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

Just So Stories

IT’S NOT JUST THAT FOLKS BUILT CAREERS ON THE FAIRY TALE…:

Do we need a new theory of evolution? (Stephen Buranyi, 28 Jun 2022, The Guardian)

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

…but that they and many more made the fantasy their religion. You can’t expect them to be rational about it.

Sex

STOLEN “VALOR”:

The Decline of Bisexuality: Most people who identify as bisexual live like they’re straight. (Ellie Gardey Holmes, October 2, 2026, American Spectator)

Take Kate Brown, who served as Oregon’s governor from 2015 to 2023. Brown’s bisexual identity made her special to progressives. When she was sworn in as governor, Time’s headline announcing her inauguration read: “Oregon’s Kate Brown Becomes First Openly Bisexual U.S. Governor.” She used her identity to prop herself up as a heroic inspiration to people. “If I can be a role model for one young person that decides that their life is worth living because there’s someone like them in the world, it’s worth it,” she said in 2016.

And yet Brown’s identity requires virtually nothing of her. She has been married to her husband for 30 years. All she needs to do is continually insist that she is attracted to women even while she is married to her husband. (One notes that heterosexual people do not typically announce an attraction to people other than their spouse.)

Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema likewise claims a bisexual identity, and likewise does nothing as a result of it. She was previously married to a man and then carried on an affair with another man, and she has not publicly dated a woman.

Brown and Sinema are not alone. The Pew Research Center found in 2015 that a full 84 percent of people who identify as bisexual are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, while 7 percent aren’t in any relationship at all.

In a world where LGBTQ identity confers fewer social benefits, we can assume that bisexuals will often be the first to drop their identities, as they were the easiest to adopt in the first place and they don’t have much impact on one’s life.

Social contagions pass.

Music

TRADITION!:

A Place Among the Fiddlers: In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out. (David Alm, October 1, 2026, Longreads)(

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.


One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam.

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.”

Identitarianism

SCRATCH A POST-LIBERAL FIND A RACIST:

A Catholic Theologian Signs Up for Mass Cruelty: Yet another thinker puts his faith in the service of monstrous deportation policies (Gabriel Schoenfeld, 10/03/26, The UnPopulist)

A lesson from the 20th century is that intellectuals sometimes choose to serve monsters. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all found thinkers willing to sing their praise even as they murdered millions. On the spectrum of evil and death, Donald Trump, a crass, ignorant would-be authoritarian, is not in their league. And yet already, under Trump’s rule, people have died—and already lives are being ruined by the tens of thousands. As all this happens, crankish right-wing intellectuals have been drawn to Trump’s scepter as moths to a flame.

A case in point, not exactly a household name but not entirely unimportant, is Chad Pecknold. […]

What is the chief source of this threat? You guessed it: Immigration!

America, Pecknold tells us, “is not an idea, it is a PEOPLE.” With the unchecked influx of strangers, that “PEOPLE” is facing disintegration. The migration crisis, he writes, has “thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt.” In its rejection of America as a creedal nation in favor of one defined by heritage and inheritance, postliberalism slides inexorably into nativism.

The source of the trouble, in Pecknold’s view, is that “American Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, have been so captivated and captured by the implicit open borders theology of liberalism that too many have forgotten how to think like Christians—and like Americans.” Contrary to the precepts of liberalism, statesmen have a “sacred duty,” he says, to restrict who may remain in a country. Accordingly, he maintains, we must reject the constitutional precept of birthright citizenship under which anyone born here, including to parents lacking documentation, is automatically a citizen. At stake is nothing less than whether “our laws permit Americans to have a country or not.”

Energy

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

Can there be solar for all, everywhere by 2030? (Sarah Steffen, 10/02/26, Deutsche-Welle)

Solar is the cheapest form of electricity in the history of the world, said McKenna, who founded the climate advisory firm Climate and Nature Solutions, and the global coalition Women Leading on Climate.

“It is scaling way faster than anyone ever imagined.”

As is battery technology used to store excess renewable energy.

2030 seemed ample when the goal was 2050.

Conservative Thought

NEGATORY RAMPART:

Traditionalism: Russell Kirk & Co. seek continuity with the sources of American politics and culture. (Mark C. Henrie, September 28, 2026, Conservative Encyclopedia)

Focusing on the French Revolution, Kirk states emphatically that the overarching evil of the age is “ideology,” and he claims that conservatism properly understood is “the negation of ideology.” As such, conservatism prescribes a “politics of prudence,” a cautious statesmanship founded upon a sensitive understanding of the complexities of human nature, the limitations of human history, and the capaciousness of the human good. Of course, liberalism’s ancient boast has always been that it founds itself upon, and best adequates to, human nature—once that nature is shorn of illusions and superstition. To the liberal mind, one might even say that if ideology is defined as a project to achieve a utopian intellectual abstraction, then it is liberalism that is the negation of ideology.

Homocentric Universe

PHYSICS IS JUST A PROOF OF HUME:

On the Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli review – a physicist’s guide to life, the universe and everything: Near-mystical musings from a scientist who believes we are on the brink of a revolution in understanding ourselves (Farrah Jarral, 30 Sep 2026, The Guardian)

It’s enough to give you vertigo, and Rovelli admits it. “The resulting image of reality is haunting. Every fact is only a fact relative to something else, and even the fact that a fact is relative to something else is itself relative. There is no ground floor.” Yet, in contrast to the bleakness that can shroud such unflinching scientific accounts of the universe, Rovelli’s telling validates our messy, subjective human experiences. “None of this prevents us from describing the world from one perspective. Ours.”

Identitarianism Music

MEN ARE FROM MARR, MAGA IS FROM MORRISSEY:

The meaning of Johnny Marr: And of not talking about Morrissey (William Davies, Sep 27, 2026)

Now aged 67, Morrissey is in the demographic sweet-spot of Reform sympathisers (the over-70s have not abandoned the Tories in such high numbers). Violence against children was not merely a topic he turned to as he was running out of ideas from the 1990s onwards, it was one of the first things he wanted to vent when he was granted a public platform in 1983. Those who grew up in the 1960s and 70s experienced the final flush of institutionalised sadism against children, and the complete absence of systematic child protection against sexual abuse, which teachers, scout leaders, vicars, sports coaches and Radio One DJs exploited to the full. They have since watched as society progressively and systematically drove violence out of schools and parental norms, which is of course not to say that abuse does not persist in the shadows and the margins. ‘Progress’ came just too late for them, no doubt leaving many in a state of profound ambivalence regarding its desirability. The insult posed by ‘woke’ (for which read the reactionary depiction of it) is that someone might feel violated and harmed by nothing more than words.

As many have observed, on learning that Far Right riots frequently feature men in their 50s and 60s, some of the violence returning to Britain’s streets is due to men who developed a taste and skill for it over forty years ago, on football terraces, nights out and perhaps at the hands of family members. These same men are also more likely to dish it out in the home (where Barbarism Begins). Psychoanalysts must have things to say about the heightened significance of sexual violence against white girls in the imaginary of the contemporary Far Right, that speaks of more than just hypocrisy (though there is undoubtedly plenty of that).

The Morrissey that depicted a world of normalised sadism and abuse was not ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ but he was honest and disturbing, perhaps more than we’re entirely comfortable with. This is not to suggest that we must all ‘hug-a-racist’, as Cameron once suggested of ‘hoodies’. But if we’re looking for a national story, with working class Manchester and indie music at its heart, the current Johnny Marr/Andy Burnham cultural love-in only tells one side of it. The blend of sixties and nineties nostalgia that Burnham and Marr have come to express is a feel-good one, especially for my generation (Gen X) and some younger. It’s canny politics to lean into this as a vision of community and conviviality, allowing ideas of ‘working class identity’, ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ to become owned by decent, generous, quietly liberal people.

There is, however, a national id that has been repeatedly pushed down, but which was blasted out of the radio by Morrissey’s unique voice circa 1983-84. It now forces its way out through the corrupt grinning neo-fascism of Farageism, which promises a restoration of violence at the borders, at sea, in the welfare system and – who knows – even within the education system. Marr is now on the opposite side of the culture war from Morrissey

Soccer

IT’S A RICO CASE:

How drawn-out saga of Manchester City’s alleged cheating came to this (David Conn, 26 Sep 2026, The Guardian)

On Friday sources confirmed that saga, in which Pep Guardiola’s expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018, culminated in guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges.

There is no precedent either for the scale of these charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 – and that City failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith”. […]

This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City’s insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City’s emails. Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium.

The published documents suggested that City’s regime, in its determination to spend the vast money required to attain success in modern football, was circumventing the financial fair play (FFP) rules. Introduced by Uefa in 2011, then similarly by the Premier League in 2013, these rules seek to restrain overspending by clubs, particularly on soaring player wages, by limiting the financial losses that owners can fund. Money must be spent from a club’s earned revenue, including TV and commercial rights, income from supporters and sponsorships – owners cannot use a sponsor as a vehicle for putting more funding in.

It is the systemic nature of the violations that makes them so punishment-worthy.

Robotics/AI

WINTER, SPRING, SUMMER OR FALL:

The Mirror and the Gap (Garrett W. Ennis, September 29, 2026, Palladium)

Many of us talk to these digital systems daily: we confide in them, seeking advice, support, approval; even purely technical queries are coloured by the rosy hue of personality. These machines mimic an identity. More than a mere black box of answers summoned from the murky depths of our collective knowledge, these fragments aggregate in the shape of a being; a mirror to ourselves. This emergent agent demands a dialogue, a relationship. You and it communicate in the medium that was said by Aristotle and Chomsky to define our uniqueness as a species.

There is a new member in our tribe.

An outsider, maybe. A literal product of the intersection between science and fiction, and yet we are quick to embrace it as one of our closest allies. We turn to AI willingly, even gratefully, because it lets us bypass what is hardest about receiving help from another person; there is no stern boss to please, no anxious colleague to manage, no friend who is too busy to listen. The guidance just arrives, without asking anything of us in return.

The need to articulate and, in so doing, make sense of our world interpersonally is increasingly being fulfilled by machines. The desire to be seen runs deep; we become legible to ourselves through the eyes of our beholders. When this process becomes automated and artificially mediated, it would seem that something essential is lost.

Why? In what way is this any more artificial than being “seen” by most others, especially a boss, busy colleague or unlistening friend?

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Robotics/AI

THE MIND BOGGLES:

Sex

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

Music

DIRT MAID:

Just So Stories

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.