The rain started. The wind whipped up a bit. The day fell right into a stormy darkness, and I noticed my first flash of lightning at 7:05 pm. However by 9 pm, a lot of the thunderstorm had departed and the night time air was for probably the most half secure. Certainly, Seattle-Tacoma Worldwide Airport’s “floor cease for arriving flights…was lifted at 9:30 pm.” Would one thing dramatic occur whereas I and the town slept? It did not, it appears. Upon getting back from the land of goals, we discovered a morning whose clouds had been lowish and taking their very own candy time to cross the sky. Recall what that irritated rasta mentioned to an excited hippie at a reggae live performance: “Stand nonetheless and dance, mon.” The clouds at current, 6am, are precisely doing that: shifting of their stillness. So far as Seattle’s Thursday is anxious, Wednesday’s panic about “giant hail, extreme wind gusts, and probably a twister” turned out to be “all cry and no wool.”
At present will see some clouds, some showers, some solar, extra clouds and extra showers. Anticipate a excessive of 57 and a low of 48.
King County Government Dow Constantine will quickly be sitting fairly at his new job, the CEO of Sound Transit. His annual wage of $450,000 comes with a number of perks: $10,000 to enhance his residence workplace, an “annual efficiency awards of $30,000,” a yr’s price of severance if he is fired. However what are we to make of what occurred on the Angle Lake gentle rail station final night time? It was hit by the in any other case comparatively delicate storm so laborious that it closed for your complete night. Was this an indication? In Leviathan, the wonderful Thomas Hobbes (a seventeenth century social thinker), referred to as an indication that concerned “uncommon accidents; as eclipses, comets, uncommon meteors, earthquakes, inundations… and the like” portenta because it portended or foreshowed “some nice calamity to come back.”
What can Canadians not cease seeing all round them since Donald Trump began his second time period? The decline of the American empire. For instance, International Information stories {that a} floating “McBarge” in Vancouver which was a McDonald’s throughout Expo 86 “however has sat empty ever since” is now sinking, “heading to the underside of the Fraser River” the place it would actually “undergo a sea-change into one thing unusual.” The story behind McDonald’s sinking ghost is riddled with indicators of the fast disintegration of what till very just lately appeared like an iron bond between the “Youngsters of a Widespread Mom” (because it’s written on the US facet of the Peace Arch on the border that separates the largest cities of the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and Vancouver BC), or “Brethren Dwelling Collectively in Unity” (because it’s written on the Canadian facet).
And, sure, the market is crashing once more due to tariffs. And I believe the entire concept behind this type of financial reasoning is much less about earnings/jobs and extra about disciplining staff. All the challenge of the current administration can solely be understood in a method made clear in a 1943 essay, “Political Points of Full Employment,” by the best economist of the twentieth century, Michal Kalecki. He wrote: “It’s true that earnings could be larger underneath a regime of full employment than they’re on the common underneath laissez-faire… However ‘self-discipline within the factories’ and ‘political stability’ are extra appreciated than earnings by enterprise leaders. Their class intuition tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their viewpoint, and that unemployment is an integral a part of the ‘regular’ capitalist system.” Please learn that fastidiously. The reply to present occasions is present in them. Biden’s economic system may need benefitted extra People, however this type of success is just not all appreciated by these on the very prime. They a lot want the ability of “the sack.”
Shares in automakers around the globe tumbled on Thursday after President Trump introduced plans to impose a 25% tariff on imported vehicles and a few components starting subsequent week.
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— The New York Occasions (@nytimes.com) March 27, 2025 at 4:00 AM
So, the GoSkagit story a few Large Lake homicide trial has a element that caught my consideration instantly. It is not that the jury didn’t determine if the defendant, Angela Marie Conijn, 59, murdered or didn’t homicide Kamran Cohee, 34. No, it is this: “Cohee allegedly started beating on the Conijns’ entrance door with a wheelbarrow, paperwork state.” I am gripped by the picture of a wheelbarrow repeatedly ramming a house’s primary door. I see all of it too properly—that door, that wheelbarrow, and that lady who’s quickly to be shot lifeless.
Wait? What? “Washington County sewer officers ran up an enormous meals tab on ratepayers’ dime.” That extraordinary headline is from The Oregonian, and issues the CEO of Hillsboro, Oregon Clear Waters Providers, Diane Taniguchi-Dennis, and the water utility’s Chief Enterprise Operations Officer, Jack Liang. The 2 “dined out alone or with others, together with varied executives inside the company, not less than 55 occasions in slightly below a two-year span at a price of $5,100.” The Oregonian focuses on three meals that occurred at Din Tai Fung, a hip joint “identified for its xiao lengthy bao soup dumplings.” These meals allegedly value a whopping $600. And figuring out very properly that every part we eat leads to the sewers, The Oregonian offers the main points of what the CEO, CBOO, and their buddies digested and turned to shit: “Brief ribs, wontons, pot stickers, fried rice, greens and 4 orders of pork and crab xiao lengthy bao soup dumplings.” From order to dysfunction. That’s the method of all issues in our thermodynamical universe.
A film that retains returning to my thoughts is Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The Nazi advising the president; the chaotic conflict room; the batshit loopy, cigar-chomping normal happening concerning the purification of water in a lot the identical method Trump goes on about colonizing Greenland. And now there’s the pet killer’s journey to the El Salvadoran jail that is stuffed with Venezuelans “who the Trump administration alleges are gang members.” Certainly, Hollywood is empty. All of the villains are right here.
If hell exists, Kristi Noem is a shoo-in.
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— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 8:43 PM
The good classical pianist András Schiff has cancelled his upcoming US live shows as a result of he is had sufficient of Donald Trump’s bullying on the world stage and help of neo-Nazis in Germany. (Schiff, who presently lives within the UK, “was born to a Jewish household in Budapest that witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust.”) Let’s finish Slog AM with Schiff’s gorgeously lyrical interpretation of Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C main.”
