knowing what the system is helps you know who your allies are...,

HuffPo |  It was, after all, the Catholic bishops who created the "right-to-life" movement in the first place, back when most American weren't even paying attention to the abortion issue, as I detail in my book Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church. In the mid-1960s, abortion wasn't a major political issue. It was regulated by the states, most of which banned it except to save a woman's life. But public health officials, doctors and some legislators began pushing to make abortion more widely available because some 1 million illegal procedures were being performed every year. The gynecological wards of many city's hospitals were filled with women suffering from botched procedures -- some 10,000 in New York City alone in 1967 -- and only women who were rich or well-connected could get legal abortions, even in cases of rape or fetal deformity.

But the Catholic bishops, who considered sexual morality their special purview, decided to make preventing any liberalization of abortion law the main cause of their newly formed National Conference of Catholic Bishops. When California considered a bill to liberalize abortion access, the Dioceses of Los Angeles hired the same political consulting firm that got Ronald Reagan elected governor of California to beat back the bill. The bishops' consulting firm created the first grassroots "right-to-life" group to lobby against the bill. 

After that, the NCCB hired a political consultant to create right-to-life groups around the country. The bishops provided the financial and administrative support to get some of the earliest and most influential anti-abortion groups, including those in New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, off the ground to obscure their involvement in the campaign against abortion, which they feared would reawaken old fears of the Vatican trying to impose its doctrine on American society. They created and funded the National Right to Life Committee, which would go on to be the most influential anti-abortion organization for 30 years, to coordinate the activities of the local anti-abortion groups.

Most of these early groups were heavily Catholic. But as more Evangelical Christians became interested in the issue, they became concerned that the bishops' control of the NRLC would dilute the effectiveness of the pro-life movement because it would be seen as tool of the Catholic Church. At a heated board meeting just before the Roe v. Wade decision, they wrested control of the organization from the bishops' conference, obscuring the Catholic roots of the organization and the anti-abortion movement.

Having lost their grassroots lobby just when they needed it most, the bishops tried another tack. In 1975, they released the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, which said abortion was the number one issue for Catholics, and laid out a plan to organize Catholics politically to support candidates who backed a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. The move politicized the issue in a presidential election cycle in which both Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford thought they needed the Catholic vote to win. Both candidates went to the bishops seeking their blessing as the press watched breathlessly. Not surprisingly, the bishops gave what was widely viewed as their endorsement to Ford because of his support of an anti-abortion amendment.

So by the mid-1970s, the bishops had created the anti-abortion movement out of whole cloth and become the first to politicize the issue in a presidential election (even though they failed to throw the election to their preferred candidate). Four years later, when Republican strategist Paul Weyrich was looking for an issue to unite socially conservative voters into a new Republican electoral coalition to replace the fading New Deal coalition, he decided abortion was the perfect wedge issue, both because it tapped into conservative dissatisfaction with the new, socially liberal culture and because it could potentially separate Catholic voters from the Democratic Party. Weyrich rebranded the bishops' right-to-life movement the "pro-family" movement, teamed up with direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie and televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to form the Moral Majority, and the culture wars were officially born.

can it be that it was all so simple?

the ecology of religious beliefs

pnas |  Here we show that the spatial prevalence of human societies that believe in moralizing high gods can be predicted with a high level of accuracy (91%) from historical, social, and ecological data. Using high-resolution datasets, we systematically estimate the relative effects of resource abundance, ecological risk, cultural diffusion, shared ancestry, and political complexity on the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods. The methods presented in this paper provide a blueprint for how to leverage the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species. 

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.

in a consumer society, there are two kinds of slaves:the prisoners of addiction, and the prisoners of envy...,

monbiot |  To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.

I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe(1). What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power(2). It’s rapidly colonising the rest of the world.

Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.

At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, who work hard and who innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility. The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hard-working or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs and the best contacts, often in the KGB.

Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined(3).

If neoliberalism were anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and think tanks were financed from the beginning by some of the richest people on earth (the American tycoons Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others)(4), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically-determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.

All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous, the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally, and are now classified as social parasites.

normotic consumption vs. environmental adaptation...,

Average water use per person per day

inhabit | One week ago, 36% of California was in a state of exceptional drought. Just seven days later, that number has jumped to 58%. Lynn Wilson, academic chair at Kaplan University, warns that the situation is reaching a point where we may have to put migration out of California on the table. He says that it wouldn’t be the first time in history that people have left an area because of drought, and if current water-saving measures don’t work, it may be the best option to help alleviate water shortages.

Related: The Latest Drilling Boom in California is All About Water

The drought has cost the state billions of dollars and at least 17,000 jobs and with some scientists expecting the drought to last 100 years, it could be just the tip of the melting iceberg. Obviously other options like importing water and desalinization should be exhausted before moving some people out of the area, but as surface water quickly vanishes from the state, sometimes the best option is to just admit that some places aren’t meant to hold a lot of people.

suburbs will die: the most spectacular future time orientation failure in human history...,

Time |  The way suburban development usually works is that a town lays the pipes, plumbing, and infrastructure for housing development—often getting big loans from the government to do so—and soon after a developer appears and offers to build homes on it. Developers usually fund most of the cost of the infrastructure because they make their money back from the sale of the homes. The short-term cost to the city or town, therefore, is very low: it gets a cash infusion from whichever entity fronted the costs, and the city gets to keep all the revenue from property taxes. The thinking is that either taxes will cover the maintenance costs, or the city will keep growing and generate enough future cash flow to cover the obligations. But the tax revenue at low suburban densities isn’t nearly enough to pay the bills; in Marohn’s estimation, property taxes at suburban densities bring in anywhere from 4 cents to 65 cents for every dollar of liability. Most suburban municipalities, he says, are therefore unable to pay the maintenance costs of their infrastructure, let alone replace things when they inevitably wear out after twenty to twenty-five years. The only way to survive is to keep growing or take on more debt, or both. “It is a ridiculously unproductive system,” he says.

Marohn points out that while this has been an issue as long as there have been suburbs, the problem has become more acute with each additional “life cycle” of suburban infrastructure (the point at which the systems need to be replaced—funded by debt, more growth, or both). Most U.S. suburbs are now on their third life cycle, and infrastructure systems have only become more bloated, inefficient, and costly. “When people say we’re living beyond our means, they’re usually talking about a forty-inch TV instead of a twenty-inch TV,” he says. “This is like pennies compared to the dollars we’ve spent on the way we’ve arranged ourselves across the landscape.”

Marohn and his friends are not the only ones warning about the fix we’ve put ourselves in. In 2010 the financial analyst Meredith Whitney wrote a now-famous report called The Tragedy of the Commons, whose title was taken from the economic principle that individuals will act on their own self-interest and deplete a shared resource for their own benefit, even if that goes against the long-term common good. In her report, Whitney said states and municipalities were on the verge of collapse thanks in part to irresponsible spending on growth. Likening the municipalities’ finances and spending patterns to those of the banks leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, Whitney explained how spending has far outpaced revenues—some states had spent two or three times their tax receipts on everything from infrastructure to teacher salaries to libraries—all financed by borrowing from future dollars.

Marohn, too, claims we’ve tilled our land in inefficient ways we can’t afford (Whitney is one of Marohn’s personal heroes). The “suburban experiment,” as he calls it, has been a fiscal failure. On top of the issues of low-density tax collection, sprawling development is more expensive to build. Roads are wider and require more paving. Water and sewage service costs are higher. It costs more to maintain emergency services since more fire stations and police stations are needed per capita to keep response times down. Children need to be bused farther distances to school. One study by the Denver Regional Council of Governments found that conventional suburban development would cost local governments $4.3 billion more in infrastructure costs than compact, “smart” growth through 2020, only counting capital construction costs for sewer, water, and road infrastructure. A 2008 report by the University of Utah’s Arthur C. Nelson estimated that municipal service costs in low-density, sprawling locations can be as much as 2.5 times those in compact, higher-density locations.

Marohn thinks this is all just too gluttonous. “The fact that I can drive to work on paved roads where I can drive fifty-five miles an hour the minute I leave my driveway despite the fact that I won’t see another car for five miles,” he says, “is living beyond our means on a grand, grand scale.”

our polity is our way of life...,

boredpanda | We are all aware of the global pollution problem, but hardly anyone realizes just how much trash we produce daily. Gregg Segal, a photographer from California, aims to show this problem through powerful imagery, photographing people lying in their weekly load of trash. His ongoing project cleverly called “7 Days of Garbage” tries to portray people from different social backgrounds to reach largest audience possible .

Segal decided to photograph the participants in front of naturalistic backgrounds to show that the garbage produced by us is effecting it directly. “Obviously, the series is guiding people toward a confrontation with the excess that’s part of their lives. I’m hoping they recognize a lot of the garbage they produce is unnecessary”, he said to Slate.

