Brothers Judd Blog

IMAGINE REPORTING INSTEAD OF MAKING STUFF UP?:

This Gen Z Investigative Reporter Is Rocking Conservative Media: Aaron Sibarium says he’s providing Old School, shoe-leather reporting from a conservative point of view. Except he’s not conservative. (MARC NOVICOFF, 11/25/2023, Politico)

“It’s rare to see someone who will cover something like, say, race-based treatment of Covid drugs … who also is like not a crank and has an IQ above 120,” Sibarium says, cracking half a smile. 

This quip is effectively Sibarium’s Statement of Purpose. In the 2½ years since he became a reporter, he’s snared some major scoops: There was his piece exploring how states, advised by the FDA to do so, used racial preferences in rationing scarce Covid-19 drugs, giving preference to young people of color over older white people. (Some of the states stopped the practice soon after he reported on them.) He broke a story that exposed the Columbia Law School’s plans to require video statements from applicants, presumably to evade the Supreme Court decision banning the consideration of race in admissions. (Columbia abandoned that plan, insisting it was a mistake, when Sibarium asked them about it.) And he uncovered Yale administrators’ bullying of a non-Black student who called his apartment a “trap house” in a party invitation, a scandal that brought personnel changes to the school. 

Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, is 27, diminutive, nasally and “formerly autistic.” (More on that later.) He’s become a force on the right who’s drawn praise from conservatives as far apart as Tucker Carlson and David French, who called Sibarium “a rising star reporter.” Sibarium doesn’t see his project as wholly new, as there has been conservative reporting for decades, but he’s trying to do something a little different.

“What maybe is new-ish about my personal project,” Sibarium says, is that he is trying “to report on the culture war in a way that is fairly aggressive and combative.”

As Americans’ trust in media has cratered, driven almost entirely by independents and Republicans, Sibarium has hunkered down, abstained from flirtations with fascism and racism (in imagery, group chats or pseudonymous op-eds) and done what some people have long been begging conservatives to do more of: pure reporting, digging up and revealing new information. Sibarium has done that, quietly, without sting operations — and without the millions of eyeballs turned on pundits like Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino and Carlson.  

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT INDIANA JONES WAS THE YEAR’S BIGGEST DISASTER:

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: Accidentally a Comedy?: It’s a portrayal so undignified that I almost expected ABBA’s “Waterloo” to play over the credits. (David Klion, November 20, 2023, New Republic)

But then there are the dialogue and the performances, above all Phoenix’s, which suggest a different genre altogether: high camp. At the critics’ screening I attended, there were regular snickers at a film that isn’t being marketed as a comedy—and yet I suspect that laughter is the reaction Scott is going for. Napoleon doesn’t make a lot of historical arguments, but it does have a perspective on its title character: It sees him not as a genius or a modernizer or a meritocrat, but as an arrogant, vain, bratty, ultimately pitiful little autocrat whose zeal for greatness cost far too many men their lives.

Perhaps this is the perspective that Scott, an 85-year-old Englishman, learned in school; certainly the script (written by David Scarpa, who previously collaborated with Scott on All the Money in the World) seems to have more respect for the Duke of Wellington, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who handed Bonaparte his final defeat, than it does for Bonaparte himself. Wellington, played by Rupert Everett, describes Bonaparte as ill-mannered “vermin” ahead of the Battle of Waterloo, and by that point the audience has every reason to agree, having watched Phoenix bumble his way through dozens of awkward and embarrassing set pieces.

Much of the awkwardness centers around Bonaparte’s relationship to Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), which provides most of the script’s dramatic heft. It’s no exaggeration to say that the film presents Josephine’s genitalia as the driver of a whole era of world history (10 minutes in, Kirby channels Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, and from then on Bonaparte is under her spell). Phoenix’s Bonaparte is motivated entirely by overcompensation for sexual inadequacy, which is neither creative nor persuasive, but at least it scans in the context of the film. It’s far less clear what motivates Josephine—status? love? lust? money?—but she does make for a plausible object of desire, a haughty dominatrix who cuckolds Bonaparte into invading most of Europe.

