The weather wasn’t great, but Malmö managed nonetheless to pull off a decent Pride Parade today.

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Adam Chandler writes about the raise of anti-Semitism in Germany.

I spent most of yesterday in Copenhagen. I snapped this picture while waiting for the metro in Ørestad, a new urban area in development. I think this is beautiful.

Mariano Rajoy says he believes the EU could introduce eurobonds within a few years. I hope he is right.

QX has some pictures from Saturday.

Anti-Semites never give up, do they?

I’m leaving for China. I will back in Sweden on 17 September. Until then, I’m basically off-line. Will probably blog while in Beijing, but I’m not sure about the reliability of my Internet connection. Amongst other things, I will visit a Jewish congregation and see how Chinese Jews go about their Torah studies.

A well-known American atheist activist has been bullied into quit blogging. Not by religious fanatics of the traditional sort, but by antagonist within the atheist community:

So, goodbye for now. Maybe I’ll be back eventually, if the hatred subsides. Who knows. Maybe the horde of haters will take up knitting as their new hobby, or a time machine will be invented and I can go back to when we were all happy giggling at creationists together without hurling slurs at any woman who dared to be too uppity. But until then, I need to focus on keeping myself sane and happy—and that’s just not going to happen within the toxic atheist community.

Atheism has really become just another religion.

By the way, perhaps it is now appropriate to start capitalise the word Atheism, as one does with Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etcetera.

The Democrats had some problem with this simple fact.

This boy’s really a fan of Sweden. More so than most Swedes, I’d say.

Not such a great idea for the nation with Europe’s most progressive drug laws.

Maybe.

I quite like it. I have a thing for the urban landscape.

Old communist-style (right) next to modern capitalist-style (left).

Or: Prince Harry wears cloths, Madonna does not.

Things are back to normal, or something.

“If you‘re feeling down about something, you’ll want to take a look at these photos,” BuzzFeed writes.

Partying with Chinese gay people. This is new to me, and I love it.

Not to my likening.

Rob Tisinai takes a look at flawed opinion poll. The anti-gay people are getting increasingly stupid.

Mao overlooking the Tiananmen Square.

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The Jingshan Park.

The Forbidden City.

I realise this building doesn‘t get to its right in this picture, but it‘s magnificent in real street view.

“President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning,” Politico reports.

I’d be very surprised if Obama doesn’t win the election. Who loves Mitt? No one.

Yesterday, I walked on the Great Wall. It’s very touristy, but it has to be done, I’m told. The weather wasn’t too great, so most of my photos only barely catch the greatness of the wall climbing the mountains north of Beijing.

I like this picture from America’s Liberty.

QX has some really fun photos from Europe’s very own Folsom Street Fair. I love the rubber-dog mask.

Yesterday, I visited the National Museum of China at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing (seen in the picture above). This is, apparently, the world’s biggest museum. I’m not so sure about that—I think I’ve been to larger museums—but it is BIG. Anyhow, on several floors, art from all eras of china’s history can be viewed. I personally liked the two extremes—the very old and the brand new. Here are a few pictures I took of the art I liked the best.

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“It is often suggested that the current worldwide debate on circumcision is an expression of growing anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic sentiment, or xenophobia. For several reasons I believe this is not the case.”

So writes Gert van Dijk, an ethicist at the Royal Dutch Medical Association, in an article that is a scholar example of xenophobia. The article, titled “His Body, His Choice”, sets out the usual, classic Christian arguments against Jewish and Muslim circumcision. Jewish and Muslim men are basically mutilated, brutally savaged by their evil parents who couldn’t care less about human rights. As always, parallels are made between Judaism, Islam, and child abuse. There is nothing new in the article at all. The anti-circumcision sentiment of medical organisations in predominately Christian countries is used as fact, research showing a link between circumcision and HIV prevention is played down, and the tiny minority of Jews who choose not to circumcise their sons is made into a global trend. For the record, I repeat my arguments on some key issues.

“Insofar as there are medical benefits, such as a possibly reduced risk of HIV infection, circumcision can be postponed until an age at which such a risk is relevant and the man himself can decide about the intervention or opt for alternatives,” van Dijk writes.

The risks are much greater in adult circumcision, and it’s a fact that young men don’t tell their parents or doctors about their sex life. By the time a boy legally becomes an adult male, he will most likely have had some sexual experience already. In the regions where circumcision is recommended for HIV prevention, it saves lives.

“The growing resistance to circumcision stems not only from medical and secular organisations, but comes also from within religious communities themselves. In the US and Israel, more and more Jewish parents are abandoning circumcision in lieu of rituals that do not lead to an infringement of physical integrity.”

