10.30.06

Becoming excellent

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:47 am by Administrator

If you want to become great at something, you can’t skip steps, as your mother might have told you. Here’s the ladder of excellence in five levels, made popular by the late psychologist Thomas Gordon, about three decades ago. (Source: Fortune, Oct. 30, 2006).
1. Unconscious incompentence: You think you know, but you have no idea that you’re ignorant of your own ignorance.
2. Conscious incompetence: Now you’re aware of what you don’t know and start to do something about it. It’s like starting to learn the basics of a new language.
3. Conscious competence: You can accomplish a task but only with great mental effort. You can make small talk in Spanish but you’re constantly thinking about what you’re saying but you’re speech is less than perfect.
4. Unconscious excellence: You’re no longer thinking, you’re doing. You can carry on a conversation in Spanish fluently without thinking about the rules of grammar.
5. Conscious exellence: The highest echelon. Here you use your conscious mind to break down and adjust the elements of your performance. You can explain to other people what you are doing.
Finally, beware of overconscious incompentence. That means your awareness of your Achilles heel becomes debilitating. Some examples from the sports world are Miami Heat center Shaquille O’Neal shooting free throws or Yankee second baseman Chuck Knoblauch trying to throw to first base. Visualize positive outcomes. Let your mind be your ally.

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10.17.06

Trying to make sense of the border fence

Posted in Politics at 9:34 am by Administrator

So Congress voted for a bill, signed into law by President Bush earlier this month, to build a 700-mile fence on the U.S.-Mexican border at a cost of at least $2 billion. Is this a solution to our illegal immigration problem or a band-aid promoted by some in Congress to capitalize on the anti-immigrant sentiment in the country? See this Washington Post story that includes interviews those with experience on the border who believe this is no solution.

Thousands of desperate Mexicans risk their lives to get into this country by any means necessary and some die tragically in the deserts of the Southwest. Reported deaths on the U.S.-Mexican border have doubled since 1995 and those numbers are most likely underreported.
Click here for the GAO report on the deaths of migrants trying to cross the border. This is an economic problem that expensive fences are not going to solve. Where there is a will there’s a way and people may be deterred for awhile but not stopped.

When American parents take their children out of the public school system and send them to private school, most people recognize that they are simply doing what they perceive is best for their children. That’s their right and no one criticizes them for that. Many parents would do the same if they could. But when people from Mexico come here—granted some illegally—and get jobs that most Americans won’t take, to provide what they perceive to be a better life for their families, the hard-liners argue they are criminals who are mooching off the system. From their perspective, they are here to make a better life for themselves. But is it really at Americans’ expense? That’s a tough question.

First off, whether or not you believe illegal immigrants ought to be here, they do buy stuff and pay sales taxes. Secondly, immigrant laborers from Latin America, legal and illegal, are a significant part of the construction industry and the people who harvest most of the fruits and vegetables you eat. (Having worked at farms and nurseries during the summers in middle school, high school and college, picking strawberries and cutting flowers, the Mexican workers were the most efficient.) As far as screening for illegals, its the employer’s responsiblity but no matter how thorough and legit the employer is, illegals can slip through because they lack the time and money or will to go over everyone’s papers with a fine-toothed comb. Many places use the same workers year after year but when there is crop to be harvested or building to be built and Jose shows up with his cousin Lupe, you might just hire Lupe because he knows Jose (networks of family and friends often is how migrants find work) and not check his papers very closely if at all. The demand exists for workers and Mexicans are in supply. For more information on Mexican migrants economic transition to America, especially among undocumented workers see this Pew Hispanic Center report from 2005

A third point about immigration, is that all of us, unless you are Native American or a descendant of black slaves, got a break to get into this country. Who decided or decides who is legal or illegal? At times in our history, laws have been passed to limit the numbers of those from particular ethnicities (in the 1920s after 14 million immigrants came between 1900 and 1920, quotas were set with Anglo-Saxons being favored and other groups usually black and yellow people, along with Jews, slavs, Latins and other being severely limited [see A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, p. 382) Of course, cheap immigrant labor is something that’s fine and dandy, as it was with Chinese building the railroads in the 1880s. However, the Chinese were not welcome as equals.

Still in light of all of the above, we do need to manage immigration, especially from Mexico. Illegal immigrants need to come out of the shadows. One way to accomplish this is to grant the illegals who are here working productively legal status so they won’t be exploited by employers and so competition for wages and contracts is fair among building contractors and farmers. Some politicians hate the idea of amnesty but as long as there is work here people will come, that’s the reality. If illegals turn out to be drug runners or involved in other criminal activity they should be deported, but most are here simply to work. Finally, the only way to slow illegal immigration is to encourage, support and enact political pressure on Mexico and other Latin American countries to build better market economies and better educational systems that can support more stable and better paying jobs for their citizens. The economic inequality in those countries is prompting people to go to El Norte. None of this is easy or cheap but it’s the pragmatic approach. Building fences are costly too and won’t solve the problem in the long-term. Besides as comedian Carlos Mencia put it, who is going to build the fence anyway?

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10.05.06

Iraq: an unwinnable war

Posted in Politics at 6:03 am by Administrator

As a journalist or anyone who seeks to be objective, one has to look at countering points of view and based on the evidence, draw conclusions. That involves more than reporting in the “he said,” “she said” format. It means attempting to uncover the truth, a much more difficult, but ultimately more beneficial task.

Read here what President Bush told the country when we went to war in Iraq, vowing to defeat the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein and free the Iraqi people.

But the week before U.S. forces invaded Iraq, my congressman, Jay Inslee, made this speech on the House floor questioning the decision to go to war. Unfortunately, many of the fears he expressed have proven to be true. Bush promised democracy. So far we’ve seen mostly anarchy. The unintended consequence of this war as Inslee and others warned is that it would divert our attention and provide traction to al-Qaeda, the biggest threat to our security, as well cost American lives.

Undoubtedly, things will get worse in Iraq before they get better. The question is how long will it take, if it’s even possible, to establish a government and police force that can maintain order.

While our government squanders hundreds of billions of dollars on a war with no end in sight, we have squabbles in our public school districts on how to spend shrinking resources. Meanwhile, in Darfur, genocide continues and North Korea and Iran are closer to going nuclear. While the so-called leadership of the two major parties blame each other in the press, it’s clear that the only hope is to elect a new chief executive who will not “stay the course.” The list of candidates are not promising. An intriguing matchup would be Barack Obama against John McCain but Obama probably isn’t ready and McCain might not win his party’s nomination.

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10.03.06

Taking the “real” out of reality TV

Posted in culture at 7:31 am by Administrator

I try not to watch reality television anymore. But like driving past a wreck it’s hard not to take a look sometimes. It’s become the playground of the self-absorbed who have such a desire to be famous, that they could care less how they come across on the tube as long as they’re on it.
I did watch the first few seasons of The Real World, the MTV series that started the craze, but eventually lost interest when I started living in the real “real world.” Somehow living watching other Gen Xers’ drama on the tube seemed like a waste of time when I had my own life to lead. Plus, living in a waterfront home with unlimited resources to start a business with your housemates is not reality. And the people on that series became more unlikeable.
I did catch part of the Bachelor Rome on ABC last night, in particular the part where Lorenzo, the bachelor, meets the 25 women he’ll choose from. My first observation of the women is that all of them, except maybe one were white. Of course, all of the bachelors on the show have been white. Ratings reality? Probably. For whatever reason network executives don’t seem to think their audience is ready for an African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic bachelor. Yet, as interracial relationships proliferate it seems odd that almost no women of color would be in the pool. In the larger sense, I don’t really care. Network television is behind the times or becoming irrelevant. We have much more to choose from now. Still it would be nice to see something other than white entertainment television on the major networks. For the real down-low on Asian-Americans in pop culture check out angryasianman.com And for the Asian-American male perspective see singleasianmale.com

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Morality and ethics in the postmodern world

Posted in Politics at 7:21 am by Administrator

Do most people live by a moral and ethical code or belief system? And if they say they do, are they accountable to it? The media cluster coverage of the downfall of U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, who sent Congressional male pages e-mails tinged with sexual innuendo, seems to point to the hypocrisy of man who publicly painted himself as a social conservative and chaired a committee on the exploitation of children. (As a former House page myself, I think most pages are astute enough to see someone like Foley for the buffoon that he is.) Now of course no one is perfect, we’re human after all, but I think people can be divided into four categories: people who live by a moral/ethical code and practice it; people who say they live by a moral/ethical code but do otherwise; people who do not believe morality/ethics matter; and finally people who would prefer to behave morally and ethically but because of poverty or other desperate circumstance break the code to survive (such as immigrants to come here illegally for a better life). Of course, at one time or another we shift between those categories.

Just an observation of people in general and especially those in power.

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Hello world!

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:13 am by Administrator

I’ve decided to enter the blogosphere to give my two cents on the pressing and not-so pressing issues of the day, hopefully making observations and providing analysis that readers find interesting.

I’m 33 years old and live in Shoreline, Wash. and work as the assistant sports editor of The Enterprise Newspapers in Lynnwood, a 75,000 circulation group of weeklies that is a subsidiary of the Washington Post-owned Everett Herald. I am originally from the Portland, Ore. area and am a single Asian male, well half-Asian actually. I graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. in 1996 with a B.A. in Politics.

My areas of interest that I may comment on include politics, economics and class differences, race, American society and culture, and sports.

I am not an expert by any means, only an observer of the political process mostly from the vantage point as a journalist. My limited experience in politics includes a stint as a U.S. House of Representatives page and volunteer campaign worker for a U.S. House Democrat. I’ve never been a political reporter per se, but have covered my share political issues pertaining to school boards, city councils and county board of supervisors.

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