Let us first take a look at this piece of economic information:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — U.S. consumer sentiment fell slightly in February amid persistent concerns about a weak job market and a slow economic recovery, a closely followed survey reported Friday.

The consumer sentiment index fell to 73.6 from 74.4 in January, according to Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expected the index to taper off to 73.7.

With that in mind, let's go back to 1979 and take a quick look at something Michel Foucault said during a lecture at the Collège de France:

[I]n Gary Becker there is a very interesting theory of consumption, in which he says: We should not think at all that consumption simply consists in being someone in a process of exchange who buys and makes a monetary exchange in order to obtain some products. The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction.

With this in mind, we can reconsider (or reread) the meaning of the current slump in consumer confidence: What is really happening is not simply consumers are worried about the weakness of the job market, but there is also a weakness in the production of satisfactions. But why this weakness? There happens to be less demand for their satisfactions. In this way, the problem is not the consumer (the actual producer) but the consumer of (or market for) satisfactions.

Now how about this comment from this week's Police Beat:

I will never get over seeing the employees of the downtown department stores in 1999 standing in window displays of the Bon, etc., put there presumably so that the demonstrators against the WTO wouldn't smash the glass. I want so badly to talk to those workers, and find out why they would do this. What they were told so that they would do such a thing. More than that, I would love to speak to their managers, the ones who made this astonishing decision to treat people like props and shields for ... stuff.

Is this not the sort of thing that the IDF constantly accuses Hamas and other Palestinian militants of doing? Also, the US Army claims that Taliban is in the habit of using women and children in this cruel manner—as human shields.