Ransomware is one of the most significant cybersecurity issues at all levels of government. The latest hack was reported Monday by the California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC) that a cybersecurity incident involved the California Department of Finance.

A statement published by Cal-CSIC described the threat as an “intrusion” that was “identified through coordination with state and federal security partners.”

“While we cannot comment on specifics of the ongoing investigation, we can share that no state funds have been compromised, and the Department of Finance is continuing its work to prepare the Governor’s Budget that will be released next month,” Cal-CSIC said. 

According to Bloomberg, the Russia-affiliated hacking group “LockBit” claimed on their blog that they swiped as much as 76GB of data, including IT, financial documents, confidential data, and “sexual proceedings in court.” 

Cybernews reported LockBit threatened to leak data if unspecified demands were not met by Christmas Eve. Cybersecurity experts say such demands usually involve cryptocurrency. 

Governor Gavin Newsom must unveil his budget for the next fiscal year by Jan. 10. Bloomberg added as of Monday afternoon, “the state’s website for past and current budgets remained inaccessible.” 

Former CNN producer John Griffin, who worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Chris Cuomo, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce a 9-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity as his Vermont ski house.

This is a different CNN pedophile than Jake Tapper’s former producer, Rick Saleeby, who resigned after it emerged that he solicited sexually explicit photos of an underage girl.

Griffin admitted to meeting the girl’s mother on a website during the summer of 2020, after which he persuaded her to bring the 9-year-old child to his Ludlow, Vermont ski home for illegal sexual activity, AP reports.

According to the Daily Mail, Griffin ‘used Google Hangouts and Kik to convince the mothers that a “woman is a woman regardless of her age,” and that “women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” according to the indictment.

In June of 2020, Griffin advised a mother of 9- and 13-year-old daughters that the mother’s responsibility was to see that her older daughter was “trained properly.”  Griffin later transferred over $3,000 to the mother for plane tickets so the mother and her 9-year-old daughter could fly from Nevada to Boston’s Logan airport.  The mother and child flew to Boston in July of 2020, where Griffin picked them up in his Tesla and drove them to his Ludlow house.  At the house, the daughter was directed to engage in, and did engage in, unlawful sexual activity.  

Reading this indictment will make you sick to your stomach pic.twitter.com/61FugCnJNg

— BUY PILLOW (@JackPosobiec) December 11, 2021

Griffin, who originally pleaded not guilty to three counts, was arrested on Dec. 10, 2021, a day after he was indicted by a grand jury. He worked for CNN for around eight years, and was fired following his arrest.

Griffin also allegedly attempted to entice two other children over the internet to engage in sexual activity – proposing a “virtual training session” in a video chat in April 2020 which would involve instructing a mother and her 14-year-old daughter to get naked and touch each other at his direction. 

In June 2020, Griffin proposed to the purported mother of a 16-year-old that she take a “little mother-daughter trip” to his ski house for sexual training involving the minor.

Griffin faces 10 years to life in prison when he’s sentenced on March 20, 2023, and must pay full restitution to the victims – an amount which is yet-to-be determined by the court. He also faces a $250,000 fine and other fees, and has agreed to forfeit his Tesla, electronics, and donate half the proceeds from his home in Vermont – and a Mercedes Benz, into the court registry.

This has been an awful year for stocks and bonds as the Federal Reserve wreaks havoc on financial markets to tame the highest inflation in decades. Risks are now increasing that overtightening by the Fed could spark a hard landing in 2023. Most asset classes have been clubbed like a baby seal, while one has escaped the beatdown: investment-grade wine. 

Investable wine is considered an ‘alternative asset’ by wealthy investors. Fine wine, with age, improves over time because there is only a limited supply of investment wines produced each year, or vintage, which must satisfy a growing global demand. 

Despite risk parity investors deeply in the red, meme stock traders on Reddit wiped out, and crypto kids decimated, wealthy folks holding fine wine investments are sitting back without stress as they are set to lock in positive returns for the year. 

