A couple of hours ago, I came home from Malmö Opera House after an evening with Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. It was beautifully sung and highly enjoyable, but one thing that’s stuck in my mind is the reoccurring theme in Verdi’s operas. It seems to me that his librettists are obsessed with the idea that men’s honour is somehow linked to the sexuality of female family members. And if the man’s honour is violated, it’s acceptable to commit murder to restore it.

This theme is commonplace in Verdi’s operas, which are played out on theatres everywhere, whilst Western society is condemning honour killings in other cultures. I’m not promoting censorship, but it’s frightening that this barbaric male chauvinism was once acceptable.

Image: The final scene of the opera depicted in 1860 (Wikipedia).

“A study involving people with diabetes has shown that belly size is a stronger predictor of a dangerous kind of heart disease than body mass index,” Channel News Asia reports.

This is yet another study concluding that weight is not really what’s important. It’s all about the waist. Having excess belly fat, or having an apple-shaped figure, has already been linked to high blood pressure, high sugar levels, elevated cholesterol, coronary artery disease, and heart failure.

Image: Wikimedia Commons (2010).

Sweden’s Supreme Court has ruled that the non-profit internet giant Wikimedia breaches copyright laws by publishing photographs of public artworks, The Local reports.

Image: Sculpture for an objective experience of architecture at the Kivik Art Centre, Sweden, photographed by Bengt Oberger. It’s been blurred to comply with the court ruling.

I can’t understand why altruism is such a popular idea in ethics. To me, being altruistic as a rule is to be self-destructive, to say that others are somehow more important. Egoism as a rule is not hatred or ill will towards others; it’s simply the notion that when there is a conflict of interest, my life is more important to me than yours. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) expressed it well when he wrote, “Egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul” (Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, Paragraph 265).

Image: Portrait of Nietzsche (1906) by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944).

“A masters student of Jagannath University was killed by suspected Islamist militants in Old Dhaka's Sutrapur area last night,” Mohammad Jamil Khan of Dhaka Tribune reports.

His name was Nazimuddin Samad, and according to reports, he was hacked to death for being an atheist.

This is yet another example of disrespect of religious liberty. Not that I am surprised considering that extremists never acknowledge freedom of religion as a core human right.

In an official letter dated 19 March 2016, the Pope says, on page 190:

In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, “as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”. It is unacceptable “that local Churches should be subjected to pressure in this matter and that international bodies should make financial aid to poor countries dependent on the introduction of laws to establish ‘marriage’ between persons of the same sex”

The pope is wrong. God created humankind to His image, and that includes homosexuals. Furthermore, if God disliked same-sex unions so much, how come He chose David who loved Jonathan more than any woman (2 Samuel 1:26) to rule the kingdom of Judah and Israel? The two men were also in a loving, same-sex union:

After David had finished talking with Saul, Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself. From that day, Saul kept David with him and did not let him return to his father’s house. And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt. (1 Samuel 18:1-4)

The Pope needs to read up on the Bible.

If you want to read the Pope’s letter in full, you’ll find it here.

Image: A manuscript illustration of Jonathan and David embracing, from circa 1300.

Pet Shop Boys’s best lyrics on the new album, Super, is “The Dictator Decides”. Pure poetry.

A favourite aphorism by Winston Churchill.

Note to non-Swedish readers: Skåne is Sweden’s southernmost county, known in some old or formal English literature by its Latin name, Scania.

David Barrett of the Telegraph reports:

British Muslims are becoming a nation within a nation, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned.

Commenting on a ground-breaking survey, Trevor Phillips said we are “in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims”.

