MrG's Blog & Notes For October 2025

* 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.

[MON 06 OCT 25] THE WEEK THAT WAS 40

DAYLOG MON 29 SEP 25 / DON'T PANIC: Law blogger Jay Kuo wrote an essay titled "Holding Our Collective Breath" on Substack, dated 29 September 2025, suggesting that, while Trump's America seems particularly insane for the moment, we need to step back and chill out a bit.

As Kuo points out, Trump thrives on chaos, for example in wildly invoking tariffs -- but Kuo then concludes: "Trump made it seem like he holds all the cards and can control the world economy by throwing wrenches into its machinery whenever and however he feels like. This worked for a time -- until our trading partners got so used to his threats and pronouncements that they stopped giving them so much weight. Then our big trading rivals like China called his bluff, causing him to back down, which he then did repeatedly."

This is the now familiar motto of "Trump Always Chickens Out" at work. Right now, Trump is threatening to send the National Guard to Portland, Oregon -- with Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat boss of the House, shrugging off the threat as empty theatrics. Jeffries was angrily criticized for saying that, but had a fair case. Trump had threatened to send the NG to Chicago, then forgot about it when confronted with obstacles. He did send some NG to Memphis, with help from Republican Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee. It's not so easy with Blue states like Illinois or Oregon that push back, the Posse Comitatus Act setting strong limits on sending the troops. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek spoke with Trump about the NG deployment to Portland, with Trump seemingly surprised that the city was not really in flames. Just to be on the safe side, Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson also challenged the proposal to deploy in court.

Kuo referenced a posting by Pete Buttigieg that said: "Trump is not as popular as he wants us to believe, and we are far more powerful than he wants us to think." -- with Kuo adding: "When Trump threatens a city within a Blue state, it gives another governor and another mayor a crack at reasserting the limits of his power. Each time he does it and backs down ... another pair of blue angels earns their wings."

It is a fact that the Trump Regime can make no end of trouble, but that's all that Trump can do. There are worries that Trump will declare martial law and cancel elections, but he has neither the lawful authority nor the practical ability to do either. Yes, Trump is doing great damage that we can't stop, but he's damaging himself doing it. Kuo suggests that if we realize "the only way out is through", we obtain a "true fighting spirit" -- to persist, to do everything that make sense, and not despair.

DAYLOG TUE 30 SEP 25 / FRENCH WEALTH TAX: According to an article from EURONEWS ("France's Zucman tax" by Gregoire Lory, 26 September 2025) 38-year-old economist Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics is making waves in France by proposing a "wealth tax". Zucman wants to slap a yearly 2% tax on the assets of all households worth over 100 million euros, translating to 1,800 households, and according to Zucman bringing in 20 billion euros a year.

France did have a wealth tax up to 2018, when it was replaced by a property tax for households with more than 1.3 million euros in property holdings. Some other European countries have wealth taxes -- prominently Norway, with a 1.1% tax on assets over 1.7 million euros. Switzerland has wealth taxes as well, but they vary regionally.

To no surprise, the "Zucman tax" is highly controversial, with critics insisting the idea is unworkable -- discouraging investment and encouraging capital flight out of France. Most of the criticisms are seen as self-serving. Not only does a tiny rich elite command a disproportionate share of national wealth in France, thanks to the protections enjoyed by their assets, they pay a lower tax rate than those much less wealthy than they are. The idea that the state taking a cut out of their assets will bog down the economy is highly arguable. As far as capital flight goes, Zucman wants to establish the 2% tax as a global "floor", applying in all countries. That's not a ridiculous idea; a 15% international "floor" for corporate taxes was established by treaty in 2021.

Zucman admits that 20 billion euros a year isn't close to enough to fix France's budget deficit, but it's just a first step towards a more rational tax system. Inheritance taxes are a closely-related target, the decline of such being a major cause of concentration of wealth.

Zucman, incidentally, wears a second hat as a professor at the University of California in Berkeley -- and he's a favorite of Americans pushing for a wealth tax, such as Senator Liz Warren. Wealth tax is a coming thing, but who knows how long it will take to get here?

DAYLOG WED 01 OCT 25 / TRUMP & THE GENERALS: At the command of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, yesterday nearly all of America's generals and admirals were at the US Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia, for a high-level meeting. The reason for the meeting was not given in advance, but it turned out to be a Trump rally -- to an unappreciative audience.

