A weekend of the long social media knives apparently just took place at rich people social network A Small World. The email excerpted above was sent to members this morning. The private social network, sold to Harvey Weinstein and then dumped by him, stopped taking new members back in February. Now they've purged their rolls of what were apparently troublemakers and/or poor people.

Meanwhile, over on A Small World founder Erik Wachmeister's new site, "Best of All Worlds," the interface is busy asking me what I am an expert in. Choices so far include "Art," "Philanthropy," "Farming" and "Hunting."

Do you know more about the A Small World shenanigans? [...]

"Julien Berckmans, a real estate agent at Brussels-based Best Home Consult, took five calls from French citizens seeking to buy property in the Belgian capital after Hollande defeated President Nicolas Sarkozy on May 6." —Rich people allegedly fleeing France in advance of regime change.

Oh dear, here we go again: “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” an irate but of course unnamed onetime Citigroup executive confides to junior father confessor Gabriel Sherman in this week’s hallucinatory New York magazine cover story, “The Emasculation of Wall Street.” “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they’ve created value for their institution.”

In the jumpy, suggestible universe of Gabe Sherman, Wall Street sleuth, things really are that simple: The beleaguered financial overclass creates value, in a rationally ordered system of maximally awarded talent. And the clueless public sector, intoxicated on post-meltdown regulatory prerogative, meddles with the primal forces of nature, skews executive [...]

.bbpBox{background:url(http://a2.twimg.com/profile_background_images/191823221/red.jpg) #f2f5f7;padding:20px;}

My office was invaded by the Occupy Protesters today & all I saw were $1000 laptops & vomit on the carpet. Thank God for #febrezeWed Dec 07 03:49:02 via TweetDeckRep. Joe WalshRepJoeWalsh

I'll just leave this here. Oh, okay, how about a review of Joe Walsh's work activity this year, his first in Congress? Well, it's pretty amazing actually.

"[T]he most popular gift that all income groups want to receive is money, either in the form of gift card, check or gift certificate. Ranking second was clothing. Among those worth $800,000 to $1.49 million, the third most popular gift is an iPad or similar tablet computer. For the $6 million or more crowd (the real one-percenters), the second most popular gift is books or CDs. Fine jewelry was more popular with the affluent than the one-percenters (only 2% of the one-percenters want jewelry this season, compared with 8% for the affluent). Yet the one-percenters are twice as likely to buy sport equipment."

In the passing convulsions of partisan government, it’s easy for our corporate lieges to depict themselves as victims. There’s always some legislative push, or Congressional leader, to bedeck with alarmist rhetoric about the “tax-and-spend” set in Washington—even as these same clever professional victims harness the supine Congress to tamp down the estate tax, extend regressive tax cuts and ensure that the regulatory state keeps weighing the financial industry’s various roulette wheels in the house’s favor.

But behind the all the public inveighing over the wild-eyed excesses of our Jacobin Congress and (more laughably still) an "anti-business" White House, our business chieftains are, true to management form, pursuing [...]

Happy Election eve, everyone! We’ve already been solemnly instructed on how tomorrow’s vote is a referendum on a poncey New Elitism, the hardy, head-stomping virtues of the Tea Party, and our ever-precarious national sanity. But the 2010 midterms are really the coming-out party for the political bagman class, fortified by the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United decision knocking down the last anemic remnants of campaign finance regulation. With a final infusion of GOP money down the homestretch, this year’s midterms are the most expensive history, clocking in at around $4 billion, outpacing the $3.1 billion price tag for the 2000 presidential cycle, and possibly inching toward [...]

I was recently at a tony wedding party—it was really fun! Hooray for love!—and all the women there were talking about, among other things of course, their dresses. It was all "Oh I got this at a sample sale" and the like. Everyone wanted to be clear that she hadn't paid full price. Many of them even hadn't. It was as if buying retail was a crime. And it was slightly scandalous (as if it were, like, 1890) that one somewhat New York-famous guest was wearing sneakers. They looked like Vans, people thought. But I pointed out that they were in fact Bottega Veneta sneakers—so, expensive, suede, woven vans—which retail [...]

You saw these homes with secrets, right? Hidden doors and even rooms! Don't they remind you of a recurring dream you've had for years? I know, ha ha, "those dreams are about a secret extra vagina" or something but actually I think living in New York for ten years makes the subconscious way literal in terms of real estate.

Well, here you go. What to even quote? Let's try this! Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

It's an incredibly hot defensive mess up in there.

