I have nothing to say.

Nothing. None of the news looks interesting enough to comment on. Charles and Camilla? Yeah, that's big news: a man and a woman who have been in love for longer than I've been alive are going to tie the knot. Shocking. A riot at Ikea? A bit odd that they were trying to get in, admittedly, but, as The Guardian is always telling us, desperate people will turn to violence when they are the victims of oppression, and, well... Ikea has victims instead of customers. I'd rather like to see Ikea added to Bush's hitlist, come to think of it. I mean, yeah, Iran is probably a higher priority right now, but Egypt? Does Egypt really cause more suffering than Ikea? It seems unlikely. And what else has happened? Sod all, as far as I can see, "sod all" being, if I do say so myself, the best summing-up of the nascent general election campaign you're going to see until Peter Snow unveils his graphics. What will he have this time, I wonder? Giant bears throwing red, blue, and yellow frisbees at each other, I hope. Or wombats would be good. I like wombats.

Tonight is Valentine's Night, so I shall be heading home with my lovely wife to indulge in a bit of stripping. And, by that, I mean I'll be up a ladder with a scraper and a steamer, removing the blight on our new living room that is wood-chip. Ah, I kill myself, I really do. Got rid of about half of it last night. The walls aren't too bad, but it appears to have been superglued to the ceiling by bastards. The previous owner (or possibly the owner before that — how would I know?) was rather enamoured of wood-chip: some of the original doors actually have wood-chip laid into their panels. Weird. Not as weird as the pictures in the house we nearly bought but didn't, though. Some people are devout Christians. Fair enough. Some devout Christians like to put framed verses from the Bible on their walls. Fair enough. The woman who nearly sold us her house (but was persuaded not to by her bastard lawyers, who we suspect were merely exercising a grudge against my wife, who used to work for them) appeared to have decorated her home by plugging a random number generator into a database that contained the Bible and Arena's complete archives. "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son." Well, maybe he did, but what has that got to do with puppies in a basket? Or with a black Porsche 911 Turbo? Amazingly enough, these pictures were less weird than the rest of the decor. A lucky escape that the sale fell through, then, you might think, but only if you hadn't seen the place we did get. Half the walls in our front room were painted a sort of washed-out mushy-pea-green; the other half were pale mauvy lavender. My very spirit still cringes at the memory of it.

Anyway, we've had extraordinarily efficient builders in, so our front room is now our front room and back room at the same time, and is huge. And we've got a new ceiling on the top floor and an insulated attic, and sundry other things done that needed done. And all we have to do is clear up the fucking mess and remove the fucking wood-chip. Oh, joy.

Speaking of building, I've been hard at the virtual webby type in recent days, getting rid of Haloscan's trackback system (which, I felt, was a bit crap) and replacing it with Movable Type's standalone trackback tool and then spending ages buggering around with it, trying to figure out how to add automatic email notification. Yeah, yeah, this is probably blogging about blogging, but I blogged about other things first, see? To soften the blow. Anyway, it's kind of blogging about programming, if you think about it. And that is fine. Still extraordinarily dull, yes, but ethically defensible. Anyway, send me a trackback ping. I went to a lot of trouble to get this just as I like it (programming in Perl is particularly difficult for me, as I have no idea what Perl is), and I wouldn't want to think it was all ultimately futile.

So, yes, like I said: I have nothing to say.

Dying in the name of fiscal security.

My friend Laura has sent me a link to this kerfuffle of Scots outrage:

PUB bosses today warned MSPs banning smoking was a bad idea – because people would live too long.

Urging the Executive to change their plans, the Scottish Licensed Trade Association said ministers had failed to take account of the high cost of geriatric care and increased pensions which would result from the health improvements.

But ...

... and you're not going to believe this next bit ...

... their "outrageous" arguments were condemned.

There then follows a lot of self-important blather.

Hats off to the SLTA for bringing this argument out in public. Now, could all the pompously outraged gits start looking at the way our beloved NHS makes decisions?

What the fuck?

James links to this story. I'm not sure I can believe my eyes.

The German parliament's Home Affairs Committee said on Wednesday that Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union should continue, but urged de facto limits by calling for migrants to undergo German language tests and checks on their employment qualities.

In Germany, it is illegal to display a Swastika. It is legal, however, to angle for votes by promising to keep Jews out of the country.

