Adeste Fidelis

We learned it in Latin in grammar school.

Because that's what we did in those days.

In-Laws

I use Daughters-in-law for the plural and Daughter-in-law's for the possessive. I just noticed that this frees me up to use both if I need to, as in "my Brothers-in-law's behavior at Thanksgiving in the old days at Scituate." But I didn't choose those forms for that reason. It's based purely on what sounds right to my ear.

Just answering the important questions for you.

Birth Dearth

I have recommended the demographer Lyman Stone many times, and the interview Razib Khan did with him this fall may be the best yet. We note that developed countries have progressively fewer children and conclude that rising income depresses fertility.  But it is not so. That is only a mild correlation when isolated from other factors.  The big drivers are education, urbanisation, and the long-term projected cost of children.  He notes, for example, that South Korean culture expects that children will live with their parents until they can have a home of their own, and at the end of their twenties if they have not achieved that, the parents buy them a home. Knowing that this is the situation thirty years earlier raises the possible cost of each child, and reduces the desire to have too many. Even if they are married, they tend not to have children.  Stone notes wryly "there is no birth control as good as having your parents down the hall."

South Korea is now down to 0.6 children per woman, an insanely low and self-destructive norm. Since WWII they have become increasingly urbanised and educated, and the expectation for a person to "succeed" in some high-status job is now so enormous that people stay in school in fields they do not even like and give up all else in order to have this. 

He notes that Chinese elites have a long tradition of few children per woman, and they have long been educated, urbanised, and expected to pay for expensive education/houses/dowries. The phenomenon was disguised by serial polygamy, so that elite men had many children, while the women had few.

Fascinating discussion start to finish.

Uncomfortable update.  There is a full description of the forced attempts at heightened fertility in Romania under Ceausescu, and the horrible results of that. It includes some background I didn't know about how many of the children got put in orphanages.  I'm not sharing this information with my middle sons. They deserve to forget as much as possible.

Compared to What?

The previous post, and I may do more of them as an ongoing experiment, looks at whether ChatGPT news gives us quite what we want. Today I read an ESPN account of Boise State women's volleyball team withdrawing from the conference tournament rather than play San Jose State, which has a transgender female. I draw your attention to the paragraph about the legal challenge.

U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews in Denver ruled Monday that the player is allowed to play, and a federal appeals court upheld the decision the following day.

The statement is true, but I thought at first that the larger issue had been adjudicated, and the general right of transgender athletes to play had already made it through a federal appeals court. Does that paragraph seem to say that to you? If you follow the links, you find that the court decisions are basically "The policy has been in place since 2022.  If you are going to contest it you don't do it as an emergency injunction basis right before the tournament.  You should have done this long ago."  That seems a fair ruling on the part of the courts, which did not rule on the general safety or fairness issues at all, intentionally.

I think that was a bit sly on the part of ESPN.  But my opposition to transgender women playing against original females may be coloring that judgement.

Now ChatGPT would report this as a source and report it at face value, perpetuating the false impression unless it had been instructed a little more specifically to look for other things.  It might also pick up information from another source which brings that issue up and follow that. It has plenty of time and energy for that, because it moves much faster than you.

To use metaphors (probably a bad thing to do with AI at this point), rabbit trails are not a problem. You can let it go down all the rabbit trails. But it is susceptible to red herrings.

Nearly A Dozen Threats

Trying out DeepNewz here for the first time. ChatGPT

Bomb Threats Against Trump's Cabinet Nominees.

Several of President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet nominees and administration appointees have been targeted with violent, un-American threats, including bomb threats and swatting incidents, according to the Trump transition team and the FBI. The attacks occurred on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, threatening the lives of the nominees and their families. Trump transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt stated that law enforcement authorities acted quickly to ensure the safety of those targeted. The FBI confirmed it is investigating numerous bomb threats and swatting incidents directed at incoming administration nominees and appointees and is working with law enforcement partners.