Back on 10 June, Trump had done a rally at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with troops who had been effectively screened to be Trump fans. The Fort Bragg rally went well, the troops being enthusiastic about the Trump message. Things did not work out so well at Quantico.

Hegseth got up and lectured the brass on the military's decline into "woke", and saying the military needed to get tough. No more "rules of engagement" -- the military needed to do whatever it took to win wars. Never mind that the Russian Army has such a mindset, and is not winning its war. It was a Fox News diatribe, "straight white male grievance".

Hegseth was a little unnerved that the brass simply sat there -- stone-cold audience, silence. That done, it was Trump's turn. He got up in front and rambled incoherently at length, praising himself, attacking his enemies, and making false assertions. The most significant part of the address was when Trump told the brass that the military would be fighting "the enemy within", to be dispatched to "dangerous cities", which would become "training grounds for our military."

There was little audience reaction to Trump as well, the conclusion of the brass being that he wasn't right in the head. Yes, most of us know that, but seeing it in person is different. If the military brass had any respect for Trump before, they don't now.

GOVERNMENT SHUT-DOWN: To cap off yesterday, at midnight the US government shut down because Congress could not agree on a continuing resolution (CR) to fund government operations. The Democrats wouldn't agree to the CR unless major Trump funding cuts were restored.

The Democrats caved in to the last CR in March, agreeing to the budget even though they didn't get anything they wanted, on the basis that a shutdown would be worse than caving in. That proved to be a mistake, and they are not inclined to repeat it.

That said, Trump is likely to use the shutdown to wreak havoc on the government. The Democrats have had to say: So be it. Trump owns it all -- though still, it was a tough call. Maybe the Dems are thinking: Trump always chickens out.

DAYLOG THU 02 OCT 25 / PAYING OFF TRUMP: The Trump Regime is all about corruption -- not just Trump taking the money, but Big Business being only too willing to give him it. Charlie Warzel of THE ATLANTIC wrote an essay titled "Bending the Knee" (1 October 2025) that pointed out Big Business seems to find paying off Trump no big problem, and even useful from their point of view.

For example, YouTube suspended Trump's YouTube channel after the 6JAN21 Capitol Riot. Trump got it back in 2023, but still sued Google, YouTube's owner. This week, Google settled with a payoff of $24.5 million USD -- mostly to be used to help fund the White House ballroom being planned by Trump. Earlier in 2025, Meta and X similarly paid off Trump lawsuits, all 3 companies paying a total of almost $60 million USD. Trumps has got other payoffs as well.

From Google's point of view, it's too easy: the payoff for the YouTube lawsuit amounted to a roundoff error, a few hours of YouTube revenue stream. Fighting the lawsuit might well cost more -- and as president, Trump can make big trouble for Google. Why fight back?

Ethically, caving in is problematic. First and foremost, in settling Google caved in to the corrupt principle that the US government can tell a business what can and cannot be published on its platforms, paving the way for further shakedowns of Google and other companies. Somewhat less obviously, Google distanced itself from content moderation.

As Warzel says, the social-media giants are "doubling down" on the notion that they aren't really publishers, and aren't liable for the content on their platforms, doing so "with a straight face even as they tune their algorithms to alter what content users see." YouTube, Facebook, and Xitter are all slowly backing off moderation. Increasingly, what used to be outrageous is becoming acceptable; what was once condemned is not now a problem.

The reasons for this abdication of responsibility are simple. Moderation of global social-media platforms requires immense resources, using systems prone to error to make tricky judgement calls. It requires a coherent and well-articulated ideological framework to make any sense, and that's not that easy to do. When the companies get caught in an ideological crossfire, they are not inclined to exert themselves on moderation.

They have the responsibility, of course. Vladimir Putin found it only too easy and cost-effective to undermine democracy by unleashing brigades of trolls -- with Eastern European nations becoming painfully aware of that threat. The trolls are still here, and still visibly active.

US Big Business doesn't seem to care. Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, commented in a recent memoir about the company's executives, saying that "the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become." Social media is in nightmare land -- and not close to waking up.

DAYLOG FRI 03 OCT 25 / ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS: There's been much fuss about the menace of the "ultra-processed foods (UPF)" we often eat. An article in NATURE ("Are ultra-processed foods really so unhealthy? What the science says" by Nic Fleming, 3 September 2025) looked into what the fuss was really all about.

