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)

December 2025

End of History

THE PLIGHT OF THE LAST MAN:

What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in a Death Spiral (David French, 12/14/25, NY Times)

While we talked about a number of issues, one theme was dominant — I refused to recognize that America was in a death spiral. The country was in crisis, and I needed to open my eyes, steel my spine and take the necessary, sometimes authoritarian, steps to pull it from the brink.

The core of their complaint was embodied by a quote from a novelist named G. Michael Hopf who wrote in his book “Those Who Remain”: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” […]

Americans live longer, enjoy higher median wages, live in larger and more luxurious homes, and enjoy more civil liberties and greater access to justice than even the recent past. The starter homes of the 1950s — tiny places that often lacked central air and other modern utilities — would be considered poverty-level accommodations now.

Violent crime is much lower than in decades past, the divorce rate has decreased from its highs in the early 1980s, and the abortion rate (despite recent increases) is far below its early 1980s peaks.

Let’s face it, folks have trouble making themselves the hero of their stories when we live such affluent lives in such easy times. Thus, they imagine apocalyptic dramas.

Robotics/AI

IT’LL NEVER FLY, NOAM…:


For the First Time, AI Analyzes Language as Well as a Human Expert (Steve Nadfis, 12/14/25, Wired)

For some in the linguistic community, language models not only don’t have reasoning abilities, they can’t. This view was summed up by Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist, and two coauthors in 2023, when they wrote in The New York Times that “the correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data.” AI models may be adept at using language, these researchers argued, but they’re not capable of analyzing language in a sophisticated way.

Image may contain Book Indoors Library Publication Adult Person Furniture Bookcase Face and Head
Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. Photograph: Jami Smith
That view was challenged in a recent paper by Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley; Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who recently received his doctorate in linguistics at Berkeley; and Ryan Rhodes of Rutgers University. The researchers put a number of large language models, or LLMs, through a gamut of linguistic tests—including, in one case, having the LLM generalize the rules of a made-up language. While most of the LLMs failed to parse linguistic rules in the way that humans are able to, one had impressive abilities that greatly exceeded expectations. It was able to analyze language in much the same way a graduate student in linguistics would—diagramming sentences, resolving multiple ambiguous meanings, and making use of complicated linguistic features such as recursion. This finding, Beguš said, “challenges our understanding of what AI can do.”

Chomsky is a synonym for “wrong” in every language.

End of History Latin America

A FASCIST INTERLUDE CAN SAVE YOU, BUT THEN YOU NEED TO LIBERALIZE FULLY:

Exploring The Chile Project (J.P. Bastos, 12/11/25, EconLib)

The government of Salvador Allende is also the subject of many misconceptions. Edwards recognizes that part of the confusion stems from the fact that Allende was from the Socialist (and not from the Communist) Party, which led authors to mistakenly portray him as a relatively moderate candidate even though, in Chile, the Socialists were much more to the left and had close ties with Cuba and North Korea.2

The book offers a detailed overview of Allende’s economic policies. For instance, Edwards reveals that the government’s grasp over the economy went significantly beyond the well-known nationalization of U.S.-owned copper mines. It also nationalized the banking sector and enforced its right to take control, for an undetermined period, of hundreds of factories producing goods “in short supply.” This short supply was often staged by unions stopping the factory floor and creating artificial shortages. He notes that every import required a license, with some tariffs reaching 250 percent. He also describes how perverse and arbitrary mechanisms were used to set price controls, which led to confiscation of goods, often imposed huge fines, and, sometimes, sent “speculators” to prison. […]

Recurring in Edwards’ narrative in the third and final part of the book is that, despite the breadth of the reforms implemented during the regime, much else was also done after the return to democracy to deepen and extend the reforms. This continuation was often undertaken by center-left politicians. This insight invites reflection on the role Chicago Boys. On the one hand, their ideas undoubtedly charted the path to greater economic freedom, much needed in Chile after Allende’s populist policies.

On the other hand, Chile’s experience highlights the limitations to economic growth and prosperity under a dictatorship. Recent empirical research has analyzed this issue in Pinochet’s Chile from two different sides. Escalante (2022) shows that the Chilean GDP per capita underperformed for at least the first 15 years following the coup. Arenas, Toni, and Paniagua (2024) also question the timing of the “Chilean miracle”, arguing that it only really developed following the return to democracy. Indeed, other Latin American development “miracles” (in Uruguay and Costa Rica) occurred without a similar story of a liberalizing autocrat.

Christmas

REALITY ON 34TH STREET:

Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger.: Bob Rutan is legendary among the tight-knit fraternity of Macy’s Santa Clauses. Like many of these men, playing Santa changed Bob. Profoundly. His story is one of struggle and failure, heartbreak and grace and—yes—the magic of Christmas (David Gauvey Herbert, Dec 4, 2025, Esquire)

Bob learned the ropes. Don’t pester kids about eating vegetables. Go light on the rouge or risk looking like a drunk. Nix the loud “ho ho ho,” because the sound carried into the other cottages, destroying the illusion of Macy’s and the One True Santa. And if a patron gets aggressive—and they sometimes did—do not physically engage unless a child, or an elf, is in peril.

Based read in conjunction with Mick Herron’s Usual Santas

Energy

…AND CHEAPER…:

Nuclear Fusion Took Big Leaps in 2025. Here’s What Mattered Most (Gayoung Lee, December 10, 2025, Gizmodo)

2025 witnessed a surge in fusion research from both established and newcomer stakeholders. Scientists reported increased fusion energy outputs compared to previous years, improved reactor hardware, and a wide range of experimental and theoretical developments supporting different parts of fusion energy. Here are the most notable advancements in fusion from the past 12 months.

