Iceland Bans Strip Clubs

Iceland: the world's most feminist country

Iceland has just banned all strip clubs. Perhaps it's down to the lesbian prime minister, but this may just be the most female-friendly country on the planet

by Julie Bindel

Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.

While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.

Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold." When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: "It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society."

The news is a real boost to feminists around the world, showing us that when an entire country unites behind an idea anything can happen. And it is bound to give a shot in the arm to the feminist campaign in the UK against an industry that is both a cause and a consequence of gaping inequality between men and women.

According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not. Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.

So how has Iceland managed it? To start with, it has a strong women's movement and a high number of female politicans. Almost half the parliamentarians are female and it was ranked fourth out of 130 countries on the international gender gap index (behind Norway, Finland and Sweden). All four of these Scandinavian countries have, to some degree, criminalised the purchase of sex (legislation that the UK will adopt on 1 April). "Once you break past the glass ceiling and have more than one third of female politicians," says Halldórsdóttir, "something changes. Feminist energy seems to permeate everything."

Johanna Sigurðardottir is Iceland's first female and the world's first openly lesbian head of state. Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an organisation based in Reykjavik that campaigns against sexual violence, says she has enjoyed the support of Sigurðardottir for their campaigns against rape and domestic violence: "Johanna is a great feminist in that she challenges the men in her party and refuses to let them oppress her."

Then there is the fact that feminists in Iceland appear to be entirely united in opposition to prostitution, unlike the UK where heated debates rage over whether prostitution and lapdancing are empowering or degrading to women. There is also public support: the ban on commercial sexual activity is not only supported by feminists but also much of the population. A 2007 poll found that 82% of women and 57% of men support the criminalisation of paying for sex – either in brothels or lapdance clubs – and fewer than 10% of Icelanders were opposed.

Jónsdóttir says the ban could mean the death of the sex industry. "Last year we passed a law against the purchase of sex, recently introduced an action plan on trafficking of women, and now we have shut down the strip clubs. The Nordic countries are leading the way on women's equality, recognising women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale."

Strip club owners are, not surprisingly, furious about the new law. One gave an interview to a local newspaper in which he likened Iceland's approach to that of a country such as Saudi Arabia, where it is not permitted to see any part of a woman's body in public. "I have reached the age where I'm not sure whether I want to bother with this hassle any more," he said.

Janice Raymond, a director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, hopes that all sex industry profiteers feel the same way, and believes the new law will pave the way for governments in other countries to follow suit. "What a victory, not only for the Icelanders but for everyone worldwide who repudiates the sexual exploitation of women," she says.

Jónsdóttir is confident that the law will create a change in attitudes towards women. "I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale."

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COMMMENT: Q. WTF does strip clubs or topless waitresses have to do with "trafficking" in women?

A. Not one goddamn thing.

Healthy heterosexuality is NOT the goal of modern feminism.

Statements like "sexual exploitation of women" and "women are not for sale" are psychological warfare, attempting to conflate strip clubs with human trafficking. Really what's going on is that the feminists HATE heterosexuality, and therefore are incensed that any woman would do anything to please a man.

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Less Than Half Of Americans Consider Themselves Middle Class: Poll

Arthur Delaney – Mon Mar 15, 12:34 pm ET

Slightly less than half of Americans consider themselves middle class, according to a new survey by ABC World News, and four in ten people who think they've achieved middle class status say they're struggling to keep it.

Fourteen percent of the 1,005 survey respondents say they consider themselves "upper-middle class," 39 percent working class and 45 percent middle class.

The average income for poll respondents who consider themselves middle class is about $55,000 a year. Self-described working class folks earn roughly $35,000, and those who think they're well-off earn $95,000. "But income is far from the sole determinant of self-defined middle class status, likely because family size, expenses, local costs of living and other circumstances also come into it," the poll notes. "Even among people with incomes under $25,000 a year, 41 percent describe themselves as middle class. So do 38 percent of those with household incomes over $100,000."

