The sun is too hot. It doesn't seem to want to go away. It wants to make Seattle one of the many homes it already has. And then there's the cruise ships (the monsters of middle-class consumption) in Seattle's bay. And also the cranes for what can only be—because it has only been so far—even more luxury apartments. All of this is Seattle today, according to the Seattle Weather Blog, an outlet that does, however, share with me the feeling that autumn could not come soon enough.

A number of our beaches on Lake Washington are full of shit, so, in the words of the great and late reggae crooner, Gregory Isaacs, "if you're feeling hot" its water can't "cool ya." Tomorrow and Thursday are expected to reach the 80s and 90s. And rest of the week will be like today, in the mid-70s. But today did have lots of breezes. Those on bikes or on foot know what I'm talking about. The air was not stagnant and hot, nor moving and hot, but moving and cooling.  

And:

In this report of a 12-year-old Tacoma boy who was found driving a stolen car while packing heat is the description of how the law restricting car chases actually worked out pretty well. Cops in south Tacoma saw a vehicle with no license. They tried to pull it over. The driver refused to comply. The cops did not chase the car but instead let "Pierce County Sheriff’s Department and Washington State Patrol airplanes follow [it]." Eventually, the car got stuck on some stubborn railroad tracks, and "the driver and passenger tried to run away, but were quickly taken into custody." There was, as you can see, no need for a dramatic and very dangerous car chase. Indeed, one wonders why the police don't just use drones for this sort of thing.  

And this is what mainstream economics misses every time. The modes of production or service or consumption are indeed continuously revolutionized, but the structure and results of class relations remain always the same. Even Adam Smith, who wrote the first systematic study of commercial society (capitalism) nearly 250 years ago, had this to say about labor-capital relations:

What are the common wages of labour depends every where upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

What he means is, as Moishe Postone pointed out in his 1993 masterpiece Time, Labor and Social Domination, that changes are not about propulsion but repulsion. They race ahead for the purpose of staying in the exact same place. At the heart of capitalism is something like Aristotle's god: the prime mover that's unmoved.   
 
And so it is as always:

If you read the Adam Smith quote above, you will certainly read with open eyes the opening to a post in Puget Sound Business Journal:

Two of Seattle’s most iconic companies are locked in standoffs between management and employees, as organized labor across the country receives a jolt of enthusiasm spurred largely by the Covid-19 pandemic. Employees for Starbucks and Amazon — two vast blue-collar workforces — have begun grassroots campaigns to form or join unions, though the success of those efforts has widely varied.

What to make of this? The BBC reports that tracks made by a massive dinosaur 113 million years have been exposed by a drought certainly caused by global warming. This revelation happened on a river bed in central Texas. The BBC: "Last week, more than 87% of the state was experiencing one of the three most serious drought categories - severe, extreme and exceptional." Where are the dinosaurs now? Where will we be tomorrow? But the former at least did not cause its own extinction.  

Let's give the mic to the dinosaurs. We know you are all dead, but this is a special mic. We can hear you from the land where things go forever. The dinosaurs grunt and howl into the mic: "The drought can't be all that bad, because Texans seem to have a lots of time to worry about 'policies restricting how race and gender are addressed' in schools, and this includes 'allowing teachers to call students by pronouns that do not match their gender identity.'" Indeed. The dinosaurs once again prove that their road to extinction was far more noble than the one humans are currently on. 

Breaking news: Sometime after Labor Day, Americans over 12 years of age will have access to "the next generation of coronavirus booster shots," according to The New York Times. 

We do not have a debate on guns. We only have a minority ruling the issue. AP reports that the "Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households." Yes, 50 percent of Republicans. But we have a political system that fails, again and again, to express what is, in this case, the will of a clear majority. 

Tweet of the day, for real:

Again, it's the pedestrians who are the problem and who need to be corrected. They are on their phones and not paying attention to vehicles designed to free, as much as possible, the attention of their operators from the road and from the outside world. In this case it is the city of Hong Kong, which has decided to install "LED lights that bathe crossing points in a red glow. The hope is that people gazing down at their devices will see the sidewalk lit up, and be reminded to stop." This move is designed only to equalize pedestrians with drivers, an equalization that entirely benefits the latter.  

The US has no problem announcing on the regular large aid packages when it concerns weapons:

Let's end PM by returning to a time when people knew the meaning of a tune, in this case Darondo's "Didn't I":