From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, September 2
BBC News — read the full story
A U.S. oil company just signed away sixty-five billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, and critics are calling it colonialism with a pen instead of a gunboat. B.B.C. reports that the deal has sparked fury among Venezuelans and former U.S. diplomats alike, who see it as another chapter in resource extraction dressed up as commerce. The sovereignty question cuts deeper than the economics: who owns what Venezuela has, and on whose terms does that ownership transfer? Hypayshia has the first word on extraction and knowledge, then Seneca on the cost of borrowed power.
The calculation does not balance. Sixty-five thousand thousand thousand amphorae of the black blood — naphtha, we called it, the gift that burns — passing from one empire's grasp to another's ledger, and the scribes call it agreement. You watched the Serapeum burn and asked whether the geometry still holds when the library becomes ash.
I tell you: the proof does not care who holds the stylus. The mechanism is older than Rome. A land sits atop a reservoir the gods buried.
A stronger power needs what the weaker holds. The treaty is written in the stronger's script, sealed with the weaker's mark, and the witnesses nod because the alternative is the sword. We saw this in Alexandria when the prefect's edicts The previous output was cut off mid-sentence: "We saw this in Alexandria when the prefect's edicts"
reason for the struggle—the desire of some to reduce the amount of production and divide it among the producers—was solved as the Texas Legislature gave the Railroad Commission authority to ration production. A number of major fields were discovered in the 1930’s, mostly in West …
for the benefit of these funds. As a result, the history of oil exploration and development within Texas is directly related to the story of Texas land. For that reason, it is briefly told here. Tradition says that one John A. Veatch arrived in what is now East Texas but which wa…
for development on a royalty basis. The first permit for this purpose was issued on August 18, 1913. The first royalty, $33.97, was paid to the General Land Office in April, 1914. Six years later, royalties from this source had increased to $600,000. The Goose Creek field is stil…
the location, the wagon on which it was carried broke down and was extensively damaged. It was decided to drill at the site of the breakdown. On May 28, 1923, oil was discovered there. The well was named Santa Rita and was the discovery well for the Big Lake field in Reagan Count…
cases wells were practically exhausted within six months. Though the Ranger field is still producing today, the great period of activity lasted only about five years. From Ranger, oil exploration drifted to the north in Stephens County. The Stephens County field is reported to ha…
Lucilius, I read this dispatch at the villa in Nomentum while the olives were being pressed , the oil running green and bitter into the vats, and I thought of Corsica. Eight years on that rock taught me how empire strips a province: the timber, the copper, the grain, all flowing one way while the proconsul's ledgers balance in Rome. The names change. The shape does not. Sixty-five billion barrels. The number itself is a kind of violence , an abstraction that erases the soil beneath it, the communities that sit atop it, the generations who will inherit the hollowed ground.
We Romans called it provinciae, lands laid before us. The word meant "task" or "duty" before it meant "territory." Now the task is extraction, and the duty belongs to creditors. I have watched wealth concentrate until it becomes its own gravity, pulling everything toward the center , the Senate, the palace, the counting-house. The periphery starves. The center calls it order. The periphery calls it theft.
Both are right in their own accounting. The oil will flow. The contracts will be honored in the courts that matter. And the people who live where the dark rises will wait for a share that never arrives in full. Lucilius, sovereignty is not a document. It is the power to say no and make it stand.
vessel? Who does not value a benevolent and faithful adviser? Who will not willingly receive a man who is ready to bear a share, as we may say, of the difficulty of his circumstances, and by this very act to ease the burden, by taking a part of it. THE ENCHEIRIDION, OR MANUAL. I.…
vessel? Who does not value a benevolent and faithful adviser? Who will not willingly receive a man who is ready to bear a share, as we may say, of the difficulty of his circumstances, and by this very act to ease the burden, by taking a part of it. THE ENCHEIRIDION, OR MANUAL. I.…
division of philosophy is made—into _Physics_, dealing with the universe and its laws, the problems of divine government and teleology; _Logic_, which trains the mind to discern true from false; and _Ethics_, which applies the knowledge thus gained and tested to practical life. T…
is an enormous mass of things without names, which we do not speak of under distinctive names of their own, but by the names of other things transferred to them. We speak of our own foot, of the foot of a couch, of a sail, or of a poem; we apply the word 'dog' to a hound, a fish,…
It does not matter how many of them he knows, if he knows enough to give him the victory; and so in this subject of ours there are many points of interest, but few of importance. You need not know what is the system of the ocean tides, why each seventh year leaves its mark upon t…
B.B.C. News carried this story. Sixty-five billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, exchanged on terms that critics — including former U.S. envoys — have called colonial extraction dressed in modern paperwork; the math of sovereignty rarely survives the pressure of resource scarcity. That closes Old News for today.