The rain began. The wind whipped up a bit. The day fell into a stormy darkness, and I saw my first flash of lightning at 7:05 pm. But by 9 pm, much of the thunderstorm had departed and the night air was for the most part stable. Indeed, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport's "ground stop for arriving flights...was lifted at 9:30 pm." Would something dramatic happen while I and the city slept? It didn't, it seems. Upon returning from the land of dreams, we found a morning whose clouds were lowish and taking their own sweet time to cross the sky. Recall what that irritated rasta said to an excited hippie at a reggae concert: "Stand still and dance, mon." The clouds at present, 6am, are exactly doing that: moving in their stillness. As far as Seattle's Thursday is concerned, Wednesday's panic about "large hail, severe wind gusts, and potentially a tornado" turned out to be "all cry and no wool."
Today will see some clouds, some showers, some sun, more clouds and more showers. Expect a high of 57 and a low of 48.
King County Executive Dow Constantine will soon be sitting pretty at his new job, the CEO of Sound Transit. His annual salary of $450,000 comes with lots of perks: $10,000 to improve his home office, an "annual performance awards of $30,000," a year's worth of severance if he's fired. But what are we to make of what happened at the Angle Lake light rail station last night? It was hit by the otherwise relatively mild storm so hard that it closed for the entire evening. Was this a sign? In Leviathan, the excellent Thomas Hobbes (a 17th century social philosopher), called a sign that involved "unusual accidents; as eclipses, comets, rare meteors, earthquakes, inundations... and the like" portenta as it portended or foreshowed "some great calamity to come."
What can Canadians not stop seeing all around them since Donald Trump started his second term? The decline of the American empire. For example, Global News reports that a floating "McBarge" in Vancouver which was a McDonald's during Expo 86 "but has sat empty ever since" is now sinking, "heading to the bottom of the Fraser River" where it will certainly "suffer a sea-change into something strange." The story behind McDonald's sinking ghost is riddled with signs of the rapid disintegration of what until very recently seemed like an iron bond between the "Children of a Common Mother" (as it’s written on the US side of the Peace Arch on the border that separates the biggest cities of the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and Vancouver BC), or "Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity" (as it’s written on the Canadian side).
And, yes, the market is crashing again because of tariffs. And I think the whole idea behind this kind of economic reasoning is less about profits/jobs and more about disciplining workers. The entire project of the present administration can only be understood in a way made clear in a 1943 essay, “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” by the greatest economist of the 20th century, Michal Kalecki. He wrote: "It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire... But 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the 'normal' capitalist system." Please read that carefully. The answer to current events is found in them. Biden's economy might have benefitted more Americans, but this kind of success is not all appreciated by those at the very top. They much prefer the power of "the sack."
So, the GoSkagit story about a Big Lake murder trial has a detail that caught my attention immediately. It's not that the jury failed to decide if the defendant, Angela Marie Conijn, 59, murdered or did not murder Kamran Cohee, 34. No, it's this: "Cohee allegedly began beating on the Conijns’ front door with a wheelbarrow, documents state." I'm gripped by the image of a wheelbarrow repeatedly ramming a home's main door. I see it all too well—that door, that wheelbarrow, and that woman who is soon to be shot dead.
Wait? What? "Washington County sewer officials ran up a huge food tab on ratepayers’ dime." That extraordinary headline is from The Oregonian, and concerns the CEO of Hillsboro, Oregon Clean Waters Services, Diane Taniguchi-Dennis, and the water utility's Chief Business Operations Officer, Jack Liang. The two "dined out alone or with others, including various executives within the agency, at least 55 times in just under a two-year span at a cost of $5,100." The Oregonian focuses on three meals that happened at Din Tai Fung, a hip joint "known for its xiao long bao soup dumplings." These meals allegedly cost a whopping $600. And knowing very well that everything we eat ends up in the sewers, The Oregonian provides the details of what the CEO, CBOO, and their buddies digested and turned to shit: "Short ribs, wontons, pot stickers, fried rice, vegetables and four orders of pork and crab xiao long bao soup dumplings." From order to disorder. That is the way of all things in our thermodynamical universe.
A movie that keeps returning to my mind is Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. The Nazi advising the president; the chaotic war room; the batshit crazy, cigar-chomping general going on about the purification of water in much the same way Trump goes on about colonizing Greenland. And now there's the puppy killer's trip to the El Salvadoran prison that's filled with Venezuelans "who the Trump administration alleges are gang members." Indeed, Hollywood is empty. All the villains are here.
The great classical pianist András Schiff has cancelled his upcoming US concerts because he's had enough of Donald Trump's bullying on the world stage and support of neo-Nazis in Germany. (Schiff, who presently lives in the UK, "was born to a Jewish family in Budapest that witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust.") Let's end Slog AM with Schiff's gorgeously lyrical interpretation of Bach's "Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C major."
