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)

Family

LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORIES:

The Missing Kayaker: What happened to Ryan Borgwardt? (Jamie Thompson, November 6, 2025, The Atlantic)

Emily told the detective that Ryan had left their home in Watertown, about an hour from Big Green Lake, at around 4:45 p.m. the previous afternoon. He’d driven the family minivan to a friend’s house to pick up wood pellets for his stove. Before setting off, he’d mentioned that he might drop the kayak in the water somewhere on his way home, and attached an enclosed trailer with the kayak. He’d told Emily over the weekend that he wanted to fish on Big Green Lake, which would be roughly on his way.

Emily told the detective she’d texted with Ryan the previous evening. She forwarded screenshots of their exchange.

At 10:12 p.m., Emily had written, “Night. Love you.” About 15 minutes later, she’d texted again, telling him that their older son, 17, was spending the night at a friend’s house.

Five minutes later, Ryan texted back: “I may have snuck out on a lake.”

Emily: “That would have been nice to know…I was beginning to wonder why you weren’t home.”

Ryan apologized, but then added: “Temperature is perfect.”

Emily: “Nothing new. I should be used to it by now. So many nights I have no idea where you are when it’s late.”

Ryan: “The meteor shower is awesome in the dark.”

Emily asked Ryan to turn on his location-sharing in the Life360 app, which he did.

Emily: “Again, no communication. Would have been nice to know.”

Ryan: “I’ll work on this communication thing.”

Emily: “It sucks going to bed not having any idea where you are. Just saying.”

Ryan told Emily he’d forgotten his paddle and was instead using a fishing net.

Emily: “No paddle is dumb.”

Ryan: “I love you…goodnight.”

Emily: “Night. Love you too. Be safe.”

Ryan: “I’ll start heading back to shore soon.”

Emily: “K.”

After her last text, at 10:49 p.m., Emily said she fell asleep. When she woke around 5 a.m., Ryan still wasn’t home.

Emily texted him at 5:12 a.m.: “Where are you?????”

Then, at 5:16 a.m.: “Babe?????”

Missing: Inside New York’s Missing Persons Bureau, Captain John H. Ayers untangles runaway dreams, fake suicides, and vanishings that never resolve. (Morris Markey, July 21, 1934, The New Yorker)

As I said before, however, youth is not the chief problem of the Bureau. The greatest number of people who disappear are men, and they fall into quite explicit categories: They are running to escape a shrewish wife or an impossible family existence, or they are running to avoid the debacle that follows financial collapse, or they are old and feel themselves in the way of their relatives, or they are attempting to leave an impression of death, with consequent insurance benefits to wife and children.

The police have much sympathy with most of these fellows, even when they find them and have to bring them miserably back. They know that it takes a lot of driving to make a man give up everything that he knows, all of his small habits and his possessions and his friends, and begin life from scratch. But they are faced with the law when a wife or children have been abandoned, for it is in the law that a man must provide food and shelter for his family, even when that family exerts all the ingenuities to make him utterly miserable.

Health

MEMORY IS A LIAR:

Being a Doctor Will Never Be the Same After A.I. (Rachael Bedard, 9/25/26, The New York Times)

This summer, I used an A.I. tool — a platform called OpenEvidence, accessible only to health care providers — to help me choose antibiotics for one patient and to interpret unusual bloodwork for another. A.I. reminded me to consider migraines when a woman presented with dizziness. I chatted with the large language model about treatments for an older man with lung cancer. I have also consulted it about a rash on my father’s back, my son’s fever, a friend’s arm pain and my own difficulty sleeping.


I practice primary care, where every malady is my business. Almost every month, I’m confronted with a complaint or syndrome that I don’t recognize. I’m confident in my mastery over what doctors do — history-taking, reasoning, communicating. I’m less confident about my continued mastery of an ever-evolving universe of facts. Now, the chatbot in my pocket reassures me that I will always know enough, or have access to the cloud-based intelligence that generally does.

The wealthy and powerful tend to insist on seeing the most senior physician, who was also, hilariously, trained longest ago.

Soccer

#FSGIN:

The damage of the Manchester City verdict runs deep. An era of Premier League history is tainted (Oliver Kay, Sept. 26, 2026, The Athletic)


This is what the Premier League has been up against since City’s reputation was shaken by a series of stories published by Germany magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018, where hacked emails indicated that the club had run a concerted and sustained campaign to circumvent financial regulations (an allegation that City have consistently and vehemently denied).