Trump HHS pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Compares CDC Vaccine Programs to Nazi Death Camps, Calls for Imprisonment of Researchers

Recent recordings from private autism meetings reveal that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump's nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services, has made controversial statements regarding vaccination programs. In the recordings, Kennedy compared the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) vaccine initiatives to 'Nazi death camps' and called for the imprisonment of researchers involved in these programs. Over the past six years, he has also likened the act of vaccinating children to abuses by the Catholic Church, describing the CDC’s vaccine division as a 'fascist enterprise' and accusing it of deliberately harming children. These remarks have raised significant concerns about his views on public health policy as he prepares to lead the agency responsible for overseeing such programs.

The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

We are making pumpkin pie tonight, and seeing molasses often reminds my wife of this story.

It's fun to say sticky tsunami, even though it is a stupid phrase.

The tank, 50 feet high and 90 feet in diameter, contained 2.3 million gallons of molasses originally destined for use in a munitions plant. The tank, though only a few years old, seemed shaky. People who lived and worked in the North End said the tank shuddered and groaned when the company filled it. Shortly after noon, the tank collapsed with a thunderous roar. The ground shook, and witnesses said the rivets popping out of the tank sounded like machine gun fire.

Shchedryk

 

Rising Influence of Heritability

From Aporia, a preprint from a paper out of King's College, London. I don't recognise the name of the lead author Damien Morris (likely my ignorance), but Ritchie and Plomin are both big names in genetics.

Mechanisms of developmental change in genetic and environmental influences on intelligence. Damien Morris and colleagues re-examine the Wilson effect, the rising heritability of intelligence with age. Analysing longitudinal data for 10,535 twin pairs, they find that heritability rises from 24% at age 2 to 50% at age 16, while shared environmental influence declines from 65% to 10%. Non-shared environmental influence also rises.

This general model is coming to be preferred - at least by people doing actual research, not the journalists, educators, social workers, etc who wield so much influence over children: The effect of genes rises as we grow older.  This study is useful because it covers the years of childhood only, when children are usually in a setting controlled by adults, usually parents. To oversimplify, twins reflect their environment(green) more than their genes(blue) at first, and have very little nonshared environmental(red) influence. As they get older, the genes assert their dominance gradually.  The nonshared environment - different friends, different available hobbies, different teachers - grows in influence as well.  By age sixteen, the parental influence on the intelligence of children is pretty much spent.

The pattern holds for other traits, but not as dramatically as with intelligence.

DeepNewz

 DeepNewz is a new AI-powered news site with Nikolai Yakovenko (nvidia, Perplexity, Deep NFTValue, Twitter engineer, professional poker, Lord knows what else) as CEO.  I have been using it the last few days and liking it quite a bit.  Tell me what you think.

Pinay Sa Alaska

I have mentioned my daughter-in-law's online activities only occasionally.  I should do it more. Pinay means "Filipina," and is one of those self-referential terms that used to be an insult but has now been adopted proudly. YouTube account is the small one, with only 13K subscribers. TikTok is the big one with 1.3M subscribers. I would not have predicted ten years ago that we had a Filipina influencer in the family who makes significant money on top of her regular job in Nome. Then again, I would have not predicted 30 years ago that we would have Romanian sons either. Life changes. Adapt.

Notice in the first video from four years ago that she has not yet learned that the first rule of performance is "get the pretty girls out front and center." That would be herself and the three granddaughters. She is quite natural in front of the camera.

No, I have little idea what she is saying in Tagalog save for the occasional English word that falls in.  Two of the three girls used to be camera shy on family Zoom calls. Now they are comfortable having their everyday activities filmed. John-Adrian (JA to his brothers and John to his wife and friends) has always been a bit of a showman. Among his many side hustles - king crab, salmon, finding gold, fleecing people at poker on Las Vegas vacations when they have had too many drinks - he has added a TikTok account of his own.  I have no idea why people would watch him, but he has started to make money as well.  Maybe I should have an "Old guy taking walks and talking to himself" TikTok account and become an Old Guy influencer or something.

