About half an hour ago, a large bomb detonated in front of the main police station in central Malmö. I live in a flat on the fourth floor right next to the entrance where the bomb was hidden in a garbage bin. To make matters worse, I think a saw the bomber about an hour before the explosion. I have given the description to the police and hope they are able to catch the man.

My flat was partly demolished by the bomb. The balcony is completely blow to bits and the window right next to my desk, where I work most of the time, was forced open by the explosion. Seen in the images I post here now are the entrance to the police station and the street where many windows from my block of flats has fallen after being crushed by the explosion.

Many people have contacted be tonight. Thank you all for your concerns. I’m all right and the damage done to my flat will be repaired. It’s shocking that things like this happens, but that’s the world we live in. Posted above is a picture I just took of the policemen now working to collect evidence where a bomb exploded about three hours ago. The site is only a few metres from my home office. Had the bomb been only a little bigger, I could have died tonight.

Now, sleep!

I can’t sleep, so I took some more pictures of the aftermath of last night’s bombing of Malmö police station across the street from my flat. The daylight gives a better idea of the damage the bomb has done.

“Prince Harry has revealed that he feels ‘incredibly nervous’ before making speeches and anxious when he enters a room full of people,” BBC reports. “He was speaking in a video as part of a campaign run by his Sentebale charity to help reduce the stigma associated with HIV.”

Watch the video clip here.

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Brandy Zadrozny of The Daily Beast writes about Swiss-American pickup artist Julien Blanc:

Perhaps Blanc’s most egregious act, according to Li, was a video filmed in Tokyo that shows Blanc pulling the heads of Asian women into his lap and forcing kisses on a cashier who nervously laughs and tries to pull away. “If you’re a white male, you can do what you want,” Blanc tells a group of students as they watch his video and take notes. Just “yell ‘Pikachu.’”

Critics of the video found a number of troubling posts on Blanc’s social-media profiles, including several photos on Twitter of Blanc’s hands around women’s necks with the tag #ChokingGirlsAroundTheWorld and a chart detailing types of domestic abuse with the caption, “may as well be a checklist.”

Revolting!

“Sweden’s nationalist party has said it will support a shadow budget bill being put forward by the country’s centre-right parties instead of the budget proposed by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s coalition,” The Local reports. “The decision has rocked Swedish politics and could trigger an election.”

“Sweden’s coalition government has failed to get its budget through parliament amid a political crisis that could see the fall of the government or even fresh elections, just three months after voters last went to the polls,” The Local reports.

Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, has announced the snap election in an ongoing press conference.

Update: The Local has more.

“There is great variation within the asexual community,” the Guardian reports.

It’s fascinating how people identify with a negative. The atheist movement does the same thing—they don’t believe in God and has made this their thing. I wonder what comes next. Perhaps an apolitical movement for people with no interest in politics who identify strongly with this disinterest? As of now, label me an anti-shrimp person. I don’t care for shellfish, and that is who I am!

In a short column in Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Petter Larsson, a prominent communist journalist, writes that accusations of anti-Semitism in Sweden’s socialist camp are as unfounded as claims of revolutionary tendencies amongst Liberals. Instead, Larsson writes, it is people on the Right who deliberately interpret criticism of Israel and concern for Palestinians as anti-Semitism.

Well, the Swedish socialist tabloid Aftonbladet published an article in 2009 claiming an international Jewish conspiracy to harvest bodily organs from Arab youths. Three years later, in 2012, Adrian Kaba, a socialist politician, wrote an article in which he described a Jewish-European conspiracy against Muslims. The same year, Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama-appointed head of the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, visited Malmö after the city’s then mayor, the socialist Ilmar Reepalu, had said that neo-Nazis had infiltrated the local Jewish community and demanded that Swedish Jews must reject Zionism if they want to be safe.

These are just a few examples. A complete list would be very long.

Petter Larsson may not like it, but the truth is that contemporary Swedish anti-Semitism primarily is a problem for the Left. To neglect the problem with this type of racism by disguising it as legit criticism of Israel only serves to illustrate the problem.

“Grace Phelps—the daughter of church spokeswoman Shirley Phelps—is one of the many members of the Phelps family who have left the church and expressed pro-gay beliefs,” Pink News reports.

