BERIGAN

Just did some quick digging on the web to see if I could find any more info on the set, and came across a big band board that Fran mentioned this in December, but called it a Boswell Sisters/Connee Boswell set! Now, I have a fair bit of her solo work, but doubt I have all the pre-Decca stuff, so that might just make the set more interesting to vocal fans.

But don't you think Mosaic must have something up their sleeve??? Besides a nice booklet, and sound restoration? They will have access to more alternates,(there are only a few alternates out there on the Retrieval and the old Jass cds, right?) breakdowns, perhaps some studio chatter like what's on the Venuti/Lang set??? Whatever, I will be glad to see more folks introduced to the 3 sisters!

Well, unless/until there is Mosiac, we can't have ALL the stuff anyway, so I am all for it!

Happy Birthday!!!!

what are you ?

Hurricane Ivan, Alabama Rain Water Oh, and be sure to check out their car listings!

Dude, you didn't get the Garbo calendar???? Only a buck!

Well, if you say so.... Man, can't believe someone didn't post this before me!

Well, apparently for Americans who don't follow the news CAREFULLY, it's new news... Don't feel so bad......

Somewhere, Steinbrenner is yelling really loudly at a bunch of baseball people. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=1963185

Man, what a weird thread!!! You could say most anything about the Doors, EXCEPT boring. You might not like them...but boring??? Morrison had about the best voice of any Rock musican, IMHO. You won't confuse them with anyone else either. And Morrison's lyrics are so different than His persona onstage. But, I doubt I am going to change any minds at this point! For real fans, if you didn't get it already, keep an out for the complete studio recordings box set. Sound is soooooo much better than the earlier cds, it isn't even funny. (Seems to be out of print!) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00...8602282-4872952

Not only with other people, but with his art as well, as he walked away from it too, and cut himself off from further artistic development. A philosophical question: can so mean-spirited a person have produced truly great art? or are we responding to his technical ability more than any profundity in his art/music? The short answer is yes. Frank Rosolino was a very mean spirited man(At least his last act on earth was) but man, could he play beautifully. Miles Davis admitted beating up women , didn't he??? We know how he played the trumpet. Artie Shaw was more than a technican.....how people can be so beautiful in one respect, and ugly in another, is beyond my understanding.

From the stories I've heard (particularly his 'brave act' of hiring Billie Holiday then refusing to stand by her when they toured the South and she couldn't get into the hotels and such), I'd have to agree. I'll listen to his music, but I wouldn't have invited him over for tea or anything... Ever hear of June Richmond? Jimmy Dorsey had her on his records 4 months(at Least) before Artie recorded one whole song with the much more famous Holiday. Does anyone know of an earlier date than March of 1938 of a black singer recording regularly with a white band???

your office looks very homey....

Guess he wasn't having much luck trying to write Shakespeare......

