"Impartiality is not neutrality. It is partiality for justice." - Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)
Name: Fran Oborski
"Cześć!" Polish Community in Kidderminster - information and news
Arkadia - the beautiful Polish 18th / 19th century park at Lowicz near Warsaw in photos
Church of Our Lady of Ostra Brama
Completorium - Polish Early Music
Consulate of the Republic of Poland in Kidderminster - all the latest news
Elektryczne Gitary - Polish rock group
Fryderyck Chopin - The Frederick Chopin Society of Warsaw
Karel Szymanowski - the great Polish composer of the early 20th Century
Kroke - Krakow - Polish Klezmer band
Liberal Group, Wyre Forest District Council - all the very latest news
M/S Pilsudski - the great pre-war Polish Ocean liner
Maanam - Polish rock group
Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły
Marshal Jozef Pilsudski - the great Polish revolutionary, soldier, statesman and leader
Mike & Fran Oborski
Motion Trio - Accordions like you never heard before!
Offmore Comberton Action Group
Orkiestra św. Mikołaja - St Nicholas Orchestra - folk
Poles in Great Britain - online discussion group
Projekt Karpaty Magiczne - Magic Carpathians Project - Band
Radio Hey Now - bilingual Polish Radio in UK!
Roger McGuinn's Blog
Roxanne Panufnik - beauty & talent ! Superb Anglo-Polish Composer
Stare Dobre Malzenstwo - Polish group
The Bigos Bar - the only web site devoted to bigos - the Polish national dish
Trebunie Tutki - Polish Highlander Band
Voo Voo - Polish group
Warsaw Village Band - Polish Folk / Rock
Warszawski Dom Tańca - Warsaw House of Dance
Wilki - Polish rock group
Wyre Forest Holocaust Memorial
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Chemo Chronicles 5
I'm coming towards the end of my third cycle of "chemo". I'm so lucky - no serious side effects - just the exhaustion. It hits suddenly. It is total - lifting a finger is so totally tiring - and there is no telling how long it lasts. Best remedy is to keep busy - it only hits when you pause. It's a small price but it does drive me wild!
I'm absolutely convinced that Fran suffers from all of this far worse than I do. She's constantly worrying and on the outlook for any problem, side effect or change in my condition. I just blunder ahead and, being preoccupied with the monster, don't tell her how much I love her, appreciate her and worry about her.
Collared....
Our cats like their collars. Our enormous tabby sports a rather flash multi-colour collar carrying his id disc, his "I've been chipped" disc, 2 bells (don't ask) and a red - cat head shaped - reflector. No birds have been saved by the bells. They are only ever rung - with a deliberate flick of the head - to summon room service. A couple of days ago he came back without the red reflector. So we duly replaced it with a yellow - fish shaped - reflector. The next day he came back wearing BOTH the yellow AND the red reflector! That cat obviously has an interesting social life. If his friend who restored the red reflector happens to read this then thank you whoever you are!
The Last Kentucky Waltz/You Tore Me Down/Lost In This World Without You/Alibi Bye/Evidence/Where Bluebirds Fly/Just Let Her Go/Wearing Out My Welcome With The Blues/Faithless Disciple/I Come And Stand At Every Door/Tell Me You Still Sing/Written Upon The Birth Of My Daughter
Sid Griffin's long awaited second solo album, his first in eight years and a very personal and intimate glimpse into his private life. Released Sept 25, 2005 this is melodic acoustic alt-country at its finest although one track, Just Let Her Go, is a Western Electric reunion and not only features the powerful drums of Dave the Rave Morgan but is an unreleased song from the late Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet, Texas Tornadoes) and features ex-Small Face Ian MacLagan on keyboards. Recorded in Sid's living room and in Louisville, Kentucky no other Sid music explains him better than the balladry heard herein.
Kidderminster 10, Bydgoszcz 0
The Daily Mail of November 19th 2005 has one of their reporters aboard a plane to Poland reporting...
