The Prices At Your Local Gasoline Stations Will Be Changed By Fairies On Flying Pigs Today -- October 17, 2018; US Gasoline Inventories Are 7% Over Five-Year Average; WTI Plummets On Report

Link here to EIA's weekly petroleum report.

• US crude oil inventories: increased by 6.5 million bbls; now at 416.4 million bbls, well above my threshold of 400 million bbls; all things being equal, WTI should trend toward $70 -- let's see what WTI is doing -- and there it is, down over 2.6% -- just holding barely above $70 at $70.02; US crude oil inventories are 2% above the five-year average for this time of the year
• refineries continue to operate well below capacity; at 88.8%; about the same -- if not exactly the same -- as last week
• gasoline production increased last week; slightly above the 10 million bbl baseline
• distillate fuel production decreased last week; slightly below the 5 million bbl baseline
• imports seem to be trending up over the past several weeks; if so, it suggests the US needs more of the "right kind" of oil
• total gasoline reserves -- going into to the slow driving season -- inventories are up a whopping 7% over the five-year average; we should see local gasoline prices plummeting -- and the prices on the signs will be changed by fairies on flying pigs today -- LOL 
• everything else: background noise

WTI is holding. Back to $70.16 now that the initial shock has worn off.

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Metaphysics

I am well into Howard Bloom's The God Problem. I do not know where he is headed. I do know the book is on metaphysics written by a brilliant scientist.

At page 291 the book is becoming increasingly interesting.

Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, German, born in 1867, was an embryologist who turned the discipline into a philosophy (his personal philosophy, of course).

Driesch fell that this big-picture fixation, this goal-directedness, was not limited to cells. "The universe is an organism or rather it is the one organism," he concluded in 1914 after twenty-five years of work in embryology. And "in evolution all natural becoming is like one great embryology."

Yes, to Driesch even the universe, in some strange way, seemed to know where it was going. It seemed to sense the form toward which it was aiming.

So did human history. History, said Driesch, is like phylogeny -- like the evolutionary process that produces new species -- like the process of biological evolution. and history unfolds in a seemingly purposeful way. History, says Driesch, seems driven by "unifying causality," by an overarching form that aches to be. Driven be an implicit pattern, a big picture, that we have not as yet learned to see.

Driven by entelechy.

I did not expect that. Bloom has two choices. Take Dreisch out or expand and support. Richard Dawkins would certainly not entertain Dreisch.

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The Eye

From the same book, page 293:

For example, the pattern of the eye will do almost anything to be. It will take so many routes to becoming that some experts claim it has evolved separately, yes, on its own, dozens of times in radically different forms and in radically different kinds of life.

The eye "wants" to be is as many creatures as possible. And it succeeds. Ninety-five percent of the species on this planet have eyes.

Take another example from a radically different realm. The recruitment strategy of a star is so enthusiastic about becoming that it greedily motivates ten billion trillion of its progeny, stars, to yank together raw material, to tear apart the atoms at their hearts, and to blaze with light. The result? The recruitment strategy of the star deliriously dots the skies.