Super-PACs will micro-target negative ads to your exact psychological vulnerabilities

Facebook is being used to harvest psychological data that will
subvert the United States electoral process.  When emotional manipulation becomes a statistically analysable process -- with experimental feedback loops -- the most cynical and corrupt candidates are the most likely to win. 


No wonder Facebook is worth so much!

Pecunianity

The Old Testament God tells us "To worship no God before him". God accepts that we are tempted to worship other Gods, and he doesn't have a huge problem if people accept Gods of secondary status.  It becomes a real problem is when people make God the second-class deity.

The primary religion of our time is Pecunianity -- the belief that all human activity can be valued in terms of money.  The punishments that await a person who refuses to accept Pecunianity's tenets are severe and swift, a type of excommunication.  They are completely shed.  Pecunianity has no problem with your secondary worship (for example, Jesus), just as long as you accept the primacy of financial and economic reasoning as a means of navigating reality.

The federal reserves efforts to teach "financial literacy" is fundamentally religious proselytization. Parents worrying about their kids finances, it is not different from elders in previous generations worrying about the immortal souls of their children. People seeing the harsh treatment of non-believers as confirmation of their view is reminiscent of theocratic legitimation, where the absence of divine intervention to rescue heretics substantiates the faith in the system itself.

unforeseen consequences.

Lead paint, Freakanomic abortions, and Oprah Winfrey aside, will a wave of violent crime follow the establishment of a sane national drug policy?  In the drug culture, violence is a business tool, and a necessary means for a financial reward (as it is in the case of armed robbery).  When victimless crimes are decriminalized, will criminals will be driven to more heinous crimes?

Overheard on the El, #28

A: "Take it for granted that you cannot put food on the table without serving the devil in some way.  If you are eating and staying alive, your conscience should not be clear -- the devil is paying you, and you are earning your wages.

With that said, when you look at how hard it is for me to get and keep a job - how dim my prospects for employment are - you can safely say that I have not been a particularly effective servant of the devil.

And that's some consolation."