"Why you come here for?" Katya, my cowboy-booted neighbour asks as we touch down in Poland. "There's nothing in Bydgoszcz. It is over for young people. You should try Kidderminster. It is much better - lovely shops, I live there now with my boyfriend. I just come home to get my things and say goodbye".
A linguistics professor was lecturing his class...
"In English," he explained, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative."
"However," the professor continued, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up. "Yeah, right."
The forward march of liberty has been halted - even reversed
Britain, America and France have all reduced civil liberties since the twin towers fell. But has this made us any safer?
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian
Then came the fall of the twin towers in New York - the true beginning of the 21st century. Ever since, we have been going either sideways or backwards, as we struggle to respond to a real threat. We got off on the wrong foot on the very first day. As America's former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke records, when George Bush was reminded of the constraints of international law on the evening of September 11 2001, the president of the United States yelled: "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."
Kicking ass, as it turns out, meant not just the invasion of Iraq but also Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and, it now emerges, probably other secret prison facilities where people were held, and tortured, in a lawless limbo. Vice-president Cheney is reportedly fighting hard to exempt the CIA from a law, proposed by the conservative Republican and former prisoner of war John McCain, that would ban all American forces and agencies from using torture. At home, the USA Patriot Act allows routine invasions of privacy and curtailments of civil liberties that would never have passed before September 11. The words of America, the Beautiful - "Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law" -seem to have been forgotten in the "global war on terror"; or, as Bush put it, in kicking ass.
Unfortunately, this country, which was a beacon of liberty before the US was even invented - if you doubt this, read Voltaire's letters about his time in England, published in 1734 - has followed suit. After the entirely justified invasion of Afghanistan, we gave a patina of international legitimacy to the unjustified invasion of Iraq. There our own armed forces seem to have been reduced, in circumstances of extreme duress, to some practices of which we can hardly be proud. At home, we have seen successive tightenings of the anti-terrorism legislation - or, to put it another way, successive erosions of the Human Rights Act, and of other, older individual freedoms secured by common law, such as habeas corpus. This culminated in the proposal that terrorist suspects should be held for 90 days without charge. Legislation to outlaw the "glorification" of terrorism and a misguided attempt to protect Muslims by criminalising an ill-defined "incitement to religious hatred" both threaten free speech. And so we find ourselves in the surreal position of depending on unelected lords, and the Conservatives, for the defence of our liberties.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, France has just extended the applicability of a "state of emergency" from 12 days to three months. The direct cause is different, but the effect is also an erosion of freedom. The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is threatening to send rioting youths back to their "country of origin" - even though they have never lived there, may not have anyone to look after them there and may not even speak the language. The French detainees from Guantánamo were brought back, only to be locked up again in France. The French republican banning of the Islamic headscarf in schools is another, relatively mild but symbolically important - and, in my view, wholly counterproductive - infringement of an individual freedom.
So in all three classic lands of western liberty, America, France and Britain, we have witnessed an erosion of liberty. Of course, we should not be naive. As we saw in London on July 7, and before that in Madrid and Bali and New York, these are new and horrible kinds of threat. As the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin always reminded us, we cannot have all good things at once. We have to make trade-offs between desirable public goods, and the trade-off between liberty and security is one of the most basic in all politics. The totalitarianisms of the 20th century promised more security in return for less liberty. In liberal democracies, we generally accept less security in return for more liberty.
Faced with jihadist suicide bombers, we must reconsider and perhaps adjust the balance. Irritating though they are, I assume that tighter security controls at airports, railway stations and public buildings are necessary. Unlike many liberals, I also think identity cards may help, provided (and this is a big "if") they work properly and we have effective controls over the information stored on them. When I read that MI5 are recruiting 800 more spies to combat the threat of Islamist terrorism, I am disturbed - but I can see the argument for it. But in every case, we need to be convinced that the reduction of liberty will bring a commensurate increase in security.
What is unforgivable is the measure that makes us at once less free and less safe. Lately, we've been getting too many of those: actions designed to prevent suicide bombers that end up creating more of them. Delivering the Isaiah Berlin lecture in Oxford the other day, the American philosopher Allen Wood observed that "the death sentence is no use against suicide bombers". This was not just a somewhat black philosophical joke; it also contains a deeper truth. As Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, has just reminded us, the larger challenge for policing, but also for post-9/11 western policy altogether, is to help to create conditions in which people don't become suicide bombers in the first place.
There may be a lesson here from the past century. That American writer's two-word summary - "freedom won" - was actually not far wrong. It wasn't any of the CIA's covert assassinations or dirty tricks that won the cold war. It was the magnetic example of free, prosperous and law-abiding societies. That was worth a thousand nuclear bombs or stealth bombers. No weapon known to man is more powerful than liberty in law.
As the hotly-contested race to elect David Cameron to the Tory party leadership gathers pace and the nation waits transfixed by the colossal intellectual scrap taking place between the contenders, The Rockall Times examines the questions the public are clamouring for answers to. For instance, "Who are the Tories?", "How long has David Cameron been a deranged coke fiend?" and "This leadership stuff is all very well, but just how does Michael Portillo get his hair so lustrous and wavy?"
Public opinion suggests that the Conservatives are a party in terminal decline, their loyal electorate eroded to such an extent that it only includes those people living in Surrey, Kent, Sussex and others from a place known as the "Countryside" (providing this is south of Swindon, of course). This is all set to change however, when the latest leadership hopeful seizes the reins of power from Michael Howard’s wizened and cadaverous hands. As former challenger Dr Liam Fox is sent chastised back to his constituency and his lucrative Sunday evening chart rundown show, we take a closer look at the two remaining candidates and what they have to offer.
Grassroots Conservative party members expressed dismay last week as their favoured Tory leadership candidate, Tony Blair, lost a crucial Commons vote which would have allowed the UK's security forces to detain shifty-looking ragheads for up to ten years — thereby allowing grub-loving Charles Clarke plenty of time to think up a good reason for having arrested them in the first place.
Those nice people at The Rockall Times are at it again...
In the wake of last week's Commons defeat for Tony Blair and Charles Clarke's laudable plan to bang up without trial anyone who even thinks about boarding a Tube with a rucksack, Downing Street doctors say Clarke must attend to his health or pay the price.
Despite the righteous arse-kicking delivered by almost 50 Labour MPs who decided — despite clear guidance from the UK's top police officers, the Daily Mail and the Sun — to reject proposals guaranteed to keep Britain's streets clear of kamikaze towelheads and therefore safe for freedom-loving Brits to go about their business as normal, subject to the restriction of certain freedoms as a lamentable, but necessary, sacrifice to ensure the Security of the State™.
Clarke, however, has not heeded physicians' advice to take a well-earned break from the crusade which they fear will cost him everything. One sawbones told The Rockall Times: "Charles is heading for burnout. It's simply not possible to maintain his level of pompous self-righteousness indefinitely. Just look at his TV appearences since the Commons vote. The same relentless, patronising hurrumphing coupled to protestations of absolute certainty as to the legitimacy of his cause."
Indeed, a quick scan of recent Clarke interviews show him still totally convinced that he is right about absolutely everything and anyone who disagrees with him is misguided, if not completely insane. "We call it Blunkett Syndrome," sighed one expert in political psychology. "Once you get it into your head that ID cards are the only way to fight international terror, nobody can convince you otherwise. When anyone disagrees, you simply counter: 'I hope you'll be happy when your kids have been killed in an suicide-bomb attack by someone who could have stopped by a properly-implimented biometric ID card scheme which is, I hasten to add, backed by senior police officers and security analysts.' There's no cure, I'm afraid."
For those of you who demand photos of the...
...cats!
