Hogmanney

In Double A baseball, no one can hit the 97 mph fastball, in Triple A, some can't hit anything but. --Chris McCague

Happy New Year. 2020. Good vision to all.

Walked back from church, a trip I had made Sunday when I lost my internet connection and could not Uber back. Today I walked past the Million Dollar Bar where they were three deep at 8 am, past Sandy's where I could not understand the coffee options, The Best Coffee stand--which might be, along the city preserve where they are raising raccoons and presumably comfort snakes but where very tough looking guys emerge with backpacks and tougher guys with only beer. Several Hemingway impersonators. Several attack roosters and menacing dogs, inappropriately chipper walkers. A much more challenging walk Sunday when I did not know where I was or where I was going and I thought I was living a post petroleum life.. And longer.

When economists argue (as Adam Smith did, forcefully) that consumption is the sole end of production – and therefore that production should be guided by the demands of consumers and not by those of people in their roles as producers – they’re often misunderstood as asserting that consumption is more important than production. (Cass operates with this misunderstanding.) But in fact they assert no such thing.

What economists mean when they insist that consumption is the sole end of production is that there is no economically meaningful production if the materials or activities that are the outcome of the exertion of human time and toil satisfy no human desire. That is, to produce is to generate some output that satisfies a human want or wants. Merely toiling to transform physical materials from arrangement X into arrangement Y is not productive unless arrangement Y contributes to the satisfaction of some consumption desire.

To use my favorite example, if I work hard to bake a sawdust-and-maggot pie, the result of my work is not really production. --Bordeaux

Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably, anti-human ideology. We are taught to look down upon our achievements with guilt, shame and disgust and not even to take into account the many, many benefits we have gained from using fossil fuels as our main energy source. Because look around. We’re living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation and we’re not allowed to be proud of that at all? --Seibtt


                                 Hogmanney

Hogmanney is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has a number of characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a readying for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.