* This is an archive of my own blog and online notes, with weekly entries collected by month. The current week in stand-alone format is available here. Feel free to CONTACT ME if so inclined.
DAYLOG TUE 26 AUG 25: Donald Trump has sent the troops to occupy Los Angeles and Washington DC, and is now threatening to send them to Chicago. Today, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker went public to tell Trump the troops weren't welcome there.
Writing on Substack, blogger Jay Kuo suggested today in an essay ("Not So Fast, Donald"): "Trump's plan to 'deploy troop' into blue cities is a paper tiger. We can't let its roar provoke us into escalation." Kuo then asks: "Is Trump blowing hot air with a little smoke, or is this an actual five-alarm fire?" In reality, Trump is on "very shaky legal ground" and the ploy may end up "backfiring" on him.
The Los Angeles intervention has considerable bearing on what Trump might do to Chicago. In sending the troops to LA, the White House invoked an obscure law -- "Title 10, Section 12406"-- that permits a limited use of the National Guard for Federal purposes. Title 10 permits the President to send in the National Guard in case of invasion, rebellion, or breakdown of Federal authority. None of these things were true in LA, so Trump claimed a bit of public unrest there as a "rebellion" that justified sending in the troops.
Well OK -- but according to the "Posse Comitatus Act", the Federalized troops only get to perform Federal functions, not local police functions. The State of California accordingly sued the Federal government; military lawyers responded by making it clear the military was not performing "local police functions". In other words, the intervention was only legal because the troops weren't really doing much of anything.
Incidentally, that was not such a restriction for Trump in Washington DC because, under the "Home Rule Act", the White House has extraordinary authority over the District of Columbia, and the troops can perform "local police functions". Anyplace else, orders to the troops to perform such functions have to go through the state governor.
In Chicago, the actions of the troops would be very restricted. The State of Illinois would press lawsuits against the Federal government, while the troops would be reluctant to obey illegal orders. Most of them would not be happy with the mission to begin with.
The real aim of the Trump White House, it seems, is to send in ICE to provoke local citizens to violence, justifying intervention against "rebellion". Citizens have to make sure they don't take the bait -- while recording everything that ICE does and send it out to the world.
DAYLOG TUE 26 AUG 25: The Trump Regime tries to bully the USA, but pushback is growing -- with Blue state governments necessarily becoming the most significant "countervailing force" against the rogue Federal government.
An essay by one Chris Armitage on Substack ("It's Time for Americans to Start Talking About Soft Secession", 18 August 2025) suggests there's a lot the states can do to push back, Armitage writing:
"Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps, attorneys general filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders, and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates."
"Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses. ... 23 Democratic attorneys general now gather on near-daily Zoom calls at 8 AM Pacific ... They divide responsibilities and share templates for lawsuits they've been drafting since last spring."
Many Blue states give more to the Federal government than they get back; control over banks in Blue states could slow down funds going to the Feds. States are asserting themselves by enacting expansive voter protections, climate policies, and immigration policies.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker have of course made headlines calling out the Trump Regime. Even when they can't flatly shut down Federal authority, they can make life difficult for Trump. Democratic governors are exploring what they can do to hobble Federal intrusions into states. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said state police would "absolutely not" help Trump's deportation efforts -- and SCOTUS precedent backs her up.
Armitage calls the state pushbacks "soft secession", though he admits not everyone likes the term. I'm not wild about it myself: Blue state governors don't want to leave the Union, they just want to assert state power until sanity prevails in the USA again. Sanity will prevail against the loser Trump Regime in the end. In the meantime, the states will come up with more ways to defy the corrupted Feds -- some won't work, many will. We get to see what happens.
DAYLOG WED 27 AUG 25: It's become well-known that AI chatbots can lead people inclined to delusions deeper into them, sometimes with calamitous results. One person afflicted with "AI psychosis" was hospitalized after ChatGPT convinced him he could bend time. Another man was encouraged by the chatbot to assassinate OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, leading to a confrontation in which the man was killed by police.
An article from FUTURISM ("New Paper Finds Cases of 'AI Psychosis' Manifesting Differently From Schizophrenia" by Frank Landymore, 26 August 2025) dug into this puzzling phenomenon. Researchers at King's College London examined over a dozen cases of chatbot-driven "AI psychosis", to unsurprisingly find that they had much in common with other mental-health syndromes, but a difference as well.
Lead author Hamilton Morrin says that chatbots can be very persuasive, being an "echo chamber for one". They can generate very humanlike responses to any question, while being designed to be agreeable and servile. There's a phenomenon called the "ELIZA syndrome" -- after ELIZA, the original chatbot -- in which some people using ELIZA were awestruck at chatting with a machine, even though ELIZA's conversational ability was obnoxiously witless. Modern chatbots are much more convincing, as well as heavily hyped, while not necessarily having adequate guardrails.
