News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and synonymous terms for the primary source of poetry. They are the fruitage of the turmoil of the soul, due to the apparently forgotten memories in us of the emotional lives in all our ancestors. They represent also the impassioned activities of our logical and rational faculties, the sum of the views of life of the past. They emanate from the dream life of man, whether this occurs in the waking or sleeping state. They are the workings of the force we call inspiration.

Sorry for this, but I find this passage a fit diversion from the subject, yet connected with it in the sublime strains of Ruthenian peasant poetry.

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


Who watches TV in Germany?

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


Świat według Kiepskich (The World According to the Kiepskis, "kiepski" in English means poor or crappy).

Main characters

Ferdek: unemployed since 13 December 1981. His favorite pastimes are drinking "Mocny Full" ("Strong Full") beer and watching television.

Halinka: Ferdek's wife, who works at a nearby hospital as a nurse.

Walduś (Cyc): Like his father he is unemployed. His life centers on bodybuilding or drinking beer with his father, and he avoids books and studying as much as he can. Walduś had problems with finishing elementary school, but after many attempts he succeeded.

Film director: Okil Khamidov (Tajik)

Do you have Turks, Tejiks, Poles depicting Germans as poor or crappy citizens of Germany?

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


Who can understand that Glasgow patter?

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


And Alfons second meaning is a pimp (Zuhälter). So when the office worker is asking about the first name and is given the answer Alfons, then he is saying that he is not asking about ocupation.

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]

Name change [Hitler]

A guy named Alfons Hitler is in an office to hand in an application to change his name.

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]

How do you like this one?

youtube.com/watch?v=26fPzEvcYxY

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


I do not know if it is fair. I couldn't find a Polish joke about Germans, so here goes the British one:

Do you know why Germans build such high-quality products?

So they won't have to go around being nice while they fix them.

I think that others can tell this season's Geraman jokes. I do not know any.

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]

Frankly speaking, I do not remember even one. But to settle a score with you, I propose to turn this thread into 'Polish jokes about Germans'. OK?

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]

No, we don't. In Poland, Germans are depicted mostly as doctors, philosophers, thinkers, poets, Popes, mostly high-minded people; only sometimes as Hilters, Goebels' and Natzi fanatics, but very, very rarely these days.

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]

Poles should make comedies like these about Germans. It would be a fair deal.

News / MORE ANTI-POLISH SENTIMENT IN GERMANY [280]


It is very easy to switch sometimes.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform "Peace Without Victory." That was
right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. That was a major achievement...

Law / Poland headed for an accounting disaster? Imports underestimated, no Euro entry [19]

Joseph Stiglitz - Problems with GDP as an Economic Barometer

youtube.com/watch?v=QUaJMNtW6GA

Some of what we are doing now is reflection of bad accounting. So more generally, information affects behaviour; so, how we describe success affects what we strive for. If GDP is what we think is success, people will strive for GDP. And political leaders all the time say: look what I have done, I've succeeded in getting economy to grow at 6%, but what he did, is to get how to figured it out; so that's part of a political rhetoric. By doing that they focus policies on things that will increase GDP. But GDP is often not a good measure of economic performance and societal well-being. GDP does not tell you about what happens to the typical citizen and this is growing problem, because when you have growing inequality in a society, you can have GDP going up, but most of society going worse off. In developing countries that may be growing by cutting down their force, but when they cut down their force, it's nothing there, so growth is unsustainable. GDP tells you nothing about sustainability.

News / Poland - Third World Country?? [300]

Joseph Stiglitz, American economist and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001), the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. Joseph Stiglitz is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, "free market fundamentalists" and some international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. He compared the shock therapy in Russia to Bolshevism:

Exerpts from Stiglitz article: econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/Theory/Transition/joseph_stiglitz.htm:

Historically the shock therapy approach to changing institutions is associated with Jacobinism in the French Revolution and (ironically) with Bolshevism in the Russian Revolution. There is an "Austrian" tradition of criticism of the Jacobin-Bolshevik approach to institutional change. Karl Popper's criticism [1962] of utopian social engineering and Friedrich Hayek's critique [1979] of the Jacobinic ambitions of scientism gave this tradition its modern Austrian flavor but the roots go back at least to Edmund Burke's [1937 (1790)] attack on Jacobinism in the French Revolution. Peter Murrell [1992] has explicitly used that tradition in his critique of the shock therapy approach. ...

Russian and Chinese Gross Domestic Product
Russian Growth and Inequality

Language / I can't type ą (first unique Polish letter similar to 'a') [5]

Check if you've got the "Polish programmer's" (Polish: polski programisty) keyboard settings.

News / Poland - Third World Country?? [300]

Third World Traveler:

In the fifteenth century, Europe began to divide, the west developing and the east becoming its service area, the original third world. The divisions deepened into early 20th century. After the October revolution, Russia extricated itself from the system. Despite Stalin's awesome atrocities and the terrible destruction of the wars, the Soviet system did undergo significant industrialization. Until 1989 Russia was the second world.

Into the 1960s, Western leaders feared that Russia's economic growth would inspire "radical nationalism" elsewhere, and that others too might be stricken by the disease that infected Russia in 1917, when it became unwilling "to complement the industrial economies of the West," as a prestigious study group described the problem of Communism in 1955. The Western invasion of 1918 was therefore a defensive action to protect "the welfare of the world capitalist system," threatened by social changes within the service areas.

