After days of real rain, the real wind came and annihilated many trees and cut power for an estimated 300,000 humans in the water-clogged region. “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,” howled wind gusts that, in some parts, reached 112 mph. This morning, Seattle’s sky is almost calm and few of the brightest stars are visible. As for the rest of the day, expect some showers, strong and cold breezes, and a high of 47.
The Washington floods death toll is now 1. It happened in Snohomish not long after Tuesday completed its first hour. A 33-year-old man, whose state of mind (sober or not) is unknown at this point, drove past signs that clearly told drivers to turn right back and make other plans. Soon after the young man made his last and very bad decision, he plunged into a ditch filled with “six feet of water.” When rescuers retrieved him from the submerged car, he was no longer among the living.
I moved to this part of America 30 years ago to avoid real weather. Yes it rained here, but rarely heavily. Yes it got cold here, but nothing like Detroit or Chicago cold. It was just perfect for me. Now look at what anthropogenic climate change has done to my little paradise. We get weather in the summer (too many hot days) and weather in the winter (rain that doesn’t fuck around).
A second Pacific cold front will cross the Pacific Northwest Wednesday followed by another atmospheric river event. These will mean additional periods of gusty winds, mountain snow, and heavy to excessive rainfall with a renewed flooding threat. Make sure to check weather.gov for the latest.
— National Weather Service (@nws.noaa.gov) December 16, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Real talk: Rain or no rain, Metro’s 60 bus is going to be late leaving Capitol Hill. In fact, though not as bad as the 8 (the bus that knows only its own time), it’s less dependable than the Seattle Streetcar, which, despite being stuck on tracks that are not separated from traffic-generating cars, still manages to meet much of its schedule. The 60 is such a mystery to me.
The replica of a Bavarian village called Leavenworth is asking the Lord of Lords and King of Kings (mother nature) why the floods had to happen now, during the one time of the year its economy, which is centered around Christmastown, gets a good blast of much-needed tourist cash. First, the snow doesn’t fall like it used to. It’s been replaced by rain. Then came the floods, which closed the town’s lifeline (US Route 2) for five whole Christmastime days. The mayor of Leavenworth, Carl Florea, said to KIRO Newsradio: “[The holiday season is] really important for our retail establishments, it’s when people do a lot of their buying, a lot of their shopping, and a lot of that we’re dependent on. Our economy is a tourism economy.”
Speaking of the Christmas economy: Artificial Christmas trees, which are popular and mostly made in “the factory of the world,” China, are now demanding more cash from cash-strapped American consumers because of, yes, Trump’s tariffs. And it’s not just the trees; it’s also the decorations. Spectrum News: “The US Census Bureau estimates that nearly $3 billion in Christmas decorations are imported annually from China.”
But what do these Nordic trees have to do with the birth of Jesus anyway? Well, Christianity appropriated them from a bunch of German heathens (Leavenworth’s dark secret). Now is a good time for a little and relevant detour into European history. During the period, the early Middle Ages, that saw the replacement of tree-worship (arborolatry) with monotheism in Germany, a popular method of converting German pagans to Christianity was to chop down their sacred trees. In Willibald’s Life Of St Boniface—an account of the Anglo-Saxon missionary, Boniface, who killed his earthy Germanic name and adopted a dead Latin one—you will find this description of his felling of a huge pagan tree, The Oak of Thunor, in AD 723:
“Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), [Boniface] cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly, the oak’s vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground, shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God… the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord.” Boniface did not stop with just cutting down the tree; he used the dead oak to build a chapel, which he dedicated to Saint Peter.
This primitive business of worshiping trees was eventually Christianized, and entered British and American culture in the 19th century by way of Prince Albert, the German prince who married Queen Victoria.
Fine, now back to the regular economy: The Bureau of Labor Statistics finally released jobs data after two months of nothing doing. And what did it come down to? The Trump economy is losing more jobs than it’s creating. October saw 105,000 jobs go up in smoke; November saw 64,000 jobs reappear. And unemployment ticked up to 4.6%, its highest level since 2021. So, these are not, after all, the golden years, the golden years.
