Your uncle is wrong about crime in downtown Seattle: Crime is down citywide in 2026 compared to 2018, contrary to the popular television news narrative. The neighborhood with the lowest crime rate is downtown. Since 2018, downtown crime has fallen by 50 percent according to a new analysis of police data by the Seattle Times, while other neighborhoods saw crime rise. Why did places ike South Lake Union (SLU) get more dangerous than downtown? Blaming the poorest members of our community for downtown crime has become a cottage industry over the past decade plus, so I’d like to indulge in some baseless conspiracy theorizing of my own. Why has crime spiked in SLU since 2018? Because the neighborhood was demolished and replaced by some of the most evil tech companies on the planet, and the rain washes the ambient moral corruption off their new offices and into the streets like industrial runoff.
Seattle has a new gun violence plan: Mayor Wilson and police brass sat down to talk it over with Stranger contributor Guy Oron, who has the details. The city budget is in the toilet, so don’t expect any solutions that involve particularly large numbers.
Why are gas and commodity prices so high? It’s not just our war against Iran: There’s an idea out there that the current spike in gas prices is all due to the US starting a war against Iran, but our wars against Russia and Yemen are to blame, too. Your car probably doesn’t run on diesel, but the trucks that deliver everything you buy sure do. Diesel is at a record high ($6 a gallon) in part because Russia (a major diesel producer) halted exports to ease domestic prices in July after Ukrainian attacks targeted their refineries.
Trump wants Ukraine to stop bombing Russian diesel refineries: He called on Ukraine yesterday to pretty please stop bombing Russian refineries because it is “hurting the world” (along with his midterm election odds), per Reuters.
But Ukraine could not have bombed Russia’s oil facilities without Trump’s help: Despite criticism for being insufficiently hawkish on Russia, Trump escalated the war last October by handing the Ukrainians targeting data for Russian oil infrastructure in the first place. He has no one to blame but himself, according to the Wall Street Journal.
If that wasn’t bad enough, now Saudi Arabia’s backup pipeline is up in smoke: Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is still way down, but fear not, Saudi oil can flow through their east-west pipeline to Red Sea export terminals, saving the midterms. Or rather, the oil could flow had a few of the pumping stations not been blown apart by missile attacks. Who’s to blame is disputed, but the Saudis reigniting their long war against Yemen offers some clues. According to Reuters, if the pipeline isn’t fixed within a week then the storage tanks at the export terminals will run dry and gas and commodity prices will skyrocket further as 4 percent of global oil supply disappears off the market.
But the government says we blew up all of Iran’s missile launchers? This discrepancy can be best explained in a TikTok where the military tech is… inflatable.
For some reason we’re still going after Ba’athists: They used to be our best ally against Iran, but then Saddam Hussein botched the invasion, the war tanked the Iraqi economy, they annexed Kuwait to try and make their money back, and we’ve spent the last 35 years bombing Iraq to the point that it’s far closer to an Iranian ally. Elite US Department of Homeland Security goon squad, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the arrest of Saddam-era Iraqi intelligence officer Raad Alanbagi in Detroit on Sunday, which will surely turn the tide.
The Trumps might be getting ready to sell off their crypto fortune: President Trump and his three idiot sons appear to have made initial moves to liquidate their World Liberty Financial digital token crypto scam, according to a report yesterday by the Washington Sun, previously known as NOTUS, and staffed by disgruntled former employees of the now pro-Trump Washington Post. I will leave the nerd details to you, the reader, to suss out, but for the less technical-minded like me, just remember: if you cannot see the exit liquidity, you are the exit liquidity.
A white supremacist who marched in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally at Charlottesville will likely be elected to the Florida legislature. Talking Points Memo has the details on Republican nominee Marshall Rawson, who primaried an incumbent Republican state legislator earlier this year in a swampy Florida district that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Tallahassee since Trump was elected (I would have guessed since the Civil War). Rawson is a bit of a Civil War buff himself, affiliating with neo-Confederate hate groups and advocating for lynchings.
I leave you with the great David Strathairn: