July 6, 2006 – Long Weekend

Wow, were to start. Last Friday Dan and Melanie came into town, because Mel’s sister got them a great deal at the Omni down town. While they were in town I got to dog sit Tanner, there two year old lab.

Most of Friday and Saturday were spent cleaning the house getting ready for Terri’s visit. I picked her up late Saturday night and on Sunday we meet up with Dan and Mel at Kirby’s for a late breakfast. We watched the new Superman movie. I know most people are talking about how bad it was, but I don’t think it is that bad. It is exactly what it was suppose to be, and entertaining action movie. There are some parts in the story line that make you go, “What the Hell?”, but for the most part it was entertaining. The special effects were good, and Parker Posy and Kevin Spacey both did a great job.

Saturday night we BBQed up some kabobs, and had a pretty nice relaxing day at the house. Monday we got a lot errands run in the morning, and went to Bret and Wills wedding that night. It was a very nice wedding.

Tuesday Terri and I were up by 5:00 to get her to the airport. John had a 4th of July pool party at his house which was a lot of fun, but I tried to take it easy after a hard night of partying at Brett’s wedding. Boo Boo had a good time at the party though; there were lots of dogs there for him to play with.

Since then all I have been doing is work and trying to recover. At least it is a short weekend. The yard is starting to get a little out of hand since I have not been able to work on it at all this past weekend. So I will probably be having fun with that this weekend.

Now on to current events. After that huge response to immigration reform last week we are once again going to turn our attention to south of the border. Ok I was not going to mention immigration reform at all, but my co-worker got me a little worked up on the subject so here it goes. Yesterday my co-worker sent out this video thinking it was very interesting. Immigration video Watch it or don’t, it really does not matter. Basically the video is a guy with a little bit of information and an agenda. He starts talking about the US population growth with some information he downloaded from the US census burro. So he points out how the population is growing and how it is predicted to hit a plateau except for the evil immigrants who will just make the population blow up right off this chart. Then from there he goes on to say that our infrastructure will not be able to handle this population growth. Where he gets this information no one knows. (It is just like the underwear gnomes on South Park, “Step 1 steel underwear. Step 3 Profits.”)

Anyway she asks me what I thought about the video, and I politely explained how I did not believe his conclusions were justified. She keeps trying to tell me that he had lots of facts in his presentation. Anyway what scares me is that I believe she is quite a bit more intelligent then your average American, yet she can not see that this guy’s presentation is lacking a lot of facts, and he is basically trying to scare people into immigration reform. What would your average American think?

Terri the other day watched “An Inconvenient Truth” the new Al Gore movie on global warming. I have not seen the film so I can not comment on it directly, however it seems like it is a lot along the lines of that clip my co-worker sent me. Lots of numbers and facts, but the link between the data and the conclusion is not there.

Now don’t get me wrong. Do I think illeage imargation puts a strain on our social services, yes. But don’t show me a population grath and tell me that. Point out how people are coming into this country using social services such as welfare. Do I think there is a link between burning fosil fules and gloable warming, I don’t know. But hay it would probably be better to be safe then sorry, so if there are some things we can do to reduce polution why not. But don’t show me an ice core and say it proves that in the last 100 yr our average temprature has increased by 1 degree and say it is proof that cars are causing a green house effect.

By the way for everyone worried about gloable warming I suggest you read a book called “A short History on Nearly Everything”. It is very intresting and walks you thew our understanding of most of the natural sciences. My favorate thing about the book is he goes on to explain how all sorts of natural things in this would we do not understand, and how easily we can be all be killed off by these natural fanomonon. His conclusion being that even though life is fragile and rare it seems to be very resealiant and finds a way to adapt.

So be wary of all those profits of doom because they will be wrong millions of times, while the optomise will only be wrong onece.