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)

2025

Law/Crime

AND NO ONE JUDGE SHOPS MORE THAN THE rIGHT:

Supreme Court rolls back (finally!) politically motivated judge-shopping (Ted Diadiun, 7/07/25, cleveland.com)

Under the archaic policy that had become the norm, a ruling from any one district judge, who hears a specific lawsuit and believes a presidential order to be unconstitutional, immediately becomes the ruling for the entire country – unless and until it is successfully appealed to the Supreme Court.

The process is called “universal injunction.” Once rarely employed, it has been used with increasing frequency over the last three presidential administrations – primarily in opposition to Trump’s orders.

It’s generally considered that universal injunctions became accepted practice in 1963, although the Harvard Law Review dug up an injunction issued in 1913. Either way, according to research gathered by the Baker Hostetler law firm, only 27 such injunctions occurred in the entire 20th century. Contrast that with the 64 issued in Trump’s first term alone, and the 30 that have stopped him in just the first three months of his current term.

Deflation

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

Middle managers fade as AI rises (Emily Peck, 7/07/25, Axios)

There are now nearly six individual contributors per manager at the 8,500 small businesses analyzed in a report by Gusto, which handles payroll for small and medium-sized employers. That’s up from a little over three in 2019.

“It’s happening broadly across the economy,” Nich Tremper, a senior economist at Gusto, told Axios.
For small companies, a lot of this happened through attrition, he says. “Rather than replacing a manager, an existing one will just see an expanded scope.”

The massive inefficient expansion of management was how white men integrated women and minorities into the workforce without giving up our own jobs.

Anglospherics

ALWAYS STRUCK BY HOW MUCH HARDER IT IS TO BE A CRIMINAL THAN JUST BEING HONEST:

The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation (Chloe Hadjimatheou, 7/05/25, The Observer)


When I first call Ros Hemmings, I expect her to be surprised. A widow in her 60s living in rural North Wales, she has never received a call from an investigative journalist in London. But instead she tells me: “Oh no, I have a very good idea why you are ringing.” She has been waiting for this call for years.

Hemmings rightly suspected that I wanted to ask her about a woman she knows as Sally Walker. Millions of people around the world know Sally by a different name: Raynor Winn. She is the author and protagonist of one of the most successful British non-fiction books in recent years. The Salt Path traces Raynor and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path.

A heartbreaking “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by a sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness, The Salt Path went straight to the top of the bestseller charts, selling more than 2m copies worldwide since its publication in 2018.

Winn has since written two sequels and has a lucrative publishing deal with Penguin to produce at least one more. Five weeks ago The Salt Path reached new audiences when it was released in the UK as a film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and Winn is a co-producer.

Standing proudly on the red carpet outside the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay, Raynor, 60, told TV cameras at the film’s UK premiere that the experience was “almost unbelievable”. In that moment, she and Moth seemed like the ultimate examples of British grit and perseverance.

Back in Wales, Hemmings saw a very different picture. Because she knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn’t her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief.

One Economy to Rule Them All

COVID WAS THE BEST BOOST SINCE Y2K:

The Weird and Lovely Surge of US Productivity Growth (Timothy Taylor, July 3, 2025, Conversable Economist)

Economists have come up with four potential explanations. Three of those suggest this surge in productivity growth probably won’t continue.

The first explanation is that this is mostly just a reflection of the rise of work from home. … [I]f an increase in work from home drove the extra boost to productivity, that would be a one-time boost to the level of productivity, not a change to the overall growth rate going forward.

The second explanation is what economists call “labor reallocation and increased match quality.” Which kind of tells you why you should never ask for messaging advice from people with PhDs in economics. But this is just the idea that before Covid people were stuck in jobs they didn’t love and then the Great Resignation essentially let people rematch to do things that they are more motivated or better suited to do, and productivity went up. Even if you buy that as a driver, quit rates and other measures of job turnover are back to their pre-Covid levels, so the lovefest is probably done. This one, too, would be a one-time increase to the level of productivity, not a longer-lived change to the growth rate.

The third explanation is entrepreneurial dynamism: The number of startups each year was steady or falling for a long time, and it jumped at the start of Covid to a higher level and it hasn’t gone back down. But again, if new firms have higher productivity, this jump will show up as a one-time increase, not a sustained increase in the growth rate.

The fourth and final explanation is that this boom in productivity has been tech and AI driven. I realize that might have been where many of you first started, but note that economists are still skeptical—mainly because there hasn’t been enough adoption yet to explain why the economy-wide productivity growth rate would’ve increased this much.

Deflation

CAPITALISM IS IN ITS INFANCY:

The AI Efficiency Trap: When Productivity Tools Create Perpetual Pressure (Knowledge Wharton, July 05, 2025, Fair Observer)

Three-quarters of surveyed workers were using AI in the workplace in 2024, but instead of experiencing liberation, many found themselves caught in an efficiency trap — a mechanism that only moves toward ever higher performance standards.

Imagine thinking that creating wealth ever more cheaply is a problem?

Latin America

MSINOREP:

Milei’s Economic Miracle: How Argentina Slashed Inflation to 1.5% (Emmanuel Rincon, July 2, 2025, Daily economy)

Milei’s first step was balancing the budget. Through an aggressive program of public spending cuts, eliminating bureaucracy, and reducing public sector jobs, he erased Argentina’s massive fiscal deficit, paving the way for a historic economic recovery. Under his leadership, Argentina began taming inflation with rare fiscal discipline, not just regionally but globally. The latest data is astonishing: in May 2025, the consumer price index rose by just 1.5 percent, the lowest in five years. Remarkably, Milei achieved this without price controls but by liberalizing the economy, fostering market confidence, and slowing inflation. Annual inflation dropped from 211.4 percent in 2023 to 43.5 percent by mid-2025. Wholesale prices even fell by 0.3 percent in May, the best figure in 17 years. Poverty also declined sharply, from 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024 to 38.1 percent in the second, with UNICEF noting that 1.7 million children were lifted out of poverty since Milei took office.

These achievements were no fluke. They stemmed from a clear strategy: fiscal balance, reduced public spending, ending monetary expansion as a financing tool, and economic deregulation. The result? Greater stability, increased demand for the peso, falling inflation, and a rebound in employment and purchasing power.

That was easy enough.

Law/Crime

REINING THEIR BRANCH IN:

Why Now? The Timing of the Universal Injunction Ruling (William Baude, Jul 01, 2025, Divided Argument)

Indeed, I sometimes think about the briefing in Summers v. Earth Island Institute back in October Term 2008. Summers turned out to be a moderately important Article III standing case, but one of the other questions presented by the government — this was the George W. Bush administration — was “Whether the court of appeals erred in affirming the nationwide injunctions issued by the district court.”

The argument against the nationwide injunction was not as fully developed at the time, was not as categorical, and relied more heavily on the issue preclusion precedent of US v. Mendoza. But it was there, accompanied by a warning that this practice was just starting to grow in district courts in the Ninth Circuit.

I sometimes wonder what the past two decades of public law litigation would look like if the Court had chosen to resolve the case on nationwide injunction grounds rather than the Article III standing ground it chose. Much better, I think! But for whatever reason, the Court did not do that.


The nationwide injunction also became prominent during the last few years of the Obama administration when a Texas district court issued a nationwide injunction against the DAPA program. But this time, when the Obama administration petitioned for cert. they did not ask the Court to review the nationwide injunction issue. That turned out to be especially fateful when Justice Scalia died while the case was pending resulting in the injunction being affirmed by an equally divided court. But again I wonder what would have happened if the United States had petitioned on the issue and gotten five or more votes to limit the scope of the injunction even while affirming on the merits.

Health

ESCAPE YOUR SELF:

Can a Campfire Improve Your Mental Health? Many Therapists Say Yes. (Stephanie Vermillion, 6/30/25, Outside)

Since 2021, Ward has been using the healing benefits of fire to help those struggling with mental health challenges and addiction through his Scotland-based nonprofit, Fire and Peace Recovery. He runs monthly retreats in Scotland’s great outdoors that harness the healing power of campfires. He’s not the only one tapping into fire’s therapeutic effects.