Sure you could just look up the exchange rate at XE.com.  But wouldn't you rather have Jocie explain it to you?

They were very proud when Outdoor Boys came up a second time and had John-Adrian on their weekly video, which has about 13M subscribers.

People always ask about darkness in Nome and say "Oh, I couldn't handle that." They are down to about five hours of daylight now, with another hour of half-light on each end. His brother Chris, halfway around the world in Tromso is actually above the Arctic Circle and is down to about 50 minutes of daylight now.  Both will tell you that it is the summer which is harder in the long run, because you get poor sleep many nights and it adds up.  With dark, you can turn on lights after all.

The YouTube Algorithm

I give it credit.  I would never have looked for this on my own and I have no idea what it is basing this on. Over 3.4M hits, probably. But you learn something new every day, doncha?

Numbered Posts

I recorded the publishing of each hundred posts over the first 19 years, and they are a diverse group. For example...

Post 1700

Post 3500

Post 5200 

Post 7900

But now that I have reached 10,000, mentioning that the last post was 10,100 seems rather silly.  I will do only the 1,000s now.

Somewhat Literary Posts, 2009

I got distracted by the election and stopped reprising posts from 2009.

Aunt Jennie The first in my Aunt Jennie's series was runner up for the Newbery in 1955 and was eventually available mostly only to collectors until recently, when The Golden Name Day was reissued, but without the Garth Williams illustrations. The comments are fun.

Tolkien Rocks (The interior link no longer works.  What's left is fun anyway.)

3) The Watcher in the Water

Dude. That totally was cool. I mean, say what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog..

Debunking the Common Belief   "Debunking" might be the surest clickbait word for me.  This one is about the myth of the lone American hero.

Ukraine Is Not Real

There is a post over at Grim's about ballistic missiles and land mines, and James jumps in with a comment that set me thinking. Go there first.

BTW, now more than ever I wish this circle was larger, because I think it is a remarkably good discourse among intelligent people who are clear where their expertise ends and their extensive general knowledge plus reasoning plus answering opposition arguments begins. I am decently intelligent myself, but my gift seems to have been attracting a very intelligent crowd. It's a great legacy. Some days I fume because I have not attracted a larger crowd; other days I marvel that I can have such conversations, which I have sought all my life.

I have cynically mentioned before that in Washington, none of these places are real. Heck most of America isn't real.  They are all merely counters on the gameboards of power in DC. No real people are dying or suffering. And it is mostly not about Democrats vs Republicans or conservatives versus liberals.  Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out that these are intra-party and intra-movement gameboards. The players are positioning themselves for votes and alliances and prestige within their own party, because that endures more than national notoriety for all but a few, and those are chancy and situational.

Montana is just one more vote in the Senate.  No people live there, only videogame characters. Should Montana feel insulted? No, because in Helena even Whitefish is only an imaginary place on the way to Banff.

Globetrotters

We don't have much of this anymore.  It used to be common in baseball as well, as in the Indianapolis Clowns, who even Hank Aaron had to play for early on to get noticed. It was not only a vehicle for black athletes to have an actual job and to show their skills, but to play out our racial conflicts, where blacks would push the boundaries of their stereotype and get to make fun of white people, but not stray too far over those borders. People were being instructed without realising it.

Choosing A Career

From Rob Henderson (bottom of page).

It is a great point, but read it in consideration of the recent post on social capital, which would suggests he might have higher status in some eyes as an office manager even at little more than half the salary. 

College graduates who studied STEM subjects are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those who majored in social sciences and humanities second-guess themselves. Nearly half of humanities, arts, and social science majors wish they had chosen a different field of study. (source). On this point, the social scientist Charles Murray has given one of my favorite examples for how a young person can think about career options:

In Real Education, Murray asks you to imagine that a young man has just graduated from high school.

He is trying to decide whether to become an electrician or attend college, get a business degree, and become a white-collar manager. He knows his strengths and weaknesses after taking a rigorous skills test. Something like the ASVAB, a test the military administers to measure the various abilities of potential recruits.

