Thursday 28th of March 2024

Gus Leonisky's blog

newt's space odyssey...

man on the moon

Forget Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine – Newt Gingrich wants to colonise the moon.

"By the end of my second term [2020], we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American," the Republican US presidential hopeful told a cheering crowd in Cocoa, Florida, a town with links to the space industry.

A whopping budget deficit and cuts to the military do not seem to have dampened Gingrich’s astronomically expensive plans for a lunar colony with 13,000 residents.

tony's australia day...

shitty policies...

 

the battle of the cults...

war of faiths
Why Evangelicals Don’t Like Mormons


By DAVID S. REYNOLDS

According to a CNN exit poll of South Carolina Republican primary voters, Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married Catholic, won twice as much support from evangelical Protestants as Mitt Romney, a Protestant. And among voters for whom religion meant “a great deal,” 46 percent voted for Mr. Gingrich and only 10 percent for Mr. Romney.

cricket score...

policebashing

 

ONE of the state's most senior police officers has been forced to step aside from an investigation into the alleged police beating of a cricket fan after it emerged that the officer involved was his son.

When NSW Assistant Commissioner Mark Murdoch fronted television cameras on Friday, he defended the actions of an officer who was captured on video punching a cricket fan.

What he did not realise at the time was that the officer in question was his 24-year-old son, Thomas.

new old abbott policy...

hirlerbyothername

JULIA Gillard says Tony Abbott's pledge to "turn back the boats" can't be done because the Navy has warned it will put at risk the lives of Australian sailors.

But the Opposition Leader says the option will remain a key plank of his asylum seeker policy.

"No one ever said that it was going to be easy, no one ever said that it was going to be possible in every circumstance," Mr Abbott said, as he campaigned in the PM's western suburbs seat of Lalor.

"What we've said, though, is that it should be an option to turn the boats around where it is safe to do so. The Navy's done it before, it can do it again."

the banana bunch...

top bananas...

From Mike Carlton

One of my new year's resolutions was to ignore the Republican primaries in the United States, but I have broken it already.

They have a horrible, irresistible fascination, not unlike watching a funnel web spider crawling across your lounge-room carpet. All those spray-on tans, those spray-on first names - Mitt, Newt, Rick, Ron - and worse, those spray-on opinions confected out there on the lunar right. These people have spun so far off any rational policy axis that they make George W. Bush look like a Roosevelt liberal.

on the rocks..

rockyrock

"The spy rock was embarrassing," he said in the BBC2 documentary series, Putin, Russia and the West. "They had us bang to rights. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose."

A diplomatic row was sparked six years ago after Russian state television broadcast a film claiming British agents had hidden a sophisticated transmitter inside a fake rock left on a Moscow street. It accused embassy officials of allegedly downloading classified data from the transmitter using palm-top computers.

one nation under god...

godromn

In recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.

the price of knowing...

wikistrike'

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the looting of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the antipiracy legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

potus murdochus...

potus

What Murdoch had intended to write - and who he had intended to target - was POTUS, a common nickname for Barack Obama, the President Of The United States.

The gaffe was immediately noticed by Australians, with ABC boss Mark Scott pointing out Murdoch would have caused: "Cheers at Telstra, confusion at Optus - and amusement from the Potus team."

Others quickly joined in, asking Murdoch what he had against our Telco.

"Yes, thanks, of course I meant POTUS," the 80-year-old newcomer to Twitter replied minutes later. "Somehow iPad changed my spelling. I should have checked. Sorry."

fighting the creationists...

science and creationism

Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.

The Department for Education has revised its model funding agreement, allowing the education secretary to withdraw cash from schools that fail to meet strict criteria relating to what they teach. Under the new agreement, funding will be withdrawn for any free school that teaches what it claims are "evidence-based views or theories" that run "contrary to established scientific and/or historical evidence and explanations".

arab sprung...

arab sprung

 

A toon doing the email rounds...

professor rattus of porkie university...

PROF RATTUS

Something is seriously amiss when the former prime minister, John Howard, asserts that parents should be concerned about "one-sided science" being taught in our schools.

Leave aside that Howard was endorsing a new children's book on climate change by Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist whose sceptical representations of climate science for adults seem driven more by a conservative ideology.

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