Kate Jones – Deceptive is not a commendable quality in a politician

Letting politicians loose with cameras and smartphones in the middle of an election campaign is never a good idea.

After all you wouldn’t let a child play with a shotgun would you?  Basically, on the political scene that is what Kate Jones, member for Ashgrove, has been allowed to do – shoot herself in the foot because her minders weren’t paying close enough attention.

Also our aspiring and sitting politicians appear to need to take a crash course in ethics and basic honesty as concepts such as truth and honesty seem to have bypassed their consciousness yet again.

That’s an awful lot of scorn to pour on poor old Kate Jones you may think.  Consider this –

• Kate Jones and her entourage are door knocking within the Ashgrove electorate trying to drum up support for the March 24 Queensland State Election;
• They (Kate and her entourage) knock on the door of a nicely presented home in Ashgrove to find that no one is home;
• Instead of making their way off the property and on to the next home they move to the verandah of the unoccupied residence where Kate Jones MP is snapped shaking the hand of a male person;
• Kate Jones MP then uploads the photograph to micro blogging service Twitter accompanied with a tweet about how she’s meeting with people in her electorate and discussing issues important to them;

The representation of the politician shaking the constituent’s hand on the verandah of the nicely presented Ashgrove residence is of course a lie.  Not only that, it is a lie told for the purposes of self promotion and political gain.  The conduct is knowingly and cynically designed to convey an image that is false and its publication is unethical.

Killer Quotes – Eisenhower on the arms race

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Dwight D Eisenhower (34th President of the United States of America)

Not many people have encapsulated the utter waste and moral bankruptcy of the proliferation of arms at the expense of solving social problems such as unemployment, poverty, hunger and the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

As time goes by true brilliance becomes ever more obvious

Casablanca is arguably the single greatest film in movie history (there’s a great way to start an argument) and one which should feature prominently if not first in anyone’s list of must see movies, if only in order to understand the origins of many common sayings and references in modern culture.

Whether or not you think it the greatest movie ever is really beside the point it has left a permanent legacy on modern culture with its classic movie lines and modegreens, gentle humour, masterfully crafted screenplay and the cast; Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains make this movie the true masterpiece that it is.  This movie is a classic and mandatory viewing.

Paul Henreid who plays Victor Lazlo in Casablanca was born on this day 10 January in 1908.

No Regrets

In my opinion this is one of the most beautiful and powerful songs.  Its significance and power is underlined by the fact that the artist who made this song famous, Edith Piaf, dedicated the recording she made of the song in 1960 to the French Foreign Legionnaires, in particular those members of the Foreign Legion’s 1st REP (First Foreign Parachute Regiment), who backed the 1961 Putsch against the Algerian civilian leadership.  France had been engaged in a bloody  war in Algeria, until 1962 a French Colony, and the Legion had been in the vanguard of that conflict.