AIDS by the numbers:
World AIDS Day is an emotional day for me. I remember lost friends, but I’m also grateful for the progress made to ease the burden on those affected by the virus.
This is what the airport in Sweden looked like yesterday when I left for Spain. I hate snow!
It takes one to know one. Why anyone is surprised by anything this QAnon freak says is beyond me. 🤷♂️
If you were deluded into thinking that homophobia isn’t that big of an issue anymore, well, you’re wrong. Top footballer Mohamed Aboutrika recently had a televised rant calling homosexuality “a dangerous ideology”. Gay people in the Arab world need our support.
“The effect is as if St Augustine had been reincarnated as a life coach, with added input from your mum.” 😀
It’s not really news—people of all communities find like-minded online—but what makes this special is the hatred some American atheists have experienced. It’s not unlike the hatred many gay people experience.
Read about it at Religious News.
“Once humans settled, they could no longer walk away from their shit,” Lina Zeldovich writes at JSTOR Daily. “And sure enough, shit began to pile up.”
An interesting read.
And the public has a say in the new design. I think this is a good idea. The current banknotes, with their fake bridges, are quite dull.
| Desktop | 32% |
| Mobile | 63% |
| Tablet | 5% |
And at least 24 killed for their coverage, according to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In total, 293 journalists are now imprisoned, of which 50 are in China.
After spending a week in Spain, I came back to Sweden yesterday. It was just above freezing point when I got off the plane. I really don’t like the cold and wish I could have stayed there. Now I have to wait five weeks for my next trip to Spain.
As if we didn’t already know that they don’t want us in their country…
Overall it seems fine, but I fear his proposed rethink of the budgetary framework. Governments spending more money is not the solution to anything.
The co-founder of iconic Bronski Beat has died. He meant a lot to a generation of gay men.
“Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the 6 January Capitol attack a PowerPoint recommending Donald Trump to declare a national security emergency in order to return himself to the presidency,” the Guardian writes.
When I talk about freedom of religion, people often ask how the law defines religion. The answer was given by the European Court of Human Rights. For the purpose of the law, religion is established and organised systems of belief and custom.
“Assange has reportedly been left with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems and signs of neurological damage following a mini-stroke,” the Sun reports.
Hmm…
A recent sighting of Putin’s notorious Buk missiles on their way to the frontline does not bode well for talks.
“For Rastafari, the ritualistic smoking of marijuana brings them closer to the divine,” Religion News Service reports. “But for decades, many have been incarcerated because of their use of cannabis.”
Now welcome, night! thou night so long expected,
That long daies labour doest at last defray,
And all my cares, which cruell Love collected,
Hast sumd in one, and cancellèd for aye:
Spread thy broad wing over my love and me,
That no man may us see;
And in thy sable mantle us enwrap,
From feare of perrill and foule horror free.
Let no false treason seeke us to entrap,
Nor any dread disquiet once annoy
The safety of our joy;
But let the night be calme, and quietsome,
Without tempestuous storms or sad afray:
Lyke as when Jove with fayre Alcmena lay,
When he begot the great Tirynthian groome:
Or lyke as when he with thy selfe did lie
And begot Majesty.
And let the mayds and yong men cease to sing;
Ne let the woods them answer nor theyr eccho ring.
Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares
Be heard all night within, nor yet without:
Ne let false whispers, breeding hidden feares,
Breake gentle sleepe with misconceivèd dout.
Let no deluding dreames, nor dreadfull sights,
When he begot the great Tirynthian groome:
Or lyke as when he with thy selfe did lie
And begot Majesty.
And let the mayds and yong men cease to sing;
Ne let the woods them answer nor theyr eccho ring.
According to Swedish newspaper Kvällsposten, the British captain was drunk and tried to flee the scene after colliding.
It’s good news, but it’s sad that it had to take a currency collapse to do it.
Had to take a blood test today, but the nurse couldn’t draw blood from my left arm so she had to put the needle into my right one, too. Now both arms are bruised and numb.
A court in Belarus has sentenced the opposition leader to eighteen years in prison. It’s not surprising, it only shows the ugly face of dictatorship.
On 16 December 2014, seven heavily armed Taliban fighters stormed an army-run primary and secondary school in Peshawar, Pakistan, and killing 150 people, of whom at least 134 were students. For the parents, this is a day of heartbreak and anger.
I try to stay away from the most absurd trolls on Twitter, but this tweet by “Jesper” is really beyond the normal trash. He’s attacking a political opponent, who is gay, by describing his two children as bought. Only heterosexuals are allowed to have biological children.
A few years ago, I wrote an article on Christian homophobia, and a common libel I looked at was that gay people buy or steal other people’s children. The idea is that, since we are assumed to be unable to have our own children, the arrangement we do to become parents involve child abuse—we take the child from its rightful parent.
I don’t know who this “Jesper” is, but I can see that he clearly walks right into this old homophobic tradition. And it revolts me. To use someone’s children as means to bring down a political opponent is simple beyond any moral standard.
