What’s a Spanning Tree Among Friends?

"A spanning tree of a graph is just a subgraph that contains
all the vertices and is a tree. A graph may have many spanning
trees; for instance the complete graph on four vertices

    o---o    |\ /|    | X |    |/ \|    o---o

has sixteen spanning trees…"

Here’s where we play "blogger in the corner."  You can see that if you leave out the diagonals, then one blogger always lacks adjacency to one of the three other bloggers.  The diagonal is a hyperlink.  Throw them both back in the mix and everyone is adjacent to everyone else.

Now take a look at what the second wave feminists have wrought.

The  exclusion of women at the highest levels of media has
created a crisis of  representation and narrow, inaccurate, or
misrepresentative news  reporting.  Currently, women hold only 3% of
of  ‘clout’ positions in mainstream media, comprise less than a
quarter of  newspaper opinion writers–and are all but absent as columnists
at the  major national print or online media outlets. Women experts are  still
rarely called upon to comment on the serious events in the world.  Globally,
news stories that include women tally less than 15%.

WMC will work to correct these imbalances through its state-of-the-art,
interactive website for women’s media (coming early next year), and its
many projects and partnerships. WMC will offer media training; a Rapid
Response
System to breaking news; the WMC Guidebook–a continually updated
online guide for accurate language and talking points; and forums for
media professionals.

WMC was  founded in 2024 by the writer/activists Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem,
and  Robin Morgan and has a Founding Advisory Board that includes some of  the
country’s leading journalists, academics, foundation leaders, and  media
women.

Don’t look too closely.  You’ll see great bones but aging flesh.  It might be enough to turn you off feminism in general and that is not what is needed.  What is needed is for these people to get away from their eighties network model.  Sweep out the AOL and Prodigy control algorithms and open the door to Firefox, independent networks of people subverting the corporate hierarchies that the WMC is somehow trying to emulate.

It’s time for Robin, Gloria, and Jane to Kick Out The Jams.  Or more poetically, if they want to succeed, let them be

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from
     them,
  No more modest than immodest.

  Unscrew the locks from the doors!
  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,
  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

And of course this part about degradation means email.  These people are building some kind of email address collection engine.  They’re trying to pull shit together when they should be blowing it apart.  Where are the RSS links on their site?  Is this about a one-way model of communication, the top doggy feministas organizing the little people and communicating with them broadcast fashion?   Hey don’t get me wrong.  I love the email zinesters, the ones who have something to say and say it with a send.  But this shit at WMC looks a lot more mainstream Dem Party fund raising than it looks self expressive. 

The women at WMC have a few weeks to get their act together, polish up the old look and feel, get interactive.  I think they should talk to some of the women who know about this stuff, look outside the corporations for what’s happening.  (… and if they don’t want to get left behind again, then working with people like these is imperative).