Fiat Lux

When I first heard about this I thought it was a hoax, but it seems to be true. Apparently forced prostitution is not just for third-world countries.

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. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

In short, if you're unemployed, female and under 55, you too can be forced into prostitution in Germany! I wonder, if you were married, would your husband have the right to object?

-------------------
SIDE NOTE: This thread is likely going to get comments and track-backs locked within 72 hours to prevent it from being flooded by comment spammers.

I had Accounting class last night, which gave me the perfect excuse to ignore the President's SOTU speech. Not that I would have watched it anyway.

Best morning-after quote goes to Jesse at Pandagon:

I honestly do think there was a typo in the propoganda sheet: this is the pwnership society, where we all get pwned by the government.

If that makes no sense to you, here's a translation. In the wonderful world of gaming, when you utterly and completely kick someone or something's ass, you 'pwn' it.

Seriously, though, what on earth is BushCo thinking with these proposed changes to Social Security? An 'ownership society' where you do not in fact own your own private account and any money left in it goes right back to the goverment when you die? If you're not going to make a real change in the structure of Social Security, then why do it at all?

On a personal note, the debate about Social Security has gotten Scott and I to talk a bit about retirement planning. We're going to have to ramp up our savings somehow, although how exactly we're going to do that with me in school and a bunch of debt already is unclear. We do have several 401ks already but haven't done much contributing the last 3 years or so due to our lowered incomes. Realistically we won't be able to save much of anything until I'm back in the workforce full-time, and that's 2 years off (and another student loan to pay off). It's a little scary when I think about how badly we're doing in retirement planning. So I try not to.

The one thing I do know is that should the BushCo plan come to pass, this family is not diverting one penny of their $ into a so-called 'private account'.

I have to work tonight and am not going to be able to watch any of the Super Bowl. Is "bummed out" too dated a phrase to use anymore?

I am settling more into a regular routine now, three weeks into school. Classes four days a week, work the other three. Which means I don't really have any days off, but some days are lighter than others.

And some are more stressful. I've been at Starbucks three months now. I'm pretty comfortable doing the job most of the time, but the stress level has not significantly abated and I don't think it's going to. The store is quite high-volume - we can get as many as 100 customers an hour - and there's the usual mix of personalities and staff drama to cope with. It can get hectic but it's really not all that bad.

No, the real stress comes from being located in a less than pristine part of town (Market Street, not too far from the Tenderloin). On a daily if not hourly basis, we have to deal with people who come in and try to steal anything they can lay their hands on -- from our tip jar to bags of whole coffee beans -- to drunks who fall asleep in the cafe and piss all over themselves and our chairs, to my personal least-favorite: junkies who shoot up in the bathroom and leave blood splatters all over the place. Sometimes they'll leave a used syringe as a parting gift. This last is particularly unpleasant, because since you don't know what kind of diseases the junkie might have, we have to lock down the bathroom until we can do a major disinfecting scrubdown.

I'm a lifelong city-dweller, so being annoyed by homeless people is hardly new to me, but I have to say that the homeless we have to deal with here do seem to be more distressing than the ones I dealt with in New York. Granted I never worked in a Starbucks when I was in New York, so maybe I was just oblivious to it there. I don't know. But as much as I enjoy slinging coffee, I would definitely be happier if I could do it someplace where I did not have to deal with junkies, people who piss themselves, and petty thieves all the time.

Plus I have a quiz tomorrow and I hope I'm going to do well on it. It's been a long, long time since I've had to study for this kind of test and I hope I'm retaining the right information from the readings assigned.

There's a rumor floating around the blogosphere that the famed Deep Throat, who (if you're too young to remember) helped Woodward & Bernstein investigate Watergate and take down President Nixon back in the day, may be dying.

That's good news for folks like me, who are really curious to finally find out who the guy was. However, I do not think it's Rehnquist.

Is Al Franken going to run for the soon to be vacated Senate seat of Mark Dayton? I really hope not.

I have nothing against Franken. I enjoy his work and generally agree with his politics. But for him to seriously run for office would not be a good idea. I'm not up to speed on who might be an appropriate candidate (although the idea that David Wellstone might run sounded intriguing), but I'd definitely like to see someone less likely to be turned into fodder for a thousand fundrasing drives by the Right.