Rather than Abba, the soundtrack should be Benny Hill. But the big problem is that when Mr. Scott realized he’d accidentally made a comedy he didn’t go all in on the slapstick. Instead of snickering at what he’s put on the screen we could be guffawing along with him.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

China Tried to Keep Kids Off Social Media. Now the Elderly Are Hooked (LAVENDER AU, NOV 25, 2023, Wired)

Gao is 69 years old, one of a growing cohort of elderly people who have moved away from television and gravitated to Douyin, China’s most popular short-form video app. There are 267 million people aged over 60 in China, according to official statistics, and while China’s government has tried to limit young people’s use of Douyin, worried about its addictive nature, many of the app’s habitual users are their parents, or even grandparents.

“Whenever he’s not cooking, swimming, or sleeping, he’s on Douyin,” his daughter Helen says. “It’s brainless entertainment. It’s better to be playing with a cat, it’s better to be doing anything else.” She’s not a Douyin user herself. “I already have attention problems,” she says. “Douyin would make that worse.”

A former soldier, Gao follows the Israel-Palestine crisis and the war between Ukraine and Russia through videos made by commentators. He shows me one where a political analyst translates headlines from English-language media outlets, such as The Times of Israel. He watches others for their analysis of military strategy.

While television broadcasts the official viewpoint, Gao says that on Douyin there are often videos from different camps putting their views across. The censors might get to them after a while, but it’s possible to witness a spectrum of opinions.

SHOCK THERAPY:

The appeal of Argentina’s radical libertarian Javier Milei (HARRIET MARSDEN, 11/21/23, THE WEEK)

Despite the “fervent” support for Milei, his success owes more to the failures of his opponent, said Sam Meadows in The Spectator. Sergio Massa took the lead in October’s first poll, with Milei coming second, but the finance minister’s “inability” to tackle the nation’s economic woes over the past year “ultimately proved an electoral millstone he was unable to shrug off”. Inflation is the fourth highest in the world, and the country owes “gargantuan” debts to the IMF. […]

After spending most of a century “in thrall to one self-destructive economic ideology”, said the Financial Times’ newsletter “Trade Secrets”, Argentina has “decided to have a shot at another” after Milei takes office in December. “How a country manages to hop straight from Peronism to reactionary anarcho-capitalism without ever having a go at boring old liberal social democracy is a wonder to behold.”

FORCING THE CONTRADICTIONS:

Poll: Gantz popularity increases, Religious Zionist Party falls below electoral threshold (MEMO, November 25, 2023)

A poll on Friday showed an increase in the popularity of the head of the National Camp bloc and member of the War Cabinet, Benny Gantz, highlighting that he has significantly surpassed the Likud Party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, the surprise in the poll was the fall under the threshold rate of the far-right and racist Religious Zionist Party, headed by the Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich.

THE rIGHT’S WAR ON INDEPENDENCE:

‘Breakthrough battery’ from Sweden may cut dependency on China: Northvolt says new lithium-free sodium-ion battery is cheaper, more sustainable and doesn’t rely on scarce raw materials (Alex Lawson, 21 Nov 2023, The Guardian)

Europe’s energy and electric vehicle industries could reduce their dependency on scarce raw materials from China after the launch of a “breakthrough” sodium-ion battery, according to its Swedish developer.

Northvolt, Europe’s only large homegrown electric battery maker, has said it has made a lower cost, more sustainable battery designed to store electricity which does not use lithium, nickel, graphite and cobalt.

DO AS THEY DO, NOT AS THEY RANT:

America’s greenest state is deep deep red (Catherine Boudreau, Nov 21, 2023,, Business Insider)

Deals like Davis’ have made Texas — America’s oil capital for more than a century — the top producer of renewable energy in the US. The state has long generated the most wind power and is second only to California as a solar-energy producer. While fossil fuel still reigns supreme in the state’s energy mix, wind and solar account for a growing share of the total. As of October, wind and solar met between 25% and 41% of Texas’ energy demand, depending on the month, according to data from the state’s grid operator ERCOT. Add in nuclear power, which doesn’t produce greenhouse-gas emissions, and green energy met upward of 50% of the state’s demand in some months.

The rapid rise of green energy in deep-red Texas couldn’t come at a better time: The state’s population is growing and the strain on the electrical grid is only getting more intense. But the boom has also triggered a Texas-size showdown: Gov. Greg Abbott and a group of his fellow Republicans in the state legislature launched a campaign to prop up fossil fuels and penalize renewables, arguing it would make the grid more reliable. Critics aren’t convinced that subsidizing fossil fuels will solve the state’s electricity crunch.

The high-stakes battle for Texas’ energy future is a microcosm of how tricky America’s green transition is shaping up to be, especially when politics are involved. Slowing down renewable energy could cost Texas in the long term, both economically and socially. Billions of dollars of public and private investment are pouring into low-carbon industries. Meanwhile, the US is already losing billions to deadly climate-fueled disasters that scientists warn will get worse unless the world rapidly shifts away from fossil fuels.

WE CAN’T GET RID OF DRIVERS AND COMBUSTION FAST ENOUGH:

Do electric cars pose a greater fire risk than petrol or diesel vehicles?: the first in a series exploring the myths and realities surrounding EVs (Jasper Jolly, 20 Nov 2023, The Guardian)

“All the data shows that EVs are just much, much less likely to set on fire than their petrol equivalent,” said Colin Walker, the head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank. “The many, many fires that you have for petrol or diesel cars just aren’t reported.”

Fires can start in several ways. Car batteries store energy by moving lithium ions inside a battery cell but if cells are penetrated or if impurities from manufacturing errors cause short-circuits, then unwanted chemical reactions can start “thermal runaway”, where cells heat up rapidly, releasing toxic and flammable gas. In petrol cars, fires can start via electrical faults causing sparks or if the engine overheats because of a fault in the cooling systems, potentially igniting flammable fuel.

In Norway, which has the world’s highest proportion of electric car sales, there are between four and five times more fires in petrol and diesel cars, according to the directorate for social security and emergency preparedness. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency this year found that there were 3.8 fires per 100,000 electric or hybrid cars in 2022, compared with 68 fires per 100,000 cars when taking all fuel types into account. However, the latter figures include arson, making comparisons tricky.

Australia’s Department of Defence funded EV FireSafe to look into the question. It found there was a 0.0012% chance of a passenger electric vehicle battery catching fire, compared with a 0.1% chance for internal combustion engine cars. (The Home Office said it was unable to provide data for the UK.)

Elon Musk’s Tesla is the world’s biggest maker of electric cars. It says the number of fires on US roads involving Teslas from 2012 to 2021 was 11 times lower per mile than the figure for all cars, the vast majority of which have petrol or diesel engines.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

Piecing Together the Evidence: Open-Source Intelligence in Israel’s Gaza War: Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins breaks down his pioneering investigative toolkit (HENRY CARNELL, 11/24/23, MoJo)

What guidance would you give readers who are being flooded with this type of information? What does a well-investigated piece look like?

One issue over the last few weeks is, a lot of organizations that usually produce quite high-quality work on other issues have kind of tried to find answers where there may not be answers available. With the [Al-Ahli] hospital bombing, there are different versions of events, depending on which quite reputable organization you ask, and that’s a problem.

We’ve seen, for example, an analysis by one news organization that pointed towards the rocket being launched from Gaza. Another news organization analyzed the same videos and pointed to it being from Israel. Even good-quality news organizations are producing contradictory statements about the same footage. It’s not even an issue of disinformation around trolls and grifters. It’s a much bigger issue.

You’ve explained that it takes a while to get to the truth. What goes into a Bellingcat investigation?

