It’s not a secret that I’ve never been a fan of the Republicans. But this administation is the scariest I’ve ever seen. There are two thing in particular about the Bush administration that I think would make even staunch Republicans uneasy.

The first is an assault on science. Whether it’s NASA, the FDA, or the EPA. The Bush administration has consistently marginalized the views of scientists. The net effect is that scientists are being silenced and the government is dispensing incorrect or inaccurate information which is slanted with a political point of view.

The second dangerous thing that the Bush administration reaches for more power than any administration I have known(granted I’m not that old). In numerous situations like NSA wiretapping, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib even Republicans think the Bush administration has overstepped executive powers.

When these two things are added together it leads to a common theme: You can’t trust the government, especially the executive branch. There’s always been a distrust of government and executive abuses of power, particularly since Watergate. But now all actions and information are tainted by politics.

It’s never been this hot since we’ve lived here in the bay area. We’ve had a couple of sporadic days where I wish we had air conditioning, but this was the first constant week where we really missed it. We tried to get out of the house as much as possible to avoid the heat. We were only partially successful

I’ve rarely seen a game demo this cool. I was already going to buy HL2: episode 2, but having Portal and TF2 just makes it an even sweeter deal.

Bottled water is one of those things that I try and convince people not to buy, because I’ve read quite a few articles like this. They all say that bottled water is no safer, nor cleaner than tap water. It is another case of good marketing taking advantage of an uninformed public.

Now it’s true that in other countries(particularly the third world) buying bottled water probably makes sense. But here in America we have pretty stringent water testing.

There have been a couple of cases where I could actually taste a difference between tap and bottled water and I think that’s a reasonable situation to buy bottled water. But that’s probably only happened a few places that I’ve been to. And I have some confidence(but no proof) that even the different taste did not affect the safety of the water.

In other news, contrary to what tens of millions of dollars in advertising would have you believe, pork is still not a white meat.

Been pretty busy at work so I haven’t been blogging as much.

Some things I wanted to mention:

Lucas is getting big. He is a cute baby, there’s no doubt. Look at this picture and tell me he’s not. It’s clear he gets it all from his mom, because he looks nothing like me. We went to the Filoli Gardens today and took some pictures. They’ll be up on the site shortly. He’s been eating some baby food for a bit now. He seems to like bananas, doesn’t mind spinach, but doesn’t like carrots.

So after watching 4 episodes of “How To Get The Guy” I have to say, it bores me. I am probably not the target audience, but it’s just not that good a show. The love coaches annoy me(especially the chick) and the advice they give doesn’t seem that relevant. It’s true that it’s been so long since I’ve been single I have no idea what it’s like.

I saw this article on how badly software piracy in China is hurting their own industries and I made a mental connection that I hadn’t thought of(or heard about) before. America will continue to be where all content and intellectual property will be targeted and created because all over Asia and South America, they refuse to pay for content. There’s a reason that talented software engineers from India and China come to America, it’s because that’s where the money is obviously. But what isn’t entirely obvious is that these countries can’t incubate their own software and content industries until people are willing to pay for it locally. It’s hard to justify investment in a local industry where %80 of people steal your product, while in another region %80 will pay for your product. It’s possible you can still sell internet based content or large enterprise software in China, but consumer packaged software and things like music and video CDs and DVDs are not going to be a viable market for decades. What this means is that American intellectual properties industries are not in as dire straits as we might think. However American jobs may very well continue to be outsourced without better education.