Getting rid of nuclear weapons

One hundred international political, military, business, and civic leaders from across political lines launched a new initiative in Paris to eliminate nuclear weapons globally to combat the threat of proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Called Global Zero, the initiative will combine high-level policy work with global public outreach to achieve a binding agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons through phased and verified reductions.

Each leader has signed a Global Zero declaration calling for a binding, verifiable agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons by a date certain. The group is developing a step-by-step plan to eliminate nuclear weapons. They met in Paris yesterday and today in their inaugural conference to review and discuss the key steps.

Sign the declaration yourself here.

Sign the petition in support of the Disappearance Convention

From No Right Turn:
In December 2006, the United Nations adopted a major new human rights treaty aimed at preventing and punishing enforced disappearance.
New Zealand didn't sign it but you can help change this.
Download the petition, collect as many signatures as you can, and post it back.

Where I have slept (sometimes with a local)

Create your own visited countries map

Turning passion into love is a relationship's main task

If your culture invents the campest art form (opera) you would think it has little trouble with deviant sex. But no, Italy is hardly known for a fantastically open out of the closet queer culture. Au contraire, gay culture seems to be one of the most closeted I have come across, for a country that has been part of the liberal west for a long time. The men may walk arm in arm along the street there, but you cannot presume they have are anything else but friends. Last time friends of mine visited Italy they had huge trouble finding any gay clubs or saunas. Do I have to blame that church organisation in Rome again for this?
In contrast, queer representation in Italian art, be it cinema, literature or the plastic arts, has huge abundance: Fellini, Pasolini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Versace... But when it comes to day-to-day Italian boys getting it on together, lovingly approved by La Mamma and patronised by La Famiglia, it's a totally different situation from, say, in Spain where the boys can get married and people like Almodovar have made a lifetime film career out of it.
We watched a wonderfully romantic Italian film last night called La Finestra di Fronte, which has a terribly sad gay side story of a young pastry chef who saved a lot of people during the war from deportation but had to sacrifice his secret lover to the Nazi round-up. If you have working gaydar you deduce that his secret hidden love is not heterosexual really soon but it takes almost until the end of the film for this to become explicit.
Highly recommended and the totty award goes to Filippo Negri (left, husband of the film's main character, and doesn't appear enough times shirtless for my liking)

An axis of evil hanging over your head

According to Amnesty International's report on the death penalty in 2005, 94 percent of all (2,148) executions were carried out by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The good news is that the number of states who have abolished this cruel and unusual punishment is growing too. Mexico and Liberia, welcome to civilisation.

If I was Iraqi

I would definitely argue against the withdrawal of US troops. (WARNING: not worksafe, thank Yadoge for the inspiring imagery)

Paris is Burning

Social studies and citizenship classes for young people never have quite the impact of being at the receiving end of a police baton during a street riot to emphasise your alienation and inferior class status and to induct you into the power structures that are challenged at your peril.
Parisian suburbs of the non-chi chi arrondissement kind have been in flames for the last week, as a sort of latter day Fronde by a new Paris mob. The CRS, of course, relished the opportunity to actually do the things every police recruit signs up for: meting out street justice and using the strong arm of the law to show who's boss. The mob, naturally enough, never shows the other cheek, resulting in fiery cat and mouse games worthy of Guy Fawke's Day celebrations. If a rival gang or drug trader intrudes on your patch, it's only natural (and it makes business sense) to protect it.
Then comes along an American professor, who thought that history had come to an end (yeah right!) and probably has trouble locating Paris on a world map, but that doesn't deter him from pontificating on the situation in Europe:

"New policies to reduce the separateness of the Muslim community [...] have been put in place in the Netherlands. [...] But the much more difficult problem remains of fashioning a national identity that will connect citizens of all religions and ethnicities in a common democratic culture, as the American creed has served to unite new immigrants to the United States."

You don't really know whether this kind of praise for his own society is just plain ignorance or ideologically driven, but if I were him I would be more careful in describing the United States as a haven for immigrants (or any other struggling and poor people). American immigrants and minorities may be more docile in accepting the Wall Mart serfdom creed trying to participate in the wet American Dream, but I cannot imagine the locals in Europe being driven like cattle if the Dutch dykes were to burst, as many blacks were in New Orleans.

"Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan."

I just wonder who those Europeans are that downplay their national identity. I have certainly met none and I doubt he has either - unless he thinks about the European diaspora in the USA. And you have to ask too whether American WASP culture is accessible to people not already connected through blood, soil or money.

"Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of the main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well."

Maybe Professor Fukuyama thinks his gated community will keep the barbarians at bay, his feet dry and his pension fund intact, but could help things along better by promoting more Muslim immigration into the United States, secularising all societies and making drug dealing legal.

A legitimate reason to start bombing Iran?

