I Refuse To Accept "The Way Things Are" In New Jersey

I'm mad as hell.  For once, Governor Corzine is actually trying to do something to really fix a significant problem in New Jersey, and the public employees union is taking him to court to prevent it from happening.  

Let's start with the basics, as we always do and always should.

Unions in the United States at one time had a just and rightful place in the bargaining process between employers and employees - it happened occasionally that employers would overstep their bounds and take actions that would be critically detrimental to the health and well-being of their employees, and unions helped the individual workers from being overrun and run roughshod over.  Then a funny thing happened - given that power of bargaining, the unions ran with it, to the ends of the earth.  They became institutionalized in certain areas thanks to the Wagner Act, a law designed to step in and force employers to accept bargaining from unions instead of simply hiring a new workforce when their existing one presented "demands" and threatened to walk out.  They forced employers to give into almost anything they could come up with, to the point of forcing employers into bankruptcy just to pay for their new "benefits" they were supposedly owed.  

Let's get one thing straight right now: the only reason unions obtained any sort of control was the Great Depression.  Unions came in and initially were able to help their members keep their jobs - but the employers didn't have the opportunity to just walk away from the bargaining table and find some new workers, because once the unions got their members back to work, they raised the bar for removing people from their positions and made it damn near impossible for employers to remove lazy and unproductive workers from the environment or move more productive workers into new areas.  Put simply, unions knocked industry to the ground and sat on it until they got what they wanted, and threatened like that, industry went along to ensure its own immediate or short-term survival.  

It gets better.  Seeing the control they could obtain over private-sector positions, unions began creeping into the public sector, supposedly to help police, firemen, road workers, secretaries and any other people employed by government at any level.  That's led to a number of bad things, like the current fiscal crisis faced by many transit agencies across the country - fares keep going up but service gets cut back further and further because the money has to pay for contracts negotiated by the thugs in these unions.  

Let me take a moment here and tell you: both my father and my father in law are involved in unions - my father is a member of the nursing union and my father in law is a member of the railroad worker's union.  I won't go further with details because I'd rather not disclose private details, but suffice to say, I've benefitted from union negotiations myself, as the son of a union worker and as the son-in-law of a union worker.  That being said, I believe unions should be de-institutionalized, and that all existing union members ought to be able to cast secret ballots determining whether they want to remain as members of the union or to have their workplace union dismantled and removed.  The Wagner Act was made for a different time and place, where America was facing different challenges, brought on by socialist policies and heavy-handed government regulation.  Pull it out, and let the people decide what they want.  

Bring back the free market.  

I Gave Up Facebook, Not The Internet, So Here's What I Think About Our Situation

In a previous post, I discussed what I thought could be done to try and keep the budget from going too far.  Among the things I pointed out at the time were the similarities between computing resources and budget resources; namely, that over time, things creep in which we don't necessarily need and which invariably bog down and grind to a halt our other resources.  With computers, this results in a fairly bad user experience, which requires a lot of time and effort to fix, and if fixed improperly leaves open the door to more and more problems.  With our government, national budget and national resources the situation is practically the same.  We have had almost fifty years of socialist programs that have led almost two generations to believe that they are owed an upbringing by their government, we have had a budget which is overstuffed with programs that have such wonderful intentions but such horrendously destructive results, and billions of gallons of oil, millions of acres of useable woodland, and hundreds of thousands of brilliant minds and capable manpower squandered on such laughable prospects as global warming/climate change when they could be building more and better nuclear/coal/antimatter (wheeeee that would be awesome!) power plants all over our nation.  

I don't need an advanced degree, or anything more than simple math, to tell me that more people taking more pieces of the pie leaves less pie for me.  Mmm pie.  The significant problem, the core of it, is control.  People want to control their own destinies, but other people want to control other people's destinies.  What?  Individuals have the will and the ability to do what they want, when they want it, and would love nothing more than to do it without other individuals having a say in how they do it.  Think about it for just a second.  As a kid, there's nothing more irritating than having your parents order you to go with them to look at houses when really you wanted to spend the weekend riding your bike all over the damned neighborhood.  Yes, we all know it's better to go look at houses, because your parents love and care for you, and want you to tell them what you think of that nice white house two towns over because even though it's a benevolent dictatorship, you'll have to live under that roof too and if you can see something that they might miss, they want to know about it.  Plus, it's better for them to find the crap you'll complain about now (like the place with the one shower for eight or nine people or the place with the basement that reminds you of that ghost story you read last week, the one that made you almost crap yourself, or the place with the one room that looked like it belonged to that liver-eating guy from the X-Files first season) rather than dive into the purchase and have to deal with a bad attitude and misbehavior later on.  Yes it's better for you, but being a kid, you just want to use your free time towards your own ends, like riding through that cemetary and pissing off the caretaker with the black van just because you could, or just relaxing with some mind-blowing 8-bit/16-bit video games.  

