I was reading the US constitution having read the declaration of independence remotely in Jr. High. Seemed the initial 10 amendments (bill of rights) dealt with my rights as an individual, ie (bear arms, speech, etc) but then in latter amendments, ie 16, rather approaches congress's rights. Amendment 16 gave Congress the right to tax, 13 talked about election of Pres and VP, 17 election of senators, 20 again pres terms etc. The bill of rights was meant to outline the peoples rights. I would like to see those amendments regarding government added in the legislature portion of the constitution, and not in the amendment section.

For example, Amendment 16, although I DO support government which has the right to excise a tax on income, it does not give me any rights, and thus should not be on the Bill of Rights.
Amendment 16 is worded as a totalitarian statement - Government can impose taxes.

Rather, on the Bill of Rights it should be reworded more in line with the original intent

" Congress shall not impose excessive taxes, nor excessive levies and unusual and hidden taxes..."

This enumerates my rights, and not congresses absolute right to impose tax. This would also be more in the line of the wording of the initial 10 amendments, citing example from Amendment 8

Am I pushing mongo?

| pushing mongo

Glad you checked out MI-5! It's pretty good, huh!? It's no Alias (which I'm totally into now, but that I fear might go the way of 24- something I liked the 1st 2 seasons, then totally lost interest in.)

Yeah, I'll mess with my settings, but it never allows me to change the quality, so it's literally pixelized and kinda blurry. Fine for bullshit tv shows, but when I tried watching 2001, my god, I was literally a foot from the screen and it was still blurry. Boo.

| Prodigy

Rudy, i think your NetFlix streaming quality might be linked to the fact that you are still using your 1200 baud modem from your days playing Neverwinter Nights on PRODIGY!

Dude! Upgrade your hardware and I am pretty sure your quality will improve.

But seriously, my computer that is linked wirelessly to my cable modem connection gives me crystal clear quality. Not HD or any of that garbage, but good enough for watching surf videos and MI-5.

Best thing about Neflix "Watch it Now" is the video quality - imagine YouTube filtered through a Commodore 64. Qua-li-ty.

Yeah, I've watched a bunch of weird shit on it too, mostly British Tv shows and ultra-softcore Skinimax-ish pseudo-porn. Now I'm back to regular dvds (which it's still the best way to rent!) or playing video games.

| NetFlix

Ryan, you should really sign up for Netflix for one month and just watch all the stuff they have to stream for the month, and then cancel.

- Billabong Odyssey (biggest wave contest: $1000 a foot, $500K bonus for 100+ ft.) PS The first 35 seconds of this one is worth the price of the whole month, no joke.
- Christian Hosoi documentary
- King of Kong
- Endless Summer I
- D.O.A concert footage
- Heavy Metal in Baghdad
- Claus Nomi documentary (TO-tal eclipssssse!!!! from "Urgh a Music War")
- Ramones: Raw
- Rise Above documentary
- Pixies

Among other goodies. R Dub seems like the kind of guy that would watch one of these a night like I am doing. Do it!

Yeah, that guy with the American flag tie is a fucking piece of shit. I totally hate him. And you know he fucking cheated, that piece of shit. I guess the goofy good guy was going to be at E3 this week to try to break the record again. Poor guy.

You know what show I'm hooked on Netflix with right now? Fucking ALIAS! I never ever watched it when it was all the rage and I decided, fuck it, let me watch the first disc. It's fucking awesome! I didn't think I'd get sucked into another one of these goshdarned shows, but here we go again. Time to rearrange my Q so it's all Alias all the time. Also, 2nd season of The Venture Bros is fucking great. First season had a joke about Wookie Life Day. Fuck Family Guy, this is comedy for ME! (Hoo Raa)

| End of an Era

For those of you that had the opportunity to visit my ludicrous office on the 39th floor, I am sad to say that chapter of my career has ended. boo... So now I am shoehorned into a box more befitting my station in the company. My new office on the 21st floor has no windows and approximately 25% the square footage of my last. My old office is now in the process of being demolished.

As my gf so bluntly put it, "You have reached the pinnacle of your life as far as offices go, it can only go down hill from here." Ouch.

/me Shed Tears

American Apparel? Not my thing anyway, so its a moot point for me.

jr0n: The Mr. Hilter baby comment... Priceless. I see the same damn sign in one of the Muni stations and the picture just disturbs me. Props for the unintentional humanity points.

D>M>

| The Real Problem Here

Amidst all this jibba-jabba about ethics, politics, right vs. wrong, economics and perverts, I think the real story we have all missed can be summed in bullet point below:

- I rejoined NetFlix to watch some good TV shows before bed and used their PlayNow feature to view "King of Kong". Great documentary and Billy Mitchell is seriously in the running for the worlds greatest DoucheBag. To quote an insightful comment on YouTube, "(Billy Mitchell is a) d d d dddddddouchebag!". Wow.

So you're saying that you would be choosing the Lesser of Two Beavers? har har har - wokka.

Sweat shops aren't cool either. But if everything was universally expensive, ie 80 dollars for a nike T-shirt, or 400 dollars for a pair of sneakers, the burden for that would largely be on us....
Not all manufacturing in asia is sweatshops (ie our company for example) hehe... but it's really these bad business people in asia willing to exploit their own people for their own personal gains. That can be controlled. They just need to implement stricter laws and enforcement in these countries and make more human rights movements.

I have a friend who used to work for AA a long time ago, and yeah, she confirmed the guy is a sleaze-bag to the max. BUT, the company is anti-sweat shop which is a pretty big deal, especially in the clothing manufacturing business. That's pretty much why people like them (plus the barely legal almost-porn, well that's why I like them, just kidding Johnny.) The workers get paid a fair wage and unlike most places that make clothes I'm pretty sure there's no child slave-labor involved. I'd rather buy clothes from a pervert than someplace like GAP or Nike that uses modern-day indentured servants.

Ya, the media really scrutinizes him, but a guy willing to put himself out there like that - sex sells but he sounds a bit creepy, (a blowjob during an interview?) - But I didn't make a judgement about the company until I went on their website and saw a whole bunch of sleezy pornoesque photos - not even of their product, just some teen girls.

Link to bush - well.. ya that was a bit stretched - just implying that the company didn't have any morals (or the ceo) just to sell it's products. And since it's doing so well - says a lot of america and what companies do to profit, and ( cover it up by doing something charitable as well). Imo, for various reasons, Bush signifies everything un-moralistic in our government and hence the obscure connection.

Anyway Ryan, sorry if it seemed out of perspective! I'm just a bored man with opinions and seemed like a neat little blog at the time.