News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

There's not a single divorced person amongst your friends, relatives workmates or neighbours? That's rather hard ot believe. I'm sure there's more than one on PF.

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

For the simple reason that there are many more mixed-up kids made unhappy by irresponsible divorcing adults than there are racists. How many racists are there in your circle of family and friends? How many kids living in incomplete or dysfucntional homes?

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

So what is your motivation in all this? To make sure you have access to your działka whenever needed or to make the world a better, clearner-living place?

News / Who controls Gazeta Wyborcza?? [216]


O yes there is. it's Rzeczpospolita.

USA, Canada / Who is better informed, the expat or the Polonia crowd? [144]


Which language did you have in mind?

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

These are not ttwo separate issues: fertility and Hollywood. Just ask yourself the quesiton: is Hollywood in its films and celeberities through their example promoting as their main role model getting married for life and setting up a wholesome, tight-knit, loving family? If they did, we'd be living in a compeltely differen world with fewer broken homes (or dyfucntional households as they are now called), less infidelity, fewer divorces and custody battle, illegitimate kids, out-of-wedlock mothers and a plethora of other social ills that plague society today.

How would you describe the prevailing role model being peddled and glamoruised by the entertainment industry and its celebs? Is that your ideal?

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

Harry
No, into more or less toxic. They all poison the system, pot lowers IQ in teens, impairs concentration, memory, abiltiy to learn and has no redeeming qualities except the passing experience of getting high, mellow, blearly-eyed and zonked out.

Are you so strenuously defending pot becuase you are truly concerned about the well-being of youth and society in general or because you like to get high on the crap? Fess up!

Food / Polish Duck Soup [117]

Thank you for your liberal-lefty tolerance. It made my day!

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]


for the cinema-goer maybe so, but to the gullible teens whose lives it detsroyed, who ended up battered by johns, beaten by pimps, drug addicted, HIV positive and dead... it did not have a 'Pretty Woman' wending.

You msut be high on pot right now, because no-one was asking for a film review showing whether it was interesting, cute, entertaining and well made -- the topic was how Hollywood influences yougn people. In fact its 'warmhearted and positive-minded' climate is what seduced the gullible girls formt eh sticks. If it had been boring and poorly made, it would have caused a lot less harm.

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]


Teenagers today look up to celebrities for their everyday fashion tips, movies or albums and even their bodies. But what happens when you take looking up to someone to a whole different level. And sometimes very tragic things can happen. Drug use is another common problem those goes along with the image of celebrities. Paris Hilton smoking pot, Nicole Richie arrested for drugs and Supermodel Kate Moss for her cocaine addiction . This is all a sign to teens that it's cool to do drugs. People who look up to their idles think they can do no wrong so when they hear about their favorite celeb getting high and in drug rehab, they want to do it also. Julia Roberts in the fabulously popular film ‘Pretty Woman’ created an image to emulate and girls from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, etc. began flocking to become rich and admired, sugar-coated sluts. Few of them lived happily ever after the way ‘Pretty Woman’ did.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]


It is not immediately known whether you are so desperately defending marijuana's alleged harmlessness to justify your own addiction or have a vested interest (dealer, kickback, etc.) in keeping the public bamboozled. But you don't have to be a scientist to know that students don't get much out of a lecture or symposium when high on grass. It is a well-known fact that marijuana use impairs concentration and damages the brain's memory and learning capacity. But if you need evidence, here is some very fresh findings from Ozz:

medicaldaily.com/articles/11417/20120809/marijuana-brain-damage-memory-learning-drug-habit-addiction.htm

Another link:

cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/08/27/marijuana-teen-brain.html

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

My uncle did such and such, and I know an eternally faithful homosexual couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary -- is hearsay and not evidence. If you watch a '60s Polish or any other film everybody is smoking. You don't' see that too much on the screen more. Nicotine is harmful and is fortunately no longer glamourised. But pot still is. Alcohol is also glamourised with actors playing supposedly upscale sophisticates going round and sipping their cocktails.

The difference is that nicotine harms only the physical health whilst alcohol and drugs including pot have behaviour-alterating and brain-damaging consequences. Talk to drug experts not pot-promoting apologists.