I'm not holding my breath that the international community will get behind any effort to attack Iran because of a couple of teenagers being hanged for being queer. It's not the first time - did I hear there have been 4,000 executions for homosexuality in Iran since 1979? - and looking at a barbaric penal code like that of the Islamic Republic it's no wonder. To protest: Iranian embassy in NZ website.
But I can't shake off the feeling that the likes of Brian Tamaki or any Christian fundamentalist would love a similar penal code established here too, so you won't hear much indignation from that quarter (let alone the White House - they're too busy trying to suppress any sodomy movies coming out of Abu Ghraib).
This is what I wrote to the embassy:

Dear Sir,
I wish to respectfully notify my outrage over the recent (and by all reports not uncommon) execution of two gay teenagers by your Government.
There is absolutely no reason, philosophically, culturally or socially, to justify the killing of people who happen to have expressed their love for each other. Would they have gotten a lighter sentence if they had murdered someone instead – or had organised a bombing of innocent bystanders?
It makes it very difficult for anyone to embrace multiculturalism or have respect for a political and legal system that has such utterly barbaric sentences for non-crimes, let alone have any respect for a religious belief that condones and sustains such system.
Yours sincerely,

There is a net petition on this issue here.
UPDATE: This is what I got back from the Iranian Embassy in reply to my letter:

Dear Hans,
I appreciate your concern, but according to our information, they have not been gay, but they have been rapists and had caused alot [sic] of hardship for the people of their town including the rape of a 13 year old boy. They were both over 18 years old and they were put on trial and as wished by the parents of the 13 year old raped boy, were found guilty and the verdict was announced and carried out according to the law of the country.

Never mind that both were executed for being gay rather than for rape.

The Greatest... of All Time

Over the last few years various countries have been holding plebiscites on their greatest citizen of all time. Apart from the rather dubious contest that pits diverse personalities, achievements and notorieties against each other, there have been some odd results: in the Netherlands, the organising TV company KRO tried to skew the voting because the frontrunner was embarrassing the Dutch thinking classes. But, in the end, Pim Fortuyn did win. I would have voted for Erasmus.
In Britain, a few years earlier, Sir Winston Churchill was anointed the Greatest Briton (in the international version, run by BBC World, Sir Isaac Newton came out tops, a far better choice in my opinion, even though I voted for Charles Darwin).
Germany went for the rather colourless conservative Chancelllor Konrad Adenauer. Surely Gutenberg or Albert Einstein would have been better choices?
In Belgium, Pater Damiaan, who tended leprosy patients on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, was considered the Greatest Belgian (even though he was Flemish). I agree with some critics that King Albert I should have gotten the title - he resisted the German invasion during WW1 and was socially progressive in an era between the wars not noted for its progressive ideas. But maybe I would have gone for either Rene Magritte or Victor Horta.
And now it's the turn of the French. Charles de Gaulle is the unmistaken frontrunner in the top 100 list, with Napoleon, Edith Piaf and Jeanne d'Arc far behind. For sheer international impact, you can't go far beyond Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur, really.
New Zealand can't be far behind now, since we've endured Big Brother, Idol, Extreme Makeovers and Apprentices already.

Anti-semitic conference

The OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) sponsored an international meeting in Berlin on anti-semitism.
The usual hand-wringing about an upsurge in anti-Jewish sentiment and condemnations of German skinheads for disfiguring monuments was joined by calls to stop attacks by Moslem youths. And of course anyone criticising Israeli Government policy is routinely lumped into the category of traitors of democracy who give succour to terrorists. So there.
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch at the conference told BBC Four's The World this morning he would vote for a Republican president for the first time in his life, because Mr Bush was the only anti-terrorist candidate.
It's amazing to see unconditional support for Israel trump any concern for your own homeland's safety in your voting behaviour. Has the term 'treason' now been redefined to exclude love for another country more than your own? Or does it only apply in Israel's case? Do we have to consider ourselves all Israelis now, or be branded anti-semitic?
I'm a little bit tired of hearing we have to support Israel through thick and thin because it is a "democracy in a sea of terror".
Since Israel defines itself constitutionally as a "Jewish state", it doesn't look like there is much space for democratic pluralism/secularism/rationalism, I would have thought. (But nice to see that this discussion is not closed within the Jewish community itself)
No need to flame me about anti-semitism. Thousands of gay men who died in the Nazi concentration camps have never stopped any religious or nationalist fundamentalist from vilifying homosexuals ever since, and you don't hear gay activists using their suffering under the Nazis as an excuse to try to shut down discussion on gay policies or to solicit uncritical support.
The OSCE should organise a conference about homophobia but I'm not holding my breath.

Latter day Queen of Sheba

And the Colonel came to Europe to show good a boy he has become after all the minor disagreements such as the French and American planes bombed down and the shooting of a British police constable.
But you gotta give it to him, after Nelson Mandela he is one of the styliest state leaders we got.
He may have looked like an old queen when he rode into Brussels town, but what struck me most were his female bodyguards, dressed in snappy blue uniforms, and looked like they could immediately get on a film set, and impress the hell out of pimply teenagers. (And it is obvious that they do!)
He may have tried to crawl from under a rock into the blinking European Spring sunshine but Libya has some way to go, according to Amnesty International's Libya report. But then, hey, what has stopped us from embracing bad boys in the past, as long as they are "our" bad boys. (Cfr. Saddam: pre-1990 Rummy's chummy; Pinochet; Mobutu; et al.)