redistribution of wealth

My good friend and ex-coworker, Liz, has a new blog (Suburban Insurgency), and—boy howdy!—is she aggregating (link). I haven’t been blogging much. The combination of work and the political climate have conspired to put me off the whole process. I did watch Ze Frank being interviewed (the other day for me, but back in July for him) by Jesse Thorn on the Sound of Young America (link). Today, stuck in sluggish pre-commute traffic, heading north on 880, I just found the whole rhetorical atmosphere of this fortnight and a half before the US presidential election too much to endure. Some pundit was blaming the current deregulatory mess on Carter. Main Street USA™ was whining en masse about golden parachutes and the greed of capitalism. Imagine that, who’d’ve thought, capitalists are not altruistic poet-philosophers. Bailout, financial rescue, terrorist pals, troopergate, etc. I can’t wait for it to be over.

flutter by wings

A while back, miladus edenensis posted on his delightful blog, Ad Usum Delphinorum, a link to an exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Honoré Daumier and his heirs (link), one of which, Wiaz, drew the cartoon below (link). The insouciant pear is French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, and the trenchant knife is Édouard Balladur, the Minister of Economy, Finance, and Privatization.

Not being familiar with Wiaz, I looked him up in the French Wikipedia, and, lo, his real name, Pierre Wiazemsky, made me think of Eve Democracy in Godard’s Le Vent d’est (1970, link) and Odetta in Pasolini’s Teorema (link). His sister Anne Wiazemsky was also the middle of Godard’s three wives, all of whose names begin with Ann. As if all that was not enough, the siblings Wiazemsky were the grandchildren of the daughter of Francois Mauriac (Claire) and the Prince of Wiazemsky and Count of Levachov (Yvan).

class divisions during wartime

I was folding in some old favorite blogs into the blogroll in the right column, when I came across a link to an article on Jonas Söderström’s blog. The following paragraph really caught my eye:

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because the division in the military reflects the division in high schools. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.

[danah boyd. 06/24/07. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”; see also her blog entry on apophenia; via Blind Höna entry]

When I first heard about the MySpace and YouTube bans the military had put in place, I wondered if they would be stationing MPs in front of Internet cafes like they used to do at bars. In the 17th century, it was coffeehouses in Europe that were considered dangerous. I guess any places, virtual or real, where folks congregate these days are danger zones.