Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

March 2024

Sex

WHEN IDEOLOGY REPLACES HEALTH CARE:

Secret files show how international group pushes shocking experimental gender surgery for minors (Gerald Posner, March 4, 2024, NY Post)


Newly leaked files from the world’s leading transgender health-care organization reveal it is pushing hormonal and surgical transitions for minors, including stomach-wrenching experimental procedures designed to create sexless bodies that resemble department-store mannequins. […]

The files — jaw-dropping conversations from a WPATH internal messaging board and a video of an Identity Evolution Workshop panel — were provided to journalist Michael Shellenberger, who shared the documents with me.

Shellenberger’s nonprofit Environmental Progress will release a scathing summary report, comparing the WPATH promotion of “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people” to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains.”


The comparison to one of history’s greatest medical scandals is not hyperbole.

It is particularly true, as the files show repeatedly, when it involves WPATH’s radical approach to minors.

When the organization adopted in 2022 its current Standards of Care — relied on by the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and every major American medical and psychiatric association — it scrapped a draft chapter about ethics and removed minimum-age requirements for children starting puberty blockers or undergoing sexual-modification surgeries.

It had previously recommended 16 to start hormones and 17 for surgery.

Not surprisingly, age comes up frequently in the WPATH files, from concerns about whether a developmentally delayed 13-year-old can start on puberty blockers to whether the growth of a 10-year-old girl will be stunted by hormones.


During one conversation, a member asked for advice about a 14-year-old patient, a boy who identified as a girl and had begun transitioning at 4.

When treating transgender youth, how informed is informed consent? (Megan McArdle, March 8, 2024, Washington Post)

This is not a novel problem in medicine. As therapist Dianne Berg points out in that discussion, if children have diabetes, they are given insulin even if they haven’t learned how the pancreas works. If they have depression, they might be given drugs that could increase their risk of suicide or permanently alter their developing brains to help them toward happier futures. And if a kid has a pediatric cancer, doctors don’t wait for her to be old enough to give fully informed consent to amputation or infertility — because without treatment, she might never reach that age.

Youth gender medicine is increasingly treating puberty as though it were a life-threatening condition like cancer or diabetes, and natal sex organs as though they were potentially dangerous growths. This is, of course, entirely appropriate if they are threatening, and letting nature take its course will end in suicide or a lifetime of emotional agony. Of course, with that kind of diagnosis you want to be very sure — and unlike doctors treating cancer or diabetes, who can rely on blood tests and imaging, gender-medicine doctors ultimately have only the patient’s feelings to go by.

Ownership Society

O’NEILL ACCOUNTS NOW:

Every adult a share-owner (Shirley R. Letwin & William Letwin, 3/08/24, CapX)

USO would, first of all, give every adult a sense of increased independence in relation to his economic environment, a sense at present confined to a few. Unlike a bank deposit or an insurance policy, a share gives its owner a direct stake and active voice in the management of an enterprise of his choice. It gives its owner a definite relationship to a business. A firm that would otherwise be a remote abstraction – a name, a set of buildings seen from the outside if seen at all, an entity enigmatically discussed in the back pages of the newspaper, an organisation directed by unknown magnates – becomes instead an operation in which the shareholder has a measurable interest, and which, as an active participant, he comes to see more clearly, closer to the inside.

Just as voters in a democracy sense that they exercise some control over how they are governed because they have the power, at the very least, periodically to turn the rascals out, so shareowners acquire an enlarged sense of being in control of their lives. By being a shareowner, a person becomes a freer man.

To value freedom is to hold that every adult ought to have a sense, accurate rather than illusory, of controlling his own life. In the past, certain advocates of free government maintained that nobody could enjoy real political or economic independence unless they owned land. Today, in an industrialised society, this is no longer feasible nor necessary. The ideal of independent proprietor-farmers has yielded to the ideal of a property-owning democracy.

Not all forms of property however can serve that ideal equally well. Title to one’s dwelling – which some 60% of British households now possess, thanks partly to the policies of the present Government – is in many ways desirable and commendable. But it does not give one a direct interest in, or what is more important, a right of control over, productive enterprises. In other words, owning one’s home does not, like owning shares, involve one in public economic life.

Further, the vast majority of British adults own investments in bank accounts, life insurance, unit trusts, and pension funds; and they thereby, though often unknowingly, possess indirect claims on shares owned by such financial intermediaries. But here again, however rewarding such investments are financially, they do not and can not give their owners a sense of enjoying a rightful and potentially active voice in determining the policies of the nation’s enterprises. In short, the ideal form of a property-owning democracy in today’s world is a share-owning democracy.

The future of all American policvies is the past of W.

