The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

We have read this book aloud at Christmas every year since the 1980s, and my wife invariably chokes up at about the same time Imogene does, so we always give her that chapter. I directed it in 1991 or so. I am quite suspicious of movies that originally had Christian themes being made into movies. They either remove the offending religious parts, as in "A Wrinkle in Time" or overegg the pudding by becoming preachy, pounding the theme to the center of the earth.

The new movie that is out does neither.  It remains fully Christian but does so lightly. The changes from the book and play are minor and understandable.  Some are even improvements, such as the brief epilogue of Beth now directing the play, followed by what happened to the Herdmans later. 

Highly recommended.

Drop-Kick

 I remember this. A rather perfect moment.

I hadn't realised it was almost twenty years ago now. I had heard about Flutie early, as my brother played for Lincoln Sudbury, a nearly adjoining town to Natick, though they didn't overlap. New England seldom has any high-ranking college programs beyond Boston College, so we heard about him a bit in the eighties as well, even in far-distant New Hampshire.

Christmas Goose

Maybe not.  No one in a hundred mile radius raises them for sale. The deliveries from Tennessee, Iowa, Oregon, and South Dakota are wicked expensive, $15-20/lb uncooked delivered. I am betting this is mostly related to the amount of work compared to other poultry, but suspect that all the non-GMO, organic, and nightly concerts by Yo Yo Ma add to the price as well. As an aside, this is part of why Amish farmers don't bother to go for organic certifications and the like.  People see the word Amish and figure "close enough."

There have been a half-dozen places in NH that have made a go of it over the last 20 years, but all have dropped goose from their product line or gone out of business altogether. It must be a tough gig.

Three Little Pigs

OK, it's the Guardian

But it's still funny.

Black Circle

My wife tells me that there is a new profile photo being adopted on Facebook, a black circle to protest the election of Donald Trump.

Tell me again who is seeking unity in the country? I have mentioned this here all the way back to the first Obama inauguration, where the overall positive sentiment for a president was noticeably higher at the beginning of a Democrat's term - Republicans and especially Independents giving him a chance - than for a Republican's - hatred and opposition from day one, back to 1960.  I did it by the Gallup numbers, which were telling. I also remember it (though imperfectly, when I compared it to the data).  I was there for a lot of it and was a sneering liberal, showing my superiority.  I know which is the divisive force in this country, and was proud to be part of it as a teenager.

It is just old, older than I am at this point, that liberals say their guys are uniters, when they haven't had to move an inch but their opponents have made the effort; but MSNBC back through Newsweek ask if the new Republican can be a uniter, then in the next breath declare he probably won't be, because of all the liberal ideas he won't pick up, the bastard. And don't even get me started on 2000.

Thanksgiving Blackjack

My games program, on which I play an infuriating version of contract bridge, is advertising Thanksgiving Blackjack this month.  This seems both historically bad and spiritually suspect.

I suppose if I could count cards, I would be tankful for that ability. I have a son who has the ability to find unfair advantages in gambling - which troubles his Romanian conscience not at all, Baptist schools or no - but these have always eluded me.  When I perfect time travel I will have a go at sports betting, if my wife allows.

How To Vote

James sends along directions for a new way of choosing who to vote for, from Mainer Sippican Cottage:  Count the Signs. 

Once upon a time, you could tell the political parties by simply observing the color of the text. Red team was always for things like annexing the Sudetenland, and blue team was for five year plans for the collective farms you’d be living in. There were also political garanimal clues. If there was an elephant label in their underwear, they wanted Mexicans to mow their lawns, but not vote. A donkey in their underoos wanted the Mexicans to vote, but not pester them in the Home Depot parking lot.

I did something similar myself in the previous election, wondering whether to vote for Stump Grinding.

This Nearly Was Mine

There were a lot of excellent versions of this.  Hard to choose.

I have stayed away from "South Pacific" because I believe the sentiment of "You Have To Be Carefully Taught" is exactly backwards. But that's a terrible reason to reject the other songs.