He called for a new, tougher approach to integration and the abandonment of “the failed policy of multiculturalism”

The article goes on to say that his comments came as new survey for of 1,000 British Muslims found that:

• One in 25 Muslims (4%) said they felt at least some sympathy with people who took part in suicide bombings, while a similar proportion said they had some sympathy with “people who commit terrorist actions as a form of political protest”.
• A quarter (25%) said they could understand why British school girls could be attracted to become “jihadi brides” overseas.
• Less than half (47%) agreed that Muslims should do more to tackle the causes of extremism in the Muslim community.
• A majority (52%) believed homosexuality should not be legal in Britain, 39% agreed “wives should always obey their husbands”, and 31% said it was acceptable for a man to have more than one wife.

Frightening as these data is, I wouldn’t say multiculturalism has failed. The problem is not that various cultures are allowed to coexist but rather that some believe that cross-cultural dialogue on matters of ethics and politics are impossible. Besides, we don’t have to travel back centuries to find a majority of “ordinary Britons” favouring a ban on homosexuality and subscribing to ideas about women as inferior to men.

Maria Rankka and Andreas Hatzigeorgiou of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce make the case for—you guessed it—Stockholm. Personally, I think it’s more likely that British companies that wish to remain in the EU would want to move their headquarters to Ireland, or Malta, for the simple reason of language.

Katie Allen and Anushka Asthana of the Guardian report:

A British vote to leave the EU risks causing severe economic and political damage to Europe and will spill over into to weaken an already febrile world economy, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF listed a potential Brexit vote in June’s EU referendum as a key risk in its latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) triggering an immediate political reaction in the UK with Brexit campaigners accused the international institution of talking Britain down.

Maurice Obstfeld, the IMF’s chief economist, said a decision to quit the EU was a “very real” possibility and would affect economic growth even if an exit was managed smoothly. The body also cut its forecasts for global growth - and for the UK and other advanced economies.

The Europhobes will of course say that this is nothing but scaremongering.

From NASA’s website:

This new image of the Earth at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands.

The nighttime view of Earth was made possible by the “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as gas flares, auroras, wildfires, city lights, and reflected moonlight.

Away from the cities, much of the nightlight observed by Suomi NPP is wildfire. In other places, fishing boats, gas flares, lightning, oil drilling, or mining operations can show up as points of light. The number of rural lights is also a function of composite imaging. Fires and other lighting could have been detected on any one day and integrated into the composite picture even though they were temporary. That seems to be the case in central and western Australia, where many lights appear in this map. Different areas burned with wildfire at different times that the satellite passed over, giving the impression (in the composite view) that the entire area was lit up at once.

The image tells a lot about the world—where people live and where the power is.

I’ve just listened to season two of the podcast Serial. It’s not as great as the first one, but I still found the story of Bowe Bergdahl fascinating. One thing that stuck in my mind was the way he described his feeling when standing under an open night sky for the first time after years in captivity. The feeling—not only knowledge—of how small everything human really is.

Image: The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire from 1888.

I studied at this college in England as a sixth-form student in the late 1980s. I’m getting nostalgic when seeing the old building in this recently taken photograph. The college is no more, but the building looks just the same.

The Guardian publishes a long article by George Monbiot in which he slams “neoliberalism”. He’s written a whole book about it, and yet he fails to grasp that the ideology he hates so much. Instead, it’s the usual long and tedious stream of straw-man arguments, greatly illustrated in this paragraph:

The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

In reality, however, free markets have proven more successful at combating poverty than any government enforced redistribution of wealth. It has also empowered workers by giving them more purchasing power. Ironically, capitalism has also given the worker what socialism promised but failed to deliver, namely ownership of big business. Pension funds are the big actors today. As for polluted rivers, the problem seems to be that since “everyone” owns them, no one cares about them. Water privatisation means someone does care and would fight to keep the rivers clean.

You don’t have to love “neoliberalism” and capitalism, but if you write a whole book about its evils, take some time to reflect on what it is you hate instead of making things up.

Personally, I think the world needs more economic freedom, not less. Redistribution of wealth through government bureaucracy in prosperous countries only results in protectivism and the prolonged poverty of many in less developed parts of the world. People need more freedom—to move about and own property.