The Liv-ex 1000 benchmark recorded a 13.6% increase year-to-date and a 44.6% rise over five years. What is most intriguing about investable wine is how it “acted like a defensive asset this year,” explained Topdown Charts founder Callum Thomas. 

Thomas continued: “We also saw a similar thing during the dot-com burst bear market, and during the 2008 financial crisis. It goes to show that sometimes you have to be a little bit more creative to find defensive assets (in a year where traditional safe haven assets have disappointed e.g. gold basically flat for the year, and bonds down double-digits).”

And many people might not be aware, but in economic downturns when lending standards are tightening, wealthy folks use wine collections, expensive artwork, and classic cars as collateral for loans while banks refuse to lend money to everyday folks. 

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The recently publicized internal Twitter communications have proven false the claim that the story around Hunter Biden’s laptop was a part of Russia’s disinformation campaign, former director of national intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe said Friday.

“What I said as the DNI in October 2020 was proven true,” Ratcliffe wrote on Twitter. “The IC had zero intelligence supporting a false narrative that the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Nobody in the IC had authority to say otherwise.”

Ratcliffe, who served as the nation’s top intelligence official and the principal intelligence adviser to President Donald Trump from 2020 to 2021, shared part of independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s post series, known as “Twitter Files.”

In the multi-post thread, Taibbi used screenshots of email exchanges between company executives to illustrate Twitter’s biased content moderation decisions, including the suppression of the New York Post’s report of the link then-presidential candidate Joe Biden allegedly had with dubious foreign business dealings based on emails retrieved from a laptop once belonged to his son, Hunter.

Twitter’s initial response to the story is to limit its reach, claiming at that time that this was based on the platform’s “Hacked Material Policy” that prohibited users from posting “content obtained through hacking.”

One of those screenshots, according to Taibbi, shows that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s moderation and safety leader until his recent resignation, had been having a “weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI” regarding issues with “election security” in the wake of the laptop story.

“Hacked Materials exploded. We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said the opposite), then said we unblocked it… and now we’re in a messy situation where our policy is in shambles, comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots, and we’re refactoring an exceedingly complex policy 18 days out from the election,” wrote one executive who is purportedly Roth.

“Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI re: election security,” the message continued. “The meeting happened about 15 minutes after the aforementioned Hacked Materials implosion; the government declined to share anything useful when asked.”

Roth’s weekly meetings with law enforcement and intelligence officials may have involved separate meetings, where not all of them showed up, Taibbi reported.

“I have to miss the FBI and DHS meetings today, unfortunately,” Roth wrote to a Twitter staffer, indicating that officials of the two agencies weren’t scheduled to meet with him together at once.

None of these messages mentioned anything about Russia, although at that time many commentators, media outlets, and Democrat leaders—notably House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), claimed that the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian disinformation plot.

“We know this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” Schiff told CNN in October 2020, claiming that it was in Moscow’s interest to keep Trump in the White House. “Clearly, the origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin, and the president is only happy to have Kremlin help in trying to amplify it.”

Such assertion had prompted Ratcliffe to speak out, accusing the Democrats of trying to “politicize the intelligence.”

“The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress,” Ratcliffe said in an interview with Fox Business following Schiff’s comments.

“It’s funny that some of the people who complain the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing the intelligence,” he added. “Unfortunately, it is Adam Schiff who said the intelligence community believes the Hunter Biden laptop and emails on it are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

A group of bipartisan lawmakers led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has introduced legislation that would completely ban the social media app TikTok from operating in the United States.

“TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is required by Chinese law to make the app’s data available to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” reads a Tuesday statement from Rubio’s office. “From the FBI Director to FCC Commissioners to cybersecurity experts, everyone has made clear the risk of TikTok being used to spy on Americans. “

Rubio – who introduced the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act) – is joined by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), who introduced companion legislation in the US House of Representatives.

“TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news,” said Gallagher. “It’s also an increasingly powerful media company that’s owned by ByteDance, which ultimately reports to the Chinese Communist Party – America’s foremost adversary.”

Allowing the app to continue to operate in the U.S. would be like allowing the U.S.S.R. to buy up the New York Times, Washington Post, and major broadcast networks during the Cold War. No country with even a passing interest in its own security would allow this to happen, which is why it’s time to ban TikTok and any other CCP-controlled app before it’s too late. -Rep. Mike Gallagher.

The app has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks, including a lawsuit from the state of Indiana, a ban in South Dakota, calls to ban TikTok ‘everywhere,’ and hitting a major snag in negotiations with the Biden administration over national security concerns.

One of the primary issues with TikTok – owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is where user data is housed.

Both ByteDance and US officials struck a preliminary agreement that TikTok data on US users would be hosted by Oracle Corp. TikTok, meanwhile, says it will delete the private data of US users from its own data centers in Virginia and Singapore as it transitions to fully store data with Oracle. The company has also said that access to US data by anyone outside of a newly established division to govern US data security would be limited by, and subject to, its protocols – which would be overseen by Oracle.

Certain administration officials, however, still aren’t comfortable with the arrangement, and have sought to make any TikTok security agreement stronger in some respects over concerns with the company’s access to consumer data, and its potential use for influence operations.

“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” said Rubio on Tuesday. “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”

Republicans have been pushing to ban the app altogether.

TikTok claims it doesn’t collect data on search and browsing history outside the app, though it does collect information within the app so that it ‘functions correctly,’ said the spokeswoman. For example, returning relevant search results and ensuring users don’t see the same videos multiple times.

Former US President Donald Trump sought to ban TikTok unless it was a US-owned entity – which President Biden rescinded shortly after taking office in light of legal challenges.

Authored by Charlotte Allen via The Epoch Times,

Not long after Elon Musk acquired Twitter with his promise of ending its censorship regime, a reporter from Reuters covering a White House press conference asked Karine Jean-Pierre, President Joe Biden’s press secretary, whether Twitter might become a “vector of misinformation.” Jean-Pierre’s response at the Nov. 28 press conference was:

“This is something that we’re certainly keeping an eye on. Look, we have always been very clear that when it comes to social media platforms, it is their responsibility to make sure that when it comes to misinformation, when it comes to the hate that we’re seeing, that they take action, that they continue to take action. … We’re all monitoring what’s currently occurring.”

That sounded pretty chilling. The idea that the government could be “monitoring” any part of any media for “misinformation” and “hate” speech—both of which are protected by the First Amendment unless they stray into defamation or incitement to imminent crime—ought to raise the hackles of anyone who cares about the Bill of Rights. And why, in particular, should social-media platforms have any legal obligation to “take action” against speech that might offend some people but is neither criminal nor libelous?

But in fact, that is exactly what the nation’s two wokest states, New York and California, have already decided that social media platforms, a category that can include everything from Facebook to chatrooms and traditional journalism blogs with comments, must henceforth do.

The New York law came first, in June, and it went into effect on Dec. 3. Realizing that free speech enjoys constitutional protection, New York’s legislators decided to outlaw only what they cagily called “hateful conduct.” But “hateful conduct,” as defined in the New York law, means “the use of a social media network to vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” Vilify? Humiliate? That sounds pretty much like … constitutionally protected speech.

Disturbing as it may be to listen to a rant against Jews, for example, the Al Sharpton of the 1990s and the Kanye West of 2022 weren’t saying anything that could be prosecuted. But the New York law requires social media networks to post “clear and concise policy readily available and accessible on their website and application that includes how such social media network will respond and address the reports of incidents of hateful conduct on their platform.” That forces everyone with a blog to pay lawyers to draft a policy statement acceptable to New York regulators and then spend hours trying to “respond,” for example, to a woman who says she feels “humiliated” that the blogger has described her as overweight.