Hillary

We were all interested in what Hillary Clinton had to say today, weren't we?  Apparently she's in an unimaginably difficult situation. 

I keep looking in the rear-view mirror, hoping to see her there.

Vance on Rogan's Podcast

 “The entire modern Democrat party grew up in an era where there was consensus. They grew up in a high social trust era. A lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that social trust came organically from the way American society worked. If you have people trying to reimpose it from the top, it degrades the very thing you're trying to create.” 

This does not sound like adventurous or alarming thinking in the podcast, blog, and substack world.  We have heard lots of people talk like this.  But it is a very unusual thing for a politician to offer.  All the presidents, VP's, and opposition candidates in my lifetime would understand the idea easily.  But I can't think of another who would bring it up as a topic for discussion.

Popular Vote

Wasn't there a movement for states to pledge they would give their electoral votes to whoever won the popular vote?  And weren't most of them blue, including California and New York? Should I amuse myself and research this?

Are we sure such short-sighted, in-the-moment partisan people should be governing us? I'm trying to keep things simple here.

Julurens

A new human cousin  The estimable John Hawks is discussing it, so I have immediate confidence it is a real something. What it is, though, is not yet known.  Julurens: A New Cousin for Denisovans and Neanderthals.

But many scientists don't subscribe to the idea that the fossil record of China should be understood through an Altai lens. A new article from Xiujie Wu and Christopher Bae presents a new look at some fossils of the later Middle Pleistocene. They focus on fossil samples from Xujiayao in north China and Xuchang in central China. These fossils, which date to between 220,000 and 100,000 years ago, contrast with the so-called “Dragon Man” skull from Harbin and other similar remains. Wu and Bae suggest that the Xujiayao and Xuchang fossils may be something different and call them the Julurens—a name that means “big heads”.

 

Feelin' Groovy

 My roommate in college used to affect an Upper East Side accent and recite this unmusically in the early 70s.  Hysterical, but...maybe you had to be there.

Phrase

 The Studies Show (sidebar) mentioned a phrase I love for bad research, in the sense of marginal results which disappear when the testing gets more rigorous: Noise-Mining.

Henderson

I am also on Rob Hederson's newsletter list, which includes some fascinating links.

 What You Can't Say

“I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.”  

People are surprisingly hesitant to reach out to old friends

Evidence from across the social sciences demonstrates that social relationships provide one of the most robust and reliable routes to well-being. For instance, individuals with strong and satisfactory relationships report the highest levels of happiness^1,2, and people who have someone to count on in times of need report higher life evaluations worldwide³. However...

Think You Know About Satanists? Maybe You Don't  

No one here but us agrarian reformers, as the communists used to say in Latin America

Rob reviewed The Dawn of Everything, which I originally liked the idea of but was talked out of it by people smarter than me.  Henderson didn't much like it either.

Tyler Cowan: One way to reduce inequality is to work harder. It creates a 20% difference in lifetime earnings.  That's not everything, but it ain't nuthin', neither. He recommends doing it early, frontloading the intense work, to increase the benefits of networking later on.

Can Therapy Cure Criminal Impulses?  Answer:  If it does, it's not very much.  There is a difficulty in studying this because of measurement of apples vs. oranges.

How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics  One of my threads today discussed the demographics of the college educated versus the non college-educated.  (bsking wanted to know about the "college non-educated," as a person who had a degree in musical theater described himself. Touche.) 

Related:  IQ and Leadership:  Can you be "too smart?" Henderson notes what we have said here often about general intelligence and its advantage in many domains, but points to the ability of the intelligent to relate to those they are leading as of at least equal importance.  He does not mention my other main point which I grow weary of making, that practical advantages of intelligent are not the same thing as character - things like discretion, temperament, honesty, generosity. Sigh.

