chaizzilla

"Few pianists have been such a lucrative target for the pirate's craft as Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997). His reluctance to make studio recordings after 1970 has resulted in an estimated 200 CD titles, mostly of live broadcast material of varying provenance and sound quality marketed without Richter's agreement. There are innumerable references to Richter on the Internet, however the two most thorough are Paul Geffen's Richter Discography and Ates Tanin's Recorded Richter."

"a celebrity culture as beguiling to Americans as it is abroad, a culture that proliferates not through some grand Machiavellian scheme but through sheer demand—is, from his own perspective, even more insidious. But acts of violence can't defeat it."

"Under the new Ownership Society, apparently, Republicans are so dead-set on letting people control their own money that they're going to go out on to the international capital markets and borrow a few trillion dollars so they can give it out to people so they can put it into the stock market. Of course, if individuals are more inclined toward conservative investment strategies they can purchase bonds and thus lend back to the Treasury the money the Treasury just borrowed so they could put it in stocks."