The Jews who abandon circumcision are a tiny minority. In fact, the fastest growing Jewish subgroup in Israel is the ultra-Orthodox. They will die before giving up circumcision. So, what do the anti-circumcision activists suggest the government do about them? Send all Orthodox Jews to prison for practising Judaism in their own family—in the name of human rights?

Besides, using members of a minority group to legitimise oppression of that minority is really old school. I don’t know how many times I have met “cured gays” who found the straight light after praying to Jesus at some homophobic camp where they were taught about the evils of homosexuality. Gay sex destroys the body, gives you AIDS; same-sex attraction is unnatural, is a choice, and not a human right at all, etcetera. The anti-gay activists love these gay-turned-straight people and explore them to make life hell for gay people. If have no problem with gay people giving up homosexuality for religious conviction, but their decision is no excuse for anti-gay laws. The same thing goes for Jews and Muslims who give up circumcision. In a free society, they have that right, but they have no right banning those who wish to practise the religion in a traditional way.

“This growing aversion to NTC [non-therapeutic circumcision of minors] is therefore not caused by anti-religious or anti-Semitic feelings, but by an increased emphasis on human rights, combined with a growing awareness that children have the same fundamental human rights as adults. If it is not permissible to forcefully circumcise a grown man, why would it be permissible to do so to a child? The law protects the physical integrity of young girls, should it not do the same for boys? As it is his body, shouldn’t it be his choice?”

Needless to say, this argument is ONLY used when targeting minority religions. If children have the same fundamental human rights as adults, how could anyone allow the forced labour that is school? Could it be because adults always have to make decisions for the child because the child is not mature enough to know what is in her or his best interest? It might turn out that your child will one day hate you for picking a bad school that made his or her life worse than it could have been, but what is the alternative? Parents have to guess what is the best for their child.

Finally, female genital mutilation is about cutting off the girl’s clitoris, reduce her libido, and in the extreme cases, to physically prevent her from having sex by sewing her vagina shut. To compare that to male circumcision is in itself xenophobic. I am myself a circumcised man, and there is no resemblance between my lack of foreskin and the missing body parts of mutilated women.

A former Mossad chief on how Assad threatens the entire Middle East.

The Middle East seems to be in turmoil, Europe has its problem the currency crisis, but the number one topic in the newspapers here in China is the conflict with Japan over the Diaoyu Islands. The government-controlled China Daily runs an interesting article on the islands today, but for some reason I can’t get the online version to work in my hotel room. Anyhow, I post a link to it here.

Ironically, it’s easier to read the online version of Japan Times in my Beijing hotel. Here’s their latest article on what Japan called the Senkaku Islands.

Today, I saw a live panda feed on bamboo, which is the only thing they eat.

I used to have a script that made the website look acceptable in IE 7 and 8, but now I’ve made a few new alterations to Aqurette.com, which made it impossible. Use IE 9 or 10, or, better still, Safari, Opera, Firefox, or Chrome. The big change is that I now use the CSS3 property “background-size” to make logos and some photographs look better on screens with high pixel density.

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The propaganda war is one.

After ten days in China and as many hours in the air, I’m now back in Sweden.

Two pictures of two amazing buildings in Beijing.

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Today, I received the new issue of Judisk Krönika, Sweden’s main Jewish magazine. And this issue has a very telling theme: the non-religious Judaism. A new survey of members of Sweden’s Jewish congregation shows that only 4.5 per cent consider Jewishness not to be primarily about religion. About 65 per cents says that being part of the Jewish people is more important.

This is a reality I know well. I also know how difficult it is to make non-Jews realise that—unlike Christianity and Islam—Judaism is not primarily about belief nor ideology. Especially militant atheists seem unable to comprehend that Judaism is more about peoplehood and nationality than religious belief in the supernatural.

(Here’s a friendly ping to Humanistbloggen.)

When visiting the Forbidden City (紫禁城) in Beijing, I was fascinated by its grandeur and wanted to learn more about its former inhabitants. Two dynastic families, the Mings (明朝), who ruled China from 1368 to 1644, and the Qings (清朝), who ruled from 1644 to 1912, used the palaces in Beijing. The Forbidden City, which is called thus because no ordinary people were allowed into it, was finished in the 1420 and served as the home for emperors until Puyi (溥儀) was forced to abdicate on 12 February 1912.

The picture above shows the First Emperor of China (始皇帝), Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇). In the picture below, Puyi, the Last Emperor (末代皇帝), is seen as the Emperor of Manchukuo, a title he had for some time after he lost the Chinese throne. Seen in the picture at the top is the flag of the Qing Dynasty, which I think is beautiful.

