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)

Orrin Judd

Russia

THERE IS NO BEAR IN THE WOODS:

The Russian Air Force Is Dying a Slow and Painful Death in Ukraine (Peter Suciu, 12/18/23, National Interest)

Russia saw two of its jets lost in just 24 hours over the past weekend, including one that was reported to have been shot down by its own forces in the skies over Ukraine.

Since launching its unprovoked war against Ukraine nearly two years ago, the Russian military has seen a significant number of combat aircraft lost in the fighting. The most recent aircraft destroyed included a Sukhoi Su-34 fighter bomber that was targeted on the ground at a Russian air base in an early morning raid on Sunday. Later that same day, a Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jet was shot down over the Zaporizhia region in eastern Ukraine on Sunday per Business Insider.

Kyiv claimed it wasn’t responsible for the downing of the latter aircraft.

“I can confidently state that it was not the Ukrainian air defense that shot down the Russian Su-25 attack aircraft! These were clearly the coordinated actions of Russian anti-aircraft troops, for which the entire Ukrainian people sends them great thanks!,” Mykola Oleshchuk, Commander of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said in a post on the social messaging app Telegram.

Latin America

“STOP ME, BEFORE I KILL AGAIN!”:

The Case for Dollarization in Argentina: A Path to Economic Stability (Nicolas Cachanosky, 12/19/23, Econ Lib)

The primary rationale lies in the necessity for a credible commitment device. This paper by Emilio Ocampo explains how dollarization can serve as such for Argentina. Drawing from the experience of Ecuador under Rafael Correa, we see that dollarization acts as a credible institutional constraint that diminishes the costs associated with a populist regime. In a country where political shifts are frequent, and the probability of populism returning to power is 100%, establishing a stable monetary system becomes indispensable for sustained economic success.

Dollarization is Cost-Effective and a Safer Solution:

In relative terms, dollarization is the most cost-effective and safest alternative. With an annual inflation rate hovering around 160% (and expected to go up in the coming weeks), the demand for Argentine pesos is practically nonexistent. Dollarization facilitates the redenomination of financial liabilities in pesos into US dollars, eliminating the risk of a run against the peso. This would not only stabilize the currency but also afford the government more time to enact necessary changes. Given the combination of high inflation and a lack of credibility in Argentine politics, the amount of US dollars required to sustain the peso exceeds the US dollars needed to implement dollarization. Those who argue that dollarization is not possible due to the lack of dollars at the central bank need to think seriously about where they intend to obtain the dollars to bring the peso back to life. Furthermore, as dollarization implies phasing out the peso, its success becomes more plausible than reviving the peso. […]

Argentina’s persistent struggle with inflation, which has averaged 60% annually since the mid-1940s, has impeded long-term planning and economic growth. The nation has exhausted every textbook solution to high inflation, all of which have proven futile.

Podcasts

ONE THING MAGA REMINDS US OF…:

PODCAST: Murder in Boston Podcast (HBO and The Boston Globe)

1989 Boston. The crack epidemic is raging, the murder rate soaring, and white flight has taken hold. Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol, are carjacked, drawn deep into a dangerous “inner city” neighborhood, and allegedly shot by a Black man. All of Boston – and the nation – is gripped by the hunt for the suspect. What follows will reveal truths about the city… and ourselves. Presented by The Boston Globe and HBO Documentary Films, Murder in Boston: The Untold Story of the Charles and Carol Stuart Shooting is hosted by Adrian Walker who, along with a team of Pulitzer-winning investigative reporters, unveils explosive new findings and change the narrative of a story long cemented in the city’s lore. The HBO Documentary Series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max starting December 4.

…we are still who Charles Stuart thought we were.

Israel/Palestine

THE CONTRADICTIONS HAVING BEEN FORCED:

Poll shows Gantz’s party soaring as Likud nosedives, Smotrich out of Knesset (Times of Israel)


The survey also showed that Gantz, who temporarily joined Netanyahu’s coalition to have a seat at the table running the war, would lead the largest party in the Knesset, while the far-right Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, which ran on a joint slate with Otzma Yehudit in the last election, would fail to make it back into the Knesset.

Republican Liberty

THE ANGLOSPHERE IS A BIT POORER:

J G A Pocock: the Antipodean’s view of Europe: John Pocock defended Britain in its broadest sense (Yuan Yi Zhu, 19 December, 2023, The Critic)

[H]e fell under the influence of Sir Herbert Butterfield, who steered him toward the history of historiography, or in other words the history of the history of history. Abstruse though it may seem to laymen, it is, as Pocock put it, nothing less than “the history of all the ways in which men have felt committed to their past”. The result was a brilliant dissertation, published as The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957), which examined late Elizabethan and early Stuart lawyers’ belief that there existed an “ancient” constitution of England, dating from time immemorial and therefore immune from interference by the king’s prerogative, not unlike how modern academic lawyers insist that judicial review can never be ousted by Parliament. […]

But it was not long before Pocock made his mark on America. In The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), he deftly chartered the influence of early modern republican thought of Florence, typified by Machiavelli, and of its preoccupation with how to maintain civic virtue against the inevitability of decay, on English republicans and American revolutionaries. The American Revolution and the framing of the republican constitution were, to Pollock, “the last act of the civic Renaissance”.

Health

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

You Know It’s a Placebo. So Why Does It Still Work? (Tom Vanderbilt, 12/19/23, Wired)

You might think that having a positive attitude about the nothing-pill is what transforms it into a something-pill. Perhaps OLPs are a sort of meta-placebo, a testament to how much we believe in our power of belief. But the real driving impulse for many patients who enroll in clinical trials isn’t positive expectation. It seems to be a more uncertain emotion: hope. As the 2017 study puts it, “Hope is a paradoxical combination of opposites, balancing despair and the counterfactual notion that things can improve—a kind of ‘tragic optimism.’” A patient who has suffered for years from some condition, taken drugs, undergone procedures, and gotten no relief may think: A sugar pill probably won’t help, but what the heck, let’s see what happens. As a 2016 paper in the journal Pain puts it, “Engendering hope when participants feel hopeless about their condition can be therapeutic.”

Cheeto Jesus

WHINE SELLER:

New York AG Ridicules Trump’s Failed Courtroom Hail Marys (Jose Pagliery, Dec. 18, 2023, Daily Beast)

“Unlike a fine Bordeaux, defendants’ case for a directed verdict does not improve with age,” AG special counsel Andrew Amer wrote in a court filing on Monday. […]

“The motion, as with many of the defendants’ courtroom antics and maneuvers during the course of this trial, is nothing more than a political stunt designed to provide Mr. Trump, his co-defendants, and their counsel with sound bites for press conferences, Truth Social posts, and cable news appearances,” Amer wrote.

But he also noted that those requests only got more ridiculous as time went on, because the evidence presented at trial only made it more clear—not less—that Trump routinely lied on personal financial statements to score bank loans and insurance policies. Justice Arthur F. Engoron shot down every attempt by the Trumps with increasingly exasperated shrugs ranging from “denied” to “absolutely denied.” And he’s expected to toss this one out too—perhaps for the last time.

In Monday’s cheeky, three-page filing, Amer noted that “additional evidence cannot possibly lead to a better outcome” for them.

Energy

THAT WAS EASY:

US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over (Jeff Tollefson, 12/17/23, Nature)

In December 2022, after more than a decade of effort and frustration, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had set a world record by producing a fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed — a phenomenon known as ignition. They have now proved that the feat was no accident by replicating it again and again, and the administration of US President Joe Biden is looking to build on this success by establishing a trio of US research centres to help advance the science.

The stadium-sized laser facility, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, has unequivocally achieved its goal of ignition in four out of its last six attempts, creating a reaction that generates pressures and temperatures greater than those that occur inside the Sun.

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You Missed

Energy

PETROPHILIA IS SUBSERVIENCE:

End of History Latin America

THAT WAS EASY:

One Economy to Rule Them All

DELTA BLUES:

Republican Liberty

SHE’D HAVE BEEN A CONSERVATIVE ON THE WARREN/BURGER COURT:

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