Oxford Analytica in Forbes discusses reasons for the rise in commodity prices:
1. Supply and Demand
2. Weak Dollar
3. Questinable Policies
4. Speculators
5. Monetary Policy

Re: #1, duh.

#5 affects #2.  Because interest rates are low, foreign investors can earn a higher rate of return elswhere.  Therefore there is less demand for the dollar.

Re: #3, as I always say, Ethanol is the answer... because the presidential primary begins in Iowa.  As the article states, ethanol consumes a quarter of the U.S. corn crop.  Hello!

Re: #4, if in doubt, follow the lead of Vladimir Ilych Lenin and blame the speculators!  What do you want to do, folks, shut down the futures market?  You do realize, any time you agree to buy something at a certain price in the future, such as locking in a mortgage interest rate, you're a speculator.

Remember the American pastor thrown in jail by the Russians for bringing a box ammunition into the country?

A pastor at the Christ Community Church in Conway, S.C., Miles was convicted in April after security officers at a Moscow airport found a box of .300-caliber cartridges in his luggage.

He repeatedly apologized, saying that the ammunition was for a Russian friend who had recently bought a Winchester rifle and that he did not know bringing such ammunition into the country was illegal.

Fox News reports he is soon to be released.  This is good news.

Meanwhile, ever think about lawfully carrying a firearm for self-defense in this country?  Just get a permit, right?  Not so fast.  Even with a permit, there's plenty of gotcha laws.  Go here, you're a law abiding citizen.  Go there (e.g. national park), you're a criminal.  Carry it/ store it this way, you're law abiding.  Carry it/ store it that way, you're a criminal.

The laws are complex and vary by state.  I'd list some of them, but I'm likely to get them wrong.  But it all boils down to this -- the more inaccessible and useless your firearm, the more likely it is to be legal.

Criminals, of course, can do as they please.

Fox News/AP reports on negotiations for the continued presence of American forces in Iraq:

Iraq's prime minister said Friday that talks with the U.S. on proposals for a long-term security pact have reached an impasse over objections that Iraq's sovereignty is at stake, but held out hope that negotiators could still reach a compromise plan.

In his strongest comments yet on the debate, Nouri al-Maliki echoed concern by Iraqi lawmakers that the U.S. proposals would give Washington too much political and military leverage on Iraqi affairs.

So how exactly are these negotiations conducted?  Do the Iraqi representatives hold themselves hostage like Bart in Blazing Saddles?

Fox News reports:

A House subcommittee has rejected a Republican-led effort to open up more U.S. coastal waters to oil exploration.

Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., spearheaded the effort. His proposal would open up U.S. waters between 50 and 200 miles off shore for drilling. The first 50 miles off shore would be left alone.

But the plan failed Wednesday on a 9-6, party-line vote in a House appropriations subcommittee, which was considering the proposal as part of an Interior Department spending package.

Worldview A says, "if we need stuff (food, shelter, clothing, energy) we should go get it."

Worldview B says, "ahhh, you fool, always looking for simplistic answers to complex problems."

Call me simplistic.

But if you want complex, maybe we should sell Alaska back to the Russians.  They would gladly get the oil out of ANWR and sell it back to us.

...and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Mark Steyn.

The Editors of the National Review Online give us an update on Mark Steyn's hearing before a "Human Rights" Tribunal:

That’s right: This was only a provincial trial.  The Canadian Islamic Congress — the radical Muslim complainants — went jurisdiction shopping, so once the trial in British Columbia concludes, Steyn and Maclean’s will find themselves the targets of another witch hunt at the national Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC).  Both “courts” can impose penalties separate from each other, and the legal costs are likely to be astronomical.  (The complainant’s legal representation is conveniently provided by the state at no charge.) Incredibly enough, in 31 years, the CHRC has not once dismissed a charge that has been brought before it.  Could the courts in Soviet Russia have boasted of such a success rate?

Steyn's offense?  He wrote a book.

Meanwhile, the Examiner reports:

A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history.

"Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths."

Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin's popular middle school text, "Across the Centuries," which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines "jihad" as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."

Incidentally, John Derbyshire made a funny observation in the National Review Online, in which he compared the longevity in office of the world's despots to the longevity in office of U.S. senators.

I found it really funny when it was written all of three weeks ago.  This was before Senator Kennedy was found to have a brain tumor.

In the mean time, repeal the 17th Amendment.

The people of Colorado passed an amendment to their Constitution in 2006 to raise the minimum wage to $6.85 and adjust it annually for inflation.  It currently stands at $7.02.  Predictably, most teenagers I know are still looking unsuccessfully for work this summer.  And I've noticed many restaurants have closed (off the top of my head, I can think of two steak places, a pizza place, and a barbecue place).  There's also a local drugstore chain that's gone down.  All these buildings now sit empty.

Granted, gas prices are certainly shifting consumption from restaurants and retail.  But that means the market wage for teen labor has dropped below $7.02.  So a teenager willing to do something productive with his time for $6 can just go pound sand.

Thanks, Coloradans, for doing what's fair and making our state a better place.

John Hood makes the following observation in the National Review Online:

Gasoline is about to exceed $4 a gallon in most of the country.  Anyone who believes that isn’t the single most important number in American politics is fooling himself.

He's probably right.  I would like to believe that Americans are far-sighted enough to make stopping Iranian nukes their number one issue.  But hey, that might cause the end of the world in five or ten years, whereas gas prices are hurting us now.

