I remembered one of my thoughts I intended to blog on...

There are now Elves on people's shelves? It has been explained to me that the elf watches the child and reports back to Santa on the child's behavior. The parent moves the stoolie elf from place to place to increase the illusion and the sense of Big Brother watching...

This sounds much like Jeremy Bentham's design for a prison, called the Panopticon. You can look it up... Foucault writes about Bentham's ideas in his book on punishment. I can't recall the title. Anyway, Bentham said prisons should be designed with all prisoners on the outer wall of a circular structure with the guard in the center. The prisoner would have what appeared to be constant supervision from the guard because he never knew if there was anyone watching, and the guard had total access and could hide from the prisoner's view.

My suggestion for truly effective Benthamite control of your children is to put an elf on the shelf with a voice in it that can scare the kid as well. As you see the kid misbehaving, the elf would say, I'm telling Santa!

We were driving down the highway this week and my daughter was disturbed by a billboard with a big nasty cop in the frame.... The words said something to the effect of "we see you when you're speeding" She was disturbed by the use of Santa as a law enforcement tool. But aren't we already using Santa as a law enforcement tool?