I like how the Stranger gives us updates from all the hot white tragedy spots.
Thanks for your great coverage of Syria, Ethiopia, Yemen, Kurdistan, and Armenia that I am sure is coming next.
The crisis in the Ukraine is real and worth attention. But it is a bummer how the media only cares about it and not the other very real scenes of ongoing suffering at the hands of dictators.

"Biden says
that Americans
should not be wor-
ried about nuclear war."

whew!

@1 -- nothing Good
comes from a Planet
Ruled by Dicktaters and
Oilgarchs. well Slaves &
shit but* it's Good to be White!

*by God

@1: I think pointing out the disparity in the reaction in the west between this crisis and others in Yemen, Syria etc is spot on.
However did Yemen or Ethiopia or Syria have nukes? No? Was an entire continent in danger of being overwhelmed? No? Did events in Ethiopia risk WWIII? No? Maybe these things are adding to the angst.

When I first moved to Seattle, I lived for a few years very near High Point (pretty dangerous area at the time) and then the Admiral District which I moved to after being attacked and mugged waiting for a bus to my night job. West Seattle - before the bridge - was in a time warp. The Alaska Junction was only a few beer joints and some old, dusty shops filled with elder wear, the Husky Deli, an art supply store, and a pretty fine hardware store.

I moved from West Seattle to downtown because, considering my hours, bus service was pure crap and getting worse all the time. I started out with the choice of four different bus lines to get to work and back home, and ended with one. After the Blizzard of '91 hit, you didn't know when or if a bus would come for nearly a week. Metro's customer help line was a busy signal all that time. You were expected to go out and just wait until something came. It was in the single digits that week with a wind that would fillet you. I waited several hours for several days. I said, "Fuck it, I'm moving to where I can walk to work if I have to." It was the right decision. My life bloomed after moving - feeling as though I had been exiled from the rest of the city.

From the video, it looks like WS is in that time warp again. Or maybe it never fully broke out of it. The bridge brought new people into that sleepy little part of town raising home prices like crazy - even before it happened all over town. WS had been so out of the way and hard to get to before the bridge that most prospective buyers didn't give it a second thought.

One wonders if rebuilding the bridge is the best choice if it's going to take forever and be the source of huge cost overruns, graft, and corruption (and you know it is, right?). I know it's hard though to have something taken away that so many have come to depend upon. My suggestion remains: Move closer to work or telecommute if you can.

@4/@7 - Sexual identity and expression (and that includes drag) and race are two totally different things, so no, it is not the same.

Or show me a link of women protesting drag queens (other than religious nuts).

Or tell me story of a drag queen who was asked to stop doing drag by a female friend.

I have heard lively feminist debate on whether drag is sexist or not. I don't have an opinion and will stay out of it. I'd like to consider myself a feminist, but I am not a woman. Nor do I do drag.

I don't think it's anti-woman though. Drag performers are exaggerating a personality type, aren't they? - not all women, Was Jerry Lewis making a comment by caricaturing all people with learning disorders? Or was he just trying to be funny.

Why exactly do you think the covid test site looks "sketchy"?

@6 "And the beat goes on" A most interesting opportunity exists in SW Seattle: finally incorporate White Center. Not that the North Enders will care but it would do cool and exciting new things for the city. But West Seattle has always been a backwater. The whole of Seattle still considers it just a vantage point for a photo op and a beach side summer drive.

On Ukraine, here's a good quote from Gerard Baker's column this week in the WSJ:
"While privileged young people in America express outrage at microaggressions in the workplace because someone used the wrong pronoun, the youth of Kyiv are gathering in bunkers to make Molotov cocktails in a last, desperate act to defend their beleaguered city--street by street if necessary--against the most violently macro of aggressions."

so damn Pleased
w/self for NOT
reading

Rupert 'Uncle Snoopy' Murdoch's "the wsj"
THNX for the Reminder rocksy

oh & btw you Forgot
to mention the
Avocado
Toast

@3 -- UPDATE:

here’s one reader’s comment
on the NYT’s Paul Krugman’s
Russia Is a Potemkin Superpower
on 2/28/22

Biden has been strategically brilliant in sounding the alarm and denouncing Putin without stealing the thunder from our allies, which has allowed the EU, Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, even Singapore, to take action without it appearing to be under American pressure.

