Publicly admitting to awful thoughts

An Ohio man has been charged with brandishing a gun at an Ohio Wikipedia conference.

An Ohio man is facing criminal charges after he allegedly stormed a stage at a Wikipedia conference in New York City with a gun – as well as a sign declaring himself a “non-offending pedophile” – and threatened to kill himself.

Connor Weston, 27, was reportedly tackled by organizers of WikiConference North America 2025, thwarting tragedy, before police said officers booked him on counts of criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.

The Dayton resident had evidently paid to attend the four-day conference when he disrupted its opening ceremony at 9am Friday in Manhattan’s Civic Hall. He jumped on to a stage at the venue, pointed a gun at his head and the ceiling, and expressed a desire to take his life while a sign draped around his neck declared him to be an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile”, police and multiple media reports said.
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Friday was apparently not the first time Weston had publicly labeled himself an “anti contact, non offending pedophile”. A social media video circulated in July shows a man providing Weston’s name, age and home town; applying that term to himself; and saying he can “choose not to harm minors … but can’t choose to stop being attracted to them”.
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Vote ‘Yes’ on California referendum on redistricting

Congressional districts for the US House of Representatives are redrawn after every census that takes place every decade. The next census is due in 2030. Each state has its own rules for how to draw the maps but in many states, especially those controlled by Republicans, the lines are drawn in strange ways just so that it gives a big advantage to their party. As a result, the percentage of Republicans who are elected to Congress from each state well exceed the percentage of votes that they get.

But Republicans are jittery that their current razor-thin majority in Congress will be lost in the 2026 mid-term elections, so states like Texas and elsewhere abruptly decided to redraw their maps midway through the decade to give Republicans even more seats. In retaliation, California governor Gavin Newsom decided to do the same thing in California to offset the Texas move. Currently the state’s districts are drawn by an independent commission so as to have fairness.

As a result, on election day November 4th, California voters will vote Proposition 50, a referendum that seeks to do away with the existing congressional district maps and replace it with a new one that favors Democrats but will be in effect only until the next census in 2030 requires the drawing of new maps. The referendum asks voters to essentially take a regressive step and approve a gerrymandered map that favors Democrats.
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How stupid are Republicans?

That question, rhetorical of course, is prompted by the story about the leaked texts by members of the group known as Young Republicans that reveal them saying the most awful things, a story that keeps gaining steam.

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

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Can you tell on sight if someone is sleazy?

The book Nobody’s Girl: Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre has just been released.

She was the young woman who died by suicide in April of this year at the age of 41. Her memoir reveals a horrific life of abuse and exploitation that continued right up to the end. After being sexually abused as a child, starting as a teenager she was sexually abused and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, passed around to their wealthy and influential friends, including the disgusting Price Andrew, like she was some kind of plaything with whom they could do as they liked. Epstein was a collector of famous people who, having no particular claim to distinction, used his considerable money (the origins of which remain obscure to this day) to buy the friendship of people whom he considered clever, famous , and influential, all this while having a coterie of attractive young single women hanging around his homes.

What is astonishing is that all these people claimed to not have sensed that there was anything amiss. But Emma Brockes, in a review of the book finds these claims of ignorance hard to believe.
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Massive protests against Trump

Yesterday saw massive protests against the Trump regime and its increasingly fascistic nature. Millions took part in over 2,700 locations in the US. This was a follow up to the June event that drew between two million and five million people across more than 2,000 locations.

In Chicago, at Grant Park’s Butler Field, at least 10,000 people assembled, many with signs opposing federal immigration agents or mocking Trump. TV stations with feeds from protests warned viewers they could not be responsible for the language used in the signage.

Some of them said “Hands Off Chicago”, a rallying cry that began when the president first announced his intent to send the national guard into the city. Others read “Resist Fascism”, but many others used language unsuitable for broadcast.

The crowd erupted in chants of “Fuck Donald Trump” when Illinois representative Jonathan Jackson took the stage.
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More than 200,000 Washington DC-area residents rallied near the US Capitol. In many cities, protesters wore inflatable animal costumes – a Dada-esque theme created during immigration enforcement protests in Portland, Oregon, to counter the administration’s narrative of a city under the grip of lawlessness and chaos.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, costumed characters included unicorns, chickens and frogs. “It’s about the absurdity of it all,” resident Amy Adler told the Santa Fe New Mexican while wearing a lobster suit she described as an ode to Portland.

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China raises the stakes

Relations between China and the US have been tense ever since Trump started his mercurial behavior with tariffs, raising and lowering and raising them again so frequently that I gave up trying to keep track. Trade relations between the US and the rest of the world seem more and more like a poker game in which the US starts out with a huge pile of chips and keeps raising the stakes, forcing out the smaller players, the countries that cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the economic giant, so that they fold. The one exception is China which does have the resources to stay in the game. Up until now, they seem to have been content to be in a reactive mode, matching the US as it raises the ante.