In my experience, Germans are nice people who, for obvious reasons, have a strong distaste for anti-Jewish discrimination. I sincerely hope that the voters are going to punish the government over this. On the other hand, the German Government have enacted such insane pro-immigrant legislation over the last few years that there is a backlash, and any moves to cut immigration — even of Jews — might therefore be popular.

Israel has long been unhappy over the large number of Jews choosing to settle in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin says its goal is to get Jewish immigrants to go to Israel.

Prescience, I call that.

There are only twelve types of people.

Esther links, in her usual odd way, to this calculate-your-Zodiac-sign thing. Now, while the idea that events in our lives are influenced by flaming balls of gas billions of miles away from us and from each other to such an extent that we can make accurate predictions by observing the patterns that those balls happen to form when viewed from Earth is not only patent nonsense but empirically inadequate, I've always been amenable, at least in theory, to the idea that the time of year at which we're born might have some bearing on our personality. I don't think for one minute that the stars would have anything to do with it, but other factors, such as climate and daylight, might. Or might not. In a world in which the temperature at which crocodile eggs are incubated decides the gender of the hatchlings, it's not that far-fetched that people born in June might be more irritable than those born in January.

So, in a spirit of scientific enquiry, I took the test. It was utterly wrong.

According to our analysis, you are a Virgo, Aug 23 to Sep 22.

Not even close.

But you are certainly not a Cancer, June 22 to July 22.

OK, that's true. But divining what star sign I'm not is unimpressive.

Based on my answers, the results give a score from 0 to 100 for each star sign, with 0 being a total mismatch and 100 being a perfect match. My lowest score — for Cancer — is 50, which just goes to show how full of Barnum's phrases the definitions are. It would be interesting to see how low a score anyone can get. My guess would be that people rarely score below 40 for any sign. My second-lowest score, 52, was for my real star sign, Aries. So that's pretty bloody wrong, then.

The test's bold assertion that I am definitely a Virgo is based on a mere 73. That's not very high, is it? The closest match I have to any of the definitions is three quarters. Even if the test had got me right, I wouldn't be impressed by a mere three-quarter match.

As it turns out, that's the whole point:

When a credulous person reads a description of their personality based on their sun sign, what do they do? In my experience, they go through and they pick up on some adjectives (such as 'blunt' and 'ambitious'), which they feel described them, and skip over the others. They notice all the adjectives they feel pertain to their personality, and, ignoring the misses, their faith in astrology is strengthened. It's a pernicious problem for all skeptics to address. But, if the tables are turned and your self-evaluation is used to place you into an astrological category, instead of being forced to fit the category given to you by birth, then your willingness to deceive yourself may be made evident. Most people read only their astrological description and accept it; they don't go through and read them all to see if one suits them better. In this way the real value of my reverse astrology test is found primarily in its one-time use by an individual; the statistical results are not nearly as useful.

Nice one.

Impossible.

Part 20 of Arthur Chrenkoff's indispensible Good News From Iraq series starts, of course, with the elections. He links to all sorts of great news, including this:

There was nothing surprising about the stunned looks I got last Friday as I stood at the entrance to the girls school in Swafiyeh, handed the guards and the representative of the Iraqi elections committee an Israeli passport and declared my wish to register to vote in the elections to the Iraqi parliament, which would begin in Jordan exactly a week later.

The elections official asked to see some document attesting to my connection to Iraq and the belittling look on his face was replaced by one of sincere astonishment when I gave him my grandparents' 1951 laissez-passez. After pointing out my father's name on the yellowing certificate and presenting a signed and notarized translation of a document proving I am his son, the mustachioed Iraqi ordered me to wait. He disappeared into the big building with my passport and the Smooha family's most precious document, leaving me with the guards at the entrance.

A scant five minutes later it was my turn to be surprised. The mustachioed one, smiling broadly, appeared at the edge of the school's inner courtyard, instructed the guards in Arabic to let me in, and then turned to me in English: "Welcome. Please follow me." When I strode with him into one of the classrooms manned by Iraqi elections officials, another surprise awaited me. The four women and young man seated behind small desks had been apprised of the Israeli's approach and they were waiting for me, all smiling.

It's wonderful to see so much of the Left's vicious pessimism proven wrong at once. I feel the same way I felt when Reagan and Gorbachev sat down and casually, almost flippantly, signed away the end of the Cold War. Jesus Jones should re-release Right Here, Right Now — except that, being successful musicians, they're probably Guardian-reading Bush-hating twats. Tsk.