Well, not exactly hot stove league, but still interesting....I don't think I would vote against any of them....I hated Jack Morris, cuz he ALWAYS won the big games... By Jayson Stark ESPN.com We know there were voters out there who didn't think Wade Boggs was as surefire a Hall of Famer as those 3,010 hits made him look. Boggs turned hitting singles into a science. We know there were voters who thought he wasn't a complete player, wasn't a team player, wasn't even a dominant player. Well, luckily for them, this is America. They have a right to their opinion. It just happens to be ridiculous. And the proof will arrive Tuesday, when Boggs will go sailing into Cooperstown on the first ballot. Of the 12 first-time candidates on this year's ballot, Boggs was the only one who got this voter's vote. But he was not the only guy with Red Sox ties that I voted for. Want to know the identity of the eight players we voted for? Read on: 1. BOGGS OK, so what are the reasons not to vote for this guy again? You sure need to work hard to find them. How do you not vote for a man who hit .352 for a whole freaking decade in the 1980s -- the highest average by any hitter in any decade since the '20s? How do you not vote for one of the four players in history to bat .300 in every one of his first 10 seasons? (The others: Ted Williams, Al Simmons, Paul Waner.) How do you not vote for the only man since Wee Willie Keeler to rip off seven straight 200-hit seasons? How do you not vote for a man who won five batting titles, made 12 straight All-Star teams, started six of those All-Star Games in a row (more than any third baseman in history), batted .350 or better in four straight seasons, scored 100 runs in seven straight seasons and thumped 30 doubles in nine straight seasons? We don't care how many hits he sprayed to the opposite field. Or how many doubles he clanked off the Green Monster. Or how many of those hits came in Fenway, period. Wade Boggs was one of the great hit machines of all time. But that's not all. He was also one of the great on-base machines of all time. Boggs had the same career on-base percentage (.415) as Stan Musial. He led his league in OBP five years in a row -- a streak topped only by Rogers Hornsby. He even led the AL in intentional walks six straight seasons -- which tells us all we need to know about how much teams enjoyed pitching to him. But the feat that defined the precision of both Boggs' swing and his batting eye was this: He had four straight seasons with 200 hits and 100 walks (the longest streak in history). Which means he did that as many times in a row as all the other players in baseball have done it in the last half-century combined. So some people may have other ideas. But Wade Boggs was such a slam-dunk candidate to this voter, it took about 1.8 seconds to decide to check his box. Rice 2. JIM RICE I've always thought there was no dumber Hall of Fame voting rule than the one that allows players to linger on this ballot for 15 years. Wouldn't you think we could make up our minds on just about anybody in five years? Or 10, tops? Sheez, we're talking about players who never play a single game during any of those years. Well, I still hate that rule. But then how do I rationalize that it took me 11 agonizing Hall of Fame elections before I finally cast a vote for Jim Rice? It makes no sense whatsoever, of course -- except for this: Of all the candidates I've ever had to consider, none of them cost me more sleep, or caused me to ingest more Rolaids, than Rice. He's that hard a call. There was no question he was the dominant offensive force in his league for a dozen seasons in the late 1970s and early '80s. Unfortunately, his career then tumbled over a cliff -- at age 34. So he never reached 400 homers, or 1,500 RBI, or 2,500 hits. And for a man who had to be evaluated almost solely for his offense, those were career numbers that just didn't quite cut it -- not for this voter, anyway. But I've always said I was an open-minded kind of guy. So last year, I invited you thoughtful folks in Reader Land to try to change my mind. More than a thousand e-mails later, I'm happy to announce you did. ... SO PLEASE STOP SENDING THEM. I read hundreds of those e-mails. I talked to baseball people who saw Rice play, or played against him. I finally became convinced he wasn't as one-dimensional as I'd once thought. Which allowed me to give more weight to his incredible period of dominance. From 1975 through 1985, Rice was No. 1 in his league in homers, RBI, runs scored, slugging and extra-base hits. And aside from homers, only the great George Brett was even close to him in any of those categories. So you can call off the e-mail assault. It's amazing my inbox didn't explode. Sandberg 3. RYNE SANDBERG Since Sandberg's vote percentage jumped from 49 to 61 last year, it's apparent he'll get elected one of these years. But it's absurd that it's taken this long. Until last September, when Jeff Kent passed him, Sandberg led all second basemen in history in home runs (277). He owns the highest fielding percentage (.989) of any second baseman since 1900. He's the only second baseman ever to start nine All-Star Games. And from 1982-92, he led all second basemen in average, homers, RBI, runs, extra-base hits, OPS, fielding percentage and 500-assist seasons. So about all he didn't do was bake the pizzas at Geno's. 4. BRUCE SUTTER Sutter Sutter's vote totals have jumped every year, peaking at 59.5 percent last year. So there's hope for him, too. But we'll ask again: Should it be this hard? This guy not only dominated his position. He changed his position. He revolutionized how closers were used, won a Cy Young, pioneered a revolutionary pitch (the unhittable splitter), averaged 25 saves for 12 years when 25 was actually a lot of saves and -- as our friend, Alan Schwarz, pointed out in Sunday's New York Times -- averaged 42 percent more outs per save than Dennis Eckersley. Sutter was also such a force that he is still the only relief pitcher who ever finished in the top 10 in MVP voting six times (in eight years). So one of these years, the world has to catch on to what this man meant in his era. Right? 5. GOOSE GOSSAGE Gossage Speaking of overlooked closers, how the heck can Gossage still be sputtering along, barely collecting 40 percent of the vote? That's a bigger outrage than My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss. Let's run through his glittering credentials again: Nine All-Star teams in 11 years. A 10-year blitz of microscopic ERAs and terrifying strikeout totals. More than 130 innings in relief three times. A span of nearly 20 years in which the average of right-handed hitters against him never cracked the Mendoza Line. And an aura that came wafting out of his fu manchu every time he grabbed the ball -- an aura that announced: "Game over." For this guy never to have come within 150 votes of election is a crime. 6. ANDRE DAWSON Dawson He spent his best years in Montreal, where the AstroConcrete turned his knee cartilage into linguini and all videotapes of his greatness apparently were confiscated at the border by customs agents. So Dawson continues to be overlooked by half the voting populace. And that ain't right. Until his knees began to crumble, the Hawk was a singular combination of power, speed, defense, leadership and unparalleled respect among his peers. He won one MVP election and finished second in two others. He was a rookie of the year. He won eight Gold Gloves. And despite all those ice packs he kept attaching to his knees, only two other players have ever matched his totals in hits (2,774), home runs (438) and stolen bases (314) -- Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. If we spent most of the '80s debating whether Dawson was the best player in the National League, why are we still debating so hard whether he belongs in Cooperstown? 7. JACK MORRIS Morris Suppose we told you there was a pitcher on this ballot who won 36 more games than anyone else in the sport while he was in it? And suppose we told you this pitcher started three All-Star Games -- a feat surpassed, since the 1970s, by only Randy Johnson? Then suppose we told you this guy pitched a no-hitter, was an Opening Day starter 14 times (more than any American Leaguer since Walter Johnson), averaged 14 complete games a season for eight years and made 515 consecutive starts without missing a turn (a record at the time)? Finally, suppose we told you he was one of the most fabled postseason pitchers of his day, that he started Game 1 of the World Series for three different Series champs and that he pitched all 10 innings of possibly the greatest Game 7 shutout ever? Would you say that guy was a Hall of Famer -- if you didn't know his name was Jack Morris? True, Morris' 3.90 ERA would be the highest of any pitcher in the Hall. But by nearly every other standard, he was the ultimate ace of his era. 8. DALE MURPHY Murphy Murphy's vote totals are starting to make Dennis Kucinich look like George W. Bush. So we know now he has no prayer of having his mug on a Hall of Fame plaque. Still, we have no trouble justifying a vote for a man who was a back-to-back MVP, a five-time Gold Glove winner, a 30-30 guy, a leading vote-getter in the All-Star balloting and the answer to the trivia question: Who led the National League in runs, hits and RBI in the '80s? Has there ever been a better player who couldn't even get 10 percent of the vote? We can't think of one. Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/stor...yson&id=1958227

Egads! What a brilliant idea! Somebody is earning a big fat paycheck coming up with this name change. The Los Angeles region, which is comprised of Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties, is the second largest media market in the country. This name change will strengthen the Angels' long-term economic health by enhancing the marketability through this metropolitan area and beyond. Sure, sure it will.....

My Condolences to ElizaBETH, and the rest of his family! I never bought anything from him, but I do have a fond memory of something Grey said on a thread I started back on the Bluenote Board. It was are you rich??? Everyone beat around the bush....folks with 10's of thousands of cds could only muster an "I'm comfortable" comment. Grey said something on the line of he was too busy being chauffer driven in his fancy SUV, drinking champane and watching a film to comment right now.

When I was selling a lot on ebay, it took my Mom, or me 2-3 hours a week to get caught up with leaving feedback. When My Mom couldn't work at the Computer anymore, it became too much for me to do alone, so I went to automated feedback...as soon as someone left it for me, It was left for them....not the way I would like it to be, but the way it is now. And there are many, many sellers on ebay that sell a hell of a lot more than I ever did at my peak.

Yeah, that is pretty damn good!!!!

As others have said, 94 is quite a long life, but it's still sad! My Dad saw him play in of all places, East St. Louis(Is there any other?) in the early 50's in a small club. Wish I could have seen him play. Missed him leading his band in LA by a few days once. I love his Gramercy Five records, especially the early harpsichord ones. If you haven't heard them before, check out the samples. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&t...10:lzazqj3yojsa The Documentary, Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got from 1985 is quite good, it even won an Oscar for best Documentary. Sadly, it isn't in print anymore. Artie wrote a few books, including... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books No longer in print, I see. We had it on the shelves at Borders in the late 90's. Wish I had read it! Lost Chords has a chapter with an interview with him, very interesting. R.I.P.

