Mammon category archive

Raw Story reports that a number of Texas lawmakers got fleeced in a Ponzi scheme involving Noah’s Ark and other equally ephemeral stuff (emphasis added–more at the link).

Archer Bonemma, the businessman lawmakers have accused of fraud, pitched them on a startup which he said would reap large profits on energy trades. Shortly after the state representatives made their bets — which totaled $2.5 million — the startup filed for bankruptcy.

The Texas lawmakers said they think Bonemma targeted them because they were religious men.

I suspect that they were not targeted because they were religious. Con men are notoriously cold and rational, if dishonest, thinkers.

I suspect that they were targeted because they were gullible and stupid.

Read the fine print.

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Run the numbers at Facing South.

Cons for cash.

. . . and Dan Casey advises them to stop flaunting it.

Dan Simpson thinks that the “American Dream” is in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. A nugget, which does not do justice to the whole:

When President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 declared his war on poverty, the poor were estimated to represent about 19 percent of the American population. Now, 50 years and Head Start and Medicare and Medicaid later, they are adjudged to be 15 percent of the population and to number at least 46 million. More than 20 percent of the 46 million are children.

The untenable-anyway argument that America’s poor are poor because they don’t want to work, preferring to live on unemployment benefits and food stamps, leaves out the children. Can anyone with a heart and in his right mind argue that more than 9 million of America’s children “deserve” to go to bed or school hungry, or be homeless with no fit place to do their homework?

The One Per Cent constructs fanciful Galtian theories (yclept “Libertarianism” and the “Laffable Curve“) and paranoid terrors to justify greed and cold-heartedness, but those who look beyond, who pay attention to what the One Per Cent and their sycophants do, rather than to what they say, recognize those as smokescreens to obfuscate thievery.

If I believed that “fair use” meant I could quote the entire column, I would do so, but it doesn’t and I will not. I have pondered for over a day now what bit to excerpt here. Whatever I excerpted, it would not have been enough.

Just read the rest.
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They are the true entitlement society.

Via C&L.

Fiore. Just watch it.

Via AmericaBlog.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

This is a hoot.

A silly hoot, but still a hoot.

Below the fold in case it autoplays.

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Here.