Word of the day

Concinnity – harmony in the arrangement or interarrangement of parts with respect to a whole or each other; studied elegance and facility in style of expression; skillfully put together.

Saturday’s smiles

Finished and Complete:  No English dictionary has been able to adequately explain the difference between these two words.

In a recent linguistic competition held in London, attended by the best in the world, this explanation was the clear winner.

When you marry the right woman, you are COMPLETE. And when you marry the wrong woman, you are FINISHED.

And when the right one catches you with the wrong one, you are COMPLETELY FINISHED!

Friday’s answers

Thursday’s questions (asked on Friday) were:

1. What happened to Thursday?

2. Who said ““Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier’…”

3. Was s/he right?

4. It’s temps in French, tempo in Italian, tiempo in Spanish and tāima in Maori, what is it in English?

5. If you could have your time over, would you?

Points for answers

There were no right or wrong answers to three of the five questions.

Andrei got a clean sweep with a bonus for the video, winning a virtual Christmas cake.

Grant got four.

Answers follow the break:

Wealth creation vs wealth distribution

Quote of the day:

. . . In general, the creation of wealth is edifying. When only voluntary transactions are permitted, the creation of wealth requires cooperation, and this brings out the best in us.

Piles of wealth, however, tend to be corrupting. The fixed nature of a pile is all about apportionment, not cooperation, and this zero-sum game tends to bring out the worst in us.

It follows directly that no matter how noble the ends, government redistribution (which is hardly voluntary) tends to bring out the worst in us. Rising government redistribution over the past 75 years has produced ample evidence of this point.

We are in this mess because we have allowed our culture to be dominated by those who are bent on spreading the false and self-serving narrative that our economy is a giant zero-sum game…

David C. Rose, Department of Economics
University of Missouri-St. Louis

Hat tip: Eye to the Long Run

Low inflation, lower interest rates, big savings

Parties on the left are no longer concerned about inflation.

They must have forgotten the costs of high inflation which include high interest rates and a loss of the real value of savings.

They also overlook the benefits of low inflation.

One of those is lower interest rates which translate to big savings for anyone with a mortgage.

It does also mean lower interest rates for investors.

They are still better off than they’d be with high interest rates and high inflation which erodes the real value of savings.

However, lower interest rates could be one reason the share market has done so well this year.

Saturday soapbox

This soapbox is yours.

You’re welcome  to look back or forward, discuss issues of  the moment, to pontificate, ponder or point us to something of interest, to educate, elucidate or entertain, to muse or amuse.

December 29 in history

1170  Thomas Becket: Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was assassinated inside Canterbury Cathedral by followers of King Henry II; he subsequently becomes a saint and martyr in the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

1721  Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV of France, was born (d. 1764).

1800 Charles Goodyear, American inventor, was born (d. 1860).

1809 William Ewart Gladstone, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was born  (d. 1898).

1835  The Treaty of New Echota was signed, ceding all the lands of the Cherokee east of the Mississippi River to the United States.

1876 The Ashtabula River Railroad bridge disaster left 64 injured and 92 dead at Ashtabula, Ohio.

1880 Tuhiata, or Tuhi, was hanged in Wellington for the murder of the artist Mary Dobie at Te Namu Bay, Opunake. Tuhi wrote to the Governor days before his execution asking that ‘my bad companions, your children, beer, rum and other spirits die with me’.

1890 United States soldiers kill more than 200 Oglala Lakota men, women, and children with 4 Hotchkiss guns in the Wounded Knee Massacre.

1911  Sun Yat-sen became the provisional President of the Republic of China.

1911  Mongolia gained independence from the Qing dynasty.

1930  Sir Muhammad Iqbal‘s presidential address in Allahabad introduced the Two-Nation Theory and outlines a vision for the creation of Pakistan.

1936  Mary Tyler Moore, American actress was born.

1937  The Irish Free State was replaced by a new state called Ireland with the adoption of a new constitution.

1939 First flight of the Consolidated B-24.

1940  In The Second Great Fire of London, the Luftwaffe firebombed the city, killing almost 200 civilians.

1941  – Birth of Ray Thomas, British musician (The Moody Blues).

1946 –  Marianne Faithfull, British singer, was born.

1949 KC2XAK of Bridgeport, Connecticut became the first Ultra high frequency (UHF) television station to operate a daily schedule.

1953 Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, was born.

1972 An Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 (a Lockheed Tristar) crashed on approach to Miami International Airport killing 101.

1975 A bomb exploded at La Guardia Airport in New York City, killing 11 people and injuring 74.

1889 1989 Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia – the first non-Communist to attain the post in more than four decades.

1996  Guatemala and leaders of Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union signed a peace accord ending a 36-year civil war.

1997 – Hong Kong began to kill all the nation’s 1.25 million chickens to stop the spread of a potentially deadly influenza strain.

1998 Leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologised for the 1970s genocide in Cambodia that claimed over 1 million.

2003 The last known speaker of Akkala Sami – died, rendering the language that was spoken in the Sami villages of A´kkel and Ču´kksuâl, in the inland parts of the Kola Peninsula in Russia extinct.

Sourced from NZ HIstory Online & Wikipedia.