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)

May 2026

Energy

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

The case for clean energy abundance: It’s a good idea — and strikingly different from conventional environmentalism. (Matthew Yglesias, May 14, 2026, Slow Boring)

But while this is all offered in good faith, I think it fundamentally underrates the merits of energy abundance.

For example, despite the considerable progress that’s been made with batteries, we are nowhere near being able to electrify things like aviation and maritime shipping. It is, however, chemically possible to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons (including jet fuel, bunker oil, and so forth) out of the carbon dioxide present in the air.

This is a lossy, energy-inefficient process for reasons of fundamental physics. If you snapped your fingers and generated enough clean energy to replace all the coal and gas currently burned to make electricity without raising prices for consumers and then snapped again to generate enough clean energy to electrify all cars and trucks and home heating, that would still leave you with electricity that’s wildly too expensive to make jet fuel.

But if electricity were abundant — too cheap to meter — then it wouldn’t matter that using electricity to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons is inefficient. It would still be cheaper to do it that way than to drill for oil and refine it. The problems of the “hard to decarbonize” sectors would be solved.

This is why, again, despite my disagreeable insistence on saying that clean energy abundance is different from conventional green politics, I sincerely think most adherents to conventional green politics should switch sides. A genuine abundance approach can solve the problem they’re trying to solve, and tweaking utility regulation or getting people to use better-insulated windows can’t.

Removing externalities multiplies abundance.

Energy

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

Floating wave energy converter deployed at sea to test performance in challenging environments (Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, May 16, 2026, Interesting Engineering)


Called MARMOK A 5, the wave energy converter (WEC) will be electrically connected to the network through the Lab platform, integrated into the BiMEP infrastructures.

The device will be evaluated in real operating conditions, with the aim of verifying its performance, robustness, reliability and ease of maintenance in the demanding marine environment. The data obtained will be fundamental to evaluate the design and move towards future pre-commercial phases of the technology.

End of History

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Make Trade, Not War: How Capitalism Creates Peace: Open markets lead to closed battlefields. (Walker Wright, 5/15/26, Human Progress)

While the liberal peace theory remains influential, a growing wave of empirical research over the last three decades suggests that markets may play a bigger role than the ballot box. This shift in consensus toward what’s known as the capitalist peace theory posits that trade openness and economic interdependence are among the primary forces that mitigate war. Of course, scholars continue to debate over how much trade and economic freedom contribute to peace. But liberal peace theorists now include economic interdependence as an essential element within the broader liberal peace project. Economic interdependence is “part of the glue that cements the ‘liberal peace’ together.”

More Reagan/Bush, less Trump/Biden.

Identitarianism

ASSUMED IDENTITY:

Black Candidates Do Not Need Black Voters to Win (Deroy Murdock, May 15, 2026, American Spectator)

In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Elena Kagan argued: “If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

Can Kagan read the minds of “minority citizens?” If not, how would she know whether the “candidates of their choice” are minorities, Democrats, or anything else?

Also important: Where is it written that minority candidates must represent minority voters?

Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District is 61.3 percent black and only 24.5 percent white, the Census Bureau reports. And yet, since 2006, this majority-black, greater-Memphis electorate has voted 10 times to send Steve Cohen to the U.S. House. Cohen is white.

Conversely, the Left whines that black Democrats can win only if a majority of voters of color (typically black) elect them. They assume that black contenders cannot secure a plurality or even a majority of white votes. This racist argument suggests that black candidates lack the charm, ideas, or ideas to win white votes, and/or whites are too bigoted to back blacks.

Thus, race-obsessed Democrats concentrate black candidates in constituencies that resemble South Africa’s Apartheid-era Bantustans. Predominantly minority congressional districts recall Bophuthatswana, KwaZulu, Transkei, and other black “homelands.” And yet, for decades, constituencies with neither black majorities nor shapes like Rorschach blots have elected black Democrats and Republicans.

End of History Founding

LIBERALISM VS IDENTITARIANISM:

Heroes of 1776 Shows That Remembering the Past Is Key to Progress: Neil Gorsuch’s new book reminds us that to accelerate progress, we must first acknowledge the progress that has already occurred. (Nick Gillespie | 5.11.2026, reason)

Neil Gorsuch: There’s no doubt that the Revolution, the Constitution, and our country have always had challenges living up to the Declaration. I think of the Declaration as sort of our mission statement, the Constitution our how-to manual. But look at the mission statement. The mission statement is all of us are equal, that we all have an inalienable rights, and that we have the right to self-rule. Those ideas are perfect ideas. They exclude no one.

Just So Stories

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Nearly Half of Italy’s Wolves Are Part Dog Now, Thanks to Hybridization. Is That a Threat to the Species? (Gennaro Tomma, May 6, 2026, bioGraphic)

Lorenzini’s research looked at genetic material collected from 748 wolves that had been found dead between 2020 and 2024, and 26 more that had been collected between 1993 and 2003. The team found that 47 percent were wolf-dog hybrids. And while some of these animals are the descendants of hybridization events that took place generations ago, others are more recent crosses, showing that hybridization is still occurring.

They are dogs.

Energy

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

US nuclear fusion firm begins installing final 48-ton vacuum vessel half for net energy (Aman Tripathi, May 15, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

The completed 96-ton steel chamber is designed to house plasma heated to 100 million degrees Celsius. CFS plans to start operations in 2027, with the objective of achieving a net energy gain, known as Q>1, where the machine produces more energy than it consumes.

“Ultimately, the goal of SPARC is to get to Q>1 as fast as we can so that we can get to the next step — to build ARC, our fusion power plant,” said CFS Chief Science Officer and Co-founder Brandon Sorbom in a press release.

Homocentric Universe

A CHOICE OF IDEOLOGIES:

One of the Largest Physics Surveys Ever Finds No One Agrees on Anything (Gayoung Lee, May 13, 2026,, Gizmodo)

“I think the most surprising finding was the gap between the public perception of scientific consensus and what scientists actually said when asked,” Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada and the Perimeter Institute, which co-managed the survey with APS, told Gizmodo. “Ideas often presented as the standard view, such as inflation, string theory, particle dark matter, or a constant dark energy, did not command overwhelming support. Inflation barely crossed 50%, while several of the others fell well below a majority.”

Dragon Has No Teeth

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

China Is Squandering a Golden Opportunity: Why Beijing Has Failed to Exploit Trump’s Missteps (David Shambaugh and Steven F. Jackson, May 12, 2026, Foreign Affairs)

Although China’s diplomatic footprint is broad, it is not necessarily impactful. Beijing is not driving the international diplomatic agenda, and it is not the most influential power in any region of the world. It never gets in the middle of the world’s most troublesome issues or conflicts, and it rarely brokers negotiations between contested parties (as is currently the case with the Iran conflict). Beijing tends to offer anodyne calls for peace and negotiation but rarely forges direct negotiations to truly resolve conflicts. This diplomatic disappearing act is symptomatic of China’s exaggerated sense of its own global power.

Xiism is no more a viable alternative to liberalism than Trumpism is. Then again, Xi and Donald are pretty similar.

Identitarianism

EMPOWERING MINORITY VOTERS:

Key Jeffries ally endorses aggressive tactics to create more blue seats (Riley Rogerson, 05/14/2026, Politico)

Asked specifically if he would be supportive of unseating Republicans by redrawing deep-blue New York City districts held by minority lawmakers, like his own, to extend instead into less diverse suburban areas, he said, “I’m going to win, but we’ve got to get more Democrats, also.”

“We’re going to have a level playing field,” added Meeks, the longtime leader of the Queens Democratic Party.

Forcing potential representatives to court their votes.

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