Did you know Godiva was a unit of the Campbell Soup Company?

Rising incomes, flattening prices and easily available credit have given so many Americans access to such a wide array of high-end goods that traditional markers of status have lost much of their meaning.

Everyone, meanwhile, appears to be blending into a classless crowd, shedding the showiest kinds of high-status clothes in favor of a jeans-and-sweatsuit informality.

Social competition used to be played out largely at the neighborhood level, among people in roughly the same class.

In the last 30 years or so, however, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups.

Millions of Americans who could not have dreamed of buying their own homes two decades ago are now doing so in record numbers. A flood of credit is now available to many financially vulnerable families and extended in a reckless and aggressive manner in many cases without thought to implications.

"People want to participate in our brand because we are an affordable luxury," said Gene Dunkin, president of Godiva North America, a unit of the Campbell Soup Company.

When the Joneses Wear Jeans

I guess the name of this MemeStreams topic needs to be changed ...

"What we really want now is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism. GWOT is catchy, but there may be a better way to describe it, and those are things that ought to be incumbent on us to look at."

A key aspect is likely to be the addition of public diplomacy efforts aimed at winning over Arab public sentiment, and State Department official Paul Simons said at a congressional hearing earlier this month that the "internal deliberative process" was broadly conceived to encompass everything from further crackdowns on terrorist financing networks to policies aimed at curbing the teaching of holy war against the West and other "tools with respect to the global war on terrorism."

MemeStreams, you tool! Use MemeStreams!

"They recognize there's been a vacuum of leadership. There has been a dearth of senior leadership directing this day to day. No one knows who's running this on a day-to-day basis."

Is he talking about Us or Them? Too close to call?

Does this help to clarify?

"No doubt they been destroyed. No doubt they are no longer capable to launch the kind of attacks that they did on all of us a few years ago."

Probably not ...

Review May Shift Terror Policies

The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting."

The Secret Way to War

"We may think our intentions are good and peaceful, and that other nations should respect our benign hegemony — but that's not the way the rest of the world views it."

Study warns of ground-based RF threat to satellites

Although Beijing has managed to assuage many of its neighbors, not everyone along China’s periphery is persuaded by the "charm offensive."

China Engages Asia [PDF]

We all know someone that's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen?

Decius wrote:
This is not a bad set of observations, but it avoids the fallacy I think is most common.

You're emotionally invested in a particular outcome, and you see the idea at hand as being related to that outcome, and so you are unwilling to sacrifice it because you feel that sacrificing it means sacrificing your ultimate objective.

This is one of Powell's Rules:

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

which has been memed at

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid9831/

Why smart people defend bad ideas

What if the pandemic begins tonight?

Preparing for the Next Pandemic

These new tools are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and social, meaning they enable new kinds of interactions between people. Almost below our mental radar, they have ushered us into a world of what I am calling continuous computing.

A Continuous Computing Manifesto

Creating a communications infrastructure that fosters a healthy democracy has been a concern of the United States since its founding. Newspaperman and intellectual Walter Lippmann once noted that the real trouble with both the press and representative democracy is "the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge." In MemeStreams, that machinery may finally have arrived.

Group Rethink

Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science. Meanwhile, more than eighty per cent of Americans say that God either created human beings in their present form or guided their development. As a succession of intelligent-design proponents appeared before the Kansas State Board of Education earlier this month, it was possible to wonder whether the movement’s scientific coherence was beside the point. Intelligent design has come this far by faith.

Devolution, or, Why Intelligent Design Isn't