* Blog & notes for last week.
DAYLOG MON 08 SEP 25 / USA AGAINST HIV: One of the many shocks generated by the incoming Trump 2.0 Regime was the cut-off of US foreign aid, particularly treatments to prevent high-risk groups in poor countries from getting AIDS. Now things are looking up.
As discussed in an article from SCIENCE ("U.S. will fulfill Biden-era pledge to provide HIV prevention breakthrough to millions" by Jon Cohen, 5 September 2025), the US is now planning to provide the new anti-HIV drug lencapavir, which has just been approved, to poor countries. While previous "pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)" schemes required taking a pill every day, lenacapavir only requires a shot every six months. It doesn't confer immunity, which is hard to do with HIV since it mutates rapidly. Lencapavir instead jams the assembly of HIV in cells.
The US committed to providing lencapavir in December 2024, in the last weeks of the Biden Administration. The Trump Regime threw that pledge into doubt, but now the State Department says it working towards providing the drug to a dozen unidentified countries. Gilead Sciences, which created lenacapavir, is selling the drug for this effort at no profit, and is also making deals with six generics companies to make and sell the drug in middle- and low-income countries. The generics will not be available for two more years. Can't get indent from first line.
When Trump came into office a second time, there was much frantic talk of how dangerous he was. These days, people are still saying Trump is dangerous -- but also how weak and inept he is. The Trump Regime is a dead end. We'll get through this, it's just hard to say when.
CONFIDENCE IN US BUSINESSES: A recent Gallup poll shows that American public confidence in big business is at a new low -- having fallen from a high of 58% in 2012 to a low of 37% today. Capitalism in general has 54% approval, from a high of 61% in 2010. Socialism has remained in the negatives, at about 39% approval. The tricky part in that statistic is that there's not much agreement on what "socialism" actually is.
DAYLOG TUE 09 SEP 25 / SHRINKING US ECONOMY: Trump got so upset at bad employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in early August that he fired the BLS commissioner. The BLS has reacted by handing him even worse employment news this month.
Writing in THE NEW REPUBLIC, one Timothy Noah zeroed in on "Donald Trump's Incredible Shrinking Economy" (8 September 2025), starting out by saying current 4.3% US employment isn't all that bad. However, employment should be higher -- why isn't it?
The problem is rooted in the USA's falling birth rate. America's population is not growing and continuing to age, which means a shrinking labor market. The USA has therefore more or less chosen -- not all that deliberately -- to import workers.
And then came Trump 2.0. Before he re-entered office, immigrants were about 15.8% of America's population -- the most ever, compared to 14.8% in 1890 -- and made up 20% of the USA's work force. Now it's down to 19%. A million foreign-born people have been chased out. That actually got started under Biden, who cracked down on illegal immigration in 2024, with the border crossings then falling -- Trump's claim of a "crisis" on the USA's southern border was, of course, a lie.
Anyway, by the end of August it appeared that the Trump Regime had deported about 350,000 people. That hasn't resulted in a dramatic labor shortage because Trump's lunatic tariffs "policy" has been bringing down GDP. Employment is shrinking, but so is the economy. The Trump Regime is trying to claim the deportations mean more jobs for "native" (read, more or less, as "white") Americans, but there's been no gain on that front. The workforce has a higher ratio of "natives" in it these days, but mostly just because of the deportations. It should be noted that one of the rationales being Trump's tariffs is to "reshore" manufacturing to the USA, but Trump's deportations demonstrate the USA doesn't have the labor force to do it.
So, in between Trump's tariffs and deportations, the USA's economy is shrinking. That's not good news at all, but personally I think that's what needed to convince Americans who voted for Trump that they made a big mistake. BTW, so far Trump hasn't attacked the BLS for releasing the soft employment figures (again). I'm wondering if he's completely losing track of what's going on around him. That would explain a lot of things.
UNHAPPY NATIONAL GUARD: Videos are appearing online of the National Guard patrolling Washington DC, being tailed by people carrying a boom box, blasting out THE DARTH VADER MARCH. The troops look annoyed. Military occupation of America's cities? I don't think the troops are into that idea. [ED: Reports emerging the next day describe them as feeling "shame". The troops are not going to do any more for Trump than they have to.]
DAYLOG WED 10 SEP 25 / CRONY CAPITALISM: The Trump Regime has shown a clear tendency to get its fingers into America's big businesses, with some suggesting it looks like "socialism" at work. It's not: it's "crony capitalism", described by Wikipedia as an economic system featuring ...
QUOTE:
... close relationships between business people and government officials, [manifested in] favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, or other forms of state interventionism.
END_QUOTE
Socialism is, in principle, state control of business for the public good. Crony capitalism is nothing like that: it's all about control of business for the benefit of the ruling clique. It is common among fascistic regimes and is corrupt. Effectively, it's public officials on the "take" to a lesser or greater extent from big business, and then steering government contracts or subsidies to favorites, with crony businesses shutting out their competitors.
