Limited, Inc.

As we have said before, LI is extremely tired of the discussion about what the Democrats could do about the war. Or the Republicans. We could give a fuck. We wanted to know what we could do about the war. Which is the start of this project which I am tentatively calling: killthewarinyourgarage. You get a little taste of the army's plight in this oped at WAPO . LI has been busily working at the anti-recruitment leaflet we mentioned a couple of posts ago. Mr. VD has sent us a graphic, and we've been assured banner space at one left leaning blog. Actually, as the leaflet idea gets more concrete, it might be the case that the website we get will hold several different leaflets. My friend Dave in the Great Pacific Northwest promised to help me on the graphix too. The tone of the leaflet is the deflated boner in the mix for LI. We are well aware that our black humored, bile & candy prose is inappropriate here. We don't want to appeal to the 18-25 set that goes to anti-war de

As a small timer, a two-bit underground man, LI has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the rich – envy of all that spread. At the same time, however, there is always the eternal mystery of wealth. Not the mystery of how it is accrued – the mystery of why. A mystery best expressed in the immortal dialogue between J. Gittes and Noah Cross in Chinatown: “Cross: That's what I am doing. If the bond issue passes Tuesday, there'll be eight million dollars to build an aqueduct and reservoir. I'm doing it. Gittes: Gonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not gonna get. Cross: Oh, that's all taken care of. You see, Mr. Gits. Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water. Gittes: How you gonna do that? Cross: By incorporating the valley into the city. Simple as that. Gittes: How much are you worth? Cross: I've no idea. How much do you want? Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over

I received an email about the anti-recruiting pamphlet idea. And I’ve been spinning around ideas in my head. But LI needs suggestions. The army is having problems. This is from one of the slew of newstories recently about recruiting “Blacks make up about 23 percent of today’s active-duty Army, but the share of Blacks in the recruit classes of recent years dropped. From 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the share slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command and cited in published reports. The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9 of this year.” 13.9 is outstanding. I think the African-American community, which has collectively turned its back on this president, has done a good job making joining the army now vaguely shameful. However, this can be accelerated. One of the things that I am always impressed with is how the conservative sphere is con

The London Times did a nice thing a week ago that I missed – they published several articles to celebrate Beckett, on his centenary. LI particularly liked Roy Foster’s appreciation, which ends with a very nice anecdote : “Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett's, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair's biography. Noting the Dublin name ("Beckett with two t's is always Irish"), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that "his brother, the playwright, now very well known" always came over for the summer championships. "We used to have dinner together every year." My jaw dropping at this une

Bush’s press conference made clear what was clear to any thinking person: there will be no pullout of Iraq via establishment politics: “ President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.” Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said,

LI has contributed another post to Long Sunday. And today is so jam packed with tasks we have to finish that we can't really fiddle in this space. Check it out, here . Oh, and even if you don't read my little contribution to that site, there is something you should read -- I'm down on my knees begging you to read it, as you don't get this is the MSM very often: a q and a with the marijuana legalization king, Marc Emery. Reality -- that is, the way people really talk -- is so censored in the press that reading the q and a made me feel dizzy. Sample (and this is in the WAPO!) ME: "Cannabis is a peaceful and honest lifestyle choice, endorsed in writings by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that is being suppressed by a Nazified, paramilitary organization (the DEA) acting under illegal authority from a White House that has usurped the Constitution. That is a rogue government in Washington DC and in a manner similar to Falun Gong, it is our duty through peaceful m

LI sometimes feels bad that our radical sensibilities aren’t really captured by a correspondingly radical politics. It is nice to be more ultra than thou, and to either proclaim the self-evident virtues of anarchy or Marxism or libertarianism, etc. But no, just as we are about to launch ourself into the heady winds of ideology, we are pulled back by then-ism. Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens. Thenism is unfashionable nowadays in these here States. LI attributes this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have

How the delights of every one's life are changed after death into things that correspond can be known from a knowledge of correspondences; but as that knowledge is not as yet generally known I will try to throw some light on the subject by certain examples from experience. All who are in evil and who have established themselves in falsities in opposition to the truths of the church, especially those that have rejected the Word, flee from the light of heaven and take refuge in caves that appear at their openings to be densely dark, also in clefts of rocks, and there they hide themselves; and this because they have loved falsities and hated truths; for such caves and clefts of rocks well as darkness, correspond to falsities, as light corresponds to truths. It is their delight to dwell in such places, and undelightful to dwell in the open country. [2] Those that have taken delight in insidious and secret plots and in treacherous machinations do the same thing. They are also in such ca