Brothers Judd Blog

EVERYONE WINS:

This farmer was skeptical about solar — until he began grazing sheep ( Kari Lydersen,
15 October 2024, Canary Media)

[W}hen the owner of one of those leased parcels decided to work with Acciona Energia to help site its High Point wind and solar farm, Gerlach initially was not enthusiastic.

“The thought of taking productive farm ground out of production with solar panels was not, in my personal opinion, ideal,” he said.

But Gerlach was determined to make the best of the situation.

Ultimately, that meant a win-win arrangement, where Acciona pays him to manage vegetation around the 100 MW array of solar panels that went online in early 2024. Gerlach does that with a herd of 500 sheep.

“We don’t own the land, we don’t get a say — that’s landowners’ rights, and I’m very pro that,” Gerlach recounted. ​“In U.S. agriculture, the biggest thing that gets farmers in trouble is saying ​‘that’s how we’ve always done it so that’s what we’re going to do.’ Renewable energy is probably not going anywhere, whether you’re for or against it, it’s coming, it’s what’s happening. As an agriculture producer, we’re going to adapt with it.”

JOBS MAGA WON’T DO:

The Border Crisis Won’t Be Solved at the Border: If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater (Jack Herrera, November 2024, mTexas Monthly)

For more than a century the threat of arrest—whether by Border Patrol agents in green uniforms or Texas state cops in white Stetsons—has not stopped undocumented workers from moving north. Recently Latin American migrants have kept coming, for the same reason millions of Scots, Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Russians first arrived at Ellis Island. The U.S. economy—the most powerful engine of wealth in human history—has been built on successive waves of foreign-born workers and entrepreneurs. The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.

One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally. In a survey conducted this September by another trade group, 77 percent of construction firms with job openings, and 74 percent of those in Texas, reported that they were struggling to fill them.

OTHER THAN DR. NO:

The Ultimate Bond Film Turns 60: “Goldfinger” launched the 007 franchise into global fame—and remains unsurpassed. (Christopher Sandford, September 12, 2024, Modern Age)

First released in the U.K. in September 1964 with a U.S. release to follow in December, the film’s other primary takeaway images are those of a nude young lady killed by being smothered in gold paint, a mute Korean assassin with an unusually lethal bowler hat, and an all-female flying circus, overseen by a blonde-framed vision named Pussy Galore, spraying nerve gas over Fort Knox, all accompanied by a breezily melodramatic title song belted out by Shirley Bassey with the young Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin fame, on guitar.

All rich stuff, you may think, if just a touch on the outré side. The contemporaneous reviews used words like “outlandish,” “ludicrous,” and “absurd, funny, and vile” to describe the film, except for Roger Ebert, who called it “chilling,” and praised Sean Connery—the yardstick by which all his successors as Bond would be measured, often to their disadvantage—for conveying a “verisimilitude” and “sleek assurance” in the role, alongside a gift for deadpan comedy. Revisiting the film years later, Ebert wrote: “Connery . . . had something else that none of [his heirs] could muster: steely toughness. When his eyes narrowed and his body tensed up, you knew the playing was over and the bloodshed was about to begin.” Connery’s performance surmounted even one or two plot twists and chunks of expository dialogue that may seem a touch heavy-going to us today. The title character’s essential game plan is to profit from the economic chaos that will ensue after he’s detonated an atomic bomb over Fort Knox, thus rendering America’s gold reserves radioactive for a precisely stated fifty-eight years. “He’s quite mad, you know,” Bond remarks to Pussy Galore, just in case anyone watching might have considered it a viable get-rich-quick scheme.

I have to say that I’m with Ebert on this one. It’s not just that Connery is perfect as Bond, with a vitality and a humanity (not to mention that widely mimicked Scottish burr) his inheritors in the role could only approximate, some more competently than others. Strange as it may seem, Goldfinger itself, like many of the author Ian Fleming’s tales, wasn’t pure invention. It was inspired by the swashbuckling exploits of the Anglo-Canadian spymaster William Stephenson (1897–1989), whose wartime scheme to relieve the collaborationist Vichy French government of its bullion reserves held on the island of Martinique had come to Fleming’s attention as a young operative with British naval intelligence.