At various points over the past eight years, various people in the football industry have speculated about what a positive outcome for the Premier League might look like. The conclusion? There wasn’t one. Find City guilty on multiple counts? It would tell us that the league had allowed its rules to be flaunted for years, raising serious questions about the competition’s integrity over the period in question and its ability to regulate its clubs in future. The league’s brand, as well as that of its dominant club over the past decade, would be damaged.

But allow City to get off lightly, either with the charges not proven or with a lenient sanction? The league would risk anarchy, the rulebook found to be meaningless, and rival clubs would be furious. Nobody wants a league table pockmarked by asterisks and points deductions, but there is, as the Premier League’s frequently embattled chief executive Richard Masters told Sky Sports News in 2024, “no happy alternative to enforcing the rules”.

Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executiveCarl Recine/Getty Images
Win or lose, the reputational risk to the league threatened to be enormous. In recent months, it has already found Chelsea guilty of breaches of financial regulations relating to payments to agents and unregistered third parties between 2009 and 2022. To put it in context, an entire period of Premier League history — featuring multiple league titles for both City and Chelsea — has been tainted and compromised.

Energy

THAT WAS EASY:

Commercially viable fusion energy that delivers limitless clean power could be closer to reality (Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Sep 25, 2026, Interesting Engineering)


A British company has demonstrated the key fuel compression principle underpinning FLARE, its proprietary approach to inertial fusion. First Light Fusion showcased this approach in a series of experiments on M3, the company’s in-house pulsed power facility.

FLARE separates the two main steps needed for fusion: first compressing the fuel, then rapidly igniting it. Much like an engine compresses fuel before ignition, FLARE first assembles the fuel to high density before delivering a separate, rapid burst of energy to trigger fusion. The M3 experiments validate the first of these stages: compressing fuel to high density using a simple, lower power driver.

“This experiment validates a central principle of FLARE: that we can simplify the machine by putting more functionality into the target,” said Mark Thomas, Chief Executive Officer at First Light Fusion.

All Comedy is Conservative

OFFENSE IS THE POINT:

Comic novel, where art thou? (Ian Oakley, 9/10/26, The Article)

The second key factor is the censorious age of social media and the rise of the awful sensitivity reader. Social media is awash with phoney “concerns” for people’s feelings, which is just a cover for seeking to cancel anyone or anything that keyboard warriors happen to dislike. Policing offence is the very death of comedy. Throw in a sensitivity reader and the comic novelist is doomed.

Anglospherics

1188 AND ALL THAT:

Meet Gerald of Wales, the medieval Bill Bryson who was Britain’s first great travel writer: Plagues of toads, bands of robbers and ‘remarkable’ eagles were no match for Gerald, discovers Nicholas Crane. (Nicholas Crane, 9/27/26, Country Life)

His party rode out of Hereford on Friday, March 4, heading west for the protection of the Norman castle at New Radnor and, after a night within its walls, continued south towards Hay-on-Wye, probably on the modern bridleway that crosses the exposed moorland of Gwaunceste Hill. I last hiked this bridleway in the company of a film crew shooting a BBC documentary about Gerald. All of us were protected from the wind and rain by high-tech, lightweight waterproofs and comfy boots, but the wools and leathers worn by Gerald and his companions were heavy and held the water. Faith was the medieval Gore-Tex.

Just So Stories

DARWIN HARDEST HIT:

Why it is reasonable to label Nathan Cofnas’ race realism as pseudoscientific (Pieter Beck, 25th September 2026, Skeptic)


Nathan Cofnas, the self-professed “race realist” who made international headlines when he accused Cambridge academic Jason Arday of plagiarism, has defended his “hereditarianism” position as scientific. I would argue, instead, that such beliefs are pseudoscientific.

Cofnas is mostly known for his controversial blogpost “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”, in which (among other things) he claims that “[In a meritocracy] Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Cofnas believes races are real (hence “race realism”) and that differences between races are due to genetic factors (hence “hereditarianism”). He puts most of his emphasis on differences in IQ, but also refers to other properties. Cofnas never makes explicit to what degree he thinks genes contribute to observed differences, but based on statements which suggest that he believes environmental interventions are useless, the role he confers to genetic factors must be very high.

Cofnas has received his fair share of criticism from relevant experts. When asked to comment about the claims Cofnas is making about race, IQ-expert Han van der Maas said that “Exceptional claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and I don’t see Cofnas providing such evidence.” Biologist Kevin Bird wrote: “Cofnas & all other scientific racists fail to meet basic academic standards. They don’t read or engage with evidence.” Biologist Gregory Kohn wrote that “Cofnas consistently resists even approaching the modern scientific literature. […] He traffics in shallow controversy and shallow controversy alone.” Geneticist Adam Rutherford: “Cofnas’ work is crap, and should never have been granted scholarly credibility.” And statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev has called Cofnas a “shallow thinker” and “racist” and said his work is based on “zero evidence whatsoever”.

