G7 Summit

Mhmmmm my dear friend Angela posted picture this on her official Instagram yesterday. Which is in itself an example of when a picture tells us more than a thousand words.

The Guardian informs us:

"Donald Trump has left the G7 network of global cooperation in disarray after he pulled the US out of a previously agreed summit communique (my embolding), blaming the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau whom he derided as “dishonest and weak”.

The US president, who arrived at the summit in Canada late and left early to fly to Singapore to prepare for his summit with Kim Jong-un, shocked fellow leaders with a bellicose press conference on Saturday in which he attacked the trade policies of other countries." 

Today Reuters published this.

PARIS (Reuters) - France and Europe are maintaining their support for the Group of Seven communique and anyone departing from the commitments made at the summit would be showing their “incoherence and inconsistency”, a French presidency official told Reuters.

The official was reacting after U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he was backing out of the G7 communique drawn up at a summit in Canada.

“International cooperation cannot depend on being angry and on sound bites. Let’s be serious,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, added.

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As I've said before, we live in exciting - if not downright scary - times! Then again, simply the thought of Trump, Putin, Xi and Kim in an unholy alliance is terrifying.

3M+1T=?

In these troubling times a quartet of four world leaders have stepped up to ward off the powers of evil and have vowed to protect "Truth, Justice and the way of life of Western Democracies".

They are, from left to right,
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany,
Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic,
Bock McMillan, Laird of Southern Charm and
Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada.

The four are collective known as "The League of Truth, Trust and Justice".

The montage was created by Abobe Spark free photo collage maker.

SCOOP: Trump Proposes Another Border Wall

The editor at large of this blog has learned - from usually well informed and trustworthy sources - that president Donald J. Trump, in talks with family and his closest co-workers, has been proposing the constructing of yet another border wall, this time at the border between the United States and Canada.

Trump is supposed to have told his confidants:

"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our northern border and I’ll have Canada pay for that wall."

The news comes as no big surprise considering president Trump's fascination with border walls and after Canada (together with the European Union, Mexico and Southern Charm) was named as a threat to the national security of the United States.

If built this wall would be 8,891 km (5,525 mi) long.

PLEASE NOTE: This is actually fake news!

On the Brink of A Global Trade War

Mr. Donald J. Trump, Esq.
president of the U.S.A.

The president of the United States of America, Donald J Trump, this morning announced that the European Union (amongst them the Kingdom of Southern Charm), Canada and Mexico would no longer be exempt from tariffs on imported steel (25%) and aluminum (10%).

The European Union, Canada and Mexico have retaliated with raising duties on imported American products. We are now at the brink of a trade war that can potentially have massive effects on the world's economy and could - if it continues to escalate - lead to a global financial crisis. 

Similar protectionist measures led to The Great Depression in the 1930's.

The Much Honored Bock McMillan,
laird of Southern Charm

The Much Honored Bock McMillan, laird of Southern Charm, prince of Cascade Falls, Sovereign Ruler of the Commonwealth of the Southern Enchantment Region and Outer Territories and finally UN appointed Protector of the Mount Whitney sim in SecondLife, in an attempt to calm the worried princes and princesses of the nation, announced that he was working tirelessly with other world leaders to prevent the crisis from deteriorating further.

European Commission Approves Truvada

On August 22, 2016, the European Commission announced that it approves Truvada as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV) in all 28 EU countries.

Truvada is the first antiretroviral drug to be licensed in all 28 countries of the European Union to reduce the risk for HIV infection, subject to national regulatory authority approval of required pharmacovigilance materials in each country.

Two major studies (iPrEx study and Partners PrEP trial) demonstrated substantial reductions in the risk for HIV-1 infection when Truvada was used as PrEP. Both studies linked better adherence to daily Truvada to better protection against HIV-1 infection.

Experts believe that it will be available on the pharmaceutical market in the next six months. Even now PrEP plays an important role, together with other measures, in HIV prevention.

PrEP is relatively costly (universally recognized is $1,539.90 for 30 tablets) if it is not reimbursed by health insurance and is affordable by very few people. Now many hope that alternative PrEP becomes available in the market and that this very effective method of prevention will be available to many more.

It is not yet clear when PrEP will be available in Sweden and at what cost.

In addition to the European Union, Truvada is also authorized for PrEP in the United States, Australia, Canada, Kenya, Peru, and South Africa.

Canadians Honor Nimoy

"Spock" your $5 bills for Leonard Nimoy pic.twitter.com/bKdKyC3l4q
— Design Canada (@The_CDR) February 27, 2015

The UPI reports; Canadians are turning the politicians on their money into Spock

"Canadians are drawing on their money to make politicians look like Spock from Star Trek, in honor of recently deceased Leonard Nimoy.

Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who appears on Canada's five dollar bill, has been the most common face to be turned into Spock.

'This series of Canadian bills was an easy target,' CDR's publisher Todd Falkowsky told Quartz. 'The existing portraits are quite large and can be improvised with easily, and the color of our $5s are the same blue as Spock's uniform."

The Laird's New Year Address - 2014

Friends, residents of SecondLife, countrymen in the Commonwealth of Southern Enchantment and residents in regions under Our protection,

As tradition bids We address you on this last day of the year. In a few hours the bells will toll and 2014 will end. The new year 2015 will be here. Of this we can be certain, and we look forward to it in hope and anticipation, but we cannot predict what it will bring us.

When We look back at the past year in first life and SecondLife it is - as always - with mixed feelings. Many things have moved forward and been improved but others are still the same or even worse.

From a strictly personal perspective the year 2014 will forever in Our heart be remembered as "Primus annus Thomaidis" (The first year of Tomais). Our royal consort's  love, patience, humor and thoughtfulness has been a great support for Us throughout the past year. His presence in Our life is a source of unceasing joy for which We will always be amazed and grateful.

For SecondLifer's in general and for SecondLife itself, We believe that 2014 will be remembered as the year when Ebbe Linden (in first life a.k.a. Ebbe Altberg) came to the salvation of us residents. Since Ebbe assumed the reigns of Linden Lab many advantageous changes in policies and practices have been made. We can - hopefully - look forward to many more years with Ebbe.

In Our first life We despair at the sight of such dictators as Vladimir "Little Father" Putin and the massmurderer Bashar al-Assad, not to mention others, with the help of their henchmen still in control of their respective countries to the detriment and misfortune of their countrymen.

However, we mustn't be discouraged, there is a New Year ahead with infinite possibilities and much hope of change. If we all, like the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, resolve to work together to make our worlds into better places we can surely accomplish many improvements.

We wish you all a fabulous, fantastic and fruitful new year! Be happy, be safe and be forever vigilant against the powers of evil until the day you die of old age with a smile on your wrinkled face!

A Better Place

(via J.M.G.)

The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield published this video a few days ago with the following clip description: "Our world is not as bad a place as we often feel it to be. It is easy to look to the future and lament how far there is left to go, but sometimes it is helpful to stop and reflect on just how far we've come. This New Years, my resolution is to help make our world a better place. What's yours?"

It's encouraging to know that there are good things happening in the world too. My New Years resolution will be the same as Chris's, although it may be on a much smaller scale.

Fall Back in Europe 2014

Last night Daylight Savings Time (DST) ended in Europe, at 3 AM Sunday morning we had "fall back"and the hour we lost in spring was returned to us.

This as usual heralds a period of biannual confusion in a global community like SecondLife.

Australia and New Zealand have already gone "spring forward" on October 5, 2014, but SecondLife, the U.S.A and Canada do not "fall back" until Sunday November 2, 2014.

Toronto On Pride Day

Matt Thomasto on Instagram, via J.M.G.

Delayed Reaction

Yesterday the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2013 was going to "the contemporary master of the short story", the Canadian author Alice Munro.

Alice Munro (Photo by Derek Shapton)

My reaction to the news is aptly described by this music video...


So it seems that  I now need to get to know another Canadian, it will be a pleasure as always, I'm sure!

Acquiring a Habit

I know exactly when, where and why I started smoking and whom I was with at the time.

For a long time I was the only non-smoker in my immediate family. My parents, both my two sisters and their boyfriends (later husbands) were all smokers. When they lit up their cigarettes after dinners I used to run around frantically, open up windows and complain loudly about the smoke and the smell and how I couldn't breathe.

The summer when I was 26 years old, I decided to travel a month around Europe on Interrail. I was studying law at the university at the time and had suddenly discovered that I had an opening of four weeks after the term ended and my summer job started. As a young man with an overprotective father, I knew I could not tell my parents my decision too long in advance because that would give my father too much time to launch a campaign of trying to persuade me to travel in a "safer" way.

I broke the news to my parents the evening before I was going to leave. All hell temporarily broke lose and I was fed with images of myself laying murdered, slaughtered, violated, raped, maimed, brutalized etc. in every street, town square or hotel room in Europe by my poor father. When he calmed down, I promised to phone at least once a week and "if ever anything bad happened, however minor I may think it was". After making this deal with my devil father, I was graciously "allowed" to travel.

The morning after I left started with a short trip to Copenhagen to catch the "North Express" at one o'clock in the afternoon. The Nord Express is (or was) a daily railway connection  between Copenhagen and Paris and viceversa.

