The latest article on this topic. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.

Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram. > The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on > the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, > according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a > brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early > 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi > Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in > money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake > investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market > services as varied as ...

Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to apply for refunds.

New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article: > China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance > technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are > also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI > driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights > for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to > counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and > China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders...

This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. > “Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been > China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, > touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change could lead to > political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy > protesters in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest > warrant hanging over his head. He was never able to return home. Now, decades > later and in failing health in Paris, Wan recalled something that had happened > one day in the late 1980s, when he was still living in Beijing...

Google has filed a complaint in court that details the scam: > In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group > in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy > fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes > of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, > credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known > brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.” > > These branded “Lighthouse” kits offer two versions of software, depending on > whether bad actors want to launch SMS and e-commerce scams. “Members may > subscribe to weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent licenses,” Google > alleged. Kits include “hundreds of templates for fake websites, domain set-up > tools for those fake websites, and other features designed to dupe victims > into believing they are entering sensitive information on a legitimate > website.”...

Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information: > Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. > Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City > Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. > > The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card > details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy > iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics. > > Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for > the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion > over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security...

Bill McKibben isn’t known for his rosy outlook on climate change. Back in 1989, he wrote The End of Nature, which is considered the first mainstream book warning of global warming’s potential effects on the planet. Since then, he’s been an ever-present voice on environmental issues, routinely sounding the alarm about how human activity is changing the planet while also organizing protests against the fossil fuel industries that are contributing to climate change. McKibben’s stark and straightforward foreboding about the future of the planet was once described as “dark realism.” But he has recently let a little light shine through thanks to the dramatic growth of renewable energy, particularly solar power. In his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, McKibben argues that the planet is experiencing the fastest energy transition in history from fossil fuels to solar and wind—and that transition could be the start of something big. “We’re not talking salvation here,” McKibben says. “We’re not talking stopping global warming. But we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in.” On this week’s More To The Story, McKibben sits down with host Al Letson to examine the rise of solar power, how China is leapfrogging the United States in renewable energy use, and the real reason the Trump administration is trying to kill solar and wind projects around the country. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bill, how are you this morning? Bill McKibben: I’m actually pretty darn good, which one feels bad about saying in the midst of planetary ecological trauma and the collapse of our democracy, but it’s a beautiful day in the mountains of Vermont and in the midst of all that bad stuff, I’ve got one piece of big good news, which it’s actually kind of fun to share. Yeah, I think in the midst of all the stress and pressure and sadness about the way the world is heading at this moment, I think having joy is a revolutionary act and it’s good. I think when you come outside and the sun is shining and it feels good outside, I don’t know. I don’t think we should be ashamed of it. I think we should bask it and hold onto it as long as possible because good Lord, who knows what’s next? Amen. One of the results of having spent my whole life working on climate change is I never take good weather for granted. If there’s a snowstorm, I make the most out of every flake. If there’s a beautiful cool fall-like morning like there was today, nobody’s out in it quicker than me. So I take your point 100%. How long have you been working in the field of environmental justice and thinking about the environment? Al, when I was 27, I wrote a book called The End of Nature, so this