Some of the participants were too ashamed of how much garbage they produced weekly, so they edited their garbage bags. Others showed everything just the way it was resulting in nasty and very strong images, which you can see here.  Fist tap Kurman.

the message of a $549,000 watch...,

bloomberg |  Don’t worry, this isn't going to be a class-warfare rant or a treatise on living the simpler, less materialistic life. Rather, it is a suggestion to some folks that perhaps they might want to make some of their conspicuous consumption a little less conspicuous. 

For example, I learned last week that Tiffany & Co. had a secret room for the big spenders. That's because when you're dropping $20 million on a necklace that, according to Tiffany's vice president, is being bought with literally a wheelbarrow full of cash, you want some, you know, privacy.

Or how about those folks who want to learn how to drive a $500,000 car very, very fast and they need to take a specific class? It's tough luck if you don’t have a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster yet, because they are sold out. So is the new $1.4 million Ferrari LaFerrari. You can still buy a Bentley GT or a Ferrari California T -- assuming you don’t mind hearing the derisive snickers of the parking valets behind your back.

The condo in the peak of the Woolworth building is going for $110 million. That isn't the building, just one apartment. That’s a relative bargain, compared with the Hamptons estate that just was purchased for $147 million dollars.

But it wasn’t a car or a diamond necklace or a house that made me realize that perhaps the ultra rich have become a bit tone deaf; it was a watch -- or a “timepiece,” as the brochure describes them. In an advertisement in last week’s New York Times, I saw a picture of the Greubel Forsey GF05. As the picture showed, it’s a busy little number in platinum and black. A quick Google search revealed a selling price of $549,000. 

I half expected to see a tagline that read “For when you need to tell the time, but you just can't do it without spending the equivalent of 36 years of minimum wage salary.” A timepiece that costs almost triple the U.S.'s median existing-home price ($201,700) does seem a tad pricey to us peasants.

college coach pay...,

slate | Perhaps nobody has profited quite so handsomely from the college sports arms race as the top coaches in NCAA football and basketball, who routinely pull down seven-figure paydays.

But who knew that these were boom times for golf and tennis coaches too?

The American Association of University Professors is out with its latest annual report on the economic health of its members' profession. Executive summary: It’s pretty weak. But this year, the AAUP has added a fun little wrinkle by comparing the growth of academic and sports spending. Particularly intriguing is this chart contrasting pay growth for faculty and head coaches. In the top football and basketball divisions, the median inflation-adjusted pay for head coaches roughly doubled between 2005-06 and 2011-12. But coaches in minor sports didn’t do so badly either: In D1-AA golf and tennis, pay packages grew by 79 and 53 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, even at doctoral institutions (shown here as category I), professors only managed a 4 percent real raise over that time.

organic negativity is not false, it's just weaker than consumerism and dopamine hegemony

itself | In a wonderful if hilarious article for the 1989 December issue of Telos, Timothy Luke, one of the primary progenitors of the artificial negativity thesis, writes a delicious article ‘Xmas Ideology: Unwrapping the New Deal and the Cold War under the Christmas Tree’¹, which is replied to directly afterwards by Paul Piccone². In it Luke claims that Christmas films such as It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn and White Christmas are an almost perfect example of artificial negativity. Against the crass commercialisation of Christmas, they appear to offer an authentic core of love and human compassion that are unspoilt. In fact, Luke argues, they are merely a way of briefly compensating for the aggressive fragmentation of late capitalism, and actually perpetuating it. The films “generate ideologies of self-gratification and fulfilment as in the cult of Christmas, which rather than being cast as a Christian celebration of Christ’s birth, is instead turned into a fantasy of self-fulfilment and collective solidarity as part of a celebration of materialistic giving (and receiving)”.

Hence:

The Christian rituals of Christmas, then, have been remanufactured by capital and the state during WWII and the Cold War into “Xmas”. Without it, the rituals of life in consumer society might disintegrate even more than they have already, making Xmas an essential aspect of exchange. It mediates the forms of subjectivity in the intimate sphere of caring with corporate agendas of spending and having. Christmas as “Xmas” becomes in film the essential simulation of settled social traditions, family unity, and collective purpose for many modern American Pottersvilles that otherwise lack these qualities.

For Luke, as in It’s A Wonderful Life, such stories are a New Deal fantasy dealt out by corporations and one side, and the state seen as benevolent protector on the other through the medium of bureaucracy – Clarence the angel attempting to get his wing is after all part of a bureaucracy of angels much like the New Deal state.

