moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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Back to the Fifties again -- the 1850s  
Heard recently on 702BL a quick discussion of recent suggestions. Chips are being spat.

Based on what I understand from that discussion:

Mrs Bishop says the Tax Act should be amended to provide taxation deductions not just for childcare or caring for disabled & elderly, but for any & all handymen, gardeners, housekeepers & so forth employed by a household.

And, from what she says, also not to allow the primary carer to work, but just to keep the household going? That is, she is suggesting the reason for the deduction not be that the expenditure is 'in order to produce assessable income'.

Sounds, basically, that this is mainly to pay for wealthy people's servants, under the guise of helping your average Aussie to pay for childcare.

The wealthy will be able to employ many more such helpers, and as both partners will *not* need to work in paid employment in order to get the deduction, I strongly suspect the amount they'd be able to claim would be considerably higher than the mean or median income couple.

Mrs Bishop goes on about the extra jobs produced, but why encourage in particular such servant's jobs, yet discourage things like people researching alternative energy, or ecological or medical research by cutting funds to a number of research centres in this year's budget?

To me this reflects the whole psychology & ideology of the 'modern' Liberal Party, which goes back to nineteenth century ideas, nineteenth century industrial & social relationships and the kind of Social Darwinism and Free Trade philosophy that had parts of Ireland exporting wheat to the English market (which could afford it) even while hundreds of thousands of other Irish (who couldn't afford it) were starving.
[permalink] posted by Mez at 5:57 pm