(There are plenty of people who do not think that a household income of $250,000 makes for a rich household, as we are reminded whenever the subject of taxes comes up. It's a state of mind.)

The Commerce Department produced a report in January for the Vice President's Middle Class Task Force that objectively measured obstacles to attaining the middle class lifestyle. That report found that it's more difficult to do than it used to be:

"While incomes for married-couple and single-parent families with two children have increased significantly, much of this rise occurred in the 1990s. In part, these increases occurred because parents are working more hours in order to maintain higher income levels," the report said.

"Unfortunately, while incomes have risen, the prices for three large components of middle class expenses have increased faster than income: the cost of college, the cost of health care and the cost of a house. Thus, we conclude that it is harder to attain a middle class lifestyle now than it was in the recent past."

Rebecca Blank, Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at Commerce, told HuffPost on Monday that the increased costs of college and health care justified the administration's focus on reforming those industries.

"In general, I think that's not a very good thing at all" that it's more difficult to obtain a middle class lifestyle, she said.

For most people, homeownership is the benchmark for middle class membership, with 80 percent of ABC's poll respondents saying that owning a home is a "necessary element" of middle class life.

Part of the survey reveals how the recession disproportionately hurts the less well-off. "Underscoring the depths of the economic crisis, 28 percent of middle-income Americans say
someone in their household has been laid off or lost a job in the last year," the poll says. "That jumps even higher, to 39 percent, among lower-income Americans, and drops considerably to 16 percent of those with $100,000-plus incomes. There's a difference in impact at the low end: Less well-off people are much more apt than those who are better off to say the layoff caused them serious financial hardship."

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COMMENT: Aha! The psycho-warfare operation to get all Americans to "consider themselves" middle-class is starting to give way under the weight of the evidence. As I said before, middle-class is "enough money and other material resources to meet all of your needs and have a few luxuries" (I estimate $50k/adult/year + $25K/child/year), and by this (correct) definition, more than half of U.S. citizens are poor.

Insurance, interest, and inflation is the three-pronged attack by which the parasites are destroying the middle class in this country.
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Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy

by Edward Shorter
The Wall Street Journal

To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn't exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.

Psychopharmacology, or the treatment of the mind and brain with drugs, has come to dominate the field. The positive side is that many illnesses respond readily to medication. The negative side is that the pharmaceutical industry seeks the largest possible market for a given drug, and advertises huge diseases, such as major depression and schizophrenia, the scientific status of which makes insiders uneasy.

In the 1950s and '60s, when psychiatry was still under the influence of the European scientific tradition, reasonably accurate diagnoses still sat at center stage. If you felt blue, uneasy and generally jumpy, "nerves" was a common diagnosis. For the psychotherapeutically oriented psychiatrists of the day, "psychoneurosis" was the equivalent of nerves. There was no point in breaking these terms down: clinicians and patients alike understood "a case of nerves," or a "nervous breakdown."

Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms. A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has "social anxiety disorder" or "seasonal affective disorder." The increased specificity is spurious. There is little risk of misdiagnosis, because the new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.

For those more seriously ill, contemplating suicide or pacing restlessly and saying "It's all my fault," melancholia was the diagnosis of choice. The term has been around for donkey's years.

All the serious disorders of mood were once lumped together technically as "manic-depressive illness"—and again, there was little point in differentiating, because medications such as lithium that worked for mania were also sometimes effective in forestalling renewed episodes of serious depression.

Psychopharmacology—the treatment of disorders of the mind and brain with drugs—was experiencing its first big push, and a host of effective new agents was marketed. The first blockbuster drug in psychiatry appeared in 1955 as Wallace Lab's Miltown, a "tranquilizer" of the dicarbamate class. The first of the "tricyclic antidepressants" (because of their chemical structure) was launched in the U.S. in 1959, called imipramine generically and Tofranil by brand name. It remains today the single most effective antidepressant on the market for the immediate treatment of serious depression.