would’ve been 1989 because I’m an old person. So, wrote a book called The End of Nature that was the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then call the greenhouse effect. And that book, well, that book did well, it came out in 24 languages and things, but more to the point, it just made me realize that this was not only the most important question in the world, what was going to happen to the Earth’s climate, but the most interesting, that it required some understanding of science, but also more importantly of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology, of theology, of pretty much everything you could imagine. And so for 38 years now, I guess, it’s been my work and at some level, I wish I’d been able to spend my life on something not quite so bleak. On the other hand, I have to confess, I haven’t been bored in any point in there. Yeah. How would you describe the environmental causes in America since you’ve been watching it for so long? It seems to me that there’s a lot of one step forward, three steps back, one step forward, three steps back. I’d say it’s been more like one step forward, three quarters of a step back over and over again. And that’s a big problem because it’s not only that we have to move, it’s that we have to move fast. Climate change is really probably the first great question we’ve ever come up against that has time limit. As long as I’ve been alive and as long as you’ve been alive, our country’s been arguing over should we have national healthcare? I think we should. I think it’s a sin that we don’t, people are going to die and go bankrupt every year that we don’t join all the other countries of the world in offering it, but it’s not going to make it harder to do it when we eventually elect Bernie and set our minds to it than if we hadn’t delayed all this time. Climate change isn’t like that. Once you melt the Arctic, nobody has a plan for how you freeze it back up again. So we’re under some very serious time pressure, which is why it’s incredibly sad to watch our country pretty much alone among the world in reverse right now on the most important questions. Yeah. Is that forward movement and regression tied to our politics, i.e., is it tied to a specific party? If the Democrats are in office, we move forward, if Republicans come in office, we move backwards? Yeah, in the largest terms. The fossil fuel industry, more or less purchased the Republican Party 30, 35 years ago. Their biggest contributors have been the Koch brothers who are also the biggest oil and gas barons in America. And so it’s just been become party doctrine to pretend that physics and chemistry don’t really exist and we don’t have to worry about them. Democrats have been better, and in the case of Joe Biden actually, considerably better. His Inflation Reduction Act was the one serious attempt that America’s ever made to deal with the climate crisis, and it was far from perfect, and there were plenty of Democrats like Joe Manchin that got in the way and so on and so forth. But all in all, it was a good faith effort driven by extraordinary activism around the Green New Deal. And it’s a shame to see it now thrown into reverse in the Trump administration, especially because the rest of the world is at different paces, some of them very fast, starting to do the right thing here. So given all of that where we are and kind of stepping back away from the progress we had made forward, you just wrote a new book that is pretty optimistic, which is a little bit different for you because you’ve been described as dark realism. Tell me why are you feeling optimistic in this moment? About 36 months ago, the planet began an incredible surge of installation of renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. That surge is not just the fastest energy transition play on the planet now. It’s the fastest energy transition in history and by a lot, and the numbers are frankly kind of astonishing. I mean, the last month we have good data for is May. In China, in May, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. Now, a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were building the equivalent of one of those worth of solar panels every eight hours across China. Those kind of numbers are world-changing if we play it out for a few more years, and if everybody joins in. And you can see the same thing happening in parts of this country. California has not done everything right, but it’s done more right than most places, and California has hit some kind of tipping point in the last 11 or 12 months. Now, most days, California generates more than a hundred percent of the electricity it uses from clean energy, which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on their grid is batteries that didn’t exist three years ago. And the bottom line is a 40% fall in fossil fuel use for electricity in the fourth-largest economy in the world is the kind of number that, adopted worldwide, begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And we know that every 10th of a degree Celsius, that the temperature rises, moves another a hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one. We’re not talking salvation here, we’re not talking stopping global warming, but we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change, that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in. Yeah, so I own a home in Jacksonville, Florida. In the Sunshine State. In the Sunshine State. I was planning on getting solar panels for the house, but then I was told A, one, it would be really expensive, and then B, it wouldn’t save me that much on my bill because of the way some local ordinances are configured. And so for me, somebody who wants to have solar panels and wants to use solar power, it’s just not cost-effective. So how do we get past that? Well, there’s a lot of ways. One of the ways was what Biden was doing in the IRA, which was to offer serious tax credits. And those, despite the Republican defeat of them, remain in effect through the end of this year through New Year’s Eve. So if people move quickly, they can still get those. Probably more important in the long run, and this was the subject of a long piece I wrote for Mother Jones this summer, we need serious reform in the way that we permit and license these things. Putting solar panels on your roof in Florida is roughly three times more expensive than it is to put solar panels on your roof in say, Australia, to pick someplace with a similar climate, or Europe, someplace with a more difficult climate, costs three times as much here. A little bit of that’s because of tariffs on panels. Mostly it’s because every municipality in America, they send out their own team of inspectors, permits, on and on and on. It’s a bureaucratic mess, and that’s what drives the price up so dramatically. There’s actually an easy way to do it. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a piece of software called the Solar App Plus that allows contractors to just plug in the name of the type of equipment they’re going to put on the roof and the address that they’re doing it, and the computer quickly checks to see if it’s all compatible, and if it is, they get an instantaneous permit and get to work right away. And then, for apartment dwellers, because there’s almost as many apartment dwellers as homeowners in this country, who don’t have access to their own roof usually, we need another set of easy technology. We’re calling this balcony solar. And across Europe over the last three years, three and a half, 4 million apartment dwellers have gone to whatever you call Best Buy in Frankfurt or Brussels and come home for a few hundred euros with solar panel design just to be hung from the railing of a apartment balcony and then plugged directly into the wall. No electrician needed nothing. That’s illegal every place in this country except that progressive bastion in the state of Utah where the state legislature unanimously passed enabling legislation earlier this year because some Libertarian Republican state senator who I’ve talked to, an interesting guy, he said, “Well, if people in Stuttgart can have it, why not people in Provo?” And no one had a good reason, so now there’s on YouTube lots of videos of Happy Utahns putting up their balcony solar arrays. So let me just to clarify that because I never heard of this before. In overseas, in different countries, they can go to, I don’t know, an Ikea and grab a solar panel, come home and plug it in the wall to power their apartment? It often powers 25% of the power that they’re using in their apartment. It’s a real amazing thing and it’s for a few hundred euros. And among other things, it really introduces people to the joy of all this. There was a big story in The Guardian a few months ago following all sorts of people who’d done this and almost to a person, they’d all become fascinated by the app on their phone showing how much power they were generating at any given moment. Solar power is kind of a miracle. It exists in so many different sizes, from your balcony to big solar farms, all of which we need. But the thing that’s a miracle about it is precisely that it’s available to all of us. I mean, no one’s going to build a coal-fired power plant on their balcony. This is something that everybody can do, and it’s something that once you’ve got the panel, no one can control. We’re talking about energy that can’t be hoarded, that can’t be held in reserve, and that essentially the sun delivers for free every day when it rises above the horizon. So that is an extraordinary boon to especially poor people around the world and an extraordinary threat to the fossil fuel industry, which is why you’re seeing the crazy pushback that marks the Trump administration. So with the Trump administration and this bill that they passed, The Big Beautiful Bill, that impacts tax credits for renewable projects like solar, how is that going to affect the solar power industry in the United States? It’s going to decimate it. There are already companies laying people off and going out of business because that tax credit was important and it’s, since we can’t do anything in Washington at the moment, why we need state and local governments to step up big to change the rules here and try to keep this momentum going in the States. The United States accounts for about 11% of emissions in the world. The other 89%, things are going much better than they are here, not just in China, but in all the places that China touches. In some ways, the most powerful story for me in the book was what happened in Pakistan last year. Now, Pakistan’s been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. Its cities now routinely report temperatures of 125, 126 degrees. The two worst floods that really we’ve ever recorded on the planet happened in Pakistan over the last 15 years. Right now there’s big major, not quite as bad, but really serious flood across the Punjab. Pakistan also has an expensive and unreliable electric system. So about 18 months ago, people began importing in very large numbers, cheap Chinese solar panels from across their shared border. And within six months, eight months, Pakistanis, without government help, just basically using directions you can get on TikTok, had installed enough solar panels to equal half of the existing national electric grid in Pakistan. It’s the most amazing sort of citizen engineering project in history and of incredible value to people. Farmers in Pakistan, I don’t know if you’ve traveled in rural Asia, but the soundtrack of at part of the world is the hum of diesel pumps, often the cough of diesel generators because you need to bring up this irrigation water from quite a great depth to wells that came with the green revolution. Often for farmers, that diesel is the biggest single input cost that they have. So farmers were very early adopters here. Many of them lacked the money to build the steel supports that we’re used to seeing to hold your solar panels up. They just laid them on the ground and pointed them at the sun. Pakistanis last year used 35% less diesel than they did the year before. Now the same thing is happening in the last six months across large parts of Africa. Pretty