When the American economy tanks, the first to go under are always Black people. This fact was, of course, confirmed in the jobs data released on Tuesday, which said that the unemployment rate for Black people hit 8.3 percent in November. It hasn’t been this high since 2021. And it will, at this pace, only get higher. Black folks have been here before and they will be here again because, in the words of that 80s hit tune, “somethings just never change.”
oh look a real unemployment problem
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 16, 2025 at 12:28 PM
The GOP has wasted our time again. It has no real plan to improve the health care system. It only wants to take money from those who don’t have it and give it to those who have way too much of it. There’s nothing much else to see in their politics than that. But the health care issue is proving to be dangerous at a time when the economy is unraveling and Trump is growing more and more unpopular. And so, some moderate Republicans have decided that political survival is the order of the day and joined Democrats to require a vote on extending health care credits for three more years. First Indianapolis, and now this! Trump must be livid. The vote, however, won’t come until January, after the ACA subsidies have expired.
Let’s close AM with a broken heart in the rain:
Prince Albert married Queen Victoria
I’d much have preferred visiting sacred trees in ancient forests to my churchgoing experience growing up. Less potato salad sure but ultimately a small price to pay.
“I moved to this part of America 30 years ago to avoid real weather.”
Have you considered moving to Zimbabwe?
@1 – I wonder if Charles was thinking of Elizabeth I – who some say was a man.
@4: “some say”? Who are these “some”? I’ve been alive for 64 years and have never heard anyone say Elizabeth was a man. Henry VIII desperately wanted a son, so he’d have been over the moon if his second child had been a boy. No one in Tudor England pretended boys were girls, when boys were what kings and family patriarchs wanted.
Snohomish provided the first Darwin Award winner of the season’s first weather disaster.
“Winner, winner, winner! Ding, ding, ding. Aooogah, Aoogah, Aoogah,!”
Nice job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards
“This primitive business of worshiping trees was eventually Christianized, and entered British and American culture in the 19th century by way of Prince Albert, the German prince who married Queen Elizebeth.”
Uhhh Albert married Queen Victoria. And technically German-born Queen Charlotte brought them to court in the 18th century, but I digress.
Hwy 2 is closed for a lot longer than 5 days:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/highway-2-will-be-closed-for-months-wa-gov-ferguson-says/
Looks like the ski season at Stevens Pass might not happen this year.
@2: I kid you not, in my high school in the early 70s in Santa Fe, NM we had an mandatory assembly where a famed Zozobra fire dancer Jacques Cartier (not the famous explorer, obviously) gave an in depth talk presenting the case for it.
https://sflivingtreasures.org/index.php/treasures/201-cartier-jacques-.html
See also:
https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/bisley-boy-was-elizabeth-i-a-man/
as long as
our Jet Setters
can still gel Aloft
and Away we Should
all be Grateful to even be
Alive and still full of Complaints
after all
We are Here
to Serve Them
& Not, as some seem
to want to Believe, for Them
to Worry About Our sorry Plight
and, when they choose to
Outlaw our Complaining,
with Good Reason! will
You go Quietly into
that Good Nite?
@10 – I attended the Burning of Zozobra in 1987, 1988, and 1989, when I lived in Santa Fe. It was quite a spectacle, if you could deal with the gigantic crowd of drunk Native Americans and “Latinx” screaming racial hatred at the White people in the audience.
Meanwhile…
3 Evergreen High students detained during lockdown, weapons found at scene
Wed, December 17, 2025 at 11:03 AM
SEATTLE — Three students were detained after being connected to a weapons report at Evergreen High School on Wednesday morning, the King County Sheriff’s Office reports.
Deputies responded to Evergreen High School around 9 a.m, shortly after the school entered a lockdown.
Three students were detained at the scene; two are being sent to a juvenile facility, while one is being released back to the school.