​The California law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September and set to go into effect on Jan. 1, at least has the virtue of exempting service providers with gross revenues of less than $100 million per year. It’s targeted at Bay Area tech giants such as Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Twitter. But its reporting requirements are even more onerous. Every company that falls under the statute’s purview must submit a twice-a-year report to the California attorney general detailing its moderation policies, not simply for “hate speech” but for such categories as “racism,” “extremism,” “radicalization,” “disinformation or misinformation,” “harassment,” and “foreign political influence.” The company must list every instance that it flagged such content and how it handled it. State Rep. Jesse Gabriel, who introduced the bill that Newsom signed, said the new reporting requirements are designed to deal with “conspiracy theories and other dangerous content” allegedly widespread on social media.

​Neither the New York nor the California law explicitly censors disapproved forms of speech or requires social media platforms to do so. But their vague and subjective language (“vilify,” “extremism”) coupled with their threats of sanctions for noncompliance (a $15,000-a-day fine in California, a $1,000-a-day fine plus a possible attorney general’s investigation in New York) are powerful inducements for social media companies to play Big Brother. And in New York, for example, Attorney General Letitia James, responding to the mass shooting in March at a Buffalo supermarket that was briefly livestreamed, has called for even tougher restrictions on internet content, such as criminal and civil penalties for transmitting images that might inspire others to commit violent acts.   ​

​On Dec. 1, Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor and founder of the legal-news blog Volokh Conspiracy, together with two social media platforms, Rumble and Locals, filed a lawsuit challenging the New York content-moderation law on First Amendment grounds.

“New York politicians are slapping a speech-police badge on my chest because I run a blog,” Volokh said.

As for California, University of Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman writes: “By prioritizing certain content categories, the bill tells social media platforms that they must make special publication decisions in those categories to please the regulators and enforcers who are watching them. The resulting distortions to the platforms’ editorial decision-making constitutes censorship.”

​And as we’ve learned from the Biden-administration press secretary, California and New York aren’t the only government entities whose “regulators and enforcers” are “watching” social media with an eye to cracking down. Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his relaxation of the site’s content-moderation policies that routinely muffled conservatives have outraged political progressives.

A Nov. 23 report from the liberal Brookings Institution asserted that “hate speech” on Twitter, including derogatory references to Jews and blacks, had increased as much as 500 percent since Musk assumed control of the platform on Oct. 27. The report noted that the bulk of this invective came from about 300 troll accounts, but that didn’t stop Brookings from declaring, “When acquisitions of social media platforms occur, there should be an obligation of the new owner(s) to ensure that hate speech is moderated.”

That was a broad hint to Congress and the Biden administration. Expect federal regulators to try to force some heavy-handed censorship of Twitter, Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights.

Read more here…

Having had his little tête-à-tête with the current boss of Twitter – over Child abuse protection – the former boss of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, took to Twitter tonight to address a number of issues, including his take on The Twitter Files (which he appears to address as if he was an outsider) and his ‘biggest mistake’ as well.

As a reminder, the current boss of Twitter had this to say recently about Dorsey’s role in the past:

Absolutely! The real CEO was the head of “Trust & Safety”.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022

Jack Dorsey titled the blog post ‘A native internet protocol for social media’ (emphasis ours):

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified. 

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.

2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.

3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.

This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets).

I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here:

I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?

— jack (@jack) January 14, 2021

I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.

Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world. 

I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol. For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable. Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation. There is no need to own or host it themselves.

Many of you won’t trust this solution just because it’s me stating it. I get it, but that’s exactly the point. Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America.

I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable. And hopefully makes it all a lot more fun and informative again.

💸🛠️🌐

To accelerate open internet and protocol work, I’m going to open a new category of #startsmall grants: “open internet development.” It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS. I’ll make some grants next week, starting with $1mm/yr to Signal. Please let me know other great candidates for this money.