Replication Crisis

Mid century 20th psychology is about the psychology of cool ideas. Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo ended up in every Psych 101 textbook, even after the evidence for their famous studies started to erode (and eventually collapsed). That's why social psychology especially is having a replication crisis - because they did a lot of poorly designed experiments to try and illustrate various points that people thought were true because they hoped were true. After WWII people were fascinated by the question of what would cause otherwise decent people to do evil things.  It was an era that believed more and more that environment could make you do anything, so "experiments" were designed not to study that - certainly not to research that, but to illustrate those ideas. 

If that sounds like something that is more artistic expression than it is science, well, yeah. Exactly. People in those fields who wanted to do actual science existed, and a much greater percentage exists now. But no one did New Yorker articles on them, no one talked about them in college bull sessions, no one referenced them from lecterns (and pulpits!) to make their own favored points. We still see it with such nonsense as such as priming, which is a follow on from the Hidden Persuaders school of belief who is worried that "they" can make you do just about anything. One of my favorite rants i, mentioned just a few posts ago, is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relatively, that we think in different ways because we grew up with a different language. It just sounds like it would be cool if it were true.

I wish I could track down the quote but have come up empty.  Maybe I thought of it myself and attributed to some senior psychologist complaining about the banal state of experimentation these days.*"You can't just put the horses out on the track and let them run anymore," meaning you could no longer think up creative experiments with far-reaching implications as much. Well, but that's the point. Are these horses representative of horses in general? Is this race a good measurement of horse abilities in general or only of particular types of horses? Does the horse behavior come naturally out of what horses are or is it imposed by trainers and jockeys? Is it different if there's a crowd? These are the things we actually want to know if we are scientists. Though admittedly it IS much more fun to watch a horse race and maybe even put down a bet on it.   

Consider Margaret Mead's Coming of Age In Samoa, described as "a proponent of broadening sexual conventions." Well fine.  Just do that on your own time without calling it science, wouldja? Or the top thinkers in psychology and sociology from their earliest decades, the Freuds, Jungs, Skinners, Webers and Durkheims  Remember my discussion of Art from Goethe's Three Questions, one of my most-visited posts in 20 years.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed that Three Questions be asked about any work of art. They must be answered in order.

1. What was the artist trying to do?

2. How well did he do it?

3. Was it worth the doing?

We wanted them to do science. They wanted to put ideas they thought were true forward, and tried to squeeze that into the form dominant and the time. Everyone considered science-y things as the most intellectual. Not necessarily rel science, though that was nice, too. They were artists masquerading as scientists. It doesn't make them wrong.  But for things like replication and advancement of knowledge rather than theorising, it doesn't cut the mustard.

Science fiction is very cool. In many ways it's more fun than actual science. And it often can tell us something about human behavior or technical possibilities. But ultimately, it's literature, not science, even if it is greatly influenced by real science, as with Isaac Asimov.

*Because it would be really cool if some senior psychologist agreed with me, you know?

Conservative Columnists in the NYT about a Second Trump Term

Via Althouse, who reads the mainstream media so you don't have to. She used one of her monthly "shares" for this one.

A Second Trump Term?  I have liked David French very much in the past, and respected that he doesn't just follow the party line, but thinks for himself.  But he couldn't find anything about MAGA that he respected?  He sees that "deep into MAGA" people have deteriorated in character? What does that mean?  How many is he talking about?

When I catch myself saying such things about others, on any topic, I have immediate recognition that I have friends who could immediately say to me "David, what have your beliefs done to your character over the years?  How dare you speak?"

They're not wrong, even when they're wrong.

Needless to say, I liked what Stephens and Douhat said much better.

Sid Caesar

 Lunch at a Mediterranean place with my old St Paul's guys, all Math or Chemistry in 1970.  My friend Ted has been digging through old Sid Caesar shows.  Worth a look.

This would have seemed very old and even comically so to me in 1970. But that date, still green in memory, is over 75% of the way back to this show. I shall wear my trousers rolled.

Soul Anchor

 Leslie speaker, great tenor sax, off-rhythm ending, what's not to like?

Palladium

I have a lot of reading to pass along to you over the next few posts

 Palladium Magazine is interesting. "Governance Futurism." Currently on the front page (see anything you like?)

The Genius Who Launched the First Space Program - Sergei Korolev

It's Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope

Palladium 15:  State Religion

When the Mismanagerial Class Destroys Great Companies

The AI Arms Race Isn't Inevitable 

The Limits to Growth Are Interplanetary 

The Past and Future of Military Drones

The Academic Culture of Fraud

Palladium Issue 14: Great Cities

The Fastest Path to African Prosperity

The City Makes the Civilization

Why Russia Doesn't Want to Liberalize

America and Europe are Equally Poor

As Caste Vanishes, Only Genes Remain

Palladium Issue 13:  Global Empire

Curtis Yarvin, Mencius Moldbug

Are any of you readers of his substack, Gray Mirror? Or of his previous blog Unqualified Reservations, under his pseudonym? Descriptions like Neo-monarchist and Neocameralist awaken interest, and being described as one of the founders of the Dark Enlightenment make me well-disposed to him.

Not sure even I can follow him down many of his favorite roads, however.  Maybe I just need to get used to these ideas.  I spent an hour browsing around in his writing tonight.

Bride

For some reason a guy my age who refers to his wife as "my bride" just rubs me the wrong way.  Is it just because it is a phrase that is out of fashion now, or is there something else in this that I'm not picking up?

Anthro Links

I am a subscriber to Anthropology.net. Some links are behind a paywall, others are free.  I get half-a-dozen short articles per week. Here are a few of the best.

"The Scythians were a prominent Iron Age people of the Eurasian Steppe, and their distinctive funerary practices were well-documented in ancient texts. Greek historian Herodotus described their customs, though often portraying them as barbaric. Recent archaeological evidence, however, provides insight that goes beyond these ancient descriptions." 

Underwater caves. "Despite Sicily’s proximity to mainland Italy, the migration of early human groups to the island posed significant challenges. The narrow stretch of water separating Sicily from Italy might seem a minor barrier today, but it represented a substantial obstacle for early human populations. Scholars have debated whether early humans arrived by sea or over a possible land bridge, and what pathways they may have taken to reach the island."

 "Our results suggest that between the Yayoi and Kofun periods, the majority of immigrants to the Japanese Archipelago originated primarily from the Korean Peninsula.” 

The heat from fire made starchy foods more digestible, and extra amylase genes likely offered a survival advantage.

There had been a lot of evidence of population collapse in Scandinavia over 5,000 y/a, and recently there has been evidence that it was plague brought by the Indo-Europeans, rather than their extreme violence, that did in the mostly Pitted-Ware Scandis of the day.  I think it looks like first one and then the other, myself, and I suspect that is the more common view. The full article is behind the paywall, but you should at least know that the evidence for all this is increasing.

Ancient Aurochs as ancestors of modern cattle.  Who doesn't want to know about aurochs, eh? There weren't that many lineages early on in the domestication 10,000 y/a, which is unsurprisingly attributed to the fact that they were large, and wild. Catching one was a project.

Tollense Valley Warfare

Findings suggest that the ancient battle at Tollense marked the beginning of large-scale, organized warfare in Europe.  One hypothesis involves control over a vital trade route. The Tollense River was once crossed by a causeway, built 500 years before the battle, which may have been part of a major trade network. At the moment, that sounds as good as any other theory.

The study above highlights the role of archers in ancient warfare, which has often been underestimated. That's a skull that the arrowhead is piercing up there, so it was um, vitally important, quite literally to at least one person there.

Cursive Myths

The importance of cursive to the development of children seems to spawn myth after myth.  This week a woman assured me that it taught children to have more continuity of thought, and that this was research, not an hypothesis. How one would measure that seems an interesting research design.

It's just one of those zombie ideas that people want to be true, like the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity.  It just won't die. As I don't share the idea myself, I have little insight into the motives for it. For some it may simply be that they were good at it.  Others think it looks better, and attempting beauty is good for us. It was important in our grandparents' education, so traditionalists think it must thus be obviously superior to whatever-the-hell-they-teach-kids-now. There is a particular attraction to ideas that it is neurologically important, or that it builds character. Again, how on earth would we eliminate selection bias in measuring that? 