I am sure you will be deriding Susan Sontag any moment now as a screwed up person, and that you hope that her ignorance was not passed on to her children.

Where are all the dead animals? Sri Lanka asks 29 Dec 2004 07:21:21 GMT Source: Reuters COLOMBO, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned -- the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast, but they can't find any dead animals. Giant waves washed floodwaters up to 3 km (2 miles) inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka's biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards. "The strange thing is we haven't recorded any dead animals," H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of the national Wildlife Department, told Reuters on Wednesday. "No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit," he added. "I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening." At least 40 tourists, including nine Japanese, were drowned. The tsunami was triggered by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, which sent waves up to 5-metres (15-feet) high crashing onto Sri Lanka's southern, eastern and northern seaboard, flooding whole towns and villages, destroying hotels and causing widespread destruction. http://www.alertnet.org/printable.htm?URL=...k/COL136356.htm

Well, I am sure you would admire the fact he was an artist, writer, socialist, vegetarian, anti religion, for gun control.... He was a fascist, not a socialist, and he hated gays and Jews. Sound familiar? No, I'm not comparing Reggie White to him, but Hitlerism finds more allies on the right (the Klan, white supremacy groups, etc.) than on the left... and did so in this country back in the late 1930s. Signed, Red "liberaton theology" Menace Hitler was a fascist, and certainly had some socialist tendences as well. After World War I a number of extremist political groups arose in Germany, including the minuscule German Workers' party, whose spokesman was Gottfried Feder. Its program combined socialist economic ideas with rabid nationalism and opposition to democracy. The party early attracted a few disoriented war veterans, including Hermann Goering , Rudolf Hess , and Hitler. After 1920 Hitler led the party; its name was changed, and he reorganized and reoriented it, stamping it with his own personality. By demagogic appeals to latent hatred and violence, through anti-Semitism , anti-Communist diatribes, and attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, the party gained a considerable following. Its inner councils were swelled by such frustrated intellectuals as P. J. Goebbels , and by the element of riffraff typified by Julius Streicher , while its public adherents were heavily drawn from the depressed lower middle class. Hitler minimized the socialist features of the program. National Socialism made its appeal not to an economic class but rather to the insecure and power-hungry elements of society. http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/N...eoftheParty.asp Also on the web... "True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?" Have a look at the headline quote above and say who wrote it. It is a typical Hitler rant, is it not? Give it to 100 people who know Hitler's speeches and 100 would identify it as something said by Adolf. The fierce German nationalism and territorial ambition is unmistakeable. And if there is any doubt, have a look at another quote from the same author: This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom. That settles it, doesn't it? Who does not know of Hitler's glorification of military sacrifice and his aim to establish a "thousand-year Reich"? But neither quote is in fact from Hitler. Both quotes were written by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's co-author (See here and here). So let that be an introduction to the idea that Hitler not only called himself a socialist but that he WAS in fact a socialist by the standards of his day. Ideas that are now condemned as Rightist were in Hitler's day perfectly normal ideas among Leftists. And if Friedrich Engels was not a Leftist, I do not know who would be. But the most spectacular aspect of Nazism was surely its antisemitism. And that had a grounding in Marx himself. The following passage is from Marx but it could just as well have been from Hitler: "Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time.... We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development -- to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed -- has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry". Note that Marx wanted to "emancipate" (free) mankind from Jewry ("Judentum" in Marx's original German), just as Hitler did and that the title of Marx's essay in German was "Zur Judenfrage" -- which is exactly the same expression ("Jewish question") that Hitler used in his famous phrase "Endloesung der Judenfrage" ("Final solution of the Jewish question"). And when Marx speaks of the end of Jewry by saying that Jewish identity must necessarily "dissolve" itself, the word he uses in German is "aufloesen", which is a close relative of Hitler's word "Endloesung" ("final solution"). So all the most condemned features of Nazism can be traced back to Marx and Engels. The thinking of Hitler, Marx and Engels differed mainly in emphasis rather than in content. All three were second-rate German intellectuals of their times. The Demand for Explanation Now that more than 50 years have passed since the military defeat of Nazi Germany, one might have thought that the name of its leader would be all but forgotten. This is far from the case, however. Even in the popular press, references to Hitler are incessant and the trickle of TV documentaries on the Germany of his era would seem to be unceasing. Hitler even featured on the cover of a 1995 Time magazine. This finds its counterpart