If we’re talking about conflict incidents, like an airstrike that blows up a building, the first thing we’re trying to do is gather as much of the digital evidence that’s out there, like videos and photographs shared from the scene. Ideally, we try to find them from the original sources where they’re shared, but that’s sometimes not possible.

Once we have all that visual information, we do a process called geolocation, which confirms exactly where these images were taken. You can’t really trust an image from an incident unless you know exactly where it took place. Once you have that, you have a catalog of content of the incident. Then you put that into a timeline.

When you look at footage, you find other images of the same scene, and you start thinking, “What has changed?” You may start looking for munition debris, the shape of a crater, shrapnel spray, and other details like that. Establishing a link between that rocket fire and [an] explosion in the hospital is very important to do.

We also look at media reports and social media posts of witnesses talking about the incident—not to take them at face value, but to look at them and say, “What is consistent with what we’re seeing? What adds bits of information we can explore using visual evidence?” If someone says there was a rocket at the scene, or the remains of a rocket, then we’ll hunt for that through the imagery.

Using that process, [we’re] going back in time to the moment of the event to establish what happened—and, ideally, moments leading up to the event as well. And sometimes that’s possible. For example, we had one investigation into a supermarket hit by a missile in Ukraine. The actual missile in flight was caught by a CCTV camera just outside the building [in] two frames. From that, we’re able to identify the type of missile that was used. It’s piecing together all that evidence, understanding where it is in time and space, and using that nexus of information to start establishing facts and eliminating scenarios.

That’s not to say that if a claim is wrong, the opposite is true. That’s just to say that [the] scenario has been eliminated and we can move to looking at other potential scenarios, hoping that through that process of elimination, you come to one likely scenario—which isn’t always possible.

With the hospital bombing, there was a claim [that] it was a large Israeli bomb. The crater that was left was not from one of those kinds of bombs; it was from a different kind of smaller munition. I personally still don’t know if it was an Israeli missile or rocket or a misfired rocket from Gaza. But I can at least eliminate some of the scenarios. And as more information emerges, you can integrate that into your understanding of the events.

THESE ARE ACTUALLY THE ARGUMENTS TO TAX ONLY CONSUMPTION:

Cutting inheritance tax is not just fiscally unsound – it’s unfair (Ben Ramanauskas, 11/20/23, Cap X)

[U]sing this increased revenue to cut inheritance tax would not only be fiscally unsound, it would be deeply unfair. It would represent an even greater shift away from taxing wealth and towards wages. Cutting inheritance tax at this time would therefore be a giveaway to the wealthiest funded by working people.

Rather than cutting inheritance tax, the Chancellor should instead eliminate fiscal drag by unfreezing the income tax and national insurance thresholds.

The main reason for this is that it will allow people to keep more of their money. While inflation is returning to target, there is still a cost of living crisis gripping the country. Millions of households across the country are struggling to make ends meet despite working hard, often in multiple jobs. Increasing tax thresholds in line with inflation will mean that they have more money to spend on themselves and their families.

Ending fiscal drag would also boost productivity. We have seen stagnant productivity growth in the UK since the Global Financial Crisis and while the tax rate is far from being the main cause of this, it has almost certainly contributed to it. As Paul Krugman pointed out, ‘Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything’. Productivity is the key driver of economic growth, which has been persistently low and is forecast to be non-existent over the next year. We have already experienced one lost decade in the UK and we are set to experience another if we don’t turn things around. The government should be doing whatever it takes to boost productivity, and so ending fiscal drag should be a priority.

Unfreezing tax thresholds could also help with the labour shortages facing many areas of the economy. While the labour market is loosening, it is tight by historical standards. Firms are really struggling to get staff to work for them, especially in hospitality and social care. If a person knows that they will be no better off in real terms then they are unlikely to say yes to an extra shift or take on another job. Allowing them to keep more of their money will incentivise them to work longer hours or look for another job.

In other words, stop punishing work, investment, and savings to make them more attractive.