Today, coming spring brought passing winter down to its goddamn knees.
Today, coming spring brought passing winter down to its goddamn knees. Charles Mudede

I promise to write on one of these days, and hopefully it will be cooler than today (70 degrees?), a new philosophy of property that takes into account homeless sweeps. The thing to ask is this: Can a homeless person own something? The sweeps make it clear that their status in our society excludes the rights and respect of ownership. What a homeless person has is regarded as no different from what's in a landfill. This means a homeless person is not an individual because property is what, above all in capitalism, defines, in the abstract, a legal subject. You are your property; your property is who you are. This is the foundation of what George W. Bush called ownership society. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reports that a "Capitol Hill encampment apparently formed by an individual camper at the Thomas Street Mini Park" was swept away today at 9 am.

The man Mayor Harrell is arm-and-arm with in New York City, Mayor Adams, apparently told a number of men of the cloth that Jesus's disciples would, if their long-dry and dusty bones were raised and reanimated, be clearing homeless encampments in the Big Apple. Peter, get your gloves on and here is a hefty garbage bag. Let's do the lord's work.

What is this? A sharp increase in freeway shootings? MyNorthwest reports that King County has already experienced 20 [of them] so far this year." What are we going to do about this? Does the mayor have a strategy for this? Something like his "hot spots." Let's hope so. Lives of law-abiding citizens may depend on it.

MyNorthwest:

It’s a common scenario: you’re driving on the freeway and accidentally cut someone off. You wave at them and mouth “sorry!” and then you go about your merry way. But sometimes apologizing isn’t enough. Before you know it, the other driver speeds up, cuts other people off, and dangerously drives next to you, screaming expletives and giving choice hand gestures.

A Big Bellevue tree refused to go into the dark without making life exceptionally miserable for the humans who felled them. Area trees will remember this day for real in tree history—April 4, 2022. A Bellevue homeowner hired Turning Leaf Tree Service to cut down a 140-foot Douglas fir. He thought he was getting a deal: free work for free wood. But when cut, the whole thing went down its own way and crashed the roof, rooms, and belongings of a neighbor's house. Sarah Jacobsen, a resident of the home the mighty Douglas fir took down with it, told KIRO that the sudden destruction, which claimed an office space, "was really loud. And then just progressively as the tree settled, more and more was coming in. Then the rain and hail was coming through. It was really crazy.” What spared the lives of the two humans in the house was pure luck.

What the dead tree had to say to the Peter of arboreal heaven: "...I tell the toerag, you treating me like wood, after all of these years? I'm just wood to you? So, I tell him: I wouldn't do that. But he didn't get it. So, I say it again: I just WOODN'T do that, bud. But he did it anyway. What's a tree to do?"

Sun worshippers of Seattle, get as much as you can out of today because not only will the rain and cold return tomorrow but some are even predicting snow might fall on Sunday. I'll believe it when I see it, and there's the real possibility that I may not believe it even if I see it. Belief is a state of mind.

Funko, an Everett-based toy company that, according to Wikipedia, "manufactures licensed and limited pop culture collectibles, best known for its licensed vinyl figurines and bobbleheads" is sending 258 of its workers to the unemployment line. The toy company, which made $653 million in 2020, is moving its warehouse jobs to a desert that calls itself a city (Phoenix). Puget Sound Business Journal has this story.

Science says the second booster of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 is effective but its power short-lived. Also, the second booster hurts a lot more than the first one. This I can personally confirm.

The confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson has left a bitter taste in the mouths of millions.

The age of hiding racism seems to be not in the future but increasingly in the past. HuffPost: "Paul [Rand], who was inexplicably absent when the vote stood at 53-46, eventually showed up and voted against Jackson — from the cloakroom, because he wasn’t wearing a suit. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also voted without wearing a suit."

The mileage that racism has in the US is nothing but exceptional. It will only end when the essential Idea (in the Hegelian sense) of Americanness is finally dust-to-dust. Racism is not transhistorial, true. It's in time, and can leave this time. But that time is not now, or, apparently, near now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels little like summer right now, so let's end with a tune that feels sunny, Steve Lacy's "Dark Red":