Terry Lane, Shaun Carney and Bam Bam Cartoon

No morning rituals today, not in the mood.
I've got a piece of audio equipment called a jam station that was very expensive, and it's so long since I've used it that I've forgotten how.
Furthermore I recently bought a smartmedia memory card for it that was generally unavailable, but I managed to find one via the web.
So this morning, out with the manual, and equiped with coffee, focus and determination. Here we go.

Then I've gotta' set myself a new set of guitar practice assignments.

The Victorian College of the Arts has a concert performance every Wednesday at the National Gallery of Victoria at 1:00 pm. (and they are fabulous, (and free)).

I'll walk to the city today to attend. I'ts an hour and a quarter's walk. But it's such a nice day here. Seems like a good idea.
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This is by Terry Lane, appearing in the " Sunday Age" 16 April 2006 (Howard'll be slathering over this one)
Forget kindness, there's work to do:

April 16, 2006

Near Manchester in England, a 19th-century dark satanic mill has been preserved to remind visitors of how far the nation has come in the matter of industrial law.
The mill in question once wove fabric on big looms that worked with an expanding and contracting motion. As the loom moved, fluff from the yarn fell onto the floor and had to be constantly cleared away. Because the loom was set approximately a metre from the floor, the clearing of fluff was a job best done by children.
The loom was heavy and moved quickly and occasionally a child would be crushed to death in the machinery. This was not a tragedy - after all, the slums were full of starving orphans - but it was a nuisance. The machines had to be stopped while the mangled corpse was removed.
The best bit of the story is that all the other workers had their pay docked for the time that it took to remove the little body. Well, why not? They weren't working, were they?
Around the walls of the museum are extracts from Hansard, recording a parliamentary inquiry into the use of child labour in the mills. The capitalists, in their evidence, made much of the fact that if they were deprived of child labour they would all be ruined by unfair competition from less scrupulous nations. They didn't actually use the word globalisation, as far as I can recall, but the excuses for miserable cruelty, greed, selfishness and inhumanity used the same arguments. Any treatment of fellow human beings, no matter how base, can be justified in the name of competition and globalisation.
But here's a thing. When the mill owners of England were murdering children and punishing their workers for bludging, there was, as far as I know, no law on the statutes that forced them to do it. This was an industrial relations regime created from their own imaginations. When the parliament began its inquiry into labour practices, the owners couldn't say: "Well, if I didn't do it I would be fined $33,000."
That is the genius of the Howard/Andrews industrial law revolution. The novelty of imposing penalties on employers who treat their employees as human beings is something new in labour law.
Up until Howard and Andrews drafted their law, we took it for granted that bad bosses would screw their workers and good bosses would treat them as fellow human beings. We had feeble laws to protect workers against the cruelty of greedy and inhumane employers similar to those in other civilised nations.
Now we have laws to protect bosses against themselves by outlawing any spontaneous outbreak of kindness. If your workers take 20 minutes off to collect a donation for the widow of a worker killed on your work site, you must penalise them by deducting four hours from their pay entitlement. If, for some foolish reason, you are inclined to treat your workers as humans with feelings and rights to a certain autonomy of decision and action, you will be punished.
Now, if I revisit that hell-hole on the outskirts of Manchester, I will have nothing but scorn for the mill owner who presumably didn't come up with the idea of docking his workers for four hours even if it only took 20 minutes to get the dead child out of the workings of the loom. Thank God for progress!
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The following is a good opinion piece by Shaun Carney of "The Age" [click]
April 15, 2006
The Howard Government has learnt to survive by admitting nothingabout anything, writes Shaun Carney.
We also know now that the Prime Minister believed from early 2002 that Saddam was rorting the oil-for-food program.
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And it's good to see that Howie is diversifying. He only used to appease big Georgie. His list just doubled.

See yez