The Batasuna and Spain
Recently the spanish parliament banned the political wing of the terrorist group ETA to operate in Spain. I dont understand this approach, I think that Spain should rather use the political party to controle the ETA rather then ban them and by that break all political contact with the ETA. I think the spanish government should take the british one as their example in this manner. Never did they ban the Sinn Fein while the IRA was killing people all over the place and I think that is what finally brought on "peace" in N. Ireland. It is never good to brake political relations with your neighbours.

Watch your toungue!
Those of you who are members of some organisation that is working on some high profile cases (like Amnesty International, The Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the likings) might find yourself sometimes in the same situation as I do. People that I know sometimes ask about Amnestys position on this and that matter. Then I feel that I am speaking as a representetive of Amnesty and then I have to watch what I say. This is rather annoying since I like to be able to express my own oppinions about things and my oppinions dont allways go along with Amnesty's, well, they are similar but I would not like to be a spokesman of theirs even though I am an avid sponsor.
Well, that was just it, I would like to be able to speak freely about my oppinions and not have them interpretated as some guidlines from some institution like Amnesty.

Defense for freedom of expression?
Many people do not like other people because the second group has some kind of mark on them that distinguishes them from the first group. This is called racism. I have no problem with people not liking other people as long as it doesnt turn out violent (mentally or physically). So even though people are racists they should at least have the curtesy to respect the people they dont like and let them live in peace, and so should the second group of people respect the freedom of expression for the first group. This is sort of part of what I am allways saying "it takes two to quarrel", there is never a "doer" and a "reciever" I think (well, perhapst sometime, but most of the time both partys of the conflict are to blame). If one party really doesnt want conflict then he backs down and allows the other one to be the bully, this is what happens in matter of racism.
Dont get me wrong, I am all for mixed cultures but I dont think that cultures should be forced to mix, that only ends up in disaster. If cultures are to mix, both of them have to be ready for it.
I guess what I am trying to say is that those who are racists should not be forced to like the groups they dont like, they should rather be isolated from them for a short time and educated about why they should not act on their racism.

Idea about better ?
We all know that democracy does not really work now, people are just to stupid to know what they should vote for and politicians are to good in hiding theyr true meaning. So why have an election between candidates, why not have rather an opinion election and then there will be a committee or whatever that says, "Ok, this is what the people want and these people are the ones that want to do it that way" in this way all the people really dont have to listen to all this campaign bullshit and really get it straight in theyr blood what the situation is about (because it says so straight on the polling bill what issues are in discussion).

Things I take for granted but aren't.
As a person living in Iceland most of my time I have come to take a few things for granted that most people in the world cant afford to take granted.
Here I am talking about things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt your fellow being. But most of all it is the freedom to be not afraid of the power that surrounds you. The government, the company's and your fellow human beings are not supposed to be a threat to you. This I have begun to take for granted by living in a small state like Iceland. We dont have to fear nothing, we dont have no ethnic minority's that are unhappy, we dont have brutal police force, we dont have a corrupt government (at least it doesn't use physical force against us). I cant even begin to imagine how it is to live in country's that have a tyranny in power or civil war going on. Thats one of the reasons why I support human rights movements, they are trying to give these rights to people that dont know they could have these rights or are refused these rights if they ask for them.

Proof of the statement that the soul doesn't exist?
The basics of modern religion is the "fact" that the soul exists in every living being. We are promised heavenly bliss after this life if we are good people and do as our lord tells us while were in these body's.
Now my doubt about this lies mainly in the question of where the soul resides in the human body. Is it in the heart? Is it in the brain? Or somewhere else? Also I cant see how the soul is supposed to have influence over this body of ours. If the soul is not made of matter then how does it control our actions? If the soul doesn't control our actions then why should the soul pay for something the body it inhabits does? If a body kills another body what part does the soul play in this? Is it the soul that says to the body "kill that body"? How does it do that? What is the link between the soul and the neurons that flow around in our brain? If the soul on the other hand is a material thing then when we die it must go somewhere, where is that? Then we can also ask ourselves of what material is the soul, how does it get created when we are born and many other questions that are just to difficult to answer. So according to Occhams razor the soul does not exist!

