That was the Cow of the Week that was.

From The Daily Mail:

A runaway cow that avoided captivity for weeks died Thursday after it was caught and put on a truck to be taken to a farm, a local official said.

The red Limousin beef cow fled Jan. 23 as it was to be transported to a slaughterhouse. It gained celebrity status as it defended its life and freedom, tricking searchers, swimming from island to island and roaming a lake-filled region near Nysa, in southwestern Poland.

Bartosz Bukala, a spokesman for Nysa authorities, told The Associated Press that the cow had been captured but died while being transported to a local governor's farm where it was to be kept.

Local internet portal nto.pl said a team of five, including a veterinarian, moved early Thursday to capture the animal, valued at some 5,000 zlotys ($1,500,) near the village of Siestrzechowice. It took a few hours and three shots of sedatives before it was put on a truck, but the animal died there, apparently from stress, the report said.

Might as well have left her there, in other words.

Cow of the week

Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake

H/t James Higham

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (373)

From Hacker News via Georgist Rapid Response Squad:

There's an ongoing discussion in Poland about land-value tax. The problem here is that such tax is seen as a form of asset forfeiture. Why? Because of the communist times legacy.

In 1970s and 1980s there were a lot of apartments built by communist government, most of which were given to average citizens either for free, or for some insignificant amount of money. Now almost 40 years passed and we ended up with millions of people still living in those apartments, which they got back then, or inherited.

Now, especially after Poland joined EU, market price of those apartments skyrocketed, while owners income levels stayed pretty low. So, if government introduced land-value tax most of those people would not be able to afford paying it, effectively forcing them to sell their apartments.

1. Whatever selling prices are now, proper LVT is based on current rental values. If tenants can afford to pay the rent, then owner-occupiers can afford the LVT, which will always be less than the rent.

2. As usual, the 'affordability' argument completely ignores absolute amounts. LVT does not have to be 100% of rental values on day one. Everybody would be able to afford a low level LVT of a couple of per cent of rental values (or whatever is necessary to replace whatever property taxes Poland already has).

3. Above and beyond that, if LVT is used to replace bad taxes/regressive taxes such as 29.97% of wages being paid in social security contributions or VAT at a standard rate of 23% of spending then again, just about everybody would be able to afford to pay it.

4. What is the moral difference between 'asset forfeiture' and 'income forfeiture'? Why do the Homeys think that the latter is acceptable but the former is beyond the pale? If you are a young worker in Poland and everything has been given away to/seized by the older generation, then you yourself have suffered 'asset forfeiture' already, and having half your earnings seized in tax and half of what is left in rent or mortgage repayments is just adding insult to injury.

5. Pigeons will always come home to roost. Who has lost most here, somebody who got their home for free from the government or inherited it forty years ago and has lived there rent free ever since, or some poor sod starting out in life who has always been paying privately collected LVT to those lucky people? What about 'equality of opportunity', which IMHO is far more important that 'equality of outcomes'?

I don't know how such tax would work in different setting, but here in Poland only visible effect would be rich people taking over properties for discount prices.

Another fine piece of triangulation by the Homeys. It is primarily rich i.e. land rich people who oppose LVT because introducing it would lead to much greater net income equality. If LVT really were in there interests, how come they are not campaigning for it?

It is quite possible that some low income people would sell up to higher earners, in which case, higher earners would still end up paying most of the tax, and low earners, taking all low earners together, current landowners and tenants alike, would end up paying least/gaining most. How is that a bad thing?

Eurovision Voting

From the BBC

The latest Eurovision figures have revealed the differences between the public phone vote and the jury vote at Saturday night's competition.

The UK phone vote gave Poland's Donatan and Cleo top marks but the jury thought they were the worst act of the night.

Their combined score meant Poland ended up with nil points from the British.

I'm thinking here that the public may not have been voting for the song

No, really? I don't know whether to be surprised or disappointed...

From the BBC:

UK drug company GlaxoSmithKline is facing a criminal investigation in Poland for allegedly bribing doctors, BBC Panorama has discovered. Eleven doctors and a GSK regional manager have been charged over alleged corruption between 2010 and 2012...

A former sales rep for GSK in the Polish region of Lodz, Jarek Wisniewski, said:

"There is a simple equation... We pay doctors, they give us prescriptions. We don't pay doctors, we don't see prescriptions for our drugs.

"We cannot go to doctors and say to them, 'I need 20 more prescriptions'. So we prepare an agreement for them to give a talk to patients, we pay £100, but we expect more than 100 prescriptions for this drug..."

One doctor has already admitted guilt, been fined and given a suspended sentence. He said he accepted £100 for a single lecture he never gave, but only under pressure from a GSK drugs rep.

He told Panorama: "They kept tempting, and I am just a man."

See also Newsthump.

See also Poland was the only EU country that refused to order [Tamiflu] when the pandemic was announced last autumn.

"Apart from that, Mrs Przybyl, how was the press conference?"

"I think he shot himself in the foot. And missed badly."

"Immigration to rise as benefit curbs lifted"

MBK emailed me a link to this.

UPDATE: In case that link doesn't work, it says much the same in today's Daily Mail (via VFTS).

Pigs on the run

From The Metro:

A herd of 100 pigs escaped being turned into Christmas crackling when their truck overturned on the way to the slaughterhouse. The porkers fled into woods at Ostroda na Mazurach* and kept police and wildlife experts at bay for six hours.

Firemen finally rounded up less [sic] than 50 of the beasts who were taken back to their farm. The driver, say police, is facing an un-merry Christmas on drink drive charges.

