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)

April 2026

Music

REDEMPTION SONGS:

Stevie Wonder and James Brown Put This Prison Funk Band on the Map (The Marshall Project)


This story might have faded into history. But a few years ago an elderly, unhoused man named Charles McDowell walked into the Philadelphia record store Brewerytown Beats, looking for a copy of the “From The Inside…” He revealed to the store’s owner, Max Ochester, that he had played bass in the band. McDowell later passed away, but Ochester tracked down the former lead singer, Ron Aikens, singing street karaoke for tips outside of Philadelphia City Hall.

Aikens told me in an interview that the band had been allowed to spend entire nights away from the prison attending industry parties, wearing free-world clothes. When they returned, he recalled, other prisoners called them “idiots” for not using the opportunity to escape.

At least one member took the bait. At the Stevie Wonder gig, Aikens recalls McDowell, the bass player, fled the venue and remained on the lam for a few months until he was caught. But even with the occasional scandal, the band was good PR for the state: “We were ambassadors for the prison system,” Aikens said. “If something was going wrong, they’d roll us out to show what wonderful things they were doing.”

End of History Religion

IMAGO DEI:

Sacred Limits and Free Institutions: How Jewish thought helped shape the West — and why it still matters. (Shmuel Klatzkin, March 21, 2026, American Spectator)

The most important of Chabad’s ideas lie in the deep insights of the Jewish mystical tradition into the nature of God’s creation. In the language of the 16th century Tsefat school of Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, before there was a creation, before there was time, before there was a “before,” there was only the Infinite Light of God. No boundaries or delimitations existed, no definitions, as nothing was defined, as there was no finitude, only the infinite.

How could a world of individuation come to exist when there could be no boundaries? Every particular thing would be overwhelmed by infinity.

But limitlessness means as well that there was no boundary to stop God from choosing to limit Himself in order to make a world that could endure and enter into a relation with God blessed by Him with a consciousness and an identity.

These are the preconditions of love. The world was created by God choosing to make love possible by making space to bring the beloved into being.

It is this world that God loves. He sees it as He creates it and calls it good, again and again. He sustains it by choosing again and again to make the space for His beloved creatures to know themselves and then to know Him. God becomes greater in this way than any being trapped in stasis, imprisoned in infinity.

God informs us in His word that we humans are created in His image and that He has put the world within us, enabling us both to work it and preserve it. We can become deputized creators, created in His image, making the world become better and preserving its ancient good, the way it has always been in God’s mind, which sees through to the end from the beginning.

We learn that we become great through making room for others — not by compulsion, for God is uncompelled — but by choice. We become greater through submitting to love, through choosing to limit our fixation with the infinite realm of our private self to willingly love our fellows and make space for them in every meaningful way, even to the last full measure of devotion.

Identitarianism

AMERICA IS CONSERVATIVE, NOT TRUMPIST:

Why Democrats are suddenly winning back the left — and the “double-haters”: Plus, the share of Americans calling themselves Republicans just hit a decade low. (G. Elliott Morris, Apr 05, 2026, Strength in Numbers)

The Democrats’ consolidation of left-wing liberalism is one piece of a broader backlash to Trumpism that shows up in the polling data right now. Another notable finding this week is from a new CNN/SSRS survey that found that about one-quarter of the public holds an unfavorable view of both parties. These are the so-called “double haters.” This group prefers Democrats on the 2025 generic ballot by 31 points.

This is a big deal for two reasons. First, that’s a massive shift; Double haters broke for Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. Now they’re swinging hard the other way.

Like Franklin’s polling, the CNN report also finds that Democrats’ gains are driven largely by opposition to the GOP, not enthusiasm for Democrats themselves. When asked what they dislike about Democrats, 22% of double haters called the party “do-nothing” and 11% said they aren’t standing up enough to Trump and the GOP, while 10% said they’re too liberal.

Soccer

DEVELOP TALENT, DON’T PAY FOR IT:

Lille were close to bankruptcy. This is how they became Europe’s most profitable club (Tom Burrows, April 4, 2026, The Athletc)

In addition to that, Schirmer says the previous ownership had run a strategy where they would buy relatively costly players to try to challenge for the league. They also found Lille had a high number of fees still to pay on transfers.

