This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both the informed and nonspecialist reader. The ...essays approach the questions why and how PiS: Law and Justice, the party of Kaczynski, returned to power and why and how it is doing what it is doing while in power. They help understand and make sense of how “history" plays a key role in Polish public life and politics. The language about PiS in Western media tends to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain largely dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was just fast enough in understanding its electorate, and helped Poland simply reverting to normalcy? Isn’t this New Normal a lot like the Old Normal: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist? The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Westernlooking Poland and an inwardlooking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition. The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.
Written by a Brit who has lived in Poland for more than twenty years, this book challenges some accepted thinking in the West about Poland and about the rise of Law and Justice (PiS) as the ruling ...party in 2015. It is a remarkable account of the Polish post-1989 transition and contemporary politics, combining personal views and experience with careful fact and material collections. The result is a vivid description of the events and scrupulous explanations of the political processes, and all this with an interesting twist – a perspective of a foreigner and insider at the same time. Settled in the position of participant observer, Jo Harper combines the methods of macro and micro analysis with CDA, critical discourse analysis. He presents and interprets the constituent elements and issues of contemporary Poland: the main political forces, the Church, the media, issues of gender, the Russian connection, the much-disputed judicial reform and many others. A special feature of the book is the detailed examination of the coverage of the Poland’s latest two elections, one in 2019 (parliamentary) and the other in 2020 (presidential) in the British media, an insightful and witty specimen of comparative cultural and political analysis.
Declining sow performance with increasing parity or an increase in the number of poor- quality pigs potentially impacts on farm productivity. This study investigated the phenotypic and genetic ...background of the sow’s influence on (i) the number of pigs not meeting the industry standards (tail-enders) and (ii) changes in performance with parity. Data were available for 3592 sows and their litters (13,976 litters) from a pig production system in NSW, Australia. The mean, standard deviation (SD), and slope for trait values over time were estimated for the sow characteristic traits: number of born-alive (NBA) and stillborn (SB) piglets and body condition of sow recorded with a caliper (CAL), along with maternal effects on piglet performance, represented by: average piglet birth weight (APBW), number of weaned piglets (WEAN), and tail-enders (TEND). Traits were analyzed in ASReml 4.2, by using an animal model. The number of tail-enders produced by a sow is a heritable trait, with a heritability estimate of 0.14 ± 0.04. Sow characteristics and maternal effects on piglet performance expressed by mean and slope had similar heritability estimates, ranging from 0.10 ± 0.03 to 0.38 ± 0.05, whereas estimates for SD traits were generally not different from zero. The latter suggests individual variability in sow characteristics or maternal performance between parities is largely not genetic in origin. This study demonstrated that more attention is required to identify contributions to the problem of tail-enders, and that slope traits could potentially be useful in the breeding program to maximize lifetime performance.
This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both informed and non-specialist readers. The ...essays consider why and how PiS, Law and Justice, the party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, returned to power, and the why and how of its policies while in power.
This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both the informed and nonspecialist reader. The ...essays approach the questions why and how PiS: Law and Justice, the party of Kaczynski, returned to power and why and how it is doing what it is doing while in power. They help understand and make sense of how “history” plays a key role in Polish public life and politics. The language about PiS in Western media tends to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain largely dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was just fast enough in understanding its electorate, and helped Poland simply reverting to normalcy? Isn’t this New Normal a lot like the Old Normal: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist? The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Westernlooking Poland and an inwardlooking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition. The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.
The following sections each look at selected issues up to and during election years 2019 and 2020. The pieces are mainly reworked articles written for Forbes, Politico, Deutsche Welle¹ and others ...during this period, and as such retain much of the original journalistic style, with some—though not exhaustive—footnotes used. This is not an attempt to explore all themes or all avenues for exploring them but aims to offer a glimpse into how some of the main fronts in the discursive battle were framed and contested.
In March 2018 the events of March 1968 in Poland were commemorated, with
When a child's cancer progresses beyond current treatment capability, the parents are likely to participate in noncurative treatment decision making. One factor that helps parents to make these ...decisions and remain satisfied with them afterward is deciding as they believe a good parent would decide. Because being a good parent to a child with incurable cancer has not been formally defined, we conducted a descriptive study to develop such a definition.
In face-to-face interviews, 62 parents who had made one of three decisions (enrollment on a phase I study, do not resuscitate status, or terminal care) for 58 patients responded to two open-ended questions about the definition of a good parent and about how clinicians could help them fulfill this role. For semantic content analysis of the interviews, a rater panel trained in this method independently coded all responses. Inter-rater reliability was excellent.
Among the aspects of the definition qualitatively identified were making informed, unselfish decisions in the child's best interest, remaining at the child's side, showing the child that he is cherished, teaching the child to make good decisions, advocating for the child with the staff, and promoting the child's health. We also identified 15 clinician strategies that help parents be a part of making these decisions on behalf of a child with advanced cancer.
The definition and the strategies may be used to guide clinicians in helping parents fulfill the good parent role and take comfort afterward in having acted as a good parent.
Negating Negation Harper, Jo
Problems of post-communism,
20/7/1/, Volume:
57, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In June and July 2010 Polish voters elected a new president to succeed Lech Kaczyński, who was killed in an April 10, 2010, airplane crash in Russia. Civic Platform candidate Bronisław Komorowski's ...defeat of Law and Justice candidate Jarosław Kaczyński, Lech's twin brother, may signify the consolidation of a Polish civic culture favoring a conservative discourse that is more classically liberal than populist.
Deforestation of riparian zones is known to influence the numbers and kinds of organisms that inhabit adjoining streams, but little quantitative information is available on how much deforestation ...must occur before the biota isaffected. We sampled fishes and stream habitats in 12 stream segments downstream from deforested but vegetated riparian patches 0-5.3 km long, all downslope from watersheds with at least 95% forest cover. We found an overall decrease in fish abundance with increasing length of nonforested riparian patch; sculpins, benthic minnows, and darters decreased, and sunfishes and water-column minnows increased in numbers. Introduced species were more common downstream from longer riparian patches. Habitat diversity decreased and riffles became filled with fine sediments as upstream patch length increased. Length of upstream nonforested patch and substrate particle size were much stronger predictors of fish occurrence than riparian patch width. Faunal characteristics and physical features of the stream changed in direct proportion to the gradient of riparian disturbance, but the abundance of several species underwent pronounced change at particular threshold patch lengths. These results suggest that riparian forest removal leads to shifts in the structure of stream fish assemblages due to (1) decreases in fish species that do not guard hidden eggs or that are dependent on swift, shallow water that flows over relatively sediment-free substrates, or (2) increases in fishes that guard their young in pebble or pit nests or that live in slower, deeper water. When watershed development is anticipated or planned, limited clearing of riparian trees may cause minor disturbance to the fish assemblage, but streams in even a heavily forested watershed with vegetated riparian buffers cannot tolerate disruption of riparian-zone trees over much more than 1 km in length. Riparian buffer length and area should be given stronger consideration in stream protection and restoration plans.
PDF