We used to do this on the school bus. Coming up to a certain roundabout, everybody upstairs would go over to the right hand side and once we picked up speed going round, we'd all dive over to the left. It does require a bit of co-ordination though.

On one particularly hair-raising occasion, when we got the 'bus to a 45 degree angle, the driver actually stopped and came upstairs to give us a bollocking. It was difficult to take him seriously because one wing of his glasses had snapped off and so they were balanced diagonally across his nose. Happy days.

* For unknown reasons, this story of pigs escaping in Poland is accompanied by a photo' of escaped pigs in Germany.

Moose On The Loose

Continuing my other occasional series on 'ruminants who fight back', from The Metro:

A rogue moose led police officers on a chase after running wild through the suburbs of Lublin in the east of Poland. The animal was captured later and released back into a forest.

Gripping stuff, eh?

Another one bites the dust

Via EU Referendum, it appears that the fairly nationalist/authoritarian Polish president has died in an air crash.

Is it just me, or do these things tend to happen to right-wingers, e.j. Jörg Haider, Theo Van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, or going further back, Wolfgang Schäuble who was shot in the back and has since been in a wheelchair and Airey Neave? And of course the IRA had a pop at the whole Tory Cabinet back in 1984.

The only leftie I can think of who was assassinated/murdered in recent times is Anna Lindh.

UPDATE: Dearieme adds Olof Palme to the list, also in Sweden. Maybe the rules are inverted in that country?

Victimhood Poker: we have a winner!

Far be it from me to fisk CiF articles (fish, barrel, yawn) but JuliaM has uncovered a corker (in the comments to my previous post).

In response to the whole "it's not fair for Microsoft to doctor a publicity shot that has been staged for one target market to cater for another target market" debacle, some cheeky chappy at CiF has come out with this:

There are those who say it's natural for a multinational company to gear its adverts towards the countries it's targeting. And, yes, if they were promoting themselves in African countries they might have an all-black cast...

Of course, this begs the obvious question: how would cheeky chappy respond if a Polish company had doctored an all-white picture originally intended for their domestic market to include a few non-white faces to cater for the UK or US markets?

PS, I trust you are all au fait with The Rules Of Victimhood Poker (scroll down to The Ace).

PPS, Giles Coren, Times restaurant critic and descendant of Jewish emigrés from Poland reckoned that the Poles are stupendously anti-Semitic, which, hilariously enough and in an actual not a parallel universe, earned him a kicking from, er, The Graun. How so? Well, just go back to The Rules Of Victimhood Poker (US rules) and you will see that 'Hispanic' (which translates roughly as 'Polish' in the European rules) counts as a Jack, but 'Non-christian' (which includes 'Jewish', either under US or European rules, thus ranking below 'Muslim' but above 'Christian') only counts as a Four. It's easy, once you know the rules!

PPS, a cursory reading of the relevant chapter in Martin Gilbert's A History of the Twentieth Century seems to confirm that murders of Jewish people continued even after 1945, so methinks Giles might have a very valid point here.

The internet never forgets ...

Re Pavlov's Cat's comment here.

I think this is the previous example to which he refers.

More PC publicity shot tomfoolery

It appears that even the mighty Microsoft is no match for the humble News Shopper.

UPDATE: the BBC have published both versions of the picture.

That's not a Nazi tree ... these are proper Nazi trees!

Croydonian regales us with tales of a Nazi tree in Poland.

Pah, that's nothing! Feast your eyes on these babies ...

Full story here.

Readers' letters of the day

Both from The Metro:

I always said that bird 'flu didn't scare me because I am a bloke. But as a male chauvinist pig, I must admit the latest outbreak has got me worried. I think the government is taking things too far by introducing these disease-equality measures.
Bob Harris, Birmingham

and

Why are Britons in Spain 'expats' but Poles in Britan 'immigrants'?
Al, London.

"Seized properties shame Poland"

Here's another example of why it takes countries much longer to recover from left-wing dictatorships than from right-wing ones.

NB - I am not trying to downplay the Poles' historic anti-semitism or their possible complicity in The Holocaust, that's a different topic.

"Poland in new blow to EU treaty"

Thank you, Mr Kaczynski!

God bless Poland (2)

Denis Cooper has done some more digging on Poland's attempts to retain at least a little of their national sovereignty, articles here, here, and here.

He sums them up thusly:

" ... the suggestion is not that the Treaty should be re-visited, but that the Bill to ratify it should have a preamble stating that 'Poland is a sovereign state and the country's constitution is its highest law'. A bit like Cash's New Clause 9, which was voted down by our patriotic MPs last week... this could all be very easily sorted out by Merkel issuing a few not-so-veiled threats about cutting funding to Poland, excluding Polish workers from Germany, and maybe mentioning that Poland had been put on the 'candidates for annexation' list along with Liechtenstein and the Sudetenland.

To remind you how it all ended up last time, let me repeat the famous words of one of Hitler's generals*, as they retreated into the Berlin Bunker in 1945 "Wenn das so weiter geht, dann können wir bald von der Westfront an die Ostfront mit der Straßenbahn fahren"**.

* I can't track down his name or precise rank.

** 'If things go on like this, we'll soon be able to take the tram from the Western Front to the Eastern Front'. Rather amazingly he was not taken out and shot for defeatism.

God bless Poland!

Where there's life there's hope...*

* Illustrating that it is possible to be right for the wrong reasons - as it happens I am perfectly happy with the idea of gay marriages.

"EU may welcome Poland election result"

Er, why the f*** is it any of their business?