There’s still hope for humankind.

The Socialist MP Hillevi Larsson has been awarded for her pro-Palestinian activism, Swedish newspaper Dagen reports. The prize contains a map of Palestine without Israel. In a lame excuse, Larsson tries to explain the map by referring to the 1948 Palestinian exodus and many Palestinians’ dream of a return to Palestine. As always, the narrative is extremely biased as no one in the Swedish Left cares much for the million Jews who were forced out of Arab lands in the years prior to 1948.

“The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world,” Brett Arends of Market Watch writes.

“Baptist pastor in Tempe, Arizona called for the mass extermination of LGBT people on Sunday in a sermon entitled ‘AIDS: The Judgement of God’,” David Ferguson of the Raw Story reports.

“Ayn Rand fans, here’s something to whet your appetites: New American Library has released the cover image for ‘Ideal,’ the first Ayn Rand novel to be published in more than 50 years,” Jennifer Maloney of Speakeasy reports.

“A new recommendation from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] falls short of endorsing circumcision for all newborns, but does say the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks,” Tablet Magazine reports. “The procedure has been shown to reduce the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, with little to no loss in sexual pleasure.”

“The world’s first clinical trials in London will explore whether the Viagra-style drug could help prevent a common form of dementia by increasing blood flow to the brain,” Nicola Harley of the Telegraph reports.

It might also cure some grumpy old men?

“I have no hatred for ‘Gays’ as individuals, but as a political movement you are Antichrist and the Devil’s diciples, and the Lord has told me to oppose you,” a monk, who spend his time distributing homophobic leaflets, has written in a letter to Pink News. Oh, dear!

Seen in the picture is the Devil taken from a fresco of Hell at the Florence Baptistery.

“The four worst-affected countries were Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Syria, accounting for 80% of all deaths,” BBC reports.

“Sweden is the fifth most taxed country in the world with more than 40 percent of its GDP raised through taxes,” The Local reports.

The protesters carried placards and banners that read, “Homosexuality is inhuman”, “Even cows don’t do it!”, and, “Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam”, Alieu Ceesay and Musa Ndow of All Africa report.

The truth is that homosexuality is very much human, that cows do in fact “do it”, and that Islam contains plenty of homoeroticism for those willing to see it.

The Hollywood Reporter has the complete list. Swedish director Ruben Östlund has been nominated for best foreign film for his Force Majeure.

“Rabbi David Mitchell wed his partner Ian Kirsh at the synagogue on Wednesday—while two other same-sex couples jumped at the chance to marry under the chuppah in a traditional Jewish ceremony,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

מזל טוב

“Israel should insist that we discriminate, that we apply double standards, this is because you are one of us,” Jesper Vahr, Denmark’s ambassador to Israel, has said, Jerusalem Post reports.

From Pink News:

Christian anti-gay group Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays launched a billboard in Richmond, Virginia featuring pictures of two identical men, claiming: “Identical twins. One gay, one not. We believe twins research studies show NOBODY IS BORN GAY”.

However, it turns out that far from being twins, the billboard is actually two pictures of the same man—and he’s gay, and does not even have a twin brother.

“Model Kyle Roux, who hails from South Africa, says he was shocked that his image was used in the Virginia-based ad, especially because he identifies as an ‘out and proud’ gay man,” Curtis Wong of Huffington Post reports.

See more pictures at Sad & Useless.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports live. Hostages are being forced to display an Islamic flag.

In an interview conducted by Niklas Orrenius of Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Björn Söder, Second Deputy Speaker of the Riksdag and a prominent member of the Sweden Democrats, says that Jewish and Sami people can live in Sweden but never become Swedes unless they leave their Jewish or Sami identity behind.

“I wanted to increase the percentage of divorces in society,” Sweden’s Golden Globe nominated film maker tells The Local.

Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports:

A machine that administers sedatives recently began treating patients at a Seattle hospital. At a Silicon Valley hotel, a bellhop robot delivers items to people’s rooms. Last spring, a software algorithm wrote a breaking news article about an earthquake that the Los Angeles Times published.