Those "Loaded Questions"...
Apparently we were not alone in our anger and disgust at those "Loaded Questions" (scroll down and see below) which accompanied a recent e-mailing from the Home Secretary on the proposed terrorism legislation.
In a new e-mailing the Home Secretary is forced to conclude...
Finally, I would like to apologise for the questionnaire which was attached to the message that I sent out to party supporters on Friday. It was not intended to gauge public opinion but to start a political debate around the proposals currently being debated in Parliament. Many people have raised with me perfectly valid concerns about how the questions were drafted. I can only say that I share those concerns and give my assurance that questions of this type will not used in the future.
Love The Handsome Family...
This is from their latest mailing...
Here’s an old, love poem from the point of view of a dead fish:
“Throw me on a Scale”
By Hafiz (1320-1389)
Today love has completely gutted me.
I am lying in the market like a filleted grouper
Speechless,
Every desire and sinew absolutely silent
But I am still so fresh.
Everything is now the same to me.
Listen:
The touch of a beautiful woman
As she lifts me near,
Drawing my scent into her body;
She thinks about taking me home
The touch of a wondrous fly
Drinking my vital fluids
Through a strange shaped flute
The sun laying its radiant gaze against my cheek
Human voices and the breeze from a passing horse’s tail,
All send miraculous currents into my world.
God’s beauty has split me wide open.
Throw Hafiz on a scale,
Wrap me in cloth,
Bring me home
That’s all for now. May the falling leaves smile as they pass your window, but not linger and frighten the children...
Xo Rennie
Visit The Church of Our Lady of Ostra Brama...
...online!
Blair's litany of failures on Iraq - ambassador's damning verdict
Meyer says PM failed to exert any leverage on Bush and was seduced by US power
I agree with Kennedy on this one...
A battle between liberty and authoritarianism
Basic freedoms are under attack in the name of the fight against terror. We should heed Churchill's wartime warnings
Loaded questions?
Having somehow got onto a Labour Party e-mailing list I received this from the Home Secretary no less today:-
I am emailing you today to find out your views on the action the Government is proposing to take to challenge the new terrorist threats that face all of us.
Since the London bombings of 7 July, we all know that the UK faces a terrorist threat of a different level of seriousness and complexity from anything Britain has faced before. We are confronting extremists whose aims are to kill and maim as many people as possible, to strike at the heart of our society and destroy what we stand for. These terrorists are part of complex international organisations that make ever greater use of new technology such as encrypted computers. Further attacks remain a real possibility, so action to protect our citizens is urgent.
The Government has introduced the Terrorism Bill, currently going through Parliament, to try and ensure that the police and intelligence services have the powers they need to stay ahead of the new breed of terrorist. Yet some are opposing the Government's proposals, which come on the advice of specialist anti-terrorist police.
Facing up to the challenges of the new terrorist threat is so important; we want to have your views as soon as possible.
Please go the Labour website to register your views. Click here to go there now.
Best wishes
Charles Clarke
Home Secretary
A scandal not a survey
So I decided to have a look at the website to "register" my "view". Lo and behold I then discovered that I was actually being asked not for my "view" but to respond either "Yes". "No" or "Not sure" to three short questions.
What is absolutely disgraceful is that the questions are NOT about the actual detailed legislation which has been before Parliament. Instead the three questions are broad unspecific generalisations that are designed simply to push you into a "Yes" answer because any other response is impossible. Look at the "questions":-
Do you think our laws should be updated to cope with the current security threat?
How can anyone say "No" to that? But saying "Yes" to this does NOT mean that you support the actual ill thought out bunngle of Government legislation which will most likely NOT "cope" with anything but just erode civil liberties!
Do you think police shoul have the time and opportunity to complete their investigations into suspect terrorists?
Yes, but NOT to hold them for months without trial!
Do you think the government should make sure there are new safeguards to protect innocent people?
Yes of course - but that is exactly what the legislation does NOT do!
