Limited Inc is starting from the fourth chapter of Ezekial tonight. So get a stiff drink.

"And, behold, I will lay bands upon thee, and thou shalt not turn thee from one side to another, till thou hast ended the days of thy siege.

Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.

And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.

Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin: from time to time shalt thou drink.

And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight."

Yes, from time to time thou shalt drink; from time to time even eat meat, twenty shekels worth. This, my readers, is the emblem and essence of the writing life. This week, Limited Inc searched high and low for funds, having to meet certain emergencies, like rent. And of course we are begging in the full, arrogant knowledge that we command the language, the Queen's tongue. If this were the eighteenth century, man, we'd be cleaning up. But in our heart we know we are screwed -- command of the tongue is worth zip in the market place. We could have made more, this year, bagging hotdogs and white bread at the local store. This has gone on for three freelancing years, and each month Limited Inc decides, okay, I'll quit. This month we are making more of an effort, having put out resumes to spas and architects lauding our ability to answer the phone, file (you are a writer? Do you like know the alphabet? -- kewl!) and generally bake our barleycakes with the dung that cometh out of man, in their sight. So far, no responses. So we are doing as much as we can, on a freelance basis, with the Austin American Statesman. And crossing our fingers that something will take us out of this hell. Hell, you think, is a metaphor, but no, no, we are talking pretty realistically. What else do you call a world in which the man who designed the awful popup page which displays that awful, unnecessary and surely never bought X-2 digital camera or whatever it is (go to Yahoo for anything and you'll see what we mean) is living in the lap of luxury, raising his idiot children as he sees fit, while we are living the life of one of those dying 19th century bohemians. That has to be hell -- it is the overthrow of all rationality, all value, of Western Civilization itself ( lately given such high marks by the commentariat) in favor of mere piggery. Piggery forever.

On that note, take a look at Cynthia Cott's cutely named: are we dead yet:

Nice graf:

"In the media sector, an estimated 100,000 media jobs were eliminated in the past year or more, according to IWantMedia.com�and many editorial types fear a new wave of layoffs any day now."

Dope

Two posts tonight! Limited Inc.'s limited readership should appreciate this, although maybe they will groan over the verbiage. Sorry.

Ahem, vee vill begin our lecture mit ein simple fifisection of a wabbit...
Oops, sorry about that, ladies and germs -- wrong set of notes!
In the November 5th New Yorker there is a column by the astute but limited James Surowiecki, who makes the standard case against breaking the Bayer patent on Cipro. The case goes like this: to come up with an antibiotic takes years of R & D, and R & D costs beaucoup millions; so if in the end, the anti-biotic isn't a moneymaker, then R & D into other anti-biotics will be inhibited. Thus it is socially advantageous not to bust Bayer's balls, so to speak.

Unfortunately, as Surowiecki sleepwalks through his econ 101 lecture, he adds a number of facts that contradict his larger point, and support the idea that monopoly actually has an inhibiting effect on medically important R & D. He averts to the slowdown in antibiotic research after 1967, a generally agreed upon high point in the war against infectious diseases. That slowdown, he contends, was market driven:
"Besides, given the choice between making an anti-biotic that a person might take for two weeks once in a lifetime or developing an anti-depressant that a person would take every day for the rest of his life, drug companies naturally opted for the latter." If S. could be shaken out of his dogmatic slumbers for a bit and made to read back his own sentence, he might notice that monopoly, here, does the opposite of what he claims it does. It levels the field so that it makes it more profitable to de-emphasize exploring anti-biotic pharmaceuticals as compared to the more lucrative anti-depressives. In other words, bad research drives out good. And the penalty for that is minimal, given that anti-biotics are being held in a sixteen year bondage according to federal law, and the patent time frame is easily extendable. S. even is hip to the result of this: "that's why in the past twenty-five years they {big Pharma] have developed just one new class of anti-biotic." Well, let's look at correlations. We have an increasingly sophisticated sphere of intellectual property laws, and we have an increasingly debauched drug research system, more interested in those nifty sex-drive-n'-hair enhancers than in coming up with cures for multiple drug resistant tb. Now if the state were sensitive to this, it would not hand out monopoly power like candy. If there was a smaller time frame, the sex-drive-n-hair enhancers would have to be marketed more efficiently, as generic drug companies can come up with amazing copies quickly. In this atmosphere, the profitability of anti-biotic drugs as compared to others would go up, since there is less likely to be a major profit in copying them, and there is more reason to emphasize them for their developers. They would be mid-list drugs, steady sellers. Moreover, breaking up the monopoly power of big Pharma would recognize the R & D real world - which is networked through a university system largely subsidized by the good old Gov. Perhaps smaller companies can't compete with giant companies that dragoon, or tempt, researchers into more frivolous but lucrative research. But if there were more starters, there might just be more incentive to do that major research. In other words, more competition, lower entry costs, is what we should be aiming at.

Of course, Surowiecki's idea that tech comes when you lay out money as automatically as an old pooch trots to the dogfood bowl when you put out the Gainesburgers is pretty naive. It shows zero feeling for the history of the golden age of medicine, which was driven, pre-1967, much more by an ethos of public healthcare than by the numbers pharmaceutical giants are used to now. And another hint: the fons et origo of that era is clearly the biggest of all state endeavors of the 20th century -- as with most of our technology, the modern medical era can be tracked back to WWII. War is the mother of invention.

Notice
Hey, my hypocritical readers, what is up with you all? What is up, what is up/ in the house? I install this great little commenting widget, and I'm expecting, oh, I don't know, some damn disagreement. I mean, I'm trying to take controversial stands here! I'm trying to be a contrarian! What am I doing wrong? I mean, here I am alone in my apartment, nobody to argue with, and I think I'll just continue the enrag� tradition of the situationalists, breed the polemic fury of Trotsky with the goofiness of Wodehouse, I think this is gonna stir em up in the streets when I cut and paste my postings, and Alan tells me I made a grammatical error on one of the posts, and that is the breadth and the depth! Surely I can't be representing the bien pensant opinion -- surely I'm not mister average Joe! Oh say it ain't so! Okay, enough with the exclamation marks (I just think they are funny). How bout those economic heresies I casually spout, though? Or my AC/DC feelings about the war? Or the way I make fun of Bushypoo, like calling him Bushypoo - which goes back to his pop, who I also called Bushypoo. I look over who is coming to this site, and I am amazed how many people apparently think I'm posting naked Lolita picks, or that there is something ineffably sexy about misspelling girls "girles" (not really a misspelling, simply a quote from an Elizabethan translation of Plutarch. Those horn dogs must be maddened to land on such sterile shores. Not that I am going to get too moral about it -- when I search for porno, I put things like 'teenage girles' up myself.) Well, I feel like some marooned Rumpelstilskin here, jumping up and down without an audience. Sadness, man, sadness.

Remora

The New Statesman, "rather provocatively" focuses, this week, on American Imperialism. Ah, that phrase! We at Limited Inc used to let it roll off our tongue with a certain jouissance (and we use to let jouissance roll off our tongue with a certain frisson, don't you know? and so we pleasantly descended, on angel wings, the sub-Barthesian ladder, full of grad school certainty and hot air). And it is still a useful phrase, but we can't but take issue with the New Statesman's take on the Cold War:

"In this issue (pages 18-19), we publish a map, showing US interventions overseas since 1945 and entitled, rather provocatively, "The original rogue state". It is not an exhaustive catalogue. It does not show some of the more recent examples such as Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq; it subsumes Cambodia and Laos into Vietnam; it has no room for El Salvador or Cyprus. A similar map, published to show Soviet interventions up to 1989, would have highlighted many of the same areas (Angola and Afghanistan, for example) but, where Latin America features heavily on our map, the Soviet version would focus more on eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

"Almost any New Statesman reader would prefer to live in a world where America, rather than the Soviet Union, won the cold war. We may think that, if the latter had won, Moscow, Leningrad (as it is no longer called) and Minsk would have been the victims of terrorist attacks, not New York and Washington. The truth is that a Soviet-dominated world would have been so tightly controlled as to make terrorism extremely difficult and, as the control would have extended to the media, much less rewarding in its psychological and propaganda effects."