If you subscribe to my journal via Feedburner’s feed, you can continue doing so. But, if you subscribe to the address, “feeds.aqurette.com/aqurette”, you’ll need to change it to my feed’s new address:

aqurette.com/feed

By the way, it seems RSS feeds is not what it used to be. Many online newspapers have abandoned them altogether.

If you thought pornography is something modern, take a look at these pictures from Pompeii.

So he wasn’t gay after all. Bummer! An ancient papyrus written in ancient Egyptian Coptic now suggests Jesus had a thing with a woman.

Angry atheists often say religious freedom is not about allowing parents to raise their children into a religion. That is wrong. Angry religious people often say religious freedom is about forcing others to adapt your religion, they are wrong, too. Religious freedom is in no conflict with free speech nor any other such civil liberty. Freedom of expression guarantees every citizen’s right to speak his mind in public. It doesn’t mean that everyone is allowed to speak his mind everywhere. If you’re in a private space, the owner of that space has the right to deny you from being their. The same thing goes with religious freedom. You are protected from government trying to inter fear with your religious practice and worship, but you have no right to behave as you wish in other people’s private space.

In other words, Muslims are entitled to protest an insulting film but no government has the right to ban the film from being shown.

The German chancellor is wrong to do this:

Der Spigel reports that a group called Pro Deutschland is planning to stage a public showing of the anti-Islam film, which has been the focus of huge protests and violent attacks on American and Western diplomatic missions across the Muslim world over the past week. Pro Deutschland, which only numbers a few hundred members, appears to be putting Chancellor Angela Merkel on the spot, having to choose between civil rights and public order.

Merkel was asked at a press conference on Monday what she thought about the plan to show the film publicly, and she answered that a ban could be justified for the sake of public security. “I can imagine that there are good reasons for this,” she said, referring to a proposed ban on the showing, adding that a ban was being considered by her government.

I hope Merkel has a rethink.

On 30 September, I’m leaving Malmö for six weeks of security training in Boden. I wrote about that in the journal a few weeks ago, and some readers have asked me about it. Well, there’s not much to tell. I‘ve rented a room at the regiment where the training will take place. I don’t know much—badly anything, really—about Boden, but the town does have an entry on English-language Wikipedia, and it has its very own website.

Seen in the picture is Boden’s coat of arms. You can tell it’s a town heavily influenced by the military.

Shame on Saudi Arabia!

Browsed through my photos from Beijing and realised that there is a flat missing in one of the large buildings on this picture. What happened?

The World Health Organisation’s book Traditional Male Circumcision among Young People (2009) has some really good advise for promoting safe circumcisions an prevent HIV:

1. Increase dialogue and understanding
2. Improve practices through training, collaboration, and regulation
3. Strengthen health systems in order to provide access to people who want medical male circumcision

Unlike the circumcision ban favoured by so many in Europe and America, this would actually do something good to the boys.

I was inspired by Peter Sawyer’s list of surreal photographs.

Shabbat shalom!

Another day, another moron.

The new far right is very similar to the old far right.

“For most of the past three decades, the Saudi regime allowed religious fanatics to set the rules and thus produced a rigid society offering no political, social, or cultural outlets for youthful energy and frustration other than jihad.”

From the Washington Post review of House’s new book.

David Sessions on Jesus’s wife.

Palin gives advice to Romney:

Palin also suggests that Romney and Ryan can be responsible for an epiphany on this country’s fiscal standing. “America desperately needs to have a ‘come to Jesus’ moment in discussing our big dysfunctional, disconnected, and debt-ridden federal government,” says Palin.

Read it here.

It’s hard to imagine a harder cultural clash than this. Needless to say, the filmmaker has the right to do whiter crazy and insulting film he wants to.

I’m mad. I’ve spent most of the night redesigning the header on my website instead of sleeping. Today, I’m a zombie (not eating people’s brains, though). What made me do this is a bug in Apple’s Safari browser, which is an unusual annoyance. Normally, everything that f**ks up about my web design is due to Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s inability to adapt to regular, standardised HTML5 and CSS3 coding. However, this time some versions of Safari refused to resize my logo properly. So after a few hours of frustration and pixel-level refining of my nice, new nameplate, I decided to give it all up and go for a completely new, minimalistic look. Inspired by the brilliant Jason Kottke, I scaled back on everything to make the design look sleek and minimalistic. The result is a website without images in its basic design. I hope you’ll love it.

