I Drink Your Milkshake!

So I'm a little late to this party. I only saw There Will Be Blood a few days ago.

I'd read and seen reviews, and as always when they reveal way too much plot in the previews, I pretty much knew how the whole thing was going to turn out.

"I guess you could call me an Oil Man.." - check
"There's an ocean of oil under us..." - check
"I have a competition in me..." - check
"I've abandoned my boy!" - check

So I thought we'd gotten past all of the plot reveals, and Daniel Plainview had alienated everyone in his life and was, literally, face-down in the gutter, when Eli returns and Daniel re-animates. Going from drunk and dead to the world to alive and on the attack, he brings his full force to bear on the now-struggling Eli and says, of course, "I drink your milkshake!" with a chilling effect that many have likened to Hannibal Lecter.

Lots of people have had fun with this .. and I'm glad to have missed these particular plot spoilers.

Like this mashup .. or this more dance oriented one using the same song .. and finally this SNL skit (sorry, I'm sure there's a more direct link, but SNL has no video search).

After which follows the Surprise Ending, after which I realized that the title of this movie is really a promise. There Will Be, and There Was.

Boy I could really use a milkshake about now...

Oil Men

I think we're down to 9 months and about 10 days until Crawford TX gets its village idiot back.

In the meantime we will all continue to sweat out this long, painful year hoping for a minimum of additional damage to the world, America's reputation, and the trend of 21st century history.

A few weeks ago I watched a video of an excellent talk Robert Zubrin gave at Google about Energy Victory. A lot of it is unsurprising - Hydrogen Power is a hoax (anyone pushing it is either stupid or a liar), using corn to make ethanol is a big lose, etc. His major point is that the single biggest thing America can do to free itself from oil is by mandating every car sold in the US be flex-fuel, that is, able to run on any sort of hydrocarbon fuel.

The cost is near zero. All engine controls today are electonically controlled closed loop feedback systems, and the hardest part is making the physical plumbing resistent to rust otherwise brought about by hydroscopic fuels like the alcohols.

This step has to be mandated, though, because otherwise there will be no incentive to provide the universal infrastructure necessary to support non-petroleum fueled cards. In other words, without eggs there will be no chickens.

Is this hard? Not really. In fact, one country already did this 10 years ago. Brazil is now completely independent of oil and is in fact an ethanol-exporting country. (Oh, and the US has placed a tariff on foreign ethanol.)

Which brings me to the subject of Oil Men. Ignoring whether Fearless Leader and his buddies are mendacious, incompetent, Manchurian candidates ... or all of the above ... the one thing I think that hurts the most is that they are all Oil Men.

And one Oil Woman, Condoleeza Rice. You know, the ex-board member of Chevron after whom they named an oil tanker.

What do Oil Men have in common? They all believe oil is the only source of energy and the most vital resource on earth. They believe that owning land is the key to wealth. They believe that wealth comes out of the ground and that it's worth sending men into harm's way to grab oil-rich land.

In all these things, the Oil Men who run the US are just like the Oil Men who run despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia, Venezuala, etc, and believe that oil rights are more important than human rights. Our Oil Men support the rest of the world's Oil Men and get rich making them rich. And they get richer with kick-backs from their Oil Men benefactors.

The things that distinguish our Oil Men from foreign and corporate Oil Men is that our Oil Men a) were never very good at it, and b) have no imagination. And our Oil Men have plunged the US into unfathomable debt, destroyed what reputation we have in the world, and nearly forced us all past tipping points of global warming, peak oil, and food shortages.

In other words, they've been busy selling off the US and the world to their benefactors and fiddling away while Rome burns. And losing us eight critical years in the process.

I hate Oil Men more than I hate MBAs and lawyers. Can we please have no more Oil Men, no more "MBA Presidents", no more frat-boy jerk-offs who have no business running a company, much less a country? Pleez?