Dangit, I wrote a little script to pass Obama speeches through a logic optimizer to find just the statements that made sense.
My system decided it was a virus and has locked me out. I should have known there was no way for that to look benign.
At least it didn’t attack you out of frustration.
Back to the question of “materialist magicians,” I would say, no, we don’t have them. As I see it, a characteristic of the hyper-materialists is their failure to produce the results they are seeking. For example, embryonic stem-cell research would be an obvious field for such an outcome: human sacrifice to the god of “Scientific Progress.” However, this research has failed to produce useful results.
In a more spiritual age, did it work out any better? Did sacrificing babies to Molech save the city from invasion or avert famine? Seems like they all ... Carthage, Tyre, Carchemish ... got the Zot anyway. It’s as if the gods of the Left are FAIL gods, no matter what you offer them ... Basement Cat is a more helpful deity, at least if you want fur all over your stuff.