According to yesterday’s weekly federal report, This Week in Petroleum, the average price of regular gasoline is up to $3.96 per gallon, just 15 cents shy of its July 2008 peak.

A friend writes:

So I’m deciding to ask an economist. It appears to me that the oil companies are really just gouging the American public at the gas pump. Gas prices continue to spiral upward at the same time oil companies’ profits are at record highs. It seems that the media continue to blame higher oil prices because of events in the middle east, but if that were truly the case, wouldn’t profits be lower rather than higher? In it’s last quarter, Exxon’s profits increased 53% over the same period last year. I just never hear of oil companies losing money or decreasing their profit share, so are they really screwing us, or is there a rational, economic explanation?

As many of you know, I teach at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. I really appreciate all of the emails and calls asking how I fared in the tornado. We are fine as are all our family and friends. The tornado by-passed Northport (where I live) entirely. It also spared the University of Alabama. Many areas in the city and suburbs, however, look like postwar Berlin including the communities of Alberta and Holt.

There is a more positive side to this story, however, that deserves more emphasis. The outpouring of volunteers and donations is not only inspiring and effective but extremely decentralized. The two local talk-radio stations, plus another, owned by Clear Channel are on the air with a simulcast from 8:00 to 8:00 to serve as an informal clearing house for relief efforts. The station that started this effort has only three employees (who were normally not on air) and it has preempted the normal programming.

Typically, someone calls in to the host and expresses a need for a particular area or group. Ten minutes later they call back to say that ten people showed up on their doorstep. Those coordinating relief often specify that they are short on particular goods and have too many others, thus allowing givers to tailor the donations. The broadcasts have informed me of several opportunities to be of help. You can listen in at WRTR 105.9 FM, and look at the talk-radio Facebook, here. Be prepared to be emotionally moved. Just last night, a worn-out informal relief coordinator in a trailer park, who needed to see her ailing mother in Mississippi, called for help. The Hispanics at the park were afraid to contact anybody about their needs. Volunteers (including two nurses) rushed to the scene.

Although most of the relief effort starts with individuals who weigh in on their own, churches are playing a key role in coordinating it. I don’t know if a more secular city would fare nearly as well.

Father forgive them,
for they know not what they do,
Yankees never say.

—

Osama’s been killed,
everyone’s now saying.
Firestorm will come soon.

—

An eye for an eye,
slaughter all people you fear.
Cold blood chills your veins.

—

Americans may
seem quite civilized at times.
Looks often deceive.

—

Summer follows spring;
autumn comes next for certain.
Blowback’s for sure, too.

—

To see justice done,
close right eye, obscure the left.
Drift off into dream.

—

Springtime arrives late.
Snows of far Afghanistan
cover many sins.

—

Summer’s searing heat
does not scorch nearly as much
as Pakistan’s nukes.

—

Enormous folly
resides in Great Leader’s mind.
People soon perish.

—

Murderous cycle
keeps turning in hardened hearts.
Fish can’t leap from lake.

I just returned from a conference.  The guy sitting next to me on the plane had with him a laptop computer, an iPad, an iPod, and a phone.  Yep, four “portable electronic devices.”  I figured the guy was probably a terrorist.  Because they keep announcing it to potential terrorists on aircraft, I know that portable electronic devices can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation system.  And this guy had four of them.

Now that bin Laden has been killed some have conjectured that al Qaeda will initiate some retaliation, and they probably would want to strike quickly.  Targeting aircraft would be difficult because of the heavy security already in place.  For example, someone wanting to bring down an aircraft using toothpaste would have a difficult time because the TSA prohibits carrying toothpaste, except in extremely small quantities, on aircraft.

So, you’d have to think that anyone wanting to initiate a terrorist attack with toothpaste, shampoo, mouthwash, or soft drinks would have a very difficult time getting those dangerous and banned items onto an aircraft.  The big loophole in all this is portable electronic devices which, despite repeated announcements about their danger to aircraft, are still allowed on board.

As was predictable, the death of Osama bin Laden doesn’t mean the war on terrorism is over. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stresses that al-Qaeda’s message “might have even greater resonance” now that bin Laden is dead.

No one should be surprised that the war will continue. The mission creep in Libya, for example, foreshadowed this.

But there is irony to behold, given that Obama, to great liberal fanfare, announced the end of the war on terrorism in August 2009. Then, in case people forgot, Obama declared the end of the war on terror once again in May 2010.

Of course, this would have seemed odd to those who followed the news. For Bush had ended the “global war on terror” back in the summer of 2005. See Bob Higgs’s insightful comments about that marketing ploy.

