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)

Energy

DONALD WHO?:

Trump vowed to kill wind power. Under his watch, America will produce more than ever (David Charter, May 29 2026, The Times uk)


The United States will have the capacity to produce record amounts of wind power under President Trump despite his vow to “terminate” all renewable energy windmills.

Experts say the industry is “winning” a fightback in the courts against Trump’s war on wind, with offshore wind farms expected to generate six gigawatts of energy by the end of Trump’s term — 34 times the capacity of the 174 megawatts in place when he came to office in January 2025.

Baseball Books

CLUTCH HITTERS:

How a Road Less Traveled Led to Baseball’s Boys of Summer: Anne Keene reflects on a soulful interview between author Roger Kahn and poet Robert Frost that sparked one of the game’s most human narratives. (Anne Keene, 3/26/20, The Saturday Evening Post)

In 1960 The Boys of Summer author Roger Kahn was in his early 30s when he drove along backroads bordering streams in the Green Mountains to spend the afternoon with New England poet Robert Frost. When the sportswriter reached the end of a dirt road, he got out of his car and walked up a hill to Frost’s cabin, where he lived alone, from May until the leaves changed in the fall, when the poet returned to Cambridge.

At the time, Kahn was a celebrated sportswriter who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Herald Tribune in the early 1950s. He based The Boys of Summer on players such as Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, Pee Wee Reese, Preacher Rowe, Carl Erskine, and Roy Campanella. Twenty years after his Boys retired, Kahn caught up with his middle-aged Boys as they struggled through life.

Kahn had met Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference at Middlebury College in 1951, where the poet pitched to the writer in a summer baseball game with the spine of the Green Mountains in the background. It was there, on that grassy field, when a love for America’s Pastime connected two artists who appreciated the delicate, often brutal plight of the aging athlete.

The World Series was a month away when the 86-year-old snow-headed poet greeted Kahn, wearing blue slacks and a ragged gray sweater. With a face as weathered as the mountain, Frost cut a strapping agrarian frame from years of laboring behind a plow, and daily hikes through the woods, where he conjured phrases about the road less traveled.

The Saturday Evening Post’s “A Visit with Robert Frost” interview drew a response that stunned both Kahn and Frost. Hundreds of letters poured into the magazine from readers. Many enclosed the November 19th feature, asking Kahn to autograph it because they knew he captured Frost in his purest form toward the end of his life.

Identitarianism

CHOKING ON THEIR BILE:

How Right-Wing Politics Make You Physically Ill (Kristen French, May 29, 2026, Nautilus)

A team of scientists found that conservative Americans got measurably less healthy than liberal Americans over the course of the 2010s. By the early 2020s they were dying at significantly higher rates, even setting aside COVID-19 deaths. They also ran a separate large survey, in 2024, of more than 21,000 people and found that right-leaning Americans—especially Republicans and Trump voters—are less likely to trust their doctors, follow medical advice, and seek care when they probably should.

It isn’t just about COVID vaccines. It extends to medications for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, and to willingness to go to the doctor for chest pain.

Israel/Palestine

WHITE PRIVILEGE:

How to Sell a Genocide exposes the double standards of reporting on Gaza (Jeff Sparrow, May 28, 2026, The Conversation)

The International Association of Genocide Scholars describes the Israeli war on Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. The association’s position came after a vote, so we know it reflects the judgement of 86% of its members.

Almost all the major human rights organisations and NGOs agree, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Yet most liberal news outlets still do not use the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza.

Johnson shows how such lexical scruples do not apply elsewhere. “Even though the destruction of Gaza, by all objective metrics, has been magnitudes more brutal and deadly than that of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine,” he observes, “the totalising moral labels of ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ were used on CNN and MSNBC 17.2 times more often in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Israel’s action in Gaza.”

His review of the first 30 days of the two conflicts found that, on CNN and MSNBC, Ukrainians were described on air as victims of genocide or war crimes 1,790 times: 1,515 for war crimes and 275 for genocide. When the victims were Palestinian, the terms were used 104 times: 92 for war crimes and 12 for genocide.

“Ostensibly non-opinionated reporters and ‘analysts’ on both MSNBC and CNN,” writes Johnson, “often asserted, as a matter of fact, that Russia was committing war crimes against Ukrainians, without this being seen as violating their neutrality.”

The only existential threat to Israel is the way it has degraded its culture.

Life Issues: abortion

SHOW THEM THE MONEY:

In Flint, Cash for Pregnant Women Leads to Better Outcomes for Babies (Roni Caryn Rabin, May 27, 2026, NY Times)

The new report offered one of the most optimistic recent assessments of cash transfer programs. Results from other similar programs across the country have been mixed. But the Flint initiative is one of several that target pregnancy and the first year of a baby’s life, when income often dips just as expenses increase. This critical period influences a child’s development and long-term health trajectory, said Dr. Hanna, who is also associate dean of public health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

The study evaluated the outcomes of some 4,500 births in Flint between 2021 and 2025, and compared them with those in similar, matched cities in Michigan. Before the program’s implementation, rates of premature birth and low birth weight had been increasing in Flint.

