Lap dancing is the most intimate form of sex work that is legal in most American cities, and therefore probably as close as researchers can get to studying actual sexual activity.

In their study, the researchers found that during the non-fertile periods of the dancer’s menstrual cycles, both sets of dancers earned similar tips.

But when naturally cycling lap dancers entered their fertile period, they earned significantly more in tips than their pill taking co-workers.

Dancers who weren’t on the pill made about $70 an hour from admiring men, during peak fertility, versus about $35 while menstruating and $50 in between.   more »

Positive About Anorexia:

Teenage girls are forming online clubs,

where they discuss what to eat

and are proud of their thinness.

They have a unifying fashion symbol

- red wristbands to show their solidarity

and allegiance to a goddess called Ana

   more »

Keywords: gorgeous, catwalk, gaunt, models, ana, anorexia, fashion

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things.

Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations.

A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million.

It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion.   more »

Rendition is a film about the ways in which, at least as far back as the Clinton era, America has outsourced torture.

It deals with the abduction of men fuzzily described as "illegal enemy combatants", often on the grounds of the equally fuzzily-defined War on Terror.

They are hooded, placed aboard Gulfstream jets, and flown to the likes of Jordan, Syria and Morocco, countries not known for their respect for human rights.

Where, denied legal representation of any sort, they are brutalised until they confess to crimes which, it has often subsequently emerged, there is no way they could have committed.   more »

Justification consequently has to assume two guises, but the national masquerade has to be stronger – a manufactured consent through propaganda.

This is where the creation of a seemingly all-powerful threat to the 'homeland' has to be inculcated. "Terrorism" has been used to instil fear and to justify the invasion and conquest of Iraq.

The word “terrorist” serves as a shield that justifies even the most heinous injustices. These include the illegal occupation and the slow genocide of the Palestinian people, the occupation and on-going massacre of Iraqis and the military occupation of Afghanistan

Any form of resistance to imperialism and foreign occupation is loftily conflated with terrorism, in a type of Orwellian double speak that turns the colonizer and oppressor into the victim.   more »