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)

Conservative Thought

THE OPPOSITE OF IDENTITY POLITICS:

Keeping politics local (Jeffery Tyler Syck, 12/21/23, American Habits)

Each one of these elections proves that keeping political debate tethered to local issues is a winning strategy but such an approach to government is simply superior. The pressure to make every issue, every aspect of our lives, about national politics is an unhealthy disease. One that rots the true heart of every democracy – localism. True freedom flourishes in the institutions that stand between the individual and the national state. It is in these layers of civil society and regional government that draw humans out of their own lives and help us to forge vibrant communities in which civilization can flourish.

To put this all more simply, the most important political goal we are given is to ensure the dignity of everyday human existence. This means ensuring that fathers and sons can enjoy an afternoon fishing with one another; That mothers and daughters can bond over a good book together; That a local community can gather at a town festival or church and look passed their many differences to simply relish the company of others. All of this is threatened by making national politics, which does not organically touch upon our daily lives, so central to our existence.

Christmas

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Santa Claus and Science: On imagination, faith, and the natural fancy of children (G. K. Chesterton, December 20, 1935, Commonweal)

Fourth, what do our great modern educationists, our great modern psychologists, our great makers of a new world, mean to do about the breach between the imagination and the reason, if only in the passage from the infant to the man? Is the child to live in a world that is entirely fanciful and then find suddenly that it is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms of fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live; in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children, without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of a child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief?

Homocentric Universe

HUBBLE HUMBLING:

After 2 years in space, the James Webb telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed? (Ben Turner, 12/22/23, Live Science)

But over the past decade, an alarming hole has been growing in this picture: Depending on where astronomers look, the rate of the universe’s expansion (a value called the Hubble constant) varies significantly.

Now, on the second anniversary of its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has cemented the discrepancy with stunningly precise new observations that threaten to upend the standard model of cosmology.

The new physics needed to modify or even replace the 40-year-old theory is now a topic of fierce debate.

“It’s a disagreement that has to make us wonder if we really do understand the composition of the universe and the physics of the universe,” Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University who led the team that made the new JWST measurements, told Live Science.

Relax, son, no one thought we understood.

Energy

DRIVING SUCKS…:

We Own More Cars Than Ever. So Why Are We Driving Less? (David Harrison, Dec. 25, 2023, WSJ)


All those vehicles had to stay in the garage during the pandemic. Now, with the pandemic largely behind us, many of those vehicles are still there.

As of 2022, the number of trips Americans took had fallen by more than a third compared with 2017, according to surveys conducted by the Transportation Department. (A trip here is defined as going from one place to another. In other words, driving to the grocery store and back counts as two trips.)


The rise of remote work accounts for some, but not all, of this decline. Shopping, restaurant dining and recreational trips, regardless of travel mode, are all down from 2017. The pandemic has turned us into homebodies.

…homes are good.

Energy

WE CAN’T GET RID OF THEM FAST ENOUGH:

STUDIES SHOW ONE DAILY ROUTINE IS NEGATIVELY IMPACTING OUR HEALTH (Jeremiah Budin, December 25, 2023, The Cool Down)


The study, conducted by researchers in Spain, found that the amount of time a person spends commuting to work in a car directly correlates to decreased sleep, increased depression, and increased feelings of being under pressure, Business Insider reported.

The study’s findings echo other reports that driving a car makes people less happy and less healthy. According to one study conducted in Sweden, couples in which one partner commutes for more than 45 minutes are 40% more likely to end in divorce, reported Slate.

According to the American Heart Association, people who drive to work instead of taking the train or bus are at greater risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity, as the Huffington Post noted.

Christmas Music

THE CROOKED STRAIGHT:

The Spiritual Architecture of Handel’s “Messiah” (Paul Krause, 12/24/23, Voegelin View)


Classical music, by contrast, especially the Baroque style to which Handel belonged, is different. On this note, Gregory Athnos, the great music professor and conductor, offers readers an introductory overview of Handel’s greatest triumph.


Unlike the pop music that Scruton derides as distraction and not having much of a purpose beyond that, Athnos writes, “At the center of the [Baroque] doctrine was the belief that composer could create a piece of music capable of producing a particular and specific involuntary emption/spiritual response in their audience.” The transcendental feeling and experience we have listening to classical music is not accidental. It is intentional. What undergirded the Baroque spirit was an understanding that the beauty, power, and passion of music expressed and communicated deeply interior and spiritual truths to its audience. And this is exactly what Handel set out to achieve with the help of Charles Jennens in composing “Messiah.”

Identitarianism

INCOMPETENCE IS THE SOURCE:

Identity Politics as Ersatz Religion: a review of American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time By Joshua Mitchell ( Jeffrey Folks, 12/24/23, University Bookman)

As Mitchell sees it, there is only one path back from the “debilitating pathology” of identity politics. It is for a community of thoughtful individuals to build, or rebuild, a society of honest “face-to-face” relationships and a “politics of competence,” and thereby restore a society in which individuals are judged on virtue, merit, and conduct rather than affiliation with one or more distinct identity groups. In this view, the rehabilitation of society depends on the actions of well-intentioned individuals to oppose identity politics in the public space…

The author probes deeply into the pseudo-religious origins of identity politics, and he demonstrates convincingly how widely this new ideology has spread across American society and Western society in general. An important point in Mitchell’s argument is that identity politics exists only in those societies that were once Christian but where Christian belief has lapsed, thus demonstrating that identity politics is in fact an ersatz form of religious scapegoating. Also important is the insight that, unlike Christianity, in which believers achieve forgiveness of sin through the intercession of the scapegoat figure, in identity politics the grievances of self-proclaimed victims can never be resolved. The model of Civil Rights protest has been hijacked and applied to a seemingly endless series of complaints, all of which obtain relief at the expense of some other group, only in time to be scapegoated by some other complainant. It goes without saying that the endgame of identity politics is an authoritarian society in which each identity group competes for recognition and relief, and in which the social cohesion that Tocqueville once highlighted as a crucial element of American democracy is replaced by distrust, isolation, and competition.

It is precisely the failure of personal “virtue, merit, and conduct” that drives such folk to submerge themselves in group Identity and victimization.

Cheeto Jesus

NO CONVICTION REQUIRED:

What Civil War History Says About Attempts to Use the Insurrection Clause to Keep Trump From Office (ELIZABETH R. VARON, NOVEMBER 15, 2023, TIME)

We can gain valuable insights into Congress’s intentions by looking at the case of Confederate General James Longstreet, whose fate hung in the balance in the spring of 1868, as lawmakers staged one of their earliest debates on the application of Section Three. The discussion hinged on whether Longstreet and other Confederates were sufficiently repentant to warrant restoring their right to hold office. Repentance was the prerequisite for removing the barrier to holding office. That thinking indicates that the men who crafted and best understood the purpose of the 14th Amendment intended to bar someone like Trump —a recalcitrant, unrepentant insurrectionist —from holding office.

Anticipating the 14th Amendment’s imminent ratification that summer, Congress considered a bill, proposed by Illinois Republican Representative John Franklin Farnsworth, to preemptively remove the Section Three disability from a long list of Southerners who sought amnesty; they were largely former officeholders, who, having broken their oaths of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and sided with the Confederacy, sought to renew their allegiance and regain their rights.

One theme, more than any other, dominated the congressional debates: repentance.

Farnsworth and the supporters of his bill insisted that they would only restore the right to hold office to those who had shown “proper repentance since the war.” Ex-Confederates needed to offer evidence of their contrition by renouncing rebelism, promoting peace, obeying the law, upholding the Constitution, and encouraging a spirit of national loyalty in others. Relief from Section Three disabilities was intended, as Farnsworth put it, for one “who now puts his shoulder to the wheel to support the Government.” […]

In the end, despite the uneasiness of doubters who felt that the long list of Section Three petitioners had not been deeply enough vetted, Congress passed Farnsworth’s bill (H.R. 1059) in June 1868, and Longstreet, along with hundreds of others (the list of pardon seekers grew as the congressional debate played out), was cleared for future officeholding.

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