So, some celebrities got married: Blake Lively, who was in the TV show Gossip Girl, and Ryan Reynolds, who was in the Green Lantern and is one of those dudes who is stipulated to be handsome but his eyes are too close together so he just looks moronic. Like a younger…thingface. Whoever. Lively herself is an off-brand Gwyneth Paltrow so it’s suitable.

They had the wedding, which was all perfect and arranged by actual Martha Stewart with color-coördinated jordan almonds (OK I made that detail up, but almost certainly yes), at Boone Hall Plantation, outside of Charleston in South Carolina. Boone Hall almost alone of the pre-Civil War plantations has its slave quarters intact. I think this is actually awesome about Boone Hall. At all the other plantations, you go, and some nice white volunteer shows you around, and you have to just use your imagination. The main house is now surrounded by vast lawns, and live oaks and azaleas, wisteria and breath of spring, tea olive, daphne odora, gardenias, and mounds of Lady Banksia roses. Mmmm, up in Charleston that Lady Banksia will get up to one-and-a-half stories high. I’m not sure why it doesn’t grow so well in Savannah. Pretty little yellow roses on a climbing vine, heaping up on itself, all up around old fenceposts. But no hovels! No wood fires, no chickens, no foundries! No crying babies, no foremen, no one making grits, no one getting beat the hell up, no black people!
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As mentioned in a recent post, I got to go to Texas for a conference on Conservatism sponsored by Sanford Levinson. Unfortunately, that was the day some joker decided to call in a fake bomb threat. So we ended up evacuated and reconvened in Sandy’s living room. Which was congenial, actually. But no PowerPoint, so I didn’t get to use the cartoons I whipped up that were supposed to allow me to make some basic points in admirably compressed fashion. So let me lay that bit out. [click to continue…]

Couple weeks back BoingBoing had a guestpost by Maja D’aoust, praising the undersung artistry of Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest. I think this is right. Elfquest doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Proto-American manga, early independent comics self-publishing. Why doesn’t everyone who prides themselves about knowing comics feel obliged to have read a bit of Elfquest? I’m sure this is due in large part to geek culture bias in favor of fanboyish – as opposed to fangirlish – productions. (Dumb guy stuff can be the greatest stories ever told. Everyone knows that. But dumb girly stuff generally can’t catch a break. Chick lit just isn’t cool.) So I’m glad to see new Pini stuff presented on BoingBoing. More power to them!

Anyway, I bring a unique perspective to this issue because my daughters forced me to read them most of the online archive of Elfquest in nightly audiobook installments. (I think I managed to convince them to let me give up after “Two-Spear”.) I have seriously read a lot of Elfquest out loud, dude. And the main thing I learned is: it’s written quite well, as comics go. My daughters have also made me read them other comics. X-Men, Fantastic Four, Teen Titans. Most of that stuff doesn’t read out at all well, and very little reads out as well as Elfquest. Also, Elfquest is the sort of thing that you might think would be – erm – a bit inappropriate for really young children, what with high elves mating with wolves and all that. But if you’ve already read the kids Greek mythology – and a bunch of other mythologies I could mention – you know there’s no problem here, so long as you are judiciously indefinite about the mechanics of it, as the Pinis are. (There’s nothing explicit in these comics.) Little girls are uninterested in sex but are interested in babies, and animals, so stories in which strange creatures have hybrid family trees are interesting to them. It doesn’t end up being any more squicky than reading them D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. (Not that I’m recommending you read your kid Elfquest, High Ones preserve us! That was a chore.)

It’s not the case that comics work as audiobooks to the extent that they are good comics, of course. Zoe is down with flu at the moment and I tried reading her some Tintin but it doesn’t work. Hergé is so good at storytelling in pictures that it’s hard to get the pacing right. Also, it sounds strange to read Snowy’s lines out loud. (Snowy ‘talks’ more than almost any other character, what with all those little asides.)

Atomic Robo reads out really well, on the other hand. As audiobook comics go, Robo is tops. Zoe gives it two thumbs up.

