While most Americans were planning for the annual ritual of overconsumption known as Thanksgiving, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation, America's leading architects of conservative thought for at least three decades, were doing their part to add to the holiday cheer. According to a November 13 Heritage article, well-off revelers could stuff their faces unhampered by guilt about the less fortunate, because there are no longer any hungry people in the United States.

You have to hand it to Heritage for always being first out of the gate to exploit the latest event or finding to advance its aims-this is the same think tank that issued a comprehensive strategy, two weeks after Katrina hit shore, for using the hurricane as an excuse to slash federal social programs. This time, its thinkers found inspiration in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual report on Household Food Security in the United States, which is as close as the federal government comes to providing statistics on hunger among the nation's poor. The latest report states that 11 percent of Americans were "food insecure" for some part of 2006, and 4 percent-11.1 million people-experienced "very low food security."[..]

But the Heritage folks are looking beyond semantic tweaks: Far from having too little to eat, they argue, poor people are eating too much. By the time the USDA report went public, Heritage had readied its own salvo, titled "Hunger Hysteria: Examining Food Security and Obesity in America." In recent years, the U.S. media and public have become increasingly obsessed with the "obesity epidemic." And what better way to attack the idea of deprivation among the poor than to note that they are getting fatter? Rightly or not, people still associate obesity with the sins of gluttony and sloth, which jives nicely with the concept that welfare recipients are lazy people who would rather feed at the public trough than get an honest job.

or maybe you read it at the original - at mother Jones?

and where is the link to happiness, you are wondering? ah it is in Nicole's comment.

Must. Resist. Impulse. To. Bang. Head. Against. Keyboard. I've been doing some reading on scientific study of happiness (i.e., how psychology and brain physiology determines our emotional reactions) and I truly believe that the empathy portion of the brain stem must be damaged or missing on conservatives. That's the only way that I can see how they can ignore the facts in front of them to come up with such a condescending and hateful hypothesis like that.

But it appears that the Heritage Foundation feels they are entitled to their own facts, much like the unintentionally hilarious Conservapedia. According to this BloggingHeads segment, Heritage is planning on starting their own version of Crooks&Liars, documenting examples of "liberal" media bias and when conservatives are shown in an unfairly bad light.

see all lazy - and slap on the wrist - stay here to discuss my laziness and go over there to discuss her article. (-:

The Dr Yes Cosmic Therapy Unit

For most of the 90's I was involved in a huge self-financed art project about happiness and creativity. We created a complete fiction of a 100 year old 'multi-global company', Bonk Business Inc.  - one hundred years of history, advertising, machines. innovations etc. We created enough stuff to fill 1000 m2 of exhibition space which then toured Europe and the States.

It was a giant folly. But almost everybody 'got it' - except the conservatives. We have many letters from ordinary people saying that the exhibition made them feel optimistic and happy again because so much effort had gone into something so ridiculous. For us it was a complex joke poking fun at business and the art establishment.

By way of illustration: One of the technologies we 'invented' was Cosmic Therapy. The machine above was also shown (by invitation) at a medical/health trade fair in Helsinki. (we also did this in Sao Paolo). We had a doctor type and a nurse type on a stand who invited people to test the Dr Yes therapy by sitting in it. They were promised that it would make them happier. The 'technology' was explained to them (of course it made no sense). Then our 'patients' would sit in the machine and don the helmet while the 'doctor' adjusted the controls and the 'patient's' friends and onlookers were gathered around smiling and laughing.

Everyone reported after the therapy that they were much happier, and the queue to try it out got longer. They all understood that it was a game - but the happiness was genuine. They were happy to take part in the 'folly'.

Not so a major German medical device manufacturer from a big stand nearby. They wanted to buy the rights. They wanted to make money from this amazing device. We told them it really didn't do anything. They thought we were negotiating. In the end they got very angry.

At the opening of the exhibition at the Finnish Embassy in Washington DC the old bepearled establishment matrons were peeing themselves - they got it. The young invited spinmeisters were wandering aound looking totally bemused. They didn't get it. Confronted by a fiction even more rídiculous than their own, their powers of analysis failed them.

Maybe the fiction in which they live can only be exposed by a greater fiction.

You can't be me, I'm taken

It might be true that consumption is happiness for some. People are genuinely striving for a large mansions and lavish life, and it is believable that achieving that status can be fulfilling. But I guess, most of the people do not really want to sacrifice much for material welfare, but are forced to believe and seek it. Isn't that just a plain compulsion of few to impose their lifestyle to all others?

The task of turning this around is enormous, and the transition to a low-consumption economy has to be carefully managed to ensure a soft landing. The greatest dilemma is that the shift could produce a damaging feedback loop - this is Kasser's anxiety. Lower consumption could lead to economic instability and increased insecurity;

This is the subject of a comment/question I raised in Geezer's wonderful Stuff diary, a week ago.

Let me try to reword my query in the present context.

• If consumption constitutes a large part of what is known as GDP;
  
• And growth in GDP is considered vital to economic "health" [ie, expansion];
  
• And drastically reduced consumption is an urgent requirement with regard to sustainable development, the environment and reduction in North/South economic inequality ...

Bizarre as it may seem, we're at a point where we need to demand the means to decrease our own consumption!

How should that demand be expressed and presented?  

In the early 1940s, a dramatic drop in household consumption was achieved - not by relying on the good intentions of individuals (and their ability to act on that coffee-stained pamphlet), but by the government orchestrating a massive propaganda exercise combined with a rationing system and a luxury tax.

What level of consumption is the goal? What is the specific scenario? For example, modern medicine requires quite a bit of supporting technological infrastructure, and is built on the idea that we will always be able to escalate the war against disease. If we were to live like Thoreau in 1830, or San Francisco hippies in 1970, we wouldn't need that sort of expensive and non-sustainable medical system. "But think of the humanity!"

   *  Replacing regular stuff with green stuff isn't getting very close to the root of the problem. If for some reason you need to give someone a motorized spice rack, then a motorized spice rack with a more efficient motor is quite clearly better. But it's also quite clearly beside the point.

    * Stuff itself is a problem less because of its environmental toll (though that is quite high) than because it's increasingly meaningless. Think of your friends. Are many of them lacking in stuff? Or is the first question that forms in their minds when a new gift arrives from under the tree: "Where am I going to put this?"

    * But this pleasure gap allows for a concentrated opportunity to begin rethinking our economic life. If stuff isn't valuable anymore, what is? Time, clearly. A gift of time -- a coupon for a back rub, or a trip to the museum, or a dinner prepared someday in the future -- is a gift whose exchange rate is figured in a stronger currency (if you're an economics major, think euros vs. dollars). Or gifts can come embedded with time already spent: a jar of homemade jam, a stack of firewood in the back yard.

    * Gifts can also be reconfigured to remove some of the hyperindividualism that marks our consumer society. Ask yourself what you'd rather receive: another thing, or a homemade card saying that, say, a cow had been purchased in your name and was now providing milk for a Tanzanian family that hadn't had milk before. (Note: this line of reasoning is probably especially strong for those of us who are Christians, and recall that the occasion we're celebrating is the birth of a man who said to give all that we had to the poor.)

    * Since Christmas has long been in the business of baptizing consumption, it's a good place to start eroding consumption's allure. Newfound pleasures from a simpler holiday -- some silence, some companionship -- suddenly start to seem attractive. Maybe that attraction will remain with us even unto February.