In the 1960s an entirely different class of drugs appeared, the benzodiazepines, indicated for anxiety rather than depression. (But one keeps in mind that these indications are more marketing devices than scientific categories, because most depression entails anxiety and vice versa.) In the benzodiazepine class, Librium was launched for anxiety in 1960, Valium in 1963. Despite an undeserved reputation for addictiveness, the benzos remain today one of the most useful drug classes in the history of psychiatry. They are effective across the entire range of nervous illnesses. In one World Health Organization study in the early 1990s, a sample of family physicians world-wide prescribed benzos for 28% of their depressed patients, 31% of their anxious patients; the figures are virtually identical. In the 1950s and '60s physicians had available drugs that truly worked for diseases that actually existed.

And then the golden era came to an end. The 1978 article of British psychiatrist Malcolm Lader on the benzos as "the opium of the masses" would be a good landmark. The patents expired for the drugs of the 1950s and '60s, and the solid diagnoses were all erased from the classification in 1980 with the appearance of the third edition of the DSM series, called "DSM-III." It was largely the brainchild of Columbia University psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, an energetic and charismatic individual who had been schooled in psychometrics. But his energy and charisma nearly led psychiatry off a cliff.

Mr. Spitzer was discouraged with psychoanalysis, and wanted to come up with a new illness classification that would ditch all the old Freudian concepts such as "depressive neurosis" with their implication of "unconscious psychic conflicts." Mr. Spitzer and company wanted diagnoses based on observable symptoms rather than on speculation about the unconscious mind. So he, and members of the Task Force that the American Psychiatric Association designated, set out to devise a new list of diagnoses that correspond to natural disease entities.

Yet Mr. Spitzer ran smack against the politics of the American Psychiatric Association, still heavily influenced by the psychoanalysts. Mr. Spitzer proposed such diagnoses as "major depression" and "dysthymia," diagnoses that were themselves highly heterogeneous, lumping together a number of different kinds of depression. But the terms turned out to be politically acceptable.

So in DSM-III there was a lot of horse-trading. The biologically oriented young Turks got a depression diagnosis—major depression—that was divorced from what they considered the psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. And the waning but still substantial number of analysts got a diagnosis—dysthymia—that sounded like their beloved "neurotic depression," that had been the mainstay of psychoanalytic practice. Psychiatry ended up with two brand-new depression diagnoses with criteria so broad that huge numbers of people could qualify for them.

. . .

New drugs appeared to match the new diseases. In the late 1980s, the Prozac-type agents began to hit the market, the "SSRIs," or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and Lexapro. They were supposedly effective by increasing the amount of serotonin available to the brain.

The SSRIs are effective for certain indications, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and for some patients with anxiety. But many people believe they're not often effective for serious depression, even though they fit wonderfully with the heterogeneous concept of "major depression." So, hand in hand, these antidepressants and major depression marched off together into the sunset. These were drugs that don't work for diseases that don't exist, as it were.

The latest draft of the DSM fixes none of the problems with the previous DSM series, and even creates some new ones.

A new problem is the extension of "schizophrenia" to a larger population, with "psychosis risk syndrome." Even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic. Let's say you have "disorganized speech." This would apply to about half of my students. Pour on the Seroquel for "psychosis risk syndrome"!

DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases: turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity.

If there were specific treatments for these various niches, you could argue this is good diagnostics. But, as with other forms of anxiety-depression, the SSRIs are thought good for everything. Yet to market a given indication, such as social-anxiety disorder, it's necessary to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on registration trials to convince the FDA that your agent works for this disease that previously nobody had ever heard of.

DSM-V is not all bad news. It turns the jumble of developmental syndromes for children into a single group of "autism spectrum disorders," which makes sense because previously, with Asperger's as a separate disease, it was like trying to draw lines in a bucket of water. But the basic problems of the previous DSM series are left untouched.

Where is psychiatry headed? What the discipline badly needs is close attention to patients and their individual symptoms, in order to carve out the real diseases from the vast pool of symptoms that DSM keeps reshuffling into different "disorders." This kind of careful attention to what patients actually have is called "psychopathology," and its absence distinguishes American psychiatry from the European tradition. With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs.

