“They’re big, they’re tough, and, presumably, some of them are gay,” Simon Evans writes, as if gay people in American football came as a surprise. Old stereotypes die hard.

While the socialists march the streets on May Day in demand for less freedom and more bureaucracy, I turn to an essay on minimalism. I like minimalism—in literature, arts, and politics.

Painting: Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918).

This has to be today’s OMG!

“The Palestinians’ lack of will to recognise the state of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people is the root of the conflict,” Israel’s prime minister says. He’s right.

More minimalism.

“The findings may be a step towards finding the holy grail of slowing human ageing,” France24 writes.

To save myself from intellectual meltdown, I have stayed away from the Swedish Humanist Assosiation’s blog—a hangout for angry atheists. I made a revisit today, only to find the latest piece of humour from Eric Wadenius, former head of the Swedish Humanist Youth Organisation. In a comment on an article by Christian debater Göran Skytte, Wadenius writes (in my translation):

Skytte has made himself irrelevant in the debate. Had I been invited to a radio or television debate where Skytte was my “opponent”, I’d decline. He is no longer worth anyone’s time.*

This from the man whose favourite argument against gay rights is that evolution has programmed him—and, presumedly, everybody else—to feel disgust against homosexuality—unless it’s female homosexuality, which makes him horny. It’s not homophobia, I’ve been told—it’s “science”.

For the record, I’m no fan of Göran Skytte nor his very conservative and narrow-minded theology, which, ironically, often result in the same attitude that Wadenius manifests. It’s a sign of modern religiosity that the extremes are so very hard to tell apart.

*Wadenius’s text in Swedish: Skytte har gjort sig själv irrelevant i debatten. Skulle jag bli inbjuden till en radio- eller tv-debatt där Skytte skulle vara ”motståndare” så skulle jag tacka nej. Han är inte längre värd någons tid.

Megan Garber writes about a one-way ticket to Mars.

A partly interesting debate (in Swedish) arranged by liberal think tank Timbro recently.

Read More

Morgan Polikoff wants this to die. I say no.

“The Rhode Island House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill that will allow same-sex marriage in the state,” NPR reports. “The bill expected to be signed into law later today by Gov. Lincoln Chafee.” Good news!

“The chemical compound in cannabis, THC, appears to be able to damage and weaken the most common strain of the HIV virus,” Wired reports.

“Waste managers in Sweden’s third city may introduce a fine for Malmö residents who don’t properly sort their garbage after finding parts of a table in a food waste container,” The Local reports.

I don’t lim this idea, but I have become something of an expert on sorting my trash.

These foes of freedom are Burma, China, Eritrea, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Not even the Arab League gets thru to these people. Hamas refuses to recognise Israel and claims all the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. In other words, no peace.

The boy didn’t even get to have sex with the woman before she stole his stuff. What a bizarre story!

Fascinating building.

The homophobes will spin this like crazy. But male rape doesn’t equate homosexuality.

The Observer takes a look at life-saving harm reduction in Denmark.

“Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party has staged a rally in central Budapest in protest at the capital’s hosting of the World Jewish Congress,” BBC reports. In some parts of Europe. it’s still 1939.

The Syrian regime has helped Iran arm Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah for years. A few hours ago, Israel strikes back.

“The new Israeli attack is an attempt to raise the morale of the terrorist groups which have been reeling from strikes by our noble army,” says a spokesperson for the regime on Syrian television. This is the regime that has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

David Sessions reviews Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age (2007).

There might be some problems with this website today as I’m doing some background improvement.

From the motivation:

The Polar Music prize 2013 is awarded to Youssou N’Dour from Senegal. A West African griot is not just a singer, but a story teller, poet, singer of praise, entertainer and verbal historian. Youssou N’Dour is maintaining the griot tradition and has shown that it can also be changed into a narrative about the entire world.

I agree. Here’s one of my favourites.

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Just a short update from previous “meta” entry.

I’m not sure that I work on all platforms, but one thing I’ve done in today’s website overview is to change all permalinks to exclude file extensions (in this case “.html”). Why? Because as the Internet develops, I subscribe to the idea that permalinks should aim to be truly permanent—and minimalistic. As you might have noticed, this is a trend throughout the Internet. More and more websites turn to nicer, more streamlined permalinks. The thought behind all this is that meaningless information, such as the “www” subdomain, and changing part, such as php/html extensions, should be eliminated from URLs to allow easier transfer to new platforms and future technology—this without breaking old permalinks.