The KCL researchers found three related variations in AI psychosis:
Typically, the users start out making practical use of a chatbot -- then, having got comfortable with the AI, start making personal and emotional queries. The chatbots are designed to maximize engagement, with the users then gradually pulled in.
Morrin says new technologies have inspired delusions in the past, but AI chatbots have a drive to engage, and: "This feedback loop may potentially deepen and sustain delusions in a way we have not seen before." The one significant difference they found was that victims did not have typical symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations and disordered thoughts.
DAYLOG THU 28 AUG 25: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS ("The world's largest sand battery just went live in Finland" by Abhimanyu Ghoshal, 17 August 2025), the Finnish town of Pornainen just put the world's biggest "sand battery" into operation.
The "thermal storage unit", built by the company Polar Night Energy, is a metal drum full of sand about 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide (42 x 50 feet). It can store 100 megawatts of heat and keep the town warm for a week. The sand battery is heated by renewable electricity when it's available, using a hot-air pipe scheme, then releases the heat when it is not. It can get as hot as 600C (1,100F). It replaced a woodchip burning plant.
* In other news of renewable energy, an article from ARSTECHNICA ("US's spike in electricity use is slowing down a bit" by John Timmer, 26 August 2025), there was a surge in US electricity use in the 1st half of 2025, with the surge attributed to the AI boom and rise of new data centers to support it. The growth is slowing down now. The relevant fact is that almost 38% of new power capacity implied in the growth was from solar power.
Unfortunately, almost 17% of the growth was from coal -- an indication of the Trump Regime's insistence on propping up coal, even forcing one coal power plant that was slated to close to stay open. According to the article, however, coal is not on a boom:
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Natural gas continues its dominance, fueling 39% of the power placed on the grid during the first half of 2025. Nuclear follows at 18%, with coal at 17%. The renewables in order are wind (12%), solar (7%), and hydro (6%).
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Solar now generates more electricity for the USA than hydropower. Renewables are providing well more electricity than coal; renewables are growing, coal continues to dwindle. To be sure, the Trump Regime's deep hatred of renewables is not good news -- but though they may slow renewables down, they can't stop them.
DAYLOG FRI 29 AUG 25: Blogger Jay Kuo, suggested in a Substack essay ("The Emperor Has No Claws", 28 August 2025) that Donald Trump, while claiming unrestricted power as president, is nowhere near as powerful as he pretends to be, being hobbled by four significant constraints:
First, a significant problem for the Trump Regime is that, while the Republicans control Congress, the Democrats still have the ability to filibuster major legislation. The result is that Trump heavily relies on executive orders, which are notoriously limited.
Trump has built his harsh campaign against immigrants by leaning on the "Alien Enemies Act", which gives him wartime powers to summarily deal with "enemy aliens" in the USA. He's been notably shipping them off to a prison in El Salvador. The courts have not been enthusiastic, with the result that the Trump Regime isn't sending immigrants to El Salvador any longer.
In the same way, Trump has been on a rampage with tariffs, but he only has emergency powers to impose them. The courts haven't been enthusiastic about that idea either, with an appeals court just having judged against him. SCOTUS will end up judging in this case -- but it's such a stretch of the law that it's by no means certain that SCOTUS will side with Trump.
Second, Blue states are increasingly defying the Trump Regime. Another Trump game has been to send the National Guard to occupy Blue cities, but that's on shaky legal ground as well. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says he will resist the deployment of troops to Chicago, and the law is basically on his side. States have successfully fought back against Trump attempts to bully them.
Third, Trump does not have strong control over his government. His mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy has spread demoralization through the civil service, while creating management chaos that gets nothing done. Case in point is the recent court order shutting down the Florida detention center named "Alligator Alcatraz". There are even reports of long-time ICE officers who are not happy with the way Trump has used ICE for indiscriminate attacks on non-white Americans.
Fourth, popular support for Trump, never overwhelming, is fading. The Trump Regime likes to arrest people who stand up to ICE, but grand juries are now often refusing to pass down indictments in response. Growing public dissatisfaction with the Trump Regime is presenting a threat to Trump at the ballot box. Trump wants Red states to gerrymander to keep the House Red as well, but they're already gerrymandered -- while the 2026 midterms are increasingly likely to mean a shift to the Left, maybe a big one, and the gerrymandering may well mean more seats for Democrats.
There's been worries that Trump will try to cancel elections, but he doesn't have the power to do that, and so far he's busy with the sort of election cheating that we're used to -- suggesting he's got nothing more dangerous up his sleeve. Yes, things are very bad in the USA right now, but the bottom line is that Trump is weak, and we shouldn't be fooled. Kuo concludes:
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This fight is far from over, [but the reality is] that it has barely begun. As we press on, we should never lose sight of the fact that Trump is beatable, that Trump is weaker than he imagines, and that Trump Always Chickens Out in the end.
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