Lady Drag, the alter ego of actor Marvin Pleitez, has emerged as an unconventional Bukele adversary, drawing media attention with eye-catching opposition to what her creator sees as the president’s autocratic tendencies, Reuters reports. 💋
In short, Kremlin wants NATO to abandon some of its member states and leave Eastern Europe ready for Russian takeover. It only shows the need for Europe to stand strong and united against Russia.
Good news is that it continues slow down. The Canary Island may soon be able to go back to normal—at least as far as volcanos are concerned.
The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has a list that comes handy when discussing with people on Twitter and other social media. People love bad arguments.
I’m going to Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve. I’m going to a country in near-complete lockdown. But the shops are open so I can buy beer.
According to a new report, the most liberal town is Givatayim. The least liberal town is the settlement of Beitar Illit.
Comet C/2021 A1, more commonly referred to as Leonard, was discovered earlier this year and made its closest approach to Earth yesterday.
A 66-million-year-old fossil of a complete baby dinosaur in its egg, apparently just a few days before it would have hatched, shows the remarkable similarities between theropod dinosaurs and the birds they would evolve into, according to a study published in iScience yesterday.
I read that the Bidens bring in a new dog and cat while current dog is set to be rehomed. So, the United States now has a new First Dog and a First Cat. Woof!
“Hong Kong’s oldest university has removed a statue mourning those killed the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. The totalitarian state can’t tolerate to be reminded of the peaceful demonstrators it killed.
It’s no longer emitting lava, and there’s been no seismic activity.
Temperatures dropped to −7°C in some parts of the Netherlands overnight on the coldest night of the winter so far, Dutch News reports.
I’m going to Amsterdam next week, and I really, really hope the temperature is going up before then.
Parents have discovered that school libraries hold books that contain depictions of oral sex between males. “Our goal is to remove anything that’s sexually explicit,” one parent says.
I will never understand why so many find sex so disturbing.
Here’s the definitive guide to animal sacrifices, if you need one. And who doesn’t?
In the Wall Street Journal, Jamie Waters has a piece about earrings for men being more accepted in recent years. What? I didn’t know there were still people thinking men can’t wear earrings.
More than six out of ten British voters believe Brexit has either gone badly or worse than they expected.
The South African bishop Desmond Tutu has died. He not only fought apartheid, he was an outspoken defender of gay rights in a continent where most Christian churches are violently homophobic.
A large Roman fort—made for thousands of battle-ready soldiers believed to have played a key role in the successful invasion of Britain—has been discovered in Velsen on the Dutch coast.
And the winner is, “No, the Taliban did not seize $85 billion of US weapons” by Glenn Kessler, published on 31 August.
The Washington Post has the full list.
Knowingly displaying any sort of paraphernalia, words, or symbols that support extremism will be considered active participation under the new guidelines.
According to Architectural Digest, the number one is fashion designer Calvin Klein, who sold a 19,500m2 property in East Hampton for $85 million.
I’ve never understood why people would want to live in the Hamptons. It’s just a very dull area.
The new therapy at Barcelona’s Clínic Hospital extracts blood from the patients, selects their leucocytes, and redesigns them through genetic engineering, making them better able to recognise cancer cells.
You guessed it, Jarosław Kaczyński is at it again.
In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes about the criminalisation of Memorial, an organisation set up to keep the memory of Soviet human-rights violations alive. It used to be an organisation that Kremlin welcomed, but:
Putin’s determined re-politicization of history has changed all of that. He began by bringing back annual celebrations, complete with Soviet flags and uniforms, of the 1945 victory in what is still called, in literal translation, the “Great Fatherland War”—as if no one else fought the Nazis. He brought back the Soviet national anthem. Slowly, Stalin was whitewashed. Nostalgia for his victories was pumped up to new levels. In 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Russians were repeatedly told on state television and in thousands of social-media posts that they were fighting a war against “fascism” once more.
And:
Dictators distort the past because they want to use it. Putin certainly wants to use the past to stay in power. If Russians are nostalgic for their old dictatorship, then they have less reason to push back against the new one. He may also want to use the past to give legitimacy to violence—Russians who have no awareness of what Moscow did to Ukraine in the past will feel no sense of guilt about repeating old patterns of aggression. History does contain lessons, and here is one of them: If Putin plans to turn his falsely heroic vision of Russia’s past into a justification for another war in the present, he won’t be the first autocrat to do so.
There was once great hope for a democratic Russia, so this return to Soviet-style oppression is truly sad. Russia could be a great country, but totalitarianism keeps bringing it down.
This is bad news for everyone involved.
No human contact needed.
“Despite their declining numbers, it is practically impossible to walk down a street in any Japanese town or city and not spy the telltale light emitting from a vending machine in the distance,” Justin McCurry of the Guardian writes.
Reading this article about Tim Bergling makes me so sad.
Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it challenged a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the electric socket. Has the bot uprising started?
This is madness. French border officials have turned back British nationals who are legally resident in other EU countries, saying they are no longer allowed to travel through France, the Guardian reports.
In traditional Christianity, 31 December is not only the last day of the year, it’s also the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. Seen here is a tenth-century painting from the manuscript known as the Menologion of Basil II.
Another year comes to an end. Let’s hope the next one will have less of Covid-19. I’m leaving for Amsterdam in a couple of hours. Happy new year!