Meanwhile, Robert Bryce in the American Magazine provides an excellent chart showing world supply and demand for oil (see table 2.1 in the article).  The table speaks for itself.  American supply of oil has declined slightly over five years, while American demand has held steady (bespeaking of increasingly efficienct usage offsetting increasing population).  Meanwhile, global supply and demand have both risen, but the latter has outstripped the former, thus causing the price spike.

On the bright side, Loose Ukrainian sends me a Bloomberg article detailing the current activity in the Bakken oil field:

... the Bakken formation [is] a sprawling deposit of high-quality crude beneath the durum wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  The Bakken may give the U.S. -- the world's biggest importer of oil -- a new domestic energy source at a time when demand from China and India is ratcheting up the global competition for supplies and propelling average U.S. gasoline prices to almost $4 a gallon.

And unlike the tar from Canada's oil sands, Bakken crude needs little refining. Swirl some of it in a Mason jar and it leaves a thin, honey-colored film along the sides.  It's light - -almost like gasoline -- and sweet, meaning it's low in sulfur.

Best of all, the Bakken could be huge.  The U.S. Geological Survey's Leigh Price, a Denver geochemist who died of a heart attack in 2000, estimated that the Bakken might hold a whopping 413 billion barrels.  If so, it would dwarf Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the world's biggest field, which has produced about 55 billion barrels.

There are technical hurdles, but with oil at $125 a barrel, the Bakken is viable, and the environmentalists have been unable to put it off limits.

Finally, Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard brings us back to the political:

Where Republicans have succeeded is in selling their solution to soaring gas prices: drilling for oil offshore and on federal lands, areas now off limits.  In the Gallup survey, support for drilling in precisely these areas jumped from 41 percent in 2007 to 57 percent in May.

So Republicans have an issue to exploit. And it's one on which Democrats are especially vulnerable because they promised in the 2006 campaign to offer a "common sense" plan to curb gas prices.  They have yet to produce one, and the price per gallon of gas has risen by more than $1.60 since Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007.

Democrats have also insisted--unwisely, it turns out--on pushing to enact a global warming bill that would further boost the price of gas and rake in trillions of dollars in new revenue.  This might have made sense a few years ago, but not in the days of public anger over $4 a gallon gasoline.

Speaking of that global warming bill, I did have a dark thought the other day that the Republicans could let the thing pass and let it wreck the country, just to teach the electorate a lesson.  Go away, dark thoughts.

Joseph Epstein writes a provocative piece in the Weekly Standard about the raising of today's children:

On visits to the homes of friends with small children, one finds their toys strewn everywhere, their drawings on the refrigerator, television sets turned to their shows.  Parents in this context seem less than secondary, little more than indentured servants.  Under the Kindergarchy, all arrangements are centered on children: their schooling, their lessons, their predilections, their care and feeding and general high maintenance--children are the name of the game.

No other generations of kids have been so curried and cultivated, so pampered and primed, though primed for what exactly is a bit unclear.  Children are given a voice in lots of decisions formerly not up for their consideration.  "If it's your child, not you, who gets to choose your weekend brunch spot," writes David Hochman in the magazine Details, "or if he's the one asking how the branzino is prepared, it's probably time to take a hard look at your own behavior."

He also examines the resulting college students:

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel.  I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home."  I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality.  Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant.  Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.  Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

I also point to today's culture among young males, who ritualistically and uniformly feel the need to express themselves by inflicting their booming car stereo sub-woofers on entire neighborhoods as they pass by, much like a dog feels the need to urinate on every rock and fire hydrant.

Oh by the way, according to Fox News, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke us another love letter:

"I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene," Ahmadinejad said.

"Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started," the hard-line president said.

We love you too, Mahmoud.

Our six year old has been experimenting with the word processor.  The little one writes:

Pops Up When Original Seal Is Broken
Safety Button
Pops Up
Shake Well
Refrigerate After Opening.
Pasteurized For Your Safety Pasteurized For Your Safety

I suspect it's a derivative work, but at least the child exhibits good taste.

Clifford D. May reminds us of some militant Islamist quotes in the National Review Online:

"We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance and the Islamic world," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared, "and this war has been going on for hundreds of years."

"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something," said Hussein Massawi, a former leader of Hezbollah. "We are fighting to eliminate you."

"Rome will become an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe," Yunis al-Astal, a Muslim cleric and Hamas parliamentarian has pledged.  "Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our prophet Muhammad."

Nice people.

Fox News/AP has this quote re: the polygamists in Texas:

Texas child welfare authorities have argued that all the children, from newborns to teenagers, should be removed from the ranch because the sect pushes underage girls into marriage and sex and encourages boys to become future perpetrators.

As opposed to our culture-at-large, which pushes underage girls into sex without marriage and encourages boys to become future perpetrators.

Who will return lost innocence to Miley Cyrus?

David Ranson boils tax policy down to its essence in the WSJ Opinion Journal:

The interactions among the myriad participants in a tax system are as impossible to unravel as are those of the molecules in a gas, and the effects of tax policies are speculative and highly contentious.  Will increasing tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes, or hold back the economy, as John McCain fears?  Or both?

[Economist Kurt] Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively.  On this page in 1993, he stated that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP."  What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.

... The federal tax "yield" (revenues divided by GDP) has remained close to 19.5%, even as the top tax bracket was brought down from 91% to the present 35%.  This is what scientists call an "independence theorem," and it cuts the Gordian Knot of tax policy debate.

See especially the graph in the article.  (I like pictures.  I know you do too.)

We remember and honor those who served and gave the last full measure of devotion.