A three-car train stops at Mount Baker Station.
A three-car train stops at Mount Baker Station. Charles Mudede

Sound Transit to Include 3-Car Trains to Handle Rising Demand:
 Seattle Times' transportation writer Mike Lindblom reports that the days following the opening of Link's two new stations, one on Capitol Hill and the other in the University District, have been, in terms of ridership, nothing less than spectacular. On Monday, the line's first business day, 47,000 people rode the train. On Tuesday, there were 57,000 riders. Before the new stations opened, a business day usually saw about 35,000 boardings. Sound Transit expects even more riders next week when University of Washington students return from spring break and Metro improves its links with Link. 50,000 people on the train exactly means 50,000 people not in cars.

Big Scheduling and Route Changes at Metro Begin on Saturday: The information about the changes, the most important of which are happening in the University District and will concern connecting riders with the new and handsome University of Washington Station, can be found here.

SUV Hits Pole and Cuts Power for 1,500 Customers in West Seattle: An SUV owned by a person who, despite living in the 21st century, and living with all of the bad news about the climate, doesn't care at all that their vehicle is unnecessarily huge and consumes lots of gasoline, hit a power pole late last night. Many homes lost power for a few hours. Many slept through all of this.

Three Dead After Speeding SUV Slams into Utility Vehicle in Tacoma: Why was the SUV moving so fast? Why did the driver not see and respond to any of the warnings about the alley being closed for repair? Was the driver in a heated argument with one or both of the passengers? If so, what were they fighting about? Love? Money? God? The answer may never be known because every body in the SUV was annihilated by the crash.

Amazon Conducts a Survey to Learn About Its Women: A survey by a labor economist informed Amazon that 39 percent of its workforce is made up of women. It was also told that only 24 percent of its managers are women. As for pay, women "earned 99.9 cents for every dollar that men earned in the same jobs." As to why it took a survey by an external body for Amazon to see the composition of its own body, that must have something to do with what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the institutional subconscious.

This Also Must Have Something to Do With What is Below Amazon's Corporate Consciousness:

Amazons erotic biospheres are across the street from a strip club.
Amazon's erotic biospheres are across the street from a strip club. Charles Mudede

The Cost of the Vanilla ISIS Crisis?: $6 million. And who will pay for this anti-government protest? The government, of course.

A Slow Car Chase Happened in the Marysville Area: A man was shot. He called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and provided a description of the suspect and his vehicle. A Tulalip officer spotted this car on I-5. It was heading north. The officer and other deputies followed the suspect, who was not speeding. He just would not stop. He wanted to drive forever. To drive until he was free from all of his troubles. So much trouble in the world. But the deputies did a quick maneuver (car bumping) they learned at the police academy and brought the slow, dream-like chase to an end. The man was arrested on a freeway that failed to take him "somewhere not here."

In 2015, One-Third of Home Buyers in Vancouver, BC, One of the Most Expensive Cities in the World, Were from China: The problem is not that the buyers are from China, but that their capital faces no checks or controls. Vancouver's housing market has been heated by hot money. Hot money is capital that's looking for high returns or safety. If you do not control this money, then it will control you and your economy. This is Vancouver. This could be Seattle.

Debris Found on Mozambique Beach "Almost Certainly" from Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: The story reminded me of these lines in T.S. Eliot's poem Four Quartets:


The sea is the land's edge also, the granite,
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone...
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.


Bernie Sanders Is Not the Same As Donald Trump. He is Not a Nut! The Economist opens a rather limp piece on inequality in the United States with these words:

Voters’ anger over inequality is one explanation for the rise of politicians as varied as Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Marine Le Pen.
Enough is enough. The press in the US and UK needs to stop lumping Sanders with Trump and other loonies. Sanders is not saying crazy things. He might be the most normal presidential candidate in the history of the United States. All of this lumping business is about distorting this obvious fact—he is a very rational, very sane politician. Hillary Clinton is madder than Sanders. And Cruz is on the moon. And Trump is from a planet that can only exist and turn and burn below his head of hair.