The UPF story goes back about 20 years, when Brazilian nutrition researcher Carlos Monteiro of the University of Sao Paulo was investigating rising rates of obesity and diabetes among Brazilians. He knew that sugar, salt, and other ingredients were associated with those problems, but those afflicted were buying lesser quantities of such things. It turned out the people were eating more of such things in pre-made pastries, breakfast cereals, frozen pizzas, potato chips, and so on.

In a 2009 paper, Monteiro coined the term "ultra-processed foods" and suggested that nutritionists be concerned about the foods subjected to high levels of processing. Within a few years, governments did become concerned about the issue. Criticisms have followed, however, that the UPF classification is too broad to be useful. Is yogurt as problematic as potato chips? And is the level of processing as important as the nutritional value -- or lack thereof -- of various foods?

UPFs began to become common in developed countries from the 1950s, in undeveloped countries from the 1990s. Consumption levels vary, with about 60% of the calorie intake of Americans being UPFs, but only half that for the French. Dozens of studies have linked diets high in UPFs with higher risks of obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, cancer, asthma, depression and anxiety. Adjusting for actual nutritional value still left an enhanced level of problems.

So what might be the problem with UPFs? Controlled studies have showed that UPFs tend to be energy-dense, and unsurprisingly tasty -- and so people eating lots of UPFs tend to gain weight. The problems that arise are linked to the lack of fiber in UPFs, and to their tendency to be addicting. There's also the issue that UPFs tend to be cheaper than traditional foods.

Nonetheless, the links between UPFs and health problems are not strong -- and again, UPFs cover a wide range of foods, possibly too wide to make a blanket condemnation sensible. A lot of UPFs are clearly junk food, but it's hard to say all UPFs are junk food.

UPFs are so common as to be hard to avoid anyway. Physiologist Kevin Hall, previously of the US National Institutes of Health, will eat UPFs, but still says to: "Eat more non-starchy vegetables, legumes, fruits, whole grains" and limit consumption of sugars, sodium, and saturated fats.

Hall makes sense. Personally, I don't have a healthy diet, being overly fond of sweets in particular, though I do watch my weight. Nonetheless, cutting back on, say, potato chips seems to be a good idea. Maybe I should drink more of the spicy vegetable juice I'm so fond of?

[MON 13 OCT 25] THE WEEK THAT WAS 41

DAYLOG MON 06 OCT 25 / INTERNET RADIO: I like music, and for years got my fix by downloading music tracks from Youtube, accumulating hundreds. A year or two ago, Youtube made downloading more difficult, and I was tiring of the fare I was getting anyway.

I was in a holding pattern on the matter for a long while, then I started thinking about online radio stations. Investigation showed there were great numbers of them -- as it turned out, most easily accessed via smartphone app. It also turned out that Google Assistant would play Youtube playlists on requests, and I could get "stations" on Amazon Alexa; since I had Amazon Prime, I could access all of the extensive Amazon music collection.

OK, what I ended up with was disordered tinkering along a number of paths, to finally buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet for my kitchen as an "internet radio". It replaced a cheap Windows tablet PC. Since I wasn't sure of what I was doing, I wondered if it made any sense to buy an Android tablet and dump the Windows tablet -- but on getting the Galaxy Tab working, I found out it was as convenient as a desktop radio, but with a vast number of channels.

I downloaded the National Public Radio app -- to originally think that it was NPR news only, but then found out it listed NPR music stations. I could listen to any NPR jazz station all over the USA. A "Chillout & Lounge Music" app proved similarly useful. A synthwave app was not so useful -- it was Russian, implying a security risk, and also had annoying Russian ads. Google playlists didn't work out either, too many ads and limited selection. Amazon stations work better, but are starting to seem repetitive.

Anyway, I've rethought my music system, relying on the assortment of old smartphones and bluetooth speakers I've accumulated. I'm also trying to find online stations to call up on my Google Nest Hub and Amazon Fire TV Cube, while looking for more online stations.

One problem I ran into was that I would call out "Alexa" to the Fire TV Cube in my living room to then give it a command, and so that implied a conflict with Alexa on the Galaxy Tab in the kitchen. No conflict: instead, I tap the microphone icon on the tablet to then give voice commands. The tablet doesn't need the "wake word".