Crony capitalism varies in degree, sometimes being subtle enough to be hard to notice. However, there is nothing subtle about the Trump Regime's crony capitalism. Trump is only concerned with enriching himself, doesn't care who he steps on doing it, and doesn't hesitate to rip off his "partners". Trump's reckless tariff policies have been making life difficult for America's big businesses. Their response has been to kiss up to Trump, and hand him big contributions -- which appears to be one of the intents behind the tariffs.
Many big businesses liked the idea of re-electing Trump, envisioning that he would cut taxes and regulation. They failed to realize that Trump doesn't play by any rules but his own, and they've ended up with groveling and shakedowns. Maybe the Biden Administration doesn't seem so bad to them now. Big business learned to think of the government as their enemy, with some of them deciding democracy wasn't a good deal. Will they learn better? It's a fundamental change in mindset, so that remains to be seen.
DAYLOG THU 11 SEP 25 / CHARLIE KIRK KILLED: The big news from yesterday was the death of prominent far-Right troll Charlie Kirk -- who was speaking at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in the Provo area, when a sniper on a rooftop picked him off.
The sniper remains at large. Two people were arrested, questioned, and then let go; a hunting rifle was found in woods nearby -- supposedly with "evidence" linking it to transgender / antifascist thinking, but nobody with at least half a brain takes that seriously.
That points to one of the inevitable consequences of the shooting: it was certain to be followed by rumors running wild. Of course, the far Right blames the shooting on the Dems, and claims the Dems were all celebrating Kirk's death. In reality, Dem officials from Barack Obama on down denounced the shooting, with most postings on BlueSky doing so as well. Approving of the shooting in any way would have been politically absurd. A few soreheads on the Left felt the Dems were "glorifying" Kirk, but few Dems said anything kindly about him, beyond saying (in so many words) that he didn't deserve the death penalty, which was true. Of course, everyone on the Left knows Kirk was a mean, ignorant, bigoted troll -- it was just not the time nor place to badmouth him.
There were acid comments, of course -- notably, pointing to a 2023 comment by Kirk to the effect that he was OK with a few people being shot as a worthwhile price for the 2nd Amendment. Just up to being shot, Kirk also had made comments about the danger of "transgender mass shooters" -- a myth passed around on the far Right, ignoring that transgender mass shooters are only a fraction of a percent of such shootings in the USA, much smaller than their representation in the population. The great majority of mass shootings are by cis white males. Also, the majority of mass shootings are by the far Right.
Certainly, the Left had a motive to shoot at Kirk, but the skill of the killing suggests someone familiar with firearms and tactics, more characteristic of the Right. Kirk had been calling for release of the Epstein files, which could have antagonized a Trump supporter. Of course, the far Right's rantings have, to no surprise, completely ignored how their own vicious rhetoric has encouraged attacks on Dems.
There's talk of the shooting being a "turning point", but I think Charlie Kirk will be in the news cycle for a few weeks and then fade, with the far Right finding something else to rant about. Kirk will be forgotten. Not being important to me, I will forget about him quickly.
DAYLOG FRI 12 SEP 25 / REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE: As discussed in an article from NATURE ("A revolution is sweeping Europe's farms" by April Reese, 9 September 2025), climate change poses a threat to agriculture, and so a threat to humanity in general. The European Union (EU) is trying to address the threat by promoting "regenerative agriculture". It's not a radical idea, simply an integration of uncontroversial practices to maintain soil health, boost biodiversity, minimizes tilling, and cut down on pesticides.
Given 4 degrees Celsius of warming expected over the next 75 years, Southern and Western Europe could lose 10% of its agricultural economic output, from damages to crops and shrinking water supplies. That's far from total collapse, but it would still be big trouble. The problem is aggravated by the reality that about 2/3rds of the soils in the EU are degraded.
Regenerative agriculture involves practices such as planting cover crops, rotating crops, reducing tilling, and integrating trees. Portuguese farmer Herberto Brunk says that his "main goal is to actually recover the soil, get our organic matter up, get our nutrients recycled and reduce as much as possible the erosion. ... At the moment, we don't have any erosion at all due to water."
Regenerative agriculture means more work for farmers, and it doesn't necessarily improve crop yields by itself, instead protecting them over the long term. Right now, about 2% of farms in Europe are fully regenerative, while 5%-10% more are getting there.
In 2019, the EU introduced the "European Green Deal", with the target of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Also in 2019, Europe suffered a severe heat wave. In 2020, the EU accordingly committed to building a food system that "works for consumers, producers, climate and the environment". In 2024, the EU adopted a nature-restoration law, with a requirement for member states to boost biodiversity on farmlands.
The work is not easy; some farmers have protested what they see as unrealistic regulations; and funding has been a problem. However, it seems regenerative agriculture is there to stay in Europe.
* I was relieved to read in this article that EU agriculture is faced with challenges, but not near to total collapse. I'm very much wondering how new heat-resistant crop strains will factor, or can factor, into the exercise.