“If you run a football club, your ideal world is that you have more receivables than payables (on transfers),” Schirmer says. “But what we saw in 2020 was a huge number of payables for all these expensive players they had brought. So you had external debts and you had payables. And then to round up the picture, you had a significant salary bill. It just wasn’t sustainable.” […]

Lille’s new owners also set about revamping the club’s academy, one that has produced Eden Hazard, Benjamin Pavard and Yohan Cabaye. In the years before their takeover, very few players had graduated from the academy to the first team.

Schirmer says it was key to their vision as it helped forge a strong identity, developing players who had an attachment to the club and city, as well as a production line of talent.

She says the academy at the club’s Domaine de Luchin training centre, 20 miles east of Lille and close to the Belgian border, is home to players from the age of 15. Lille have around 70 children there, with 35 living on site and attending the private school.

In the younger age groups, there are around 50 children — from under-eights to under-11s — who train at partner clubs. For the under-11s to under-15s, also around 50 children, Lille work with a public school that offers a sports focus. The children go to school there while training with the club. They have the same set-up for the girls’ teams.

Anglospherics Latin America

THE eND OF hISTORY IS A THREE-LEGGED STOOL:

Chile’s Hard Right Isn’t as Trumpy as It Wants to Seem: How to keep a consensus while pretending to break it. (Quico Toro, Apr 03, 2026, Persuasion)

Foreigners make a lot of lazy assumptions about Chile, but the stereotype of a country set on a hard right-wing path by a brutal dictator who brought prosperity along with repression is a partial truth at best. The truth is much more interesting. Per capita GDP grew only about 40 percent during Pinochet’s entire 17-year rule, and that includes two devastating recessions in 1975 and 1982. Chile’s real push into middle-income status came with democracy: GDP per capita (in constant 2010 dollars) more than doubled from around $6,400 in 1990 to over $14,000 by 2018, and poverty plummeted from 45 percent in 1987 to just 20 percent by 2000.


Chile’s development success story is the story of deepening consensus around institutions built on fundamentally sound liberal principles.

As important as saving Chile from Communism and institution capitalism were, Pinochet’s crowning act was returning to democracy once the threats were gone.

Technology

PLAY THE CLASSICS:

How the Turner Twins Are Mythbusting Modern Gear (Mike Knispel , March 16, 2026, Carryology)

The Turner Twins’ trajectory into the world of high-stakes exploration wasn’t born from a childhood obsession with Everest; it spawned from a near-tragedy.

At age 17, just prior to their 18th birthday, Hugo dove into the sea and hit a sandbank. He fractured his C7 vertebra. In a week where eight other people were admitted to the same hospital with similar injuries, Hugo was the only one to walk out. The proximity to permanent paralysis was a profound wake-up call.

“We had a midlife crisis at 17,” Ross explains. “Life got put in perspective.”


They needed to live and test their limits. They started by rowing the Atlantic to raise funds for Spinal Research, a UK-based charity they’ve worked with for years. But the real epiphany came on a London tube train years later, reading about the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They looked at the grayed photos of men in tweed on the ice and wondered: How did they survive?


They realized they possessed the ultimate scientific tool: a perfect control subject and a perfect variable. If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance—be it core temperature, calorie burn, or cognitive function—could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.

The “time travel” experiments were born.

Identitarianism

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Judge Rebukes Prosecutors as ICE Protest Cases Falter: “Not Ready for Prime Time” (The Intellectualist, Apr 03, 2026)

A series of federal prosecutions against immigration-enforcement protesters in Los Angeles has encountered setbacks in court, with some cases ending in acquittals or dismissals and others drawing scrutiny over the government’s evidence and the circumstances of the arrests. […]

Reporting from the Los Angeles Times described one of the most serious courtroom setbacks: a federal judge’s criticism of prosecutors after late disclosure of evidence in the Escobar-Gutierrez case, followed by a reported dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be brought again. During the proceedings, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. told prosecutors, “You’ve got to be ready for prime time and you’re not,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

In arguing for dismissal, a federal public defender echoed that criticism, describing the episode as “amateur hour at the U.S. attorney’s office,” also according to the Los Angeles Times.

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