There are elegant restaurants on this town—unchanged in a century or more—where waiters in formal livery serve an upscale cuisine to bloated oafs who’ve chosen to dine in their gym clothes if not in their actual undergarments. No one even seems to find this odd. What are you having? Did you want a cocktail? — The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy
After leaving Oxford Thursday we’re now in the Cotswolds, just outside Mitcheldean, a breathtakingly lovely part of Southeast England. We managed to drive the scenic A466 road from Monmouth to Chepstow which meandered between England and Wales, the border being the River Wye. And I’m driving upside down and backwards…
1.
The Eagle and Child, a famous watering hole and once the favorite of writers' group The Inklings featuring JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, has been shuttered for over three years. The good news is that the owners, St John's College, has announced that new management has been procured and, along with some extensive refurbishment, hope to be open again some time in 2024-25. Like its sister pub across the street, The Lamb & Flag, the owners are hoping it will be run by a community group as well. The Lamb & Flag also closed at beginning of the pandemic but that same community group (The Inkllings) stepped up and re-opened last October. Dave Richardson, a spokesman for Oxford CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), said "Community ownership of pubs is well established in Oxfordshire and while this is mainly in villages, the success of the Lamb & Flag just across the road proves that it can work in a city environment too. This is a pub calling out for sympathetic management who would respect its heritage, provide a good range of ales and maybe offer some good value food. But it needs a great deal of structural and fitting work so I wouldn’t expect it to reopen for a couple of years after work starts.”
2.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority, said John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli in his famous quote. However, the Washington Post reported last year that psychological studies have shown that power doesn’t change people as much as it accentuates their preexisting traits. When we claim that power corrupts, we let powerful people off the hook. How you use authority reveals your character: Selfish leaders hoard power for personal gain. Servant leaders share power for social good. And the ultimate test of character for people in power is how they treat people who lack it.
Now in the news is Democratic US senator from New Jersey Bob Menendez whose allegations include accepting “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value”. The indictment alleges that in exchange, Menendez passed non-public US government information to Egyptian officials; used his position as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to facilitate and “sign off on” weapons sales to that country; plotted to disrupt a criminal investigation into one of the businessmen; and persuaded the Biden administration to install a new prosecutor whom he believed he could influence on behalf of another businessman. Bob says he’s a victim (of course!) of a smear campaign by those who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a US senator and serve with honor and distinction”.
David Sirota for the Guardian claims the problem is that supreme court justices have for years been legalizing – and personally engaging in – similar kinds of corruption. At the same time, top Democrats are constantly assuring justices that no matter how repugnant their behavior, there will be no serious challenge to their power.
US columnist Moira Donegan for the Guardian goes a step further by writing the court has hijacked American democracy, vastly overextended its own power and flaunted its corruption. It will take a political movement to stop them. In detail she notes that not only are the justices political actors, but a tidal wave of reporting suggests that many of them are particularly corrupt ones. Last November, the New York Times published a report in which a former conservative activist detailed how a lobbying group purchased a building near the supreme court, infiltrated the body’s historical society, befriended the justices and allegedly received advance notice of the ruling in a 2014 birth control case from Samuel Alito. This April, ProPublica released the first of a series of disclosures about Clarence Thomas’s relationship with the billionaire Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow, who has showered the justice with lavish vacations – at his New Hampshire Compound, on his “superyacht”, and onboard his private plane – as well as paying for the private school education of Thomas’s nephew and buying the home (https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus) of the justice’s mother, renovating it and allowing her to live there rent free. Similar revelations were made about a luxury fishing trip taken by Justice Alito, paid for by another billionaire Republican donor, Paul Singer, whose subsequent interests are before the court Alito has not recused himself from. When asked to appear before the Senate judiciary committee to explain these gifts and the subsequent failures of disclosure and refusal, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Congress’s oversight power, writing a curt letter telling the Senate to go kick rocks. These are not the actions of people concerned for their court’s legitimacy. These are the actions of people convinced that there is nothing the elected branches can do to stop them.
One of the slickest and slimiest trends that we’ve been witness to in the last several years is for the powerful to blame the world’s ills on ‘the elite.’ The orangeman has it down as he dismisses 91 criminal charges against him as the work of a liberal deep state bent on his destruction and, in the process, the silencing of his millions of supporters. In this telling, the voluminous evidence – showing Trump conspiring to overturn a democratic election, or harbouring top-secret government records, or paying hush money to a porn star – can be waved aside as nothing more than a plot by the elite, its sheer abundance proof of the enemy’s determination. The orangeman, however, may have picked up a few tricks from the true master, Rupert Murdoch, who wrote in his recent departing missive that “Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” Bwaahaaaaahaaaaaaa. Murdoch and his outlets have pushed that doctrine for decades, and the consequences are hardly a secret. The twin populist right victories of 2016 – Brexit and Trump – both carried a Murdoch stamp of approval, but the impact has been even wider. As scholar David McKnight noted, for years Murdoch-owned media framed the climate crisis as just another liberal orthodoxy: “In this scenario, scientists are an ‘elite’. On the other hand, climate deniers … are elevated to the status of brave dissidents against an oppressive set of beliefs.”
