blog.ohern.net

SADDLEBACKING DEFINED

2009-01-27T23:26:00.000-08:00

From saddlebacking.com:
Saddlebacking: sad�dle�back�ing \?sa-d?l-?ba-ki?\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she�s saving herself for marriage.

Thank you, Dan Savage (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=1031968)

Flickr

2007-06-29T16:48:00.001-07:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Totally fucked up day

2007-05-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

So this after noon I get a call from my real estate office broker telling me that my business partner, Brian, has gone missing. WHAT! Yea, missing, gone, not to be found. Apparently his wife got a call this morning that the police had found his car abandoned. His cell phone was in it.

This totally shook me. I left work at my other job to take off and feel like I was doing something. I knew I probably wouldn't be able to find him but I had to try something...

This is really fucking with me, this is straight out of a TV show. My favorite theory right now involves this one client who, after admitting that he has an anger management problem and has been going to alcohol rehab, let us know that his wife left him a month ago... He's been freaking out about a construction deal he's been putting together and is now falling apart. Apparenty he's unable to grasp the fact that he's mostly to blame for the falling apart but has it in his mind that it's Brian's fault.

Yea, I'm a little freaked out that it might be foul play (fuck - did I ever think I would say that about a situation in my life!!!)

I drove around Renton today just in case. I showed up at my office and was talking with one of the other guys and Brian's wife calls. Apparently there was a 0.89� charge on his card at 9:08am and she has an address. Wants us to go check it out. Turns out to be a gas station and he bought water. I say he bought water because it was a debit transaction and thus who ever bought it has to know Brian's pin number. Good sign?!?!?

Right now I'm waiting for a call from the gas station owner to let me know what was on the security tapes. did he have his car out side? was he with any one? FUCK! I hate this. I know this is a bit much to blog about I've run out of things to watch on youtube to keep my mind off of it so I figured I just write it all down...

Resoulution to blog more....

2007-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

spent the day today working on the house and such. I started out by getting more pruning done on the pear tree outback. From the books I've read it looks as though 5-10 years ago it was pretty well taken care of. Since then no pruning or care has been done and its not doing so well. It still produces a shit load of pears but I'd rather trade a few of those pears for a healthier looking tree. I've cut out about 20% of the branches so far and I think I'll need to remove almost double that to get it thinned out to where it needs to be.

Once it started raining I moved into the garage and cut more wood for what will be our new raised beds. I found a house in our neighborhood that had a bunch of old 2x8s and 2x6s between 4-6 feet. I'm following the square foot method so this is perfect. Yesterday I built three 2x8 squares and I cut the 2x6s to day.

After a quick dog walk I ran over to McLendons to grab wood trim for our living room to finally get the chair rails in place. After that, distraction set in again and I felt I needed to check in at a few web sites. Time to get motivated again.

Taxes and the such

2006-11-30T11:19:00.000-08:00

The other day a co-worker of mine included me on and email foraward about one persons view of tax cuts. I view him as one of those selfish conservitive types who thinks community service is hiring an undocumented imigrant to do manual labor for $5 an hour. He sent me this email to piss me off and it worked. He thought it was quite funny to hear my "crazy liberal socialist" reaction.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten totals $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this.

The first four men-the poorest-would pay nothing, the fifth would pay $1, the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18, and the tenth man-the richest-would pay $59.

The story goes on to say the the resturant owner decides to give them $20 off their bill for being such good customers. The divide it up along the same portions as their payment structure.

But after paying the bill one of the ones paying the least for dinner realised the guy paying the most of the bill got the biggest discount ($7) and thus started to cry "The system exploits the poor!" The poor people beat up the rich guy for getting such a big discount and the next night he didn't come back for dinner. The story ends saying:

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college instructors, is how the tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore.

