problems. If we look at this, it shouldn't be hard to figure out that a natural academic liberal is going to be interested in changing a problem while a conservative may not have the same interest and may feel the status quo is superior to radical change. It is important to point out that there should be nothing wrong with either approach. Unfortunately, in today's day and age, that respect of both approaches is not only lacking but it's nonexistent.

So, let's examine further the axiom of Karl Popper's "We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or discipline." (1963, borrowed from a citation used by Barry Friedman, June 2006) What Popper is stating is that academia tends to be involved in solving problems, not in studying phenomena, or if studying phenomena, it is in the guise of solving a perceived problem. Well, this works pretty well if you're a liberal academic, but probably does not work as well if you are a conservative academic. When a conservative does not perceive a problem, he or she is already distanced from the accepted methodology of academia. You may notice that a lot of conservative pundits recently have been perceiving a problem that they have been studying: The liberal bias of the left. In a bizarre way, the liberal tendency for studying academic problems may have been somewhat responsible for substantiating the necessity to question liberal methodology.

The problem this creates, especially in social science, is that most investigations tend to be investigations of solving problems. This is a liberal tendency, based on the simple definition provided. This is why non-social science fields do not often suffer from this problem. Unless there is an obvious blatant disregard for impartiality, a natural scientist is usually not going to be seeking problems to correct while investigation natural phenomena. However, the problem does occur when a natural scientist begins to attribute social science procedure to investigate natural science situations, such as depleting ozone layers or deforestation complications. The scientist may or may not be correct in such assessments, but when a social science methodology of seeking a social problem is perceived, the results can easily fall back into one of interpretation rather than in direct science investigation. This is why there's a connection problem with critics of evolution. If left to direct scientific practice, there would be no reason why both a scientific and a religious solution could be obtained. But unfortunately, the science is often left behind in the name of religion, and the science becomes muddied by impure definitions of scientific practices, such as the definition of "theory" when dealing with science and when dealing with personal ideas.

So what is the solution? Well, right now, probably nothing. Until our science becomes strong enough in social avenues, we're limited to interpretation of results by how we feel about the issues. There is an avenue of growth in the fields of economic trends that is promising, although it involves the movement of masses of people, which rarely explain why an individual does anything. Game theory falls into this paradigm. We can look at countries and say that a group of ten thousand people will probably do this or that based on what is the most rational choice given. But ask what Joe is going to do if faced in the same situation, and you'd have as much luck hitting it big in Vegas.

Isaac Asimov wrote about a character named Harry Seldon who created a field called Psychohistory, I believe it was called. By breaking down the variables of decisions and processes, Seldon was able to determine the course of human events for thousands of years. However, it was one man who Seldon never could have anticipated that threw the whole mathematical formula into chaos (which Asimov called "The Mole"). It was a brilliant design of what scientists do not understand and cannot understand no matter how beautiful the process is created.

Until then, we are confined by our numbers, our beliefs, and our emotions. And unfortunately, our current process benefits those of a liberalist mindset. Perhaps the solution is not to circumvent this but to understand it, much as Seldon would have done if he'd only realized "The Mole" was a possibility.

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Ann Coulter is the Devil...so buy her book

There's an interesting debate going around and around in circles these days. Ann Coulter wrote a book that bashes liberals. Yes, it's true. She really did. She said bad things about liberals.

Okay, now that we have the ground-breaking assertion out of the way, what has happened next is that one person actually read the copy ABOUT the book, and now every liberal on the planet is throwing a fit about the book. Granted, few of them have, or will, read it, but they're all throwing fits about it.

The book, according to Coulter's many interviews, takes to task the 911 widows who have been using their status for political purposes. Well, disregarding the fact that EVERY politician in this country uses victims for their own purposes (Brady Law, Megan's Law, Duane's Get Off My Lawn You Damn Yippersnappers Law), she claims that because of this "status", she and other conservatives have no ability to question their "authority" as experts. Well, it's a bunch of hooey, but honestly, who cares?

What's actually happened here is that Ann Coulter has written another anti-liberal book, the liberals are all up in arms about it, and she's now #4 on the national bestseller charts. Seems pretty savvy to me, if you ask me.

If liberals REALLY have a problem with Coulter, ignore her. She's the spokesperson for ONLY herself, not anyone else. Sure, conservatives are all in love with her because she's a lot more attractive to men than Rush Limbaugh, but that's about where the attraction ends. She's not brilliant; she's annoying. But somehow she's become brilliantly annoying. Figure that one out.

