Word: seemed
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...Jarmusch begins his film The Limits of Control, the tale of a hitman who doesn't seem to hit, with a quote from the first two lines of Arthur Rimbaud's poem "The Drunken Boat." Some may see this as an alert to pretensions ahead, although my own interpretation was that it serves as a sort of helpful mini-review...
...Lone Man greets her musing as he does most evidence of other life forms, with the blank stare of a supermodel. If you thought Jason Bourne was terse, the Lone Man makes him seem like Regis Philbin. Come to think of it, The Limits of Control is like a Bourne film, except one in which everything goes smoothly for Jason, the workdays include a lot of napping and there's no blood, although cinematographer Christopher Doyle does regularly frame our hero against sumptuous red surfaces. At the climax, when confronted with a seemingly impenetrable fortress, instead of scaling walls...
...trade in a $4 billion IOU (i.e., the government loans) for about 5% of Chrysler's stock. The UAW, on the other hand, was trading in a $4.5 billion IOU (related to its VEBA health-care trust for retirees) in return for 55% of Chrysler stock. Does that seem fair? A third group, the secured debt holders, were to trade in a $6.9 billion IOU and get $2 billion in cash - an amount that was later raised to $2.25 billion to mollify disgruntled creditors, though it still failed to win their support...
...pilot program raises some questions, of course. It is unclear, for example, whether these funds will significantly benefit the social lives of underage students. Yet reviving some manner of funding for parties is preferable to no fund at all. And, while it may seem unsatisfactory that alcohol consumption will be more strictly monitored under the new system than during the Party Fund days, we cannot realistically expect the administration to indirectly fund underage student drinking, considering the potential for legal liability...
...ideas; dissent is encouraged, and skepticism is built in. As luck would have it, that's precisely the kind of operation the Founders created with their slow-moving clockwork of checks and balances. But in times like these - periods of crisis and one-party rule - skepticism and dissent can seem unpatriotic, and the flawed ideas of smart people can easily get out of hand...