*  *  *

As you might imagine, Dorsey’s holier-than-thou views prompted some pushback on social media…

I agree users should be in charge of their own algorithms and a few other things. It’s a bit late for these epiphanies, sadly.

— (((clevecarole))) (@Clevecarole) December 13, 2022

If you knew how to fix it, why didnt you when you had the chance ?

— Iain (@iain3000) December 13, 2022

Too little to late.

— Omnimatty (@omnimattyc) December 13, 2022

@jack You caved and history will remember you as a coward. That is all.

— CryptoJbot (@CryptoJbot) December 13, 2022

You hired people that thought alike and then gave them free reign to do as they wished. They banned and suspended on a whim for wrong speak.

— Tyrone Jackson (@TyroneBJackson) December 13, 2022

This is pretty weak. I’d just accept the responsibility that Twitter was being run by a cult of middle managers who had personal opinions and vendettas against certain accounts. In addition, you allowed child exploitation, for that you should apologize.

— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) December 13, 2022

I read it, it doesn’t really make any sense.
Summary: We did the right thing but it was the wrong thing. It was simultaneously not wrong at the time but clearly wrong at the time. I was the CEO but I was a nobody. There was nothing I could do but I had total power.

— Lastdance 🇺🇦 (@Lastdance_LL) December 13, 2022

Fox News host Tucker Carlson went off on the US intelligence community during an appearance on former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s podcast. He also called Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer an “asshole” while discussing members of congress who are controlled by the intelligence community.

Carlson recounted an incident where he wanted to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin before the Ukraine war, and reached out through a well-connected friend to do so. Carlson kept Fox and his producers in the dark, yet was given a ‘tap on the shoulder’ by one of his ‘closest friends” who knew a high-up official at the National Security Agency.

After flying to Washington DC to meet in person, it was conveyed that the high-level NSA employee, who is a ‘secret fan’ of his show, knew that Carlson was “trying to get a Putin interview and go to Russia,” adding “they have your emails and your texts, and they’re going to leak them to the media to discredit you as a Putin lover.”

Carlson then called a friend who is a US Senator, who told him that the US intelligence community accused him of being a Russian agent.

“Michael McFaul, who I would say is the leader of the neocons in the House… I got into an argument with him once last year on the phone. He told somebody that I was a Russian agent or something, and I was outraged,” Tucker said, referring to the former US Ambassador to Russia under President Obama.

“So I called him on the phone, and I used bad language. I was really mad. And he [McFoul] said ‘whoa, whoa, whoa’ – that’s what the intel briefers told me, that you were working for Russia.”

“That’s what the intel briefers told you? You believe your fucking intel briefers? Like, how old are you son? I’m from DC. My dad was in this world. Like, you’re being manipulated by your intel briefers, DUH! And he’s like ‘well they had, you know, all kinds of corroborating evidence.'”

Watch:

(h/t @AMFirebrand)

Carlson went on to discuss Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) statement that “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this,” regarding former President Donald Trump.

“How could he say something like that?” Carlson said, adding “How could you, as the head Democrat in the Senate, accept a system where the people are not in charge? It is not a democracy. Unelected spy agencies are controlling the outcome of domestic politics, like, you’re ok with that?”

“That’s a dictatorship, asshole,” Carlson added. “Like what do you think that is?“

“And I couldn’t have less regard for Chuck Schumer and I know him and he’s not stupid, he’s not stupid at all,” Tucker continued. “He’s quite smart. So he’s never thought this through? He’s never thought it through? He has thought it through, and he accepts it as OK, and we should never accept something like that, ever.”

Watch the entire interview below:

Chalk up another way that China is benefitting from Western sanctions against Russia.

First we saw China seize the opportunity to buy Russian oil at a steep discount. Now, China’s shipyards are racking up record orders for liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers as world markets adjust to supply disruptions caused by the sanctions regime. 