WALLS ARE ANTI-TEXTUAL:

Church and State Unseparated: Why Protestants should take their foundational role in American society seriously again. (David Hein, October 8, 2024, Modern Age)

“What this volume proposes,” Smith writes, “is that the United States Constitution’s disestablishment did not secularize society, nor did it remove institutional Christianity” from the realms of education, law, and politics. That displacement “occurred nearly a century later.”

Informed by both the English Whig and late-eighteenth-century American republican traditions, this voluntarist order, which recognized that religious belief and membership must be the products of the individual’s untrammeled will, was, therefore, liberal in respect of the establishment of religion but conservative in its grasp of the role of Christianity in American society. Smith ably demonstrates how Americans by and large accepted this continuing role for Christian institutions, “perpetuating . . . Christianity through federal and state courts, state colleges and institutions, state legislatures, and executive proclamations from governors and presidents,” as well as “through state cooperation with religious institutions.”

Both church and state, he says, were united in working to achieve a common goal: fostering a moral realm that embraced “historically Christian conceptions of virtue.” The cultural weight of these institutions, which incorporated conservative understandings of ethics and social order, countered irreligious tendencies to moral radicalism. Christians believed that religious faith had a beneficial impact on law, politics, and education. Thus, it warranted the support of civil magistrates. At the same time, Christians believed in religious liberty. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville memorably depicts the benefits of the entanglement of religion and liberty. Unforgettably, too, Samuel Francis Smith highlights these themes in his patriotic hymn “My Country ’tis of Thee.”

Particularly valuable is this volume’s chapter on Thomas Jefferson, who aimed to do more than merely end the privileges of state churches; he also wanted to see Christianity removed from the civil sphere. The author makes it clear that Protestants in the early republic embraced freedom of religion but generally rejected the Sage of Monticello’s wish to remove institutional Christianity’s influence from civic life; they declined to join what Smith calls his “personal war against churchly authority.”

Among the most important spokesmen for religious institutions and their continuing influence were New England Federalists, intellectuals in colleges and universities, and religious and judicial elites: they generally upheld the fundamental role of Protestantism in American culture. Smith points out that they and their like-minded Protestant brethren would have agreed with most of the Framers, who did not endorse a wall of separation between church and state. Many Protestants in the early republic believed that American society needed the efforts of practicing Christians in order to prosper; good Christian men and women fortified the Republic.

At the same time, disestablishment had a positive impact on religion, strengthening Christianity in the public sphere. It prevented an Erastian subordination of the Church to the state. It reduced political interference with religion and avoided the negative reputation that came with state control.

THE WATER WE SWIM IN:

Slog and Sacrifice: You don’t have to be religious to appreciate what millennia of religion have given us. (Jonah Goldberg, October 4, 2024, The Dispatch)

Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

For instance, Western science flows straight out of the Abrahamic revolution. “Postulating a single creator for the entire universe,” writes Walter Russell Mead, “leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven.” Therefore, the universe outside of our heads is discoverable and knowable through investigation. The scientific method has many catalysts —from alchemy to dye-making to the necessities of war—but even these things had religious aspects, and the systemization of science itself was the product of religious scholastic orders and institutions (like Harvard used to be). Modern astronomy is largely a Christian invention. (Yes, the Chinese had astronomers, too. But when they discovered that the Christians were better, they imported Jesuits to jobs the Chinese couldn’t do.)

Or take the ideal of “universal brotherhood”—i.e. Equality. It’s a Christian idea flowing straight out of Paul’s exhortation to believers in Christ: “You are all sons of God.” And Paul, a heretical Jew, owed much of his thinking to his religious upbringing. You could argue that the idea of the right to follow your conscience started with Socrates—though given how things ended for him, that’s debatable. But the idea of conscience—conscientious objection to war, civil disobedience, etc.—became a thing thanks to folks like Aquinas and Martin Luther.

I suppose it’s possible that there could have been an alternative timeline where we got driverless cars and microwave ovens, democracy and the Bill of Rights, without Abraham and his theological progeny. But the indisputable fact is that we didn’t. And remember, God gave us plenty of time to figure this stuff out without Him.