“Law enforcement officials in Los Angeles are finding that, among very young perpetrators of sexual abuse—we’re talking 12-year-old boys here—access to porn is a very common driving force in their actions,” David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times reports. “Too young to know what normal, healthy sex might be, they become hyper-sexualised by pornographic videos of abusive sex acts.”

There was a big far-right rally in Germany yesterday. Kate Connolly of the Guardian reports:

While avoiding blatantly racist slogans, some told the Guardian of their angst over the “demise of the West” due to the rise of Islam or voiced their distaste of salafists and homosexuals in the same breath, or decried the recent decision by local politicians to increase the number of homes for asylum seekers. One group, knocking back bottles of the local beer, talked openly of their fears of what they call “fecal jihad”

Faecal jihadism? Racists never cease to amaze me. Their stupidity is infinite.

“Sweden will never eliminate cultural differences by trying to deny they exist or avoiding discussing them,” Norhan Elhakeem, a Canadian journalist specializing in issues of integration, writes at The Local.

Hear! Hear!

(Photo by Jon Sullivan.)

“A representative of US hate group Family Research Council has said he doesn’t know whether gay people should be executed,” Naith Payton of Pink News reports.

“The United States and Cuba will begin talks to normalise relations, including opening an embassy in Havana and putting to rest one most enduring Cold War standoffs,” Brian Murphy of the Washington Post reports.

This is good news. Nature will soon put an end to the Castro tyranny and it’s important that the democratic world doesn’t turn its back on Cuba when regime dies off.

“Russia’s ambassador to Denmark on Wednesday made light of Swedish concerns over a Russian military jet’s alleged near-miss with a passenger plane, suggesting Swedish authorities may have smoked too much cannabis,” The Local reports.

I think the ambassador should lay off vodka for a while.

As Sweden is heading towards an extra election on 22 March 2015, opinion polls seem relevant news again. Below are the figures of the latest such poll from Ipsos, which newspaper Dagens Nyheter publishes today.

Political Bloc	Support
Centre-Left	44.1%
Centre-Right	40.8%
Far Right	12.5%

“A Chinese airline passenger pulled open an emergency exit as his plane was about to take off because he ‘just wanted fresh air ’,” Tania Branigan of the Guardian reports.

Richard Verrier and Saba Hamedy of the Los Angeles Times report:

Sony Pictures Entertainment has canceled the Christmas Day release of “The Interview” after the nation’s major theater chains said they would not screen the film.

The action came as U.S. intelligence officials confirmed widespread speculation that the North Korean government was behind the devastating cyber attack, which has hobbled Sony Pictures and spread fear throughout the entertainment industry. “The Interview” depicts the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Growth is inevitable, Russia’s de facto dictator Putin says at a press conference now aired on BBC News. But the facts say that the Russian economy is heading towards disaster:

On December 15th Brent crude barely budged—it dropped by 1%—but the rouble plummeted, losing 10% of its value against the dollar, the worst drop since the previous rouble crash in 1998. The Central Bank of Russia is thought to have intervened, using $2 billion to buy roubles. This did not work, and nor did the midnight rate hike: the rouble lost another 11% on December 16th.

Update: Putin is now rambling on about the West trying to destroy Russia by supporting terrorism in Chechnya and by criticizing human-rights violations. He is also saying that the West abused Russia’s vulnerable position in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, not least by allowing new members into NATO. Over all, Putin’s mindset is very much that of the Cold War—it’s all about Russia towards the West.

Many have criticised Göran Hägglund, leader of Sweden’s Christian Democrats, after an article by him was published in newspaper Dagens Nyheter yesterday. In short, what Mr Hägglund suggests is a cut in benefits to asylum seekers and a replacement of the current praxis of issuing permanent residency to refugees from Syria.

Although I’m in favour of open borders, I can’t see what’s so bad about Hägglund’s suggestions. Issuing temporary residence permits is in no way a measure that will conflict with fleeing people’s right to seek asylum. And receiving government benefits is never a fundamental right. Sweden should be a safe haven for those fleeing war, but it should not be a place where people go to get things for free on the taxpayers’ expense. In my opinion, all government benefits should be paid out only to those who have qualified by working and paying taxes in Sweden.