Food / Polish Duck Soup [117]

Merged: Duck soup anyone?

I understand that Poznań is the place in Poland to go for czernina (aka jusznik), fruity, sweet & sour, chocolaty-brown duck-blood soup. I've never sampled it there, but it is often featured by Pol-Am rerstaurants and at Polonian fests. It is turly delicious with egg noodles, potato dumpings or boiled potaotes. Anyone on PF every taste it? Does any Warsaw restaurant serve it?

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]


That's probably because you are wallowing in urban legends. I chatted with Kotański and he could have told you a thing or two. Check out the people who deal with these probelsm on a daily basis such as Krajowe Biura ds. Przeciwdziałania Narkomanii . The ones peddlign the view that 'soft' drugs are innocent, harmless and fun have a vested interested in suckers swallowing that line. They are the cartel bosses, media people on the take and dealers who inject such lies into the mainstream ,and there are plenty of numbkulls ready to believe it. Are you one too? The MDs serving as apologists for the drug trade are either potheads themselves or are getting kickbacks.

Evidence more reliable than pothead myths and urban legends: justthinktwice.com/factsfiction/fiction_marijuana_is_harmless.html

USA, Canada / Who is better informed, the expat or the Polonia crowd? [144]

teflcat
Google Watts riots out in LA, or Detroit's 12th Street in 1967...

Language / Word in Polish equivalent to romantic love? For wedding gift picture frame [4]

The Polish verison of 'Amor omnia vincit' = 'Miłość wszystko zwycięża'.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

You must be hitting the strong stuff at present if you don't know the difference between a glass of burgundy with dinner and a wasted drunk lying in the gutter. Why not join your compatriots who are keeping the Union Jack (and the puke) flying over Kraków and Wrocław on UK stag nights. God save the Queen!

USA, Canada / Who is better informed, the expat or the Polonia crowd? [144]

Those people, the grandparetns and great-grandparents of most of today's Polish AMericans (90% of whom are US-born), came before World War One, worked hard, sarcificed, raised families, built churches and schools, had modest but well kept-up houses, kept theri kids out of trouble, paid their taxes and did more than theri share fighting in World War Two in the US Army. If their english was less than fluent, they caused no trouble for the US of A. Later minorities would go on rampages, burn and kill and turn decent neighbourhoods into slums in no time. They looked for hand-outs and received affirmative action. That early generations of Polish-born immigrants pulled thermselves up by their own boot-straps and were too proud do accept charity. They did not do anything that their descendants would have to be ashamed of.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

So he is defiling public space. No citizen should be forced to view a wasted, puked up drunk in the gutter. But thern I forgot about the pommie larger louts who invade Kraków and Wrocław and defecate on the pub floor. Sorry -- I reckon you regard that as normal behaviour. To each his own!

USA, Canada / Who is better informed, the expat or the Polonia crowd? [144]

But, from what I hear, many of the expats on PF speak halting, fractrued Polish if at all. The pot calling the kettle black?

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

Same with religious beliefs. You may have to live in a Protestant country (Sweden for instance) for whatever reason, but you remain a Catholic. Or you are a hopeleessly dyed-in-the-wool atheist who gets stationed in Malta but doesn't abandon his godless ways.

News / Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland [111]

America's gun permissivneess is insane. Poland's got much more sensible guns laws with greater screening of potential gunowners.

Re freedom, Polish makes a poignant and salient distinciton between swoboda (liberty) and swawola (anarchic licentiousness).
The druggie and boozer is free to get wasted in the privacy of his home, but the mintue he starts staggering down the street , sleeping in the gutter or puking on someone's car, he is contaminaitng pulbic space, just like the graffiti creep defacing someone else's property..

Besides, rarely does a substance abuser live on a desert island (no dealers there!), so his habit usually poisons the life of his wife and kids, maybe the neighbours as well. So instead of stupidly and deliriously shouting 'Freedom, freedom!', maybe it would be better to see what could be done to promote decency, clean living, mutual consideration and altruism. It seems too many try to push things to the limits of the law or see what they can get away with. Wouldn't it be better to see what can be done to make the world a better place?