LOVE ONE ANOTHER, AS I HAVE LOVED YOU:

To Die Well, We Must Live Well—And for Others (Marianna Orlandi, 9/24/24, Public Discourse)

Lonely deaths are the inevitable product of our independent lives, the necessary outcome of decades spent “focusing on ourselves” as our culture mandates. They are the natural consequence of hours dedicated to running on a treadmill instead of chasing children; of hundreds of hours studying privately, uninterrupted by conversations with friends and peers who might have slowed us down; of hectic sleep schedules that prevent us from taking part in our friends’ plans and parties; of choosing solitary meals over shared ones. Such a focus on oneself is typical of today’s culture across the board. And it is by no means exclusive to single people.

Marriage and family life is not, in itself, a remedy to our egocentric cultural ethos. We all know families who leave elderly parents alone or even acquiesce to family members’ desires to give up on life. Said differently, there is little that an institution, even one as noble and as necessary as the family, can do on its own. Marriage and childbearing are paths to self-sacrifice and community, but they are not the only way, and they are not sufficient. I recently had a conversation with a psychiatrist here in Austin and she and I agreed that, at least partly, this may be what the latest surgeon general’s advisory indicates. After a life spent focusing on careers and on how to invest “our” time, and never having cared for younger siblings or older relatives, upon becoming parents, adults lack the virtues and skills that caregiving requires. Family life must be approached with a self-giving rather than a demanding heart, but there is nowhere for young people to learn the former attitude, which is not just a natural instinct. Today, this self-giving love and care are in critically short supply—from conception to natural death.

I believe the remedy is to recover our ability to see the other and to love him or her in all the different stages of life (and to allow ourselves to be the subjects of such love). We are made for communion, for relationships. Even the first man, Adam, was lonely before he encountered Eve, who was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. He had everything a man could want, but he felt lonely nonetheless. The same is true for us: we are utterly incomplete without one another. It was with Eve that Adam found joy and fulfilled his likeness to God. He became able not just to generate new life, as animals do, but to embody human souls. As one of my young students reminded me, it is revealing that sacrifice is an absolute requirement for Adam’s fulfillment: his rib needed to be taken from him (literally) for Eve to exist.

Contrary to what we are generally taught in school and popular media, we need to rediscover that a happy life requires not just the company of another, but sacrifice for the other. At the same time, we need to see the other as an end, not just as a means to our personal happiness.

To see the other and love him is the entirety of morality.

“IT’S NOT YOUR iDENTITARIANISM I OBJECT TO…”

The Rise of the Conservative Left: As the political left gets more progressive, it’s leaving behind the very people it used to champion, prompting them to search for new leaders (Michael C. Behrent, Oct 09, 2024, Discourse)

The trajectory of the left can, historically, be plotted along two axes. Temporally, the left tries to push society toward greater justice and equality, hastening the work of progress. Socially, it champions the interests of workers and ordinary people as opposed to elites. Most of the time, these axes harmonize: Political, social and cultural progress often advances the interests of society’s lower ranks. In the past, this has meant that political movements seeking to further the interests of ordinary people have tended to be liberal or progressive.

Yet in recent years, a very different situation has emerged. Ordinary people are less and less convinced that the progress progressives are offering is working in their favor. They worry not only about economic forces threatening their way of life—such as globalization, deindustrialization and automation—but also about ideologies hailing from universities and urban centers that classify their beliefs as old-fashioned and even abhorrent. Consequently, many nonelites have gravitated from the left to the right, particularly toward populist parties that, over the past decade, have flourished in many countries. In these circumstances, a space has emerged, almost by default, for an unusual political stance: a conservative left.

…it’s that you’re not valorizing my Identity.”

THANKS, DARPA!:

Fixing typos in the book of life (Stephen McBride, October 7, 2024, Risk Hedge)

mRNA (messenger RNA) technology can turn cancer from a death sentence into a mere nuisance.

Remember, “mRNA” is the tech that helped scientists develop a COVID vaccine in record time. Please, don’t hate mRNA because of how governments + big pharma forced these vaccines on us.

mRNA really is a game-changing tech with incredible promise. For cancer, it can prime our bodies to seek and destroy solid tumors not easily cured with surgery, and without the nasty side effects of chemo.

