I have a doll of James Madison, in a "Leaders of the World" series,
featuring Madison, Franklin, Washington . . . . , and Herbert Hoover.
Really! But I only have the Madison doll. I also have a Malcom X action
figure.
Do people know Charles Higham's fine book Trading with the Enemy? Higham is,
unfortunately, not a professional historian. He is actually a purveyor of
movie star bios, who, however, stumbled across some really scary stuff
concerning how US firms like ITT, GM, Ford, Standard Oil, etc., were allowed
to trade with the Nazis _thoughg the war_, supply their forces, build their
tanks and trucks, and make money doing so, all with the blessing of the US
government under the auspices of the tarding with the Enemy Act. After the
war, GM and other firms recovered substantial compensation from the
government for daamges due to Allied bombing of their factories. The book
lacks the kind of apparatus necessary to make it respectable in a scholarly
sense, but insofar as I was able to indepepently test and verify its claims,
I found it to be about 85% accurate, which is pretty good, and the errors
that I discovered were pretty minor.
--jks
>
>there's an op-ed piece in today's {Sunday Feb. 18, 2001's) L.A. TIMES by
>Edwin Black indicating that Thomas J. Watson of IBM supplied punch-card
>technology (crude computing capacity) to the Nazis to help them do the
>information-processing tasks needed to organize the massive slaughter of
>Jews (and I presume, other pariah groups) after 1939. He's the author of a
>new book, "IBM and the Holocaust" (Crown).
>
>On a lighter note, I saw an "action figure" (doll) at Toys 'R' Us for Janis
>Joplin. Today, I saw an ad for a collectible doll of Twiggy, the 1960s-era
>anorexic fashion model. Also, I hear today on the radio (Harry Shearer's
>"Le Show") that "action figures" are being issued representing characters
>from the Quentin Tarantino's bloody action movie, "Reservoir Dogs." As
>Harry notes, we should expect dolls to made soon of Jeffrey Dahmer.
>
>(Is "anorexic fashion model" redundant?)
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
>
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