The George Cross is really a civilian decoration – the highest available to honour bravery for civilians – the equivalent of the Victoria Cross for the military if you like.

Next up, sell the George Cross. We’re the only country with a military decoration on its flag. That’ll sell faster than passports.

Just a reminder:

The Happiness Purpose, author Edward de Bono, dating from 1977, defines a Proto-Truth on these lines:

A Proto-Truth is any new truth that is put forward as the new truth and upheld as dogma until a further new truth manages to secure the position.

In the positive application: it is meant to refer to new ideas and discoveries, understanding that a new discovery will overtake the old. That a hypothesis may one day assert itself over old beliefs.

In the negative application: This allows you to say whatever you want to, believing: “what is the use of having a mind if you don’t change it from time to time.”

Use of Proto-Truthing in a negative application permits you to proceed to do whatever you want without the hang-ups attached to what you might have previously said, committed to or put in motion. Often the stand is to “shrug” off knowledge or awareness of prior arrangements or statements.

“Why not give them a passport and let them get/go on their way…” Edward de Bono.

“Why not” politics.

The politics of possibility, poetry, provocation.

Joseph Muscat :

http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/elections2013/Campaigning-in-poetry-governing-in-poetry-Joseph-Muscat-20130304

” Everything is possible, Muscat promises, and he wants us to believe that all the problems the Opposition has been picking away at will melt away.”

In the same just-days-before-the-election interview, he also said:

“I’d like to think that I will be campaigning in poetry and governing in poetry. If right now we are saying people will be chosen to public posts based on what they know and not who they know, this will be the case. If today I am pledging meritocracy, then meritocracy it will be. Doing otherwise would only mean returning to the old way of doing politics.”

Just words. Dangerous, because they mean nothing.

— Dennis Schaal

The most worrying bit…