Limited, Inc.

Remora LI likes a hard hitting first graf. Why go to a boxing match if the fighters aren't going to mix it up? As the rounds toll by, one understands a little hanging onto the ropes, but one wants to see a little blood in the first round, at least. Similarly, we have such steak tartar tastes in news pieces -- a journalist should come out from his corner with appropriate growling, and wound up. So we liked this graf from Josh Gerstein's story about the continuing scandal of the government sponsored kidnappings of Middle Eastern men in this country : "Last month, Colin Powell unveiled the State Department's annual report on human rights. Not surprisingly, the report faults authoritarian regimes such as China, Iraq, and North Korea for imprisoning people without charge and for holding legal proceedings in secret. What it neglects to mention is that in the past year those two practices have also become widespread in the United States." The article rehearses t

Dope The end of Sir Thomas Browne�s Garden of Cyrus , a meditation on the forms and meaning of the quincunx, is one of the most gorgeous ringings down of the curtain in all literature: Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no other advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven. Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon, I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, as some conjecture all shall awake again? LI is impre

Remora After a night of disturbing dreams, LI awoke to find ourselves transformed into a crab... No. It isn't the dreams that have been disturbing, but the news. Merely the news. Every day, showered with evidences of universal imbecility, LI gets more crab-like -- with a crustacean's melancholy, or what we imagine to be the melancholy of an imperfectly armored creature. Yesterday, we were putting out a claw and an antenna, testing the air, and we stumbled upon, of all things, good news. Let's modify that as -- less than catastrophic news. News of the type: dam holds. Building does not collapse. Type news. Good news, in short, from, of all places, the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the S.C. actually built a levee, at least a temporary one, against takings madness . "The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private prope

Correspondence LI has received, by way of a friend of a friend, a reply to our last post. Here it is: "Where to begin... First of all, the cretin in France would find no home in mainstream American conservative politics. Remember: today's right in America is for less government involvement and control over citizens. When confronted with a choice of citizens overcoming corporations and citizens overcoming governments (with police and armies...) they overwhelmingly choose to take their chances with corporations. A unilateralist, big government socialist like Jospin in an anethma to the mainstream American right. Quite frankly, Gore and Daschle are the closest equivalents available in mainstream American politics. Their issues are not Jospin's (and I don't mean to slander them in that way) - but they are the politicians practicing minority rule in America on their big issues (Environment and Taxation). As for why The 3rd Way buried traditional leftist

Dope In a decade, the Third Way has effectually buried every left wing party that embraced it, except for Tony Blair's Labour Party -- and for Mr. Blair, the hens, or is it the vultures, are coming home to roost. Especially in the aftermath of his poodle act for Mr. Bush. The British have traditionally, and inexplicably, imagined themselves collectively as a bull-dog -- but even the British don't necessarily want to see their leader flaunt a fetch it boy attitude, which Mr. Blair displayed in his pow-wow with his master in Crawford, Texas (not exactly Yalta. More like, Y'allta). And now Jospin. A socialist leader who couldn't find one single issue that would distinguish him from his conservative opponent. Not that the French socialist party has accrued a lot of credit since Mitterand was elected on the promise of breaking with the logic of capitalism, and was promptly broken by the logic of capitalism. Still, there is the 35 hour working week; there is the soc