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)

WHEN MAN WAS RULED BY KING LUDD:

October 5, 2026

Life in The Grim Old Days: Chelsea Follett’s new history shows how wretched life was before the industrial revolution, but our escape from it began long before the steam engine. (Robert Zubrin, 4 Oct 2026, Quillette)

Here’s how it was: Because most children died in infancy, a woman needed to give birth many times, and sooner or later one of those births would almost certainly kill her. If somehow you survived infancy, childhood diseases would probably kill you, and if they didn’t, the education you got would be either no school or a nightmare school. If you made it to adulthood, the lack of transport would limit your marriage prospects to the people in your village, to whom you were probably related, and with whom you were therefore condemned to produce genetically questionable offspring (as you probably were yourself). You lived in a one-room shack filled with filth, or in a tenement in a town whose streets were filled with filth, and so the air stank and the water was unsafe to drink, which is why you were sick most of the time. You had just a few stinking lice-infested rags for clothes, and lice in your hair too, so you itched all the time. The food was of low quality and limited variety, and generally available in inadequate quantities. But even if on rare occasions you got something good to eat, you would not enjoy it much because, by the time you reached adulthood, most of your teeth were gone. You worked from dawn to dusk, but, exhausted as you were, you might not get much sleep because you shared your home with livestock, and even if they were well behaved and made little noise, you needed to be alert at night because there were no police, and you were living in a criminal-infested combat zone. After the development of printing, there were books, but even if you could read and afford them, you would not have much time to read because you worked all day and it was dark at night. Then, if you survived all this to live long enough to face old age, things really went downhill.

Energy

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

October 5, 2026

How everything-to-grid tech could turn your EV and home into part of giant power grid network (Kaif Shaikh, Oct 04, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

As solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and connected devices spread, millions of things that consume electricity can also store it, shift when they use it or, in some cases, send it back. “Everything-to-grid” is the emerging idea of coordinating those resources so they become active parts of the power system rather than simply sitting at the end of the network. The World Economic Forum included the concept among its Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026.

Just So Stories

IT’S NOT JUST THAT FOLKS BUILT CAREERS ON THE FAIRY TALE…:

October 4, 2026

Do we need a new theory of evolution? (Stephen Buranyi, 28 Jun 2022, The Guardian)

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

…but that they and many more made the fantasy their religion. You can’t expect them to be rational about it.

Sex

STOLEN “VALOR”:

October 3, 2026

The Decline of Bisexuality: Most people who identify as bisexual live like they’re straight. (Ellie Gardey Holmes, October 2, 2026, American Spectator)

Take Kate Brown, who served as Oregon’s governor from 2015 to 2023. Brown’s bisexual identity made her special to progressives. When she was sworn in as governor, Time’s headline announcing her inauguration read: “Oregon’s Kate Brown Becomes First Openly Bisexual U.S. Governor.” She used her identity to prop herself up as a heroic inspiration to people. “If I can be a role model for one young person that decides that their life is worth living because there’s someone like them in the world, it’s worth it,” she said in 2016.

And yet Brown’s identity requires virtually nothing of her. She has been married to her husband for 30 years. All she needs to do is continually insist that she is attracted to women even while she is married to her husband. (One notes that heterosexual people do not typically announce an attraction to people other than their spouse.)

Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema likewise claims a bisexual identity, and likewise does nothing as a result of it. She was previously married to a man and then carried on an affair with another man, and she has not publicly dated a woman.

Brown and Sinema are not alone. The Pew Research Center found in 2015 that a full 84 percent of people who identify as bisexual are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, while 7 percent aren’t in any relationship at all.

In a world where LGBTQ identity confers fewer social benefits, we can assume that bisexuals will often be the first to drop their identities, as they were the easiest to adopt in the first place and they don’t have much impact on one’s life.

Social contagions pass.

Music

TRADITION!:

October 3, 2026

A Place Among the Fiddlers: In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out. (David Alm, October 1, 2026, Longreads)(

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam.

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.”

Identitarianism

SCRATCH A POST-LIBERAL FIND A RACIST:

October 3, 2026

A Catholic Theologian Signs Up for Mass Cruelty: Yet another thinker puts his faith in the service of monstrous deportation policies (Gabriel Schoenfeld, 10/03/26, The UnPopulist)

A lesson from the 20th century is that intellectuals sometimes choose to serve monsters. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all found thinkers willing to sing their praise even as they murdered millions. On the spectrum of evil and death, Donald Trump, a crass, ignorant would-be authoritarian, is not in their league. And yet already, under Trump’s rule, people have died—and already lives are being ruined by the tens of thousands. As all this happens, crankish right-wing intellectuals have been drawn to Trump’s scepter as moths to a flame.

A case in point, not exactly a household name but not entirely unimportant, is Chad Pecknold. […]

What is the chief source of this threat? You guessed it: Immigration!

America, Pecknold tells us, “is not an idea, it is a PEOPLE.” With the unchecked influx of strangers, that “PEOPLE” is facing disintegration. The migration crisis, he writes, has “thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt.” In its rejection of America as a creedal nation in favor of one defined by heritage and inheritance, postliberalism slides inexorably into nativism.