I could be wrong, of course. We shall see.

UPDATE: He's not running.

It's been several weeks since I catblogged on a Friday. Gimli is about 10 months old now and has grown into the biggest cat in the house. Here he is, hanging out in the kitchen.

He's still a very active kitten most of the time, but can also be very affectionate. His habit of grooming both people and other cats has not gone away and is very endearing. He has, thankfully, grown out of his former habit of chewing on my nose to wake me up.

I have some notes sitting around for a blog entry I was planning on posting on March 11, three and a half years after 9/11, but today's news is upsetting enough that I'll blog about the topic now instead.

Here's the notes I'd started on:

Sitting in a room in the library on campus, looking out a glass window at the hills of San Francisco, and listening to some Sara McLaughlin sharply brought to mind a moment from the last vacation I took before 9/11; a few days at a ritzy spa in Arizona with my mother & sister. The moment I am thinking of was towards the end of the trip. I had had a massage and was sitting in the quiet room of the spa, enjoying some tea and looking out another glass wall at a storm coming in over the mountains. I was relaxed, and at peace. And I'm feeling pretty good today, but it occurred to me as I sit here that in a very real way, I have never felt that good ever since 9/11. With three and a half years passed since that terrible day, I am starting to wonder if I ever will feel the same way again.

I'm not as bad as I was the first few months afterwards. The horror, the pain, the feeling that my world was ripped out by the roots -- they do not grip me the way they did. I've had to work to get to that point. As with other subjects that I know will depress and upset me, I go out of my way to not awaken the pain. It's a reasonably successful technique - whole days can go by without me thinking of that morning. And then I do, and the pain and fear and sorrow come back.

I'm unsure whether trying not to think about things that upset me is the best possible coping tactic, frankly. But it does get me through the days and allows me to function as a reasonably normal person, most of the time.

Today was one of those days when my coping skills failed me. The thought that maybe there really was enough information out there, that there was enough to warn people; that maybe, just maybe, this madness could have been averted makes me feel like hell.

The Rude Pundit has a really good obituary for the late great Arthur Miller.

As Kevin Drum notes, Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head with regard to Howard Dean's election as DNC head.

For a while, Mr. Dean will be the public face of the Democrats, and the Republicans will try to portray him as the leftist he isn't. But Deanism isn't about turning to the left: it's about making a stand.

Indeed. On both counts.

The National Hockey League canceled what little was left of the season Wednesday after a series of last-minute offers were rejected on the final day of negotiations.

When Republicans can lie and lie and nobody seems to ever actually call them on it .... heck, even so-called "reporters" can blatantly lie and nobody seems to care .... when it's OK to call even former US Presidents traitors because they don't agree with you .... when things that would have been a major scandal in the past are glossed over with hardly a peep in the press ... what on earth can one small blog do to make a difference?

Per Feministe:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

Mine: Why?

From: Writing Effective Letters, Memos, & E-Mail by Arthur H Bell. Third Edition (C) 2004.

Sorry about the last few days of blog silence. I haven't been feeling very inspired lately. However, Kevin Drum makes a good point about credit reporting.

The problem with credit reports is that they're strictly under the control of one side of the credit transaction: businesses. If a business requests a report, they get it, no questions asked. If a business reports a problem, it goes on the report, no questions asked. The consumer never knows any of this is happening, and that's the way the credit reporting companies like it.

This needs to stop. If a business requests a report, the consumer should be notified — by email, phone, or in writing — and the report should go out only if the consumer authorizes it. If a nonroutine entry is added to a credit report, the consumer should be notified so that she can object immediately if she thinks a mistake has been made. Consumers should be full partners in the creation of credit reports, and any changes or uses of credit reports should be fully transparent to the consumer involved.

These aren't just pieces of paper anymore. Credit reports are minutely detailed resumes of your entire life, and credit reporting companies shouldn't be allowed to arrogantly treat your life as if it's their sole property. After all, an improper use of your credit report can do you tremendous damage. It should fundamentally be considered joint property, as much yours as the credit reporting company's.