Authorities located two weapons, but no injuries were reported.
https://komonews.com/news/local/3-evergreen-high-students-detained-during-lockdown-weapons-found-at-scene-uppdate-guns-shooting-teenagers-arrest-police-response-safety-emergency
Interesting context:
https://www.greatschools.org/washington/seattle/716-Evergreen-High-School/
Student Demographics
Hispanic – 50%
Asian or Pacific Islander – 23%
Black – 12%
White – 8%
Two or more races – 4%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander – 2%
Native American – 1%
@12~that’s what
Totaled your
Psyche?
well
That
explains
a lotta things
so Sorry
for your Loss.
@14 – I’ve been to more “diverse” places all around the world that you couldn’t possibly imagine, and the situations I’ve been in there would make your naive White-Guilt ass shit its pants.
@12: The crowds have gotten too large in recent years for a lot of folks I know to go anymore, but no, it’s never been like that at all. Audience? It’s outside.
@16 – yes, audience. An audience does not exclude it being outdoors. Like I wrote, I went there 3 years in a row, in 1987, 1988, and 1989, and I know what I’m writing about.
@15 my heart bleeds for your persecution complex
Try getting shot once and stabbed 11 times, spanning 3 different attacks, by “PoC”, totally unprovoked.
I used to be a dumbass naive White liberal like you guys lol
All that got shot and stabbed out of me a long time ago
@17: It’s certainly plausible one could hear ‘Chinga tu madre, gringo ese’ in the crowd, and at Fiesta on the Plaza if that’s what you meant.
One of the black guys who stabbed me (5 times) called me a “White motherfucker” while he did it, I was just waiting for the bus. Later, I had to deal with stupid naive White “progressive” liberal idiots, like most of you here, telling me how he couldn’t possibly qualify as being a “racist”, because he had no “power”.
It’s hilarious how you don’t even begin to understand how stupid and naive you are.
@21 – No Phoebe, I mean the Burning of Zozobra. I lived in Santa Fe for 3 years and have been there many times before and since. I know the difference between BoZ and the Plaza.
@ Bi-Pedo…
Cool story, brah…
@23: So tell us what happened then. It’s a big crowd. Lots of hooting and hollering, cheering and revelry in anticipation of the burning and beyond, but what instigated the anti-white hate you describe? What was said? Was aimed at you specifically? To keep us from filling in the blanks with our imagination, what happened?
@24 – How very stereotypically “progressive” of you.
@23: I believe you about being in Santa Fe, but I don’t believe your characterization of its peoples.
@25 – free-floating hostility towards White people, shouting of anti-White slurs (“fuck you White boy” seemed to be popular), some fights. Did you ever actually attend the Burning of Zozobra? I did 3 times.
@27 – maybe it was different when you were there in the “early 70’s”. A lot has changed since then.
@27: Yes, since the sixties.
@29: I go back as much as I can to visit my mother and go to the opera. So sorry you feel that way about The City Different.
@bladesattractor
perhaps
they could
See/Feel your ‘Vibe’
and just responded Organically
in Any case
remind me to stay
as Far Away as possible
from you in any crowd where
more than one person is gathered
@30 – Phoebe, you didn’t ever answer my question.
Did you ever actually attend the Burning of Zozobra? I did 3 times.
Queen Victoria property referenced now. Thank you Charles.
We appreciate Slog staff who correct their very occasional errors.
@31 – kringeofartian, “victim blaming” is so very “progressive” of you.
I was a naive White-Guilt liberal “progressive”, like you, when all those attacks happened.
Gee I wonder why I’m not one anymore?
@32 – Yes several times, in fact, not to name drop, but my parents were friends with Will Shuster. You bet I attended. I’ve never attended Burning Man though.
@35 – Cool, I bet it was fun back then (Shuster died in 1969). I had an overall good time, or I wouldn’t have attended 3 years in a row. It is, like I wrote, a fascinating spectacle. I encourage all White Seattle liberals to attend at least once.
