bob, we will miss you...

Legendary Australian writer, journalist, playwright and auteur Bob Ellis died today, 3 April 2016.

You know the joke: your point the finger at someone's shirt and you say "Oh" as if there was something your interlocutor had to look down at and then you raise your finger and hit his/her nose? Got ya...

Meanwhile Moscow has to deal with US aggression and ingratitude... 

Loony Park... Picture by Gus at Luna Park, Sydney, modified by Gus

The prime minister says defeat of his income tax plan is a wake-up call for state premiers to start living within their means.

Senior ministers have thrown their support behind Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, after his contentious plan for income tax was rejected at yesterday's Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting in Canberra.

Electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman. So why do we keep doing it over and over again?

In this issue of Science magazine, 4 march, 2016, the story of Fukushima is not too good. The power plant now is surrounded by ten metres tall tanks that hold 750,000 tonnes of radioactive water. There are diagrams of the tools that are the only thingsters that can go into the "hot zone" which is too radioactive for people to work in, even with safety gear on. The Japanese are clever with their robots. There are four main types designed to perform different tasks.

Meanwhile there is jump in thyroid problems:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's nuclear policy is "catastrophic", the White House says, as world powers meet to debate the future of nuclear weapons.

Malcolm is throwing everything at it.

From John Passant:

saved by precision bombing... Image rendered by Gus.

from Crikey …

For all the talk yesterday of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's state income tax proposal representing a major reform to the federation, it's hard to see it as anything other than a political solution to a political problem.

Donald Trump said Wednesday that women should be punished for having abortions in a hypothetical world in which abortions were made illegal in the US.

The Republican presidential frontrunner made the comments after after being repeatedly questioned on the subject by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews during a pretaped town-hall event.

The Republican-dominated Mississippi state Senate approved a bill on Tuesday allowing churchgoers carry concealed firearms without a permit while also allowing churches to designate and train members to serve as armed security.