Suffice to say, Piccone doesn’t like this much. He believes the films as quite capably critiquing the American they found. Indeed, rather than stressing the values of capitalism and welfarism, these classic Christmas films: “If anything, it is the concept of solidarity and, particularly in It’s A Wonderful Life, communitarian values which are idealized”. Indeed, one of the main enemies in It’s A Wonderful Life is the heartless landlord Mr Potter. The protagonist of It’s A Wonderful Life, George, is the son of the owner of a small bank Savings and Loan. When his father dies, the slum landlord Mr Potter wants to start denying loans to the working poor, because these loans are not profitable and to also take over the company. In an very famous scene in front of the board of directors, George argues that from an economic perspective the loans his father made may not have been good sense, but from a human perspective, in getting people out of the slums, they had been an obvious good “People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, […] they’re cattle”. This convinces the board of directors to reject this, and to put him in charge of the company. Thus the older, benevolent capitalism of the small town with its concern for human values and the desire to enable people’s ambitions even if it was not profitable, the bank as service provider for people not profit, is contrasted to the centralised despotic and money orientated capitalism of Potter where profit is the only concern and people are pure objects from which to extract it. The film speaks to spiritual and moral values over money values. The same is true of Miracle on 34th Street, speculative capitalism is opposed to kindly capitalism of the small banker who knew your needs and ambitions. These films are not artificially negative, but authentically and organically negative. But this leads to a problem – they were still created by the Hollywood and, as Piccone claims, became more popular during the Reagan years because of the family values agenda he articulated. How can they be organically negative if they are put so easily to use by the Reaganite neo-conservative New Class? Piccone never accounts for this – but whatever we think of the films at hand, this small example of the major theorists of the concepts of Artificial Negativity and the New Class clashing over a particular object shows some important conceptual flaws – how do we point genuine versions of organic negativity out and be attentive to false artificial negativities? In this light, after a little anaylsis we can see that these terms have, first, no theoretical coherence and second, fulfil only one role, a purely polemic way of labelling and dismissing the distasteful.

consumed: inside the belly of the beast

jman.tv | Consumerism has become the cornerstone of the post-industrial age. Yet how much do we know about it and what it is doing to us? Using theories of evolutionary psychology to underpin a bold narrative of our times, this film takes a whirlwind tour through the "weird mental illness of consumerism", showing how our insatiable appetite has driven us into "the jaws of the beast".

"By the age of 20, the average westerner has seen one million commercial messages." With this kind of exposure, it is impossible to live in the modern world without being a product of consumer society. Now psychologists, like Geoffrey Miller, are saying that it is distorting the way we interact with the world and each other: "We've all kind of gone collectively psychotic". Evolutionary theory says we are indistinct from animals and so have two primary subconscious motives: survival and attracting a mate. As modern society has taken care of our survival, "we spend more time thinking about social and sexual issues than any animal has had the luxury of doing in the history of life on Earth".

According to scientists this has led to an obsession with 'prestige' or our rank in society, something that in consumer society has become synonymous with consumption. "The principal way you're supposed to display your mental traits now is through your purchases." Manipulating our innermost impulses, capitalism has begun to not only reflect our evolutionary tendencies but also to amplify and distort them. Creating an environment in which consumption takes the place of traditional human interaction, "consumers are neglecting to develop the crucial naturally romantic traits, saying instead, 'I've got a Porsche out front'". Yet this capitalist system, which fits so neatly with our animalistic traits, is not making us happy.

One of the great conundrums is that in an age of plenty, addictions, depression and mental health issues are becoming part of everyday conversation. The obsession with our place in society has led us to, "squander this golden age on silly anxieties." In the long term the individual and psychological cost of modern culture is relatively small. The environmental cost on the other hand could ultimately destroy life, as we know it. "It's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of growth rates that we are getting around the world are not sustainable", says Tim Cooper, a professor of Sustainable Design and Consumption.

Measures taken to try and mitigate the impact of modern life, such as transition towns, recycling, alternative power and enduring design are not dealing with the root cause, only attacking symptoms. So for the moment we must endure this strange society that is making us all so unhappy. Our only hope is that it may only be a temporary illness: "I actually think runaway consumerism is a temporary historical glitch. I think we'll grow out of it." Exploring how human psychology has moulded the society that is slowly destroying the world and us, 'Consumed' takes us inside both the apocalyptic and redemptive sides of the human condition.

chasing status in public and neglecting your own....,

journeyman | "By the age of 20, the average westerner has seen one million commercial messages." With this kind of exposure, it is impossible to live in the modern world without being a product of consumer society. Now psychologists, like Geoffrey Miller, are saying that it is distorting the way we interact with the world and each other: "We've all kind of gone collectively psychotic".