The CS Monitor has a piece out today about the role of religion in Europe vis a vis its role in America. Most of what's said isn't really news if you've been paying attention, but it's still worth a read. Here's a tidbit:

Luis Lopez Guerra, the Spanish government's point man in its campaign to wrest from Catholic influence social legislation on questions such as abortion, divorce, and gay marriage, sees things differently.

He wonders why, in a country where less than half the population ever goes to church, he should have found a Bible and a crucifix on his desk, along with the Constitution, when he was sworn in as undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice a year ago.

The Spanish government's plans to legalize gay marriage this spring, to liberalize divorce and abortion laws, and to permit stem-cell research, do not represent an attempt to impose an atheist state religion, he insists. Rather, he says, they "extend civil rights and make the law independent of Catholic dogma."

*sigh* I really wish I had been more interested in learning to speak, rather than to sing, a second language when I was younger. Europe's looking better and better as the years go by.

There's another flurry in the recurring cycle of "where are all the female political bloggers" going on this week, fed by a couple of posts at Kevin Drum's site.

I don't think there's some sort of deliberate conspiracy on the part of Kevin Drum and his pals to keep female bloggers out of their blogrolls. But I do think there's a particular blindness that left-leaning men enagage in. I believe they generally do care about womens' issues and want to see women playing a more active and vocal role in the general discourse. But simultaneously, they don't realize that their inaction is not helping that day come to pass.

Despite decades having passed since "the feminist revovlution", this is still much more of a man's world than it is an egalitarian one. Men in positions of authority, like the top bloggers, need to realize that they have to actually do something to help change the status quo.

I just posted a suggestion on Ezra Klein's site to this end, and I'm going to repost it here:

How about creating a new mini-blogroll on your front page. Update it regularly. In it, you link to bloggers who ought to have better recognition but for whatever reason, don't get it. And make a point of being diverse in your linking. To make the workload manageable, I'd suggest updates every 4 to 6 weeks and no more than 5 to 7 blogs listed in the blogroll.

Even better, try to get one or two of the other big-name Lefty bloggers to do the same thing.

I'm not the only person to make this suggestion. Several people said more or less the same thing in the comments to Kevin Drum's post. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. Maybe the guys will take some steps to show they do walk the walk when it comes to advancing women. Or maybe deep down they really are a bunch of sexist pigs. Let's see what happens.

One of the campus facilities dep't trucks was decorated with this bumper sticker:

Why is MY oil under THEIR sand?

*sigh*. Some people are real idiots.

I'm tempted to make a minor stink about the sticker to the college administration but since I didn't get the license plate of the truck I'll let it slide. if I see the truck again, though, I'll make a note of it.

I don't have any new cute cat pictures, so today I'll share the random contents of my iTunes Party Shuffle:

Sunday ..... "Sunday in the Park with George"
Talking Back To The Night ..... Steve Winwood
Bomday Dreams ..... "Bombay Dreams" (London Cast)
Fallen (Radio Edit) ..... Sarah McLachlan
Big-Eyed Fish ..... Dave Matthews Band
Meet Virginia ..... Train
Live To Tell ..... Madonna
All This Time ..... Sting
Something Happened On The Way To Heaven ..... Phil Collins
Somewhere Down The Crazy River ..... Robbie Robertson

I really need to start listening to more newer artists but I don't have the time or more important the money to start buying a lot of stuff in the hopes I'll like some of it.

UPDATE: If you like cat blogging, Atrios has a particlarly nice shot of his gray cat this week.

One of the many things I'm working on these days is summer internship applications. With that in mind, here's something depressing about job opportunities for women:

Did Stan Shih Really Say that a Woman's Place was in the Home?

Stan Shih is the CEO of Acer.

Althought I have strong feeling on the subject of Israel, I rarely blog about it. This is in part because I think it's easy for me to have an opinion while sitting safely here in America, but the people who are actually living through it probably don't appreciate the armchair quarterbacking. Also, because my position is hard to explain and tends to satisfy nobody. Some don't like it that I have little good to say about the Palestinian leadership and the practices of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, et al. Others believe whatever Israel does is right without qualification.

So all in all, I tend to let the subject be. There's plenty of other things to blog about. However, today I ran across an entry in the Bull Moose Blog that I liked. It's short and worth a read.

Steve M from "No More Mister Nice Blog" is shuttering his blog.

I'm bummed; his was one of the ones I really liked.