If you’re looking for pure pith and wit, that response was made by SJ Merc forum member johnny99, “Buy it Now!” LOL! My usual stream-of-consciousness styled response follows, even as the headline link apparently changes it’s claim as new numbers flicker across the twitter tape. ;-)
Headline: Meg Whitman outspends Jerry Brown 86-1
My abridged forum response, in full below, is to the comment She’ll make way more than $91M once she has the Governors seat:
Once one has achieved the Ultimate Epic Win over the Money Boss Level in this real-time co-op campaign-mode 3D first person shooter game that we call western society, money becomes relatively boring; another commodity raw input material. Been there, done that. It’s on to the next level of Personal Influence or Political Power or both. That’s why there’s a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation influencing the uplift of civilization. That’s why there’s a Google.Org. That’s why, if Whitman doesn’t have first female President penciled in on her November 2016 calendar, I’d be somewhat disappointed.
I’m not a big fan of Whitman the politician to the extent that she’s chosen to become a champion of conservative oligarchic policies, quite the contrary; I’m simply observing human nature. I think it is a virtue for humans to always try for the next achievement, whether in World of Warcraft or IRL. In general, anyone who voluntarily enters the public service gauntlet — who braves the blistering colonoscopic public scrutiny with nose mashed against that hellish grindstone — has my utmost respect, even if they are my policy opponent.
In the venue of contemporary political theater, it’s always an uplifting, classic underdog story to Americans when super highly qualified aspirants with comparatively infinite supplies of cash — yet advocating anachronistic policies — lose to those of comparatively less ostentation material means, while advancing adaptive techno-progressive policies that will enable us to build upon the best of what we’ve achieved to date, without falling prey to a self-satisfied inertia that leaves us stagnant as an emerging global civilization, putrefying in the current cesspool of unsustainable resource skews.
In the context of consensus media narrative, the change of which we generally speak only began with our collective recognition of the mess we’re in as an evolving western branch of a rapidly emerging global civilization, symbolized by the election of Barack Obama. The President himself tirelessly explains that he is not the incarnate embodiment of change itself, merely the beacon that we illuminated in 2008 so that we could get to work as communities, as a people, to implement a new, more efficient, effective, egalitarian, robust, secure, and scalable Earth OS, moving forward.
Increasingly, local politics exerts a global influence, particularly as every grass roots public policy battle can potentially find it’s way to the front page of Google News. That’s one immediately obvious way that every local bit and byte of policy code can potentially impact ongoing development of what I rather whimsically refer to as the open source Earth OS. It’s always running; can’t be taken offline all at once for upgrades; is chock full of crappy undocumented machine language code that often creates frustrating design constraints; yet it’s our job to internalize a sense of ownership and responsibility for the entire product; to make the whole thing a little better, each and every single day, via our own seemingly insignificant contributions to the source tree. Or sure, Avatar’s home tree is a fantastic transgenerational metaphor for the IRL global cognition grid that wires us all more intimately and interdependently together, every day.
On the grid, even the most isolated local thoughts and actions can have near immediate global impact. Just ask William Kamkwamba [http://goo.gl/i07O].
Perhaps that’s why many continue to suggest that local policy battles matter more than ever, and why more of us non-politicians should consider taking a public stand for consistent, gradual, patient, persistent change over the coming decades. I will if you will. Go ahead. You first.
Sustainable adaptive change. So easy to say, so difficult to do.