PS! The website will still not work properly in Internet Explorer older than the current 9. It’s because those old browsers can’t read the new HTML5 attributes correctly. There are JavaScripts to fix that, but I don’t want to encourage the use of old browsers. If you’re on IE8 or older, get rid of it—now! Download Firefox, Crome, or some other modern freeware. Pronto!

A reminder: The only, now working news feed for this journal is this: aqurette.com/feed

This past weekend, an online friend of mine and his family were attacked in the streets of Gothenburg, Sweden, by an angry, Muslim radical. The reason for the assault was my friend wearing a T-shirt the perpetrator thought was an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. The incident was reported to the police.

Seen in the picture at the top is the perpetrator. My friend took a photo of him after the assault.

This is a statement from a man who is about that have nuclear weapons.

Joya Banerjee on how an anti-circumcision fringe group waged an ideological attack against AIDS scholarship.

This is something that i know only too well after years a debate with the most extreme anti-circumcision mob online.

From Slate:

The evidence that circumcision can prevent the spread of HIV is unequivocal. Circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by about 70 percent—making it more effective than most flu vaccines—and it is being promoted by global health authorities such as the World Health Organisation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a simple, permanent, and effective way to help prevent HIV infection. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement last month emphasizing that the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks, and recommended physicians discuss circumcision’s benefits and risks with new parents nationwide.

Unwanted facts in places, I’m sure.

At sunset, it’s Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most holy days of the Jewish calendar. Many secular Jews visit the synagogue on this day only. Many, not only the Orthodox, take part in the 25-hour fast. I’m taking the day off blogging.

Painting by Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879).

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, a day meant for atonement and reflection. I tried my best to be a good Jew, but when I, in the afternoon, was resting in my flat, a neighbour played a song by Lady GaGa on repeat—and these lyrics stuck in my head:

Hello everybody!
Get a ride to the west side,
Kiss the girl with her tongue tied.

Hello everybody!
We’ll get out cause you don’t care,
Shut down like software.

Hello everybody!
Take a sip for the hip-hop,
Fuel up at the rest stop.

We’re just physical creatures of the underworld,
She is the queen of the Faux Disco Scene.

Retro, Dance, Freak!

Job didn’t have this struggle!

No, not by itself. Ironically, none of the religions we know today would be here had it not been for people considered blasphemers at some time.

Andrew F. March writes about it at the New York Times.

An über-conservative Christian lobby group is doing what it can to distort the truth.

Science historian Laurel Braitman is the author of the forthcoming book “Animal Madness”. A topic i know only too well after years with a dog that seems to go between complete apathy to suicidal attempts to fight down horses. Salon has an interview with the historian.

OK, the headline sums it up. I’ve made some dramatic changes to the website’s design, and because I was too eager to put it online, I haven’t had the time to fix a proper stylesheet for mobile devices. In other words, the website will look bad on many smaller screens—like my own iPhone—for a while yet.

Anyhow, the thing is that the browser support for nice looking typefaces has long been bad and boring. A small selection typefaces has been available, like the Verdana font I used in my journal since 2005, but the ones I really like have either been working on Apple only—like the beautiful Gill Sans—or not at all. And since I have had problems with my logo not working well as a background image on the newer high-resolution screens, like Apple’s retina, I simply felt I had to do something radical. And this is it—for now. The journal is now running a typeface I’ve modestly call “Aqurette” and I host it on my own server. The idea is that no matter what computer you’re on, the website will look about the same. That is, if you’re working on a computer with up-to-date software, which I’m sure you’re not.

Tell me what you think by email or text message.

Memory is a strange thing. It feels so long ago, but this picture was taken on the roof of a building in Beijing only a few days ago. Not the best photo, but I was so happy the night a took it. Had a beer, with my beloved husband in a bar, at midnight, on a rooftop in China. The miracle of life is in those brief moments of pure happiness.

My old antagonist Pelle Billing is upset over a decision taken by Save the Children Sweden not to lobby for a ban on male circumcision. But what Dr Billing and the rest of the anti-circumcision lobby don’t get is that circumcision saves lives. It’s not only about some superstitious minority groups not realizing that Christian ideas about the body are objectively right. On a global area, in which Save the Children operates—circumcision is absolutely vital in the fight against diseases that kill people. A quote from the Slate article I wrote about earlier this week:

The evidence that circumcision can prevent the spread of HIV is unequivocal. Circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by about 70 percent—making it more effective than most flu vaccines—and it is being promoted by global health authorities such as the World Health Organisation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a simple, permanent, and effective way to help prevent HIV infection. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement last month emphasizing that the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks, and recommended physicians discuss circumcision’s benefits and risks with new parents nationwide.

