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KOMO! Say it ain’t so. We already hate your conservative owners, but you should never, ever write headlines like this: “Mariners’ super power is staying the course no matter what.” Were you born yesterday? Are you new to the city? Have you not heard of the infamous “Seattle choke”? Many of us recall Dikembe Mutombo grabbing that ball from the Sonics’ greatest season. Many of us are still stuck on that 1-yard line in Super Bowl XLIX. Those in the know, know what I’m talking about. We should keep our traps shut, proceed one step at a time, and be happy that we have three guaranteed playoff games in Seattle that will force a hoard of Canadians in Vancouver to cross the border and blow a bunch of cash on our city. That is our bird in the hand.
By the way, the big and bad money behind Mayor Bruce Harrell bought ads that will attack his opponent, Katie Wilson, during Monday’s semifinals match between the Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays. The ads will say all sorts of nasty things about a perfectly good person. Money. Money. Money. Such is a rich man’s world. The Seattle Times has the sorry story.
Busting That Does Not Make Us Feel Good: This incident happened on Sunday, while the musician’s band, Unpresidented Brass Band, played the Ghostbusters theme across the street from the city’s notorious ICE building. The clarinetist, “a 38-year-old child and family therapist,” is being held without formal charges. “Ain’t that [Trump’s] America.” The musicians in the therapist’s band wore banana costumes.
The pic above was taken on Saturday (October 12) in a war zone called Downtown Portland. One could walk, in a matter minutes, from here to where the clarinetist in a banana costume was arrested. And what did I see on that fine rainy day? Portlanders doing Portlandish things—drinking coffee, drinking in dive bars, walking, biking. So, what’s all this war zone nonsense really about? Trump is punishing a predominantly white city for demonstrating, at the beginning of this decade, the importance of Black lives. This was the original sin. This, and nothing else, fuels the obsession with Antifa. White people caring about Black people. Trump would not be in power if the majority of white people recognized the humanity of brown and Black people.
How do we explain the power of Portland’s frog and other inflated creatures? I recommend watching this clip from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise.
Those familiar with the birth of cinema (1890 to 1910) will understand the young professor’s meaning. Film historians usually present Lumière brothers work as real (snapshots of everyday life) and those of filmmaker/magician Georges Méliès, as fictional. After all, the clips produced by the former were called “actualities;” and the short films by the latter were clearly fantasies. But the professor in Godard’s film insists that the opposite is true in the context of cinema. The shots of everyday life by the Lumière brothers are fantastic; and those by Méliès, such as Le Voyage dans la Lune, are the actualities. This, in my view, is what’s going on in Portland. Trump’s administration claims that it is the real, the actuality, but it is in fact the fantasy. And Portland’s inflated creatures are real because they reveal that the real is actually a fantasy.
This is why you must always live in a city. What does Everett do after the Fred Meyer closures? Offer, for the next 6 months, a free transit route that has access to locations with grocery stores. Of course, all bus routes should be free all of the time. But a city also needs to find ways to be less dependent on corporate supermarkets and drugstores. We are not like the rural areas, which don’t have the efficiency of density on their side. When a giant goes in a city, it has the means to easily fill the hole with smaller and local businesses. Indeed, exactly this is happening right now in Federal Way: “As Walmart prepares to close in Federal Way, local small grocery stores are finding success.” That city, by the way, will soon (December 6) be connected to Link’s Line 1.
Yes, it’s nice and (almost) cold. But the sun refuses to be done with us. What gives? We need the rain to resume, which, unfortunately, will not happen today, which will be much like yesterday—sunny but, thankfully, sweater weather. The clouds are expected to gather tomorrow and gradually grow as the week progresses.
Let’s get this right. In 2023, Argentina voted for a libertarian, Javier Milei, because he promised that, if unleashed from the government, the creative and wealth-generating powers of the market would explode. Two years later, nothing of the kind happened. In fact, Milei received government cheese from Trump to keep his free market dream alive. And it gets worse. The BBC: “Trump says upcoming Argentina elections will decide how ‘generous’ US will be.” Meaning, if Milei loses power, the US is “gone.” Meaning, the US is only offering socialism for free markets and not for the poor or working classes. Trump: “I’m with this man because his philosophy is correct. And he may win and he may not win – I think he’s going to win. And if he wins we are staying with him, and if he doesn’t win we are gone.” Need one say more.
new ayn rand just dropped
#argentina #milei #javierMilei #bailout #uspol #aynRand #atlasShrugged #meme #memes
— ⚯ Michel de Cryptadamus ⚯ (@cryptadamist.universeodon.com.ap.brid.gy) October 11, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Brett Hamill, myself, and Seattle’s next mayor, Katie Wilson, are doing a thing this Friday at Town Hall. Because Hamill will be in character, Burl Dirkman the powertool man, I promise to be John Houseman, the snotty law professor in the 1970s show The Paper Chase. I have no idea who Wilson will be.
Let’s end Slog AM with a tune that brought D’Angelo fame, “Brown Sugar.” He became a shade yesterday. But as long as I’m here, your “going to live on and on.”