much any place where there’s really deep established trade relations with China, and it’s not just solar panels. What the Chinese are also doing is building out the suite of appliances that make use of all that clean, cheap electricity. The most obvious example being electric vehicles and electric bikes. More than half the cars sold in China last month came with a plug dangling out the back, and now those are the top-selling cars in one developing nation after another around the world because they’re cheap and they’re good cars and because if you’re in Ethiopia or Djibouti or wherever you are, you have way more access to sunshine than you do to the incredibly long supply chain that you need to support a gasoline station. But my understanding, and my understanding is definitely dated, which is why I’m glad I’m talking to you, but for a very long time, my understanding of solar power was that it wasn’t that efficient, that you wouldn’t be able to get enough power to really do much of anything versus fossil fuels. Is it true that the Chinese have really invested in the technology and really pushed it forward? Yeah, I mean Chinese are now, you’ve heard of petro states, the Chinese are the first electro state in the world. This stuff works great and it works great here. I mean, I was telling you about what’s going on in California. In some ways, an even more remarkable story, given the politics, is that Texas is now installing clean energy faster than California because it’s the cheapest and it’s the fastest thing to put up. If you’re having to build data centers, and God knows, I’m not convinced we have to build as many data centers as we’re building, but if you do, the only thing that builds fast enough to get them up is solar or wind. You can put up a big solar farm in a matter of a few months as fast as you can build the dumb data center. Your question’s really important because for a very long time, all my life, we’ve called this stuff alternative energy, and it’s sort of been there on the fringe like maybe it’s not real big boy energy the way that oil and gas is. I think we’ve tended to think of it as the Whole Foods of energy. It’s like nice, but it’s pricey. It’s the Costco of energy now. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go. 95% of new electric generation around the world and around the country last year came from clean energy, and that’s precisely why the fossil fuel industry freaked out. You remember a year ago, Donald Trump told oil executives, “If you give me a billion dollars, you can have anything you want.” They gave him about half a billion between donations and advertising and lobbying. That was enough because he’s doing things even they couldn’t have imagined. I mean, he’s shut down two almost complete big wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. I mean, it’s craziness. We’ve never really seen anything like it. Do you think we’ll be able to bounce back? As we’re watching all of these forward movements that have happened before Trump came back into office, it feels like he is burning it all down and not just burning it down, but salting the earth. Nothing’s going to grow there again. Yeah, I completely hear you. Yeah. This one possibility. Look, 10 years from now, if we stay on the course that Trump has us on, any tourist who can actually get a visa to come to America, it’ll be like a Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. People will come to gawk at how people used to live back in the olden days. I don’t think that that’s what’s going to happen. I think that at some point, reality is going to catch up with this, and everyone’s going to start figuring out we’re paying way more for energy than else in the world, and that means our economy is always on the back foot. That means that our consumers are always strapped. I mean, electricity prices are up 10% this year so far around this country because he keeps saying, “We’re not going to build the cheapest, fastest way to make more electricity.” I don’t see how that can last. But then I don’t see how any of this, none of it… I mean, I confess, I feel out of my depth now, the hatred of immigrants, the racial hatred, the insane economic policy around tariffs, none of it makes any real sense to me politically or morally. So I could be wrong, but I hope that America, which after all was where the solar cell was invented and where the first solar cell came out of Edison, New Jersey in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine in the world went up on a Vermont mountain about 30 miles south of where I’m talking from you speaking in the 1940s. That we’ve now gifted the future to China is just crazy no matter what your politics are. The idea that we are ceding ground to China is not just about solar energy, but in all sorts of ways. The move of the Trump administration to be sort of isolationists is actually hurting us way more than being open and growing and advancing. Yep, I couldn’t agree more. Look, I’ve been to China a bunch of times. I’m glad that I’m not a Chinese citizen because doing the work I do, I would’ve been in jail long ago, and I’m aware of that and understand the imperfections and deep flaws in that country. But I also understand that they have a deep connection to reason. They’ve elected engineers, or not elected, appointed engineers to run their country now for decades while we’ve been electing lawyers to run ours. And as a result, they’re not surprisingly better at building stuff. And so they have. And I think now, they’re using that to build a kind of moral legitimacy in the world. If the biggest problem the world faces turns out to be climate change, and I have no doubt that it is, then China’s going to be the global leader in this fight because we’ve just walked away from it. Yes. The question that comes to mind when you say that is, it’s clear to me that what some climate change skeptics and renewable energy skeptics have been able to do is to wrap things like solar power and wind energy into the culture war. So now that it’s a part of the culture war, people just stand against it because, well, they’re on the wrong team. Instead of looking at the economic reality that their bills could go down significantly if they dived in. It’s super true, but it’s also true that solar power is remarkably popular across partisan lines. The polling we have shows that yeah, the Republican voters are less enamored of it now because Trump’s been going so hard after it, but still like it by large margins and want more government support for it. I think the reason is that there are several ways to think about this. I’m concerned about climate change. I’m a progressive. I like the idea that we’re networking the groovy power of the sun to save our planet, but I’ve lived my whole life in rural America, much of it in red state, rural America. I have lots of neighbors who are very conservative. There’s lots of Trump flags on my road, and some of them fly in front of homes with solar panels on them because if you’re completely convinced that your home is your castle and that you’re going to defend with your AR-15, it’s a better castle if it has its own independent power supply up on the roof, and people have really figured that out. So this can cut both ways, and I hope that it will. That’s that story from Utah about the balcony solar. That’s the one place where people have said, “Well, there’s no reason not to do this. Let’s do it.” Yeah. So you’ve been doing this work for a really long time. I’m curious, when you started doing this work, could you have ever imagined the place that we are in right now as a country? No. Remember I was 27 when I wrote this first book, so my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. Turns out that that’s not exactly how it works. It took me a while to figure out. Really the story of my life is first 10 years after that, I just kept writing more books and giving talks and things because I thought being a journalist that we were having an argument and that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do the right thing because why wouldn’t they? Took me too long, at least a decade, to figure out that we had won the argument, but that we were losing the fight because the fight wasn’t about data and reason and evidence. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had enough money and power to lose the argument, but keep their business model rolling merrily along. So that’s when I started just concluding that we needed to organize because if you don’t have billions of dollars, the only way to build power is to build movements. I started with seven college students, a thing called 350.org that became the first big global grassroots climate movement campaign. We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And in recent years, I’ve organized for old people like me, what we call Third Act, which now has about 100,000 Americans that work on climate and democracy and racial justice. And so this is a big sprawling fight, we don’t know how it’s going to come out. The reason I wrote this book, Here Comes the Sun, was just to give people a sense that all is not lost, that we do have some tools now that we can put to use. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Few have felt the whiplash of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with China more than American farmers. The US is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, from corn to soybeans, wheat, and cotton. And the largest importer of America’s farm products? China. The two countries have engaged in a back-and-forth series of escalating levies since Trump imposed tariffs on the country in April. Those tariffs were then deemed illegal the following month by a US trade court, and the administration is currently appealing that decision. One of the many farmers caught in limbo is Bryant Kagay, who raises cattle and grows soybeans, corn, and wheat. Kagay says he voted for Trump last year even though Trump promised that as president, he would place tariffs on the very products Kagay sells to China. But now, Kagay questions whether the president has a long-term trade strategy and is increasingly concerned about what the market will look like come harvest time this fall. “I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s,” Kagay says. When a farmer from a country with low or no tariffs can sell corn cheaper than Kagay’s on the global market, he adds, that farmer will win out. As the US and China continue negotiating, Kagay talks with host Al Letson about how tariffs from Trump’s first term affected his farm, why he voted for Trump in 2024 knowing tariffs could jeopardize his business, and why farmers are often hesitant to take government subsidies—yet often accept them anyway. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Al Letson: So tell me about your farm. From what I understand, you weren’t living in this area, you weren’t living in Missouri for a while, and then you and your family came back. Bryant Kagay: Yeah, well, I’m the fourth generation on our family farm. I guess my great-grandfather, he started a very small operation and then my grandfather has grown it, really, mostly in the 60s and 70s and 80s. But yeah, following college, I had a corporate job, lived in several different states, but in 2018 my wife and I decided to come back and work into the farm, more in a management-type role, management trainee, if you will, type role. And I’ve continued to take more responsibility since coming back. How many employees do you have on the farm? Yeah, so it’s myself, my dad, my 87-year-old grandfather is still involved as much as he can be. And then we have two full-time employees and currently one part-time employee. So we’re a fairly small operation as far as manpower goes. What do you produce? So our main products, corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we also have a cattle operation. Many will refer to it as a cow-calf, so we have cows, produce calves from them, but then we also have, often referred to as a beef feedlot or a finishing operation that we feed cattle to get them right up to the point of them going to the meat processor for them to become the finished product. So you’re running a family business that depends on international trade. We’ve been following President Trump’s trade war with China. What would really steep tariffs mean for your farm? I think that what they mean for our farm is, it’s not that different from what they would mean to everybody. We live in a very global economy, a global market. So many of the products that we purchase, both on the farm and within our households and within any business you run, often come from overseas. Those trade networks and industries have been set up, many of them have been in place for decades. Chinese manufacturing, we’ve been making things in China for years and years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They’ve got pretty good systems to get them shipped here. I think steep tariffs will, at least for the foreseeable future, will mostly raise the prices that everyday Americans and farmers spend on the things that they buy. So I think that’s how it affects all Americans. Now, how does it affect me differently? Well, many of the products I sell that get shipped into overseas markets or international markets, now they are looking to buy that commodity from somewhere else. And what I’m selling is a commodity. I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s. So if mine is now 20% higher or 120% higher, whatever these tariffs are, I’ll buy it somewhere else, because it’s the same stuff. Are you scared that if these tariffs continue that it will basically put you out of business? If China can buy soybeans from Central America at a much cheaper price than what they would buy them from you, how is that going to affect your farm in the long term, especially if these tariffs stay up? For our farm, personally, we try to manage things very financially conservative. So do I feel that a trade war would put us out of business? No, probably not, because if a trade war puts us out of business, it’s going to put a whole lot of other people out of business first, and there are business owners that have probably taken on more risk. And at the end of the day though, if there are, let’s just put it in simple terms, a hundred units of soybeans produced globally and China uses 50 of them, whether they get 50 from the United States or 50 from everywhere else, all the soybeans are probably going to go somewhere and get used. It’s that friction that gets added in the system for tariffs that, well, now instead of sending multiple large container ships to China with soybeans, I’ve got to send a hundred smaller container ships to multiple other countries to make that same sale. So you lose that economic efficiency the more hurdles you put in this trade deal. So what do you think of Trump’s reasons for imposing these tariffs? Well, it depends what day you get. So someday, one day, it may be, “I’m going to impose these tariffs because I want to bring American manufacturing back.” And you think, “Well, I could get behind parts of that in some industries.” But for that to happen, we’ve got to have consistent tariffs for a long time because I’m not going to come build a factory tomorrow, it’s going to take years. There’s whole supply chains that have to be built up around it, and if I’m an investor or a business owner, I don’t want to build a factory when tomorrow he may say, “Well, tariffs are off. We worked out a deal.” On one side, this long-term play that, “I want to get manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.” Which yeah, I think, I don’t know too many of us that would argue with that, but there’s a lot of hurdles to doing that and that’s a long-term play. And then the other side is, “Well, I’m just using it as a bargaining chip. I’m going to get him to the table and get better deals.” And he’s maybe done some of that. I don’t know. I’m not a hundred percent confident that he has a really clear vision for exactly how this plays out. I think, I don’t know, it’s been so uncertain whether, are these short-term, we’re going to try to get short-term deals, or is this a long-term strategic, we’re going to rebuild American manufacturing? And I don’t know where it is because it changes every week. And when we talk about, is it a long-term goal, I’ve done a lot of reporting on manufacturing in the past, and the thing that keeps coming to me is that it may be a long-term goal that is really unrealistic in the sense that I can’t imagine Americans going to work in manufacturing plants where the pay is not going to be the type of pay that… The reason why all the manufacturing is in different parts of the world is because their economies are different and people will go in there and work for a couple dollars an hour, whereas, here in America, people would need government aid to survive off of working in a factory if we were paying the same amount to workers that they do in China. So it doesn’t feel like a realistic goal to me, it feels like manufacturing at that scale is in our past and not really in our future. Yeah, I completely agree. I just think, yeah, if you want to talk automobile manufacturing or some of those higher level, more advanced type manufacturing. Yeah, and maybe there’s a national defense reason we need more computer chip manufacturing in the country, but if you think we’re going to have a Nike sneaker factory in the country, come on. These other countries have been doing this for decades. They’re good at it. They’ve got systems set up, they’ve got the people to work there. I don’t know any of my neighbors who want to go sit at a sewing machine and make t-shirts all day. That’s not what this country’s going to do. It’s probably not realistic. Yeah. So all that being said, in 2024 you voted for Trump knowing that this may be what he would do. How did you come to the decision to vote for him? That is a very good question, and it was something that I struggled with, to be a hundred percent honest, I was not thrilled with either candidate. I’m a little bit embarrassed that on the global stage, these are the best two candidates that we could come up with out of this great country. I was very uncomfortable with the Harris campaign on some social issues, some other things. I was very uncomfortable with the Trump campaign on a lot of, I guess, his personal character issues that I am very uncomfortable with. I don’t think it represents our country very well, what we stand for very well. Ultimately, because you look at what a president can do, I felt like his policies long-term were probably more in line with what I wanted, but this was not something that I was really sold on either way. So I did know that these trade wars were possibly coming. I also felt that his business experience, I guess I felt, much like he says, some of the time that he would use these type of things as a bargaining token, but at the end of the day, I do feel he’s got a decent business acumen and would recognize that, yeah, we’re not going to bring a bunch of manufacturing back to this country. Maybe we should use our power on the global stage to get some better trade deals. I was hopeful that amidst all the rhetoric and all the talk that he would use them maybe more wisely than I feel he has to this point. Let me run down some numbers for you here to… Because I want to focus up that you said that he’s got a good business acumen. In 1991, his casino, the Taj Mahal, bankrupt. In 1992, Trump Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Castle Hotel Casino, ’92, bankrupt. Trump Hotels, Casino and Resorts in 2004, bankrupt. Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009, bankrupt. I could go on, there’s more. I would say that the way we have talked about Trump, both in the media… Because I believe that the reality show that he was on where he’s got that great saying, “You’re fired.” It’s myth building. It makes this idea that he is a really great business man, but the truth of the matter is that when you look into his business deals, I mean he had a college that the government had to sanction and shut down because it was ultimately deemed, and I may be putting it in colloquial terms, but it was ultimately deemed a scam. So I mean, how do you feel about that when you think about it, looking at it from this vantage point? Yeah, maybe I should have rephrased my previous statement as he has given us this idea that he has a lot of business acumen. I’ve always questioned whether he really does or not, because I see those things that you’ve mentioned. Apparently he’s been pretty good at running failed businesses and enriching himself, which that is what pointed to a lot of the character issue that I had voting for him to begin with. I mean, that’s one of the character issues. I still think it’s no secret. I live in a very red area and the people I talk to, I think there’s still some that they still are very confident that he has this really good plan that this is all going to work out for the better. And I guess I don’t necessarily… I don’t have that much confidence. I think he’s doing a lot of running his mouth without much of a plan, and maybe it’ll end up okay in the end if he throws his power around enough. But I’m a little more skeptical. So Bryant, your farm has been in your family for a very long time. How have you seen farming change over the years? There have been a lot of changes in agriculture over the long term. When I think about my great-grandfather, he would’ve started with some horse-drawn equipment, likely moved into tractors pretty quickly thereafter, but nothing on the scale of what we use today. There’s a lot of technology that we use to try to make sure every product we use gets put in the right place at the right time, and we are just better at conserving land and water resources as well. I’ve done a lot of reporting with farmers in the past, and the one thing that I think our listeners may not understand or know, is really like the economics of farming. So I’m just curious if you can break down for my listeners, what’s your income like and how do you get that income? Do you get a big check from delivering cows to market? How does all that work? I think from the outside people see, we deliver a lot of high value products, whether it’s right now cattle are at record highs. The checks we receive from selling cattle are very high. The checks we receive from selling grain can be very big. To the average American, that’s a lot of money. The issue is that we have so many expenses tied to producing that crop that really very little of it is profit. As far as the money, when I had a corporate job, I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had so much money that went into my bank account and that was very reliable and consistent. With this, it’s a lot more inconsistent and you find the business can pay for a lot of our living expenses. So my out-of-pocket expenses are less, but I don’t take just regular paychecks. Mostly what we do is we take our profits and invest those back into the business through land and equipment that it’s like this business has it’s built in 401(K) that you’re investing in assets all the time and eventually you hope to get a pretty big asset base, but you don’t do it through collecting a lot of cash in your bank account. It goes elsewhere. When it comes to competition, it seems to me that you are dealing with different factors than your dad had, than your grandfather, than your grandfather had. And I’m thinking of specifically with the rise of big agriculture and these big company farms that I would imagine make it hard to compete because of the resources that they have. Yeah, I think what’s often referred to as corporate farms probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be some confusion in just because you’re a really large farming operation doesn’t mean it’s not still family owned and operated, but it may not still have that same family feel that I feel our operation does. As you get bigger, you do have to put some corporate structure, mid-level managers, a lot more process and procedure in place. We have seen over the past 10 years, especially some of the very biggest producers have continued to grow, and I think the economics have worked out for them to do that. And they’ve really built systems and as equipment gets bigger, they’re just able to cover