What does money smell like? The Times notes the rapid rise of "sweet" in perfumes, which makes sense, given that pop culture is garbage and syrup, though Prada Candy, God bless. There are also a few holdouts, like Hermes perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena: "Instead, his new Hermès Santal Massoïa, introduced in November, is made of the 'milky' woods sandalwood and massoia. It smells sort of like a tree that’s been through a brutal storm." LOL! (Also, weirdly true. Though also sort of like a ripe melon got trapped in a sauna after being beaten with a cedar bat.) Elsewhere a (terrible-sounding) perfume is described by saying it "conjures an [...]

Got plans tomorrow night? Cancel 'em! Or at least modify them so that you give yourself time to attend this: "Mark Crispin Miller hosts Chris Lehmann, author of Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class. In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It's a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's financial elite." Awl pal Chris Lehmann! You'd be a fool to miss it. (McNally Jackson, 7 PM)

It’s that magical time of the year when brand preferences are being lodged in the consumer psyche by any means necessary, be it free online shipping offers or conventional “doorbuster” style shopper stampedes. (Plus, in an admirable show of advance conditioning, there are those sidebar Four Loko-fueled parking lot brawls.)

But the romance of the brand is a notoriously ephemeral thing, as any casual survey of thrift-store Tickle-Me Elmo and Tamagotchi displays will promptly demonstrate. To do the job right, in this as in so many other realms, we would do well to heed the example of the Germans. As Bloomberg’s Chris Reiter reports, Deutschland’s [...]

For people saddled with unsustainable mortgage payments, foreclosure proceedings come with a heavy emphasis on the "closure" part-since they mean eviction, devastated credit and near-permanent status as a financial pariah. But the purveyors of the fraudulent debt instruments behind the nation's present foreclosure tsunami play, as always, by a different set of rules. For even in managing the wind-down of home loans poisoned by their own special brand of recklessly securitized debt, American banks continue hewing to the same fee-seeking, asset-stripping mode of enterprise that originally jeopardized the U.S. housing market, and much of the broader economy along with it. Now, as then, they've distorted the housing market with [...]

Throughout the recent history of humanity at least, if not all of it, one thing has always been true. Rich people have their primary homes on hills, and their secondary and tertiary homes at sea level. That way when they lose their beach houses, they can fly their helicopters back to the main house.

Two articles are getting a good bit of attention in the wake of Hurricane Sandy: There's this, about the "hideous inequality" of New York: "Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents like me who could invest all [...]

Here are the shocking revelations about where Mitt Romney slept in January while campaigning, according to the fine people at Think Progress, who themselves sleep in biodegradable hovels. Uh, the Empire Hotel doesn't even make the list of the best hotels (or most expensive hotels!) in New York. And there's basically nowhere else to stay in Palm Beach except the Breakers. Even I've stayed at the Omni Parker House in Boston! This is one of those topics on which the media is not equipped to advise us. All hotels look expensive to the LIBERAL MEDIA.

The campaign also spent $60 on a Best Western in Arizona, by [...]

Christmas is nearly upon us. Are you prepared? Let us help with this guide to gifting for every occasion. All of the gifts here are certified by us as things that people actually would truly like to receive this holiday season. (Hint, hint.)

JUST TRINKETS

Hermes leather coffee cup holder. $195.

Well, it is fun to run the numbers on exactly what "sort" of person runs a wedding announcement in Vows (technically now called "Weddings/Celebrations," which is so dull). The numbers are useful and also, sure, about what you'd expect. Harvard. Credit Suisse. Gay. That sort of thing. But two things: our trusty researcher friends here are comparing education and job credentials to the "average American," which, oh no. Vows is a section that is for New Yorkers, not average Americans. And New York is a funny place. (Full of gays who went to Harvard.) But then also they're dismissing self-selection in a totally untoward way, writing: "There's also [...]

Oh yes: you probably do not know this, unless you read all of the papers. (And if you do read all the papers, that means you got to enjoy "Recall election could trigger change," a real doozy from the Herald, though they also have this brisk and informative thing for those unfamiliar. Trigger change! It sure could. Or could not. Anyway!) Today the mayor of Miami and also a Miami-Dade county commissioner are up for a recall vote, which is notably the work of one man. One billionaire, no less: Norman Braman. Now… the squeaky thing here is: he's right! There should be an ability to recall these [...]

The great social prophet in consumer society is the bearer of taste refinement. This is a figure who can assuage our innermost disquiet over the dizzying rounds of having, holding and re-leveraging that make up our economic lives. Sure, we might, from time to time, inspect the great storehouse of disposable junk and value-free financial instruments that sustain the fictions of our pecuniary well-being, and find a still small voice offering variations of the great existential questions “what does it all mean?” or “why bother?” But tastemakers can briskly smooth over our worry-ravaged brows; they realign the often brutal prerogatives of the market with the heaving tremors of the [...]