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)

Culture

Books Conservative Thought

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Political Philology: J. R. R. Tolkien Against the Leftists (Adam F. Bishop, 2/09/26, Public Discourse)

In Tolkien’s deeply Catholic theology, language is the key element of sub-creation, the artist’s ability to form a Secondary World into which the mind can enter. As Tolkien claims in his 1947 essay “On Fairy-stories,” through the “enchanter’s power” of language, “new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.” This use of language is “a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

God has bestowed on man a remarkable gift: the ability, through words, to abstract universals from the world around him. Tolkien provides the example of perceiving green grass and recognizing that the greenness can be separated from the grass. The “enchanter’s power” then lies in using those universals in an act of sub-creation, being able to consider these words apart from the physical world and to create Fantasy. Through this gift, we imagine what does not physically exist, calling into our minds and the minds of others “ideal creations” that have “the inner consistency of reality.”

Tolkien holds such a high view of the sub-creative power of language that he states, “The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant’s bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) ‘in a very real sense’ a great deal more real.” The sub-creation of the human word reflects God and His Creation in such a way that Fantasy, insofar as it leads one to God, can be more real than the physical objects around us. The robot factory, being an artifice that exists to produce more artificial constructs, separates man from his sub-creative ability; there is no art in the robot factory, but only brute utilitarianism. In the imaginative realm of Fantasy, the art and the artist signify God. As Tolkien states, “[the Christian] may now … fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.”

Therefore, language is more than just a tool; it is a way in which man resembles God and participates in truth and reality.

Music

“DEAD ON SNOW”:

The Night the Music Died: Searching for the ghost of Buddy Holly in Clear Lake, Iowa. (Michael Hall, February 2009, Texas Monthly)

The other acts on the Winter Dance Party lineup were Ritchie Valens, a 17-year-old kid from the San Fernando Valley who had had a breakout hit with “Come On, Let’s Go”; the Big Bopper, a 28-year-old deejay from Beaumont who had made a splash that year with a novelty hit, “Chantilly Lace”; Dion and the Belmonts, a quartet of teen singers from New York with a few minor hits (“I Wonder Why” may be the most notable); and Frankie Sardo, an Italian kid from New York with another minor hit, “Fake Out.” Holly would be the top draw. At Christmas he returned to Lubbock to put a new band together. Earlier Holly had befriended and recorded a young deejay and singer named Waylon Jennings. Now he told him to learn how to play the bass; Tommy Allsup would play guitar and Carl Bunch drums.

The tour had no frills. Jennings, Allsup, and Bunch backed up all the stars, who sang through one microphone and whatever primitive public-address system the local promoter had found for the show. Sardo—whom Jennings later called “the worst singer you ever heard in your life”—was on first, then the Bopper, Valens, the Belmonts, and Holly (sometimes the Belmonts played second). There were no set changes; the show was a dance, and the stars played one after the other, the earlier acts doing a handful of songs and the later ones getting more time. Holly played 45 minutes to an hour. He began every performance with the old folk song “Gotta Travel On,” then moved through his hits, as well as “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which had just been released, and a few covers, such as “Lucille,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Salty Dog Blues.” The whole concert was about two hours long.

That winter was brutally cold, and the musicians traveled in a series of cramped, drafty old charter buses that kept breaking down. The first performance was a January 23 show in front of six thousand kids in Milwaukee, where the temperature was 17 below zero. From there the tour crisscrossed between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The bands played every night, sometimes driving three or four hundred miles to make shows in tiny towns like Kenosha, Mankato, and Montevideo. After about a week, they were miserable. Valens was sick, and the Bopper was coming down with the flu. There was never any time to do laundry, so besides being cold, the buses began to stink. “We smelled like goats,” Jennings later recalled. On January 30 Holly asked the Fort Dodge, Iowa, promoter about chartering a plane.

Identitarianism Immigration Malthusianism

THE LONG RACIST TAIL OF MALTHUS/DARWIN:

The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti‑immigration efforts today ( Brian C. Keegan & Emily Klancher Merchant, March 26, 2026, The Conversation)

Ehrlich’s predictions were conspicuously wrong – and experts said so at the time. But his logic resonated through the 1970s and ’80s across the political spectrum. Its shadow is evident in today’s anti-immigration campaigns and White House arguments for mass deportation.

We have followed its long afterlife, as a computational social scientist studying contemporary extremism and as a historian whose book “Building the Population Bomb” analyzed Ehrlich’s impact. […]

The intellectual genealogy behind “The Population Bomb” ran deeper than Ehrlich’s own career. The “bomb” analogy was borrowed from a 1954 pamphlet by Hugh Moore, a businessman whose population anxieties descended from Guy Irving Burch, the anti-immigrant eugenicist who founded the Population Reference Bureau in 1929.

Burch, worried about “alien or negro stock” replacing Europeans, introduced the phrase “population explosion” to American public discourse in the 1930s as part of a campaign for immigration restriction. Moore updated Burch’s framework for the Cold War, warning that population growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America would produce communist expansion and nuclear war.

Ehrlich’s use of ecological carrying capacity – the idea that any environment has a finite number of resources to support a population before collapsing – justified coercive population control initiatives as foreign and domestic environmental policies in the minds of many Americans.

Too many of you: not enough of me.

Culture

“I JUST THINK YOU’RE DUMB”:

Why Fallacies Don’t Exist: (except in textbooks) (Maarten Boudry, Feb 12, 2026)

As the saying goes: correlation does not imply causation. If you think otherwise, logic textbooks will tell you that you’re guilty of the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. You can formalize it like this:

If B follows A, then A is the cause of B.

Clearly, this is false. Any event B is preceded by countless other events. If I suddenly get a headache, which of the myriad preceding events should I blame? That I had cornflakes for breakfast? That I wore blue socks? That my neighbor wore blue socks?

It’s easy to mock this fallacy—websites like Spurious Correlations offer graphs showing correlations between margarine consumption and divorce rates, or between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the number of Nicholas Cage films released per year.

The problem is that not even the most superstitious person really believes that just because A happened before B, A must have caused B. Sure, in strict deductive terms, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy—but real-life examples are almost nonexistent. That’s the first prong of the Fallacy Fork.

So what do real-life post hoc arguments actually look like? More like this: “If B follows shortly after A, and there’s some plausible causal mechanism linking A and B, then A is probably the cause of B.” Many such arguments are entirely plausible—or at least not obviously wrong. Context is everything.

Imagine you eat some mushrooms you picked in the forest. Half an hour later, you feel nauseated, so you put two and two together: “Ugh. That must have been the mushrooms.” Are you committing a fallacy? Yes, says your logic textbook. No, says common sense—at least if your inference is meant to be probabilistic.

Here, the inference is actually reasonable, assuming a few tacit things:

Some mushrooms are toxic.

It’s easy for a layperson to mistake a poisonous mushroom for a harmless one.

Nausea is a common symptom of food poisoning.

You don’t normally feel nauseated.

If you want, you can even spell this out in probabilistic terms. Consider the last premise—the base rate. If you usually have a healthy stomach, the mushroom is the most likely culprit. If, on the other hand, you frequently suffer from gastrointestinal problems, the post hoc inference becomes much weaker.

Almost all of our everyday knowledge about cause and effect comes from this kind of intuitive post hoc reasoning. My phone starts acting up after I drop it; someone unfriends me after I post an offensive joke; the fire alarm goes off right after I light a cigarette. As Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, once put it: “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’” The problem with astrology, homeopathy, and other forms of quack medicine lies in their background causal assumptions, not in the post hoc inferences themselves.

Baseball Books Religion

ALL GREAT ART DESCRIBES THE FALL OR THE CRUCIFIXION:

Take Me Out to the (Simulated, Hallucinatory) Ballgame (Adam Dalva, March 25, 2026, NY Times)

The abbreviation of Henry’s full name, JHWh, is a conscious echo of YHWH, the Hebrew name for God, and the book teems with religious symbolism: Ball stadiums, Coover writes, are the “real American holy places.” But because Henry has created a clockwork universe, a procedural generator whose rules are fixed, theological intervention is impossible. The dice control everything from off-season sports to a complex system of politics — all of which is highly entertaining to read.

But the dice can also cause tragedy. In one indelible scene, a freak sequence of rolls brings out the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart, which details the unlikeliest (and unluckiest) scenarios. Henry can’t accept what he sees, and what he’s done to his favorite player. But to cheat the rules of the game would be to render the whole thing meaningless. His hands tremble. Disaster has struck.

Immigration

AMERICA HAS A CULTURE TO ASSIMILATE TO:

Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration (Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov, Mar 18, 2026, The Argument)


Americans are divided over immigration — in a recent YouGov/Economist poll, 55% said legal immigration should be increased or kept the same, and 46% said immigration makes the U.S. better off (only 24% say it makes the country worse off).

That’s a lot more support for immigration than you see across the Atlantic. In a YouGov poll of Germany, 32% of respondents said that legal immigration over the last 10 years was about right or too low, and only 24% said legal immigration has been mostly good for Germany. In the same survey of France, 33% said legal immigration was about right or too low, and 22% said it has been mostly good for France. Across every Western European country surveyed, there was about 50% support for ending all new migration and requiring many existing migrants to leave.

So in America, immigration is hotly contested; in Western Europe, it’s generally way underwater. But we’re not just talking about a difference in public opinion. By almost any metric you choose to name, immigration is working far better in the United States than non-EU immigration is working in Europe.

In the United States, immigrants are actually more likely to be employed than non-immigrants (but only just). In Germany, on the other hand, OECD data reveals that only 58% of non-EU immigrant prime-aged adults work, compared to 78% of non-immigrant Germans. In France it’s 52% (of non-EU immigrants) vs 66% (of French people).

Notably, in Spain, where immigration isn’t deep underwater politically (47% said legal immigration was about right or too low, and 42% said it has been mostly good for Spain) immigrant labor force participation is higher than native labor force participation.

In the United States, immigrants commit much less crime than natives; in Europe, non-EU immigrants generally commit much more crime than natives.

Art

JUST BUSINESS:

IN SEARCH OF BANKSY: The British street artist’s identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan — and uncovered much more than a name. (SIMON GARDNER, JAMES PEARSON AND BLAKE MORRISON, March 13, 2026, Reuters)

Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims – and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency.

As for the risk he might face of retaliation or censorship, Britain’s legal and political establishments seem comfortable with Banksy’s messages and how he delivers them.

On September 7, for example, he stenciled a provocative piece on the exterior wall of London’s Royal Courts of Justice, a historically protected building. It depicted a judge in wig and robes bashing an unarmed protester with a gavel. Two months earlier, the government had designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. The day before the painting appeared, about 900 people were arrested at protests against the ban.


Stephens didn’t reply to a question about whether the mural was tied to that crackdown. In any event, Banksy’s painted protest against British justice appears to have gotten a pass so far.

Under local laws, graffiti is a crime, with penalties ranging from fines and community service to (rarely) jail time. The day after the mural went up, London’s Metropolitan Police said it was investigating “a report of criminal damage” to the building. An investigation remains under way, the Ministry of Justice said. The mural was power-washed off the wall, leaving behind a shadow of the image. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the ministry said that as of December, the government had spent £23,690 removing the piece. The work continues, it said: Next, specialist contractors will use laser equipment on the stain.

The justice ministry declined to say whether Banksy was penalized or paid compensation. Stephens had no comment.

Some artists have questioned if Banksy, once considered anti-establishment, now enjoys special treatment from Britain’s powers that be. In 2014, Vice Media asked: “Why Is Banksy the Only Person Allowed to Vandalize Britain’s Walls?” The story quoted David Speed, a street artist who ran a British graffiti collective. “It’s very much one rule for him and another rule for everyone else,” Speed told Vice. “When street artists do it, it’s vandalism. When Banksy does it, it’s an art piece.”

Contacted by Reuters, Speed praised Banksy as “a really important artist of modern times.” Yet he still wonders why “one artist should be able to have carte blanche and everyone else would be subject to penalties.”

“Is he above the law?” Speed said. “The evidence would suggest that he is.”

Some experts believe Banksy’s ability to use the world as his canvas is money in the bank. One analyst, MyArtBroker, observed that the Royal Courts of Justice mural helped bolster Banksy’s market value.

Although such public pieces “cannot be monetised directly, they maintain visibility and authorship – qualities that keep collector confidence high and demand active,” art investment site MyArtBroker wrote in a report on the 2025 market for Banksy’s work. Banksy’s “street interventions,” it said, help prop up demand and prices for his art as a whole. One Banksy piece was sold by Sotheby’s for £4.2 million ($5.7 million) last year, the report noted.

Banksy lawyer Stephens didn’t answer questions about whether Banksy has been penalized for his exploits. But he noted that some owners are happy when he paints on their buildings. “It appears that if people find a Banksy added to their wall, most of them call Sotheby’s rather than the police,” he wrote. “The question of where the artist’s work sits in the legal landscape is an interesting one, and I’m as bemused as anyone else.”

This is the story of the art, commerce and paradox of Banksy, arguably the most famous anonymous man in the world. The journey to understand him began in Ukraine and took us to a billboard in New York’s Meatpacking District, and the walls and auction houses of London.

Art

COMFORT:

What is it, therefore, that makes a good walking stick?: As it turns out, quite a lot. Gabriel Stone investigates. (Gabriel Stone, 3/10/26, Country Life)

A well-made stick is an object of beauty, a symbol of connection to the land from which it was plucked and, over many patient hours, refined. That symbolism becomes weightier still when it takes the form of the crozier, or shepherd’s crook, long carried by bishops on ceremonial occasions to represent pastoral care for a perpetually wayward flock. Cathedrals excepted, a wooden stick feels out of place in town or, at least, a striking style statement. In the countryside, however, there’s no finer companion to tackle uneven ground, beat down nettles, shoo errant livestock or simply rest on in contemplation.

Books

INGLORIOUS:

Captain America, Our First Antifascist Superhero: Peter Meineck on the Ancient and Modern Inspirations Behind the Heroes That Populate the Marvel Universe (Peter Meineck, February 27, 2026, LitHub)

Captain America was introduced in December 1940 by Timely Comics, the forerunner of Marvel. At that time Britain had been at war with Germany for seventeen months. Adolf Hitler’s forces had swept through Europe. The Nazis were setting up concentration camps for Jews, Romani, queer people, academics, political prisoners, and anyone whom the regime considered “degenerate.” Britain was being relentlessly bombed by the Luftwaffe, Germany had invaded France, Belgium, and Holland, and the concentration camp at Auschwitz had opened. America was still a year away from entering the war.

From the beginning Marvel was defined by its superhuman characters set against the background of the coming war. Its first comic book, Marvel Comics #1, had been released by Timely in August 1939 and introduced several characters. There was the Human Torch, the Angel, Namor the Sub-Mariner, the Masked Raider, and a Tarzan-like figure called Ka-Zar. By issue #2, the Angel was shooting down Nazi bombers over Poland. Then in issue #3, Namor was sinking German U-boats. Right from the start Marvel’s characters were responding to real events in the world—and what’s more, they were taking a stand.

At the foundation of the Marvel universe lies something essentially heroic. Almost two years before America entered the war against the Axis powers, Bill Everett was telling stories about a superhuman figure from Atlantis doing battle with the Nazis. Then came Captain America in 1940, a new hero billed as “against those who would conquer the United States” and the “sentinel of our shores.” Readers were encouraged to sign and become one of Captain America’s United States Junior Sentinels. Then they would receive a membership badge and an ID card. The Captain was introduced bedecked in his red, white, and blue stars-and-stripes costume. He carried a kite-shaped shield, which resembled the one on the great seal of the United States, and wore a blue half mask emblazoned with a distinctive white “A” and edged with small wings.

Captain America’s creators, Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon (Hymie Simon), were sons of Jewish immigrants from Europe and aware of the dangers of the Nazi regime. In The Human Torch #3, released in December 1940, a story by Carl Burgos (Max Finkelstein) already has the Torch battling a Hitler look-alike named “Hiccup.” In one brilliant panel a tendril from the Torch’s fiery wake singes off Hiccup’s Hitler moustache. In that same issue Namor helps the US Navy defeat a surprise seaborne attack by the Germans and is rewarded with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

It’s clear Captain America was introduced for one incredibly urgent purpose: to galvanize American youth against the Nazi regime.

Art Uncategorized

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

In Blind Test, Audiophiles Unable to Tell Difference Between Sound Signal Run Through an Expensive Cable and a Banana (Victor Tangermann, Feb 22, 2026, Futurism)

Pano ran high-quality audio through a number of different mediums, including pro audio copper wire, an unripe banana, old microphone cable soldered to pennies, and wet mud. He then challenged his fellow forum members to listen to the resulting clips, which were musical recordings from official CD releases run through the different “cables.”

The results confirmed what most hobbyist audiophiles had already suspected: it was practically impossible to tell the difference.

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