Slog AM: Costco Sues Trump, Shirtless Man With a Gun Killed by Police, Seattle Traffic Is Getting Worse

What will the weather do for us today? Rain some, keep things nice and chill with an expected high of 45, and cover our skies with low and lugubrious clouds. What more do you want? Winter is right around the corner. And I have a new and thick jacket (it feels and looks like a sleeping bag) in case temperatures drop to levels that we imagine and feel as arctic. Will it snow this year? Dream… dream, dream, dream.

Yesterday at 1:30 pm, a man described as shirtless and “waving a gun” was shot by the police. First with a traditional bullet, and then after he was shot, with a “sponge round.” He did not survive the incident, which occurred near South Othello Street and MLK Way and closed the intersection and Othello Station for well over 12 hours. The street and station reopened early this morning.

Traffic in Seattle keeps getting worse. This year, which is down to its last month, drivers “spent more time in traffic than did in 2024,” according to the Seattle Times. Road construction and post-pandemic orders to return to the office are seen as the source of this increase in congestion, which, for drivers, translated into “three extra days behind the wheel.”

We must now turn to the German philosopher Leibniz to make sense of this story in Urbanist: “Why It Takes So Damn Long to Build a RapidRide Line.” The answer? “Permitting timelines, errors in pre-construction survey work, and delays from property acquisition [are] factors that have been holding back new RapidRide ribbon cuttings in recent years.” In short, public transportation projects, despite their enormous importance in the present age of global warming, face, in the process of their actualization, virtual obstacle after virtual obstacle. And what does Leibniz, the 17-century German philosopher and polymath, have to do with any of this? 

Leibniz’s idea of compossibles. What he meant by this concept is that in the virtual realm, you have possibilities that can either effortlessly connect with other possibilities or not even be present in the virtual. If the possibilities are numerous and do connect, their transition from the virtual to the actual requires little effort. The compossibilities of cars, for example, are, in the US, much greater in number than the ones for our modes of public transportation. For this reason, the planning period of the former faces fewer obstacles than the latter.

And this is why we must take the virtual as seriously as the actual. Seeing what can happen increases its compossibles. And so we learn that SeaTac City Councilmembers James Lovell and Senayet Negusse don’t see the “giant parking-par-and-fly lot” across from Link’s Angle Lake Station (the actual) but a prime location for a new city hall (the virtual). Note: The virtual is no less real than the actual. To explain why demands a long explanation of the difficult concepts of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. But this is the AM. You are still waking up. Let’s keep on moving.

Indeed, we are only a few days away from the opening of Federal Way Downtown Station. Tacoma, what you got to say about that? “On my own, once again.”

Costco to Trump: “Better have my money.” The Issaquah-based company is suing the present administration for money that’s been sucked out of its stores by a massive black hole called tariffs. Costco, along with other companies, hopes to get paid if the Supreme Court decides the sky-high duties on imported goods are in fact illegal. The president has claimed that, one, exporters pay for tariffs (not the US); and, two, they are making more money than a sucker could ever spend. Both claims are as far from reality as Proxima Centauri is from our one and only star.

There you have it. First, the Trump Administration claimed nothing happened. Then it said something did in fact happen. Then it threw a MAGA admiral, Frank Bradley, under the bus, claiming he authorized a second attack on the survivors of a boat obliterated by a US missile. Now, the Secretary of War [Crimes] Pete Hegseth is blaming the whole bad business on the “fog of war,” meaning the US is in a war with Venezuelans suspected of smuggling drugs. But no one in the White House or the Pentagon has confirmed that one of the many boats destroyed by the US was in fact “a clear and present danger” to the military or the country it defends. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Department of War Crimes…

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— Dutchy Patrick (@dutchiepatrick.bsky.social) November 29, 2025 at 11:11 PM

And what happened during the second missile strike that clearly killed defenseless “combatants” in this fabricated war?

Secretary of War [Crimes] Pete Hegseth: “I watch that first strike live. At the Department of War [Crimes], we got a lot of things to do so I did not stick around. Couple of hours later, I learned that commander had made — which he had the complete authority to do, he made the correct decision to sink the boat and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back.

Reporter: “So you did not see the survivors after that first strike?”

Hegseth: “I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is what is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and you plant fake stories in The Washington Post not based in any truth at all.”

I really believe Hegseth is going to jail. The man is as thick as two planks. He has no idea that he’s dealing with defence professionals. And he is firing them in droves. Those people do not go into the night and find new hobbies.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025…

 

Admiral Hosley retired/quit because he did not want to give such orders! Admiral Bradley was happy to do so because he’s a huge Trump cheerleader!

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— MadGreek 🧿 (@madgreek2024.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 2:51 PM

While the brilliant Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, is collecting awards and accolades in the US (he recently visited Seattle), the Iranian government has sentenced him to a one-year sentence, a ban on international travel, and banned him from joining political groups. Indeed, I’m shocked he was allowed to leave the country in the first place. His latest, and maybe his greatest, film, It Was Just an Accident, spells it out: The Iranian government terrorizes its citizens. I have no idea where he found the courage to make this film. He had spent the last 20 years or so under house arrest, or in court, or in jail, or in fear for his life. And the first thing he does when liberated is to make a film that makes the Iranian government pretty much a monster in a horror movie. Let’s applaud him.

Scratchmaster Joe has left this world and entered the great unknown that’s always right next to life. This happened a little under two weeks ago. He was still young, though he had, according to my recollection, stopped practicing what made his name in local hip-hop, cutting and scratching. Joe was a real pro of an art that once stood at the top of its culture—the rapper played second fiddle (for example: DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince). Though the DJ entered the twilight three decades ago, some never lost the faith. They continued to believe in the wheels of steel. This was Scratchmaster Joe when I first saw him in 2008. I last saw him a month ago, at the Columbia City Station. He appeared to be a little lost. We talked for a bit and then parted ways forever.

Let’s end AM with a very special version of Drake’s hit “Hotline Bling”: