Brothers Judd Blog

THE DAMAGE DONE:

Ancient Lead Poisoning May Have Contributed to the Roman Empire’s Downfall (Paul Smaglik, Jan 6, 2025, Discover)

Now a team of researchers has provided hard evidence linking pollution and ancient intellect. They identified the level of pollutants in three ice cores that dated between 500 B.C.E. through 600 C.E. — the era spanning the rise of the Roman Republic through the fall of the Roman Empire. Then they compared those levels with how lead pollution affected the general public during its peak in the 1970s, before it was banned from gasoline.

The lead in the air in Roman times was enough to affect IQs then by about a third as much as in the late 1970s, when the U.S. Clean Air Act went into effect and about twice as much as in the early 2010s, according to the study.

“Elites and non-elites in cities and rural areas alike were affected by the background air pollution — no one could escape the health effects,” says McConnell.

JUST YOUR AVERAGE TRUMPIST:

How Crazy Was The Las Vegas Cybertruck Bomber? (Tom Scocca, January 6, 2025, Defector)

The striking feature of Livelsberger’s writing was how ordinary it sounded. One of the two messages released by officials opened with a note-for-note cover of Trump’s central campaign message: “We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse.” What followed was a litany of standard doomer and/or influencer populism, the sort of grievances that the Trump movement runs on and which Elon Musk retooled X to concentrate and amplify.

“The top one percent decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them,” Livelsberger wrote. “You are cattle to them.” And: “A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.” And: “Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He complained about homelessness, called DEI a “cancer,” and declared (while endorsing Donald Trump) “We are done with the blatant corruption.”

His other message was just as familiar, in a slightly different key—the apocalyptic operator key of Steve Bannon and the most militant participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

Was this the tone of a mentally ill person? Yes. Was it the tone of the controlling faction of the Republican Party? Also, unquestionably, yes.

iDENTITARIANISM IS TEXAN:

The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s story is all-too familiar (Alexander Nazaryan, January 4, 2025, UnHerd)

He was Texan-born and -raised, an Army veteran who spoke with an East Texas drawl, forced to shack up at a trailer park after his career and love life went sideways. In short, he was as American as gas-station apple pie, loaded with carcinogens and carbohydrates, wrapped in a plastic sleeve that will be floating shortly in a waterway near you.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

CAN’T BEAT BEING AN ANGLOSPHERIC ISLAND NATION:

The US Invasion That Worked: Why the Dominican Republic Isn’t Cuba (Howard Husock, January 03, 2025, AEIdeas)

It was then, four years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion meant to topple the Communist Castro regime in Cuba, that Lyndon Johnson dispatched Marines to the Dominican Republic, another island nation some 600 miles east of Cuba. Architecture was not the only similarity between the countries. The DR, like Cuba, had long been run by a local dictator, Rafael Trujillo. After his 1961 assassination and a military coup that deposed the country’s first elected president, civil war broke out; one side was led by pro-Castro forces, who had commandeered the major radio station. Faced with the prospect of another Cuba in the Caribbean, Lyndon Johnson dispatched the Marines. As with Vietnam, the left objected, as per folk singer Phil Ochs’ protest song, “The Shores of Santo Domingo,” where he sang “up and down the coast, the generals drink a toast.”

In reality, the Marines, who left the next year, ushered in an era of democracy and prosperity; there have been free elections since 1966. During the same period there’s been a striking economic divergence between the DR and Cuba. The World Bank writes most recently,

The economic growth of the Dominican Republic has tripled the regional average over the past two decades, resulting in 2.8 million people rising out of poverty, a middle class that now surpasses the poor population, and an improvement in access to basic services, housing and education.

Cuba, with a nearly identical 11 million population, saw its GDP fall by 1.9 percent in 2023. It has had trouble keeping its electric grid functioning. And, of course, it is a Communist dictatorship—ranked 178th in economic freedom by the Heritage Foundation.

Pity the Frenchified Haitians.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Why Milton Friedman Still Matters (Paul Krause, 1/03/25, Voegelin View)

One of the most disturbing trends in American society is the drift toward economic totalitarianism. More and more Americans are speaking fondly of excessive government control over economic life, an erosion of economic liberty which will have dramatic consequences for our other freedoms.[…]

The assault on freedom begins with economics because economics touches everything in life and economics is the primary means by which strong families emerge and with strong families the political, social, and religious freedoms we enjoy. Without family vitality, there is no societal vitality. This, too, was something that Friedman keenly understood.

Friedman stated unequivocally that our political and spiritual loves and liberties were very much contingent upon economic freedom, “The economic controls that have proliferated in the United States in recent decades have not only restricted our freedom to use economic resources, they have also affected our freedom of speech, of press, and of religion.” Today, we all sense this reality that Friedman saw over 50 years. As our economic freedoms deteriorate so too are their efforts to restrict our political and religious liberties.