One Economy to Rule Them All

AFTER ALL, THEY REFLATE:

Are bubbles good, actually? (Tim Harford, 11th December, 2025)

There is a solid theory behind the idea that investment manias are good for society as a whole: it is that without a mania, nothing gets done for fear that the best ideas will be copied.

Entrepreneurs and inventors who do take a risk will soon find other entrepreneurs and inventors competing with them, and most of the benefits will go not to any of these entrepreneurs, but to their customers.

(The dynamic has the delightful name of the “alchemist’s fallacy”. If someone figures out how to turn lead into gold, pretty soon everyone will know how to turn lead into gold, and how much will gold be worth then?)

The economist and Nobel laureate William Nordhaus once tried to estimate what slice of the value of new ideas went to the corporations who owned them, and how much went to everyone else (mostly consumers). He concluded that the answer — in the US, between 1948 and 2001 — was 3.7 per cent to the innovating companies, and 96.3 per cent to everyone else. Put another way, the spillover benefits were 26 times larger than the private profits.

Latin America

THE CRYING ENDS:

Two Years of Milei: The Reform Agenda Moves Forward in Argentina (Marcos Falcone, 12/10/25, Cato at Liberrty)

As of September, the economy is growing at 5 percent on a yearly basis. Poverty, which exceeded 40 percent before Milei took office and peaked at 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024, is now down to 31.6 percent. Monthly inflation, which often surpassed 10 percent in the pre-Milei era and reached 25 percent in December 2023, now hovers around 2 percent. Both exports and imports are rising rapidly.

Technology

SCROLLING IS READING:

If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?: The internet is training us to expect optimized experiences (Jay Caspian Kang, Dec 10, 2025, The New Yorker)

I have felt the panic myself, and so, this past July, with a book deadline looming, I got off of social media. The break started with X, which was my biggest problem, but, by the end of August or so, Instagram, TikTok, and pretty much anything that allowed me to argue with strangers had been deleted from my phone. Before this, I was spending roughly ten hours a day looking at my phone or sitting at my desktop computer. I didn’t need that number to come down, but, when I checked my weekly status report, I wanted all the brightly colored little bars that track the number of hours I’d spent on time-wasting apps to be relocated to the word-processing app that I use to write my books.

The plan worked, more or less. I finished a draft of the book on time. But the other imagined effects of a social-media detox never quite materialized, at least not in a noticeable way. I was especially hoping that I would start reading more books, because I have found that enviable prose prompts me to try to write my own, not necessarily out of a sense of inspiration but rather out of fear that if I don’t hurry up and start typing, I’ll fall behind. And yet, the chief effect, I found, was that I simply didn’t know what was happening in the world. That was nice enough, but all those books I had hoped to read never found their way into my hands.

Republican Liberty

RETURNING LAWMAKING TO THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH:

Supreme Court win for Trump in FTC case would restore the Founders’ design (Ilya Shapiro, Dec. 8, 2025, NY Post)

Justice Neil Gorsuch reiterated the need to revive the nondelegation doctrine to stop Congress from handing vast, standardless power to bureaucrats.

Kavanaugh, meanwhile, seemed eager to draw a line between agencies that enforce the law and courts created by Congress that exercise judicial authority.

Given the court’s trajectory, none of this should be a surprise.

Over the last 15 years, the justices have steadily chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor in a string of separation-of-powers cases, while reaffirming Chief Justice William Howard Taft’s principle from Myers v. United States (1926): Because the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, he must be able to remove the officials who exercise that power in his name.

Health

NO BODY’S PERFECT:

Why Some Doctors Say There Are Cancers That Shouldn’t Be Treated (Gina Kolata, Dec. 8, 2025, NY Times)

The idea that finding a cancer early is not always a good thing is not easy for many patients and their families to accept. And it is true that lives can be saved by treating cancer early.

Autopsy studies repeatedly find that many people die with small cancers they were unaware of. A review of these studies in prostate cancer reported that the cancer can appear in men as young as their 20s. The older the men were, the more likely they were to have undetected prostate cancer. By their 70s, about a third of white men and half of Black men had undetected prostate cancer.


A study of thyroid cancer in Finland found that at least a third of adults had undetected tumors. Less than one percent of people die from thyroid cancer

The problem is that it is impossible to know if someone’s cancer will be deadly or not. And if the cancer is gone after treatment, there is no way to know if it needed to be treated.

But there’s a way to know on a population level if an increase in diagnoses is a false alarm or a danger signal, said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Look at the number of deaths from that cancer. If more lethal cancers are being found, there should be more deaths. But if the death rate remains steady as the incidence of that cancer spikes, many of those patients did not need to receive diagnoses.

That happened, for example, with thyroid cancer in South Korea. The incidence of thyroid cancer soared with the introduction of widespread ultrasound screening. But deaths did not increase. It was estimated that 90 percent of the cancers that were discovered and treated in women did not need to be found.

Well aware of such incidents, Dr. Vishal R. Patel of Harvard, Dr. Welch and Dr. Adewole S. Adamson of Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, asked whether the current spike in diagnoses in younger people of those eight cancers is tied to more deaths.

It is not, they reported in a recent paper examining trends over the past three decades.

For all but two of the eight cancers whose incidence has soared in younger people, death rates are flat or declining.

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