But in a surprising development, China took the lead in raising the stakes, imposing new measures that would enable them to restrict the export of rare earth materials that are crucial for electronics.

China’s Ministry of Commerce on Thursday unveiled its most expansive rare earth export controls to date, allowing Beijing not only to restrict shipments of raw materials and magnets — as it has in the past — but also any devices that incorporate those elements. Because Chinese rare earths are embedded in everything from iPhones and electric vehicle motors to fighter-jet sensors, the rules effectively give Beijing potential veto power over vast swaths of global manufacturing.

The vast potential reach of China’s action, and the U.S.’s counteraction, was on display Friday: Trump’s tariff announcement sent stocks tumbling, with the S&P 500 dropping more than 2 percent, its worst day since April.
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New Trump slogan: Make America Sick Again!

In previous government shutdowns, federal employees were furloughed and not paid during it but when the shutdown ended, they were brought back and given their back pay. This time Trump first said that they may not get any back pay and then upped the ante by saying that he will begin firing them. He and the Republicans seem to think that this will put pressure on the Democrats to acquiesce to their demand to approve a short-term spending bill that will result in cutting health care subsidies under Obamacare that made health insurance premiums more affordable.

Over the weekend, people started getting fired. It seems like the first firings are targeting health care workers and had been planned even before the shutdown.
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Trump will be mad that Nobel committee says, “No peace prize for you!”

This year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado and Trump will be mad that he did not get it.

The peace prize was tarnished when it was awarded to the war criminal Henry Kissinger and it did not redeem itself when it gave the prize to Barack Obama who had done nothing to deserve it. But Trump clearly feels that he too deserves it and has been campaigning hard for it.

While Trump has played down his chances to win the prize, he has been active behind the scenes, phoning Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, in Oslo this summer to tell him he wanted to discuss the “Nobel peace prize … and tariffs”. He regularly brings up the award; usually as he makes the tenuous claim to have ended six or seven wars since his return to the White House.

“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump said last year during the presidential race.

The obsession has become a running joke among foreign diplomats seeking to lobby their interests, including at a regular breakfast among European ambassadors where a common topic is how to keep Trump engaged in the support of Ukraine.

“Anytime he is talking about solving seven wars, he is really sending a message: give me the Nobel,” said one senior European diplomat based in Washington.
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Trump’s new push for a peace deal to end the [Gaza] war kicked into gear during last month’s UN general assembly, where he met with Arab leaders and then approved a 20-point peace plan that he announced during a White House summit with Benjamin Netanyahu in late September.

The timeline for the award has played an active role in trying to reach a deal this week, as officials have regularly said they believed a peace deal would be ready by Friday – the same day as the Nobel committee announces its choice.

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US policies are shifting global alliances

That India has for some time been a rising economic power, there can be no doubt. It has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country and having a large domestic market undoubtedly helps in the creation of large businesses and industry. For the longest time, relations between US and India were cool, mainly because India, starting with its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, pursued a non-aligned foreign policy that chose to not align itself with either of the then two main power blocs of the US and the USSR. As a result, The US tended to see India’s traditional rival Pakistan as more of an ally and favored it.

That changed quite dramatically with the rise to power of Narendra Modi as prime minister, a right wing Hindu chauvinist who assiduously cultivated good relations with the US, especially with Trump. And for a while, the two seemed to be best friends. But recently, there has been a dramatic cooling of relations, with Trump putting some of the harshest tariffs on imports from India.

Isaac Chotiner tries to understand the dramatic shift by talking with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As Vaishnav says, the 50% tariff on India is a major blow to India..
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September jobs data not released

Today is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly report giving the number os jobs gained or lost in the previous month plus any revisions to the numbers for the two preceding months. The last two jobs reports were awful, with job growth essentially stalled since May, indicating that the growth in economy has slowed dramatically, possibly indicating a recession. Trump fired the commissioner of the BLS in early August following the dismal job numbers for July (claiming that she had dishonestly manipulated the numbers to make him look bad) but things got even worse when the August numbers were released.

However the BLS did not release any numbers today and the official reason is that it is due to the shutdown. But that seems likely (what a surprise!) to be a lie.

The data for the release have already been collected, according to two former heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But the Trump administration has so far defied calls to publish the report.
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Earlier this week William Beach, who led the BLS for four years under Trump and Joe Biden, also said the jobs data for September “have been completely collected and processed” by the BLS. “The jobs report is likely written in final draft,” he wrote.

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