This kid is slightly above average in his linguistic abilities. He’s exactly average in intrapersonal and interpersonal skills (ability to understand himself and others). He is at the 95th percentile in both small motor skills (ability to exert subtle and precise control over one’s bodily movements) and spatial skills (ability to mentally rotate objects).

So he looks up the average income of electricians and managers. He sees that the average income for electricians is about $73K and the income of managers is about $84K. Should he go to college? The kid should ignore these averages. If he wants to become a manager, he will be competing for such positions against people who are much higher than him in linguistic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills. Plainly, his competitors would play social chess at a higher level than him. But his fine motor skills and spatial ability are superior to most people, even most electricians. The young man reflects on this, and sees that the 10th percentile of manager incomes is $55K. The 90th percentile of electricians is $104K. Thus, even if he obtains a bachelor’s degree (which isn’t guaranteed, given that 40% of male college students fail to graduate), he’d go on to earn far less than he would as an electrician.

This is a good example because it can be used to approach other questions.

Looking at averages can help. But knowing your unique set of abilities and unusual circumstances, along with broader statistical trends, enable you to make wiser decisions about your major and chosen career.

Also, the up-front cost of college is not entered into the discussion, which would push the monetary consideration even farther in the direction of a trade. And yet people still choose that over the trades, and mate availability may be part of that.

Vaccination

There are not many places on earth where we have detailed cause-of-death data from before the era of widespread vaccination. Massachusetts is one of those places. From 1842-1877, 70% of all deaths were from diseases which we today have vaccines to prevent.

 

Has Snopes Changed Back?

I am truly asking this.  I am not giving an answer. And man, I was much happier when I was avoiding politics, before I somehow got sucked in in October as the election heated up.  After this I am going to go back to interesting anthropology bits; evolutionary psychology as it relates to current mating patterns (I still have one son in Duxbury unattached; and it fits into my next category as well); nostalgia - especially on YouTube; and CS Lewis/Inklings.

I used to love Snopes, and over a decade ago thought that a Snopes-like site in Arabic would do the world a lot of good. Then I started getting reports it was slanted left and eventually followed up on a crazy-sounding idea that the Chinese were using parts of aborted fetuses to make cosmetics.  Snopes said this was "False."  Not even "Mixed."  But their own description revealed that Okay, not everyone does it. And even those who do don't do it a lot.  We don't think.  Though it's hard to get a straight answer out of China. I didn't think that qualified as "false," and subsequent uses around 2010 revealed some odd political slants as well. It was likely a decade ago that I learned that the couple had divorced and the man had remarried a very liberal woman who was injecting interpretation.  Though that's a vague memory at this point and I don't much care. I hadn't been back.

But the challenge was issued in the comments on another site that Kamala had slept her way to the top and this was airily dismissed as having been debunked, so I googled it, and got a lot of other links about her, including her Wikipedia entry that acknowledged she had "dated" him and he had appointed her to some entry-level political positions. When I put in Kamala Harris Willie Brown I did finally get links that addressed the issue, including Snopes.  So I bit. Snopes called the accusation "Mixed," and acknowledged that they had dated when she was 29 and he was 60. Umm...He had separated from his wife for over a decade but was still technically married. Well, read it yourself. To me it looks like they are explaining away a fair bit. She slept her way to the middle, then affirmative action took over for her rise.  The Wiki entry talks about people who praised her career as a prosecutor, listing the terrible kinds of people that all prosecutors prosecute.  I have read other descriptions that she made her bones offering young black men terrible plea deals, the usual way of dealing with backlogs. I am not in a position to judge that either way.

But give this background story to some other candidate or in some other century and what would we say? Powerful older married man sleeping with a woman half his age and giving her political appointments?

Have any of you used Snopes recently for anything political? What's your take?

Bad Election Narratives

Was it racism that did Harris in?  Sexism? Turnout Troubles?  Billionaires for Trump? 