I was forever given extra penmanship practice in grades school, sometimes being kept in from recess. It was considered important that I learn to hold the implement loosely at the proper angle, rather than squeezing the pencil until my fingers ached. This was presented to me as an approach that not only made the letters look better, but would train me to be more "relaxed."  Well, I did have a dozen symptoms of anxiety, yes, from pica to bruxism and beyond, but I never experienced holding a small wooden rod loosely and trying to do something intentional with it as having any positive effect.

Football Hooligans

 

(Post)Modern Medievalist Reimagining an Ancient Myth

I had the single thought of Lewis as a 60s writer, or perhaps a mid 1900s writer.  The Ransom Trilogy is sci-fi, a new genre at the time, however much Lewis inserted his medieval "Discarded Image" into it. Camus, Brecht, Kafka, In Till We Have Faces you have to bring yourself to the text and interact with it or you just aren't going to understand its unusual features. A woman veiling herself permanently and humans coinhering with shifting goddesses seems more like Kafka's Metamorphose, or something out of Brecht or Camus. It is turning into Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Reenacting the actions of gods and goddesses, which is unusual in modernist literature, yet has the same mythic quality as say, some of Vonnegut or Borges. The Owl Service by Alan Garner has 20th C people reenacting a pagan Welsh myth, rather helpless to change it, rather like Stoppard's hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unable to escape their fate because they are stuck in script of "Hamlet" no matter what they do, illustrated immediately by the coin flip never changing no matter how many times it is repeated. 

It is more modern, or especially postmodern, to retell (or reinscribe as the more postmodern term is) a myth paying attention to the motivations of the gods and goddesses. Ancient writers would give only the barest description - "Venus was jealous" and let the story unfold in ways that would leave the audience wondering "but why then did she not simply banish/kill/make the mortal ugly?" It was not unknown in the past. We see behind the characters' emotional curtains a bit in "The Trojan Women," and Paradise Lost pays significant attention to motives of divine, diabolical, or mythic characters. But it is rare. It is much more common to focus on a villain's or minor character's* POV in our day than it had been before. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "A Modern Prometheus" and initiated the popularity of the idea, but it has become even common now.  Garner's Grendel, ** or the entire premise of "Wicked."

We want to force Lewis, and probably Tolkien, into a mold of nonmodern writers, forcing themselves back into older forms, or a mold of ancient or medieval writers updating them themselves for the present, but not really see them as 20th century writers.Yet their characters are seldom simply evil or good. They are mixed, with good motives barely surviving but not fully extinguished, and even the heroes bent or needing redemption in some way. Even before he was a Christian, Lewis had wanted to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of the jealous sisters. He even shows the improvement of Redival, the less-mentioned sister because she turns outward to care for others, her husband and children.But Orual judges her by other criteria than caring, and still finds her wanting. These are perspectives that would have been impossible for writers in most of history. 

Crystal Downing of the Wade Center calls Lewis the first postmodernist writer.  Jack would likely point to GK Chesterton and Owen Barfield as his influences that all artists and thinkers are products of their eras - including especially our own, which is the one most frequently neglected.  We view a subject through every prism on the table; but not the mirror on the wall directly across from us.

So that's it. Don't limit Lewis's categories, or Tolkien's.  They contain many eras.

*The New Testament way be the first work to focus consistently on the actions of minor or low-status persons as having importance.

**I was in a student-written production based loosely on Grendel, and got to beg for mercy but be killed anyway on stage.  Never die out in the open in the theater.  Find some way to land behind a sofa or rock, because otherwise you will have to lie absolutely still until the scene ends. "Grendel" was notable for its cast of seven male students with a rather bawdy female director, leading to a series of cast parties that were unrivalled, about once a month, last for a year. Drunken actors can get rather graphic in charades. I missed the enactment of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but apparently it took the entire three minutes even though everyone knew the answer immediately.