My response was that, wow, that story is truly ignorant and short sighted. By likening taxes to an extravagance such as going out for dinner fails to relay the point that taxes are used to pay for basic services that benefit our society. No one gets by for free as the story portrays, no matter how little your paycheck is. In reality the tax system is set up so that there are so many tax loop holes that only those who can afford to hire accountants can take full advantage of tax breaks.

Since Bush came to office taxes cuts for those in the top income brakets have dropped significantly while those in the middle have seen rates rise. Those at the bottom have seen miniscule declines. The statement that the system exploits the poor becasue it doesn't give out equal tax breaks to everyone is wrong and horribly simplistic. If the sytem burdened everyone the same that would be one thing. The truth is that the poor pay a much large percent of their incomes to taxes.

The basic thrust of U.S. tax policy since the early 1980s has been threefold. First, to increase massively the tax burden on wage and self-employed labor through FICA (Social Security and Medicare) tax increases while reducing the burden on corporations, whose share of total federal tax payments has plummeted. Second, to reduce to 20% the rate on capital gains, which make up roughly half the reportable income of most of the big moneymakers. Third, to make sure, through a series of phase-outs and self-employment levies, that the highest marginal rates concentrate on middle- and upper-middle-class Americans rather than the truly rich. What's extraordinary is that voters stand for it.

Consider: a two-worker professional couple with $160,000 a year could be in the 40%-42% marginal rate group when you allow for Social Security, Medicare and self-employment taxes, all income-based, on top of the 31% basic rate, together with such silent middle-class fiscal killers as the phasing out of exemptions and itemized deductions as certain income levels are reached. This is in marked contrast to the 20% marginal (capital gains) rate paid by the typical corporate CEO on his top dollars from stock options.

So, to address the final statement, what happens if the rich go away? Nothing except we need to make sure they can't keep making money off the poor in our country. If the rich and the corporations are alowed to move off shore and keep expoiting the American people we become a nation without control of our own ecoomic policy. We have a nation where, to make money, you need money. If we don't control our own money we will never be able to dig our selfs out.

The problem with leisure

2005-08-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

I spent the whole day on Sunday sailing around Lake Union. It was a beautiful day and I got a great sunburn. I was grateful to find that I had a whole day I could go take for my self. When I came in to work this morning KUOW�s Weekday program was doing a show on The Upside of Downtime. I wasn�t able to call in to the show and give my opinion but here are my thoughts.

We, as a society, have huge amounts of leisure time compared to our ancestors. Due to specialization (remember that word from World History in high school?), we are able to be a lot more productive than they were. Back in the days of subsistence living, one would work everyday, all day, their entire lives. Taking a weekend, let alone a vacation, was rare. It could be said that living that lifestyle would be less stressful than our modern day system where every year we have to do better than before. If we don�t, some one else will and then we�ll be unable to catch up unless we work double time the next year.

But still, we are lucky that we have weekends, lunch breaks, vacations (for some paid vacations), and mandatory overtime pay. Those are all luxuries that our grandparents and great grandparents established as standard and now we take for granted. People are now thinking that they need more. More than that, they think that they deserve more leisure time. I disagree.

Americans have a lot of money. More than their share of money. Whether we know it or not, we ride on the backs of people who struggle to survive every day. We make an un-proportionate amount of profit compared to what they make and we don�t care because we don�t have to see them. We are not better, smarter or more deserving of this wealth. We are just lucky; lucky to have a good education, lucky to have good jobs available, lucky to have parents who didn�t sell us into slavery.

So I will continue to enjoy my weekends. No I will be grateful for my weekends. As much as I would love to go sailing every day, I know that no one should have that much leisure time. No one deserves that much leisure time. But until we are all faced with the truth of what our society costs the rest of the world, we will continue to want more for less and believe that we are somehow more deserving of our lifestyles.

Scootn' Along

2005-08-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I purchased a Honda Aero 50cc Scooter. There were a number of reasons for my purchase. One was gas prices. Two was my environmental impact.