I doubt I would agree with many of the author's political leanings, but he plays it straight and by the numbers as a sociologist who looked hard at the common explanations and found them all wanting

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives, by Musa al-Gharbi at his substack Symbolic Capital(ism)

Critically, until somewhat recently, the voting patterns of men and women were not that different. Whoever got the lion’s share of the male vote tended to win the female vote too. This changed after 1996. And it didn’t change because men suddenly grew more Republican (they didn’t). It changed because women shifted aggressively towards the Democratic Party in the mid-90s, and consistently gave Democrats around 54 percent of their vote for every cycle since, irrespective of who was at the top of the ticket or what the pressing issues of the day were.

He believes this month's numbers are a continuation of trends over the last 30 years, in particular the division between those who have what he calls symbolic capital, making their livings in big tech, finance, media and entertainment, big law, branding, versus physical goods and services. We constantly note what good money people can make in trades and wonder why young people, particularly young men who seem to have diminished status these days, don't flock to them.  This may be a large part of it.  In the current world, they sense that higher status is held by those in the professions which rely on the manipulation of symbols rather than objects.

The old joke is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two groups and those who don't, so I am always suspicious of over-streamlined narratives like this. Folks is folks, after all.  But this has a lot of explanatory power and will take some additional thinking about.  He has at least one book We Were Never Woke.

Whaddya Gonna Do In a Little Canoe?

 Looking for another old camp song, circa 1959, I came across this one. I asked my wife if she had sung it at Girl Scout camp, and she assured me that her mother would never have allowed such a thing. It has a fun twist in the second verse.

Sold By Weight?

 From Stephen Hopkins, @ phil_lol_ogist on X

Someone at Trader Joe's never studied the Middle Ages

 

French Carol

 

The harmonies get more complex as it goes

Sanctuary States

The American Conservative has a recent article How to Break the Sanctuary States. Eigenrobot at X extracted a key section

That is why I recommend the president order the Department of State to cease issuing student visas to all foreigners who seek to matriculate at universities and schools located in sanctuary jurisdictions. Foreign students overwhelmingly attend universities in sanctuary zones, and they bring billions of dollars to pay tuition and living expenses ($40 billion a year nationally).  

This steady stream of foreign students represents the Achilles’ heel of California, New York and Massachusetts—all three states representing major redoubts for non-cooperation with ICE. California alone has over 237,000 foreign students, and almost all of them pay the full tuition costs at the state’s overpriced universities.

Therefore, Trump should instruct his consular corps at U.S. embassies and consulates to cease issuing visas to all students seeking to enroll in universities in all 13 sanctuary states. The outrage will roar from China to India to Mexico. The visa pause should continue until ICE certifies the return to full cooperation of all state and local authorities on all deportation matters.

I have a natural conservatism that is suspicious of serious disruption, because it has unforeseen effects. This is somewhat balanced by a natural libertarianism that says "Lets worry about the foreseen effects first. Full speed ahead." 

This would include medical schools, and I have a fair number of Indian and Eastern European practioners up here. They tend to have children more than the Chinese, American, and Western European doctors do.  Boston is a sanctuary city and I think all of Massachusetts is a sanctuary state. New Hampshire is not a sanctuary state, but I don't know about Hanover and Lebanon.  Looking it up, there are no sanctuary cities in NH at the moment and the legislature passed a bill outlawing them, so the supply line from Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Geisel remains intact. And Massachusetts? "The Princess Bride" said it best, as it did many things. "If I make him better, Humperdinck suffers?"

Am I that petty?  Yeah, probably. And it would only be temporary, until they figured out which side their bread was buttered on.

Which come to think of it, for smart people they aren't very good at down there.

Reaching Your Full Potential

Linus* once stated "There is no greater burden than a high potential." I felt that deeply when I read it in the 60s. I am more ambivalent about it now.  There are greater burdens.  I suppose that one is common enough among the children of the chattering classes that it deserves at least a mention.

The adversity being blamed in that conversation was ADHD. Yes, that can interfere with you reaching your full potential. So can being blind. So can being 2SD too short if you are male. So can chronic alopecia, or schizophrenia, or being born in Tajikstan, or a hundred other things.  Hardly any of us reach our full potential. 