The point is, even though you'd be doing what's best for you by going with your folks, you want to go do what you think is the best use of your time.  Now substitute "government" for "your folks," "your money" for "your time," and toss in edicts that have the force of law, and you've got a better idea of what's going on.  

----

A note about Nadya Suleman.  

Because you know I had to say something about this.  

I don't usually condone the use of IVF because very frequently the eggs and sperm are pared down to one egg and one sperm, and the remainders are, for those who can't afford storage, destroyed.  Doesn't sound too bad except that those are potential human beings - destroyed = killed.  

That being said, for the few who are ready to accept however many children come into the world as a result of either IVF or natural conception, I gladly and happily endorse, encourage and embrace their actions.  To accept such a bountiful and wonderful gift from God despite the hardships one may face takes a courage and a resolve few have ever matched.  Nadya absolutely deserves praise and encouragement for these actions.  

Would I have gone the same route as her, and taken all of this on outside the bonds of marriage, and fitfully declared to the world that I would, that I could, do this alone?  Absolutely not.  There is not a chance in hell that I would've even dared to try something like this on my own.  That's one of the reasons for marriage - to provide support in every form, to mitigate the impact of the crap God chooses to throw at us and to help us come out of it better.  Doing something like IVF while wildly proclaiming self-reliance and independence reeks of either stupidity or severe mental issues.  

All of that taken into consideration, the media has taken this whole situation WAAAAAAY too far.  When you have Entertainment Tonight going on about the 911 calls she's made (none of which have resulted in child services or any other authority showing up at her door), you know things are out of control.  People need to leave this woman alone and let her find her own way out of this situation - rather than coming up with more ways to smear her for having multiple kids.  Really, all she needed was a tsk tsk from her parents - not months of hounding by every media outlet and left-wing anti-life butch-to-the-extreme feminist nutjobs haranguing her for all of her faults.  

Temperence, people.  

-----

I gave up Facebook for Lent, as I'm sure you saw from the title.  

I left the notifications RSS feed in my Google Reader, so every time you tag me I see it - I just don't respond.  Why did I do this?  Isn't that cheating?  

Nah.  It's really really easy to ignore Facebook when I don't have it open all the time and when I've disconnected it from all of my other online presences.  It's harder to stay off of it when the notifications are there, taunting me and telling me that someone superpoked me (and only me).  I'm doing this for the challenge, not so I can avoid being stalked or something.  

-----

I've created a second blog, one solely focused on the Newark Light Rail expansion you're all sick of hearing about.  

http://expandncs.blogspot.com

That site will cover all updates and such, along with the Facebook group (which I don't have the link for and won't put up here because it'd require me to log into Facebook), and it also has a link to the Google Docs version of the proposal.  

----

That's all for now.  =)

Yes, Hillary Will Be Put Down At The Dem Convention After Losing

FNC this morning ran a bit pointing out how The Pantsuit Mistress (HRC) had, earlier this week, compared her run for office to Eight Belles bid for the Kentucky Derby, only for everyone to see the poor horse break her ankles and be euthanized on the track after coming in second.  There was also a point about how while she's tried to compare herself to Rocky Balboa, he too lost to Apollo Creed in the end (a Pyrrhic Victory, to be sure, for Apollo since the people were all behind Rocky by the end of the fight, but a victory nonetheless).  

I'll say now what people who know me have heard me say from the beginning: there is no way Hillary can win the presidency as a Democrat.  The Democratic Party leaders want her, but the people who call themselves Democrat all across the fruited plains have come out swinging for Obama (I'm looking at the delegate counts to say this).  

Here's what will happen, knowing the Democrats and their race-baiting ways.  Hillary won't make up the difference in time, and the delegate count will point clearly (as it does now) for Obama.  Superdelegates, however, will basically ignore the results and vote her in anyway.  This will trigger a race riot like nothing the world has ever seen.  The battle will boil down to the Democratic leaders vs. the Democratic proletariate.  BHO (which, by the way, is also an acronym for a particularly nasty form of spyware - Browser Helper add-On) gets to play the race card no matter what, and this will keep things quite interesting because no matter what Pantsuit suggests or says or does, the perception that racists are running the Democratic Party will be unavoidable.  

Bottom line: if they choose Pantsuit over Spyware, the Democrats will not win the election because the Obambies will find a way to skew the results for another candidate (doubtful it will be McCain but no matter).  Be it Nader, Paul, or one of the multitude of third-party candidates, they will divide themselves up.  

If they choose Spyware over Pantsuit, the Pantsuiters will inevitably see how incredibly weak-willed Democratic Party leadership is and switch their support to either McCain or again, a third-party candidate.  I see them switching to McCain in large part because A) he's been soft on her, and B) they have somewhat similar views on a lot of the issues.  

Either way, Mac gets to sit back and comfortably watch the Democrats destroy each other, resulting in a Republican victory.  It's just a question of how big.