Just another day in the capitalocene...
Just another day in the capitalocene... Aaron Peck

Once again the capitalist golden egg proves to be nothing but a bunch of straw. Heidi Groover of the Seattle Times reports that a "lawsuit filed in federal court [on] Tuesday alleges [that] Zillow illegally failed to disclose to shareholders that it was struggling to accurately predict home prices for its house flipping business". This kind of story is so, so old, and yet somehow it never gets old enough. Zillow, Seattle-based online real estate company, came up with something new—flipping houses with an algorithm. This is the future, they said; be the future or be left behind. Money became excited. But it did not work out as planned, and so the hot money became cold. AI can't do the golden egg thing in this part of the market. As for the straw that's now in the mouths of shareholders and flippers, I take this image from one of the Japanese ghost stories collected by Koizumi Yakumo (Patrick Lafcadio) at the end of the 19th century. The old fox is said to turn fantastic things into this ordinary stuff.

WA's redistricting commission finally presented the public with its new maps. But the maps failed to meet the deadline, and so the entire matter is "in the hands of the state Supreme Court, although the [commission] did send their maps to the court for consideration." To get a sense how crazy all of this has been, just go and check out recent tweets by Rich Smith.

Here is a stool for the stupid. Here is the dumb cow. Here is the top charlatan of the day, Christopher Rufo, milking it for all he can.

COVID cases are, as expected, on the rise again. You just have to give it up. This is the world we are now in. And it's not going away any time soon. If you want to make sure you, to use the words of Hole, "live through this", then wear a mask.

The Canadian author and urban theorist Aaron Peck returned to his city, Vancouver, from Paris, where he currently lives, only to find "the whole south coast of BC... pummelled by a storm with rains so hard meteorologists call it 'an atmospheric river.'"

Peck continues:

The impact was felt all the way into the Interior where whole cities were evacuated due to flooding, the same places evacuated this summer because of forest fires. On the coast [a] shipping container came loose and crashed into Sunset Beach. I have missed the smell of the ocean.

You have to see the sea-tossed barge slamming and splashing Vancouver BC:

Bellingham? KIRO 7 reports that parts of its downtown "are still under water with cars submerged and roads closed." Expect the future to be more and more like this all over the place. And electric cars will not save us. The noose of capitalism is around the neck of the only world that made humans possible.

Back to Canada. These horses. The song that must be in their panicked minds. It can only be: "Give me a higher ground":

Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, the two men convicted of killing one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Malcolm X, will be "be exonerated after 55 years". This decision was made after a 22-month investigation revealed too many holes in the case that was brought against against Aziz and Islam. The former is still with us, the latter is not. In 2009, he crossed the river that Malcolm X crossed in 1965.

The QAnon Shaman was sentenced "to more than three years" in the cooler. “What you did was terrible,” the judge told the most-famous shaman of the 21st century. “You made yourself the center of the riot.” The QAnon Shaman happens to be a vegan.

Let's close this post with the post-postmodern blues of Alabama Shakes: