Just had to get this off my chest.
Help! The Government Has Labeled Me A Threat!
My True, and Terrible, Experience with Restraining Order Abuse
My trials start, as they usually do for young men, with a girl. Cliché, but true. We met the first week of my sophomore year in college, at Michigan Tech, in 2006. That day she was just the friend of a friend of my roommate’s. Before long she was more than that, part of a group of 5 of us that became close friends. When she had to move out of her dorm at the end of her freshman year, I was there to help, taking her stuff down M-26 to a self storage unit for the summer. We shared a religion, both had only one brother who was close in age (my brother is actually a twin) and enrolled at Purdue, were middle class, had an affinity for the Tigers and Red Wings. Her favorite Tiger was Pudge Rodriguez and I can remember her finding Facebook groups for Curtis Granderson to try and get me to join back when Facebook was more individualized, not the middle aged soccer mom message board it has become. The only one I ever accepted was clever, the title jokingly saying 70% of the earth is covered by water and the rest belonged to the then Tigers centerfielder. She made it a point to see if I had saw that one saying approximately, “it may be a little thing but I like to show the people I care about that I have been paying attention.” We went to movies together, on campus and off, went to school football and hockey games (both in Houghton which is in the Keweenaw Peninsula jutting into Lake Superior and in Detroit, 10 hours apart). I can tell you she cheated when playing Euchre, a one time experience trying to wait out an October blizzard that was never repeated. My roommate, who I still talk to nearly every day, has a great picture of the two of them at Cedar Pointe. I could tell you what her ACT score was and that her older brother was born premature just like I was. She even went so far as to seek me out in the parking lot to the on campus Catholic church, asking me to sit with her at mass (is there a more intimate act of friendship than that?) She got the best grades of her college career then. She’s even bought me dinner on occasion. My grades went up when I found them too. I had found those who made me a better man. I didn’t know how to put into words how important those friends were until I saw the following passage from CS Lewis:
“In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together; each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day's walk have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out toward the blaze and our drinks are at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk.”
She joined the Tech track team in the second half of her sophomore year. We still saw each other, every week and a half to two weeks. Lunches, dinners, watched the Super Bowl together. It was apparent that just after a couple months running around with the new crowd, and one bad season, she was quickly losing happiness. Too much of our meetings were spent with her lamenting about team politics, nasty attacks from her supposed teammates meant to get her to tow a decidedly unimpressive line, and being forced to represent the team, and school, in inane NCAA PR (yes, they do try to claim with a straight face that student athletes matter to them) that she was adamant she didn’t have time for. Then she moved in with those same teammates she conspicuously failed to ever complement. By that fall, the first half of my senior year, she was miserable. She began complaining about dizziness when she stood up, it being bad enough that she needed to see a doctor. He diagnosed it as iron deficiency. If he had been there the same Friday night she called and asked me and my roommate to go over to her house he’d have come to a different conclusion. After getting snapped at by her for an hour and a half she downed a tablespoon of Nyquil and shuttled us out the door. The excuse was that she had suddenly started feeling sick, I am sure that it was because she was depressed and needed to get to tomorrow faster than her body clock would allow. In previous meetings she complained about her father and asked one of our group if he’d do cocaine with her. She didn’t mean to actually do it but her tone meant she wanted to, it was a list of red flags a mile long. I’m not brilliant, the stress was obvious. I don’t need to be a doctor to know that was causing the dizziness.
I should have gotten involved sooner than I did. Her grades had gone from the Dean’s List the year before to C’s (low enough that her cumulative GPA had dropped to a 3.0) and she was referring to herself as a failure of an engineer. By that November, I was trying to get her to hang out with the rest of the group more often and had taken to make sure to tell her the truth that she had lost sight of. She was smart, charismatic, attractive, that life could truly be great for her. I meant every word of it. In a month she went from posting on a Facebook note at 1:30 in the morning how much she loved me (not the first time she had used the four letter word to describe how she felt about me, we were close) to ignoring me and then accusing me of a criminal felony, slashing the tires on her car. I will never understand why that happened, even with the wisdom of years and a reading of Gone, Girl (bad joke) I’d be lying to say it makes sense. We often look at the latest celebrity disaster and say how those close to them need to intervene. No one ever says what to do when your intervention is rejected. I decided to stay the course.
My last semester we saw each other constantly, she had gotten a job that year across the street from my lab. I worked in the building that housed her lab. We had class twice a week in adjacent classrooms. I saw her going to the gym. The previous semester we had both had class in the Electrical Engineering building in back to back hours so I’d see her coming out as I was going in. The off campus Catholic Church, St. Ignatius, was less than two blocks from her house. Houghton is a 10,000 person town four hours from “big” cities like Green Bay and Duluth. Tech is a 6,000 person campus. The Wal-Mart is a big deal, quintessential small town America. Most people know each other and it would almost be eerie not to see someone than it was to see them. Shockingly, we bumped into each other. I was always a gentleman, or as much as I ever am. It was frequent enough that I didn’t want a false felony accusation to be the last thing she had said to me. It could have been terrible if that exploded again given everything. I stopped by her house on the third Saturday of January and I thought that, after a wide ranging discussion that was civil and lasted for hours, we had actually patched things up. She was still miserable though. Sitting through excuses about how the coaches were doing training that she didn’t respond to is not a fun way to spend an afternoon. It was over a full calendar year after she had joined the program and she was not getting better, she was regressing. Conferences were months away and I could have told you then that she was going to fail. I was pretty sure before but that talk removed any doubt. Her future was slipping away, there are consequences to failing, doors do close. She didn’t have normal ambitions, she wanted to go to Med School (logical for a Biomedical Engineer). It was obvious that without major changes that she would fall short. There was no reason for that, if she was surrounded by actual friends and true teammates it wouldn’t have happened. I once again redoubled on efforts to get her to join the rest of us when we were having fun or hosting a surprise birthday party, hoping that she’d figure out how good things had been and knowing that if she did that her resume would come back. She is a year younger than me so this was her junior year. If she made the Dean’s List the rest of her time as a student as well as taking over the summer the classes she had done poorly in, her transcript would have been med school worthy by the time she graduated the next May, maybe the end of that summer. She would still have been 21.
For that I got a second round of false allegations, this time I had smashed in the front quarter panel of her Grand Prix (that’s closing in on two thousand dollars in fictional damages). False allegations, even if you know they are wrong have a way of making you doubt yourself. I have spent time seeking out the wisdom of others to reinforce what I already knew. Here’s what I’ve found. There is no way to stop bad behavior if you don’t tell the other party that how they are acting is unacceptable. That really isn’t possible without talking face to face. I wasn’t nasty, just firm in that there is clearly a problem here and it has to be resolved. Bill Parcells, once wrote in the Harvard Business Review, that confrontation is required for leadership. Education means to lead. Many schools embody this in their name. My high school was named for Winston Churchill. For that, the stalker allegations started. My senior year was the best year of my life academically, a 3.94 GPA in 36 credit hours and I worked two jobs, one of which got me international recognition. My team finished in 2nd place in the value investing conference at RISE in Dayton. If you watch CNBC in the middle of March you probably know what that is. We outperformed every Ivy League endowment fund my senior year. In the two years from 2008 to 2009 the fund grew by 10% which was world’s better than the stock market as a whole. It was even more impressive considering I could only be long equities and bonds, no shorting allowed. I was good at finance, it was what I wanted to do for a career. I didn’t have time to stalk anyone, considering I was burning 70 hours a week on school. In busy weeks, I was doing that in four days. My faculty advisor said I needed to devote so much time to my work that I should fail at everything else. I met his goals, and still found time to live life, to succeed elsewhere. I did it while fighting depression related to what I’ve been writing about today. I did it while still fighting for a friend who was giving up on herself. I did not have time to obsess though.
I tried to be the man that Tom Landry would want, “A leader is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” Why is that so important? Well, I believe that leadership is the epitome of love. Epictetus, the Ancient Greek slave and philosopher, talked about how everyone must at some point say to yourself who you want to be and do what needs to be done to get there. The key, hang around people who get the best out of you, those who lead. The Polynesians who settled Hawaii use the word kumu to mean teacher…and lover. To be successful you just have to surround yourself with those who love you. It may not be easy but it is surprisingly simple. She had stopped doing that and the rest was predictable. I guess I could have taken a victory lap when a year later she had regressed even further as a track athlete. Her results from the 400 meter dash at conferences her senior year:
Place Name Year School Time
2 Vallar, Kayla JR Grand Valley 55.98
4 Hohmann, Zoey FR Ferris State 57.39
9 Chandler, Adrienne JR Grand Valley 59.88
12 Bildner, Katie FR Hillsdale 1.00.52
13 Rotter, Becky FR Northern Michigan 1.00.84
16 [Name Redacted] SR Michigan Tech 1.04.77
I redacted her name because this isn’t about public humiliation. The point of showing the results is that if you know someone is going to fail, you stop it. Period. End of story. Do everything you can. I knew that she would never be competitive. Obviously, she didn’t make it out of her heat and never raced in the finals. She fell short by several seconds in a race that requires one revolution on a track. To be frank, she never should have been there at all. She was uncompetitive. If that is your main extracurricular activity to put on a resume you’re in deep trouble. She was also the captain of the team which was equally awful on the whole.
Women – Team Rankings – 21 Events Scored
Grand Valley St. - 291 Ashland - 146
Hillsdale - 136 Northern Michigan - 70
Findlay - 62 Saginaw Valley St. - 34
Ferris St. - 23 Tiffin - 20
Northwood - 19 Lake Superior St. - 14
Michigan Tech - 3
Every event scored gives 10 points for first place, 8 for second, and 6 down for third to eighth. Each event is worth 39 points. In 21 events, there are just shy of 820 total points possible. Tech scored less than one half of one percent of the total possible. My senior year, when I had identified that she wasn’t going to change the culture of the team but sink to their level, they scored a total of 5 points. 3 points. If this was a rap battle, it would be time to drop the mic. In academia, I could write QED immediately underneath those tables. Does anyone doubt why I had been working so hard to get her out of there? The program is terrible, worse than most public high school teams and most definitely worse than my alma mater. What would Winston Churchill say about adults performing below children? Being last place always comes back to culture and a last place culture molds last place people. They weren’t friends, they weren’t teammates, they didn’t care about each other. That magic that creates a good team, the camaraderie was entirely absent. When you have no friends, when you aren’t a friend to others, bad things happen. Thomas Sowell’s favorite Russian parable, Boris and Ivan, is instructive in the motivations of those who made up the Tech track team. It is impossible to be happy surrounding yourself with those who coerce those around them to failure. It is a misbegotten notion that if you can get everyone to fail, it absolves you of your own failure. Relativism, moral or otherwise, is fertile ground for terrible evil. Like egging on someone you live with to falsely attack someone you don’t even know. Like enablers who give an addict his next fix or his next shot, the thing these people truly fear is someone in their group achieving. Sometimes you can learn a lot by finding out who doesn’t like you. I believe it was Tennyson that said a man cannot make a friend without making a foe. Failure was a fait accompli, I’d fight against that for someone I’m close to always. Being right never felt worse. I have no doubt that Tech’s track team is the worst scholarship collegiate varsity team in the United States of America. When you have admitted you are a failure as an engineer, a good job, opportunity, happiness requires a better extracurricular record than that.
If I had the same record it would have taken a lot less than three years to get a strong rebuke and what would have been said to me would be a lot worse than anything I ever said to her. One last time I went to bat to get her back on the right track. America is a great place, ever forgiving. Even though she was at a place that she never could get a job as a biomedical engineer, med school was just a semester away. If your grades don’t cut it, a school usually requires 27 to 30 (it varies) credits of basic science and mathematics to trump your transcript. Having been an excellent undergraduate student at one time, she would have tested out of enough of that to be eligible by the end of that year. Combine that with an internship and she would have been a quality applicant barely after her 22nd birthday. That isn’t behind schedule in my book. I highly suggested that, it seemed like a smart idea to me.
Instead she gave me a nasty email reply to tell me she was going to a job that is a dead end. It was one I had actually been interviewed for (never turn down a chance to hone that skill, even if you don’t have any intention of ever taking a potential offer). She went to work for the most despised industry of health care. It’s a fifty year old industry (a dinosaur for tech) that has only recently become mainstream because of corporate welfare. The stimulus bill threw $20 billion at hospitals to adopt electronic health records. Obamacare made adoption necessary. From Breitbart to the American Thinker EHRs have been exposed as a grand fraud with disastrous consequences by conservatives. On the other end politically, the New York Times, and others, haven’t been shy about pointing out how bad the technology is. Costs haven't been lowered, care hasn’t improved and fraud has exploded. Here in metro Detroit, there is a famous case involving a doctor who defrauded Medicare by over $10 million in a single year by purposefully misdiagnosing patients with cancer. Now that billings are done with a click rather than a complicated paper trail, Medicare and Medicaid waste has ballooned to over $60 billion dollars a year according to the CMS. Since EHRs are standardized there is no good way for insurers to snuff out which doctors are good and which are poor. It has materially altered care for the worse and the cost is prohibitive enough to impact access. Think all of the horrors of the Obamacare website on a grand scale. The sad thing is that was the goal all along. The VA scandals give proof to that If politicians were just looking to line their pockets they’d green light failed ideas that go bankrupt a couple years later like Solyndra, Fisker, or, a local company to me, A123 Systems. EHRs haven’t gone the way of green energy because they are the propaganda to excuse the rationing that is coming with socialized medicine. That has been known for over a half decade at the Wall Street Journal. Mickey Kaus, a California Democrat, compared it to Mao’s Great Leap Forward (which killed 100 million people). As a Catholic, I consider her involvement in that my greatest failing. It violates the sanctity of life that is a cornerstone of my faith. It would be like knowing someone who works in an abortion clinic. I thought I was being remarkably pragmatic. I didn’t crusade publically against immoral cronyism, I just tried to keep anyone I know from being attached to it. That destroys opportunity, it destroys freedom, and consequently it destroys happiness.
Even though I had not seen her for over a year and she was leaving the state she was granted an ex-parte restraining order against me. Ex-parte orders are supposed to be issued only in dire circumstances when there is an obvious and immediate threat and a delay for a hearing could result in irreparable harm. Obviously, that situation didn’t apply here. The hearing is assisted by the courts through the PPO office which aids petitioners with forms and helps them fill out and make their case. It is, to my knowledge, the only type of action, civil or criminal, in which that happens. Hearings are held in front of a judge without the knowledge of the other party as to their occurrence (that’s what ex-parte means). When you find out what was going on in my life at that time you’ll again realize quickly I didn’t have time to stalk anyone.
The end of May saw me holding the hand of my mother as I pulled her off life support. She had suffered a sudden stroke. In minutes she had lost all functioning in the left hemisphere of her brain. I can still remember watching the EMTs as they dabbed at her eyes with a paper towel, her dilated pupils failing to react. The eye is a remarkably expressive organ, until it isn’t. Hopefully you never have to see a loved one breathing but already dead. The last thing I had said to my accuser was an email telling her that I was to be giving the eulogy at my mother’s funeral and, despite the problems we had been having, I would appreciate it if she attended. Coming home from preparations at the funeral home I was handed a business card from the Sheriff’s Department, Deputy Jackson, by my stepfather (my dad died from a heart attack when I was 14). I called him back and was told a PPO had been taken out against me. He promised to mail me the order because I was reasonably refused to burn an afternoon to drive to downtown Detroit to meet him and he wasn’t going to come back out to my house in Livonia. There was no talk about how to appeal the decision (you must do it within days) and the order was never mailed. I called him back twice to let him know but he didn’t show much concern. Sadly, in Michigan law, a mere phone call, no matter how limited the conversation was, counts as oral service. I was found in violation of Civil Law at a hearing I wasn’t aware existed and served the complaint without actually being served. Once again, no other court action allows for that. In fact, not being able to locate a defendant and serve them a civil complaint in person or through certified mail is grounds for dismissal. I have to endure a permanent public record with no way to object. I am 10-2184-PH, just run a background check on me. Even though the order expired years ago and was never violated if you are so inclined call the Macomb County Court Clerk’s office and they will send you a copy to read. Or walk in. I did last week, the file is in the basement now but it takes less than five minutes for them to bring it to you to peruse.
At the time, besides burying my mother, all three of my remaining Grandparents were gravely ill. I had turned down a job dealing with Florida pension funds that February because I could not afford to move away. On my Dad’s side, my Grandmother had emergency quadruple bypass surgery and is now gradually slipping away into dementia. On my Mom’s side, my Grandmother had complications from hip replacement. She needed a second surgery after her femur broke at the attachment point. It then got infected, severely. For the doctors reading this, her Sed Rate jumped to 145. The infection ravaged her for two more surgeries and nearly six months. Her fever ran at 102 degrees or higher and limited sleep was disrupted by it breaking with a bout of the sweats every night. We had to change her bed sheets daily. She couldn’t walk and we had to take her to an infectious disease specialist in another network. He finally suggested the right cure that involved having her sit for an hour for 40 consecutive days to receive a cocktail through a pic line. The infection had spread to a previously replaced knee which required it to be taken out, a block filled with antibiotics replacing it for ten weeks, and a new mechanical knee to be put in afterwards. There was one other one that I’m missing. Suffice it to say, it was not a good time.
Seven surgeries in two years that left her immobile. She required 50 blood transfusions because her body was too weak to replace what she was losing with each operation. That meant that she was hospitalized for at least a week rather than the day or so which has become standard procedure. One of those times she was overdosed with morphine that put her into a state just above a coma. Having finally gotten back to even, it was years before she regained her vigor. She will never be fully mobile again. Concurrently, my Grandfather was slouching towards death as his lungs, heart, and kidneys all shut down. He was diagnosed as terminal in 2009 but survived until fall of 2011. Palm Sunday 2010 saw him have a cardiac event that brought his blood pressure to 39 over 20. His body was unable to filter out toxins from the blood so the last year and a half we had to admit him to the ER around once every month because the ammonia in his blood brought on episodes that made him believe he was living in someone else’s home or worse. He didn’t sleep and often times would try to walk out at night which meant someone had to pull night duty to keep an eye on him. My Grandma needed surveillance in the day and my Grandpa needed it at night, it was a 24 hour job. We actually had to tie a bell to my Grandpa so we knew when he was on the move. He’d sleep for a couple of hours and then get up and sit at the kitchen table for hours, his head sinking down as he warned about a mythical riot going on at the jail in which he hadn’t been a cop for 20 years. Oh, those table sessions.
Speaking of law enforcement, with a PPO I could never get hired into that profession like my Grandfather, 3 uncles, mother and brother all have done at various levels in their life. Even though it is classified as a civil misdemeanor there are actual consequences to having them issued against you. You are unable to purchase or possess a firearm, you aren’t allowed to appear within the vicinity of the person who put one out against you (if you were living with the petitioner you would lose your rights to your house and your family), the order is entered into the Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN). Having a court order entered into LEIN means that it is accessible by any law enforcement personnel in the country. If I was to go to California, a couple thousand miles away, and like a clueless tourist found myself going over the speed limit, the on car computer system would highlight the order if I was pulled over. The message is a pernicious one, I’m a threat. What was a routine traffic stop now has the cop moving one hand to his gun. That’s a pretty easy way to cause a pedestrian situation to become a tragedy.
