With a nod to Dean Baker, here’s a go at today’s Gazeta Wyborcza whose front page sub-head tells us that the cost to the taxpayer of ruling party PiS’s pre-election giveaway is 18 billion zloties. In paragraph three, the insignificant detail that this is over 25 years is given. Not quite so terrifyingly expensive after […]
“Zakłócenia w ruchu powodują zmiany w czasów odjazdu” reads the sign pinned immediately below the summer bus timetables in the Polish town where I have been spending the holidays. Now some old sticks in the mud may tell you this means “Traffic disruption will cause changes in departure times” but there are more efficient, informative […]
“I like it when they beat up students,” he confessed with a smile. I didn’t go so far but I agreed that in America, France and West Germany they had it too good and it wouldn’t do them any harm to get a bit of a kick up the hole. Who could this charming humanitarian […]
… for the failure to post any of the deluge of comments over the last few months. This was due to a combination of spam and technical incompetence: in blocking spam to one post I somehow disabled all commenting. Your comments are now up on the relevant pages but I’ll post a few replies of […]
Monica Leech, a PR consultant to a government minister, has unexpectedly lost her libel case against the Irish Independent. The Indo had published a story about what had happened the previous day on RTE radio: a caller introducing himself as “Norman” had stated that Leech was winning public contracts in exchange for performing sexual favours […]
Marcin Świetlicki’s second novel, Trzynaście (Thirteen), is a follow up to his first novel, Dwanaście (Twelve), which was a “magical, cult” novel, the blurb tells me. I read Twelve so I suppose that makes me a “follower with exaggerated zeal” of Świetlicki. Or maybe Świetlicki was yanking his publisher’s chain when he wrote the blurb: […]
Some time ago a genius discovered that Republicans don’t watch Michael Moore films and Democrats don’t watch Hannity and Colmes. Lefty talks to lefty, nutcase to nutcase and no one crosses the party lines. There is no real debate. I myself regularly check out Hannity and Colmes, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter – […]
This weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza is headlined “You Will Earn More.” The euphoria continues, unblemished by debate, assessment, macroeconomic statistics or rationality in the body of the story. “Składka na ubezpieczenie rentowe” will drop from 6.5% of your gross wage to 3.5%. That’s a fall of nearly a half! The exclamation mark was used by the […]
Bishop Stanisław Stefanuk described the use of strikes by teachers and doctors as a terrorist method in his sermon on June 7th (Corpus Christi). He must read Fakt
“Police had to use force yesterday to disperse demonstrators” reads a photograph caption in Friday’s super libertarian Gazeta Wyborcza. How do they know? In the absence of two independent, named sources (or is that old hat in the old media?), should the caption not read: “Police used force to disperse demonstrators”? This was published hard […]