USA, Canada / Who is better informed, the expat or the Polonia crowd? [144]

Dont' be so horse-blinkered and intolerant. There are many human situations which defy simple cubbyholing. Someone with a family of five or six to support may have to work his backside off in Chicago or Greenpoint and have little time or enegry left over to take ESL courses. at night. The bastard's gotta sleep you know! By the time the kids are all off on their own, he may be too old to get much out of language schooling.

I knew many Poles who had been 50 years of so in America but were not conversant in English. THEY DIDN'T HAFTA BE! In American big-city Polish neighbourhoods the police and fire briagde, the doctors and utility companies, the insurance agnets, banks, shopkeepers and undertakers they dealt with all spoke Polish. So, contrary to your suggestion,they did not encumber taxpayers with translation fees. Things may ber different in the UK these days, where Polish concentration is far lower, but I am speaking about neighboruhoods that once were 85-90% erthncally Polish. There were even blacks who spoke Polish -- I remember our postman Julius who could hold his own with his Polish-speaking householders.

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

Please re-read the post more carefully. Polonia is not a place, it's a frame of mind. You take it with you wherever you go. When in Poland I never stopoed being a Polonian despite the years I have spent in my grandparents' homeland. Looks like you just like to bicker and squabble and, as they say, 'szuzkasz dziury w całym!'

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

During martial law (and the whole bloody thing is common knowledge which I personally experienced first-hand in case some smart a*rse asks 'Where's the evidence?') all cinemas and theatres were closed, concerts and sporting events banned, phone conversations monitored, mail censored, a curfew enforced, and people couldn't leave their hometown without special permsision. Petrol was severely rationed and the TV mainly broadcast communist propaganda. So there was ltitle else to do except badmouth Jabberwocky & Co. and copulate. Hence the baby boom of the early 1990s.

USA, Canada / Who is better informed, the expat or the Polonia crowd? [144]

The great thing about America is that everyone is free to espouse the cultural norms and language he/she feels the most comfortable in. There is no official ban on religion* as there is v Christians in Saudi Arabia, nor does the governmnt impose penalties (like Lithuania does) for not learning or using the host language. You can write 'paczki do Polski' or 'polska piekarnia' on your plate glass window and police will not show up to fine you. (If you live in or near a black ghetto, you'd better but steel bars on the windows!)

In the late 19th and early 20th century there were all kind of nativist groups of 200% WASPs, the Know-Noithing Party, etc. who tried to WASP-ify** the immigrant or openly told him: *Go back to where you came from.' But luckily America has overcome those growing pains. Now it's the backward Brits that produce the most anti-Polish graffiti and sloganeering, if the UK media reporting such incidents are any indication.

*Anti-Christian themes (including destroying Christmas dispalys) permeate the activites of the ACLU loonies other such fanatical groups and are backed by the leftist-liberal media, but thankfully that is not official US government policy,

**WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Contemplative life may be the way to go for certain people. Contemplative religous orders freely choose peace, silence, prayer and hard work over the rat race, and that is their civil right. But they also add their temporal contribution to the world by producing farm produce, making cheeses, wines, wicker baskets, coffins, etc. for their fellow man.

Is deriding and debasing such people your 'enliightened' idea of tolerance?

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

MarcinD
Freudian slip? You wrote: '...people that grew up in large values themselves', when you obviously meant 'large families'. According to the Freudians, that slip-up suggests that deep down you believe large families are a positive value, but wanting to seem 'modern' and going with today's mainstream popcultrure flow, you are suppressing that thought..

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

What immigrant groups in your view would be most beneficial to and least problematic for Poland? Which ones do you think are most likely to actually be brought in? Or will they bring themsleves in? Being brought in sounds like a major recruitment drive by the state.

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

What is your expert reason for the demographic coilapse? What do you think will be its conseuqences in 10, 20,m 30 years from now?

News / Poland Parliamentary elections 2015 [1060]

Sure, someone is taken ill or gets stuck in traffic. Some MPs of the 2 ruling parties secretly* vote against the government. The margin is so slim that anything can happen.

The voting result is posted on an electric board but is the way someone voted recorded or is discretion ensured?