One fallout of playing with old smartphones was that I started using my high-end Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G phone again. I'd bought it for its nice camera array, but then lost interest in photography, and it was gathering dust. Now it's in use once more, in part for watching videos because it has a high-res display. One odd thing was that, after I went back to it, it spent hours repeatedly updating its OS. Makes sense: it couldn't go from an old to new OS in one step, so it worked its way up.

DAYLOG TUE 7 OCT 25 / DRONES AGAINST JAMMING: As discussed in an article from IEEE SPECTRUM ("How Ukraine's Killer Drones Are Beating Russian Jamming" by Tereza Pultarova, 2 June 2025), everyone knows the war in Ukraine has been dominated by drones.

Drones have ended up being low-cost smart munitions, but they are controlled via radio links, which are vulnerable to jamming. Not surprisingly, the war has also resulted in a race to build more and better jammers. Drone-makers have responded.

Drone builder Krattworks of Estonia sells the "Ghost Dragon" quadcopter drone, with visible light and thermal-infrared cameras, 20-kilometer (12-mile) range, and jamming-resistant radio link. The radio link can hop over 6 different frequency bands to evade jamming. It navigates using the US GPS navigation satellite system as a normal practice, but GPS can be jammed -- so it can also use Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's Beidou navsat systems. The navsat systems all operate in the same 1.2 to 1.6 GHz radio band with some signal overlap, so one receiver system can in principle read all four. Since navsat jamming can "spoof" drones into flying into the ground, the Ghost Dragon crosschecks navsat data with its other sensors to see if it's being spoofed.

The drone can in principle fly by "dead reckoning", using chip-based accelerometers to track changes in velocity and direction, but that's not very accurate. As a result, the Ghost Dragon can also use artificial intelligence to navigate, with a camera staring downward to match ground images against satellite images. AI is also used to recognize targets for terminal attack. There is also work on radio "mesh networks", with drones relaying signals between one another, making them harder to jam.

Of course, drones can use unjammable fiber-optic links, but they are expensive and cut into drone payloads. Russians like fiber-optic drones, but Ukraine has figured out a countermeasure, using a "fence". A fiber-optic drone trails a fiber thread behind it as it flies, the thread falling to the ground. Ukrainians string a length of razor wire -- not really wire, a long slender metal strip with sharp blades along both sides -- between two posts, with a mechanism spinning the razor wire periodically to tangle and then cut the fibers.

Incidentally, latest news says there's a very long line of heavy-hauler trucks stuck at the border of Kazakhstan and Russia, mostly loaded with cargoes from China. The hang-up appears to be due to the fact that Ukraine's SBU intelligence service smuggled drones into Russia via Kazakhstan for its sneak attack on Russian air bases early this year. The Russians are checking the cargoes for drones and other problematic items, and confiscating them. The attack is still paying off.

DAYLOG WED 8 OCT 25 / UKRAINE DOES RENEWABLES: One Bill McKibben published an essay on Substack ("It's hard to drone a solar panel", 4 October 2025) that shined light, so to say, on Ukraine's push towards renewable energy.

Renewables get us off the fossil-fuel kick, and are cost-effective. For Ukraine, they have a big further plus: solar and wind farms are more resistant to attack than traditional power generation systems. As a result, solar and battery-backup arrays are being installed all across the country, along with installation of heat pumps. Hospitals have been leaders in the effort, but schools -- which are often used as bomb shelters -- and multifamily housing units are also going solar.

Ukrainian renewable-energy activist Svitlana Romanko commented: "New fossil fuel infrastructure is very vulnerable now -- it's just a waste of money. By contrast, it's very hard to destroy these small power plants and the energy they provide is cheap." Romanenko believes that Ukraine's push to build drones, most of them electrically-powered, is giving Ukrainians hands-on experience in working with the systems of the clean energy revolution. After the war, might Ukraine enjoy a "Green New Deal"? She says:

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* It should be noted that Ukrainian government energy plans have foreseen the installation of new nuclear power plants -- though the war has shown them to present great hazards. However, a WALL STREET JOURNAL article says the government has installed six battery parks, capable of storing a total of 400 megawatt-hours. The locations of the arrays were not given, with speculations that they are underground, with decoy surface arrays to soak up air attacks.