Books Long War

MUNDT IS A MONSTER, SERVING EVIL:

IN PRAISE OF READING LE CARRÉ’S ENTIRE OEUVRE IN ORDER: Ben Winters on finishing a project he never wanted to end (BEN H. WINTERS, 3/08/24, CrimeReads)

I started at the top, not wanting to miss anything, and not wanting to allow someone else’s arbitrary rankings to dictate which books I read, in what order.

And so I traveled with John le Carré from the beginning, with Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) two delightful if unremarkable mystery-thrillers very much of their time and place. It is only with book number three, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) that we can feel the great man becoming great; it is in In From the Cold that he finds his metier, the grubby heroics of Cold War spies, and the sophisticated nuance and drollery of his voice. By the time we get to The Looking Glass War (1965) one has the sense of a true artist, alive in a world he would make his own, adding notes of comedy and world-weary melancholy to his canvass, expanding outwards from the core.

And does he ever, in books six, seven, and eight—Tinker, Tailor (1974), Honorable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979), the famous trilogy starring the flawed spymaster George Smiley, whose owl-frame glasses and air of heroic melancholy will forever define for me what a protagonist should be: not a hero who is always heroic, but one who tries to be, and never quite can.

And of course, le Carré was only get started.

Actually, he’s pretty near the end. Only the novels where he brings Smiley back to relive the old days are really worthwhile. But I too have recently been reading them in order and highly recommend the practice. Without Call for the Dead you fail to understand the Smiley of In from the Cold and the deep silliness, if not actual malice, that LeCarre’s bothsidsism aimed at the West in the Cold War.

Books

HAM ON RHINE:

Heil Bukowski!: The Nazi Letters That Never Were (Abel Debritto, 3/08/24, 3AM)

Accidents do happen, though. As luck would have it, I came across a relatively tiny database with a large number of Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Herald Examiner issues. A perfunctory search yielded no results at all. I remembered that Bukowski’s father was mad at him for signing his piece as “Henry Bukowski” in a 1940 Los Angeles Collegian issue, his first known publication ever. I tried several variations of the Bukowski name and, lo and behold, there they were, three letters by a “Henry C. Bukowski, Jr.” I clicked on them and sure enough those were the elusive letters Bukowski had mentioned in interviews and poems, lying dormant for God knows how long in that small database no one had ever heard of.

Funnily enough, when I took a close look at the front cover of those three issues, I couldn’t help but notice they were not Los Angeles Examiner nor Los Angeles Herald Examiner, even though I was positive that’s how they were called in the database. I retraced my steps and clicked again on those Los Angeles Examiner issues, only to be taken to yet another newspaper called Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express. But of course! A classic tagging mistake! All the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express issues had been mislabeled Los Angeles Examiner. The only way to find those letters was by accident. Blame it on the Digital Humanities’ race to digitize all books known to mankind in the blink of an eye. That, and sketchy OCR at best were the main culprits of many unproductive hours in front of the computer. And how naïve of me to think that Bukowski would have submitted his letters to Los Angeles Examiner, which was the morning edition of the paper. He tried the evening edition, when he was sober enough to read it. Funny how these things make perfect sense in retrospect only.

It all had been worth the effort. Those controversial letters were no longer some sort of mythical creature mockingly teasing me in the distance, putting my patience to the test. They were right there up for grabs, waiting to be scrutinized, analyzed, and dissected. Oh, the joys ahead!


But first things first. Although claims about those Nazi sympathies had been made by Sounes in 1998, Miles in 2005, and, above all, Ben Pleasants in his Visceral Bukowski in 2004 — all of them when Bukowski was long gone — the hard truth is that the first person to happily spread the gospel was none other than Bukowski himself. In interviews, poems, stories, and novels, Bukowski didn’t shy away from talking about what he called the “Nazi trip,” especially in the infamous Pleasants tapes — I say infamous because when Pleasants was attacked for proclaiming Bukowski was a Nazi at core, he always maintained that everything he said was sourced from the tapes he recorded in the mid-to-late 1970s, when he was working on a Bukowski biography that never came to fruition. For years, it was thought that Pleasants had made that up and that those tapes were pure fabrication, but after Pleasants passed away in 2013, I was able to track them down and, indeed, I could hear Bukowski droning on and on about his Nazi persona.

What Pleasants failed to mention was that it was all said in jest. In the tapes, Bukowski is very clear about that. His Nazi trip was a giant put-on, as simple as that. Perhaps, in a perverse sort of way, it was just another instance of his self-deprecating humor. Pleasants, who had been researching into Bukowski’s work as early as 1970, was fully aware of Bukowski’s public statements. And yet, what Bukowski remembered half-jokingly in those tapes and elsewhere, Pleasants turned into radical, deeply-rooted Nazi beliefs. Striking, to say the least. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if it was just his personal vendetta over the canceled biography. It didn’t help matters that Bukowski wrote a short-story in 1978 where he made fun of Pleasants’ overbearing, self-centered demeanour.

