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)

UNIMAGINABLE AFFLUENCE:

October 9, 2026

The Wonder of Consumer Surplus: Is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country a good measure of economic wellbeing? No, it’s not (David R. Henderson, 10/08/26, Defining Ideas)

And what exactly is consumer surplus? The idea itself is straightforward. The consumer surplus that you get when you buy an item is the maximum amount you would have been willing to pay for the item minus what you actually pay. So, for example, if you would have been willing to pay $50 for a shirt, but actually pay $30, your consumer surplus on that purchase is $20. Another way of saying that is that the consumer surplus is a measure of the consumer’s gain from a particular trade.

Why consumer surplus matters

One of the hardest ideas for non-economists to accept is that both sides gain from trade. The good news is that when I gave examples in class, most students got the point quickly.

Indeed, one of my students gave an example that I hadn’t previously considered but that I have since used in speeches to illustrate the concept of consumer surplus. It goes like this: You go to a store and find a shirt with a price tag of $50. You try it on and decide you like it. You go to the cash register to pay. The salesperson points out something you hadn’t noticed: the shirt is on sale for 40 percent off and so the price is actually $30. My student pointed out that a minimum estimate of your consumer surplus is $20 because you would have been willing to pay $50 but instead paid only $30. Of course, that’s a minimum estimate because you probably would have been willing to pay at least somewhat more than $50. How do we know? Because you probably weren’t indifferent between buying the shirt at $50 or keeping your money.

Once you understand and really appreciate consumer surplus, you can start looking around and appreciating what you have.

https://www.hoover.org/research/wonder-consumer-surplus?utm_campaign=52012217-MKT%20%7C%20Hoover%20Daily%20Report%20%7C%202026&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9WDIFH4_Gv1i8qBK-oHn6e6u8O04FtKnpvWPklwR_O8GEuW1CymA-2nL_2MgLFxMRA_fn5nXOYRe0nPFrx9d1tEG_3IA&_hsmi=443357330&utm_content=443357330&utm_source=hs_email#:~:text=And%20what%20exactly,what%20you%20have.

Anglospherics

MAGA IS THE DEMAND OF STATUS FOR WHITE MEN…:

October 8, 2026

Law and Violence (IAN MITCHELL, 10/08/26, Country Life)

Status is the basis of all primitive “law”. The prehistorical paterfamilias ruled his roost by fist and club. Law amounted to the memory of past practice as carried in the memory of the head of the tribe. Decisions or commands going beyond tradition represented pure power, which was therefore not law in any acceptable modern sense. That was the ancient version of autocracy, or traditional kingship.

Whereas status depends on fist and club, contract depends on the voluntary agreement of two or more parties who, at the moment of signature, are juridical equals. That is a functional legal fiction which works because there is a greater power, the state, which will enforce the law which makes agreement possible in the first place. The principle behind all that is engraved above the entrance to the US Supreme Court: “Equal justice under law”.

Status imposes hierarchy; contract is based on voluntary agreement. The two principles represent, respectively, the vertical and the horizontal axes on the graph of all human power relations.

Though status is the basis of all physical power, even in the animal kingdom, contract has other sources of strength. Since the invention of writing, and the ability to store agreed texts (on clay tablets to begin with), legally enforceable agreements have been the insurgent power in human affairs. At first this was largely private, but soon the principle was applied to public affairs too.

From the point of view of Western political culture today, the effective starting point of organised resistance to status unbound was the sealing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

…by those who think themselves incapable of competing as equals.

Sport

SUITORS BEWARE:

October 7, 2026

Adventurer sets foot on British soil after 28-year walk home (Seren Hughes, October 06 2026, The Times)

For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot.

On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel.

Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea.

Energy

SKIPPING OUR WORST MISTAKE:

October 7, 2026

The solar boom is rapidly transforming emerging economies: Renewable electricity is cheaper than ever. So while the West got rich on coal and oil, some of the poorest countries in the world are banking on solar, wind and water instead. (Kira Schacht, 10/07/26, Deutsche-Welle)

Many of the same countries that became economically powerful off the back of fossil fuels are now trying to transition to renewables. But they are held back by centuries of legacy infrastructure.

Because a gas boiler won’t run on wind power, and a diesel truck cannot be solar-powered, societies looking to shift to green energy need to use more electricity and increase their share of renewables.

That is where many middle- and lower-income countries have an advantage. With less existing energy infrastructure built around fossil fuels, they are better placed for a faster rollout of renewable electricity sources.

In many instances, solar power in particular is now cheaper to produce than fossil electricity. And unlike large coal or gas plants, which take years to construct and millions in investments, solar and wind farms can be built quickly and with much less upfront cost.

Music

WRECKING:

October 7, 2026

Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell (Ted Gioia, Oct 05, 2026, The Honest Broker)

This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I’d heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.

One Economy to Rule Them All

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.”

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