Among the many objectionable aspects of President Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, one in particular sticks in my craw. He said that “today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.”

First, I dislike the whole idea of “the greatness of our country.” Countries cannot be great. They are abstractions and, as such, they are incapable of acting for good or for evil. Individual residents of a country may be great, and many Americans are great, because, to borrow Forrest Gump’s construction, “greatness is as greatness does.”

The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great.  The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.

But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.

Second, anyone can see that the U.S. government will use this particular killing as evidence of its dedication to and capacity for carrying out the noble service of protecting—and, failing that, avenging the deaths of—the American people. (Never mind that trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of deaths, untold destruction of property, vast human misery, and sacrifices of essential liberties in this country went into gaining the proudly proclaimed achievement of killing a single man.) The process has already begun, with former presidents and the mainstream media adding their voices to amplify the government’s official line. Glory to the USA, glory to its hired killers, glory above all to its heroic Great Leader. The whole spectacle is profoundly disgusting. Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.

During the bleak days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the Federal Trade Commission initiated rulemaking proceedings aimed at regulating the content of television ads aired Saturday mornings, times when many children were watching cartoons. Spearheaded by then-chairman Michael Pertschuk, the FTC was worried about the impact on young, unformed minds of commercials touting sugary ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, such as Count Chocula®, Fruit Loops® and Cap’n Crunch®. A majority of the commissioners reasoned that kids seeing such ads would immediately demand that their mothers rush out to the grocery store to buy products containing more sweetening ingredients, artificial colors and artificial flavors than nutritious whole grains.

Toward the end of the unenlightened 1970s, when nearly everyone wore god-awful clothes and had bad hair days every day, the public’s reaction to news of the FTC’s “kid-vid” rulemaking initiative was both swift and caustic. Soon tagged with the moniker “National Nanny” and excoriated in many media outlets for presuming to tell parents what breakfast cereals they should allow their children to eat, the Commission eventually drew in its horns.

But bad ideas never die and they don’t fade away. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Janet Adamy, in a story published on April 29th, the Obama administration is poised to ask (read: demand that) “food makers … sharply limit any advertising to children and teens of foods high in sodium, saturated fat and added sugars.”

The U.S. has finally killed Osama bin Laden, the press and the administration report. Many will say this vindicates the war on terrorism, but it doesn’t.

The Wall Street Journal says, “The development capped a manhunt of more than a decade for the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that left 3,000 people dead and dramatically altered U.S. foreign policy and the nation’s sense of security.”

“Manhunt”? In fact, the U.S. response to 9/11 has been a minor revolution in American statecraft toward the principles of aggressive war, nationalism and centralized executive power. Hundreds of thousands have died. Trillions have been spent. Key civil liberties have been undermined. And will the war now end? All of it? What domestic impositions and foreign occupations will remain?

Obama is absolutely right about the horrific loss that visited so many people on 9/11, including the unseen communities, families and loved ones touched by the tragedy, and we shouldn’t forget this. But even more neglected are the many who have been devastated by the U.S. government in its wars, before and after 9/11. Al-Qaeda, as Obama notes, has killed scores of Muslims throughout the world. This makes bin Laden a mass murderer of Muslims, the president correctly says. What of the scores of thousands of Muslims killed by the U.S.? What does that make our government?

Notably, Obama describes the operation that killed Osama as involving some degree of precision – at least compared to the drone attacks and all out wars that typify U.S. foreign policy, although the president didn’t say this. Had a very limited operation been all the U.S. was doing for ten years — if this was indeed something resembling a “manhunt” — there would be much less to protest, as well as less of a budget problem.

Now that Osama’s dead, if Obama does bring the troops home and end the ramping up of the national security state at home, he will deserve some credit, although that still doesn’t legitimize everything that’s happened since 9/11 – including, for example, the war with Libya, as divorced from the goal of killing bin Laden as was Bush’s adventure in Iraq. But Obama says the task of defending U.S. security is “not complete.” That would mean more war, I fear. Indeed, Senate hawks are pushing for a war in Syria, and it is unclear that Osama’s death will deter the War Party from calling for more military interventions, all under this rubric of the war on terror. But if the war on terror doesn’t end now that the main villain implicated in 9/11 is dead, does that not bring into question the war on terror’s rationale? For how can it be that this war has been worth it for killing Osama, yet the war must continue now that he’s dead? What in fact will mean the end of the war on terrorism?

