Headline from the Torygraph: “BBC’s Jonathan Ross is sleazy, smug and crass.”
I don’t know. Actually, I do: administration and marketing with some broken English in case a multi-national corporation should become aware of your existence and deign to give you a job. How different things were in 1918, when I was a boy, taking my school leaving exam with Aleksander Wat. I won’t divulge my own […]
Headline from the Torygraph: “BBC’s Jonathan Ross is sleazy, smug and crass.”
The cinematic highlight of the year for me occurred last Saturday evening, when I finally got around to watching The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s superb portrayal of a Stasi agent who, for reasons that are never really made wholly clear, risks everything to save some people from a […]
The people of Poland woke up this morning slightly dazed, slightly confused, by the million-strong army of industrious party activists who were busily engaged in removing and ecologically disposing of the election campaign posters that had appeared over the last six weeks of intense but cheerful campaigning. Battered but proud, ex-prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński spoke […]
According to the latest Polityka Rafał Antczak has a new job. Antczak was one of the three authors of an article in Gazeta Wzborcza about how we can’t afford to be so rich. I was later able to reveal (i.e. I read the paper) that the think tank Antczak worked for (CASE) received funding from […]
Yesterday’s entry on Beata Sawicka’s corruption charges was a little hurried. Here, for those with strong stomachs, is the sleazy story in more detail. In January 2007 the CBA (Anti-Corruption Office) agent meets Sawicka on a training course. He poses as the representative of a western property developer. On October 1st Sawicka is arrested for […]
Where to begin? Beata Sawicka, an opposition party deputy was caught red-handed by the CBA (Anti-Corruption Office) a week or two ago accepting a bribe in connection with the sale of land. A CBA man had gone undercover as a developer and elicited the bribe from Sawicka in an operation that lasted months and months […]
Amid the coverage of Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize win for The Gathering (which I might get around to reading), it has been mentioned that this is the second time the prize has been awarded to an Irish woman, the first being Iris Murdoch in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea.An illuminating article by Murdoch […]
During my extensive discussion of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, I mentioned how the author envisioned a new super-elite emerging from the wreckage of consensus capitalism. In such a scenario, “trickle-down” economics, first touted during the Reagan administration, amounts to creating a new servant class, scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from the top table. […]
Here’s Sławomir Sierakowski in the latest Polityka: In a country where according to official statistics more than half of Poles live below the social minimum but discussion of economics usually begins with the flat tax and always ends with lowering taxes populists are bound to win.