The source of the trouble, in Pecknold’s view, is that “American Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, have been so captivated and captured by the implicit open borders theology of liberalism that too many have forgotten how to think like Christians—and like Americans.” Contrary to the precepts of liberalism, statesmen have a “sacred duty,” he says, to restrict who may remain in a country. Accordingly, he maintains, we must reject the constitutional precept of birthright citizenship under which anyone born here, including to parents lacking documentation, is automatically a citizen. At stake is nothing less than whether “our laws permit Americans to have a country or not.”

Energy

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

October 3, 2026

Can there be solar for all, everywhere by 2030? (Sarah Steffen, 10/02/26, Deutsche-Welle)

Solar is the cheapest form of electricity in the history of the world, said McKenna, who founded the climate advisory firm Climate and Nature Solutions, and the global coalition Women Leading on Climate.

“It is scaling way faster than anyone ever imagined.”

As is battery technology used to store excess renewable energy.

2030 seemed ample when the goal was 2050.

Conservative Thought

NEGATORY RAMPART:

October 3, 2026

Traditionalism: Russell Kirk & Co. seek continuity with the sources of American politics and culture. (Mark C. Henrie, September 28, 2026, Conservative Encyclopedia)

Focusing on the French Revolution, Kirk states emphatically that the overarching evil of the age is “ideology,” and he claims that conservatism properly understood is “the negation of ideology.” As such, conservatism prescribes a “politics of prudence,” a cautious statesmanship founded upon a sensitive understanding of the complexities of human nature, the limitations of human history, and the capaciousness of the human good. Of course, liberalism’s ancient boast has always been that it founds itself upon, and best adequates to, human nature—once that nature is shorn of illusions and superstition. To the liberal mind, one might even say that if ideology is defined as a project to achieve a utopian intellectual abstraction, then it is liberalism that is the negation of ideology.

Homocentric Universe

PHYSICS IS JUST A PROOF OF HUME:

October 2, 2026

On the Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli review – a physicist’s guide to life, the universe and everything: Near-mystical musings from a scientist who believes we are on the brink of a revolution in understanding ourselves (Farrah Jarral, 30 Sep 2026, The Guardian)

It’s enough to give you vertigo, and Rovelli admits it. “The resulting image of reality is haunting. Every fact is only a fact relative to something else, and even the fact that a fact is relative to something else is itself relative. There is no ground floor.” Yet, in contrast to the bleakness that can shroud such unflinching scientific accounts of the universe, Rovelli’s telling validates our messy, subjective human experiences. “None of this prevents us from describing the world from one perspective. Ours.”

Identitarianism Music

MEN ARE FROM MARR, MAGA IS FROM MORRISSEY:

October 2, 2026

The meaning of Johnny Marr: And of not talking about Morrissey (William Davies, Sep 27, 2026)

Now aged 67, Morrissey is in the demographic sweet-spot of Reform sympathisers (the over-70s have not abandoned the Tories in such high numbers). Violence against children was not merely a topic he turned to as he was running out of ideas from the 1990s onwards, it was one of the first things he wanted to vent when he was granted a public platform in 1983. Those who grew up in the 1960s and 70s experienced the final flush of institutionalised sadism against children, and the complete absence of systematic child protection against sexual abuse, which teachers, scout leaders, vicars, sports coaches and Radio One DJs exploited to the full. They have since watched as society progressively and systematically drove violence out of schools and parental norms, which is of course not to say that abuse does not persist in the shadows and the margins. ‘Progress’ came just too late for them, no doubt leaving many in a state of profound ambivalence regarding its desirability. The insult posed by ‘woke’ (for which read the reactionary depiction of it) is that someone might feel violated and harmed by nothing more than words.

As many have observed, on learning that Far Right riots frequently feature men in their 50s and 60s, some of the violence returning to Britain’s streets is due to men who developed a taste and skill for it over forty years ago, on football terraces, nights out and perhaps at the hands of family members. These same men are also more likely to dish it out in the home (where Barbarism Begins). Psychoanalysts must have things to say about the heightened significance of sexual violence against white girls in the imaginary of the contemporary Far Right, that speaks of more than just hypocrisy (though there is undoubtedly plenty of that).

The Morrissey that depicted a world of normalised sadism and abuse was not ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ but he was honest and disturbing, perhaps more than we’re entirely comfortable with. This is not to suggest that we must all ‘hug-a-racist’, as Cameron once suggested of ‘hoodies’. But if we’re looking for a national story, with working class Manchester and indie music at its heart, the current Johnny Marr/Andy Burnham cultural love-in only tells one side of it. The blend of sixties and nineties nostalgia that Burnham and Marr have come to express is a feel-good one, especially for my generation (Gen X) and some younger. It’s canny politics to lean into this as a vision of community and conviviality, allowing ideas of ‘working class identity’, ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ to become owned by decent, generous, quietly liberal people.

There is, however, a national id that has been repeatedly pushed down, but which was blasted out of the radio by Morrissey’s unique voice circa 1983-84. It now forces its way out through the corrupt grinning neo-fascism of Farageism, which promises a restoration of violence at the borders, at sea, in the welfare system and – who knows – even within the education system. Marr is now on the opposite side of the culture war from Morrissey

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