Today is May 1, also known as May Day, the holiday of holidays for communists, socialists, and other such purported champions of the working class. (Personal disclaimer: I was once a member of the working class, and these champions never did a damn thing for me, unless you credit them with somehow contributing to the reality that at two of my jobs, I was “represented” by a union, which meant that every month a union functionary showed up at the factory and collected the union dues the employer was contractually bound to withhold from my pay.) So, live it up, commies. Celebrate your vaunted solidarity to the high heavens; you have nothing to lose but your intellectual and moral bankruptcy.

Nineteenth-century Germany was the fount from which the greater part of socialist dogma flowed. As fate would have it, however, that same time and place also gave birth to some of the greatest glories of Western civilization. I am thinking, in particular, of the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruch, and many others, who left a legacy that will enrich the soul as long as human beings retain a capacity to appreciate beauty in its sublimest form.

Johannes Brahms (1833-97) was one of the greatest composers of all time. (Note that when I say so, I am relying not only on my own decidedly scant expertise in music, but also on the judgment of those who are clearly qualified to judge.) His Double Concerto for violin and cello ranks among my most beloved pieces of music. His First Symphony, which he labored for fifteen years to perfect, is an immensely stirring tribute, as it were, to Beethoven, whom he revered as the greatest master and in whose shadow he always worked—a marble bust of Beethoven looked down on the place where he composed at the piano. If he never equaled the master—did anyone?―his compositions certainly achieved the first rank, spanning a range from beautiful songs and exquisite chamber pieces to grand symphonies and A German Requiem.

Karl Marx (1818-83) was Brahms’s contemporary, and like him, wore the fashionable facial hair of the nineteenth century. There, however, the similarity ends. Marx’s mind moved not along aesthetic lines, but along what he mistakenly took to be “scientific” ones. In his main work―a sprawling, turgid, almost incomprehensible mishmash of empirical observation, philosophical musing, ideological ranting, polemics, and ostensible economic analysis―he sought to overthrow the received doctrines of classical economics and to replace them with ideas that would show the oppressed workers of the world the earthly paradise that awaited them as the remorseless interplay of historical developments carried the world inexorably toward a classless society.

Not content to watch from the sidelines as this allegedly irresistible historical process occurred, Marx also busied himself in workaday revolutionary politics, seeking, as it were, to prod the workers into turning the wheel of history a bit faster. As we now know to our sorrow, however, such Marx-inspired revolutionary efforts were ultimately channeled into the creation of vast charnel houses in Russia, China, Cambodia, and many other places. The human toll in blood and suffering far exceeded that of any other ideology, and in a few unfortunate places, such as Cuba and North Korea, it continues even today.

None of these horrors was preordained. Individual choices, not some ineluctable historical force, brought them about. People ought to have known better. By the early twentieth century, when the grim harvest began in earnest, Marx’s doctrines had already been thoroughly debunked by Eugen von Böhm-Bawert and others. No matter. Revolutionary leaders such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and others recognized Marxism as the perfect cloak for their will to power, and a sufficient number of the downtrodden took comfort from this new, if godless, religion to give it their allegiance and to serve self-proclaimed Marxist leaders as useful, murderous idiots.

In the study of history, one encounters many mysteries. One constantly searches for connections in order to understand the course of events. One looks to cultural environments, for example, as breeding grounds for the ideas that move people in new directions. Yet the same time and place may produce the most exhilarating art and the most deadly ideology. Nineteenth-century Germany was such an ambivalent hotbed of cultural creativity.

Did the administration threaten to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from covering future presidential events? Reporter Carla Marinucci says yes, although the White House denies it.

A little over a week ago, protesters paid $5,000 each to get into a DNC fundraiser where they could interrupt Obama’s speech and break into a song, expressing their opposition to the solitary detention of alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Private Bradley Manning. These particular vocalists appeared daring in their interruption, although they sang about how the president had their vote regardless, and upon finishing the tune gushed to him about how much they loved him.

The spectacle was caught on video by Marinucci. But the White House says this violates the terms agreed to by reporters at these pool-only events. According to Marinucci, the White House attempted to intimidate her, threatening to bar her, her paper, and other Hearst papers from future access. The administration implies this is not true: “[N]o reporters have been banned from covering future presidential events and the White House of course would have no problem including any reporter who follows the rules in pool-only events.”

So there appears to be a real conflict over what happened here, a clash between the SF Chronicle‘s side of the story, and Obama’s. Moreover, the chilling effect that would be implied if the administration did indeed intimidate the Chronicle is significant, and the newspaper is brave for standing up for transparency and apparently going head to head with the administration over this. It was also brave for Marinucci to take out her camera in violation of the rules in the first place, since the public interest in seeing video of the president’s embarrassment should outweigh whatever possible reason there could be for barring video cameras from the fundraiser.