a lot more acres. I think for our operation, we decided that our way to improve and build for the future was not necessarily to try to achieve scale at all costs, but to try to focus more on a more diverse operation and also just to produce, let’s say, higher quality over quantity, let’s put it that way. Yeah. So take me back to 2018 when President Trump imposed tariffs on China. This is right around the time when you are starting to come back to the farm. How’d that affect you and your family? Yeah, so that was an interesting year. We had a pretty severe drought that first summer I came back and then trade war with China on top of that. So it was a pretty rough year that first year, but I guess I was still getting my feet under me. So maybe I didn’t fully grasp, I just thought that was normal, but that first trade war, it did severely affect the price of soybeans, primarily because China is such a huge buyer of US soybeans. We produce a lot of soybeans, and when your largest customer, the harder you make that to do trade with them, that directly affects our bottom line. And then on top of that, they come through with these direct payments from the government that I think are a touchy subject amongst farmers. I’m not going to tell you we turned ours away. You feel like it’s a competitive market. You can’t reject it on principle, but at the same time, I don’t think any of us feel like that’s how we want markets to operate. We try to be self-sufficient and run our business in a way that can be profitable and let me do that. I don’t need the government to come in and write me a check to make sure I stay in business. Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is why do you think it’s a touchy subject? Well, I think if you ask many people, in the parts of the country I live, about welfare programs, SNAP, they might look at those with a negative light. This idea that, “Hey, I work really hard to support myself. I don’t need the federal government coming in and doing that for me.” And then all of a sudden I’m a farmer and I’m taking this check from the government because government-induced tariffs reduce the value of my product. At the same time, I don’t know any farmer who turned theirs away who said, “Well, I don’t believe in it, so I’m not going to accept it.” We all took it, but I ultimately think it’s really those programs aren’t administered very well on who actually needs them the worst. And also if you give all a certain number of farmers in the same area, a whole bunch of money, it’s no different than the COVID payments that drove a lot of inflation. You can’t just hand out a bunch of money and not have other effects in the economy. And I think we saw that as well through that. So there’s a lot of debate about whether those payments actually helped or hurt, and I’ll let economists argue over that. The thing that stands out for me when I think about those payments is that when Trump did it, the left complained. And when Biden did it, the right complained. To me, what it tells me is that America has turned politics into sports. Maybe neither party is functioning or serving Americans particularly well, but because of team loyalty, people just go with it and sometimes they vote not for their interests, but for the team that they represent, their home team, the thing that they feel strongly about. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons that our political system has drifted this way. I live in a congressional, like a house district that there’s virtually zero chance that it would ever flip to blue. So I think our incumbent, as long as he continues to say and do right-leaning things, he’s never going to be challenged. And he’s never going to be held to account for how much he actually accomplishes because, “Hey, he’s on my team, so I’m not going to go against something that my team wants.” But it’s something that American politics really has to figure out. I think we continue to go through these cycles where really nothing really happens. And I just think with this many smart people, we have to be able to come together and come up with solutions that maybe the edges of both sides are not thrilled with, but ultimately move our country forward. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, but I too am very frustrated with this polarized, “I pick my team. The other team can do nothing right and my team can do nothing wrong.” Because we just know that’s just not how it works, and it’s just not true. I’m not confident enough in my own abilities, knowledge, biases, to think that I have all the solutions to make all this better. I know we need both sides to be able to come together, but our political system, our primaries, there’s so many reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to break, but you just see these presidential elections that are so evenly split, so much urban rules, so much class-based voting, and it’s not good for our country, and we do need some leaders who can really bridge that and try to bring people together for a greater good. You just gave a great campaign speech. I’m just saying. You are looking for an answer and I think you might be it. I’m just saying. Bryant Kagay, thank you so much for talking to me, and thank you for being open, man. You just have a good conversation. I am going to be thinking about this conversation for days to come. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoy it. I try to be open and honest and I appreciate those kind words. I try to be a reasonable voice amidst all the polarization, so thank you.

One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain. A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies. > It would be hard for U.S. users to avoid the Chinese VPNs. The ownership of > many appeared deliberately opaque, with several concealing their structure > behind layers of offshore shell companies. TTP was able to determine the > Chinese ownership of the 20 VPN apps being offered to Apple’s U.S. users by > piecing together corporate documents from around the world. None of those apps > clearly disclosed their Chinese ownership...