Reality as We don't want it

Here is a Story to warm the cockles of your heart, or more likely, the skin under your collar. Refining capacity, which We need, is getting squeezed with narrow Profit margins, while the relatively Speculative Crude prices are plowing ahead. Year over year, a miserly 33% increase in the former, with a 70% increase in the later. I have not checked, but expect the front end–Land Oil right–did not much better than the Refiners. The Speculative urge has to be curbed in Commodities, and my Suggestion for Oil would be assigned Refiner Delivery where failure to fulfil the Futures contracts to the assigned Refiner would cost the Option-holder an 8% Penalty upon Sale paid to the Refiner assigned; this means the Penalty is valid if such Options are resold before Delivery to the assigned Refinery. It may not work, but it could forestall the jammed Profits-taking coming from multiple Turnovers of Contracts.

Arnold Kling is still searching for fiscal reality in Government Expenditures. It is a Condition which could not possibly reach achievement where Legislators extort Campaign Contributions for their Votes on Spending legislation. Establishing a flea circus museum in Indiana wields equal weight with provision of Emergency Room medical service in major Cities. Worthy Causes become a Profit-making function for Construction and Management companies. Separation of Medicare from Social Security could only identify Social Security as sound both in principle and funding, while expressing the ridiculous nature of the state of Medicine in this Country. The Defense Budget could be cut by 80%, and the United States would be on par with the rest of the World in a decade; cutting the Defense Budget by the Cost of the Interest on National Debt for its payment would be a help. I don’t know what Arnold defines as Domestic Necessary except for shelling out for the huge Civil Service, which could probably be cut by 30% without much notice by Anyone other than Civil Service personnel (I would notice the lack of about 30 pieces of letter paper per Week!). My advocacy: kick out the Republicans, kick out the Democrats, and put in the Rednecks; it might take them 3 Terms to understand the legislative language of bills, getting nothing passed.

I could not learn the abstract, now it seems I cannot learn the Concrete examples either. Maybe I ought to join the Rednecks in Congress. The Authors do not seem to integrate the principle that the abstract must be taught in conjunction with the Concrete; I once having blown a Math Final because the Test used a Symbol construction totally New to myself, and was something which should not have been tested under the pressures of personal achievement; I would have passed the Exam easily under the known Notation, or if allowed to become familiar with the new Notation. Should I have studied more–assuredly; but it not the Issue, Concrete Examples should contain variety and the methodology to Problem formation. Here I am still grousing after decades. lgl