Researchers would have expected those rates “to increase even more, because the rates were rising year after year and rising in the matched cities, but instead, Flint’s rates went lower,” said Dr. Sumit Agarwal, a physician and economist at the University of Michigan and the paper’s first author. He and the study’s other authors concluded that the program effectively reduced Flint’s preterm birth rate by 2.7 percentage points and low birth weight rate by 4.2 percentage points.

Previous studies have found that Rx Kids was also associated with fewer evictions, better maternal health and a drop in welfare investigations of child maltreatment. The program has now expanded to 42 communities in Michigan.

Dragon Has No Teeth

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

Ten China falsehoods exposed by the Trump-Xi summit (Miles Yu, May 25, 2026, Washington Times)

  1. The myth of the “Thucydides Trap”

The Beijing summit revived the tired mythology of the “Thucydides Trap,” the claim that conflict between the United States and China is inevitable because a rising China is displacing a declining America. This theory is not only intellectually bankrupt, but also historically erroneous, because the rising power was defeated in the Peloponnesian war that Thucydides masterfully documented.

Xi Jinping himself is trapped not by geopolitical reality, but by Marxist-Leninist dogma, which insists capitalism is collapsing and communist victory triumphantly inexorable. The CCP mistakes dogma and propaganda for reality. America remains the world’s leading military, technological and financial power, the global hub of innovation and inspiration, the only superpower capable of shaping global security, trade and alliance environments.

China, meanwhile, faces demographic collapse, economic stagnation, mass unemployment, popular disenchantment and elite political instability. More importantly, the real divide is not “China versus America,” but communist China versus the entire free world.

Anglospherics

CONTINENTALS:

Our Straussian Techocracy (Hirsh Chitkara, May 2026, Liberties)

The Silicon Valley elites funding the New Right believe it is much more difficult to be cynically correct than idealistically wrong. This is central to the worldview of figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen. They believe it is their lot in life to possess superior judgement that enables them to pierce through conventional thought. […]

The tech oligarchs therefore see themselves as having undertaken a heroic but thankless task. […] All three men imagine themselves as lonely Atlasses holding a perpetually ungrateful world on their shoulders.

The fundamental divide between the Anglosphere and Europe runs along this line. The English-Speaking World, at least since Hume, happily accepts that we can never see beyond the cave. The Rationalists are gnostics, who are convinced they’ve escaped. It’s just self-flattery.

Identitarianism One Economy to Rule Them All

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Dear conservatives, industrial policy is a dead end (Samuel Gregg, 26 May 2026, CapX)

Industrial policy is in fact already widespread in Western societies. State subsidies, special tax write-offs, outright capital grants and joint public-private enterprises are rife in developed economies. The differences are really about scale and form.

One reason why many governments have often been reluctant to acknowledge the degree to which they promote such practices are the well-documented economic and political problems associated with industrial policy.

Among other things, these include: 1) the fact that governments cannot know everything they would need to know if they were to design successful industrial policies; 2) the massive opportunity costs associated with diverting scarce resources to less productive economic sectors; 3) industrial policy’s inherently political nature and its consequent susceptibility to political machinations and rampant cronyism.

Then there is the reality that the world’s economies are littered with powerful examples of industrial policy failure. Japan was once considered the poster child for industrial policy success. In the 1980s, many American commentators insisted that unless the US imitated Japan’s extensive use of industrial policy, it risked being supplanted by Japan as the world’s economic superpower.

The irony is that from the early-1990s onwards, Japan started slipping into its ‘Lost Decades’ of stagnation, and there is little doubt that industrial policy played a leading part in facilitating that decline. Indeed, one of the most comprehensive studies of industrial policy’s long-term impact upon Japan concluded that it produced ‘little, if any positive impact on productivity, growth, or welfare’.

This track record should cause conservatives to be more wary of industrial policy, including the current Chinese variety.

Music

THE LAST GIANT:

Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95: Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality. (Peter Keepnews, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.


“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”

That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”

Mr. Rollins was rarely satisfied with his own playing; he often came away from a performance or a recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better. He unquestionably did have his off nights, perhaps more than any other jazz musician of his stature, but some fans saw this as a positive sign: The occasional bad night, they argued, was a small price to pay for his willingness to take chances and his refusal to constantly play the same things the same way.

Sonny Rollins: 12 Essential Albums: The towering saxophonist, who died at 95, was a master of living in the moment. Listen to some of his most compelling work, onstage and in the studio. (Hank Shteamer, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

‘The Bridge’ (1962)
By 1959, Rollins was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in jazz, but he wasn’t meeting his own high standards. So he decided to take more than two years off from performing and recording, famously spending much of that time practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the Lower East Side apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille. The album that commemorated his return made no radical break with the past, instead showcasing a warm, intimate sound built on the plush chording of the guitarist Jim Hall. Offsetting the relaxed mood was the title track, a Rollins original where he sailed over the brisk up-tempo swing of the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Ben Riley with marvelous agility.

