“Everyone knows the key to building wealth is through saving and investing” begins one of those newsoid articles that internet portals use to pad out their pages. Written by God knows who at the behest of God knows what financial institution, the opening line at least has the merit of ditching that ridiculous myth about […]
I came across an ad in a current affairs magazine today. Here it goes: “Most women put quality first! 100% fewer hot flushes, 94% less excessive sweating, 98% less sleeplessness. [brandname]. Active extract SE 2000. Choose [brandname] medicine whose [sic] effectiveness and safety have been confirmed by scientific research!” Phew, I thought. Those other medicines […]
The EU and the US have come to a new agreement on the “sharing” of passenger information on transatlantic flights (or the west-bound ones anyway). The negotiations were carried on under some duress – err, with a degree of urgency – because the previous agreement on spying on (among other things) the meal preferences of […]
Last week’s Polityka has an article on that most intrusive of the arts: architecture. Like their fellow members of the ??e-elity at the Gazeta Wyborcza, they seem think it a terrible shame that Poles are so backward looking. They just don’t appreciate the efforts made by thrusting, forward-looking engineers — errr, I mean architects of […]
It appears I have been going too easy on Gazeta Wyborcza. Here’s Tony Judt on Adam Michnik, its editor: “Today, America�s liberal armchair warriors are the �useful idiots� of the War on Terror. In fairness, America�s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has […]
A few words on the political situation here. The coalition is broken and PiS is looking around for MPs it can persuade to jump ship and join them. How to persuade them? Well, with the promise of jobs of course – a secretary of stateship for you, for instance. A PiS official was secretly filmed […]
Taking pot shots at holy cows without even troubling to study the deeper philosophical issues involved — especially where a recently deceased and well-loved public figure is involved — is a cheap and nasty way of drumming up some publicity, which has a long and dishonorable history. So here goes: two of the most respectable […]
It is interesting to compare the coverage so far of the US’s torture bill in Gazeta Wyborcza with that of those radical firebrands at the New York Times. GW (page 7, today) says it’s a key law in the fight against terrorism (this presented as fact, not as Bush’s or Cheney’s position), whose purpose is […]
Judging by word of mouth (and not the increasingly obviously phoney bestseller lists bookshops put up by the door to clear out old stock), Leopold Tyrmand’s Z?y (Bad) is the most popular Polish book I know of. Everyone loves this story of a superhero in the grey days of Polish communism. It’s a good few […]
Military coups in Thailand, rioting in Budapest and here in Poland a government falling apart and apparently bribing opposition members to join them. The main opposition party wants to take to the streets… Where will it end? The prospects are grim indeed. This is only a young state – just seventeen years – and some […]