I'm going to stick my neck out and make some predictions now.

By the end of Bush's presidency, there will be at least three more genuine democracies in the Middle East, with more teetering on the brink.

The good work will go on after Bush finishes, because the Democrats won't win the Presidency without embracing the Bush Doctrine — though I'm sure they'll call it something else to save face.

Iraqis will build a monument to Bush, and maybe to Blair, and definitely to Coalition soldiers.

Within five years, Iraq will be one of the world's most important economies. And not just because of the oil.

Iraq and Israel will become official allies, and probably guarantors of each other's security.

There will be massive celebrations in Iraq on the thirtieth of January every year for generations. This will be their Fourth of July. The celebrations might well involve everyone symbolically staining their fingers purple.

Maybe I'm too optimistic. But it all seems quite realistic now.

A woman on the radio talks about revolution
But it's already passed her by.

Look at it this way.

Omar tells two stories from the Iraq elections:

The suicide attack that was performed on an election center in one of Baghdad's districts (Baghdad Al-Jadeedah) last Sunday was performed using a kidnapped "Down Syndrome" patient.
Eye witnesses said (and I'm quoting one of my colleagues; a dentist who lives there) "the poor victim was so scared when ordered to walk to the searching point and began to walk back to the terrorists. In response the criminals pressed the button and blew up the poor victim almost half way between their position and the voting center's entrance".

I couldn't believe the news until I met another guy from that neighborhood who knows the family of the victim. The guy was reported missing 5 days prior to elections' day and the family were distributing posters that specified his descriptions and asking anyone who finds him to contact them.

...

one story that is famous now in Iraq is about one brave Iraqi (A'adel Nasir) who saw a suspicious looking guy walking around a polling center in (Al- Hurriyah) district and soon the brave man realized that the suspicious guy was trying to commit a suicide attack; he ran towards him, wrestled him and knocked him down causing the bomb carried by the terrorist to explode, sacrificing his own life and saving the lives of the people standing in line at the gate of the voting center.

How is it that millions of people have so much difficulty making a moral distinction between these two sides? How is it that anyone supports the first group against the second in the name of human rights?

Gratuitous cuteness.

I haven't done anywhere near enough of this to keep her eager fanclub satisfied, so here are some pictures of Phoebe.

On the sofa with Boris.

On the way home in the car with me, the day we got her.

There. Happy?

Scepticism in a world of stupidity.

Perhaps, once upon a time, being sceptical was easy. Perhaps things that sounded obviously untrue stood out. But, when it is true that Dutch banks are legally obliged to pay for their robbers' guns, it is true that the Soviets successfully banned surnames in Mongolia, it is true that people in a democratic country have just gone on a march to protest another country's transition to democracy, it is true that the word "brainstorm" is being replaced in some quarters with the phrase "thought shower" so as not offend epileptics, who claim that they were never offended anyway, and it is true that Saudi Arabia is facing a sand shortage, how are we supposed to spot hoaxes?

All of which is a preamble to my pointing out that Kate has pointed out that the article in The Telegraph upon which I based my post about state-enforced prostitution in Germany may not be completely true.

Well, that's one way of reading it. The article which supposedly debunks the Telegraph piece really does no such thing.

A spokesman for the Federal Labor Office said that if job seekers said they were prepared to work as, for example, dancers in strip bars, advisers could put them in touch with any suitable employers, but vacancies would not be displayed in job centers.

He also stressed job centers would not look for prostitutes on behalf of brothels, nor offer sex industry jobs to people who hadn't specifically mentioned it as an area of interest.

What the spokesman doesn't mention is the twenty-five-year-old woman The Telegraph were writing about, whose job centre told her to contact an employer who was interested in hiring her but didn't tell her that that employer was a brothel, who then tried to sue her job centre only to find that the law was on their side. Until I see a denial of that, I'll work under the assumption that it did happen — but it looks like it was the result of a job centre employee being either stupid or nasty, not the result of them following the letter of the law. We can, no doubt, expect to see more such fuck-ups, but not as part of a widespread state-imposed program.

Meanwhile, I love this quote from "celebrated Berlin prostitute" Molly Luft:

"One can't expect everyone to be prepared to work in the sex industry," Luft said. "Plus if people aren't very attractive they aren't going to make much money," she added.

She's never been to Glasgow, then.

Heroism and rudeness.

