Limited, Inc.

Remora Alan, who has graced Limited Inc, on occassion, with controversy, (and who is wise enough to know it is spelled "occasion" -- LI can never remember the s-es and c-es in that word) has finally done it. He's finally set up his own weblog, which he is calling the Gadfly's buzz . Well, we were both in philosophy, and both our site names reflect, sadly enough, that experience. Alan is starting out with heavyweights -- throwing around Habermas' name and such. Now, LI must confess that one of the pleasures of middle age is not reading Habermas. Just the thought that I will never read Habermas again has gotten me through many a torturous moment. The man has a fatal addiction to 797 pages, plus footnotes. And we are talking about prose that resides at a level comparable to, say, the speeches at the Darmstadt Bricklayer's Union Annual May Day Festival. But he is a great codifier of the obvious, got to give him credit. Anyway, Alan is tossing around the ques

Dope As readers of this page know, LI has taken to hanging around a very expatriated Turk named S. S. has the immigrant desire for selective amnesia, and isn't this New World just the place for that? The parts of T�rkiye she would like to select for the memory hole are many, including: the traffic jams of Istambul; Turgut �zal's grandiose, gargling pronunciation of the word Turkiye -- Ozal was the right wing prez of the country during much of the eighties; Turkish machismo; and as a subset of the last, the prevalence of black, bushy moustaches above the upper lips of her countrymen in their virile primes. Unfortunately for S., all her talk about Turkey has only inflamed Limited Inc's Turkophilia. This curious and lonely passion (for what country has a worse press in this country? All due, I assure you, or at least I have been assured, to Greek propaganda) began when we reviewed Orhan Pamuk's latest novel for In These Times. That review required a lot of looking

Remora In 1812, as the wave of repression passed over England, now in its tenth year of war with France -- first with the revolution, then with Napoleon -- one Daniel Isaac Eaton published Tom Paine's notorious atheistical tract, Age of Reason, and was sentenced to an hour in the pillory, plus imprisonment, by his judge, Lord Ellenborough. Shelley responded to the Ellenborough in an open letter that began like this : Advertisement I have waited impatiently for these last four months, in the hopes that some pen, fitter for the important task, would have spared me the perilous pleasure of becoming the champion of an innocent man.�This may serve as an excuse for delay, to those who think that I have let pass the aptest opportunity, but it is not to be supposed that in four short months the public indignation, raised by Mr. Eaton�s unmerited suffering, can have subsided. Letter My Lord, As the station to which you have been called by your country is important, so much the mo

Remora The magic of the market place in the hands of the magicians LI has the long, grudge-laden memory you'd expect from a disappointed loner and potential assassin. Meaning I review for a living. But nothing has tickled us so much, in the hours of bile that precede dawn, as the news about the energy markets. For if, like me, you were reading the biz press in the nineties, the Daniel Yergin crowd, the Larry Summers crowd, well it just seemed super-evident that when we give power to the power companies, a veritable cultural renaissance would ensue, a happy coordination of supply and demand that would reward stockholder and consumer alike! It was bliss to be a free trade ideologue in those days. The epicenter is still the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a think tank associated with Daniel Yergin. The think tank has issued a report that recommends ... further deregulation! Of course, with 'structure" this time, maestro. �The power business in the U.