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)

2026

End of History

GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:

Why Labeling Muslim Brotherhood “Chapters” as Terrorist Groups Is Problematic (Emile Nakhleh, 1/14/26, The Cipher Brief)

In the early 1990s, the Egyptian MB rejected political violence and declared its support for peaceful gradual political change through elections, and in fact participated in several national elections. While Islamic Sunni parties in different countries adopted the basic theological organizing principles of the MB on the role of Islam in society, they were not “chapters” of the MB.

They are free standing Islamic political groups and movements, legally registered in their countries, which often focus on economic, health, and social issues of concern to their communities. They are not tied to the MB in command, control, or operations.

Examples of these Sunni Islamic political parties include the AKP in Turkey, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, Justice and Development in Morocco, al-Nahda in Tunisia, the Islamic Constitutional Movement in Kuwait, the Islamic Movement (RA’AM) in Israel, PAS in Malaysia, PKS in Indonesia, the Islamic Party in Kenya, and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

During my government career, my analysts and I spent years in conversations with representatives of these parties with an eye toward helping them moderate their political positions and encouraging them to enter the mainstream political process through elections. In fact, most of them did just that. They won some elections and lost others, and in the process, they were able to recruit thousands of young members.

Based on these conversations, we concluded that these groups were pragmatic, mainstream, and committed to the dictum that electoral politics was a process, and not “one man, one vote, one time.” Because they believed in the efficacy and value of gradual peaceful political change, they were able to convince their fellow Muslims that a winning strategy at the polls was to focus on bread-and-butter issues, including health, education, and welfare, that were of concern to their own societies. They projected to their members a moderate vision of Islam.

Music

DEMOTICS ARE US:

Weep, Shudder, Die: Can Opera Talk? (Dana Gioia, December 16, 2025, Church Life Journal)

The term “folk opera” refers to the European genre of sung theater that borrows musical material of a specific region or people—melodies, modal scales, or dance rhythms—to create operas of popular appeal that reflect national identity. Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), for example, used Czech dance rhythms and melodic patterns that his regional audience recognized as their own. Gustav Holst’s opera, The Wandering Scholar (1934), likewise based its style on English folk music, though it never quotes any actual folk tunes. Gershwin used the term both to claim operatic status for Porgy and Bess and to acknowledge the work’s debt to African American music. A musicologist might debate how accurate the term “folk opera” is in this case. The pointed Gershwin/Heyward lyrics have a Tin Pan Alley polish that hardly feels folkloric. But it helps to know where the composer stood. The question matters because Porgy has inspired many subsequent works of American musical theater whose popular sources have complicated their identity.

The problem is older than Porgy. When Joplin published the score of Treemonisha, he subtitled it an “Opera in Three Acts,” although the work resembled operetta far more than traditional opera. Joplin understood that opera had greater prestige. The genre of a musical work establishes specific expectations for the audience, performers, and critics. Joplin wanted Treemonisha regarded as a serious work of art, not as a musical entertainment.

The concept of genre is important because it suggests what formal elements a composer and librettist might bring to new works. In American opera that question becomes complicated when creators want to incorporate elements from popular music and theater. It confuses the frame of reference. Porgy has spoken dialogue; it also has self-contained songs. Both of those features associate it with the Broadway musical. Traditional opera generally sets the entire libretto to music. How far can a composer depart from the conventional model of opera before the audience changes its perspective on the work? Must every word be sung for the work to be serious?

Critics tend to deny any work with substantial dialogue the title of opera. Real operas should have continuous music to guide the drama without relying on dialogue to move the plot. Depending on the context, a piece with spoken dialogue is labelled an operetta, musical, Singspiel, or zarzuela—all less exalted categories than opera. The criteria seem clear, but, in practice, they are applied inconsistently. Many classic musical works escape the downgrade.

No one refers to The Magic Flute as a Singspiel, even though it has a great deal of dialogue. Three factors elevate The Magic Flute to the status of opera. First, the score shows Mozart in the full maturity of his genius. Second, in addition to its low comedy, the work has a Masonic subplot with music of undeniable nobility. Third, The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera, and no one wants the divino maestro to have checked out writing an operetta. Likewise, Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (The Clever Girl) and Der Mond (The Moon), both of which have dialogue, earned the honorific by the brilliance of their music and the parable-like quality of their libretti. Based on two folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, the operas have a tough edge and dark vision that no one would associate with operetta or children’s theater.