However, to date I am not aware of any discussion of Cofnas’s pseudoscience in depth. People on both sides of the debate (pro and contra Cofnas) have a tendency to argue in the abstract, rather than discussing concrete passages from Cofnas’s work, as I will do here, citing Cofnas extensively. Since I am making quite a strong claim by using the term pseudoscience, I have an obligation to provide enough evidence.

There’s no such thing as specxies.

Health

FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT…INTO A DIAGNOSTIC MANUAL:


Trauma Is Apparently Contagious: The rise of “secondary traumatic stress” shows how far the concept has stretched—and that’s a problem for the patients most in need of care. (Christina Buttons, 9/26/26, City Journal)

Once trauma no longer required direct exposure, it became possible to describe the person hearing about another’s trauma as traumatized, too. In that context, psychologists Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman proposed the term “vicarious traumatization” in 1990 to describe changes in therapists who repeatedly encountered clients’ graphic stories of pain and stress.

From there, the number of people considered susceptible to secondary trauma expanded, and the concept has been invoked with increasing frequency. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a federally funded organization, now describes secondary traumatic stress as a “common occupational hazard” for professionals who work with traumatized children and warns that listening to their stories can compromise workers’ health and professional functioning.

The concept has also spread well beyond psychotherapists. Teachers can acquire secondary trauma from students. Journalists can experience vicarious trauma from reporting on suffering. In 2023, Time announced that “the whole world” was at risk of compassion fatigue because wars, mass shootings, disasters, and social media continually expose ordinary people to other people’s misery.

Identitarianism

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Religious ‘integralists’ on the right, meet your socialist soulmates: Where, exactly, do JD Vance and Zohran Mamdani differ on “the warmth of collectivism”? (George Will, September 25, 2026, Washington Post)


DSAers want to scrap the Constitution in order to facilitate confiscating wealth, private property and other impediments to government-enforced equality and social perfection. Christian integralists, who are disproportionately Catholic, are devout and determined to make the nation more so. They would enliven politics if they would specify the measures they advocate to (as they mistakenly say) return America to being a “Christian nation.”

Integralists want to integrate spiritual and temporal (government) power, subordinating the latter to the former. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, the most intellectually interesting integralist, opposes “the relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy,” and those who are “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution.” Integralists have no “horror of political domination and hierarchy” because law — government — must be “parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.”

Vermeule’s constitutionalism aims not to “protect liberty” as “an end in itself,” because “constraints on power are good only derivatively,” by serving the integralist agenda, which requires robust parental government. Government should “direct” individuals and society toward virtuous living through “respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function.” Well.

Energy

EVERY OBJECTION TO RENEWABLES WAS BOGUS:

Why farmers are pairing crops with solar panels (Josh Axelrod, 9/25/26, Deutsche Welle)

The idea for agrivoltaics dates back to 1981, when two German scientists published an article titled “Kartoffeln unter dem Kollektor” (or “Potatoes beneath the collector”). But the first pilot project didn’t begin until 2004 in Japan, a land-constrained country, where there’s particular concern over balancing solar deployment with the protection of farmland.

There are three main types of agrivoltaics: horizontal, where panels look directly up at the sky, vertical, where they’re placed in large rows, perpendicular to the ground, and integrated, often installed atop greenhouses.

Research suggests shade-tolerant crops stand to benefit. That includes berries, grapes and tomatoes — where the panels’ steel framing often doubles as trellises — as well as peaches and peppers.

The panels can also prevent water from fully evaporating, creating a more humid microclimate that benefits the soil — though humidity is a double-edged sword, sometimes introducing plant disease.

Sheep have also proven to be a particularly good match. Compared to cattle or goats, they’re generally easier to manage around solar infrastructure, less likely to damage equipment, and small enough to fit comfortably beneath panels. The practice has other sustainability upsides too: sheep manure fertilizes the soil, and sites require less herbicide.

“If we look at the sheep industry, this has been a real paradigm shift for them, where instead of having to pay to lease land to graze their animals — now they’re actually getting paid to graze,” Kinzer said. “So it completely puts the economics on its head and is a huge opportunity for the sheep industry, which is really struggling in the US pretty much since World War II.”

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Robotics/AI

THE MIND BOGGLES:

Sex

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

Music

DIRT MAID:

Just So Stories

APPLYING DARWINISM:

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