To celebrate MLK day, my family and I had lunch at a superb soul food restaurant, Paschal’s, in Atlanta, Georgia. There’s a lot of good history in this place. MLK and other civil rights leaders regularly dined here in the 50s and 60s. But what caught my attention during my visit was the robot that served our food. Pictures of MLK on the wall; a robot bringing soul food to the table. What to make of this? Beats me. But I enjoyed my fried chicken sandwich, which came with a bowl of greens. The robot was silent. 

Seattle area firefighters faced three fires last night. One happened in Kent, another near Woodland Park Zoo, and a third in Tacoma. The Seattle Times reports that no one was injured in the first fire, a person was injured in the second one, and the third destroyed an abandoned house. All fires are under investigation.

Vivian McCall and Nathalie Graham reported yesterday that “at least 6 Seattle public schools sheltered in place” because of a number of reports from our community of ICE activity. These reports were not confirmed, but they did reveal a level of real fear in this and other cities that have yet to experience the nightmare Minneapolis is presently going through. ICE is not about capturing criminals but making all of us scared of the power that is now concentrated in the hands of the White House.

In short, Trump has his own secret police, and such an organization works by the power of what the 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham called panopticon. The basic idea isn’t that the secret police is always watching people, looking for people, kidnapping people (that’s an impossible task) but instead wants you to believe in its ubiquity. The Seattle schools that locked their doors yesterday made it clear that we’ve now entered this state of mind.

Is Seattle next? This is a tough call, and this administration is intentionally unpredictable. But I do know that Seattle, San Francisco, and New York City are at the center of an AI bubble that’s keeping the US economy above water. As Ruchir Sharma of the Financial Times put it back in October: “AI companies have accounted for 80 percent of gains in US stocks so far in 2025.” This is serious business. And if that bubble pops, then you don’t even want to know. This is why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recommended, during a speech he delivered at 2O26 World Economic Forum at Davos, the expansion of AI into more and more domains of life. If it stops growing, if the investments cease, if the fantasy evaporates, then Wall Street will experience a fall that puts Icarus to shame. At that point, what protected Seattle and San Francisco from Trump vanishes and we become no better than Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. This, mind you, is just an idea. I could be wrong, very wrong. 

Another important speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos was delivered by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. He basically said it like it is: the US is cooked, a joke, a thing of the past. And what countries in a post-Trump world must figure out is who is sitting at the table, because if you are not, then you’re on the menu. Canadians aren't having it. They know the US like a wife knows an abusive husband, and are now telling the world that nothing can be done to appease that madman in the White House. Just think about it. Who in their right mind comes up with the idea to invade Greenland in this day and age? An age where capitalist time dominates capitalist space? And so this lebensraum stuff is so primitive and tiresome. In the words of Slick Rick, we are “in a madman’s dream.”

Trump on NATO: "Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy." 

(He means Greenland.)

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2026 at 6:19 AM

What’s frog activism about? You have ICE on the one side and the inflated frog on the other. What is the meaning of this? Simple enough: ICE is reduced to a performance that's as bad as a $70 inflatable frog. But the performances were not identical in nature. One, ICE, is a show; the other, frog, a critique of what's shown. The latter ultimately evaluates a performance, but (and here comes the complexity) not in the belief that there's a real ICE, a real Ross, a real Noem, and so on. Any enforcement of immigration laws requires the fiction of a performance.

Let’s revisit this horrible incident that occurred in St. Paul on January 19. ICE smashed the door of a home, and dragged ChongLy Scott Thao, a US citizen, into the freezing cold. He only wore boxers, crocs, and a thin blanket. According to several reports, ICE drove Thao from here to there and then from there to here for almost an hour, and in-between photographed him, fingerprinted him, determined they had the wrong guy, dumped him at his house and bounced. Stop and think about this for a moment. No accountability, no report, no internal investigation. Even the secret police in the dystopian film Brazil (1984), provided a receipt for kidnapping Buttle, who turned out to be (like Thao) the wrong guy (they were after Tuttle). This rudimentary record, provided after the secret police destroyed Buttle's home and traumatized his family, is nowhere to be found in ICE's real and present dystopia.

Octavia Butler for the Win: University of Washington researchers determined from Seattle Public Library's checkout data that Butler's Parable of the Sower and Kindred are among its "most read titles." Now and then, Seattle knows what time it is.

Seattle may have nothing going on in the Oscars this year but the James Beard Awards, "considered the Oscars of the restaurant world," named two of its restaurants, The Wayland Mill and Little Beast, as contenders for Best New Restaurants. Bellingham's Starla—the new bar from the owners of Capitol Hill's bygone Blotto—is also in the running. As we say in Shona, makorokoto!

Did I even talk about the weather? I did not. Today, I’m just going to look out my window here in Columbia City, and like that famous “Fast Song” skit on In Living Color, tell you what I see. Fog, which is slowly lifting. Across the street there’s a huge apartment complex under construction. It’s not as ugly as the one in Ballard, Urbana. Next to the construction site are some birds that appear to be bickering. European Starlings? The members of that featured class seem to never get along. They are always going at each other about something or another. They fly to this tree and bicker. Then they fly to another tree and continue bickering. If reincarnation is a thing, my hope is to return as a European Starling so that I can finally learn what the fuss is all about.

That said, let’s end AM with that priceless Living Color skit.