Overheard on northbound Link train at around 1:35 pm: "You come from where? Kentucky! And it's your first time here. Welcome. You will love Seattle. It's a great city. It really is. But I would stay away from the University District. Shootings are out of control there right now. Something like six people got shot and killed there this weekend? Is that right? Six or five? Maybe eight? Real bad. But Seattle is cool. You came at a great time. No rain. Nothing like that yet. But stay away from downtown. If you want to live, don't go there. Bad people run downtown. Real bad. You will like Seattle. My favorite city in the world. I would not live anywhere else." These words, which came out of the mouth of a young man hitting, without a doubt, his sixth beer of the day already, utterly confused the luggage-gripping Kentuckians. They de-boarded at Westlake Station.

Nothing reasonable will ever make the rich happy. First, they were certain that high wages would kill jobs, hurt the economy, kneecap small businesses, and so on. Now they are telling us there are way too many jobs in Washington State, and this will "raise prices" so businesses can "afford the higher pay their employees can command in such a tight labor market." What does this all mean? The rich, whose interests are transformed into economic laws by market-indoctrinated journalists and academics, only want workers who are precarious and paid pennies. (More about this in a moment.)

By the way: Seattle's minimum wage rises to $18.69 an hour on Jan 1, 2023.

And there is this: The Puget Sound Business Journal reports that the "U.S. Census Bureau data shows new business applications in Washington slumped in the first half of 2020. But since then, applications have picked up and have continued to surge." And this brings back a point I have made before—and this point should trouble the right as much as it troubles the left: Is capitalism really about what is understood to be capitalism (growth, making profits, and so on)? It seems it may not be. It's possible that capitalists could make agreeable profits in a social situation that was more equitable. (This fact is made clearer if the concept of "socially necessary labor" is grasped.) But this may not be what the elite actually want—functional capitalism. It's not profits that really matter, but crude class power. The two might actually not be identical, as most people think. The medieval logic, as theorist Nancy Fraser has hinted, might make more sense of capitalism than the other way around. The ape explains the human.  

The first half of today was right. The second half, wrong. My cats did not want to leave the house in the morning. I opened the door, they looked at what was going on (autumn), and said: "Hell no." But come noon, summer was clearly breaking through the clouds. The cats saw this through the opened door and said: "That's more like it," and ran into the garden, whose roses are still blooming.      

Trump wants the Supreme Court to become the gods (the deus ex machina) in his Justice Department drama. This is how his lawyers worded his raw theft of confidential government documents: “In sum, the government has attempted to criminalize a document management dispute and now vehemently objects to a transparent process that provides much-needed oversight.” The Cox Media Group National Content Desk, which supplies national stories to KIRO, described the situation like this: "Trump asks Supreme Court to intervene in dispute with FBI." A dispute? This is a dispute? The way this country loves Trump is just out of this world.

America also loves Black Trump, Herschel Walker:

MAGA be like:

The reverend be like...

The Musk is now ready to buy Twitter for the original price, $44 billion. My prediction? If this deal goes through, Twitter will tank. The center-left and mainstream news, rather than the right and MAGA, drives that platform. Twitter can easily be replaced if it goes to the dogs.

Let's end PM with excellent '90s R&B: