Common Sense

Last word on immigration this weekend

I've been hearing quite a few voices in this debate since my own milquetoast post a few days ago. Everyone seems, for the most part to make some good points, but here's what I see:

1. We have 11-12 million illegal immigrants in this country. We can't possibly find all of them and deport them to their country of origin. It's just silly to think you can do so (I'm looking at you Tancredo). The only thing close to a workable policy this way is for cops to stop every latino who speaks Spanish and ask them for ID. We've already established that a majority of the illegals in this country aren't from Mexico or Latin America, so this is just racist on the face of it.
2. Bringing a guest worker program of some kind helps assimilate them into our culture instead of ostracizing them from it and forcing them underground. Then we all benefit from there being here. We get the labor that we so need to keep the economy humming, they get a path to citizenship if they want it.

The problem we're encountering now is that several people are thinking purely in ethnic and racist overtones. It is the dirty Mexicans and our broken southern border, while the real threat could come from anyone with forged papers or just about any cargo container in one of our nation's seaports. This shouldn't be as big an issue as first securing ourselves where we know we are most vulnerable to attack. Terrorists aren't going to risk life and limb to sneak across the Mexican border. They've got the resources to enter the exact same way that the 9/11 hijackers did, at the airport.

Any sensible, real policy is going to involve a guest worker program and dealing with the fact that many people want to come into this country. Getting bent out of shape everytime someone flies a Mexican flag or assuming the entirety of the problem can be solved by getting rid of the Latinos is stupid.

It's official, Nathan Macias has won the recount

Pink Dome has the full statement from Rep. Carter Casteel.

Genocide is profitable

From Super Read DH:

Hard to Distinguish

 

The Greater Houston Partnership has announced the latest guest in its International Business Distinguished Speaker series: Bolivia's Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. He'll speak on "The Lurch to the Left in Latin-American Politics."

The partnership's announcement didn't really go into depth about Sanchez de Lozada, the former president of Bolivia. Left unmentioned, for instance, was the minor fact that he's been charged in his native country with genocide.

Sure, it's an odd charge -- he allegedly ordered the death of 60 strikers, so unless the strikers were from a really, really small ethnic group, it's hard to see a genocide charge stick. Still, it might be worth mentioning that the expert on "the lurch to the left" is on the run from his own country.

As one person who received the e-mail put it, "Learn to do business in Bolivia from possibly the only guy on the planet who can't help you do business in Bolivia."

A GHP spokeswoman did not respond to a request for further information on Sanchez de Lozada. Or on what other accused genocidal leaders are up next in the Distinguished Speaker series.

Slow day

After curling up in the floor and letting my dog lick my face, I checked my email and Vince had a great suggestion for getting around my predicament without doing a long import thing.

I have noticed it is a slow traffic day though, which is discouraging me even more. But I will persevere. I just have decipher what all the babbling is about on the Word Press site so that I can customize the layout and design. And Sailor Moon is going to have to help me with the Photoshop stuff. I'll have a site up and running for you by Wednesday, but  it will take months of painstaking work to get the design I want.

Crushing news

I just got some tech support help from someone who has made this kind of switch before. He says there is no way to preserve my permalinks since I didn't do domain mapping before.

Once I move, all the old links and any Google searches will lead back to Typepad, and I will lose traffic because of it. Damn.

It occurs to me that I could simply abandon this foolhardy venture with WordPress and just upgrade my Typepad membership and start doing domain mapping now. Nothing says I have to use WordPress now.

But this was supposed to be more than just a new domain name. I wanted to do something really special for all of you nice people who have made Common Sense fun for me to do.

Quite a predicament I'm in. Discuss my stupidity in the comments.

I just want to drown myself in a bath tub

After last night's success with the new WordPress blog, I'm starting to have a sinking feeling that I'm in way over my head.

Creating the blog and setting up the hosting was easy compared to the task at hand, which is to import all of the posts and comments from Typepad and preserve the permalinks for search engines while redirecting to the new blog. Just starting from scratch could mean quite a drop off in traffic, and I want this new blog to be a permanent home for everything I've done so far.

It's just that I've done an awful lot since December 2003.

The things I do because I love all of you dear readers so much.

Subjectively objective writings

Slate today has perhaps the best article on the "cult of Objectivity" I have ever seen.

Objectivity—the faith professed by American journalism and by its critics—is less an ideal than a conceit. It's not that all journalists are secretly biased, or even that perfect objectivity is an admirable but unachievable goal. In fact, most reporters work hard to be objective and the best come very close. The trouble is that objectivity is a muddled concept. Many of the world's most highly opinionated people believe with a passion that it is wrong for reporters to have any opinions at all about what they cover. These critics are people who could shed their own skins more easily than they could shed their opinions. But they expect it of journalists. It can't be done. Journalists who claim to have developed no opinions about what they cover are either lying or deeply incurious and unreflective about the world around them. In either case, they might be happier in another line of work.

The Gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson is looking more and more prescient everyday.

The problem I have always had with Objectivity is that, on the face of it, it is a ridiculous argument. It is simply not possible to report a debate as though both sides are of equal credibility and weight. Oftentimes, one side is right and the other is wrong. A reporter's job is to inform the public on that debate, whatever it may be, so that they know what is going on.

The news I report to you is obviously slanted; it is whatever I read viewed through the lens of my own personal experience and beliefs. But I do try to be intellectually honest. I won't simply repeat something because it is ideologically beneficial to me. I try to show you what I'm thinking and how I arrived at my opinion in the hopes that you, too, will arrive there with me.

I certainly don't always live up to that. It is sometimes much easier to simply say "Look at that chimp in chief" and move on to the next post. On my best days, though, I hope I do enlighten you.

Journalism's history is replete with a lack of Objectivity, anyway. One of the reasons this blog is named "Common Sense" is as an homage to the birth of the newspaper industry in America. Pamphlets liked Thomas Paine's Common Sense and many of the small, local newspapers of the Revolutionary War era were designed to sway you to join a cause. They took sides based on the publishers' and the writers' own views.

During America's early elections, they were also a source for promoting scandal. Just read some of the editorials from the Election of 1800 and you'll see what I mean.

Journalism has been at its best when it was inciting Americans to rebellion or Edward R. Murrow editorializing on the dangers of McCarthyism (I watched Good Night and Good Luck last night). I hope that is what I am accomplishing here, and I hope that is the legacy that I live up to.

Let me close with a quote from William Faulkner, one that kicked off the Gonzo movement in the 50s: "The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism." Journalism is a never-ending search for the truth, and trying to report a debate Objectively does more to cover and confuse the truth than anything else.

Not really surprising

The largest study ever conducted on praying for the sick found that... it has no beneficial effect. In fact:

In an unexpected twist, patients who knew prayers were being said for them had more complications after surgery than those who did not know, researchers reported Thursday.

The complications were minor, and doctors surmised that they could have been caused by the increased stress on patients worried that their conditions were so bad they needed prayers.

Hmm. A Catholic priest wasn't surprised, either.

Father Dean Marek, a Catholic priest who was involved in the research, said he wasn't surprised by the results.

"I am always a little leery about intercessory prayer," said Marek, director of chaplain services at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "What we have in mind for someone else may not be what they have in mind for themselves…. It is clearly manipulative of divine action and personal choice."

 

Also, asking an invisible man in the sky to make your friend better is just silly.

This was a randomized, blinded trial of several people having cardiac bypass surgery. Most did not know if someone was praying for them or not. The study encompassed about 1,800 people and had three groups. Two Catholic monasteries and one Protestant group offered prayers to about 2/3 of the group. 1/3 was told someone was praying for them, 1/3 was told it was likely someone was praying for them and it was true and 1/3 were told someone might pray for them but cruelly, no one bothered.

This part slays me: Researchers said they didn't ask family members of the sick people to stop praying because it would have been unethical to do so, meaning some people received more prayers than others.

The results are in. The study is over and praying for people, at least for total strangers, does not work. It was stupid to try and put some scientific scrutiny on matters of faith, which by the definition aren't supposed to bear scrutiny. Can we just move on now, and maybe fund a study in which we try to determine a way to actually do the surgery so that those in recovery suffer from fewer compliactions.

Sucess!

I have created the shell of what will be the permanent home of Common Sense. And it only took me three hours!

Now all that is left is redesigning that shell and them importing the 3500 or so posts I have archived here on Typepad. Many of those are double posts from when I moved from Blogger. I should be able to go through and delete many of them, though I really don't want to go through the bother. Anything that makes this next move more painless I guess, right?

This is excrutiating

I decided to switch to WordPress as part of the brand-spanking new Common Sense. That may have been a huge mistake since I don't know anything about computers.

I'm learning fast, though. I'm trying to upload through an FTP server all of the contents of my directory folder to the root directory on my new Web host's server. So far, it has not been successful and I've tried three times! But I will persevere. I have to since I've already dropped $95 bucks on Web hosting. If any of you would like to help cover that cost, I sincerely hope you will visit the PayPal donate button to the left of the screen. Because I don't really have $95 bucks to spend so freely.

Help a blogger out.