These cancer-killing jabs are only in the trial phase. But the results are extremely promising.

What’s even more promising is mRNA vaccines for pancreatic… colorectal… metastatic… and lung cancer are all showing positive results in trials, too. What if mRNA is the “skeleton key” that helps us cure every cancer?

I love how my friend Matt Ridley describes mRNA: “Synthetic messengers that reprogram our cells to mount an immune response to almost any invader, including perhaps cancer, can now be rapidly and cheaply made.”

IF IT WERE EASY EVERYONE WOULD DO IT:

Solving Our Political Disarray: The Constitution is more than a legal code. It is also a framework for union and solidarity. (Yuval Levin, Fall 2024, American Heritage)

The problem is that we have forgotten that creating common ground is a key purpose of the Constitution and that it should be a key purpose of our own political and civic action.

We too often lose sight of how the Constitution creates common ground by compelling Americans with different views and priorities to deal with one another – to compete, negotiate, and build coalitions in ways that drag us into common action even (indeed, especially) when we disagree.

This points to an even deeper problem underlying our contemporary frustrations with our system of government: we have not only lost sight of the importance of pursuing greater unity, but we have also tended to forget what unity in our free and dynamic society really involves. Unity doesn’t quite mean agreement. Americans do have some basic principles in common – especially those laid out in the Declaration of Independence. But although those widely espoused principles impose some moral boundaries on our political life, there is enormous room for disagreement within those boundaries.

This includes some significant disagreement about exactly what the Declaration’s principles actually mean regarding the nature of the human person and the proper organization of society, let alone disagreement about discrete political and policy choices in response to the needs of the day. Our politics is unavoidably organized around these disputes and requires us to take on common problems while continuing to disagree about questions that matter a great deal to us. But that disagreement does not foreclose the possibility of unity.

A more unified society would not always disagree less, but it would disagree better – that is, more constructively and with an eye to how different priorities and goals can be accommodated. That we have lost some of our knack for unity in America does not mean that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.

The parties to our various disputes now tend to talk about one another more than they talk to one another, and, so, even very active citizens actually spend relatively little time in active disagreement with others, let alone in efforts to overcome such disagreement for the sake of addressing some common problems in practice. This is the sense in which we have forgotten the practical meaning of unity: in the political life of a free society, unity does not mean thinking alike; unity means acting together.

How can we act together when we do not think alike? The United States Constitution is intended, in part, to be an answer to precisely that question. And it is a powerful and well-honed answer. Alleviating the disunity of contemporary America would, therefore, require not recklessly discarding our Constitution as an antiquated relic but rediscovering its fundamental purposes, grasping just how powerfully it speaks to some of our most serious contemporary problems, and finding ways to better put it into practice to address those problems.

That approach involves pushing, plying, and pressuring Americans to engage with one another and so also to understand themselves as engaged in a common enterprise. The Constitution forces insular factions to forge coalitions with others and, thereby, to expand their sense of their own interests and priorities. It forces powerful officeholders to govern through negotiation and competition rather than through fiat and pronouncement and so to align their ambitions with those of others. It forces Americans to acknowledge the equal rights of fellow citizens, and has (gradually, and thanks to the heroic efforts and sacrifices of many) come to better align the definition of “fellow citizen” with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

None of this is easy or simple. All of it happens through politics and so through contention, competition, pressure, and negotiation. It’s a struggle. But the Constitution is rooted in the insight that this very struggle is, itself, a source of solidarity and an engine of cohesion.

BETWEEN IRRESPONSIBILITY AND EUGENICS HE’S THE FACE OF ABORTION:

Trump Becomes a Pro-Choice Champion… for Florida’s Abortion Rights Movement (Marc A. Caputo, Oct 11, 2024, The Bulwark)

MOVE OVER, MARGARET SANGER. The new face of abortion rights in Florida is . . . Donald Trump?

One of the groups backing Florida’s abortion-rights initiative is trying to attract Trump voters with mailers and a soon-to-be-released digital ad that highlights the former president’s opposition to the state’s existing six-week abortion ban.