Update on Opera
I have now been using the Opera web browser for several days and am pretty impressed despite its faults. It is stable and can display most web pages correctly (and if it doesn't it is most of the time fault of the web programmer who made the web page). It still has a few issues with advanced things like Java script, Java, plug ins and stuff like that but I still do say to people to try it out and file in bug reports so the developers can make this a good browser.

A good browser on first sight
I just installed the newest version of the opera web browser. This is a good browser I think, it supports the standards of the web and most plug ins I think, haven't been using it that much yet, if I do find some flaws (or features I dont like) I will summarize them here. The first good things I notice about it is it has lots of options, it takes little memory on my Linux machine (less then netscape/mozilla at least), imports the bookmarks from IE, konqueror and netscape on startup, has its own little "desktop" (for lack of a better word for it, it is just that the same window in Window Maker contains many sub windows, each with a different web page, its like having many windows up of netscape) and it has a little section besides the tool bar that displays commercials (this is done so you can get the browser for free, you can get rid of this by paying something like $36 or 38) I hardly notice it though so it is ok.
This I think I must say is great software for typical usage (I dont know about security and stuff like that, have to wait and see what the experts say about that).

Health for the human mankind
I was just reading an article in a local paper here in Madison about a young boy who has learning disabilities. Some people seem to think that it is because when his mother was carrying him in her womb she ate a lot of fish from a lake that was later diagnosed as mercury contaminated. First this intrigued me to find more information about mercury and how that affects the human body. Later I began to think about the health of a human body in our local environment today. Why cant we build up an immune system that can fight off the dangers of todays environment? Is it because technology (and therefore pollution, at least at the moment, hopefully increasing technology will someday mean that pollution wont increase) is growing faster then human evolution? We are making new technology that requires more power that requires more burning of coal, more nuclear reactors, more dams to harness the power of water, all of this leads to the pollution of the environment which pollutes the animals that we then eat. Then we try to invent new ways to protect us from this pollution by inventing more machines that require more energy etc etc, its a vicious cycle that we are getting ourself in.
Where is this going to stop? I dont know but I would surely like to see the world wake up to this fact and try harder to do something about this instead of making more cars and other energy gulping machines.

Great Technology
I think some of the technology today is great, that is the technology that works! Now let me tell you what I think works in todays technology. For instance, radio, television, VCR, some software of computers and many more.
Now I would like to mention some specific software for computers. As I am writing this text I am listening to the public radio of Iceland through Real Player, now that I just find fantastic!!!

Web Browsers
Why is it so difficult to make a browser that works?
I mean, we have this language called html and it has its standards which shouldn't be to hard to follow. But what is happening is that all sorts of companies (Netscape, Microsoft, Macro media and more) are adding all sort of non standard things to the web (Java, Flash etc etc) that make this quite difficult. So what is there to do?
The answer lies in the hands of the web designer, does he want to take the risk that a few users will be very unhappy when they cant make full use of the web or does he want to please the users that can make use of high technology, because this is the definition of high technology something that doesn't really work, YET, but looks cool.

Basic rights and politics
Now that we have seen that every person has a right to living in some place (have shelter), some food and medical care how are we supposed to reach that?
I think it is obvious that a system like capitalism stands for is not the way to do that, we have to have social security to ensure these rights.

Human Rights of Homeless People
The other day I read an article in a local newspaper here in Madison, Wisconsin about a homeless guy that exercised his right to free speech the other day and said bad things about USA and Jewish people and how the situation in Israel/Palestinia was the fault of Jewish people and how USA had failed in that situation.
Well, needless to say some people who listened to him got offended and called the cops to have him removed. The cops showed up and asked him to come with them, he refused (he has every right to that since he didn't do anything wrong) but then the cops became a little more aggressive (no violence happened, but they grabbed his hand) and tried to lead him away. Then the poor homeless man saw that he should rather complie to their wishes and went with them.
Well, that was a good exercise for the police here in Madison in human rights and what you can do and what you cant (now this is only one example, I dont know of any others like this here in Madison, but there are several cross the USA, I mention USA specially because they claim to be the best and all that crap). But this got me to think about the rights of homeless people in general, isn't it a violation of ones human rights to let one roam the streets without a place to call home?
I did a little checking and found the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There it says quote:

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

So yes, it is a violation of ones human right to be roaming the streets homeless and food less. Please let the next homeless person you see know of this and lets correct this error!

If you want to discuss any of these topics further then you can send me an email and please specify if you mind if I put our correspondence on this web site.