In 2022, China has scored 45 LNG tanker orders — quintupling the country’s tally from last year. Having assembled only 9% of the world’s existing LNG tankers, China captured 30% of this year’s orders and now accounts for 21% of global orders on the books, Reuters reports. That’s about $60 billion in business. 

China’s growing presence in this speciality shipbuilding market represents demand spilling over from South Korea, which has long dominated the LNG tanker category. Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding accounts for 75% of China’s 2022 orders. 

South Korean shipbuilders have been deluged with orders for ships that will be used to transport gas from Qatar’s North Field expansion. That will bring huge growth in Qatar’s production capacity — to the extent that QatarEnergy’s CEO in October said his company will, within the next five to ten years, surpass Shell as the world’s largest natural gas trader. In that endeavor, Qatar is itself capitalizing on Europe’s drive to replace Russia’s pipeline gas with shipborne imports.  

Building modern, membrane LNG tankers is a highly technical process that requires certification by Gaztransport & Technigaz (GTT), a the French company that holds the patents and licenses its designs to shipyards. The need for precision — as hundreds of workers painstakingly laser-weld seams inside 40-meter-tall LNG tanks — translates into build times of up to 30 months.   

Some of the tanker demand is coming from China itself. SIA Energy’s Li Yao tells Reuters that China will need some 80 LNG tankers to haul 20 million tons of gas a year just from the United States. 

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge in Montana has ruled that parts of the state’s law preventing discrimination against individuals in health care settings based on their COVID-19 vaccination status are unconstitutional.

Republican-backed House Bill 702 was passed in 2021 by the Montana Legislature as an anti-discrimination measure and signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte in May of that same year.

The bill banned employers from mandating that employees get vaccinated or share their vaccine status through an immunity passport.

In a 41-page ruling on Dec. 9, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy stated that the law was unconstitutional as it applies to employers and employees of health care settings.

“No party questions the authority of the Montana Legislature and Governor to exercise their respective legislative or executive authority to enact or modify public health and anti-discrimination laws,” the lawsuit states. “Rather, the challenge, in this case, stems from an ostensibly purposed anti-discrimination statute and its incongruent impact on healthcare providers and patients, hospitals, nursing homes, doctor’s offices.”

Law Fails to Deal Specifically With COVID-19

State Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Department of Labor Commissioner Laurie Esau were named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit goes on to state that the law passed in 2021 failed to distinguish between vaccines and did not deal specifically with COVID-19, instead encompassing “all vaccines whether for measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis, or flu.”

This, in turn, plaintiffs argue, “caused critical concerns for health care providers whether hospitals, doctor’s offices or other medical facilities by limiting the ability of such providers to know the vaccination status of patients and employees.”

Plaintiffs also argue that the law “preemptively precludes health care providers and other employers from knowing the vaccination status of employees or patients if the employee or patient refuses to answer any inquiry about vaccination status or immunity passports.”

“That situation, for any number of reasons, creates untoward problems for healthcare providers of any description in trying to protect the environment where services to patients are rendered and to prevent the spread of diseases,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit argues that the law as it pertains to health care settings violated a string of laws.

In his ruling on Friday, Molloy said that plaintiffs had successfully argued that the law violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regulations.

Specifically, he said, plaintiffs had successfully argued that the law was preempted by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act which requires employers to consider accommodation to create a safe work environment for workers, including employees who are immunocompromised.

‘A Win for All Montanans’

“Deprived by law of the ability to require vaccination or immunity status of an employee, a health care employer is not able to properly consider possible reasonable accommodations if an employee asks to limit his or her exposure to unvaccinated individuals,” wrote Molloy, a Clinton appointee.

The judge further noted that HB 702 “removes an essential tool from the health care provider’s toolbox to stop or minimize the risk of spreading vaccine-preventable disease.”

Read more here…