In my last car, a Pontiac Grand Prix, I was getting about 20 MPG. Another way of looking at it was that at $2.50/gallon it cost me 0.12 cents per mile I drove. With my scooter I get 85 MPG, or just under 0.03 cents per mile. In the last two weeks I�ve driven about 480 miles on my scooter. That means I�ve saved $46 so far in gas. At this rate it will take me about 35 weeks to pay for the cost of my scooter ($800). This doesn�t even take into account the cost of annual repairs and insurance. After everything, I expect to save about $3500 in one year.

The second reason I gave up my car is that I decided I needed to live what I preach. Cars are killing our environment and we have had to declare war on an entire region because of our dependence on oil. Guess how many people I�ve seen commuting alone in their Hummers this week? Seven! Countless others are alone in their Dodge Rams, Explorers, and Suburbans.

I do have to acknowledge that my scooter has a 2 stroke engine. For those who haven�t played with 2 strokes before, they are not the most environmentally friendly devices out there. They have the unfortunate problem of expelling uncompensated hydrocarbons out the exhaust. In fact they are so bad that starting in 2006 the EPA is going to make them illegal to import to the US (PDF). So while the Suburbans are using 9 times as much gasoline as I am on my scoot, I�m putting oil down the storm drains. From my point of view I�m still the better environmentalist (and in the future I�ll upgrade to either a four stroke scooter or a fuel cell vehicle).

I am actually not quite ready to give up a car completely yet. But with my extra cash I�m going to put my self on my girlfriends insurance for her car and help out with the gas a bit (her car gets 35 MPG). I don�t think I�ll need to use it just for my self much but when we go places together and/or with our dog the car will be good to have. I�m going to start working the bus more often too. Someday maybe I�ll sign up for flexcar. Until then, keep an eye out for me on the streets, happily car free.

2005-08-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

I don't care what it costs. Build the damn monorail. We have spent too many years not doing anything to fix traffic. Now it�s going to cost a lot more than it would have if we had done something 10 years ago and spent the following years making upgrades.

I�m sorry to hear that so many people who supported the monorail are now backing out. What do they want to do instead? Not many people are offering new solutions. And any solution that they would offer would cost as much if not more so why don�t we just build it already!

So there may still be hope. New bidders are trying to come and save the day. I hope that this will convince people that the monorail will work and be cost effective. All you people who think that it is a big waste of money; do more than bitch about it! Put together a plan, solve the problem and make a difference!

2005-08-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

When will our governments accept that what they are doing is making things worse. I understand what they are trying to do. It�s the same things the bullies in grade school did. If we can scare everyone into thinking that we'll kick their ass if the put a toe out of line, then they will listen to us, respect us and fear us. It works for a while, but it is a childish way of thinking. Eventually people grow up.

Now we are dealing with a group of people (we will refer to them as "crazed terrorists" from now on) who know no fear. They feel as though they have nothing to loose and everything to gain. We, on the other hand, feel the opposite. We are reacting out of fear and are completely afraid of loosing the posh life styles we have grown to enjoy.

This is the reason it needs to stop. We need to rethink our role in the world community and learn not to create these quagmires of hate. Refusing to accept any responsibility as the cause of the crazed terrorists means we have not learned any thing. And as with all empires that do not learn and adapt, we will fall.

2005-04-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

Damn those politicians. To fix Washington's tax deficit we are going to raise taxes on liquor, cigarettes, and estates. How is this smart? Its not if you think about it. I am about getting people to stop smoking. Did we not all learn in middle school that negative reinforcement does not work? The republicans were being self serving when they argued to get rid of the estate tax, but it was good for everyone when it went.

The real problem I have is that we are avoiding the larger issue. Our society is living off the backs of the people who are struggling to get by, living pay check to pay check. The people who have more money than they know what to do with are skating through every tax loop hole their accountants can find.

How is it that Washington, one of the more progressive states in many regards, has one of the most regressive tax systems in the nation? All you people who are making less than $30k a year are now supporting those who make more than $80k. Why is it you don't get more pissed off about this?