And...potential for what?  Wealth? Beauty? Education? Strength?

We should be more concerned that we don't reach our full potential for Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude; Faith, Hope, and Charity.

False Measurement of Adversity

The trend toward adversity points for college admissions is another way to increase the advantage of upper-middle-class white kids rather than reduce it, exactly as subbing in interviews for standardised tests did a generation ago. Those kids speak the dialect of the college admissions office staff at a completely natural level. They can write a better adversity essay, hitting all the right notes, better than kids who have faced actual adversity, who sometimes slip up on that.  My elder son from the Romanian orphanage, who was sent into the fields to herd sheep and goats at age six so his father could have cigars and palinca, and was later dropped off at Casa de Copii, the mouth of hell that you saw 60-Minutes specials on, only charmed a small religious college in South Carolina with his bio, and they seemed to forget it the day he arrived. Probably just as well. We kept him out of Special Ed and ESL in high school and he gradually figured it out. 

He didn't write an essay.  He told them the story, sometimes laughing, when he went down to see them. 

If you are trying to uncover a Black kid from inner-city Baltimore who is a diamond in the rough, an essay may not be your best bet. That will give you six middle-class kids from Bethesda and three second-generation Nigerians. A standardised test sorted by ZIP code will do better.

Political Betting

Listening to Ryan Glasspiegel today talking about why he bet on Harris late in the campaign. He reasoned that it was looking like a tossup, both sides would cheat if they could, but the swing states had Democratic governors and it's always easier to cheat for more votes in cities. That is not terrible reasoning, but illustrates that large realities can overwhelm even accurate subtleties. Hugh Hewitt's If It's Not Close They Can't Cheat is bout 20 years old, I think.

He seems to have made it back betting Trump for the popular vote, which was 4-1 against even the day before. 

I would put my money on the nose of a pony before I put it on a political race.

Christmas Music

I have been a person who waited until the very end to cut and put up the Christmas tree. It echoed not my own childhood (though we were late-ish until my mother remarried), but my mother's and grandmother's Swedish traditions, where the tree was decorated by the adults Christmas Eve and the children saw it for the first time in the morning. This makes more sense when you are using real candles and the tree is only up for a week. Which even we didn't do, but my grandmother remembered. You can read about it in my Aunt Jennie's book The Golden Name Day, recently reissued with terrible illustrations, and notable for the fact that such details as houses burning down or girls' hair catching fire for Luciadag* were studiously unmentioned.

We had a friend who was a stickler (a good Episcopalian at the time) for only having Advent music before Christmas and Carols only sung after midnight Christmas Eve. She has gotten over that, but when we were Lutherans we trended in that direction somewhat. But I quickly settled for grousing about Winter Songs and Santa Songs mixed into the religious holiday, sometimes smuggled.

So let's give thanks to the Lord above,'cause Santa Claus is coming tonight. 

It got a little silly.  Tracy and I would sing Christmas Carols in July or October, but shut down after Hallowe'en until Thanksgiving Night. Then we would go full bore until Epiphany, when everyone else was buying Valentine's candy.

A young friend, sort of a stepson, posted this on Facebook yesterday.  He is a musician, and he's got a solid point here.

People don't sing "We gather Together" in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, do they?  Not even the ones who know all the verses by heart.

*Tell your side of the story if you want, bsking.

O Holy Night

I won't be doing them every day, as I do when I start in Advent.  This year will be more irregular. This is the warmup.

When I sang this in children's choir in 1964, I started my solo "Truly, he taught..." two measures early, choked it down after a syllable. That's good training for not panicking onstage. Mistakes happen. Never let 'em see you sweat.

Skilled Immigration

I'm not sure how much of this I agree with, but I would have agreed with a lot less of it before I read it. So in the interests of passing along a good persuader, I give you Aporia's Increasing Skilled Immigration Would Be a Mistake.