All Stan Lee stuff is just terrible. As Harrison Ford said to George Lucas: you can write this stuff, but you can’t say it.

I’m trying to find information on the effects of the 1990s welfare reform (surprisingly difficult, suggestions welcome) I came across this NYT article by Jason de Parle which included the following striking result (link added.[^1]
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Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan and Kathryn Edin of Harvard examined the share of households with children in a given month living on less than $2 per person per day. It has nearly doubled since 1996, to almost 4 percent. Even when counting food stamps as cash, they found one of every 50 children live in such a household

The result is striking because of the $2 figure, which is derived, not from a US poverty line, but from the World Bank Poverty line for developing countries. These children aren’t just poor by American standards – they would be considered poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

[^1]: Why does the NYT link internally for things like “Social Security” but not to the studies it is quoting?

Would you be surprised to hear that Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti recently said this:

political scientists need to re-think the type of democratic structures that are required to govern in a post-Eurozone crisis world. The EU needs institutional renewal.

Monti also provides tips on how best to influence Angela Merkel’s thinking (go silent on a topic. It spooks her). This and more, from a fascinating blog by Aidan Regan, a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI in Florence. But don’t get too excited about democratizing Europe just yet. What Monti actually meant was this:

The European parliament, he argued, needs to be empowered to take collectively sanctioned decisions for Europe as a whole. Furthermore, the technical decisions required to solve the crisis (in his opinion) have to be somewhat removed from the immediate interest of national electorates. In fact he went as far as saying that citizens (and their respective governments) need to be faced with the threat of an exit from the European Union so as to empower European policymakers to take new and bold decisions.

In other words, democratic accountability as normally understood is expendable in the interests of administrative efficiency. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he; and understandably, perhaps, in the Italian context, since Monti is certainly a contrast gainer relative to Berlusconi. But it’s an unusually candid and ‘realist’ statement of the default trend in European integration. It is precisely this that makes many people wary of deeper integration, that drives up Euroscepticism in defence of national prerogatives, and indeed that tends to fuel right-wing populism. It is equally a world removed from, for example, Habermas‘s vision of the EU as a radically democratized, market-restraining constitutional order, trans-national and cosmopolitan in character, and governed by humane values.

As Chris says in comments here, Romney’s main hope of getting away with his claim that 47 per cent of the US population are non-taxpaying moochers is the expectation that very few people will actually regard themselves as part of that 47 per cent. The same calculation is made by those who have pushed this talking point for years such as well-known plagiarist Ben Domenech and general lowlife Erick Erickson. It’s unsurprising that they should think this. After all, they’ve been making this claim, in one form or another for years, going back to the WSJ’s attack on “lucky duckies” in 2002. The claim has been refuted time and again with the points that most of the 47 per cent are workers subject to payroll tax, or retired people, but this refutation hasn’t reached the Fox News audience, many of whom don’t realise they are the moochers being attacked here.

But I don’t think this will help Romney, and the reasons why reflect some important developments in relation to post-truth political discourse in the US.

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Detailed here at [Wired](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony/all/).

>Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT. … Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public. n essence, many of the charges stem from Swartz allegedly breaching the terms of service agreement for those using the research service.

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I’ve always been a great fan of the documentaries made by Louis Theroux. I think he’s an incredible filmmaker – almost a genius how he is able to portrait people and make documentaries that stick to the mind. Most recently, Theroux has made a series called Extreme Love, in which he visits families who are affected by severe autism and by dementia. The first one, on autism, was screened on Dutch TV last Friday, and can be seen on your computer screen for the next 60 hours on this website (Original with Dutch subtitles).

