“Normalisation is the process by which something unusual or extreme becomes part of the everyday,” Owen Jones writes.

It’s frightening how fast the extreme has become normal.

Today, Sweden’s celebrate its national day to commemorate the election of King Gustav Vasa on 6 June 1523. I’m no fan of nationalism, and even less so of Gustav Vasa. He was never king of the province I live in.

Skåne (or Scania) didn’t become part of Sweden until 1658, when the Swedish army occupied this part of what was then Denmark.

It’s time for some extra hotness this summer.

The Biden administration says the artist has a long history of denigrating Jews, and its Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, adds that Roger Waters shows “despicable Holocaust distortion”. They’re right. It’s sad that Waters has deteriorated into this advocate for dark-age Jew-bashing.

I’m back at my favourite cafe by the beach.

Appart from some streets in San Fransisco, Amsterdam, and Berlin, I can’t imagine a car like this being left intact for long.

One of Italy’s most controversial politicians is gone. He was both mad and clever. A libertine de Sade would like.

I have had a Mastodon account for a while, but haven’t used it much. I thought it’s about time to give it some more attention, so if you want to, you can now follow me on Mastodon. Toot! Toot!

Cormac McCarthy is dead. I loved his books. The only thing I didn’t like about them was the lack of quotation marks. Made me dizzy at times. The novel No Country for Old Men is, in my opinion, his best work. It made a great film, too.

I arrived at the airport about 30 minutes before I’d planned, thanks to a taxi chauffeur who loved his accelerator.

I hardly slept the past twenty-four hours, and I suspect the five-hour flight to Sweden will not allow any rest. Small children screaming next to me is a curse.

A stunning artwork by William Blake from 1794.

The New York Times has published an appreciation of a great writer.

“Lauri Hussar became president in April after his Estonia 200 party signed a coalition agreement with the Reform Party – the majority partner – and the Social Democrats,” Pink News reports. “In an interview with Lithuanian National Radio and Television, Hussar said he believed laws allowing same-sex unions and marriages could be adopted in about four weeks’ time.”

I took this photo from my aeroplane window on yesterday’s flight back to Sweden.

Fear the gay soldiers!

Charles Spencer in the Telegraph:

Gorgidas, general of the city-state of Thebes, decided to divide the 300 warriors of his elite unit, the Sacred Band of Thebes, into 150 sexual pairings. “Who would desert his beloved, or fail him in the hour of danger?” asked Plato. While the homosexual Sacred Band flourished, in the mid-4th century BC, it led Thebes in crushing victories over the warriors of Sparta.

After a very short visit to my home in Spain, I’m now back in Sweden and on my way to my workplace in Copenhagen. Everyday life kicks in.

“The bespectacled former head teacher who leads the Liberals in Stockholm has appeared resplendent in makeup and an eggshell blue ballgown for a video in support of drag queen library readings,” The Local reports. 👍

This is a test to see if a new feature works.

Like the previous entry, this is a test to see if a new feature works.

I apologise for the spamming in your feed, but like the previous two entries, this is a test to see if a new feature works.

Sorry, I try to make some code work that just don’t want to cooperate. Grrr!

The boss told me that they have installed air condition in the workspace while I have been away. I’m not convinced.

“Rescuers are continuing a grim search off the Greek coast as hopes fade of finding survivors from an overcrowded fishing boat that capsized and sank on Wednesday, killing at least 78 people, amid fears that the number of victims could reach 500,” the Guardian reports.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has delivered the final word on the question of European citizenship for British nationals post-Brexit. The answer is that Britions are no longer Europeans, at least not when it comes to citizenship.

It’s Friday night and Shabbat begins in an hour or so. I’m at work, not being able to be 100% frum. However, I justify it with the mitzvah of always save human life, which is what I do in this alarm centre.

“The couple have produced just one series under their Archewell Audio podcast imprint since inking the agreement in 2020 for a reported US$20m,” the Guardian reports.

According to a new survey, some 46% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans expect 2024 election cheating. I fear for or democracy, but not due to fraud as much as the widespread belief in it.

Jurors will next hear arguments about whether Robert Bowers should be sentenced to death, New York Times reports.

This is a photo I took through an aeroplane window some time ago. I don’t know what it is about clouds, but they have a calming effect.

“The chief executive of airline Ryanair has apologised after a flight attendant announced that the Israeli city of Tel Aviv was in Palestine,” BBC reports.

Good for Ryanair that they recognise that they did wrong. This normalisation of the false Palestinian narrative is so tiresome. Israel belongs to the Jewish people, and Jews built Tel Aviv. There was only sand before the Jews made it into a vibrant city.

“A teenager from Pickford, Michigan, was arrested on Friday by the FBI after expressing explicit neo-Nazi and antisemitic beliefs online,” the Jerusalem Post reports.

A downside to the work I do in the alarm centre is the confrontation with images of dead people. Like now, when I study a case where a man met his end in a brutal car accident. However, it also makes me humble. Life is fragile and living is a blessing.

According to Swedish newspaper Expressen, Europe know gets more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuel. And this without the communist takeover advocated by many environmentalists!

A new study suggests that humankind, by pumping water out of the ground and moving it elsewhere, has changed Earth’s rotational pole.

In Ancient Peru, the Moche people made ceramic figurines of their sexual practices. Like this one.

