Carole King, Upton Sinclair, Iraq and Big Oil

"Hidiho, Hydi,Hydi,Hydiho, going to get me a piece of the sky..."Carole King from Tapestry.
Hope everyone is cool this super Summer weekend.
The flick There Will Be Blood is engrossing. It's about oil. It's also about bloody violence in the early oil fields.It's also about the irrelevance of fundmentalist religion in opposing the oil market competition. It's an adoption of Upton Sinclair's Oil.
Daniel Day-Lewis is an awesome actor. This is not, however, a flick for children.
Is Upton Sinclair's muckraking still relevant in today's new Guilded Age. I think so.
Oil is also still relevant, at least for now. The violent oil wars are still visible. Our Irag preemptive war had alot to do with distroying Saddam's nationalized oil production. The ensuing religious civil war is a good replication of There Will Be Blood.
Big Oil joined Bush/Cheney in the Iraq invasion. Big Oil is now on the cusp of getting Iraq to agree to favorable no-bid oil contracts. Bush/Cheney are also pressuring Iraq to agree to our long-term military presence in Iraq to protect Big Oil. McCain is in Iraq now to pressure for this.
Everyone agrees on the need to transform our energy infrastructure. We need to move to a post-oil era. But that's like turning around a large ocean carrier.
Pessimists like my friend, the Saratoga suburban critic James Howard Kunstler, argue that all the alternatives to oil are marginal solutions. Some optimists disagree. Let's split the difference and hope that at least our reliance on imported oil can be eliminated.
As an aside, I rented Blood from a supermarket Redbox...those non-personal machines. Whe I returned it, the machine ate it and did not give credit for returning. When I called the Redbox #800 , I couldn't get a live person.
Help me here, Carole King and Upton!
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