“Try getting shot once
and stabbed 11 times, spanning 3
different attacks, by “PoC”, totally unprovoked.”
yeah.
who on
Earth could
even Imagine
someone calling
themselves ‘knife’
whose comments’re
repulsively Aggressive
a real Toe-to-Toer
EVER Provoking
Anything!
color me
Unpersuaded
your
Hole is
Calling. it
wants you Back.
@37 wow that’s so stereotypically “progressive” of you, kringeofartian.
I hope you get half of what I’ve experienced.
Weird how no mainstream news outlet has reported on what has been happening with the CHOP trial where Antonio Mays, Jr. got murdered by White Antifa/John Brown Gun Club idiots since Monday huh! There was a whole court session yesterday, on Tuesday 12/16/2025! What’s the deal? You’d think The Stranger would be all over this! It makes the cops look bad! (But it makes The Stranger look bad too). I thought Black Lives Mattered!
The evil conservatives at The Seattle Times didn’t even cover it, CKathes! You wrote yesterday: “(Now, if the ST weren’t doing this reporting, I’d agree that the Stranger would indeed have that responsibility.)” What’s The Stranger’s excuse now?
https://www.thestranger.com/slog-am/2025/12/16/80375582/slog-am-bad-weather-broken-levees-and-slop-is-word-of-the-year/comments/29
SEATTLE ON TRIAL: Fire dept medics ‘abandoned’ 16-year-old CHOP shooting victim Antonio Mays Jr to die: expert witness
Mays, a black teenager from California, endured more than 25 minutes of “agonizing pain” before succumbing to his injuries.
An emergency medical services (EMS) expert testified Tuesday in the ongoing wrongful death lawsuit Mays v. City of Seattle, saying that Seattle Fire Department (SFD) medics failed to follow protocol and “abandoned their position as paramedics” during the response to the 2020 shooting of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. in the deadly Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, also known as “CHAZ” or “CHOP.” This follows last week’s testimony from Seattle Police Detective Alan Cruise, stating that officers were prohibited from entering the zone after the shooting under directives given by the City.
Robyn McKinley, a veteran EMS professional who conducted an independent investigation into Seattle Fire’s response, told the Court that medics from Medic One fled a designated casualty collection area outside the zone when protesters arrived with the wounded teenager in a vehicle. McKinley described how dispatchers instructed CHAZ/CHOP protesters to transport Mays, shot by armed individuals acting as “security” within the zone, to a rendezvous point at 14th and Union streets. Dispatch provided details about the incoming vehicle, including its make, model, color, flashing lights, and confirmation that the occupants were unarmed.
Despite this information, medics reportedly believed someone in the vehicle was in possession of a firearm and drove away without making contact with the patient. McKinley testified that Mays was still alive and breathing at that moment, with a detectable pulse. Scrambling to save the teen’s life, protesters stumbled upon a separate Seattle Fire engine and transferred Mays for treatment. By that time, it was too late to save him.
“The system failed this young man,” McKinley said, noting that a system error had mislabeled the casualty area as a “scene of violence,” complicating the response. She added, “With this particular incident, the ball was dropped,” and emphasized that she had never seen EMTs “abandon in that fashion” during her career.
Seattle Fire Captain Josh Pearson, a supervisor at the time, defended his team’s decision to depart the “chaotic” scene. He said that the car transporting Mays was moving “recklessly” toward Medic One, and that medics assumed, incorrectly, that a man riding on top of the vehicle was brandishing a gun.
Due to the documented violence surrounding the autonomous zone, McKinley testified that she did, in fact, believe the medics had a “perceived fear” at the time the vehicle encountered them. However, the expert told the Court that the medics failed to contact dispatch to notify them that they were “abandoning” the patient, a violation of standard operating guidelines (SOG) of scenes of violence response. Additionally, McKinley said that emergency responders did not report their alleged observation of a firearm, nor did they request police assistance. It has since been determined that the subject did not have a firearm on his body.