in the academic literature too. Scholarly works on Hitler's deeds continue to emerge (e.g. Feuchtwanger, 1995) and in a recent survey of the history of Western civilization, Lipson (1993) named Hitlerism and the nuclear bomb as the two great evils of the 20th century. Stalin's tyranny lasted longer, Pol Pot killed a higher proportion of his country's population and Hitler was not the first Fascist but the name of Hitler nonetheless hangs over the entire 20th century as something inescapably and inexplicably malign. It seems doubtful that even the whole of the 21st century will erase from the minds of thinking people the still largely unfulfilled need to understand how and why Hitler became so influential and wrought so much evil. The fact that so many young Germans (particular from the formerly Communist East) today still salute his name and perpetuate much of his politics is also an amazement and a deep concern to many and what can only be called the resurgence of Nazism among many young Germans at the close of the 20th century would seem to generate a continuing and pressing need to understand the Hitler phenomenon. So what was it that made Hitler so influential? What was it that made him (as pre-war histories such as Roberts, 1938, attest) the most popular man in the Germany of his day? Why does he still have many admirers now in the Germany on which he inflicted such disasters? What was (is?) his appeal? And why, of all things, are the young products of an East German Communist upbringing still so susceptible to his message? Modern Leftism Before we answer that question, however, let us look at what the Left and Right in politics consist of at present. Consider this description by Edward Feser of someone who would have been an ideal Presidential candidate for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party: He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend "lived together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill. He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: "As Christ proclaimed 'love one another'," he said, "so our call -- 'people's community,' 'public need before private greed,' 'communally-minded social consciousness' -- rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!" The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people's ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or wrong in some sense depends on one's ethnic worldview, and especially on what best promotes the well-being of one's ethnic group There is surely no doubt that the man Feser describes sounds very much like a mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in most ways today. Feser does not mention Hitler's antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once again to have become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early years of the 21st century. There is, however, no claim that Hitler was wholly like modern Leftists. In ways other than those listed by Feser, Hitler was in fact very much like some much older Leftists. Ludwig von Mises speaks of those similarities. Writing in 1944 he said: "The Nazis have not only imitated the Bolshevist tactics of seizing power. They have copied much more. They have imported from Russia the one-party system and the privileged role of this party and its members in public life; the paramount position of the secret police; the organization of affiliated parties abroad which are employed in fighting their domestic governments and in sabotage and espionage, assisted by public funds and the protection of the diplomatic and consular service; the administrative execution and imprisonment of political adversaries; concentration camps; the punishment inflicted on the families of exiles; the methods of propaganda. They have borrowed from the Marxians even such absurdities as the mode of address, party comrade (Parteigenosse), derived from the Marxian comrade (Genosse), and the use of a military terminology for all items of civil and economic life. The question is not in which respects both systems are alike but in which they differ..." (For those who are unaware of it, Von Mises was an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a remarkably prescient economist. He got out of Vienna just hours ahead of the Gestapo. He did therefore have both every reason and every opportunity to be a close observer of Nazism) And as this summary of a book (by Richard Overy) comparing Hitler and Stalin says: "But the resemblances are inescapable. Both tyrannies relied on a desperate ideology of do-or-die confrontation. Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The dictatorships were military metaphors, founded to fight political war.' And despite the rhetoric about a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two economic systems converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial private sector, while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction and state-owned industries. In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience of two economic defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism. As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless. Why camps? Prisons would have held all their dangerous opponents Who really needed slave labour, until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty and terror achieve for the regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies.' http://jonjayray.netfirms.com/hitler.html

Only one cd (Well, a set so more than one) the Venuti/Lang Forget who wrote the liner notes, they are fine in general, but back-handed compliments to Annette Hanshaw and Jack Pettis have not endeared him to me. Clothes, a watch...so very practical for the most part...Must be getting old! Got the 5th season of the Simpsons as well! Might just live long enough to see the 16 (At Least) seasons come out!