Identitarianism

OTHEFR THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW…:

Autocracy, Corruption, and Decline: Why Hungary and Orbanism Must Never be a Model for the U.S. (Michael Maya, June 30, 2025, Just Security)

Do average Hungarians share the enthusiasm for Orban exhibited by Trump, CPAC, and the Heritage Foundation? In short, no. Here is one telling statistic: from 2010 to 2024, emigration from Hungary rose by 464 percent. In fact, the number of Hungarians leaving their country rose sharply almost immediately after Orban’s April 2010 election victory. For scores of Hungarians, the future looks bleak, with a recent survey finding that 34 percent of recent graduates and 55 percent of 18-40-year-old Hungarians plan to emigrate. In light of Hungary’s aging population – its median age is 43.9 years – Orban can ill-afford to drive out Hungary’s best, brightest, and youngest. That so many Hungarians are eager to flee Orban’s rule provides the first hint that enthusiasm among his U.S-based cheerleaders is misplaced, even suspect.

Even a cursory inquiry into Orban’s record reveals that he has presided not over Hungary’s advancement but rather its alarming decline. For one, he has masterminded Hungary’s transformation from a full democracy to an “electoral autocracy,” according to the European Parliament. Freedom House now rates Hungary as only “partly free.” As noted in Bertelsmann’s 2024 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): “Elections are typically free but not fair, with the ruling Fidesz party benefiting from large-scale gerrymandering, asymmetrical media access and the misuse of state assets.” Today, Hungary is an SGI bottom dweller, ranking 30th out of 30 with respect to: (1) Elections, (2) Quality of the Parties and Candidates, and (3) Access to Official Information.


Adding to Hungary’s woes is its economy, which has stagnated since 2022, with GDP growth rates declining for four years straight and a ballooning budget deficit of 4.9 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the European Union average of 3 percent. Hungary is also plagued by high inflation, forcing the government to take drastic steps such as limiting grocers’ profit margins. Predictably, Hungary’s currency, the Forint, has lost value and both domestic and foreign investors, wary of arbitrary regulatory shifts and opaque enforcement, are rethinking investments in Hungary. More than €20 billion in EU funds that would have come to Hungary have been suspended over rule of law violations, and innovation lags as firms hesitate to invest in research, development, or new technologies. Why? Among other things, they lack confidence in intellectual property protections.

For ordinary Hungarians, Orban’s mismanagement of the economy has translated into living standards significantly lower than many of the other 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Given these and other declines, it is no surprise that, just in the last year, Hungary fell 13 places in Gallup’s World Happiness Report. Hungary now ranks below Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Honduras. Predictably, countries with thriving democracies dominate the list of happiest countries.

Identitarianism

WHY MAGA HATES AMERICA:

Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism (Mike Pence & Ed Feulner, Summer 2025, National Affairs)

Conservatism once proudly embraced a positive vision, offering the American people clear alternatives to the prevailing left-leaning orthodoxies of the day. In the final decades of the 20th century, conservatives not only opposed affirmative action’s quixotic pursuit of equal outcomes, they championed equality of opportunity for all. Conservatives were not simply opposed to letting communism run wild; they contained it by boldly leading the free world. Conservatives were not just critical of big government; their support for free markets unleashed one of the greatest economic expansions in history. At the heart of conservatism lay an ambition to help America flourish, coupled with the desire to preserve the private institutions — families, churches, local communities, and the like — that serve as the building blocks of an ordered society. […]

Conservatism is not a rigid ideology promising utopia; it is a disposition — a state of mind grounded in timeless principles. It recognizes human nature as it is and has been throughout the ages, and points toward a distinct approach to governing ourselves. Conservatism values obedience to a transcendent moral order, reverence for tradition and our forebears, prudence in decision-making, humility regarding our place in history, and the pursuit of justice in a fallen world. These harmonious values make conservatism a timeless philosophy that aligns seamlessly with self-governance.

In seeking to privilege white males, the Right needs bigger government, has to repudiate morality for its universalism and, thereby, must oppose the Founding.

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Anglospherics

WE ARE ENGLISH:

Identitarianism

IDENTITY POLITICS AT ITS UGLIEST:

Cheeto Jesus

DONALD WHO?:

Religion

ALL SCIENCE LEADS BACK TO FAITH:

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