The best kind of leadership is cooperative and inclusive, not coercive and bombastic. Thanks to Biden, it's the world vs. Putin, not the US vs. Russia.

Biden's refusal to take Putin's nuclear weapons posturing seriously projects confidence and strength, and isolates Putin further as a desperate madman who's lost his grip.

The Russian people have no appetite for a nuclear exchange, not just between the US and Russia, but with all Western nations with nuclear weapons. Even China, which is economically dependent on global stability, is appalled and alarmed by Putin's nuclear saber-rattling.

Remember the campaign ad that asked: "It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep...But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Who do you want answering the phone?"

The vast majority of sane Americans made the right choice.

--Yuriasian, Bay Area; Feb. 28

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/opinion/putin-military-sanctions-weakness.html

well it looks like
Smokin Joe’s PRECISELY
The Right Guy for The Job

well Done sir.

Well Done Brian Callanan!
(on the west sea. bridge)!

can you do
The Homeless /
real estate Speculation next?

thnx!

(how on Earth do you make
that Uke sound just Like
an Electric Gitar?)!

@14 kristofarian: Amen to that!
And Happy Birthday, Paul Krugman (02/28/2022)!
I love reading the Nobel prize winning economist's
commentaries in the Seattle Times. He's so consistently
spot on.

@4:

Look up the term "drag king" sometime...

or is it real estate
Speculateers &
it's a fawking
Mess.

how long can
You Hold out?

hang on!

gonna be ONE Guy ownin'
ALL of it someday who knows
maybe soon. wanna Bet on it?

thanks aunitie Gee!
he was always worth
the one dollar on mon-
days and fridays in the nyt
Paper! I do Miss that old rag.

she's a little
spendy these days

now I subscribe
for a buck a week

some of their
Columnists are
Excellent but I usually
end up at the comments

when you get that many (mosly
literate) peeps you can get
some pretty great Insights.

and when there's (frequently)
back-and-forth twixt the Com-
mentariati -- occasionally, the
essayist themselfs it's worth it.

While we're on the subject of the quality of comments @21, why do you use so many line breaks? It makes it very hard for me to follow your thoughts.

@1 - The last time there was a land war in Europe, started by a deranged dictator with territorial ambitions, it damn near destroyed the world. A big reason it did not was that said dictator never got nukes. This time, the Fuhrer DOES have nukes, and the potential to kill us all is way more than hypothetical.

None of the other conflicts you mention come anywhere near having this level of impact for the Western world. As we are a part of that, the people and the media are justifiably interested in what is happening in Ukraine. These other conflicts suck, as do the dictators causing them, but they are not the same. And there is also a significant amount of thinking that suggests we should stay out of foreign wars when possible.

@12 Fixed this for you:

"While privileged middle-aged people in America express outrage at the tyranny of vaccines and masks, the people of Kyiv are gathering in bunkers to make Molotov cocktails in a last, desperate act to defend their beleaguered city—street by street if necessary—against the most tyrannical of aggressions."

@24 spot on

While grandmas in a Ukraine we’re making Molotov cocktails Rightwing commenters like #12 and WSJ editorial board were screaming about Biden being Hitler for asking people to wear masks and get vaccinated. AND telling us the invasion was fake news and what an admirable genius Putin was.

when ya wanna Wreck a
Nation you might hafta
leave Out a few (incon-
venient - to one's Nar-
rative) things so dis-
Traction can prove
itself Most Useful.

and doesn't Every-
One Hate on The
Kids these days?!

well-put
Doug, Raja.

bet ole Uncle Snoopy Murdoch
misses his Rodger 'Dodger'
Goebbels/Ailes pretty
dang Bad eh Rocky?

@22 -- pretty much
just how it comes out