Bloomberg reports that Italy’s far-right government wants to criminalise surrogacies arranged abroad. The proposed law is an attack on what the government sees as the gay agenda. It’s absurd.

The Guardian runs an article about this—rather ironic—search for a missing submersible that went deep to look at Titanic.

An article in the Guardian makes me think people are disgusting: “Sometimes, he would wear swimming trunks as underwear—he would wear them in the shower, where they would get a wash, then they would dry quickly.”

Good news! ERR writes:

It is proposed that the institution of marriage, as defined by family law, be modified so that any two natural persons of legal age, regardless of gender, may marry. The words “man and woman” will be replaced with the words “two natural persons”.

It’s not often, but today I’m off work and have nothing planned. It will be sleep and television. Nothing else.

The working day is almost over. It’s 11pm and I want ice cream. 🍨

It’s Friday evening and Shabbat begins.

This is just sad.

A team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine is gaining ground in their search for solutions to the global problem of bacterial antibiotic resistance. Th new drug, called dequalinium chloride, could save millions of people. Their study has been published in Science Advances.

A few hours ago, a group of so-called Wagner soldiers, were marching towards Moscow. The Russian capital was preparing for war, and the world tried to understand what happened. Now, the Guardian reports that there’s a peace negotiated:

The Wagner group chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, will move to Belarus under a deal to end the armed mutiny that Prigozhin had led against Russia’s military leadership, the Kremlin said on Saturday night.

The deal was brokered by the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Lukashenko had offered to mediate, with Vladimir Putin’s agreement, because he had known Prigozhin personally for about 20 years.

Peskov said the criminal case that had been opened against Prigozhin for armed mutiny would be dropped, and that the Wagner fighters who had taken part in his “march for justice” would not face any action, in recognition of their previous service to Russia.

Although Putin had earlier vowed to punish those who participated in the mutiny, Peskov said the agreement had had the “higher goal” of avoiding confrontation and bloodshed.

Prigozhin and all of his fighters vacated the military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don that they had previously taken over, the RIA news agency reported.

Forcing your enemies into exile is very Caligula-esque.

It’s more than a year old, but this article by Hannah Natanson and Moriah Balingit in the Washington Post should be read by everyone. The Christian Right is at it again, playing the paedophile card.

The Jerusalem Post runs an article about a new anti-Semitic hate group. The far right is a bunch of complete idiots. Potentially dangerous imbeciles.

Anti-Defamation League has an article about the hate group. A quote:

GDL’s overarching goal is to cast aspersions on Jews and spread antisemitic myths and conspiracy theories. This includes frequent references to Jews having undue power through their “control” of major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government, or disparaging Jews as degenerates who molest children and advocate for pornography, abortion and LGBTQ+ communities. GDL maintains that the Holocaust is a Jewish lie, and accounts of the Holocaust are merely propaganda or lies generated by Jews for their own benefit. Similarly, the GDL says that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York and Israel intentionally targeted a U.S. warship during the height of the 1967 Six-Day War.

I can still remember when I first heard Depeche Mode’s music. I was 12 years old and was hanging out with a friend who loved electronic music. He had bought Some Great Reward, and we listened to it repeatedly. Since then, Depeche Mode has been a companion through life. It’s been years when I haven’t listened to any of their music, but I always come back to it.

Tonight, I saw the band live for the first time. Don’t know why it’s taken me all this time. Perhaps it’s a good thing, because I can’t compare this concert with anyone they have done before. I realise that the band members are not young anymore, but I liked it.

I was really moved by the part where the band celebrated the late Andrew Fletcher who died last year.

For a number of years, it was found in some lunatic here and there, but now the LGBT-grooming conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire again. The idea they’re promoting is that gay and trans people are trying to requite children for sex by offering information about sexual orientation and gender identity. So, if your not a cisgender heterosexual and dare to tell a child about your family, you’re grooming.

Homophobes love so portray gay people as paedophiles. They have done so for as long as organised homophobia has been a favourite occupation among conservative dimwits. So this “grooming” nonsense is not new. Nor is the fact that the vast majority of child molesters are heterosexuals, which makes sense considering that the vast majority of people are heterosexuals.

This is validated by the result of the 1994 study “Are children at risk for sexual abuse by homosexuals?”, conducted by Jenny, Roesler, and Poyer and published by Pediatrics:

In 82% of cases (222/269), the alleged offender was a heterosexual partner of a close relative of the child. Using the data from our study, the 95% confidence limits, of the risk children would identify recognizably homosexual adults as the potential abuser, are from 0% to 3.1%. These limits are within current estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality in the general community.

I’m sure there are more recent studies, but these are still the facts. Not that the conspiracy theorist care about facts, but still.

One such thing is the complete lack of humour among bigoted fanatics.

The Guardian writes about new research finding that rising temperatures are associated with a substantial rise in domestic violence against women.

“It’s a democracy nothing like the South Africa of old,” Rich Lowry writes. He’s right. The Arab world’s preservation of refugee camps are examples of apartheid, though. It’s absurd that people are treated as refugees generation after generation because their families followed the Arab nations’ orders to evacuate Israel.

So, the French are protesting, and vandals are destroying Paris. This is the favourite pastime in France.

Madonna’s condition was so serious that her relatives were preparing for the worst, according to the Daily Mail. She’s now hospitalised in New York.