It’s become the go-to defence of the supposed anti-elitist. No matter the heinous acts they are alleged to have done, no matter how strong the evidence, and no matter how much power they themselves wield, they insist they are the poor, benighted victims of those who truly pull the strings.
Back to ol’ Bob…“The allegations leveled against me are just that — allegations. I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I will still be New Jersey’s senior senator,” he said from Hudson County College as he doubled down on his innocence and did not take questions. “Prosecutors get it wrong sometimes,” he said during the press conference “Sadly, I know that.”
Yep, innocent.
3.
I’m going to keep ‘yelling’ about the destructiveness of the oil and gas industry as it ties directly into our fragile environment/biosphere/ecosystem. Yes, I drive a car. It uses gas. The system is set up for the automobile industry across the globe. Whole economies depend on the intricate web of corporations tied to this system; vehicle manufacturers, gas and oil companies, state and federal highway building and maintenance, service station owners and franchises, auto repair shops, auto parts stores…you get the picture.
Most people didn’t see this coming at the beginning of the age of the automobile, when in 1886 Carl Benz applied for a patent (#37435) for his vehicle powered by a gas engine, and most people don’t give it a second thought today. It just the way things ARE.
The New York Times posted a special article on Monday about the current trend of Monster Fracks. Increasingly complex oil wells are sweeping across Texas, birthplace of the fracking revolution, and the nation. A Times analysis found that these new wells can consume millions of gallons of water, often taken from dwindling aquifers. To satisfy that thirst, energy giants are drilling not just for oil, but for the water they need. Nationwide, fracking has used up nearly 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011. That’s how much tap water the entire state of Texas uses in a year.
How is this acceptable? Since 2011, BP has dug at least 137 groundwater wells in Texas for its oil and gas operations and reported using 9.1 billion gallons of water nationally during the past decade. EOG, one of the country’s largest frackers, consumed more than 73 billion gallons of water for fracking at the same time. Apache Corporation, Southwestern Energy, Chevron, Ovintiv and other major operators also have intensified water usage, the Times analysis found.
According to our own Department of Energy, The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy delivered a new report to the President on negative impacts of the ill-conceived hydraulic fracturing ban some have proposed. Economic and National Security Impacts Under a Hydraulic Fracturing Ban explains why a ban would have far-reaching and severe consequences, including the loss of millions of jobs, price spikes at the gasoline pump and higher electricity costs for all Americans—and the likelihood of increased CO2, SO2, and NOx emissions. A ban would end the U.S. role as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer and would force the United States to become a net importer of oil and gas once again. It would weaken the Nation’s geopolitical influence and put our national security at risk.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has been working since 2005 to close loopholes in our bedrock environmental laws, including laws that are intended to protect people from drinking water contamination, toxic waste, and toxic air pollutants from fracking. In 2021, they released a report titled A Hot Fracking Mess which focuses on gaps in the regulation of radioactive material released into the environment by oil and gas operations.
The top Democrat on the House Energy, Climate and Grid Security subcommittee, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), introduced legislation in July to give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate an oil drilling practice known as hydraulic fracking. The legislation – known as the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2023, or FRAC Act – would close a loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act that prevents EPA from regulating the notorious drilling process that involves injecting huge volumes of toxic chemicals deep into the ground to recover oil and natural gas, potentially contaminating the nation’s water supply and putting the public’s health at risk.
Of course, if the orangeman gets elected, there will be no more EPA. If he gets elected this country is shite out of luck. But, I digress.
The FRAC Act is one of five bills that was introduced in the House at the same time to address environmental and public health concerns related to the fracking process. Collectively, the five bills have been dubbed the Frack Pack and, in addition to DeGette’s FRAC Act, include: The CLEANER Act, which would close a loophole in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act that allows oil and gas companies to avoid responsibility for the hazardous waste they create, the FRESHER Act, which would create a study to better understand the effect of stormwater runoff from oil and gas operations, the CLOSE Act, which would eliminate the aggregation exemption that allows oil and gas companies to emit a range of hazardous pollutants while producing, processing, storing, and transmitting fossil fuels without meaningful regulation by EPA, and The SHARED Act, which would require increased testing and reporting of water contamination near fracking sites.
And now…
As he jets and motors the airways and byways of the planet, He still finds time to enlighten the poor peasants that follow his wanderings. Thanks Gary. I'm sure it can't be easy.
Oy. Except for the Cotswolds