The "truth" about the Soviet dominated world has been out for some time; far from being Orwell's vision of an anthive, it was a world of factory workers drinking the cleaning fluid and criminal clans making the economy work, when it worked. There is an odd prejudice afloat in the world, shared by left and right alike, that totalitarian regimes are somehow better at violence, better at "domination." And so it is thought that democracies, going to war, have to towel off the democratic mascara and really get top down and Patton-ish, censor the press, throw the thousand or so "foreigners" in jail (as is being done right now -- see earlier post), etc. Well, though dictatorships are more violent, it is a different thing to say they are better at violence. Sure, Eichman made the trains run on time, but the US won the war and held an election in the midst of it, as well as completing it with another president than the one who started it. In other words, success in politics has to be looked at in terms of social reproduction, and democracy has been pretty ace at that, even if, as in the election our present POTUS stole, it is imperfect. That Churchill could be defeated in the election right after the war is a possibility folded into the expectations of those who fought the war. The vicious, immoral Vietnam war affected the overthrow of those who designed it, in this country; the stupid Afghanistan war pretty much broke the whole design of the Soviet empire. The Cold War was a peculiar war in many ways, but none more than this -- it put the systems themselves in competition. It was the way the militaries were built up, rather than a military clash, which decided the "war." There is a random element in real war, military genius, which makes it problematic to identify victory with some sort of systematic superiority of the winning party. Napoleon could have prevailed at Waterloo, but it is much harder to envision Brezhnev prevailing with his gasping system over one that was opening up such a clear and increasing lead in all the technologies that counted.

Remora

Right after 9/11, Eric Boehlert published a nice compendious look at the WTC buildings.

His sources were agreed that the buildings were an exercise in elephantiasis, the bigger is better aesthetic of despots, pharaohs, and Rockefellers. Nelson and David were the men behind the WTC. The financing, the shady way the Port Authority suddenly had extra port authority to build the things, the running off of small merchants, the choice of an architect/drone, Yamasaki, were all about what NYC was in the seventies -- a sort of Trojan graveyard in which the buzzardly rich picked the bones, while the angry poor cried among them, scrapped up livings from the broken streets, and were instilled with the ethic of hopelessness. Yamasaki was type-cast: he'd processed modernism into a plutocratic pleasing tic, discarding its utopian beginnings, and distilling its totalitarianism into pure Brasilia; his own eccentricities simply made things worse:

"And then there were the unusually narrow office windows that robbed tower inhabitants of what should have been an indisputable perk: the view. Yamasaki was afraid of heights and decided in order to make everyone feel secure while they worked in the offices, the windows, set between columns, would be just 18 inches across, narrower than Yamasaki's own shoulder span."

Well, in this week's New York Obs, Nicholas von Hoffman goes on a rampage about the Towers. von Hoffman is one of those muckraking journalists who rode in on the sixties, re-discovering capitalism's black secret: profit has little to do with the economist's juiceless picture of it as a sort of epiphenomena of efficiency. No, profit is made, and the making of it, like charcuterie, requires a certain high imperviousness to the squeals of dying animals. Although way back in 1830, Balzac already understood this, the generation of sixties journalists seemed especially transfixed by the insight, which was not covered on any of the tv quiz shows they saw as kids. Hoffman went from writing for the Washington Post, I believe, to writing the biography of the ultimate American confidence man, Roy Cohn. Unlike Murray Kempton, who Hoffman has obviously thought about a lot, Hoffman doesn't really have that last bit of sympathy for the sinner. This is why he has lately sounded like H.L. Mencken -- not from the good period, but from the forties. Hoffman has spent the nineties in a state of perpetual irritation. Limited Inc had its own trouble with the nineties, the era of the mendacious Clinton, the end of welfare as we know it, and the heavy skewing of the wealth index to the top of the pile, (not to mention that sound (what's that sound?) in the background (everybody look what's going down) -- which turned out to be the bombing of Iraq) but Hoffman was irritable to a degree that even got on our nerves. We like the way he stubbornly remains unaffected by an afterglow of sentiment for the ruined towers, but we really mean unaffected. Here's the second graf:

"Never the same again goes the cry of regret. But why? And why should we want it to be the same? I am not, of course, speaking of the lives lost, yet the crime of Sept. 11 does not obviate the truth of the World Trade Center towers: They were a couple of ugly and ill-proportioned buildings of egotistical dimension and heartlessness. They had nothing noteworthy about them but gross altitude. It was by height alone that they drew attention away from the graceful Empire State Building, that old, fine-lined, Art Deco candlestick in the sky. The Empire State is a building worthy to be a symbol of a city, but the W.T.C. towers were two blunt, aluminum-clad hippo teeth stuck up in the air, symbolic of little more than the crassness and philargyry for which New York is known. They were Governor Nelson Rockefeller�s "Fuck you, everybody, I�m more powerful than you are�my balls are bigger and my dick swings a larger arc than yours."