Sonny Rollins – Stockholm – 1963 – (Sonny Rollins – 1930-2026) – Past Daily Tribute Edition

Sonny Rollins: One of jazz’s last living greats dies at 95 : Revered for albums including “The Bridge” and “Saxophone Colossus,” Rollins overcame addiction, prison and self-doubt to become one of jazz’s greatest saxophonists. (Shakeel Sobhan, 5/26/26, AFP)

Ever critical of his work, he once said in an interview, “I don’t consider myself a musician that has learned as much as I want to learn.”

At the height of his fame, he withdrew from performing in 1959 and spent more than two years practicing alone on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge, a period that inspired “The Bridge” and cemented his legacy.

Magic, mastery and magisterial power: 10 of Sonny Rollins’ greatest recordings: After his death aged 95, we look back at a remarkable catalogue of work that stretches from vivacious mid-50s sets to his evocative performance after 9/11 (John Fordham, 26 May 2026, The Guardian)

Sonny Rollins, colossus of jazz saxophone, dies aged 95: One of the last stars of the bebop generation, Rollins was a genius of melodic invention and improvisation, working with Davis, Monk, Coltrane and others (Ben Beaumont-Thomas, 25 May 2026, The Guardian)

‘I was so close to the sky. It was spiritual’: Sonny Rollins on jazz landmark The Bridge at 60 : It’s one of the most romantic stories in music: the jazz star rejecting fame to practise on a New York bridge for two years. Now 91, Rollins recalls those long cold days – and how he has coped after losing the power to play (John Fordham, 21 Jan 2022, The Guardian)

Rollins had withdrawn from jazz before, in the early 50s, when heroin addiction had taken him into a stretch of hard-labour rehab at the Lexington Narcotics Farm in Kentucky. In 1956, the year after he got clean, the exultant Saxophone Colossus session emerged. So Rollins understood the liberating potential of focused, relentless hard work, away from gigging and hanging out. But he also knew how fresh and different the new music of Coltrane, Coleman and Davis was sounding by 1959 (the year in which those three made the groundbreaking albums Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Kind of Blue) and felt he needed to provide answers of his own.

Did he worry about the disappointment his withdrawal might bring to his fans? “Am I playing music for other people, you mean?” Rollins inquires. “Yes I am, in a way. But I’m playing for myself. I have to sound good. I don’t want to make my public feel I’m great if I don’t feel like that. Also, I’ve always loved practising – as much as I did performing. Wherever I was, on tour or whatever, I always wanted to find some place to practise, because that’s in my DNA, to keep improving myself.”


Every scrap of music Rollins heard from his youth in jazz-steeped Harlem onwards seemed to get stored in the random access memory of his mind, to be inverted and reshuffled on the fly in performance. His neighbourhood friend Thelonious Monk would smuggle him underage into clubs, he would pass the world-famous Cotton Club on his walk to school, and he would internalise it all, plus snatches of his siblings’ classical practice, jukebox hits and more. Reappraising and digging into all that material in his head, away from the pressures of gigging and travel, seems to have been a trigger for Rollins ascending to the bridge.

“I just happened to be out walking and I saw some steps and I thought: let’s see what’s up there,” Rollins says. “And when I got up to the top, I just saw all this fantastic open space. No one was up there. It was busy, sure – the subway trains and cars were going over and the boats going underneath – but there weren’t many people walking on it in those days; it’s much busier now. There were a lot of pillars and abutments back then, where I could find spaces where people couldn’t see me, though they could hear me. The only people who could see me were the few who were walking across the bridge. And not many of them would stop to talk. I guess they mostly thought: who’s that crazy guy?”


Presumably calls of nature and inhospitable weather must have intervened now and then? “Well, I would play for a long time every day, often 14 or 15 hours. Of course, sometimes I’d come down to go to the bathroom, or I’d go to a bar I liked where I might have a cognac, but then I’d go right back up. If it was cold, I’d play with gloves on; that was not a problem.

“It was so wonderful to be so close to the sky up there, any time of year. Maybe this might sound a little bit corny to people, but it was a spiritual feeling to me. Years later, I remember playing an open-air concert, somewhere in Buffalo or Maine, and I looked up at the sky and felt that communion with some kind of spiritual element. It felt great to me – that distance thing, reaching out to something beyond the people.”

INDEX: Sonny Rollins (The Guardian)

AUDIO: The Bridge (remastered) (You Tube)

Sonny Rollins Is at Peace. But He Regrets Trying to One-Up Coltrane. (David Marchese2/27/20, NY Times Magazine)

I’m working toward why I’m here — what it’s all about. At this point in my life I’m — well, I don’t want to say satisfied, but I feel that I’m closer to an understanding. It’s always been my idea that the golden rule is a good thing, but I wasn’t quite able to understand if the golden rule was possible. If somebody is playing music and I’m playing music and we’re in a saxophone battle, I still have to play my best, regardless of the other guy. It has nothing to do with my trying to make him feel bad because playing music is for a higher cause. So I believe living by the golden rule is possible. Not only possible but the reason we’re here.

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers: Sonny Rollins dies the day before the Miles Davis centenary (Ted Gioia, May 26, 2026, The Honest Broker)

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