The majority of the intellectual class has convinced itself of human perfection in some form or another. This is the basis of all totalitarianism—the incessant, even violent, effort to remake human nature into a perfect end-state. Yet Friedman stated that lovers and champions of freedom have always recognized this paradox about humanity and freedom: the imperfection of humanity is the greatest pillar for the freedom of humanity. As he writes, lovers of freedom “conceive of men as imperfect beings.”

Freedom is good, though we know it is imperfect because we ourselves are “imperfect beings.” Good things are always ruined by the fanatical dreams of perfection. The bait and switch of the tyrannical lust of totalitarians is that they blame our imperfection on a system rather than seeing imperfection in ourselves. This gives them the license to dismantle the goods we have from freedom through the phantasmagoric promise of a perfect future.

The Biblical, anti-Rational, recognition of Man’s imperfectability is the Anglospheric difference.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

Why Are There No Trillion-Dollar Companies in Europe?: Large companies don’t just happen. They are born, fostered, and grown in low-tax, high-opportunity societies. (David Hebert, January 1, 2025, Daily Economy)

The same can be said about tech giants. They will want to locate themselves where most of their customers live and, with a massive customer base with one of the highest rates of adoption of technology in the world, locating in the US makes good business sense.

But this explanation falls short, too. Notice that it presumes that these tech giants exist and are simply deciding where to locate. The truth is that these tech companies did not descend upon the world like mana from heaven; they had to be created and built from the ground up. The real questions we must ask, then, are 1) what makes the US so fertile for economic growth and 2) what makes Europe so reticent for growth?

It is no secret that the US remains “the land of opportunity.” Even just logically, we can tell that it is based on immigration patterns. The US remains one of the most immigrated-to countries in the world. In fact, the UN reports that 20 percent of the total immigrants in the entire world are in the United States. But this still invites a question: why do so many people want to live in the United States when they could live elsewhere?

There are many factors, but chief among them are economic in nature. First, we can look at average wage rates across countries. The US remains one of the highest-earning countries in the world. Lest we think this is a fluke or a historical accident, cross-national studies confirm that simply living in the US actually causes wages for workers to increase.

The newly-awarded Nobel Prize economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson evidenced this by looking at the city of Nogales, a city at the border between Mexico and Arizona. What is unique about this situation is that the city’s people share a common heritage and culture; in fact, there are families that were split in two when the wall was first erected. Because of their shared heritage, the only real difference lies in which side of the fence, running right through the middle of downtown, one lives. The US side is much, much wealthier than the Mexican side. In fact, in 2012, the fire department on the US side of Nogales famously helped the Mexican side put out a fire by “exporting” water over the fence. They could only do this because of their dramatically higher wealth.

We can also look at the ease with which one can start a business.

WHEN GIANTS ROAMED THE EARTH:

New England stone walls lie at the intersection of history, archaeology, ecology and geoscience, and deserve a science of their own (Robert M. Thorson, December 15, 2024, The Conversation)

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That’s due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind – an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That’s long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth.

FREAKY FARM WIVES:

Is the Tradwife just a kink? Don’t underestimate the happy housewife’s power (Poppy Sowerby, December 30, 2024, UnHerd)

The “traditional-wife” lifestyle has recently become a cultural juggernaut. Born of the reactionary idea that women must stay at home to care for children and the household, it teenaged into an aspirational trend which involved everything the dream Fifties stay-at-home mum did plus a soupçon of farmgirl hardiness (the most viral tradwives are those who run homesteads, muddy, ruddy and graceful). In 2024, she came of age, with Mormon model Nara Smith becoming one of TikTok’s top influencers by baking in exquisite ballgowns, baby perennially on the hip. Hannah Neeleman (or “Ballerina Farm” on Instagram), then broke the internet in July. An article in The Sunday Times profiling this “queen of the tradwives” crystallised the fantasy. It kept X busy for at least two weeks, as commentators argued over whether the newspaper had unfairly implied that Neeleman was oppressed. For part of the fascination these women hold is the conviction that beneath their mild and milky exterior, torment and frustration must surely lurk. As a result, the article focused heavily on Neeleman’s pre-trad career as a ballerina at Juilliard; look what you could have been, the piece seemed to say — and you packed it all in… for this? Feminists have, after all, been trained by Betty Draper, Mrs Robinson and the Stepford wives to spy the Prozac-popping crackpot beneath the painted-on smile; exposing the tradwife’s purgatorial “real life” has become a favourite pastime of internet curtain-twitchers — not out of concern, but prurience.