I was early, so I could choose where to sit and found a nice compartment with eight seats and settled in before the other passengers started arriving. The last one to arrive just before the train departed, was a tall and husky blond guy with trembling hands, amazing blue eyes and a dazzling smile. He sat down opposite me.

At first there was this usual awkward silence in the compartment but after awhile we all started talking a little and introducing ourselves and sharing our travel plans. The guy said his name was Andrew and that he was a Canadian from Newfoundland on vacation in Europe. He was on his way to Paris for a few days before he was joining an archeological excavation at some place outside the city.

Andy was a smoker, he smoked Marlboro's. I didn't mind a bit when he lit up a cigarette, strangely enough. When we had travelled together a while, he offered me to come with him for a cigarette in the corridor. I gladly went along with him and accepted the cigarette and puffed on it, carefully at first so as not to reveal that I was a beginner. We had a great time together and the smoke pauses repeated themselves during the trip until we settled in for the night. Andy stretched out his unshod feet towards my side and I did the same and in that way we went to sleep resting our heads on the others feet.

When we arrived in Paris we decided to get a room at a hotel together, until it was time for him to continue to his damn excavation. We had four wonderful days together in Paris. I had fallen in love and was sad to part. We stayed in touch the first six months after, but then with time and distance and other men the letters and cards swindled and finally ended. The only thing I was left with was my newly acquired habit of smoking.

To this day I still smoke Marlboro's and I think of Andy when I see a man with more than usual tremor in his hands.

Canadians & Kissing

(Via J.M.G.)

Singer-songwriter Jonny “Gay Pimp” McGovern.highly recommends visiting Canada for their French Kissing, but perhaps he only means Quebec and the French Canadians not the Anglos....? Has anyone tried out the Anglo Canadians kissing skills yet and can tell me if they are worth testing also?

This video is a part of Tourisme Montreal’s new "Do Your Thing In MTL" video series, where they are trying to promote LGBT tourism to Montreal.

The Cat & the Princess

Once upon a time, as all good stories should start even the true ones, there was an English cat living in Canada. He was a tall and lean man with a great capacity for love. On the other side of the Atlantic ocean in a small provincial Swedish town there lived a short and full figured princess with a weakness for tall and lean men and a similar capacity for love but no one to shower it over.

sirhc and Vampi posing for my blog project Naked Avatars in SecondLife
(see the tag Nakna avatarer i SL)

Little did the two know that the love of their lives existed and was waiting to be found. Universe saw this and knew it was wrong. This should not be like this, Universe felt, the two should be together and love and take care of eachother.

Universe thought about it a while and then it came with a brilliant plan and set it in motion. First it lighted a spark in the brain of a creative American computer geek named Philip Rosedale, something about creating a virtual world where he and his geeky friends and people from all over the world could meet and discuss their weird digital stuff and kill each other in war games and build stuff and have wild, steamy and passionate sex with fabulous women and tall, lean, men or cats or whatever they wished. Philip managed to convince enough of his wonderful geeky and creative friends about his vision and they set out to create the virtual world that was to become known and loved as SecondLife.

The idea took off, the world was created and the wonderful, creative and innovative computer geeks from all around the globe converged into SecondLife. They built stuff, they beautified it, they just went wild with all their ideas. And the friends of the geeks started to check in to see what it was all about and they fell in love with it too, so did their friends and the friends of their friends.

Both the English cat and the Swedish princess were sort of computer geek so they of course heard about SecondLife too and joined the fun.

Then one day the princess was out on one of her excursions into the dark side of SecondLife, some war sim or other, and she saw this lean, mean, killing machine of a cat. And she loved what she saw and heard and could not get the cat out of her mind. She started prowling around wherever he went and stalked him from sim to sim until one day she decided to take a leap of faith and just pounce on him. The poor, innocent and lovable cat did not know what had hit him. The princess was like a whirlwind, a tornado of excitement and love that took over his life, his thought and his dreams, just as he had - unknowingly - taken over her's.

The two started spending more and more time together, falling deeper in love as the days and weeks and months went by. They also started sharing their first lives on Skype, with the cam running 24/7, so they could look after each other and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and watch a little. After a while they got handfasted in some weird wiccan ceremony and their love was sealed. Only Universe knows what kind of kinky heterosexual stuff went on in front of those cameras besides the two watching each other sleep, eat, wash, pee and all the other daily humdrum. Universe watched on and smiled and saw that all was well.

Then one day the princess woke up and couldn't see the cat anywhere in his apartment. He had completely disappeared from it, the camera was still running but the apartment was empty. She was not that worried at first but as the hours passed the worrying mounted, especially since the cat was sick and feverish at the time. When the hours turned to days she definitely knew something was wrong. She called out for help and assistance among her friends and an especially resourceful friend, a practical woman of course, lifted the phone and called the local police force in the Canadian town where the cat was living.

