30 Days

Season two of 30 Days premiered last night. Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame, gets someone to experience something they generalize oppose for 30 days and films the results. Last night, a gun-toting, border-patrolling Minuteman moved in with a large family of illegal immigrants living below the poverty in LA. It was really good. If the other documentaries in the season are as good then it will give Lost a run for its money as the best current TV show.

The Minuteman's argument for his position was that it's the law of the land and as such it's his duty to go and patrol the border. Certainly laws should be respected, but they are a means and not an end. Moreover, the laws and policies are not always right, so his argument is not convincing - he needs to read Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail to get some perspective.

Personally, I don't think the problem will be "sovled" until the root causes are addressed. i.e. Use a little "supply-side economics" and try to address Central America's vast poverty and poor economies. (Also, the American government's indifference to prosecuting employers who hire illegal immigrants also means that that there is a demand to match the supply of illegal labour - I read somewhere a few month ago that only a couple such indictments are handed down per year). Patrolling the border is necessary, but isn't going to stop people from trying to enter the US. i.e. If you are so poor you can't survive and support your family are you any worse off if you get caught at the border and deported? Not really. But there is always a non-zero chance you'll get through and end-up better off. So your expected returns are always positive, regardless of how well the border is patrolled. [It's simple statistics: Pr(Caught) * Punishment + Pr(Not-Caught) * Reward = 0.99 * 0 + 0.01 * 1 = 0.01 > 0].

After watching 30 Days, I watched Life and Debt, which was also good. It's a documentary about how the IMF and World Bank screwed Jamaica.

A Long Anticipated Weekend

It's been a long and tiring week. I'm glad that I have a long weekend to rest.

Last weekend I went camping at the Olympic National Park with Nabeel and Suor. On Saturday (after some creative exercises involving getting keys to get other keys to recover keys that were lock into someone's apartment), we took the ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island then drove to Port Angeles on the Olympic Pennisula. (There is a bridge between Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Pennisula). We hiked up Hurricane Ridge then camped at the Heart O' The Hills campground. The weather was okay, but a little cloudy. There were lots of deer at the top of Hurricane Ridge.

The next day, we went to Second Beach (after a short hike) on the Pacific Ocean. It's a pretty good spot for photos, but it was raining fairly heavily the whole time we were there. (Kind of like last time!). I haven't sorted through all my photos yet, but I'll try to post some later this weekend.

On Tuesday I went to a Lifehouse concert at El Corazón with Suor. The setting was very "intimate". (i.e. Small, crowded, hot, and sweaty). I only recognized a small subset of the songs. (I have their album No Name Face, but have not heard either of their other two albums...well that's a small lie, I've listened to their new album once). Overall the concert was good though. (The opening act was decent (for an opening act) too...but we never figured out who they were).

Since my last post about 30 Days was popular, I guess I'll comment about this week's show too. :-) A (Christian) guy from West Virgina goes to Dearborn, Michigan to spend a month living with Muslim family and observing all of their customs, including, wearing a traditional outfit when he left the airport in West Virgina that made him popular with the airport security. (One third of Dearborn's population is Muslim). It was an interesting story, probably the most interesting of the three episodes that they've shown so far. He struggled with his stereotypes (but was open-minded) and (understandably) had a lot of trouble trying to reconcile the Muslim lifestyle with his Christian beliefs (in particular going to a mosque to pray). Next week's episode sounds very similar in it's approach - a straight guy goes to San Francisco to become a roommate with an openly gay man.

30 Days

Last night I watched the premiere of 30 Days, a TV series by Morgan Spurlock from the famous (or is that infamous?!) documentary Super Size Me. The concept of the show is very similar to Super Size Me - the results of 30 day lifestyle experiment are recorded (and accompanied by a social commentary).

In the first episode, he took his fiancée to Columbus, Ohio and they lived on minimum wage for a month. With the underlying point of the show being that a minimum wage job ($5.15 / hour) is inadequate to support someone, yet alone a family. They actually found jobs that paid slightly more than minimum wage (~$7/h), but had a quite depressing life. Despite living in an ant-infested former crack house (apartment), they ended up earning less than they spent in the month. (Mostly because of ~$1000 in hospital bills - it's kind of hard to pay that off when you only make ~$44/day after taxes)...it makes me grateful to have grown up like I did and to have a decent job.

I think in future episodes other people will be the guinea pigs and Spurlock will just narrate.