—Edward Shorter is professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto. His latest book, written with Max Fink, "Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia," is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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COMMENT: The Medical Business is NOT a health care system. Most people who become medical doctors do so NOT because they want to help others, but as a career decision, with the expectation that far-above-average status and $ will accrue to them thereby.

Nutritional medicine has been proven safe and effective for many decades (see, e.g., http://www.doctoryourself.com/); orthomolecular psychiatry, invented by Dr. Abram Hoffer, has also a FAR better track record - in terms of safety, efficacy, AND cost - than conventional (drug) psychiatry. Doctors - practitioners of the medical business - advise the high-grain/low fat diet BECAUSE it has been proven to make most people fat and sick (see "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes); and they tell you that the amounts of vitamins and minerals you need to be healthy are "dangerous" BECAUSE they need you to be in a diseased condition. They are creating consumer demand for drugs and surgery; that's the business they're in.

They feel just fine about the millions who are suffering needlessly. They are parasites.

And schizophrenia is not a mental illness, it is a physical illness with obvious mental and non-obvious physical symptoms. Treating a physical illness with psych meds is evil, especially because we have known for 40 YEARS how to cure most of them with nutritional medicine.
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Why pharmaceuticals might be called Weapons of Mass Prescription

Monday, March 01, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.

When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn't rhetoric, it's an historical fact.)

Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.

It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?

Weapons of Mass Prescription

What if a nation wanted to reduce its own civilian population but do it covertly? One way to accomplish that would be to slowly poison the civilian population through exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting molecules and nerve toxins.

And as any terrorist can tell you, the most covert way to accomplish that would be to inject such chemicals into the everyday products that people routinely consume: Water, food, personal care products and medicines. I even published a cartoon with this theme a couple of years ago: http://www.naturalnews.com/021880_w...

Here's another interesting fact: If you examine what's in the water, food, products and medicines sold across North America, you'll discover a dangerous assortment of chemicals that, taken together, could quite reasonably be considered weapons of mass destruction.

Interestingly, the fluoride dumped into public water supplies was originally an offshoot of the enrichment processing facilities for uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. These days, however, fluoride is usually just the toxic waste from fertilizer manufacturing factories or the waste from smokestack scrubbers of coal-fired power plants. Either way, it's not good for your teeth: The entire fluoride agenda largely a convenient, low-cost way to dispose of industrial waste chemicals while calling it a public health program.

Antibacterial soaps derive their antibacterial properties from chemicals that are molecularly quite similar to the infamous Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. And yet these products are openly marketed for use by children.

Similarly, children and adults continue to be poisoned by heavy metals like mercury thanks to the highly toxic practices of modern dentistry -- an industry which astoundingly has still failed to admit to the obvious toxicity of a heavy metal its practitioners continue to install in people's mouths as "silver fillings" (which actually contain more mercury than silver).

There are hormone-disrupting chemicals in most of the plastics used in the processed food industry -- especially canned soups which are often highly toxic for a variety of other reasons. MSG and other nervous system destroyers are used throughout the food supply in soups, snack foods, salad dressings, flavorings and dips.

These are all chemical assaults of one kind or another, but the greatest assault on the minds and bodies of western consumers comes in the form of pharmaceutical chemicals. That's why I call them 'Weapons of Mass Prescription.'

Destroy any nation by destroying the health of its citizens

If you want to destroy any nation, simply unleash Big Pharma into its medical system. Within just two generations, its people will suffer widespread organ damage, sharp decline in cognitive function and rampant degenerative disease brought on by the side effects of everyday pharmaceuticals...

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COMMENT: The tares thrive on the barren ground, but the fruits of their labors are bitter; the good seed needs a nurturing environment, but if they get it the fruits of their labors light up the world. (yes, I know I'm combining parables.)

The tares are trying to make the U.S.A. an environment that selects for the qualities of the tare; they are not affected by all the pollution, and getting vitamins and minerals doesn't turn them into good seed.
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