General Howard Schultz will retire from the old war between employers and workers in April of 2023. He will be replaced by Laxman Narasimhan, "a 55-year-old Indian American businessman [who] has previously been the CEO of consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser and the CCO of PepsiCo." The word is Schultz will be very close to Narasimhan during the transition. But we all know that the kind of information the interim CEO will transfer to the new one will not concern the best sources for coffee beans, the recent developments in the art of steaming milk, and the all-importance of customer satisfaction. The matter will concern the inveterate  stubbornness of labor, and the time-tested methods of back-breaking its spirit. 

Two headlines on KOMO's website: "Investigation underway after man found in bushes with gunshot wound in Tacoma" and "Renton police investigating homicide after man found dead on the ground." The Renton man was shot multiple times. At this rate, one expects to soon see this headline: "Dead man with gunshot wound found at the top of a Seattle tree."

According to the Seattle Weather Blog, we just experienced the "3rd-hottest August on record." Expect more records of this kind to be broken in a future that is so near it has already arrived. All we will have from here on are moments that remind us of the time when the climate was predictable, when the world was much cooler. One such moment was sampled this morning, the first day of September. There was almost no light in my bedroom window until 7 am. The clouds in the sky were dark, slow, and low. What was hard to connect was this moment with the last day of August, which, like some days in the month, had a sun that flexed its strength like a massive and obnoxious muscle-man on a beach.

Also consider this: Seattle experienced for the first time on record two months in a row (July and August) that had an average temperature that "was 80°F or higher." 

Seriously? When will Seattle finally abandon this middle-class obsession with graffiti. It is just in poor taste. It shows nothing but a gap in one's mode of feeling, which should be urban in the deepest sense. The American middle class: we must denounce its mousy values at every opportunity. 

Starting today, the youth of Seattle (18 and under) can "ride free on King County Metro and other transit agencies across the Puget Sound region." This is an important development because it will normalize public transportation in a generation that will need a powerful sense of the public spirit if it hopes to make the transition to the post-capitalist society that the new and much warmer climate plainly requires. And by post-capitalism, I mean a society that has abandoned the present location of value, which is not found in things or even in money but in the structure of social relations. This reading of value is Marx's greatest contribution to political economy.   

As for Pakistan:

The Ginni that keeps popping out of the bottle. Today: "Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, [also] urged lawmakers to overturn Trump election loss in Wisconsin, report says."

President Biden's prime time address: The president laid into "MAGA Republicans" a couple months ahead of the midterms, which are looking slightly better for his Democratic party.

Let's end PM with a new short film by Kendrick Lamar, “We Cry Together”:
 

 

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