Image: Atlas by Lee Lawrie (1877–1963), photographed by Another Believer (Wikimedia Commons).

“Quod nescire velis homines, tua nesciat uxor.” Mediaeval wisdom from the Book of the Civilised Man by Daniel of Beccles, a member of the court of Henry II of England (1133–1189).

I don’t like the Swedish branch of Save the Children for several reasons. It has worked against nearly all reforms making the lives of gay people better in this country, and a few years ago, it tried to hijack the It Gets Better campaign and make it into something else than an effort to stop the wave of suicides amongst bullied gay teenagers. Now this organisation is about to make Veronica Palm its new leader, which only makes it worse. Palm has on several occasions slandered Jews and shown poor judgement on anti-Semitic ideas. It’s sad to see an organisation with such a noble cause doing so badly.

The Times of Israel reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harshly criticised a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) resolution from last week in which Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem’s Old City are wholly ignored.

The resolution refers to Israel as the “occupying power” at every mention and uses the Arabic al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif without ever calling it the Temple Mount, as it is known to Jews. The text does refer to the Western Wall Plaza but places it in quotation marks, after using the Arabic Al-Buraq Plaza.

“This is yet another absurd UN decision,” Netanyahu said Saturday. “UNESCO ignores the unique historic connection of Judaism to the Temple Mount, where the two temples stood for a thousand years and to which every Jew in the world has prayed for thousands of years. The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history and has again proven that there is no low to which it will not stoop.”

It bothers me that Sweden officially subscribes to this type of historical revisionism. You don’t have to love Israel and its government’s policy towards the Palestinians to acknowledge that Judaism has historic links to Jerusalem. To rewrite history to fit contemporary political convictions is simply wrong.

Image: The siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under the command of Titus in 70 BCE (1850) by Scottish painter David Roberts (1796–1864), via Wikimedia Commons.

The headline is a quotation from Molière’s The Misanthrope, which, by the way, is the only play by him that I really enjoy.

Image: Portrait of Molière (1622–1673) from 1730 by French painter Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694–1752).

“Switzerland has suspended the citizenship process for the family of two teenage Muslim brothers after the boys’ refusal to shake hands with their female teachers sparked a national debate over religious freedoms,” the Guardian reports. “The brothers, aged 14 and 15, had informed education officials in the northern municipality of Therwil that physical contact with women who are not family members violated their faith.”

This is absurd. Freedom of religion is truly under threat in Europe.

“Residents were shocked to see the flag, understood to have been a Nazi swastika banner, flying from one of the official flagpoles next to Vetlanda town hall in southern Sweden in the morning,” The Local reports.

And it gets worse:

It is not the first similar incident in Sweden recently. Last month a man who made Hitler salutes in Umeå was fined for inciting racial hatred. And earlier this year The Local reported that a Swedish Nazi group had tried to block the entrances to two schools in Örebro, with tape featuring their logo.

Far-right swordman Anton Lundin Pettersson who walked into a school in Trollhättan and stabbed three people to death in October last year had also expressed Nazi sympathies ahead of the attack.

Swedish anti-racist foundation Expo has said that neo-Nazi activities are growing in intensity in Sweden, although the organisations propelling far-right propaganda are declining in numbers.

And yesterday, a saw on television how Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik made a Nazi salute in an Oslo courthouse. This in a segment about him winning a case against Norway for violating his human rights!!!

One sentence in a The Local’s article makes me ill: “After making a Nazi salute on the opening day of proceedings, he claimed he was now a Nazi who had renounced violence and even compared himself to Nelson Mandela.”

Prince, one of my childhood favourite musicians, has died at the age of 57. Sad and unbelievable.