Read more at The Local.

“North Korea dispatched covert commando teams to the United States in the 1990s to attack nuclear power plants and major cities in a conflict,” Bill Gertz of Washington Free Beacon reports.

Mallory Ortberg of The New Yorker has written some funny mock reviews attributed to Ayn Rand. An example is this review of 101 Dalmatians:

A wealthy woman attempts to do her impoverished school friend Anita a favor by purchasing some of her many dogs and putting them to sensible use. Her generosity is repulsed at every turn, and Anita foolishly and irresponsibly begins acquiring even more animals, none of which are used to make a practical winter coat. Altruism is pointless. So are dogs. A cat is a far more sensible pet. A cat is objectively valuable.

“The FBI has concluded that North Korea is to blame for the devastating hacking attack against Sony Pictures,” Taylor Berman of Gawker reports.

“They are registered as Jews in the Ministry of Interior, but over the past 48 hours, it has been made clear to him that his wife cannot not be buried here in their small town because the local rabbi refuses to allow it,” Yizhar Hess of Ynetnews reports.

The way the religious establishment in Israel treats non-Orthodox Jews is despicable.

“A Chinese court has ordered a clinic to pay compensation to a gay man who underwent electric shock conversion treatment intended to make him straight,” Ben Tufft of The Independent reports.

“The Hamas terror group has been redoubling its efforts to restore the cross-border offensive tunnels that were destroyed by Israel during last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip,” The Times of Israel reports.

“The hackers who attacked Sony Pictures are making more demands of the studio following their success in scrapping the release of The Interview,” Jacob Kastrenakes of The Verge reports.

From the interview by Alexis Petridis of the Guardian:

“It wasn’t just music,” she said. “Images were coming out that I’d never seen before. It was then I started to think ok, what’s happening? What is the source of the leak? It’s not just one person, or someone sitting next to me in an office, or someone in a recording studio. I’ve had leaks before, a couple of weeks before an album was released, a lot of other artists have too, we all have to deal with that. But to have songs in the earliest demo form, from last March, that’s extremely disturbing to me.”

“The 11-foot-tall work—part of a personal museum housing mementos, trophies and awards—captures the 29 year-old’s athletic prowess,” Dan Avery of NewNowNext reports. “It also captures his healthy endowment, as the statue’s shorts tent quite noticeably in the front.”

“In a discussion for Australia’s Joy 94.9 FM, a senior official in the Australian Salvation Army suggested that sexually active LGBT people should be put to death,” James Park of Pink News reports.

“An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognised the ape as a ‘non-human person’ unlawfully deprived of its freedom,” Richard Lough of Reuters reports.

“Downton’s conservative aristocrats would have been far more abusive—verbally and actually: mocking, sneering and complaining about their servants was standard Edwardian and inter-war conversation,” Polly Toynbee of Guardian writes.

As most socialist, Polly Toynbee is obsessed by class. In most cases, I think the Socialist Left is wrong about its class warfare, but it is a problem that so much of contemporary culture romanticises the hardships of the working people of the past.

Seen above is the nativity scene in Hortus deliciarum by Herrad of Landsberg (ca 1130–1195).

An arsonist set fire to a mosque and injured five people in the Swedish town of Eskilstuna today, BBC News reports.

“At a cinema in North Bergen, security guard is on high alert for trouble surrounding the long-awaited screening of ‘the North Korean film’,” Nicky Woolf of the Guardian reports.

I love the fact that people of the free world refuse to give in to the communist regime in North Korea. The film in question, The Interview starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, is said to be quite bad and not very funny, but it’s now a matter of defiance to watch it.

“Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir, 28, was arrested a year ago for writing an article about the Prophet Mohammad and the caste system, an extremely sensitive subject in a West African country with deep social and racial divisions,” Kissima Diagana of Reuters reports.

Putting the gross violation of human rights aside, it’s absurd that legislators still think God and prophets need protection from blasphemers.

Sex and drugs helped Britain overtake France to become the world’s fifth largest economy, Szu Ping Chan of the Telegraph reports.

“Sweden’s government has scrapped plans to run a snap election in 2015 after crisis talks,” The Local reports.

