A NOT-SO-MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON. How Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters was connected to the Chevron Shakedown:

Roger Waters, the rock musician, has denounced Chevron for its “greed,” complaining that it is “disquietingly apparent that the rich and powerful are still much attached to the feathering of their own nests at any cost to others.” Well. Documents submitted to the court show “George R. Waters” taking two equity positions in the case, one for 0.076 percent and one for 0.025 percent, through “Fenwick,” presumably the firm of Mark Fenwick, Rogers’s manager and an heir to the Fenwick department-store chain in the United Kingdom. That would come to roughly $9.6 million of a $9.5 billion judgment. You could feather a lot of nests with that. (I was unable to contact Waters or Fenwick for comment. Rock stars are really hard to get on the phone.) If taking in a few million dollars via an investment in extortion and bribery is not greed, then what is?

I’d like to think that in the late 1970s, Waters wrote the hateful lyrics to Pink Floyd’s The Wall as a warning to his future self about the dangers of the anti-Semitism his rock star persona could slowly adopt. And now we now that “Money,” the single from their perennially best-selling 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon apparently wasn’t intended to be ironic, either.