This week’s Polityka has an ad for a cultural event called a “Gala of Film Music” to take place in the National Philharmonic in Warsaw on June 25th. There is a photograph of a concert hall and orchestra and another photograph of a cup of coffee. A caption tells us that “the gala is a […]
So divided is the new government that each ministry becomes the fief of the party that holds it. The ministries are, in practice, patronage machines employing only party loyalists. They are milked for money, jobs and contracts. Ministers cannot be dismissed for incompetence or corruption, however gross, because it would lead to the deal between […]
Media Lens has a good article about Chavez coverage in Britain. Meanwhile in Poland Rzeczpospolita makes a much better attempt than Gazeta Wyborcza to disguise its disdain for Chavez in today’s paper.
A tale is told which is meant to illustrate the difference between the US mindset and the Russian and explain why the US won the cold war. When an American peasant sees his neighbour build a large and pleasant house he thinks “some day I’ll build myself a better house.” The Russian peasant, the conventional […]
While browsing through a 1902 copy of Przegląd Techniczny in my library the other day I came across an advertisement for the “My Lord Coupe,” a five-seater electrical car. Although it had a range of 80 kilometres there was one big drawback: charging the batteries took “a good four hours.”
Boris Johnson, writing in the Spectator, suggests that it would be a shame were Silvio Berlusconi to lose the next election. Focussing primarily on Berlusconi’s legendary gaffes, suggesting “they help to make him fallible and human, and to explain his popularity”, Johnson admits that five years of the Forza Italia government have “been a disappointment, […]
Luca Coscioni, at one point in his life, was known as an Economics professor and enthusiastic marathon runner. During the 1990s though, his life changed radically as he was diagnosed with Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (also known variously as Lou Gehrig’s disease or Motor Neurone Disease). The disease left him paralysed and unable to speak without […]
From Friday’s Rzeczpospolita, a national daily paper in Poland: A front page article by Marcin Czeka?ski about the detrimental effects of the government’s disarray. It seems that many key posts have not been filled yet. There is no treasury minister, for example. And then this gem: “Privatisation is limping. PiS [the near-winners of the elections] […]
A tightly-edited, coherent entry today: An initially unpromising article about ambulance services in the current (print edition) Polityka reveals (apart, of course, from the under-funded mess that Poland has inevitably made of its emergency services) that hospitals in Poland were located not in places determined by the needs of the surrounding civilian population but according […]
One of the great worries facing the new political establishment in Poland is the low birth rate. Hence the decision to pay people to have children. I was reminded of this when reading Tom Tomorrow’s criticism of Niall Ferguson: “You see this theme popping up a lot on right these days – the fear of […]
