The homeless crises and its sweeps might pump fresh blood into a key urbanist concern. We can see this potential in SDOT's eagerness "to build protected bike lanes in the Delridge neighborhood" where people had recently placed "illegal concrete blocks" to prevent those living in RVs from parking there. Now we know how to get things moving for Seattle's underdeveloped bike infrastructure.

Here's the plan: Urbanists must form an alliance with the homeless on wheels. Look at the gaps in the bike system. Send the RVs to those dislocations. The neighbors then freak the fuck out. The City eventually sweeps. The illegal eco-blocks appear, and, when removed, we will not only get a bike lane from SDOT but one that is protected. The scheme will work if the urbanists can give the homeless some skin in the game.

However, SDOT did get some deserved love from urbanists recently:

Gov. Jay Inslee says Washington is going the way of California. The state will "ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035." This decision was not hard to make because car-makers follow California (not the other way around). If the bear state makes a decision about emissions, its market is large enough to impact all other emission standards in the US. Inslee is only smelling the coffee. Oregon will do the same.  

King County confirms a second case of "an infant who has contracted monkeypox." The thinking is that the infant, who is "stable and receiving treatment," caught the virus from a family member or someone close to their family. What all of this throws a light on is the fact that schools are opening soon. Get ready for the explosion of a virus that could not be contained because of the expansionary logic of capitalism. 

Today in the old struggle between those who own the means for the reproduction of socially necessary human needs and those who do not: "Investigators with the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Starbucks... saying the company broke labor laws when it withheld pay increases and benefits from unionized baristas."

If you were wondering, if it was on your mind, if you lost sleep over it, then I offer your benighted state nothing less than a light at the end of the tunnel: Bumbershoot is not happening next week.

Along with this terrible heat, which has dominated the second part of summer, there has been a busy hornet's nest in the rain gutter of my house. Some of these wasps have even made it all of the way into my bedroom. I was given the stuff to kill them all, but I can't pull (or press) the trigger because I admire how much they work. They begin as soon as it is morning, and they do not stop until the sun is out of the sky. All of this effort ended with a few chemicals? How cruel. I will write about this tomorrow. But for now, we are in yet another hot day. Let's hope it is the last of its kind.

How hot is it?

 
 
 
 
 
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I'm impressed. The White House Twitter account, in the words of HuffPost editor Phil Lewis, "is pulling a 'this you?'":

My two cents on the whole curious business of Trump nicking top-secret documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago. There is no new or shocking news today about it. The US is preoccupied with the $400 billion (1.6% of the GDP) in student loans that the government released into an economy that's mostly privatized. But what we can see in this documents drama is a resemblance to the final days of the Arab nationalist Muammar Gaddafi. Recall that when he lost control of the capital of Libya, Tripoli, on August 20, 2011, he went to Sirte, his hometown, and declared that it was now the capital of Libya. The logic of this madness is mirrored by Trump's capture and relocation of top-secret documents to what is, in his mind, the new capital of the United States of America, Mar-a-Lago.  

Happy Birthday, Wayne Shorter, a jazz intellectual of the first order. You are what now? 89.

Let's end Slog PM with one of Wayne Shorter's great compositions, "Footprints":

 

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