Evolutionary theory says we are indistinct from animals and so have two primary subconscious motives: survival and attracting a mate. As modern society has taken care of our survival, "we spend more time thinking about social and sexual issues than any animal has had the luxury of doing in the history of life on Earth". According to scientists this has led to an obsession with 'prestige' or our rank in society, something that in consumer society has become synonymous with consumption. "The principal way you're supposed to display your mental traits now is through your purchases." 

Manipulating our innermost impulses, capitalism has begun to not only reflect our evolutionary tendencies but also to amplify and distort them. Creating an environment in which consumption takes the place of traditional human interaction, "consumers are neglecting to develop the crucial naturally romantic traits, saying instead, 'I've got a Porsche out front'".  Yet this capitalist system, which fits so neatly with our animalistic traits, is not making us happy.

One of the great conundrums is that in an age of plenty, addictions, depression and mental health issues are becoming part of everyday conversation. The obsession with our place in society has led us to, "squander this golden age on silly anxieties." In the long term the individual and psychological cost of modern culture is relatively small. The environmental cost on the other hand could ultimately destroy life, as we know it. "It's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of growth rates that we are getting around the world are not sustainable", says Tim Cooper, a professor of Sustainable Design and Consumption. Measures taken to try and mitigate the impact of modern life, such as transition towns, recycling, alternative power and enduring design are not dealing with the root cause, only attacking symptoms. So for the moment we must endure this strange society that is making us all so unhappy. Our only hope is that it may only be a temporary illness: "I actually think runaway consumerism is a temporary historical glitch. I think we'll grow out of it." Exploring how human psychology has moulded the society that is slowly destroying the world and us, 'Consumed' takes us inside both the apocalyptic and redemptive sides of the human condition.  Fist tap Dale.

because they can...,

eater | Ray's & Stark Bar, the Patina Group's restaurant and bar located at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will be adding a 20-item Water Menu to its beverage list next week. Eater LA reports that Ray's & Stark GM and water sommelier Martin Riese created the list which includes waters from ten different countries including Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. The bottles range in size from .75 - 1 liter, and are priced from $8 - $16. The most expensive bottle is Riese's own California-made water 9OH2O. Eater LA had previously reported that 9OH2O retails for $14 per bottle because it's made "in limited editions of 10,000 individually numbered glass bottles."

According to a press release, waters on "LA's most extensive Water Menu" will be for sale by the bottle and also as part of a $12 water tasting menu. Riese is quoted in the press release saying: "We are already accustomed to pairing food with wine or beer, but many people don't know that water is just as important to the entire dining experience." The menu is a booklet that features descriptions of each water varietal, including information on origin, mineral content, and tasting notes. Here's the water menu in full and the press release:

a tale of two discounters...,

cbsnews | This holiday season, the biggest discount chains in the U.S. will tell the tale of two very different shoppers: Those that have and those that have not.

Walmart (WMT), the world's largest retailer, on Thursday acknowledged that its low-income shoppers continue to struggle in the economy and issued an outlook for the fourth quarter -- which encompasses the holiday shopping period -- that falls below Wall Street estimates. On the same day, its smaller rival Target (TGT), which caters to more affluent shoppers, said it expects results during the quarter to exceed the Street's projections.

The two discounters offer valuable insight into how Americans will spend in November and December, a period that's traditionally the busiest shopping period of the year. Some merchants depend on the holiday shopping season for up to 40 percent of their annual sales, but economists watch the period closely to get a temperature reading on the overall mood of American consumers.

The forecasts seem to confirm a trend that has taken shape during the economic downturn. Well-heeled shoppers spend more freely as the economy begins to show new signs of life, while consumers in the lower-income brackets continue to hold tight to their purse strings even as the housing and stock markets rebound.