The deal that saved Sweden’s socialist minority government is called the December Agreement. I don’t like it. It’s the end to parliamentarianism as it transfers powers from the Riksdag to the minority government. I think the centre-right opposition will regret this agreement.

“They are pro-European, socially liberal, regard unemployment and poverty as more important issues than race relations or immigration, and the vast majority are regular users of social media,” Toby Helm of the Observer reports.

There’s hope for Britain!

In an article published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, a group of scientists present their findings on the erect penile length and circumference dimensions of 1,661 sexually active men in the United States. Amongst other things, they found that oral sex makes the penis larger.

Seen above is the painting Fellatio (1906) by Édouard-Henri Avril (1849–1928).

Liam Hoare of Slate writes:

An old new power struggle is underway in Europe. With Russia on one side and the United States and the European Union on the other, the struggle is geopolitical—in Ukraine, violently so. But it is also ideological, a clash of values and cultures at the heart of which is the question of whether societies should integrate or ostracise their LGBTQ citizens. It is Europe’s new gay Cold War.

“Sweden may have narrowly avoided snap elections that would have been dominated by a debate on immigration, but with asylum seekers arriving in record numbers the issue is unlikely to stay off the agenda for long,” analysts say according to The Local.

The problem is that the debate the Sweden Democrats wants is a racist one where people’s right to live in and identify with Sweden is determined by ethnicity and religion. What Sweden—and most of Western Europe—need is a debate on how to create new jobs for low-skilled workers with bad knowledge of the language required by most employers in today’s labour market. And this is not solely a debate on immigrants, but also relevant to all those natives—mainly boys—who leave schools without a proper education. It must become uncool to be a lazy and stupid bling-seeker.

A small mosque in the Swedish town of Eslöv is burning, SVT reports.

“Should no survivors be found among the 162 passengers and crew members aboard Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501, which disappeared Sunday morning en route to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia, carriers from Malaysia or their subsidiaries will have been involved in the world’s three deadliest aviation disasters this year,” Michael Forsythe of the New York Times reports.

This tweet from ÜberFacts made me laugh:

“The Palestinians are pressing for a UN Security Council vote this week on a resolution that would call for the recognition of a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines by 2017,” Elhanan Miller of The Times of Israel reports.

Lithuania will join the eurozone on 1 January 2015. This is what the country’s euro coins will look like. The motif is taken from the coat of arms of Lithuania. I think it looks nice.

“It might not feel like it, but we are safer, richer and healthier than at any time on record,” Fraser Nelson of the Telegraph writes.

“The number of attacks on Jews is expected to be higher in 2014 than in any year since 1984,” Rosa Silverman of the Telegraph reports.

“An Alco poll published in Proto Thema on Sunday showed the neo-Marxists leading by 3.3%,” Helena Smith of the Guardian reports.

What this would mean for the eurozone is not known, but it most likely will cause some turmoil in the EU.

“The Transportation Ministry’s acting director general of air transportation, Djoko Murjatmodjo, confirmed on Tuesday that wreckage discovered in Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan, was from AirAsia flight QZ8501,” Nadya Natahadibrata and Hans Nicholas Jong of The Jakarta Post report.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate have the list. It’s a very American-perspective list.

According to the people over at The Local, this is the list. It’s a very Sweden-perspective list.

“The draft resolution by the Palestinians calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem within three years and revised to include language declaring East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state was presented to the UN Security Council late Monday,” The Times of Israel reports.

Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg View writes:

Polls suggest that the opposition Syriza party may win power in Greece; its leader, Alexis Tsipras, wants to unwind government spending cuts to halt what he calls a “humanitarian crisis” in his country. If he does win the prime minister’s job on Jan. 25, the EU will need to take his concerns seriously, recognise that fiscal backtracking is preferable to seeing Greece exit the euro, and concede that the unfortunate solution to the nation’s unsustainable debt is to forgive some of it.

Dynasty-actor Joan Collins is amongst recipients of top honours from the British Queen, Caroline Davies of the Guardian reports. Here’s the list in full.

The poem “Ring Out, Wild Bells” by Lord Tennyson:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in navyress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.