Happy birthday!

I hope you would all kindly join me in wishing a very happy birthday to oil today. Oil just turned 150. Oil, you've barely changed at all over the years, still as black and slick as you were when we first pulled you out of the ground.

That's right, today is the 150th anniversary of when a charming, unemployed drifter and accomplished fake colonel Colonel Edwin Drake and his associate, the hobo sounding “Uncle Billy” Smith, started the first commercial well in Titusville, PA sparking the creation of the oil industry as we know it. Here we are 150 years later and that precious dinosaur blood well has turned Titusville into a megalopolis and the world's shining jewel. As the country moved off of whale oil and onto this viscous thunder-lizard blood, we soon saw the rise of oil companies, cars, plastics, chemical industries, and areas that housed radical fundamentalist Muslims (like Titusville).

So happy birthday, oil and commercial oil industry! Sure we may have already hit Peak Oil an dthe are using you at a clip that doesn't seem sustainable, but you understand, right? Now if you don't mind, we'd like to get on with finding out a way that we can do without you. Nothing personal, it's just this damned heat and smog and preacher murdering, bellowing oil men. Thanks for the memories.

The hot new toy for your kids

From Lego artiste Sir Nadroj of Brickstud comes the hot new toy for the summer season: Lego There Will Be Blood. Have Lego Plainview beat and humiliate his Lego reverend, abandon his Lego boy, and slowly be driven to a boil by his Lego life as an oilman. Or have him fight pirates and shit or go on adventures with Lego Indiana Jones. Whatever you feels best captures the spirit of P.T. Anderson's epic.

"DRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIINAAAAAAAAGE!!!!!!!"

"I'm finished."

DRAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE, Fidel, you boy!

If Cuba has a milkshake and I have a milkshake and I have a straw...

Cuba claims massive oil reserves

The state-owned Cuban oil company says the country may have more than 20bn barrels of oil in its offshore fields - more than double the previous estimate.

Cubapetroleo's exploration manager said drilling in the offshore wells would begin as early as the middle of 2009.

Such reserves would place Cuba among the top 20 oil producing nations.

Uh-oh, looks like we're going to need to add Cuba to the list of places we shouldn't import oil from. Let's see the list includes the entire Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia. Perhaps we just need a sufficient offshore operation. You know, giant rigs drilling slightly at an angle. I believe the term is slant drilling. Steal Cuba's oil, that's got to bump up our 3% of the world's oil reserves up a couple percent. I'm sure the CIA already has a plan and there are still a couple people in the backrooms there still pissed about the Bay of Pigs. I say let them commence Operation Plainview. We can drill our way out of this energy crisis.

Blood for something...

Your daily reminder of what we're really in Iraq for, via the Washington Monthly.

U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

....In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron.

Profiteering as policy. Dictatorship to colonialism. Be proud.