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A Sentence Not Written By Us in a Satirical Manner, We Swear Long or Short Capital
Coming on Sunday: Blogs.com Portfolio. We are one of Marc Andreessen’s favorite blogs! How cool is that? (We learned this via Felix Salmon, who is also on his list)
Antidote du jour:
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I guess the moment has finally come to talk about The White Buffalo … I wonder, what took so long?
The distinctions between genetic mutation, supernatural origin and spiritual value all come to mind here, but as usual, these easy obvious hints always need to be traced back to an origin to reveal clarity. Hence, IMHO, this visual journey is about making decisions at forks in the road — where the core of complexity is made simple by re-defining the basic premise of where we stand.
Thus, the heuristic role of the buffalo in this metaphor is essentially related to defining terminology, e.g:
1. Antidote: something that relieves, prevents, or counteracts; an antidote to the mechanization of our society.
2. Anecdote: a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.
To wit, The White Buffalo Story, is a narrative about the fragmentation of society, polarity and demographic dynamics; unfortunately, it’s not an uplifting story, but one worth hinting at nonetheless.
I’ll give you the short and fast version. The Bush era came about as a result of an election flaw relating to a hanging chad, which placed the balance of Americas future into the out-stretched hands of wealthy republicans. Now, eight years later, Americans are divided between those that have plenty, those that are trading in SUVs for new models, those who are redecorating McMansions, those who are flying to resorts, and those who are living in a world of denial — as they blindly look past those that have less and less and those who struggle to survive.
This division is not about color or genetics, but a matter of geometry and imbalance — a defect which was very pronounced in 2000, when the chads hung by threads — and now a matter of greater disproportion, as inflation surges from a tsunami wave of wall street and washington corruption. The geometry of greed and the cancer of corruption have exploited Americas Manifest Destiny to a point where extinction of our society is well at hand.
This post Katrina era with foreclosures, bankruptcies and an on-going nightmare war, alongside the lowest historical approval rating for the full spectrum of politicians make this a very bleak time — which just keeps getting worse. Adding misery to pain, is the lack of hope in another bogus election, where the majority of people seem reliant on a methanphetamin/ritalin cocktail of misinformation and disinformation, laced with apathy and disillusionment. Once again, the only winner will be a consortium of lobby groups that are too big to fail.
Sadly, this is where the buffalo comes back into The American Story, perhaps as a ghost that haunts our directionless corrupt society.
From Wiki: There were government initiatives at the federal and local level to starve the population of the Plains Indians by killing off their main food source, the bison. The Government promoted bison hunting for various reasons: to allow ranchers to range their cattle without competition from other bovines, to weaken the Indian population and pressure them to remain on reservations.[6] The herds formed the basis of the economies of local Plains tribes of Native Americans for whom the bison were a primary food source. Without bison, the Native Americans would be forced to leave or starve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bison
This is quite antidotish:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1045733/Penguin-parade-The-day-knighted-special-bird.html
I need to delete that rough draft above and edit, as I missed the metaphorical seasonality of cyclical snow. Sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest.
I started out wondering why this section is called Antidote du jour, versus Anecdote du jour, but things spun out of control early on and the stress of the deadline hit me fairly hard. I remain confused as to what the buffalos are all about (truth be known).
Yves…the blogs.com mention is way cool. Congrats.
Even more cool is Marc Andreessen’s readership.
As a nerdy sidenote, I’ve always wondered if, in the movie series “the matrix,” they picked the name Mr. Anderson (keanu reeves) to be a loose rip-off of Andreesen’s namesake.
To continue my confessed nerdy love for the Matrix, I’ve also always wondered if the character of “the architect” was a ripoff of Vint Cerf, the real father of the internet (NOT Al Gore).
Doc
On the snow: look at the steaming breath. White or black they’ve been left out in the cold.