Anyhow, this change shouldn’t bother anyone. All “old” permalink should be automatically redirected. The extension should just disappear.

Update: I’ve been made aware of problems with new permalinks in the Opera browser. Will try to fix it.

Update 2: I think the problem with Opera is solved now.

Same sex marriage is now legal in the state of Delaware. Confratulations! Governor Markell signed the bill on Dover’s Legislative Hall stairway.

Photo of the historic moment by Doug Denison.

Yes, it’s 4Real. Fascinating!

Amazing pictures.

This is the same George Soros that supports leftist activism and hates capitalism.

Today is Europe Day, which is celebrate by listening to the Anthem of Europe, which is the final part of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, also known as “Ode to Joy”.

Enjoy!

I’m in favour.

That’s the question I ask myself when reading about Ariel Castro, who did just that to three girls. It’s like the Fritzl case all over again.

Jibril Rajoub would rather kill his own people than recognise the Jewish State. That is how deep the hate goes.

I’m returning to the very north of Sweden tomorrow for a week of pistol training in Boden. I expect it to be somewhat warmer then last time I visited the town. The photo was taken in November 2012.

I just now listened to this week’s BBC Radio 3 arts programme, “Night Waves”, in which Clementine Cecil talks about the threat to Moscow’s Melnikov House—Дом Мельникова in Russian. I was curious to find out more about this house, and found it here. A magnificent piece of modernist architecture.

Photo by Sergei Arssenev (via Wikipedia).

“A Swedish-American team of researchers claims that babies begin learning their native tongue when they are still in the womb,” The Local writes.

Southern Poverty Law Centre has a useful list with information about these hate groups’ propaganda.

After reading a Swedish review of Randall Sullivan’s biography over Michael Jackson, I searched the internet for more information about the late artist’s plastic surgery and came aross this article. So much self-hatred. It’s so sad.

In an open letter to the Swedish government, atheist activist Eduardo Grutzky writes (in my translation):

All children belong to us all; and all children should have access to a reality-based education that fosters autonomous individuals. Children are neither Communists, nor Muslims, nor Jews. They are merely children to parents who are Communists, Muslims, and Jews.*

This the usual distortion of the Humanist Association. They love this idea about ethnicity being an ideology. And as always, Grutzky goes on to list a number of prohibitions that would criminalise minority groups. Multiculturalism is the big threat a violation of minority people’s human rights.

Let me remind everyone of what the Framework for the Protection of National Minorities, adopted in Strasbourg in 1995, says about assimilation. Article 5:

1. The Parties undertake to promote the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their culture, and to preserve the essential elements of their identity, namely their religion, language, traditions and cultural heritage.

2. Without prejudice to measures taken in pursuance of their general integration policy, the Parties shall refrain from policies or practices aimed at assimilation of persons belonging to national minorities against their will and shall protect these persons from any action aimed at such assimilation.

Jews are a national minority in Sweden. So, Grutzky’s version of “human rights” has very little to do with the reality-based human rights. Forcing minority people to assimilate is a crime, and it makes me angry that this heterosexual try to milk the gay-rights movement’s advances to legitimise discrimination against other minorities. Grutzky makes the case that subcultures shouldn’t be allowed because they harbour homophobia. Sure, homophobia is real problem in a number of religious communities, but had it not been for the liberty to chose a subculture before the mainstream, gay rights would be nonexistent. It was people like myself who challenged the homophobic mainstream by refusing to assimilate and take pride in our own culture and identity. So, don’t be fooled by the likes of Grutzky. A society that doesn’t allow it members to opt out of the mainstream is not free.

*Grutzky’s text in Swedish: “Alla barn är allas barn, alla barn ska få tillgång till en verklighetsbeskrivning som fostrar autonoma individer. Barn är inte kommunister, muslimer eller judar, de är barn till föräldrar som kan vara kommunister, muslimer eller judar.”

“As thousands cheered outside the state Capitol with rainbow and American flags, Governor Mark Dayton signed a bill on Tuesday that makes it possible for same-sex couples to get married,” NBC News reports. Great news!

It’s been one of those rase days that feel absolutely perfect, when the sun is shining at you, and nothing seems impossible. I have spent this perfect day at a remote shooting range in the forest of Northern Sweden. A friend took this photo of me during a break.

And weaker men are more likely to support the welfare state and wealth redistribution. This according to a new study by Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University in Denmark and Daniel Sznycer of the University of California.

“More than 20 South African boys have died over the past week during coming of age rituals, police said on Thursday, and they blamed botched circumcisions as the likely cause of death,” Reuters reports.