 

When asked, 71% of Trump supporters want to increase high-skilled immigration to the United States. This isn’t a priority for most of Trump’s coalition, but one wealthy and disproportionately influential faction has consistently and publicly advocated for increasing high-skilled immigration, to the point that Trump himself has endorsed giving green cards to all foreign students. This faction is the libertarian-adjacent tech-right, whose support for Trump is motivated by concerns about regulations, freedom of speech and averting California-style political dysfunction in the rest of the country. They are making a fatal mistake.

I didn't remove the links for this post, but I didn't read them myself.

Dr Arlene Unfiltered

'These rabbits who claim to have the second sight—I've known one or two in my time. But it's not usually advisable to take much notice of them. For one thing, many are just plain mischievous. A weak rabbit who can't hope to get far by fighting sometimes tries to make himself important by other means and prophecy is a favorite. The curious thing is that when he turns out to be wrong, his friends seldom seem to notice, as long as he puts on a good act and keeps talking.' The Threarah, Watership Down, as quoted by Captain Holly.*

I think of this quote whenever someone makes a prediction that goes badly wrong, but seems to still have an audience.  We can all point to religious groups where this has happened. Sometimes the "prophet" has enough honor that he goes away and so does the movement.  Yet it is surprising how many double down.

Over at Grim's Hall Texan99 put up a post from Hot Air that included video predictions of an obvious Kamala victory in condescending tones by semi-prominent Democrats who have media channels. I feel like I have met both of these prophets many times before. They seriously annoy me.  Yet after these shamefully wrong predictions, they have soldiered on in at least some venues.  Dr. Arlene, a former political science professor and current political analyst, has memory-holed this particular video but gone on to rapidly put up more explaining how this terrible vote came about.  I watched two, and they are even more condescending and irritating.

I don't usually follow Hot Air.  It is often correct and the reporting is pretty good, but they are in that niche of being unnecessarily inflammatory.  The headline for the story talks about the "Lamestream Media," for example. But they very clearly point out the bias of the legacy media on the weekend before the election.  It's not in their op-eds, it's in their news text, and David Strom gives specific examples, exact quotes, and contrasts it to how Trump is usually quoted, with phrases or half-sentences yanked out and frog-marched onto the front page unwillingly, made to confess to things they did not actually say - because Trump didn't exactly say them either.

I don't recommend sending these to liberal friends.  They will get irritated and stop hearing.  But if you choose to take that risk, point out that this is exactly how MSNBC, the Washington Post, or even the AP appear to us. Watching things like this is our normal everyday experience when we are in a place where this is all that is on offer. All of us tend to not see and not hear what we dislike.  It takes some effort.  It takes thinking "If I were going to answer that claim in some sort of refereed or mediated situation, what would I say? What would be my strongest points, what would easily be dismissed as mere name-calling or cliche?"  It is called steelmanning an argument, a clever twist on strawman. 

You have to want it. It doesn't happen naturally when you are harvesting meme-farms for cleverly vicious things that will impress the people in your group. The humor there is usually not actually funny, just mean in the way a particular audience likes. They eat it up and tell you how wonderful you are, and your place in the category is reinforced again. 

*Ross Douhat has called Watership Down the greatest political novel of the late 20th C.

********

(Unnecessary rant, that happened because I got overheated.)

Here is where I get especially upset, and I have seen a lot of it post election. How can you say such things about people who have shown you nothing but affection? "Oh, I didn't mean you, AVI.  I wasn't thinking of you at all when I posted that.  But surely you must know that there are lots of people like that out there." 

No, I don't know that.  I've met some and have upbraided some on my own side. But there actually aren't a lot of Christian Nationalists out there.  There are lots of articles "well, 60% of Republicans say they support A, which is darn close to saying B, and what they really mean but don't say out loud is H, as in 'Heil Hitler.' I've seen them online myself." They are almost but not quite bogeymen. They are few. You are overinterpreting Gadsden Flags or purely defensive expressions of 2A rights as threatened attacks. If they don't want illegal aliens you refuse to hear that because you won't use the word, considering it an attack on all immigrants.