Identitarianism

IDENTITARIAN, NOT CHRISTIAN:

If It Were Me, I’d Try Not Helping the Christian Nationalists (Jake Meador, 3/08/24, Mere Orthodoxy)

[T]his has been a persistent problem in the Christian Nationalism discourse virtually since it started. There are really two types of “Christian Nationalist”: When the term is used by basically anyone to the left of The Gospel Coalition, it is being used as a scary sounding word for “non-libertarian socially conservative Christians.” And that’s not a great definition, not least because there’s very little that today’s non-libertarian socially conservative Christians are saying that we haven’t been saying for decades. What’s more, using the label in that way represents utterly normal Christian beliefs you find across church history as being somehow uniquely pernicious and dangerous in some brand new way.

That said, when many people more to the right use the term, they have something specific in mind. Stephen Wolfe’s (no relation to William Wolfe) The Case for Christian Nationalism isn’t arguing for a pro-life, pro-natural marriage Christian liberalism. He is, rather, echoing interwar European right ideas about natural greatness, hierarchy, and political power. […]

So: The Christian Nationalist political project, as defined by Stephen Wolfe, Andrew Isker, and Andrew Torba and their close associates is a) Nazi-adjacent, b) seeks to retrieve such political tradition as the Confederacy and the interwar European right, and c) routinely engages in anti-Semitic and anti-Black racial speech. These are the core ideas and practices that define the movement.

All Comedy is Conservative

IS hE NOT AMUSED:

Does Jesus Have a Sense of Humor?: Jesus is fully God and fully man. He is like us in every way except sin. This includes having a sense of humor. (Austin Ruse, 5/08/24, Crisis)


There are three questions to consider. Does Jesus have a sense of humor? Does Jesus express this sense of humor by actually laughing? Does Jesus deliberately make others laugh?

There are other scenes in The Chosen that have irked the grumpsters.

Jesus reads the soul of the Samaritan woman at the well. She invites Jesus and His guys to stay in her home at Sychar. Told that one of the rooms is haunted, Jesus smiles and playfully says, “I’ll take that one.”

Yet another scene shows Jesus coming up behind His dear friend Lazarus. Lazarus is one of Jesus’ closest friends. Recall that Jesus weeps when Lazarus dies, and He raises Him from the dead. In this scene, Jesus comes up behind His best friend and pushes Him, just like guy friends do. Utterly charming. Utterly human.

We must admit, none of these instances are biblical. G.K. Chesterton argues that Jesus shows His entire humanity in Sacred Scripture with the exception of mirth. It certainly seems that Red Letter Jesus did not express humor.

But how would this be possible? He is fully human, and He certainly could not be one of those drab, humorless people whose humorlessness is a stark deficiency. Are critics arguing that Jesus is one of those?

Does Jesus express this sense of humor by smiling and even laughing? The proposition is that on this earth Jesus did not smile or laugh in the company of children, who were plentiful around Him. Is this remotely possible?

Are we to believe that He did not smile or laugh at the sight of cats wrestling or a monkey leaping. Nature can be very funny. It is hard to believe that He did not take joy in His creation even unto laughter.

If He doesn’t find His Creation amusing it can only because He’s not paying attention.

Family

ACCEPTING HOW GOOD WE HAVE IT:

The Hidden Power of “Thank You” (Loren Marks, David Dollahite, Joe Chelladurai, Laura McKeighen, March 8, 2024, Public Square)

Our recent research as social scientists indicates that for many, “Gratitude is a divine emotion.” Although we did not ask directly about gratitude, many participants spontaneously discussed gratitude in their spiritual lives and their relationships.

Gratitude, however, is far more than an emotion. Over the past twenty-three years, our in-depth interviews with about 200 exemplary, marriage-based families for the American Families of Faith National Research Project have indicated that gratitude seems to frequently serve as a “gateway virtue,” a proverbial on-ramp to a freeway of other positive attributes and relational processes. In short, gratitude seems to be a catalyst for other “goods or values.”

Homocentric Universe

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The “blind spot” in science that’s fueling a crisis of meaning (Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, 3/07/24, Big Think)


Cosmology tells us that we can know the Universe and its origin only from our inside position, not from the outside. We live within a causal bubble of information — the distance light traveled since the Big Bang — and we cannot know what lies outside. Quantum physics suggests that the nature of subatomic matter cannot be separated from our methods of questioning and investigating it. In biology, the origin and nature of life and sentience remain a mystery despite marvelous advances in genetics, molecular evolution, and developmental biology. Ultimately, we cannot forgo relying on our own experience of being alive when we seek to comprehend the phenomenon of life. Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it from within.

Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and subjectivity in a Universe that was supposed to be fully describable in objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over.

Each of the cases just mentioned — cosmology and the origin of the Universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of life, cognitive neuroscience and the nature of consciousness — represents more than an individual scientific field. Collectively they represent our culture’s grand scientific narratives about the origin and structure of the Universe and the nature of life and the mind. They underpin the ongoing project of a global scientific civilization. They constitute a modern form of mythos: They are the stories that orient us and structure our understanding of the world.

For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything — including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves — as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split — the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known — that constitutes our meaning crisis. […]


We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits direct experience — that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience.

We collapse the wave function.

Robotics/AI

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Let AI remake the whole U.S. government (oh, and save the country) (Josh Tyrangiel, March 6, 2024, Washington Post)

Perna needed up-to-the-minute data from all the relevant state and federal agencies, drug companies, hospitals, pharmacies, manufacturers, truckers, dry ice makers, etc. Oh, and that data needed to be standardized and operationalized for swift decision-making.

It’s hard to comprehend, so let’s reduce the complexity to just a single physical material: plastic. Perna had to have eyes on the national capacity to produce and supply plastic — for syringes, needles, bags, vials. Otherwise, with thousands of people dying each day, he could find himself with hundreds of millions of vaccine doses and nothing to put them in.

To see himself, Perna needed a real-time digital dashboard of an entire civilization.


This being Washington, consultants lined up at his door. Perna gave each an hour, but none could define the problem let alone offer a credible solution. “Excruciating,” Perna tells the room, and here the Jersey accent helps drive home his disgust. Then he met Julie and Aaron. They told him, “Sir, we’re going to give you all the data you need so that you can assess, determine risk, and make decisions rapidly.” Perna shut down the process immediately. “I said great, you’re hired.”

Julie and Aaron work for Palantir, a company whose name curdles the blood of progressives and some of the military establishment. We’ll get to why. But Perna says Palantir did exactly what it promised. Using artificial intelligence, the company optimized thousands of data streams and piped them into an elegant interface. In a few short weeks, Perna had his God view of the problem. A few months after that, Operation Warp Speed delivered vaccines simultaneously to all 50 states. When governors called panicking that they’d somehow been shorted, Perna could share a screen with the precise number of vials in their possession. “‘Oh, no, general, that’s not true.’ Oh, yes. It is.”

Russia

THERE’S A REASON THESE GUYS ARE OBSESSED WITH MANHOOD:

Unilateral Illiberalism (Brian Stewart, 7 Mar 2024, Quillette)

When Ayatollah Khomeini granted Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci an interview in the holy city of Qom in 1979, the meeting was terminated when she tore off the chador she had been made to wear, calling it a “stupid medieval rag.” When Fallaci met Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, she was blunt: “I want to understand why everyone dislikes you so much, why you are so little loved.” And after an extended harangue from Yasser Arafat about the need to eradicate Israel with revolutionary violence, Fallaci drily remarked, “Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.”

Bemused viewers of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin saw no evidence of the skepticism or thinly veiled contempt that La Fallaci (as she liked to refer to herself) brought to her craft. Nor were they rewarded with an informative glimpse into the Russian despot’s mind. Instead, they were treated to an unedifying display of sycophancy that permitted Putin to filibuster for more than two hours. In The Rebel, Albert Camus spoke of tyrants conducting “monologues above a million solitudes.” Thanks to Carlson’s flaccid performance, Putin’s semi-coherent and ahistorical monologue reached millions more than usual. […]

Did Carlson really expect anything less? Did he really think Putin would inveigh against the San Francisco school board or Hunter Biden? Imagine how disappointed he must have been to learn that the former KGB colonel is not a regular viewer of Fox, let alone Carlson’s show on Twitter. […]

But if Carlson thought that touting Putin’s credentials as a good Christian leader and a champion of law and order would earn him the approval of the Russian tsar he was mistaken. During the interview, Putin seemed to mock Carlson and later complained about the absence of “so-called sharp questions.” Seldom has there been such a poor return for ceremonial self-abasement before a blood-drenched ruler. Putin’s sneering hauteur could not conceal that he is not a leader to be trusted, still less to admired. And as Carlson fawned over the Russian despot, he displayed a personalized version of what the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut calls the West’s “penitential narcissism.”

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Energy

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Republican Liberty

IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM INHERENT IN LIBERTY…:

Energy

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

Homocentric Universe

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

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