The Capitalist Destruction of Russia (US economic advice did what Hitler or atomic warfare couldn't.)

News / Poland - Third World Country?? [300]

Actually, the Soviet model was seen, for a period of time, as the model for fast industrialisation during one generation and of becoming independent in that way - this was one of the reasons why Cuba, Vietnam and some other countries entered the Soviet model path mostly on their own will. The second reason of embracing the Soviet model was the policy of the USA - the policy which some so-called third world contries strongly oposed.

News / Poland - Third World Country?? [300]

In August 1952, the French historian Alfred Sauvy in the magazine L'Observateur coined the term Third World. He was referring the term to countries that were unaligned with either the Soviet bloc or the Western bloc during the Cold War.

News / Polish Jesuits created a Facebook site for non-believers. Atheists not a total waste? [70]


I understand eternity or afterlife, if you like, as something you share with other people, people of the past, present or of the future, something which does not die in you when you die. If you do not think of a religion as good for you, then think of a new science, new knowledge, which would return a man to his/her spiritual home and out of the world in which (s)he is reduced to a superfluous number in a mechanistical universe - today's world of 'eat, drink & be merry for tomorrow we die'.

This is trully a terrible world, most aptly described by Aldus Huxley in his famous book The Brave New World.

The Ultimate Revolution:


pulsemedia.org/2009/02/02/aldous-huxley-the-ultimate-revolution

Aldous Huxley

News / Polish Jesuits created a Facebook site for non-believers. Atheists not a total waste? [70]


The God who created the world with all its evil and suffering is the God who also agreed to participate in our pain, who took on a human form and willingly died the death of tortured prisoner. That is the distinctive concept of Christianity.


Just the beginning of a course of thought, this sentence being only the evoking of the actual situation in the 19th century.

News / Polish Jesuits created a Facebook site for non-believers. Atheists not a total waste? [70]

JonnyM

An interesting fragment:

A superficial study of the life-patterns, myths and rituals of "primitive" peoples played a significant part in undermining the religious faith of Christians in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, it was taken for granted that these other races were "lower on the evolutionary scale" than Europeans (What, after all, had they invented? Where were their railway trains?). Secondly it was assumed by people who had completely lost the capacity for analogical and symbolical thinking that the myths by which these races lived were meant to be taken quite literally and represented no more than the first gropings of the rational animal towards a scientific explanation of the universe. On this basis, since it was impossible to miss the parallels between "primitive religion" and the most "advanced" of religions, Christianity, the question had to be asked whether the latter should not be classified as just one more pre-scientific effort to account for observed facts.

(Gai Eaton, [i]The Only Heritage We Have in Studies in Comparative Religion, 1974)

News / Polish Jesuits created a Facebook site for non-believers. Atheists not a total waste? [70]


Who is to answer?

News / Polish Jesuits created a Facebook site for non-believers. Atheists not a total waste? [70]


Animal mind or animal spiritual needs may be primitive; however, man's spiritual needs, being as they are, are sometimes better satisfied by the naive, religious imagination rather than by scientific facts. This can be gauged by a fad for spiritualism or vogue for the occult. People ceased to see angels only to start to see UFO instead.

"Earth is flat, circumscribed by the horizon and the celestial dome," said William Blake. Do we really need to imagine more than that; save for scientists, of course?

News / "Shale Gas Revolution" will make Poland a Leading Country in Europe! [202]


As the bell clinks, so the fool thinks. I hope that they won't find anything.

News / Poland needs a left wing govt. [111]

A dream list.

News / Poland needs a left wing govt. [111]


are the lowest paid and may be kicked out of their work at any time; they are only disposable pawns living in constant fear of being replaced by anyone else or even by a newfangled automaton; finally, their jobs can be outsourced to China or any other country of cheap labour.

On the other hand,


but who use their brains and with their thoughts create our world, and here I mean not only financiers - those are the salt of the earth, true men and not slave-like creatures imitating robots by busting their butts.

People driven by the fear of hunger, Soviet gulags or American prisons often despise others, but by doing that they despise themselves and at last they will be despised by others too.

News / Poland needs a left wing govt. [111]


youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FzrBurlJUNk

What can you say about hard work, incentives and production in case of some people in the video?

News / Poland needs a left wing govt. [111]

Then when Poland was a Communist country? Can you explain what Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Lenin had to do with communism and with each other?

What do you understand by leftists? Where have you found shirts with those "Mass murdering leftists"? What is to smoke pot? Needs to be equal even if they don't work, the Soviet system was criticised even in the '80s for practicing the old Testament principle: "если не работаеш - то не кушаеш", that is: if you do not work you do not eat.

News / Poland needs a left wing govt. [111]


What is Communism? When and where one could/can find it? What Poland has to do with Communism?

News / Poland needs a left wing govt. [111]

The United States considered Romania "a unique country with a special role to play
in East-West relations." Romania was the only Warsaw-Pact member to refuse joint military maneuvers on its soil or the assignment of its troops beyond its frontiers. It was also the only Warsaw-Pact member to join the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,

the International Monetary Fund, and GATT; moreover it traded more with non-Communist countries than with the Soviet Union and its allies.

France granted Ceaușescu the Legion of Honour and in 1978 he became an Honorary British Knight (GCB, stripped in 1989) in the UK, Elena Ceaușescu was arranged to be 'elected' to membership of a Science Academy in the USA.

US Relations With Nicolae Ceaucescu