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.

---

---

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]

---

WRITER'S LINKS
Absolute Write Paypal donation button:

Absolute Write is one of the leading sites for information on writing and publishing, especially the scam versions thereof. It has a broad, deep online community with an enormous message base going back years. Now it needs help. See the details and discussion here
Preditors and Editors
Everything you wanted to know about literary agents
On the getting of agents
Writer Beware
Miss Snark
Writer's Net

---

(and my Wish List)

---

 
Back to the 'Fifties, again  

The path down which so many of us worry 'WorkChoices' leads — part of a story about working in the USA ('Tales From Kafka Station', below, from the Undulant Fever blog).

This is one of the reasons I get so croggled that there's an idea that one would vote for the Liberal Party (of Australia)'s policies "because I'm worried about my (grand)children". I actually saw someone write this in a printed newspaper during the previous election. His (yes, it was a male) whole argument in his letter led, as I read it, to one point; except the final sentence was the exact opposite of what I thought. The mental sensation was very like being abruptly spun around physically.

Apart from the harmful things that those policies (or sometimes the lack of any policy) do to the environment, which will detrimentally effect those following generations, they affect society in a way that is of detriment to the majority of people in it, in things like working conditions for instance. Again, I'll repeat that it's not the 1950s that John Howard is reviving, it's the 1850s.

undulantfever.blogspot.com/ 2007/ 10/ tales-from-kafka-station.html

Tales From Kafka Station
10/20/2007
But I think the major part of it may be that this is part of a tendency among Big Business (not just the Postal Service) that's been growing for years, to deliver -- subtly or blatantly -- a message to employees that "Your Life Belongs To US!"

Forced overtime. Cancelled days off. Restrictions on use of leave time. And all growing more and more frequent, more and more the "standard" model of a working environment, more and more what American workers expect to find in the workplace, more and more what's considered normal.

What I was told in that office was just a step away from actually being forbidden to see a doctor on my day off, because in the eyes of management, every day of an employee's life belongs to them.

That's not an employee/management situation.

The name for that is slavery.

In Australia, following the British law, most official employment in the nineteenth century, gradually changing through the twentieth, was under the Master & Servant Act. Many of the concepts were very similar to so-called 'modern' work ideas; stripping away the 'playing-field-levelling' and protections built up with so much time & struggle.

"Much of the labour law which has evolved in the 20th century … stems from an experience-based perception that the market constraint is not a sufficient protection." – Keith Hancock, senior deputy president (1992-1997), Australian Industrial Relations Commission

Labels: history, industrial relations, IR, politics, society, USA

[permalink] posted by Mez at 9:59 am