But speculation that these influencers are trapped by male fantasies is all part of the grift: it is no coincidence that Neeleman wore the infamous milkmaid dress on the cover of Evie last month, with the headline “The New American Dream”. Flirting with the aesthetics of Simone de Beauvoir’s archetypal housewife — a woman condemned to “immanence”, a passive and internal state of drudgery — is a deliberate provocation by influencers like Neeleman: dressing like a milkmaid transfigures the common-or-garden microcelebrity into both a sex symbol and a challenge to modern feminism. This is the secret to their success.

Inevitably, then, pulling off the “homesteader” vibe has become the focus of a multimillion-dollar industry, with blogs and books springing up left, right and centre — well, mostly on the Right. But the guides betray an irony of this trend: the real tradwives aren’t just about frilly dresses — there is a serious and sober set of moral values at the core of trad ideology, one shot through with puritanical and paranoid beliefs about the state, Big Pharma, the food industry and so on interfering with the closed, controlled unit of the family. This, after all, is why Nara Smith spends four hours making her kids cinnamon-toast-crunch cereal from scratch. Being this evangelical takes dedication. So the delusion that young mums can dip into this aesthetic without engaging with the conservatism at its foundations is worth a lot of money.

There’s a reason that the tradwife’s appeal has endured — it has, let’s remember, been a trend for a decade or more. It’s partly because the media adores the whiff of oppression that clings to her, hence the Ballerina Farm hysteria. She is also an ideal foil for feminism — beautiful, natural and meek, she is everything conservative men love, and everything radfems hate: perfectly poised for virality. And that’s because her role as a lifestyle guru means that her actual values — though generally Mormon, conservative and modest — are mysterious and therefore intriguing. Her fans are not looking for direct precepts; being told that abortion is wrong, or that premarital sex makes you worthless, would not be appealing. Instead, they want to cosplay a nebulously traditional woman by baking rye bread in a long dress.

GODSPEED:

Jimmy Carter’s Boyhood Fishing Memories (Jimmy Carter, December 29, 2024, Garden & Gun)

About once a year my daddy took me on a fishing trip to a more distant place, usually farther south in Georgia. We made a couple of such visits to the Okefenokee Swamp in the southeastern corner of our state, near the Florida line and not far from the Atlantic Ocean but cut off from the east coast by sand hills. The swamp is a shallow dish of six hundred square miles of water and thousands of islands, mostly of floating peat, on which thick stands of cypress and other trees grow. These peat islands are the “trembling earth” from which the area got its Indian name. Stained with tannin, the water has a reddish-brown color, but was considered by all the fishermen to be pure enough to drink.

We stayed at the only fish camp around the western edge of the swamp, owned by a man named Lem Griffis. His simple pine­board bunkhouses, with screens instead of windowpanes, could accommodate about twenty guests. As we sat around an open fire at night, Lem was always eager to regale us with wild tales about the biggest bear, the prettiest woman, or a catch of so many fish they had to haul in water to fill up the hole left in the lake. His stories were honed by repetition so that the buildup and punch line equaled those of any professional entertainer. We listened and laughed for hours even when we were hearing the same yarn for the second or third time. His regular guests would urge, “Tell us about the city lady who thought her son might drown.”

Lem would wait awhile until enough others joined in the request, and then describe in vivid and heart-rending tones the anguish of a mother who was afraid to let her only child near the swamp. “I finally said, ‘Ma’am, I can guarantee you the boy won’t drown. I’ve been here all my life and never heerd of anybody drowning in this here swamp.’ The lady was quite relieved. There was always a long pause, until Lem finally added, “The gators always get them first.”

IT’S ALWAYS CUTE…:

The Great MAGA Immigration Meltdown (John Ganz, Dec 29, 2024, Unpopular Front)

While Elon Musk and his tech oligarch cohort have revealed themselves to be pro-immigration—at least,t for the type of skilled workers that they need for their businesses—the national populists of MAGA are up in arms about what they feel is a betrayal of the fundamental anti-immigration principle of the movement. These objections have been articulated in terms that range from putatively colorblind civic nationalism to raging racism and antisemitism, with the predictable specter of Jewish capitalists importing pliant ethnic hordes—a Great Replacement—being raised. It’s descended into name-calling with the pro-immigration business lords calling MAGA types “retards” and the MAGA types responding with other slurs that I will not repeat. For those of us who wish ill on all these characters, the battle has been amusing to watch. If only Bannon, Musk, Loomer, and Vivek could somehow all lose. It’s also pretty funny to see the racism machine that Musk built blow up in his face, although we all now have to live with the fallout.

As might be expected, Trump, himself an employer, has deferred to the power of money—the only force he respects—and come out in favor of the H-1B program.

This is not a debate about policy as such—in fact, many of the people doing the argument seem to have a very vague idea about how the program works—but, as the antagonists realize, about the ideological content of MAGA.

..when MAGA pretends it’s the illegality they object to