AI NOT KILLING JOBS: An article in FUTURISM ("New Yale Study Finds AI Has Had Essentially Zero Impact on Jobs Excuse Me?" by Sharon Adarlo, 5 October 2025) focused on the dire warnings that artificial intelligence technology is causing mass unemployment. Yale researchers investigated that claim, to conclude: NO -- at least, not yet. The report concluded: "While generative AI looks likely to join the ranks of transformative, general purpose technologies, it is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs."

DAYLOG THU 9 OCT 25 / WHITE HOUSE HATES ANTIFA: Yesterday, there was a "roundtable" at the White House, with President Trump and his stooges warning the USA of the threat of an insurrection by anti-fascists (ANTIFA) that could destroy America. It was almost total nonsense, of course -- there being no organization known as "ANTIFA", the term being no more than a label for the collective of resistance groups pushing back on the Trump Regime. The great majority of such groups are studiously nonviolent.

However, Trump described ANTIFA as a terrorist organization, saying that Portland, Oregon, was a "bombed-out city" with windows boarded up -- belied by videos of protests featuring participants in cartoon animal costumes dancing in the streets. No current videos show any mass violence. Oregon authorities have pushed back on the tales of mass devastation, saying the protests -- against ICE facilities in the Portland area -- have not been destructive, and that local police have been able to control them without much difficulty.

The purpose of this bogus White House exercise appears to have been to justify government action against organized (nonviolent) resistance groups. Trump also attacked journalists for, in effect, having the nerve to give honest reports on what was going on in Portland. Reports from RWNJ trolls, a number of them attending the roundtable, were supposedly more realistic. Trump, not incidentally, rambled at the event, seeming lethargic, and clearly finding it hard to stay awake. Grandad seemed to need a nap.

* It is clear that Trump, or rather Trump and his inner circle, want to establish authoritarian control over future elections. That's very frightening -- but not easy to do, particularly when the Trump Regime is so ignorant, incompetent, and dim-witted.

Sometimes fear does get to me. In the last few weeks, on occasions I've gone into a momentary physical and mental state of deep anxiety -- which I finally realized were low-key panic attacks. Now I start to get one, I take a few deep breaths and get through it.

Yeah, things are bad. These days, I remember a lot of things that I went through when I was young, things were bad for me, and I was coming unglued. No coming unglued, now that I'm old: I run into a problem, I figure out how to deal with it.

DAYLOG FRI 10 OCT 25 / UNTETHERED: Trump has been on the warpath as of late, wanting to send the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, on the basis that these cities were being devastated by out-of-control demonstrations. As per law blogger Jay Kuo, Federal district courts in both cities have said: Not so fast. In Portland, Judge Karin Immergut said that Trump's claims were "untethered to the facts", while in Chicago Judge April M. Perry said she had seen "no credible evidence" of such problems.

Yes, but what happens at the appeals court and SCOTUS level? Conservatives in the judiciary say they shouldn't second-guess the executive's judgement, and so they may give Trump the green light anyway -- in short, Trump can send in the troops if he just feels like it.

The big question mark here is that Trump wants to take unprecedented action and send in the NG against the wishes of the state governors The states of course will make their case to SCOTUS, meaning the high court has to side with somebody. Will SCOTUS then simply throw up their hands then?

Along another front, Trump has been able to get criminal indictments against ex-FBI director James Comey and New York State AG Letitia James. Comey has been accused of false testimony and James has accused of mortgage fraud. The cases are so flimsy that DOJ staff pushed back on them, to be bulldozed aside. A highly relevant fact is that Trump has made no secret of his vindictiveness towards Comey and James for pushing back on him, saying in a deranged Truth Social post about his enemies: "They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING! JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!"

It appears this was a private message to AG Pam Bondi that was sent out to the public by mistake, but everybody is still aware that Trump runs on spite. It seems likely the courts will agree to motions to dismiss the charges, given Trump's lunatic paper trail, and there's less ground for appeals.

NO NOBEL FOR TRUMP: The Nobel Prize Committee has just announced that the winner of the Peace Prize for 2025 is Venezuelan opposition politician Maria Corina Machado, currently in hiding from the repressive Venezuelan government. True to form, Trump was petulant that he didn't get the NPP, with his toadies echoing the complaint; one Member of Congress even wanted to pass a resolution saying Trump should get it, or something like that.

Putin and Lukashenko also said Trump deserved it -- constituting the least persuasive endorsements ever. Trump is likely to be quiet about the NPP for a while, since it only comes around once a year.