Even more than using condoms alone—which must be used correctly every time one has sex over the course of a lifetime—male circumcision as part of a range of HIV prevention interventions has the potential to significantly slow the spread of AIDS in the worst-affected parts of Africa. At a fraction of what it would cost to maintain AIDS treatment for an HIV-positive individual over the course of a lifetime, male circumcision is a permanent and inexpensive prevention method that, when coupled with condoms and counseling, makes sense for countries where HIV is spread mainly through heterosexual intercourse.

PS! Dr Billing will never read this because he has blocked me on all social media. I figure he’s done that to everyone who doesn’t agree with him. That’s one convenient way to block out unwanted truth.

Update: I love the grammarians amongst my readers. Yes, it should be “does” not “do” in the headline. I’m writing about the singular Pelle, not the plural Pelle—or Pelles. The headline is now corrected.

I just read another hostile article by someone eager to tell the world that blogs are for losers. Well, I’m blogging because I want to, not because other people like to. What annoys me is that “diary” is used as a negative in these anti-blog articles. When I think of diary, I think of such great diarists as Alan Clark and say to myself that blogging is something I should keep doing until I die of old age. To all the anti-bloggers I say, “Buy a book!”

No, officially it’s not today, it’s on 20 April 2013. But I appreciate my husband every day. I may not say it aloud Too often, but I do love him.

We’ve been apart for about a week, and I miss him terribly. Worse still, I will leave for a six-week training camp on Saturday, one day before he gets back. All in all, we will not see each outer for eight weeks.

So thank God—or Apple, contemporary technology and not least Hércules Florence—I have pictures of him. He hates it when I post photos of him, but now I do it anyway. I want something nice to look at in my journal.

I took this picture of him at Beijing Zoo two weeks ago.

I love you, Johan!

This from Jerusalem Post today:

In a response to a speech at the UN General Assembly by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Ira’n UN mission said Israel had made “baseless and absurd allegations against (its) exclusively peaceful nuclear program.”

So, what did the fakery elected president of Iran say at the UN? Apparently, this:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran stoked the anger of Israel, the United States, Syrian insurgents and gay rights advocates on Monday, using the first full day of his final visit to the United Nations as Iran’s leader to assert that he has no fear of an Israeli attack on his country’s nuclear facilities, regards the Israelis as fleeting aberrations in Middle East history, is neutral in the Syria conflict and considers homosexuality an ugly crime.

Nice man. Sounds like Erich Honecker.

“Police were called out early on Friday morning after loud bangs were heard near the Jewish community centre in Malmö,” The Local reports.

I’m an active member of the Jewish Community of Malmö, a board member of its egalitarian synagogue, and I feel very upset about the fact that some people in this city hate Jews this much. Over the past few years, there have been many incidents—mostly verbal attacks on members and staff—but placing a bomb at the entrance is extreme. Thankfully, no one was injured, and the police have taken two men into custody.

The bias of mainstream media never stops amazing me.

The Weekly Standard has published the Israeli prime minister’s address to the United Nations.

I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what the article in Jewish Press says.

Not if you are a hyena.

Yes, it’s Matt Barber. Let’s call this phobia the Dionysus complex.

“Germany’s Ministry of Justice has presented a draft law to permit circumcisions by doctors and mohels in response to uncertainty about the procedure fueled by a Cologne court’s ban on the procedure,” Forward reports. Good!

It’s Friday night and Shabbat is here again. Tomorrow, I’ll be travelling by train through Sweden to Boden. I will probably do some blogging on the way.

Here are some poetry and readings for Shabbat from Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles.

So says Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the executive director of the Movement for Progressive Judaism in Israel. And I agree with him.

I really should be in bed by now. I have a long train ride ahead of me tomorrow. Luckily, most of it by night in a made bed.

Instead of going to bed, which would be the sane thing to do, I’ve read articles and seen photos of Boden Fortress. It’s quite amazing! This is one of the thing I just have to see during my six weeks in this north-Sweden town.

Photo by Johan Elisson.

That just might be the last thing the world needs—more taxes to more ineffective bureaucracy.

This is my home for the coming six weeks. I’m in Boden, living in what used to be the Swedish Army engineer regiment. I live in a room by myself—because I sometimes feel bad by too much social interaction, and because I can afford the extra rent. Seems in the picture is about half my rime. It’s huge, but the rest is literally empty space. The walls, too, are completely empty. Only painted concrete.

I think the designer was a minimalist, or, more likely, an army boy who just couldn’t care less about the look of room. In any case, I like it. I prefer open space to many things. It also fascinates me how very few furniture I really need. A desk for my computer and a bed for sleeping, that’s it.

Maureen Orth has written an interesting article about the inner life of Scientology.