“Gilette - Follow The Road, Don’t Cross It™”

It’s like reading an article about a petrol refining company, who, having prior experience with gasoline as a useful and profitable substance, decides to seek venture capital for the development of a petrol-based fire-extinguisher. They obtain the funding - presumably because some people with money just wants to see the world burn and / or because being rich and having brains is not necessarily strongly correlated - but after having developed the product, tests conclusively prove the project’s early detractors right: The result is surprisingly always more fire, not less. And they “don’t know how to fix it, while still adhering to the vision of a petrol-based fire-extinguisher”.

Does he love his wife? I can’t recall a single sign of actual affection. A wife is just one more thing to check off the “list of things to have”, along with a house, a job and a son to carry on… Well, I don’t think Vernon knows what exactly. Probably some ill-defined set of Proper British Traditions. To be fair Petunia is using him in the exact same way for for precisely the same reason. And the money, of course.

Ah yes, the printing press: Likely the most cumulatively subversive memetic infection vector ever conceived.

Define ‘mind-control’. Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation has been perfectly capable of changing people’s broad moods since 1985 and is being actively used to treat depression right now. The underlying technology is only going to get more precise, especially as more research on spintronics is done for other purposes. Sure, right now our understanding of how what goes on in a given brain translates to ‘thoughts’ is insufficient to change those thoughts in any reliable way, but there’s little doubt that when we do, the technology to make it happen will almost certainly be around.