Do you want the sun to shine tomorrow?
These questions are loaded, meaningless and are an insult to the intelligence of the public. They are designed to force a "Yes" response come whatever and Ministers will then no doubt be informed that everything in the garden is lovely because the public do agree with us after all - and this survey proves it!
My Sociology Lecturer at College use to say that the only thing to do with loaded meaningless surveys like this was to add the question "Do you want the sun to shine tomorrow" which would then enable you to issue yet another happy affirmative press release under the headline "We were right - people want the Sun to shine today!"
The Government should be thoroughly ashamed of this crude, manipulative and dishonest little "survey". We should all be thoroughly worried that the Government think so little of our intelligence and opinions that they have dared to come up with such an obvious piece of fraud and deceit.
Are you ready...
...here's what the US Department of Homeland Security suggests!
One of those days...
First thing this morning we down looking at the vandalism to the fencing surrounding the old Comberton Arms site - a pretty gruesome mess - phoned Wyre Forest Community Housing Chief Executive Ray Brookes who was, as ever, helpful. Then looking at traffic issues on Birmingham Road. After that we dropped into St Ambrose Catholic Primary School before looking at parking at the junction of Leswell Street and Clarence Street. Then on to traffic issues in Albert Road and a search for a white lining crew in Offmore Road - there wasn't one. Back home by 9.30am. Fran was then off to a meeting at County Hall. I updated this web log, issued press released, replied to post, dealt with constant phone calls and visitors. Tons of post including interesting letter from "annon." naming lots of local drug dealers - that's one for the Police. Spent some time with a local resident discussing response to threatened Phone Mast on the TA site.
White lines on Offmore Road at last...
Later down to bank in town, back to St. Ambrose Catholic Primary School, saw white lines (at last!) on Offmore Road near the Railway Bridge - looking good! Meanwhile Fran was on phone to County Council Officers about the Wyre Forest Schools Review.
Comberton Arms fencing - not sure...
Checked Comberton Arms fencing progress - partially restored but not finished alas and I'm not sure it will last the night. This one could run and run. After that it was sorting Consular cards for Polish Independence Day (November 11th).
Meetings...
I attended District Council Budget Scrutiny Group chaired by Cllr Graham Ballinger. Despite starting a bit groggy from "chemo" I brightened up during the meeting. I'm not sure that Graham was altogether pleased ;-) Later Fran off to Interim Offmore Primary School Governor's Meeting. I'm at home fielding phone calls and posting this.
If I get really lucky Fran will return at some stage with fish and chips and a bottle of wine, the cats may get the fussing they demand and I might fit in a couple of late night episodes of "The West Wing" (Season Six on DVD no less) before falling into bed.
Get Safe Online...
...if you are worried about online security then this is the site for you!
Rebirth of the accordion!
Some years ago FROOTS (Folk Roots as was) published a cartoon. In the top row the dead were shown entering Heaven - being fitted with wings and halos - and issued with harps. In the bottom row the dead were shown entering Hell - being fitted with horns and tails - and issued with accordions! Well times have changed. Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads at midnight in return for the secret of how to master the blues. I hope that Motion Trio didn't have to go that far to master the accordion but the outcome is equally dramatic. In their hands accordions sound like they have never sounded before! Here's what their label's web site has to say:- This innovative Polish accordion trio founded in 1996 has managed to change the face of their instrument, the accordion, already. Six hands create timbres that really catch and even more surprise. Most of the music played by this 'Trio Infernal' so masterly is written by Janusz Wojtarowicz. The vanguard sound collages range somewhere between minimal music, jazz and rock and meet the Notion of Motion: to redefine the accordion and explore soundscapes far beyond what one associates and experienced with this instrument so far. The three energetic musicians do this on a strictly acoustic basis, neither samplers nor additional effects are part of their concept.
So what do would be new UK citizens need to know?
Find the official teaching pack here!