Nationalism

We have had discussions here about nationalism versus internationalism throughout the whole nineteen years. Not once have any of us resorted to the speaker's trick of starting with "Webster's defines..." I have used that idea on the topic of racism, which has at least three distinct definitions that are treated as "oh, it's all the same thing" in political conversation these days.

The link in Point 4 in the post below this one has something similar in its discussion of nationalism versus globalization. It's a good reminder that nationalism has at least three distinct meanings, which are not interchangeable though are often treated as such by those who fear it. They regard all expressions of nationalism to essentially be the first definition.  The other two matter.

1. Devotion, especially as excessive or undiscriminating devotion, to the interests of culture of a particular nation-state.  

2. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.  

3. The belief that a particular cultural or ethnic group constitutes a distinct people deserving of political self-determination.   

Tariffs

David Foster over at Chicago Boyz has a discussion of tariffs with both some standard reminders and some less-common arguments.

From Point 2: 

Imagine Massachusetts enacting a tariff on oranges to protect an industry of heated orange groves and Florida a tariff to support air-conditioned cranberry bogs. State politicians could trumpet creating a new industry, but OJ would be $25 a glass in Boston and cranberry sauce would be $10 a scoop in Miami. Tariffs amount to a “beggar thyself” policy. The Constitution’s framers recognized this and crafted the Commerce Clause to forbid restriction of trade by states. The same principle applies to trade between nations. (WSJ)

Trade based on relative efficiency of production, as for the orange/cranberry example, is a classic example of the advantages of trade.  But a high proportion of trade today is not of this nature: it is simply labor arbitrage, based on differentials in wages.  The primary reason why products made in China have been so much lower cost than those made in the US is because Chinese people would work for lower wages than US people. There was nothing inherent in Chinese geography or climate, or Chinese skill sets, that made assembly of iPhone more efficient in China than in Iowa.

From a link at Point 4: 

Since Clinton implemented NAFTA, and the US-China Trade Agreement of 2000, 12 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared, replaced with a combination of health care, education, leisure & hospitality and warehouse jobs.  According to the US Census Bureau, the manufacturing jobs lost pay an average annual salary of $61K and change.  The weighted average of the jobs that replaced them is $43K plus a bit.  The average household size in the US is 3.13 people.  This means that over 37 million people – about 11% of the US population – has been whacked from the middle class to paycheck-to-paycheck level.  No wonder young people are coming to believe capitalism doesn’t work, and there is increasing concern for the ’wealth gap’.

Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand

 They had a few of these from their Hamburg days, including "Sie Liebt Dich"

Twins Reared Apart

There was a fascinating case of South Korean twins reared apart after one was lost at the market when they were two years old and after foster care, was later adopted to the US. The researchers noted consistent similarities in personality, mental health profile and the pattern of cognitive abilities. They showed similar high conscientiousness and low neuroticism, high verbal comprehension and working memory. 

What did Psypost report first after telling the charming story of how they got reunited? That they "expressed" different values WRT stereotypical cultural differences in individualism and vertical collectivism. What did Psypost highlight in the headline? The "striking"16-point difference in IQ, rather than the usual average of 7 points. 

However...

The researchers suggested that this discrepancy might be partially explained by US’s history of concussions...

Um, yeah.  You have to get to paragraph eleven for that.  Old friend Gringo over at Maggie's Farm picked up on the same thing right away. They were pretty much the same on everything except what they said out loud about communitarianism, each being conventional according to culture - which would be something of a similarity; and the one with lots of concussions had intelligence in the same pattern, just less of it. 

Even I grant that getting bapped on the head frequently is a significant environmental effect.  Another is near starvation before age six. Or eating lead. Not much else. 

Always remember that South Korean students outperform Americans because they are so regimented and are worked so hard, but Finnish students are better than Americans because they are so laid back and allowed to pursue interests without pressure. Got that? Couldn't possibly be genetic, so it has to be "whatever else you got in the environment."

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.