There is a theoretical bias among critics that opera should be entirely sung

Books

…THAT DO BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS:

Why Moby-Dick nerds keep chasing the whale: I spent 25 hours with the superfans (John Masko, 10 Jan 2026, UnHerd)

Aside from exhaustion, the prevailing feeling as we filed out of the whaling museum, clutching our marine-themed goodie bags, was bewilderment. Moby-Dick is a bewildering book, all the more when read in a single sitting. This might be because Melville, with his penchant for turning characters into archetypes and ephemeral moments into eternal principles, is writing to persuade all peoples and all eras at once. He seems to speak directly across the ages to a reader in our own time who has asked him a question. We can imagine the young woman at a meet-the-author event with Melville’s ghost at some swell Manhattan venue: Why, she demands, would any sane person voluntarily risk his life to prowl the world’s oceans in a wooden vessel to find, kill, and disembowel huge man-eating monsters and melt their flesh down into lamp oil? And why would they further pledge their allegiance to an even bigger maniac who had resolved to subdue the world’s single deadliest sea monster or else die in the attempt?

Melville knew that even in 1850, such shots across the bow of cool-headed reason demanded a passionate defence. Even among readers living near Melville’s farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, located multiple days from New Bedford by stagecoach, and only recently connected by rail, the whaling life would have seemed utterly foreign. And so, his narrator sets out to make the irrational inevitable: to convince us that for a man of his time, or indeed of any time, there is no work more honourable or more beautiful than whaling. The most unsettling thing about Moby Dick may be that even after we witness the White Whale massacre and drown of all of Ishmael’s shipmates, we are still forced to admit that he has succeeded. That we (particularly we men) might never have the chance to live as fully or as deeply as Ishmael did.

Health

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

US projects to 3D bioprint livers, hearts and kidneys using immune-matched cells (Mrigakshi Dixit, Jan 13, 2026, Interesting Engineering)


The project targets patients suffering from acute liver failure. These are people caught in a race against the clock.

In the human body, the liver is the only organ capable of complete regeneration, but it needs time to heal. Usually, the time runs out before the healing begins.

“The goal is to create a piece of liver tissue that you can use as an alternative to transplant,” explained Adam Feinberg, professor of biomedical engineering at CMU and the project’s principal investigator. “The liver we are creating would last for about two to four weeks.”

That month-long window will allow the patient’s own liver to reboot.

If successful, the patient keeps their original organ, and a precious donor liver — currently a rare and finite resource — becomes available for someone else.

Sovereignty

WE REDEFINED SOVEREIGNTY 250 YEARS AGO:

US decapitation doctrine signals end of Westphalian order (Imran Khalid, January 13, 2026, Asia Times)

To understand the gravity of this moment, one must look at the history of sovereign immunity. Since the mid-17th century, the international system has functioned on the “fiction” of equal sovereignty. Whether a nation was a global empire or a tiny principality, its leader was considered the personification of the state and thus beyond the reach of foreign domestic law.

This was not a moral judgment, but a practical one designed to prevent a cycle of endless retributive litigation between nations. By breaking this seal, the United States has effectively signaled that sovereignty is no longer an absolute right, but a privilege granted by the powerful to the compliant.

liberalism is required for a regime to be a legitimate sovereign.

Anglospherics

WE JUST CLAIMED OUR RIGHTS AS ENGLISHMEN:

A Revolution Not Made but Prevented : “The major issue of the American Revolution was the true constitution of the British Empire.” (Russell Kirk, Fall 1985, Modern Age)

Was the American War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and of the Whigs generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that the word “revolution” has come to signify nowadays. Rather, it paralleled that alteration of government in Britain which accompanied the accession of William and Mary to the throne, and which is styled, somewhat confusingly, “The Glorious Revolution of 1688.”

The most learned editor of Burke’s works, E. J. Payne, summarizes Burke’s account of the events of 1688–89 as “a revolution not made but prevented.” Let us see how that theory may be applicable to North American events nine decades later.

We need first to examine definitions of that ambiguous word “revolution.” The signification of the word was altered greatly by the catastrophic events of the French Revolution, commencing only two years after the Constitutional Convention of the United States. Before the French explosion of 1789–99, “revolution” commonly was employed to describe a round of periodic or recurrent changes or events—that is, the process of coming full cycle; or the act of rolling back or moving back, a return to a point previously occupied.

Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word “revolution” acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and governmental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. Thus when the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Declaration of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution had restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution; his overthrow had been a return, a rolling-back, to old constitutional order; the Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.

Health

KNOWN KNOWNS:

Why sports stars who head the ball are much more likely to die of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease (Jasmin Fox-Skelly, 1/06/26, BBC)

The dangers of contact sports have actually been known about for almost 100 years. In 1928, US pathologist Harrison Martland published a scientific article arguing that, “for some time, fight fans and promoters have recognised a peculiar condition occurring among prize fighters which, in ring parlance, they speak of as ‘punch drunk’.”

Symptoms included a staggering gait and mental confusion, and were most common in “fighters of the slugging type, who are usually poor boxers and who take considerable head punishment”. In some cases, punch-drunkenness progressed to dementia, later classed as “dementia pugilistica” – a type of dementia occurring in boxers who have experienced repeated head injury.

At first, it was thought the problem was confined to boxing. But in recent decades that understanding has changed. In 2002, West Bromwich Albion and England soccer player Jeff Astle died at the age of 59 following a diagnosis of early onset dementia. In the US meanwhile, American football player Mike Webster died suddenly age 50 after experiencing cognitive decline and other Parkinson’s-like symptoms. In both cases, examination of the sports stars’ brains showed they had died from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a more modern term replacing the diagnosis of dementia pugilistica.

Always fun when tobacco advocates claim no one knew the cancer risks of smoking and then you read an old novel referring to cigarettes as coffin nails.

Identitarianism

NOTHING TO OFFER BUT HATREDS:

Pareto Punishment: The Trump movement in its death throes. (Kevin D. Williamson, 12/15/25, The Dispatch)

Some political disputes are impossible to resolve because they involve fundamental principles—and, in some cases, fundamentally American principles: The fight over abortion, for example, pits one libertarian argument (for women’s individual bodily autonomy) against another libertarian argument (for the bodily autonomy of the unborn), at the root of which is a disagreement over a question of fact (whether there is a second individual with rights to consider). Some disputes are difficult but not impossible to resolve because they involve good-faith disagreements over preferences and priorities: Americans who are more risk averse tend to prefer a larger and more expensive welfare state and are willing to trade some quality and innovation in medical care in exchange for more certainty about prices and access to care, whereas Americans who are less risk averse are more open to approaches based on market operations, competition, and consumer choice. There is not really a correct or incorrect level of risk aversion, objectively speaking: We have different preferences based on our own situations, our own experiences, and our own temperaments. And that is precisely the kind of situation in which it is possible to come up with solutions based on, or at least adjacent to, that Pareto concept: When something is very important to the other side and not very important to you, that is the place to give in—and when something is very important to you but not very important to the other side, that is an opportunity for getting your own way.

But when political failure—or political treachery—is defined as cooperating with the other side or by giving the other side anything of importance to its partisans, then there is no room for compromise or consensus-building. At this political moment, Republicans are particularly perverse: If a Republican leader manages to win some Democratic support for a Republican proposal, this is taken by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world as an indictment rather than as evidence of basic political skill on the simpleton’s theory that if the Democrats are for it, then it must be bad. Greene may be trying to rehabilitate her reputation lately, but that remains her fundamental orientation.

I have a sense, admittedly based on nothing more than subjective evaluation, that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in. A movement based on entirely negative deliverables—Épater la bourgeoisie!—is naturally going to be a short-lived thing. If my sense is correct, then this is a ripe moment—if anybody has the wit to make something of it. Doing that starts with looking across the table and starting the conversation: “Okay, then—what do you want?”

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

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:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.