See what happens?

Are you wondering about the price of your gasoline? You may have noticed that the price of crude oil is off its highs, but unleaded gasoline hovers stubbornly in the vicinity of $2.90 / gallon. What's up?

I'll listen to competing theories from commenters, but my read is this: our Congress has managed to further boost gasoline prices, even as they have sought to blame the oil companies for "price gouging". How have they managed to do this? Some credit goes to their passage of last year's massive energy bill and its new seven-year ethanol mandate. Specifically, this year four billion gallons of ethanol are required to be incorporated into our automobile fuels. This amount gradually rises year by year to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012.

The problem with mandates of this kind, of course, is that they're legal requirements that brook no excuse. Domestic production not yet capable of producing that much ethanol? Tough. Internal transport of ethanol from the midwest to the coasts difficult or expensive? Too bad. Money is no longer an object, since the legal mandate trumps expense. So while July unleaded gasoline closed at $2.07 / gallon Wednesday, the July ethanol contract was closing at $4.08 / gallon. And no, that's not a typo.

We can thank our lucky stars, I suppose, that this mandated gunk is still usually just a tenth of our fuel (E10 blend, i.e. ten percent ethanol and the rest unleaded gasoline), else prices could be even worse. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation here, nine-tenths gallon of unleaded plus one-tenth gallon of ethanol at the July contract prices is a $2.27 gallon of fuel. Add Wisconsin's minimum markup (9.2 percent, I believe), federal tax of $0.184, Wisconsin state tax of $0.327, and we're looking at a pump price of $2.99 a gallon, which appears to be in the ballpark of what we're actually seeing. Whereas if the ethanol were not required as part of the mix, the price would be reduced to $2.77.

Take a moment now to bask in the asininity radiated by our sainted lawmakers. Confronted with the problem that gasoline was getting expensive, they designated a partial substitute, created a law to make it artificially scarce, and now obligate us by law to use the more expensive concoction.

Part of the reason this is so frustrating is that one starts to wonder whether, given the nature of our government today, to complain is to open the door to even worse outcomes. Don't complain about gas prices, since then Congress will have to do something, and the people making the loudest suggestions might turn out to be ethanol lobbyists. Don't complain about illegal immigration, since that encourages the Senate to trot out a massive amnesty bill guaranteed to tempt millions more border crossings. Don't complain about drug prices, otherwise we'll wind up with a new budget-busting Medicare entitlement. It's a disheartening notion.

Is "constructive complaining" a remedy? In other words, don't just say "gas prices are too high." Rather, make sure to say "would ya open up the arctic wildlife refuge for some drilling already, jeez?" Or, "could you stop raiding the transportation budget so we could have a state tax amnesty for the rest of the year?" Or, "would you drop these stupid boutique fuel, oxygenation, and biomass mandates, for crying out loud?" I suppose that would be great if most people actually agreed on which remedy they want, but of course they don't. The resulting cacaphony of complaints and suggested remedies gets polled, push-polled, and focus-grouped for a few weeks and pretty soon the headlines read: "Gas prices too high, survey says." Oy!

Make-a-wish car

3XHAR and I found ourselves stopped behind a heavily bumper-stickered automobile last weekend. I will highlight three stickers as representative of the vehicle: (1) "Free Tibet Free Palestine", (2) [yellow '=' on blue background], and (3):

"We are making enemies faster than we can kill them"

Now, that last one prompts two immediate questions from me. First, who has the figures on how many enemies we are making? Second, can we use that as an endorsement to speed up the killing and rectify the situation? Because when push comes to shove comes to punch comes to shoot comes to inventing an entirely new class of destructive capability, the United States takes a back seat to no one. Check the data if you don't believe me: the United States led the world in exports of rubble in the biennium 1944-45; greater rubble exports than the rest of the world combined, in fact. Interestingly, once the world's appetite for importing rubble was sated, the enemies disappeared -- which ought to be a cautionary tale on the utility of half-measures.

But aside from my knee-jerk reaction, do you see a consistent, unifying concept behind the stickers? I do not. They're a complete mess. Take "Free Tibet," for example, which the ChiComs literally did. In the U.S., the sticker's sentiment has practically universal support. Yes, we would very much like Tibet to be free. But the creator of the sticker mosaic, who is Deeply Concerned about a few hundred thousand Islamofascist wackos that are in a frenzy over the U.S. pouring its national wealth into Iraq, apparently doesn't even bat an eye at the hundreds of millions of Chinese who -- I dunno -- might be your enemy if you try to take Tibet from them.

Even putting that aside, let's focus on these enemies we are supposedly "making" now, presumably by having the temerity to actually fight them. I seem to recall that we weren't fighting them in 1993, and they bombed the World Trade Center. Did we call the military? Nope. We let the FBI handle it. Criminal matter, you see. So we weren't fighting them in 1996 when they attacked the Khobar Towers. The FBI was sent to investigate that as well. We weren't doing much fighting in 1998 when the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, nor in 2000 when the USS Cole was attacked. After 9/11, how much more of this "not making enemies" could we reasonably stand? And do spare me the drivel about our "agressive American imperialism" making enemies, since that "imperialism" at the time was guaranteeing that muslims could continue to live in the Balkans, that Kuwaitis could have their own country, that the wealth of the OPEC nations could be safely transported on the world's oceans, etc. Lame complaints about how mean and awful America is also fail to explain why London, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca, Egypt and Russia had to be attacked as well.

So given the rather obvious fact that our enemy, the militant Islamic radical, is motivated to kill by one's insufficient Islamic-ness, how will bumper-sticker guy make nice with the radical and still pursue gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered equality (the yellow "equal sign" sticker)? How, exactly, will he square that circle? He cannot, because the back of his car is completely divorced from realpolitik. Rather, it is cant. It is, metaphorically, religion. Recall Ned Flanders' frustrated appeal to God: "I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!" Bumper sticker guy wants all his stickers to be made true, even the stickers that contradict the other stickers.

Critter report

I was out of town last weekend sampling the wildlife of the northern half of Wisconsin, dominated at this time of year by the wood tick. Happily, arachnids weren't the only animals crawling or hopping. Of mammals we didn't see a whole lot: deer, a badger, and chipmunks. Black bear have been scarce of late owing to an upswing in homo sapiens sightings adding bustle to the neighborhood. Of birds there were crows as usual, but also ravens, turkeys, vultures, red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, black-capped chickadees, goldfinches, hummingbirds, two kinds of nuthatch, a loon and an oriole. Orioles are notorious latecomers in the spring, such that once you see one you can be assured that the bird migrations into Wisconsin are complete. And though we never actually saw the whip-poor-will, we could set our watches by its nightly 9 pm chirpfest. Sources allege that the bird is only the size of a robin, which I find amazing considering how very loud they are.

I think the most interesting animal of the weekend though was a large moth, probably of the family Saturniidae, that was attracted to the screen door by the inside lights. Its total wingspan was about five inches, but also remarkable was the fact that its eyes reflected back a very noticable orange light. While this is rather common thing with mammals, I never thought to expect eye-glow among bugs.