McKinley’s testimony follows last week’s revelation from Seattle Police Department (SPD) homicide detective Alan Cruise, who stated he received direct orders from Assistant Chief Thomas—originating from city officials—not to enter the CHAZ/CHOP zone after the shooting. The prohibition lasted nearly five hours, preventing police from securing the crime scene and resulting in protesters and/or potential suspects tampering with the evidence. His testimony bolstered the plaintiffs’ argument that the city’s abandonment of the Seattle Police East Precinct and prohibition on officers entering the zone created a “state-created danger,” delaying critical medical care and police investigation—leading to Antonio’s death and rendering the city liable for negligence.
The fatal shooting occurred around 3 am on June 29, 2020, when protesters operating as “CHAZ/CHOP security” unleashed a barrage of gunfire on Mays and his 14-year-old friend, Robert West, while they were driving a vehicle through the zone. The Antifa-BLM autonomous zone was established following the death of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis police custody. Anti-police activists occupied a six-block radius in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, leading city officials to abandon the SPD east precinct and implement policies restricting police and emergency responder entry without special approval.
Mays, a black teenager from California, endured more than 25 minutes of “agonizing pain” before succumbing to his injuries, said Attorney Evan Oshan, representing the Mays family. No arrests have been made in the killing. Courtroom audio played for the jury captured frantic protesters seeking aid after Medic One departed, which included the sound of Mays’ labored breathing in his final moments. The trial continues, with the city defending its handling of the unprecedented protest zone.
https://thepostmillennial.com/seattle-on-trial-fire-dept-medics-abandoned-16-year-old-chop-shooting-victim-antonio-mays-jr-to-die-expert-witness
@22 I can’t imagine why a black person would stab you.
…just kidding. We’ve all read your comments on here. There are SO many good reasons.
@39 The entire point of that trial and story is that a bunch of white cops let a young black man die of a gun wound because they’re a bunch of scared babies. It has nothing to do with antifa anything. CHOP had nothing to do with Antifa either. You literally don’t understand what that word means and you constantly look like a fucking idiot every time you post anything about it.
I’m surprised you aren’t celebrating the black kid dying based on every other racist ass post you’ve ever made on here.
@40 – “victim blaming”, how “progressive of you.
I was a “progressive liberal” when I got stabbed.
Gosh golly gee, I wonder why I’m not one now?
@9 its not just Hwy 2 and Stevens. Highway 410 is wrecked as well and getting to Crystal is going to be a nightmare. I’ve had a few friends tell me they have already deferred their pass to next season. If you want to ski this year you are going to have to super patient or go outside the state. It’s a real bummer for the seasonal workers who depend on that income. The super ironic part is we are about to get slammed with snow so they all would be able to open up soon.
@41- “CHOP had nothing to do with Antifa either.”
LOL write some more funny stupid shit
“I’m surprised you aren’t celebrating the black kid dying based on every other racist ass post you’ve ever made on here.”
White Progressives are my most-hated ethnic group.
Thanks Charles for engaging / correcting a simple mistake (the kids could learn a lot from you).
@45 if you’ve been stabbed three separate times, perhaps is time to look in the mirror and figure out why you keep finding yourself in those situations. Methinks you’re not the innocent angel you’re making yourself out to be.
@47, it was two separate incidents, one where I was waiting for the bus (gee why don’t more people want to take public transit???), totally minding my own business, and one time I was in my car at a red light with my door stupidly unlocked, totally minding my own business. PLUS I WAS A LIBERAL when they happened (wonder why I’m not now?).
Nice “progressive” victim-blaming though. You probably think I deserved it for being White in “bad neighborhoods” huh. Maybe they were just trying to help me to become more “progressive” by forcibly “dismantling my White Privilege” for me.
Getting shot was another separate time (third violent attack). That was another black guy who was trying to help me become more progressive.
White liberal “progressives” are still my most-hated ethnic group, though.
People who write “methinks” are smug fucking idiots