You’re My World

Happy birthday Cilla Black – 67 today.

Nothing But Dreams

Day 28 of New Zealand Music Month – Tina Cross sings Nothing But Dreams.

Tuesday’s Poem on Thursday

A couple of days late: this Tuesday’s Poem is Leaving The Tableland by Kerry Popplewell.

It was chosen by Tim Jones who said it showcases her skill at exploring the palce where landscape and memory meet. And it does.

Links on the right hand side of the page take you to others who write or feature a Tuesday Poem.

One of this week’s is Mother Ease by Pam Morrison at Cadence. A poem she says she wrote when  being mother was a defining role in my life. I wondered about other shapes ‘motherness’ might take.

Apropos of matters poetic, Beattie’s Book Blog has a couple of gems  on old age by Owen Marshall.

5/10

Oh dear, just 5/10 in NZ History Online’s weekly quiz.

Better educated than squashed

Quote of the day:

 “at the end of the day, we want people educated, not squashed”,

Ngai Tahu Maori Rock Art Trust curator Amanda Symon, after the heavy rain caused a massive rock fall at the site of the Takiroa rock drawings west of Duntroon.

Higher costs is the point – updated

Complaints that the ETS will impose higher costs on us seem to have missed the point – that’s what it’s supposed to do.

Imposing higher costs on activities which cause emissions is designed to provide an incentive to change behaviour which will lead to reduced emissions.

Matt Nolan at The Visible Hand in Economics puts it simply:

 Even if you don’t believe in global warming, we have a liability that is based on carbon emissions.  As a nation, either people who produce the carbon pay for it – or everyone pays for it through higher taxes.

So here in lies the question – do we want higher prices for carbon goods or lower incomes because of higher taxes?  Given that the liability is a function of the amount of carbon we produce, it follows that pricing carbon on the basis of this will lead to the “best” solution – no matter what political party you support.

If the cost of something rises, it doesn’t follow that consumers’ costs will increase by the same amount.

If the price of fuel and power go up, we have a choice about paying the increase or using less. Saving fuel and power will save money. 

Using less energy and using what we do use more efficiently makes economic and environmental sense whether or not you think the climate is changing.

UPDATE:

Scrubone gets it and Kiwiblog’s post on Matt’s post has generated lots of comments.

May 27 in history

On May 27:

893  Simeon I of Bulgaria crowned emperor of the first Bulgarian empire.

927 Battle of the Bosnian Highlands: Croatian army, led by King Tomislav, defeated the Bulgarian Army.

927  Simeon the Great, Tsar of Bulgaria, died.

1120  Richard III of Capua was anointed as prince two weeks before his untimely death.

1153 Malcolm IV became King of Scotland.

1328  Philip VI was crowned King of France.

1626 William II, Prince of Orange was born(d. 1650).

1703 Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of Saint Petersburg.

1798 The Battle of Oulart Hill took place in Wexford.

1812  Bolivian War of Independence: the Battle of La Coronilla, in which the women from Cochabamba fought against the Spanish army.

1813  War of 1812: In Canada, American forces captured Fort George.

1837 Wild Bill Hickok, American gunfighter, was born  (d. 1876).

1849  The Great Hall of Euston station in London was opened.

 

1860  Giuseppe Garibaldi began his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian Unification.

1863  American Civil War: First Assault on the Confederate works at the Siege of Port Hudson.

1878 Isadora Duncan, American dancer ws born (d. 1927).

1883 Alexander III was crowned Tsar of Russia.

1895  Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy.

1896 The F4-strength St. Louis-East St. Louis Tornado killed at least 255 people and causing $2.9 billion in damage.

1905 Russo-Japanese War: The Battle of Tsushima began.

1907  Bubonic plague broke out in San Francisco, California.

1908  Maulana Hakeem Noor-ud-Din was elected the first Khalifa of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

 

1911  Hubert H. Humphrey, 38th Vice President of the United States,  was born (d. 1978).

1912  John Cheever, American author, was born (d. 1982).

1915 Herman Wouk, American writer, was born.

1919  The NC-4 aircraft arrived in Lisbon after completing the first transatlantic flight.

 

1922  Sir Christopher Lee, English actor, was born.

1923 Henry Kissinger, 56th United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was born.

1927  Ford ceased manufacture of the Ford Model T and began to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.

1930  The 1,046 feet (319 m) Chrysler Building in New York City, the tallest man-made structure at the time, opens to the public.

1933  New Deal: The U.S. Federal Securities Act is signed into law requiring the registration of securities with the Federal Trade Commission.

1933 – The Walt Disney Company released the cartoon The Three Little Pigs, with its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

 

1933 – The Century of Progress World’s Fair opened in Chicago.

 

1935  New Deal: The Supreme Court of the United States declared the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, (295 U.S. 495).

1937  The Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County, California.

1940  World War II: In the Le Paradis massacre, 99 soldiers from a Royal Norfolk Regiment unit were shot after surrendering to German troops. 

1941 World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency”.

1941 – World War II: The German battleship Bismarck was sunk in the North Atlantic killing almost 2,100 men.

 

1942  World War II: In Operation Anthropoid, Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague.

 

1943 Cilla Black, English singer and presenter, was born.

1954 Pauline Hanson, Australian politician, was born.

1957 Toronto’s CHUM-AM, (1050 kHz) became  Canada’s first radio station to broadcast only top 40 Rock n’ Roll music format.

1958 Neil Finn, New Zealand singer and songwriter (Split Enz, Crowded House), was born.

1958  The F-4 Phantom II made its first flight.

1960  In Turkey, a military coup removed President Celal Bayar and the rest of the democratic government from office.

1962 The Centralia, Pennsylvania mine fire started.

1965 Vietnam War: American warships began the first bombardment of National Liberation Front targets within South Vietnam.

1967  Australians voted in favour of a constitutional referendum granting the Australian government the power to make laws to benefit Indigenous Australians and to count them in the national census.

1967  The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy was launched  Jacqueline Kennedy and her daughter Caroline.

1968  The meeting of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (National Union of the Students of France) took place. 30,000 to 50,000 people gathered in the Stade Sebastien Charlety.

1971 The Dahlerau train disaster, the worst railway accident in West Germany, killed46 people and injured 25.

1975 Jamie Oliver, English chef and television personality, was born.

1975  The Dibble’s Bridge coach crash near Grassington, North Yorkshire killed  32 – the highest ever death toll in a road accident in the United Kingdom.

1980 The Gwangju Massacre: Airborne and army troops of South Korea retook the city of Gwangju from civil militias, killing at least 207.

 

1987 Artist Colin McCahon died.

1995 Actor Christopher Reeve was paralysed from the neck down after falling from his horse in a riding competition.

 

1996 First Chechnya War: Russian President Boris Yeltsin met Chechnyan rebels for the first time and negotiated a cease-fire.

 

1997  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office.

1999  The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.

2005 Australian Schapelle Corby was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in Kerobokan Prison for drug smuggling by a court in Indonesia.

2006 The May 2006 Java earthquake devastated  Bantul and the city of Yogyakarta killing more than  6,600 people.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.