Strobe Talbott of the New York Times writes:

The possibility of a British withdrawal is already intensifying centrifugal forces among the 27 other member states. Marine Le Pen, the powerful leader of the National Front in France, has said that Brexit will help inspire a Frexit if she becomes president. There is talk in Athens about “Grexit-Plus,” a threat to leave not only the eurozone but also the union itself. Geert Wilders, the populist leader of the Netherlands’ surging anti-immigrant Freedom Party, has pronounced the union “finished.” Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, flouts Brussels’ rules and derides its institutions.

Meanwhile, the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, is actively stirring up trouble and discord in Europe. His annexation of Crimea two years ago was punishment for Ukraine’s seeking affiliation with the European Union. Russia has courted right-wing and anti-Brussels parties in Europe, and a Russian bank owned by a Kremlin ally supported Ms. Le Pen’s National Front with a $10 million loan. Russia’s military has brazenly violated the airspace and territorial waters of Nordic countries, while the Baltic States have also been targeted by Russian-based cyberattacks.

For Mr. Putin, the collapse of the European project would be payback for what he views bitterly as Western triumphalism when the Soviet empire dissolved in the early 1990s. The more the European Union frays, the easier it is for Mr. Putin to promote his alternative vision of a Eurasian Union dominated by Moscow

Andrew Harrison of the Guardian has made a list of Prince’s ten greatest songs.

“Investigators said they want to speak to the singer’s friends, staff and flight crew—as it was claimed he had needed emergency treatment for the same drug used by fierce rival Michael Jackson,” Ashleigh Rainbird and Christopher Bucktin of Mirror report.

The headline is a quotation of Jean-Paul Sartre that I like.

The headline is a quotation of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970). I don’t know why, but something made me revisit his Madame de Sade today. A superb play that is a joy to read.

In a few hours, I’m off to Stockholm for a two-day meeting. Breaking with my normal routine, I’ve decided to leave my laptop computer behind and go offline. If the weather is nice, I will walk in this beautiful city that was my home for many years. I will stay in a hotel in the Old City, which still looks very much like it did in 1868 when this painting was made.

Image: Stockholm panorama by Swedish landscape painter Carl Johan Billmark (1804–1870), via Wikimedia Commons.

I had a lovely walk in Stockholm yesterday morning, when I took this photo of the City Hall.

I sometimes forget to return a book to the library on time, and every time I’m embarrassed about it when I pay my fine. So, it’s nice to know that I’m far from he worst offender in the world. At the Guardian, Eleanor Ainge Roy writes about a woman who has now brought back a book to a New Zealand library 67 years after it was due to be returned.

“A pastor who rallied with Ted Cruz has claimed that gay people love each other like cannibals love their victims, and like Nazis love their children,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

Keep in mind that Ted Cruz is now the moderate Republican candidate.

Gay people are ruining everything, according to Steve Pauwels, Pink News’s Joe Williams reports.

I thought I’d heard every homophobic calumny there is, but “sodomite supremacists” is new to me. But it’s not surprising, considering that homophobes consider liberty and equality for all an abomination.

King Solomon of Israel is traditionally considered the author of the Song of Songs, and I have always wondered what he meant when he wrote this:

If only you were to me like a brother,
who was nursed at my mother’s breasts!
Then, if I found you outside,
I would kiss you,
and no one would despise me.
I would lead you
and bring you to my mother’s house—
she who has taught me.
I would give you spiced wine to drink,
the nectar of my pomegranates.

Regardless of intent, it’s a beautiful poem.

שבת שלום

Image: Solomon’s descent into idolatry by Willem de Poorter (1608–1668).

The image of the King and Queen was taken by photographer Henrik Garlöv at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm a few days ago.

I have soft spot for the monarchy. Even though I realise that it’s an undemocratic institution, I see no harm in adding this personal touch to an often overly impersonal state. The Swedish monarch has no political power and is merely a symbol; and unlike many other European monarchies, Sweden has never been a republic. Besides, in a country obsessed with modernity, we can afford one antiquity.

Image: Kungahuset.se

I have been to Malmö Live and listened to Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto. Perfect for a Saturday afternoon.