Vampi and sirhc and their alts for the blog project Naked Avatars in SecondLife

Despite the unusual circumstances the Canadian police were amazingly helpful and swiftly located  the cat and - after receiving his consent - informed the resourceful woman about his whereabouts and where he could be reached.

The beautiful cat had been found wandering the streets and not being able to find his way home in his sick and feverish state. He had been taken to hospital for treatment and was recovering when the Canadian police found him and informed him that a crazy princess in Sweden was asking about him.

Universe, that had been watching the whole story unfold, knew that something had to be done. The two could not be kept apart anymore, both needed the other to look after them and to look after the other. In some miraculous way a plane ticket was arranged  with a one way trip to Sweden. The still weak cat packed up his stuff and got on the plane which would deliver him to the waiting princess.

On this day, July 20, three years ago the two fell into each others loving arms at the train station in Helsingborg, Sweden, (See Bock in SecondLife; The kitten has arrived). Since then the two have stayed as inseparable as they were before, but now in both lives. The princess has taken care of the cats health and he has done the same for her. As it turned out the cat is an amazing cook, baker etc., etc., so he put the princess on an organic, nutritional and healthy diet. She is not as full figured anymore but feeling much better she tells me.

Universe is still watching over the two. It sees that they are doing well and it is happy, and so are the rest of their friends. For this is a true story, somewhat freely embellished but nonetheless true.

The princess is the lairds CTO Vampi Twine DeSantis McMillan McMillan (honorary) and the cat is his Sergeant at Arms sirhc DeSantis McMillan. The wonderful resourceful woman is PirateJenny Whybroe.

Happy 3rd Anniversary in Sweden, sirhc!

I hope you two will live happily together ever after. Love you both!

Far Out!

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been on the International Space Station since December 2012 and in command of the vessel since March. While in space he has, with the help of his sons Kyle and Evan,  built up a fan base back on Earth thanks to his Twitter feed of comments, photos and videos showing what life is like in space.

Here commander Hadfield takes farewell of the I.S.S. before heading back home to planet Earth yesterday after five months in space, by singing David Bowie´s "Space Oddity".

(via J.M.G. and others)

David Bowie's team seems happy about it too, as they should be.

CHRIS HADFIELD SINGS SPACE ODDITY IN SPACE!“Hallo Spaceboy...”Commander Chris Hadfield, currently on... fb.me/24sZNW5ly
— David Bowie Official (@DavidBowieReal) 12 maj 2013

Are You Man Enough?

The Muddy York RFC in Toronto, Canada

Americans and Firearms

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The second amendment to the United States Constitution (Bill of Rights, adopted 1791)
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The poster above and the information below are from the Brady Campaign's website. The numbers and statistics are from 2010.

Gun Murders by Country
In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States.

The United States has weak gun laws. The other countries have strong gun laws. 

Gun Murders by Country and Population SizeWhen the countries are compared on the basis of firearm homicides per 100,000 population, the United States remains an outlier.

In one year, the U.S. firearm homicide rate was:

• 5 times that of Canada
• 10 times that of Finland
• 13 times that of Germany
• 19 times that of Australia
• 24 times that of Spain.
• 44 times that of England and Wales

A 2010 study affirmed this pattern: U.S. homicide rates were 6.9 times higher than 22 other populous, high-income countries combined. For a summary of the study, see: http://bradycampaign.org/studies/view/191.

Guns Used in Crime = More Deaths
Research indicates that the overall rate of crime in the United States is comparable to the rates in other developed countries (see Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America). However, in part because of our weak gun laws, guns are used more often in crimes in the United States than in other countries, which means that more people die. This partly explains why, even when our homicide rates are low by historical U.S. standards, they still are far higher than comparable countries.

We Can Do Better 
The U.S. needs to do a better job of protecting its citizens from the dangers of guns by making it harder for dangerous people to get guns. We can start by requiring Brady criminal background checks for gun sales, including those at gun shows. Join us in this fight. Lives are at stake. Go to www.bradycampaign.org and sign up today!
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Addendum 12/16/2012, 05:50 PM
My initial reaction to such tragedies as the Newtown killing spree is always an utter disbelief that such a thing can happen and a then a deep sadness for the fate of the victims, their families and yes -  often enough also - for the perpetrators and their families. The initial shock is then followed by a longer lasting anger and passion concerning how something like this can happen and how we must act to stop it from ever happening again.

It seems like an open and shut case that these killings occur with such regularity in the U.S.A. due to the lack of political will to regulate the owning and selling of firearms, handguns and semiautomatic weapons.

How the American judiciary and politicians (historically and to this day) could interpret the second amendment in such a way as it is implemented today is a complete mystery to me.