The children with autism featured in this episode are all situated on the severe end of the spectrum. I haven’t done any literature review on this, but my hypothesis is that it is very difficult to truly understand for people who do not have a disability, have never had a disability, or who never cared for people with disabilities, how it is to be disabled or live with someone disabled. We need narratives in order to understand, and preferably narratives not merely composed of words, but also of sounds, images, pictures — things that are able to convey not just factual knowledge but also meanings and emotions. Work like the one produced by Louis Theroux and his team offers us a unique opportunity to get a little closer to a world we may never enter. I may be incredibly naive, but I believe that if more people would regularly watch documentaries such as this one, the world would be a better place. If that’s true, then that would be another reason to watch this – apart from witnessing a genius at work.

Attention Conservation Notice: A few hundred words in the key of Someone Not On the Internet[^deceased] Is Wrong
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So I click over to the Corner to see how they are spinning Romney’s fresh troubles. I like John O’Sullivan’s moxie. Basically, Romney should say 1) he’s not backing off; 2) in saying 47% of Americans pay no income tax, thereby implying they are freeloaders, i.e. pay no taxes, he was just forgetting that up is up, not down. Could happen to anyone. “We pay so many taxes that we sometimes forget how many and how much, as I briefly did.” 3) – 8) are some suggestions about how to finesse 2). We need to lower taxes on these freeloaders! Freeloaders are made of taxpayers!

But I think the really important step is probably 9). I can’t imagine why O’Sullivan didn’t give this step its own number. So far as I can tell, it’s absolutely crucial to the whole scheme not coming down around Romney’s ears. “Romney should then leave without taking questions.”

It almost seems unnecessary, but Freeloadergate opens the way for attack ads suggesting Romney is gearing up to expand the War On Women into a three-front war against Women, Children and the Elderly. (It’s like the Romney campaign is turning into one big parody inversion of the protocols for abandoning ship.) Just do a montage of pictures of smiling children – at play, in school, with their families – and nice retirees – in their homes, pictures of their younger, working selves around them – with a brutal ‘FREELOADER’ stamped across each face. And the audio of Romney over it all.

The wages of talking such nonsense really ought to be getting blasted with ads that take the nonsense at face value. Let Romney clean up the mess.

Last summer, Jamie, Janet and I were hanging out in this New York apartment we’ve managed to split with a few friends. We got a call from Jamie’s cousin Trevor, who lives on the Upper West Side, at 102nd Street and West End Avenue; Trevor proposed to visit us and hang out with Jamie for the day. And he told us that he’d take the subway by himself and walk from 59th and Lexington (we were on 62nd Street and 1st Avenue). When Jamie heard that, he turned to me in astonishment, saying “Trevor will take the subway by himself–and he has disability!”
 

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I have been officially named the Dark Lord of Queensland politcs. At least according to Shadow Treasurer, Curtis Pitt, who observes, of Queensland Treasurer, Tim Nicholls:

there is one name the Treasurer won’t dare speak—the Treasurer’s own Lord Voldemort Professor John Quiggin. He does not want to draw attention to the analysis by the Federation Fellow, because it is a truly independent analysis—one which puts a sword to the Costello audit.

Seriously, I do seem to have this effect on Treasurers. Nicholls’ predecessor, Andrew Fraser was equally unwilling to speak my name or face me in debate. And Peter Costello, admittedly an ex-Treasurer, but one who held the position for twelve years, declined to respond to my critique.[1]

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I must make a Public Statement about Women Who Breastfeed While Teaching. Because I am a woman who used to teach, and I breastfed, and though I never breastfed my kid during class I did on occasion bring him while I was teaching. And I think I may have breastfed him during at least one faculty meeting.

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When I walked in the door, a nice lady, walking out, smiled brightly and said ‘Howdy!’ So it seems I’m in Texas – Austin, to be specific.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow, if anyone cares to come and listen. Talk title is: “Liberal, Conservative, Utopian: Political Philosophy and its Missed Contents”. Talk is based on longer manuscript stuff slated to be published eventually – one always hopes. I’ll see about posting that stuff, a bit later, in draft form. For the talk I just turned my unmanageably large ms. into a series of sub-New Yorker gag cartoons, because it wouldn’t fit otherwise. It’s a surefire strategy for talk success! (It’s not like you can refute a cartoon, after all.)