Jonah Goldberg explains just how great the Iraqi election is:

Americans snatched the victory from Iraqis. We defeated Saddam, not the Iraqi people. If they were going to take pride in their liberation they would need to feel some ownership of it.

...

The Iraqis now have their heroic story of resistance. Americans could not vote for them. We could not walk down Iraq's most dangerous highway in their place. Iraqis seized their own future. They have their narrative, their symbols, their victory. John Kerry grumpily says we shouldn't "over-hype" the election, which is just one more grain of sand on the vast beach of reasons why he deserves to remain the junior senator from Ted Kennedy's state. We should hype this to the hilts. Not as a Republican or "neoconservative" I-told-you-so - the pro-war side has gotten too many important things wrong to ever blithely use I-told-you-so and Iraq in the same sentence - but rather as Americans: We should hype this because the heroic effort of millions of Iraqis to un-pry the clenched fists of murderers is the stuff nations are built on. Our public diplomacy requires such hyping.

He's right, of course. This election has reminded me that I've not been entirely taken over by cynicism; it has, in fact, restored my faith in human nature. The scenes of jubilant Iraqis enthusiastically embracing their new right to vote remind me of the scenes of the Berlin Wall being torn down. And they seem to have had a similar effect on a lot of the anti-warriors, too: many of those who opposed the war are nonetheless agreeing that the election is a Good Thing. And, in the face of the footage, those who oppose the election are revealing to the public what utter bastards they are.

Jonah provides a link to this report in The Washington Post:

The young man wore a winter jacket over his explosive vest and approached the polling station with his hands in the pockets.

"Take your hands out of your pockets," said Ali Jabur, the Iraqi police officer in charge of patting down voters on the street outside. The young man obliged by throwing his arms wide, and blew them both to bits.

Three hours later, in streets still littered with the bomber's remains, some very determined voters streamed into the Badr Kobra High School for Girls, intent on casting the ballots that they called a repudiation of the terrorist attacks meant to scare them away.

...

When the suicide bomber at the high school struck shortly before 11 a.m., the polling site had been growing busy after a slow start. But Hadi Saleh Mohammed, the election official in charge, felt he had no choice but to close it down. There were the wounded to evacuate, a gruesome mess to clean up, security to reassess.

While all that went forward, the voters stood at the end of the block, waiting.

"They wanted to come back in," Mohammed said. "They didn't want to go back home."

This is heroic. Compare the Spanish to these people:

"I would have been happy to have died voting at the time of this explosion, because this is terrorism mixed with rudeness," said Saif Aldin Jarah, 61, a balding man with white hair who leaned on his daughter, Shyamaa, as he shuffled into the afternoon sunlight after casting his ballot.

"When terrorism becomes aimless and without a goal, it becomes rudeness," Jarah said, holding aloft a finger stained purple with indelible ink.

That may be the most damning use of understatement I've ever heard.

The welfare state.

Traditionally, the Law of Unintended Consequences is meant to refer to things that one couldn't reasonably have predicted. Who would have known, for instance, that burning fossil fuels in Britain could contribute to avalanches in the Alps? These days, perhaps it should be renamed the Law of Unconsidered Consequences, or maybe the Law of Slapdash Legislation.

Here's the latest government weeze from Germany:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners - who must pay tax and employee health insurance - were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job - including in the sex industry - or lose her unemployment benefit.

This should help to solve Germany's welfare funding crisis. Stop paying benefits to anyone who refuses to become a prostitute. I reckon there are a lot of savings to be made there.

It gets better.

Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

Let's just run through that again, shall we? If you are unemployed, you have to give your details to the job centre. The job centre in turn have to give your details to any brothel who asks for them. The brothel's HR department can then order the job centre to order you to work for the brothel. If the job centre refuse, they are breaking the law and the brothel will sue them. If you refuse, you will lose your entitlement to state benefits and you will quickly become very poor — eventually poor enough that you'll start to consider taking the job.

Of course, there was an easy and obvious way to avoid this problem, but, apparently, it presented difficulties of its own.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars.

How can anyone simultaneously claim both that they can't tell the difference between a brothel and a bar and that they are fit to hold public office?

So, you may well be asking, why has the German Government taken the somewhat unconventional step of introducing enforced conscription into prostitution for the long-term unemployed?

Prostitution was legalised in Germany in 2002 because the government believed that this would help to combat trafficking in women

Of course.


Update:

Is it true? Isn't it? Or is it? Or not? Hmm.