Business as usual...
Business as usual... Charles Mudede

Let Us Not Get All Nostalgic About the Days Before Amazon: Amazon did not take Seattle's soul, as the god-awful New York Times post claims. Seattle has never had a soul to take or steal or kill from day one. As the former Stranger columnist Clark Humphrey pointed out in his post "Ten Things Every Seattleite Needs to Know," this city has always been about making money from booms. And besides, what's seen as the soul of the city—the happy days for white middle-class workers—was rotten to the core for blacks, who were once locked in a neighborhood, and are now locked out of the city altogether.

The post also says dumb things about Kshama Sawant, one of the greatest councilmembers in Seattle's boom-and-bust history, and Marxism. Like so many inadequately lettered Americans, the author of the post knows next to nothing about Karl Marx's work. If he bothered to read the German philosopher's books, he would find almost no "economic theory" in them. Marx mainly critiqued the forms of capitalism described by classical political economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Reverend Thomas Malthus. And so one of the many brilliant things you will find in his books is the first examination of booms and busts. For Marx, they were not exceptional (or exogenous) but a regular feature of the system (endogenous). We now call these booms and busts the business cycle.

Blacks In Seattle: Seattle $36,000. Blacks in the US: $38,000.



Tires Slashed During Depeche Mode Concert: Before jumping to conclusions, it must be understood that there is nothing in the music of Depeche Mode, a British pop band that reached its productive and creative peak in the 1980s, that condones this kind of behavior. Indeed, one of Depeche Mode's most popular tunes, "Behind the Wheel," celebrates driving: "My little girl/Drive anywhere/Do what you want/I don't care." You certainly can't "drive anywhere" with slashed tires. KIRO reports that one of the victims of this crime, Tim Spiech, came from Portland for the show. The Portlander had no idea two of his car's tires had been slashed by a sharp object until he started driving. He soon noticed something was very wrong, stopped, looked at the tires, and realized he was stuck in Seattle. So far, the Seattle Police Department is aware of five vandalized cars.

Portland Permits People to Live in RVs on Private Land: MYNorthwest reports that the decision was made by Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly with support from the mayor and is effective immediately. A parking lot owned by a business or church or what have you is allowed "up to three RVs or tiny houses." Like Seattle, Portland is in the middle of a housing crisis. But unlike Seattle, Portland is trying to do something about.

The Heavy Rain Is Over For Now: But a number of regional rivers have more water than they can carry. When this happens, the surplus water makes life difficult for humans, who are happy when water stays within the limits of a river and sad when it doesn't. KOMO has a guide to flooding information.

This Is Why Four American Soldiers Died in Niger: For reasons that make no sense, Donald Trump placed Chad on the infamous Muslim ban list on September 24. Chad, which had been working closely with Western allies to fight terrorist groups in the region, was offended by Trump's nonsense decision and pulled its troops out of an area that includes Niger. On October 4, four American soldier were ambushed in this area and killed. Trump was certainly informed of these events and their connection to his ban, and so probably hoped the deaths would not make much news in the US (they happened in the Darkest Continent after all). But on October 17, a reporter from a "fake news" network asked him about the deaths and his strange silence (no tweets, no nothing about the incident), and Trump, of course, blamed Obama for everything.

When that didn't work, he dragged the dead son of John Kelly (the White House Chief of Staff and former general) into the growing mess. When that didn't work, Trump and John Kelly began attacking a black congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, from Florida—she knew one of the men (Sgt. La David Johnson) killed in Niger and criticized Trump's handling of the matter. At present, mainstream media is focused on Wilson, some speech she gave in 2015, lies made by Kelly about this speech, and Wilson's colorful hats. Little is being said about Chad and the Muslim ban that killed four American soldiers.