Walmart and Target both are discounters, but they cater to different customers. Walmart, which says its customers' average household income ranges from $30,000 to $60,000, hammers its low-price message and focuses on stocking basics like tee shirts and underwear along with household goods. But Target, whose customers have a median household income of $64,000 a year, is known for carrying discounted designer clothes and home decor under the same roof as detergent and dishwashing liquid.

turning natural material resources into garbage via manufactured demand...,

thestoryofbottledwater | The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.

seoul flaunts the come up...,

WaPo | Americans aren’t particularly accustomed to foreign music competing with their own in global markets, so when the South Korean song “Gangnam Style” popped onto U.S. music charts, it was something of a wake-up call. Korean pop music has been thriving in East Asia for years, which is remarkable in itself given the country’s small size and the wealth of successful musicians in its bigger and richer neighbor Japan.

So how do Korea’s music companies do it? Part of the industry’s success comes from being just that: industrial. Musicians are meticulously groomed, songs set to careful formulas, and all of it processed on a grand scale. The New Yorker’s John Seabrook explained the concept of “cultural technology,” a factory-like system whereby everything from composer nationality to eye shadow color to hand gestures is pre-determined by formula and protocol. Seabrook suggests that the “cultural technology” model produces music “too robotic to make it in the West” — the music’s painstaking earnestness also doesn’t quite translate for Americans — and K-pop has indeed long struggled to make it big in Western markets.

How, then, to explain the sudden U.S. success of “Gangnam Style,” written and performed by a K-popper who is of the “cultural technology” system but also an aberration within it: older, less attractive (sorry) and more satirical than his K-compatriots? How did Psy manage to utilize the successes of “cultural technology” — he’s got Americans mimicking his dance and glued to his video, in true K-pop form — while also overcoming the more “robotic” aspects of it that have hampered its Western reach?

The answer may have to do with the timing of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” in which the largely agrarian dictatorship became a wealthy and developed democracy in a few short decades. The country became rich enough to support a big domestic music industry during a time when the way people consume music was changing. Fist tap Dale.

the ultimate consumer products road map

the obesity epidemic explained?

who destroyed the economy: the case against the baby boomers

theatlantic | My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I'd be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

 This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

We are sitting on a beach in late afternoon on a sun-drizzled lake in the Cascade Mountains, two college-educated, upper-middle-class white men settling in for a week of generational warfare. My son, Max, splashes in the waves with his grandmother; sunbathers lounge in inner tubes around us; snow-capped peaks loom above the tree line. The breeze smells of Coppertone and wet dog. My father thinks back on the country that awaited him when he finished law school. "There seemed to be a lot of potential," he says, setting up the first of many evasions, "but there weren't a lot of jobs."

I'm mildly impressed that he's even bothering to mount a defense. The facts as I see them are clear and damning: Baby boomers took the economic equivalent of a king salmon from their parents and, before they passed it on, gobbled up everything but the bones.

Ultimately, members of my father's generation--generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964--are reaping more than they sowed. They graduated smack into one of the strongest economic expansions in American history. They needed less education to snag a decent-salaried job than their children do, and a college education cost them a small fraction of what it did for their children or will for their grandkids. One income was sufficient to get a family ahead economically. Marginal federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare exception, since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement benefits have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these Americans chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes onto future generations.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose twelvefold from the time the first boomers began working until last year, when they began to cash out their retirement. (The growth trend over the 12 years since I entered the workforce suggests that the Dow will double exactly once before I retire.) They will leave the workforce far wealthier than their parents did, with even more government promises awaiting them. Boomers will be the first generation of retirees to fully enjoy the Medicare prescription-drug benefit; because Social Security payouts rise faster than price inflation, they will draw more-generous retirement benefits than their parents did, in real terms--at their children's expense. The Urban Institute estimated last year that a couple retiring in 2011, having both earned average wages, will accrue about $200,000 more in Medicare and Social Security benefits over their lifetimes than they paid in taxes to support those programs.

Those retirees and near-retirees bequeath a shambles to their offspring. Young people are unemployed at historically high levels. Global competition is stronger than ever, but American institutions have not adapted to prepare new workers for its challenges. Boomers have run up incomes for the very wealthiest Americans, shrunk the middle class, and, via careless borrowing and reckless financial engineering, driven the economy into the worst recession in 80 years. The Pew Research Center reports that middle-class families today are 5 percent less wealthy than their parents were at the same point in their lives, after adjusting for inflation, even though families today are far more likely to include two wage earners. Another Pew report shows that those ages 55 to 64 are 10 percent wealthier today, even after the Great Recession, than Americans of that age bracket were in 1984. Those younger than 35 are 68 percent less wealthy than the same bracket was in 1984.

job's package is ALL in your heads I-sheeple...,

waste unrivalled by anything short of uranium production...,