Saw the new Batman film yesterday evening at the Estonian pre-screening. It was quite brilliant, it had style. Christopher Nolan did a great job with it, but the most spectacular performance was by the late Heath Ledger. He played the Joker in such a convincing way that you might think that this comic book character actually could exist.
UPDATE 26 JULY: I agree with the Movie Blog regarding the elevating role played by Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent / Two-Face. It really makes the movie stand out.
Vacation is hard work. Today was the first day of my vacation, so naturally I was at work finishing some unfinished business. This evening, however, I will escape from the city and spend a few days in Western Estonia, including Haapsalu and Saaremaa.
I will be back in Tallinn again for the Thrusday evening Estonian pre-premiere of the Dark Knight. Friday will be full of things to do and then I will have again some breathing room next weekend. I try to spend as little time in Tallinn, partly also due to the fact that my new home lacks for the moment some essential things like kitchen, curtains, bed and a clothes closet.
This summer has been full of work until now and now I am also moving to a new apartment, which means a lot of hassle, inconvenience etc. Hopefully it will be worth the trouble.
If anyone is interested, I am renting my old studio apartment (30m2) in the city centre (Jõe 7, Tallinn; 6th floor) for ca 5000 EEK / 320 EUR per month + quite small (less than 1000 EEK per month) communal costs. The apartment is going to be fully re-furbished and re-furnished (with the help of a professional interior designer) and available hopefully from mid-August. It is small, it is in a big building with a lot of other people, but it has a fantastic location (near the port, next to the World Trade Center Tallinn).
Now that my active participation with TEN and EYP is over, I have been focusing my activities on human rights issues. Namely, I am working to establish in the long-term an Estonian Human Rights Centre, the first step has been to create the Human Rights Centre at International University Audentes.
One of the projects I have undertaken is to give expert advice on human rights as one of the legal experts for the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency. One of the first tasks for our team was to complete a Study on Homophobia and Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation - Estonia (download PDF) which was one of the basis for FRA’s comparative report “Homophobia and Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation in the EU Member States Part I – Legal Analysis” (full report in PDF, press release).
In the fall, the Human Rights Centre will publish its own report on Human Rights in Estonia in 2007.
Today was a day off from work, and it was remarkable in that it was quite eventless, so that it can actually be condensed into a paragraph: I woke up at 9am, surfed the internet, had a nap at noon, woke up again at 2pm, made myself some dumplings (Pelmeenid tilliga), ate them and started cleaning my drawers and the room. By 7pm, I had done most of the cleaning, left on the robotic vacuum cleaner, took the laundry out to be washed and had a Nizza salad at Vapiano, then went back home and now I am watching TV.
Yesterday, was a more eventful day, I saw Franz Ferdinand at Õllesummer and did some other stuff.
The above quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was evoked by a judge in the first decision since the US Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners should have recourse to civil courts. The court said:
First, the government suggests that several of the assertions in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made in at least three different documents. We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWISCARROLL,THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3(1876)(“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”). In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions. To the contrary, as noted in Part III, many of those assertions are made in identical language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a single source. And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a credible argument that — at least for some of the assertions — the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs. Other assertions in the documents may ultimately rely on interview reports (not provided to the Tribunal) of Uighur detainees, who may have had no first-hand knowledge and whose speculations may have been transformed into certainties in the course of being repeated by report writers.
Hopefully this is a step further in the direction of closing down the Guanatnamo Bay facility, or at least stop its illegal status of no-law zone. This is the 21st century and democratic countries should no better than to tolerate this abuse of basic principles of the rule of law.
In an interview to the Associated Press on board the flight back from Khanty-Mansiisk president Ilves explains why he walked out of the Fenno-Ugric Congress, and gives his thoughts on Russian developments. Nice balanced reporting from the AP, including the final quote from Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission:
“The EU is completely against all kinds of totalitarianism,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. “We reject totalitarianism, including Soviet totalitarianism.”
I have succumbed to temptation and written another article, this time on the arguments against compulsory military service. It is basically a condensed overview of some of the arguments against conscription, the main one being that it has a much bigger price for Estonia than proponents of it would like to show. It sparked debate, which is a good thing.
I wrote an article on the Irish No vote to EU, in which I make the rather unpopular argument that EU treaty modifications are so complex that they are not suitable for referenda. The Irish no-vote is an indirect consequence of the 1987 decision by the Irish Supreme Court, requiring Ireland to always put all EU treaty modifications to a referendum.
If we started the EU from scratch today, it would be much different, but we have to look at the historical context in which it developed and make best of the system we already have in place. The voters are indirectly represented in two ways, the Lisbon treaty has been approved by the European Parliament, which consists of representatives of EU citizens, and it has been represented by 18 member state parliaments, which have also been democratically elected by the people.
It is interesting to note the comments section for my article, where there is actually quite a lot of meaningful debate on what is the meaning of democracy in today’s world (along with the usual name-calling and personal insults).
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