Every year in South Africa, boys aged 10 to 15 years from several of the country’s tribal groups are circumcised in traditional “initiation rituals”. The ceremonies usually take place over a number of weeks in remote rural areas.

Deaths are often caused by blood loss or infection when circumcisions are poorly performed by traditional practitioners.

These circumcisers need to be train to perform safe practices. This particularly important as surgery on boys at this age is a great deal trickier than on infants.

Lailufar Yasmin writes about secularism from a Bangladeshi perspective:

The fact remains that secularism cannot be imposed from the top, merely as a state directive. The term secularism itself was coined and introduced in the English vocabulary in 1851 by George Jacob Hollyake in order to create a conscious difference between secularism and atheism. It is the same tension that we face in our country right now. Moreover when secularism is imposed as a top-down approach, it looks like nothing short of an attempt to ‘catch up’ with the West or try to prove to the West that “look, we have denounced religion; we are modern too!” This is a typical crisis that non-Western societies face: how to define themselves as modern so the West understands. But what is overlooked here is that secularism cannot just be imposed as an ‘add and stir’ method, for non-Western societies have their own uniqueness to add both to the concepts of modernity and secularism.

One problem is that the West—especially Europe—nowadays makes no distinct differentiation between atheism and secularism. Banning burqas is only the most obvious example.

This poster can be seen all over Malmö today. Seen in the centre of the picture is the Communist Party’s local chairman, Daniel Sestrajcic.

“I am one of those people who dare to say that I welcome a progress towards Europe as a federation of national states,” Carl Bildt writes in Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet.

A welcome move indeed!

I love air travel.

It’s my birthday next week, and I have decided to celebrate it by enjoying Richard Wagner’s music drama Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. There are few—if any—composer whose work I enjoy as greatly as Wagner’s.

So says Leonard Bernstein, quoted in an article in The Local. And I agree. Hate the man, love his music!

Drawing by John Charles Dollman (1851-1934), from the Hélène Adeline Guerber (1859-1929), Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas (London, 1909).

At their convention in Texas, the Boy Scouts of America have voted to lift a ban on gay scouts. However, the ban on gay leaders remains.

There’s some good and bad news on the gay-rights front today. In Russia, human-rights activists were beaten by police and humiliated by fascist “Christians” from the Orthodox church. In Ukraine, gay people he’d their very first Pride parade, despite a local ban. Good, good, good!

I want it now!

1. On Sunday, the French homophobes took to the streets again and rioted against civil liberties en equality. Spokesperson Caroline Mako says they are a new movement, which aims to “maintain a permanent presence” in France. Pitiful people.

2. “The EU voted Tuesday to end an arms embargo on the Syrian opposition,” France 24 reports. It didn’t take long before the Syrian dictator’s best friend, Russia, criticised the EU. Russia sees no problem with shipping weapons to a brutal regime conducting domestic genocide, but when someone tries to help civilians being bombarded by the same military that should defend them, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov says that the EU decision “directly hurts our ability to organise an international conference”. Oh, the hypocrisy!

1. The Local writes about a woman who live-tweeted as she was sexually harassed by four men on a German train. I’m not shouted about these things happening. Some men are sexist pigs. But the indifference by so many bystanders is harder to understand. “He’s taken out his cock. I scream at him. The S Bahn is full. Nobody intervenes,” one tweet reads. No one seems to care for a woman who is about to be raped in public!

2. Too gay to make money? Apparently, that’s what Hollywood thinks about Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Behind the Candelabra—starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. “During a press tour in January, Soderbergh explained how he was turned down by every studio he approached with his Liberace project because executives deemed it ‘too gay’ to turn an acceptable profit,” Mother Jones writes. It’s 2013, not 1933!

3. “Italy is set to move off the EU ‘crisis list’ this week, as the European Commission acknowledges its efforts to reduce its budget deficit,” EU Observer writes. There’s light in the very dark tunnel?

1. When I took a walk through the city yesterday morning, I passed Malmö Caste, which was originally built in 1422 but destroyed in a fire in 1529. What caste we see today is from 1542. However, there are still some details left from 1422.

2. E! Online reports that rapper Lauryn Hill face criticism from the gay community for some lyrics on a new song.

3. In a new interview, Syrian dictator says he intends to retaliate any future Israeli airstrike. There’s no end to the madness of this brutal regime!

4. “The Swedish government wants to send troops and police officers to participate in UN peace keeping efforts in Mali,” the Local reports. Good! We must all stand up for liberty.