The real crux of the situation is that she has written yet another book (yes, I've read all of her previous books) where she doesn't really say anything. She can best be equated with intelligent, conservative smut. And yes, I read her because I see her specifically as intelligent, conservative smut. I'm not going to change my life because Ann thinks one way or another. Well, unless we're dating, and then all bets are off.

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Someone tried to scam me today

I was selling an item, and the person contacted me using one of the scams you recognize if you know how these things work. Because I'm lucky enough to be heavily involved in Internet message boards, this immediately caused my spidey senses to tingle. I then asked around, and sure enough, someone was trying to do exactly that.

What is it with people today? Scamming for a few hundred dollars is an okay thing? It's okay if you can get away with it? I'm sorry, but what is happening in our society today? I don't remember things being this bad before. Sure, there were con artists in the past, but they were unsavory types that preyed on people. It's becoming mainstream now.

Are we becoming a world of untrustworthy people, or have we always been untrustworthy but too hopeful that it might not really be true?

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Well, we all strive for something....

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Even the weekends are getting harder

I'm not sure what it is, but every day seems harder and harder. I spent last week looking forward to the weekend, but once the weekend got here, I found myself with absolutely nothing interesting to do. I mean, nothing.

I've been going through a liquidation phase of my life lately where I'm getting rid of everything. I signed up with Amazon.com to sell a bunch of my old books, and I've been selling them like hotcakes. I sold my Xbox and all its games. I've listed my Playstation 2 and all of its games, and I'll probably end up selling that as well. I've cleaned up one of my laptops and it's almost ready to sell. I intend to do the same thing with three other computers I have sitting around.

I'm selling my fax machine to a woman in California, and I'll probably sell a few other things to her as well.

Yet, with all of this stuff being liquidated, I still have WAY TOO MUCH STUFF.

My university application is stalled while my GRE score makes its way there. I finally completed an endless drama of having City College of San Francisco send my transcript (it would have been easier getting the pope to go on a double date to see the Da Vinci Code). All that is causing my application to NOT be submitted to the communications department is that GRE test score.

I don't think I can handle Michigan much longer. I mean, I love the job, but I hate the state.

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My Craigslist vice

I'll admit it. I spend a great deal of time reading the "women seeking men" posts on the Craigslist site for San Francisco. I'd read it for Grand Rapids, but so few people post there that it's not worth the look.

What strikes me as quite interesting is this tendency for a common dialogue to happen. I'll describe it here:

Girl: I am looking for someone real, who doesn't play games, is intelligent and isn't interested in just a cute Barbie who's perfect in every way.

Now, this sounds fine. But then the post usually adds one of the following processes:

"Would also like someone who is only 6 feet tall, has long flowing hair, looks like Fabio, has so much money that Bill Gates is jealous, doesn't mind that I'm either a) currently in prison, b) have 94 kids, c) would be diagnosed as schizophrenic if I hadn't stabbed the examiner in the head with a pair of scissors, or d) all of the above."

Now, when I have actually found a great profile, I'll send a friendly small message, and I get zero response whatsoever. Then a few days later, that SAME person will write a new profile asking why she can never find anybody.

My favorite was one who actually responded. She wrote a profile that claimed men were only after her for her physical attributes, didn't appreciate her for her humor and her intelligence but only in her looks. So, I thought, wow, this is someone who is more of my liking, someone who is intelligent and has a sense of humor. So I wrote. She asked for more information, with kind of a detailed request of specific information. Then she wrote back after I gave her what she asked for and said: "Sorry, I'm looking for someone who is at least 6'3". She was 5' even, by the way.

Usually this is the part of the post where someone just says he's giving up, that there are no real women out there, or they're all nuts. And yes, I am beginning to believe all that, but I still find myself going through the Craigslist postings, looking for people, finding one or two who actually sounds really great. I don't respond that much anymore because no one ever responds back to me, making me think there are too many guys actually trolling that board with agendas to score rather to find someone for long term.

But it leaves me concerned because I don't really think I'm going to find anyone in the real world because it just never seems to happen. I'm the "good friend" to too many women, and as an online female friend of mine likes to constantly point out to me: I'm the safe friend, and the real issue is that they're NOT interested in me, even if they say stuff like "I wish I could find someone like you." You hear that complaint from a lot of guys these days. I think it's a misinterpretation for a lot of guys because I've been there and I've misinterpreted it many times. When I hear the "I love you as a friend" or some variation thereof, I now interpret that as "I have no desire to date you and am looking for something better." Yeah, it's kind of negative attitude to have, but honestly having that attitude doesn't really change anything. I'm still alone, and I'm still not getting anywhere with any of the women I know and have known in my life.