After graduating from school I had trouble finding a job in finance (2009, go figure) so I worked at what I could get while studying for the CFA exam which I passed in December of that year, a 34% pass rate, and had finally gotten into the field as a broker’s assistant. To work in a brokerage you must be compliant with federal law. The Securities and Exchange Act of 1937 requires you to be fingerprinted and submit them to the FBI database. I have to disclose all political donations and any public mention, including a testimony for a charity, can serve as grounds for dismissal. The start date for my employment was late June 2010, I had the fingerprints taken at the Livonia, MI police department that week. Before the end of July I was fired from that job, the broker called me on my cell phone after hours while he was out of town and told me to mail in my key. Just about the time that he would have finally turned in my fingerprint profile and it worked through the system.
I was unable to get a job until the PPO expired, and then only in community banking. I have gotten one other chance to work in the career I wanted. I was hired in to be a client associate, essentially a secretary who cut checks for clients, wire transfers, answered phones and dealt with the copious amounts of paperwork that a heavily regulated government industry. The job required a GED. I was hired and promised that I’d be sponsored within a month for my Series 7 and 63 licenses (you have to be sponsored to take the test unlike a Bar Exam). I was never allowed to sit for the license exam.
I’m not perfect, been wrong before in making market predictions, that is impossible, but if I had never been fired back in 2010 things could have been quite different. At the end of 2010 I published a Gundlach-esque powerpoint presentation about how getting short China would have been a good idea. In 2011, Hugh Hendry, a famous British fund manager, shorted Japanese companies in cyclical industries (i.e. steel) that did a large amount of their business in China. He earned 52% that year, the best hedge fund performance on the planet. At the end of 2011 I got an article published saying that the Australian Dollar was overvalued and that you should be averaging into a short position (Australia is a second derivative of China so it was the next step in my short China idea) over the next three to six months. It peaked in March 2012, falling close to 25% in the next year and a half. It is still a good idea in case anyone is wondering. I got fired from my last job, the one I was promised to be licensed at, for saying publically that long duration treasuries were a good buy. This year the 30 year treasury is up close to 18% considering capital gains and interest. That’s not a bad record. That isn’t a bad life. I’ll never have that career all because nothing I do now changes the fact I’m seen as a threat. For what it is worth, I like wheat futures now. If this makes it to print keep your eye on that over the next six months to a year. I just get to sit idly by and watch life pass me by. I can’t stress how this fact, mixed with the trials of family health and tragedy, brought me to my knees. There were days that I didn’t think I’d make it through. There were even more days that I wished I didn’t have to live through. Like I said, everyone has their failings.
Unfortunately the story doesn’t end there. In 2013, she filed a second PPO, this time in Wayne County where I live. Stunning that her previous job was measured in months before she left. And no, if you’re wondering, I did not try to meet her somewhere. I haven’t seen her since 2009. Less than three days after she was granted it, ex parte of course, she sent me multiple text messages. I could have gone to jail for answering them. I guess I’m not an immediate threat to her. I appealed this time and the order was rescinded. She didn’t even show to the appeal hearing. I sued her, in her answer to my complaint written in plain language was finally the truth. I never did anything illegal. If I were present at either of my PPO hearings I could have told a judge that. Are you surprised that the grandson, son, nephew, and brother of law enforcement officers (present and past) would respect and live within the law? Instead I found out after the fact and am considered obsessed for wondering why I have been convicted by the American equivalent of a star chamber for a thought crime. Instead I am 10-2184-PH, guilty of one count of standing athwart history and yelling stop, one count of refusing to define deviancy down. What would Buckley or Moynihan say about that? Where do I go to get my reputation back?
Link dump, I don't feel like going back in and adding them back to this format from Word:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b5g1avyCSA
http://health.usnews.com/health-news...issatisfaction
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/...care_data.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/bu...says.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/bu...e-billing.html
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...452302125.html
http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/21/ob...#ixzz39W5PGd60