More in that vein pours out of his pen. I don't know about the dick swinging a larger arc, although it is a very rat pack image -- the early seventies, you will remember, were immortalized by such White House sayings as Spiro Agnew's threatening to put Katie Graham's "tits in a wringer.' This is what you get when you unleash gin and Hugh Hefner on the 50s college male population, then follow up with a decade of luscious stories of flower girls giving it up for free, I guess.

Remora

Limited Inc plans, God willing, to take a trip on a plane again some day (correcting an earlier version of this post that pinged on Alan's grammatical radar -- see comments). Nobody, to put it mildly, has been calling for our services lately. Is media dead, or like Elvis is it out there in hiding, its death a huge fake-out? Well, that's a story to cry about at some later point. More relevant point is that we would like, really, not to have to confront villains on our flight. It is part of the wish list that includes not running out of gas, getting the dinner from the first phase of when the hosts are handing them out (I hate it when I have the seat that is just above the dividing line, so I get the dinner and drinks last), and not setting next to a whacko. Yes, I prefer flying undisturbed by gun or knife or even tweaser toting loonies stalking down the aisle, none of that. But securing airline customers from such unpleasantness seems to be a very low priority in D.C. right now. A high priority is making sure that companies like Argenbright Security keep raking in the dough. Here's the WP story
Shaping a Compromise on Airport Security by Ellen Nakashima and Greg Schneider

The grafs about Argenbright, apparently the nation's largest provider of airport security, strike a comic note:

"Last month federal investigators found that Argenbright was employing security workers who did not speak English at Dulles International Airport. When investigators gave a skills test to 20 Argenbright workers at Dulles, seven failed. The company was already on probation for serious security violations last year at the Philadelphia airport, for which it paid $2.3 million in fines and restitution and several managers went to jail.

"Argenbright Security was founded in Atlanta in 1979 by Frank Argenbright, who sold the company in December to Securicor PLC of Britain for about $175 million. Workers from Argenbright were on duty at Dulles and at Newark International Airport when terrorists hijacked flights from those locations on Sept. 11."

The house repubs and our C-i-C Bushypoo seem to believe that the old system should be fluffed up like you fluff up the pillows for the guests, after which the attention will be off it, money will flow, and we can all go to sleep again. I sometimes forget that capitalism's unremitting focus on profit produces, in times of stress, a blindness to prudence ever surprising to the outside observer, or victim. Let's see if short term memory loss is the norm in Congress, or a mere aberration.

Remora

It is a barbarous place. Men are tortured by being confined for years to silent underground chambers. Some are cast into prison for violating taboos against using unclean plants, and left to rot the best portion of their lives away. Others, for petty thefts, can receive what amounts to a life sentence.

No, we aren't speaking of some Moslem republic in Central Asia -- we are of course describing the legal system of California, in many respects more regressive than the penal system of England, circa 1815. In such darkness, untouched by the recently much vaunted fruits of Western Civilization (Limited Inc is exaggerating -- there are some very sweet sex videos coming out of the Valley), a small but astonishing victory for reason was reported by the AP's David Kravets in this story:

Federal court throws out 50-year 'three-strike' sentence for shoplifter in California

lede graf:

"A federal appeals court threw out a shoplifter's 50-year sentence under California's "three strikes" law as overly harsh � a ruling that could lead to hundreds of challenges from defendants who received near-life terms for petty crimes."

further down, the casus and crux, a scandal to the Greeks and a stumbling blocks to our homegrown redneck element, who are no doubt even now petitioning for an end to the reign of the pernicious judiciary:

"[Leonardo] Andrade got 50 years in prison for stealing nine videotapes, valued at $153, from a Kmart. The court noted that kidnappers and murderers could receive less time than Andrade, who had a record of several nonviolent, petty crimes."

Of course, given the barbarity of a considerable portion of the electorate, which has sublimated its grandfathers' thirst for lynching into a penal code of a dense, complex ignorance, and a penal archipelago that has safely euphemized its systematic cruelties under such euphemisms as 'solitary' , no doubt this will be an issue on the hustings. How can our children be safe when bloodthirsty video thieves are allowed to prowl the aisles at KMart with impunity? We can just see the torches burning in the suburbs of Los Angeles, all the Day of the Locusts faces, the masks under the masks of reaction, like some Georg Grosz nightmare.