I guess this is one of the many reasons I have this desire to return to California. I didn't have this problem there. That doesn't mean I won't have it after I go back, but for some reason, the day my car stopped at the first Michigan gas station, I became an enigma to dating, or perhaps a "leper" is a better description. I always felt that in California I could really be myself. I can't do that here. Being myself in a very tight waddish area of the country is dangerous. I even had one student try to "out" me because my lifestyle was different than the usual paradigm. The fact that she didn't get anywhere with that approach only made her more upset, causing her to actually try to get me into some kind of trouble, not realizing my life is much less of a secret than she suspected.

Never had that sort of problem in California. I guess that's why I peruse the San Francisco Craigslist community and wouldn't peruse a Grand Rapids one even if there was one. I don't fit in here, and I don't think I ever will.

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All dressed up but nowhere to go

I took the GRE over the weekend for the second time. The last time I took it was 7 years ago, before applying to universities for grad school. I did all right, but not the greatest in the world. I've never been a great person for standardized testing. But the score was better than I expected, considering the fact that I had taken a pre-test a few weeks ago, and it all but indicated I was a complete moron, barely getting the "spell your name correctly" question correct.

I'm kind of in a zero movement area of my life right now. I don't really know what to do. I miss California more and more every day, but I'm scared to death of moving back there because I can't guarantee I'll have a job after arriving. I really have this fear of future poverty. I mean, I grew up in that environment; I don't think I can handle going back to it.

But I find myself with nothing to do each and every day after work. I have no social life and wouldn't know where to find one if I was inclined to search for one. I finished my latest novel and am burned out on writing for a short while. I find myself antsy all the time, not sure of what to do. I feel like I should be out there doing something, but I can't figure out what that thing is.

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Is radio becoming irrelevant to the music industry? Ask the Dixie Chicks

For those of us who remember 2003, one of the pivotal moments in music, especially country music, was the comment Natalie Maines told a London audience in which she indicated that she was ashamed that President Bush was also from Texas. The country western music radio stations were up in arms, Toby Keith went on the war path, and the extremely popular Dixie Chicks went from a number one country music group to persona non grata. You couldn't hear them on the radio under any circumstance.

Fast forward to the current day, and the Dixie Chicks have released their new album, Taking the Long Way. Their first single is "Not Ready to Make Nice" which orchestrates DC's refusal to drop the whole issue in lieu of the backlash they received from country western radio stations. Well, judging from the news stories that came out immediately after the album was announced, local Grand Rapids country western stations (there are two biggies) indicated the following comments: "We gave them a chance and they blew it again" and "Our radio station isn't going to be playing any Dixie Chicks music at all." THE REST OF THE COUNTRY responded in about the same manner. Country western stations weren't going to touch the new Dixie Chicks material. They were going to make the Chicks pay for their insubordination towards country music. In other words, don't get on the bad side of Toby Keith and his posse, or you're going to be sorry.

Well, sorry Toby, but without hardly ANY radio play whatsoever from their own genre, the Dixie Chicks are now number one in the country in album sales for both the mass market and the country market. Without radio stations playing their music, they sold 526,000 CDs in the first full week. Toby Keith's first week for his new album "White Trash With Money", sold 330,000 CDs. In the year, only Rascal Flatts's "Me and My Gang" has done better with 772,000 units sold.

So what can this mean? Perhaps it means something bigger than the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith. Perhaps it is starting to show that the old radio standard is becoming irrelevant. The Dixie Chicks maintain an active presence on Myspace, which has them updating their information with almost daily reports. They talk to their fans, even if they can't always talk to them one on one. Other stars, like Shania Twain, also have Myspace presences, but they're not really on them. Perhaps we're starting to reach that era we were promised so long ago where we can physically reach out and talk to the people we admire. Without serious radio play, I truly believe this has made a serious impact on the survivability and continued growth of performers who used to be under the thumb of the radio stations.

Perhaps what we are seeing is the end of the radio station's era of control of the purse strings of music consumers. With Ipods, MP3 players, and a disdain of anything music industry related by the new crowd of people who consume music, is it any surprise that the industry is changing and it takes monumental events and people like the Dixie Chicks to reveal that the people are interested in the performers, not the dogmatic decisions made by people who make them based on their personal beliefs more than the quality of the music. Perhaps this is the start of something much bigger than anyone realizes.

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