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

Health

…AND CHEAPER…:

A new kind of drug points to where medicine is headed (Priscilla Duggan, July 30, 2026, Larchmont Chronicle)


Just this past May, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug named vepdegestrant (Veppanu) for a subset of patients suffering from metastatic breast cancer. First and foremost, this is a promising development for individuals with oestrogen receptor-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. However, there is an extra layer of excitement to this news: Veppanu is the first drug of its kind (known as a PROTAC) to ever be approved by the FDA. For the remainder of the article, I will go over exactly what I mean by this and unpack all these science terms.

Let’s break it down into simple concepts: proteins are everywhere in the body. Receptors, enzymes, structural elements—they’re all made up of proteins. Many diseases stem from proteins that aren’t behaving as expected. For example, an overactive protein could lead to cancer, or a misfolded protein could lead to a neurodegenerative disease. Therefore, many existing drugs work by blocking a protein’s function.

PROTACs (which is short for proteolysis-targeting chimera) work in a completely different way. In simple terms, they stick onto a specific protein and bring it to our cell’s natural garbage-disposal system.

What is this “garbage disposal system”? In biology, when a protein needs to be destroyed by the body, this is referred to as “ubiquitination.” A faulty or misfolded protein that needs to be destroyed is first “tagged” with a little flag called an E3 ligase. This flag calls over another protein called ubiquitin, the cell’s garbage man. Basically, ubiquitin’s job is to destroy whatever the E3 is connected to. […]

Medicine is learning not only how to inhibit problematic proteins, but how to remove them. Consider the plethora of diseases caused by protein malfunction: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, cystic fibrosis—the list goes on. With this in mind, this step forward has promising implications for many diseases that have long been considered non-treatable.

Law/Crime

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

David Cole’s Qualified Defense of the Supreme Court (Ilya Somin, 8.1.2026, reason)

Can we rely on the courts, and most importantly the Supreme Court, to resist major assaults on the rule of law by the Trump administration? That question was front and center during the Court’s recently concluded 2025–2026 term. With its six Republican appointees—three nominated by Trump—some feared that, much like the Republican-controlled Congress, the Court would reflexively back the president….

By the end of the term, however, the story was more nuanced. The Court blocked four of Trump’s major initiatives: ending birthright citizenship, imposing worldwide tariffs, firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and dispatching National Guard troops to Chicago, Portland, and other cities. In other significant cases as well, the Court rejected positions advanced by Trump. In a decision that he called “a tremendous loss,” it held that federal law permits the counting of mail-in ballots posted by election day but received thereafter. And it refuted the Trump administration’s assertion of constitutionally unchecked power to demand that Google turn over the cell phone location histories of unlimited numbers of Americans. The justices may not be, as Trump called them after he lost the tariffs case, “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” but this is not Donald Trump’s Court….

These are not the decisions of a Court doing the president’s bidding or voting exclusively along party lines. By contrast, had these issues been put to a vote in Congress, would a single Republican have broken ranks?

The rulings cannot be dismissed as mere token losses for Trump. Each one established important guardrails on the executive branch. The tariffs decision rejected the president’s assertion of emergency powers, a step courts rarely take. Justice Samuel Alito called the birthright citizenship case “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court.” The decision blocking the firing of Cook protected the independence of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s most powerful financial institution. And the National Guard decision kept troops off our streets, halting Trump’s invocation of a classic authoritarian move.

Health

WE CAN’T GET RID OF DRIVERS FAST ENOUGH:

5 Sneaky Daytime Signs of Sleep Apnea, According to Doctors: If you’re experiencing any of the symptoms on this list, it’s time to see your healthcare provider. (Emily Laurence Sardinha, 7/29/26, Parade)

“The most common daytime symptom of sleep apnea is tiredness or fatigue,” reiterates Dr. Brooke Judd, MD, the Section Chief of Sleep Medicine at Dartmouth Health. “Sometimes this is severe sleepiness to the point that someone may unintentionally fall asleep during a conversation or while driving, but it doesn’t have to be that obvious.”

Law/Crime

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Charges Dropped in Reflecting Pool Case as Prosecutors Say Work Was ‘Botched’ (Madaleine Rubin and David A. Fahrenthold, July 31, 2026, NY Times)


Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2.

Puritan Nation

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

The True History of New England’s Stone Walls: Why we love them, and why I build them (Matt Seaton, July 19, 2026, The Atlantic)

[T]oday, we live with a solid remnant of that astonishing feat of human labor—the quarter-million miles of stone walls that an 1871 survey measured in the American Northeast. Where those walls still stand, we cherish them as charismatic markers of the Yankee landscape. Contoured lines of stacked stones running across fields help organize the vista. Their geometry implies a reassuring sense of something permanent—and permanently right—about a deeply American scene, along with white clapboard houses, red barns, rolling hills, goldenrod.

I first became properly acquainted with stone walls after my wife inherited her parents’ Vermont home, in 2010. A ramshackle line of piled rocks ran between the garden and the meadow. One section had gotten pulled aside and left in a heap, and there the stones had lain for several decades, slowly gathering humus and turning into something resembling a small burial mound—until I came along and decided to disinter the stuff and pile it back up. My work was rudimentary, but I was enraptured.

Other modest efforts followed, and then came the coronavirus pandemic. In need of something to counteract the alienation of desk-bound remote work, I turned to the collapsed and spreading 70-foot vestige of a wall that bounded the beginning of the meadow. I attended a day course at the Stone Trust, an educational foundation in southern Vermont, where I learned the principles of building to a line, “battening” (the English style of tapering a wall inward toward its apex), and reinforcing with through-stones and copestones; my building became more proficient.

Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.

Identitarianism

THE CONSPIRACY IS PANDEMIC…:

Fauci’s COVID‑origins hearing shows how conspiracy theories became political weapons (Art Jipson, July 30, 2026, The Conversation)

In the years since the pandemic, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and others have accused Fauci of many things, but the central conspiracy accusation is that Fauci helped enable the COVID-19 pandemic through U.S.-funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, and then participated in a coordinated government-scientific cover-up, misleading Congress to conceal that connection and suppress the laboratory-leak explanation. Paul, a Republican, has repeatedly called for Fauci’s prosecution. […]

Conspiracy thinking is rarely isolated. For example, a person who comes to believe that public health officials are secretly manipulating information may be more receptive to claims that vaccines contain hidden dangers. Someone who distrusts pharmaceutical companies may be more receptive to claims that the pandemic was engineered for profit. Someone who believes powerful elites routinely operate in secret may be more receptive to broader conspiracy narratives such as QAnon.

These beliefs can reinforce one another, creating a broader worldview in which institutions, experts and government officials are presumed to be acting deceptively. […]

Claims were generated in online communities, repeated by political figures and amplified by media personalities, who injected these talking points back into supporters’ social media feeds. The repetition made the claims feel increasingly familiar – and familiarity can be mistaken for evidence. […]

The most consequential feature of conspiracy theories may be their ability to move from one group to another.

A claim can begin in an obscure online community and spread through social media to become a political weapon.

The Fauci hearing demonstrates the culmination of that process. These claims have moved into the formal machinery of government, where they are being amplified by elected officials and federal agencies. A theory’s credibility can increase simply because someone with greater institutional authority has repeated it.

…but people refuse the vaccine: not being terrified of things that humans don’t control.

Uncategorized

BEER AND TREMBLING:

Country Music, Sin, and Grace: Sing Me More Songs About Jesus (Terence Sweeney, July 30, 2026, Church Life Journal)

To close, I would like to take up some holy writ from Kris Kristofferson. In his song “Sunday Morning Coming Down”—sung by Johnny Cash—the singer tells us about waking up Sunday morning depressed and hungover. He groans, “The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.” In short, he ain’t doing too well. But he is not just hungover. He suffers from the sense that “there ain’t nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound . . . of Sunday morning comin’ down.” Soren Kierkegaard would say that the singer knows he is in despair, which puts him in a better position than those of us (including some in church pews) who do not know how far we are from God. The singer describes seeing a boy playing in the street, a father and a child, and smelling frying chicken, all of which “took me back to something that I lost somehow along the way.” What has he lost? What anyone in despair has lost. He has lost Sunday. He has lost being in relation to God and to others. Even if he looks for solutions in getting stoned, he does so in a prayer: “I’m wishin’ Lord that I was stoned.”

Identitarianism

IDEOLOGY CAN NEVER WITHSTAND REALITY:

Orwell Vindicated: Under Totalitarian Trump, Reality Itself Is A Communist Plot (Paul Krugman, July 30 | 2026, National Memo)

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its two million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality.

Robotics/AI

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Powerful AI models are being given away for free. It was inevitable.: They aren’t a security threat — they’re what competition looks like. (Bill Gurley, July 20, 2026, Washington Post)

There is a name for what those challengers did. Economist Michael E. Porter called it cost leadership and placed it among a handful of fundamental business strategies. Cost leadership, he argued, is the surest route to a market position a rival cannot easily attack. Walmart, Dell, Southwest — none of them won by building the fanciest product. They won by delivering a comparable one at a structurally lower cost, and letting price do the rest. Open-source software is the purest form of software cost leadership ever devised.

The classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo would not have found any of this surprising. In a competitive market, they observed, price is driven toward the cost of producing one more unit. For most goods, such as steel, wheat or labor, that floor is stubbornly high. For software, it is almost nothing: Once the first copy exists, the millionth costs essentially zero to make. A price that falls toward zero is therefore not a market failing. It is a market working exactly as the classical economists said it would.

Music

RAISE YOUR HOPEFUL VOICE:

He Sang About Loneliness. He Built Belonging (Samuel J. Abrams, July 30, 2026, AEIdeas)

Durkheim had a word for the feeling that runs through Once and much of Hansard’s music: anomie. It is what happens when people lose the relationships and rituals that tell them where they belong. In the film, the two protagonists have remarkable talent, but they lack people who can hear it and recognize it. They meet and truly see each other—albeit for a fleeting moment in time. The standout song, “Falling Slowly,” is remembered as a love song, but it is really about trust. Two strangers make something beautiful because each is willing to be vulnerable in front of the other.

That kind of encounter feels rarer today as we are increasingly isolated and disconnected from each other. AEI’s Survey Center on American Life found that the share of Americans with no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2021. Those numbers describe far more than isolation; they reveal that so many lives are lived in places where people do not feel known.

Hansard’s answer to loneliness was never a theory. In 2010, just before Christmas, volunteers collecting for Dublin’s Simon Community asked him to sing. He said no, went home, felt bad about it, grabbed his guitar, and came back. The volunteers had already left, but he played anyway. Other musicians joined him. He returned the next Christmas, then the next. 15 years later, thousands gather outside the Gaiety Theatre on Christmas Eve because one person came back.

That may be the most important thing Hansard ever created. Not an album or an Oscar-winning song, but a place people knew they could return to.

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You Missed

Robotics/AI

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

India

THE NEXT ORBAN?:

One Economy to Rule Them All

RISE THE TIDE:

Film/TV

IT DEMONSTRTES THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EMPATHY:

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