Please do not be distracted by this lame matter about Katie Wilson being rich or not. The same sort of rubbish is happening with Zohran Mamdani: The “hijab-wearing ‘aunt” who feared for safety post-9/11” was actually his father’s cousin. So what? Brown and black immigrants almost never call a parent’s cousin a cousin. The children, Munya and Jesa, of my first cousin, Farayi, call me uncle; I’m not their bloody cousin. So, all of this is just a big waste of time. Like Mamdani, it’s Wilson’s politics that matter. This is what the race is all about. We are voting for her because she promises to do things Mayor Bruce Harrell clearly failed to do. The rest is beside the point.
The weather? It will rain a little this morning, but the afternoon will see some sun, which will be low in the sky and gone just before 6 pm. Expect a high in the mid 50s. Also expect Thursday to be pretty dry, and Friday to be very wet. Yesterday, Columbia City experienced around 5:30 pm a wonderful burst of loud rain that hit the windows of my house in a manner that recalled this passage from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way: “A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain”
Amazon will cut jobs in Washington State: 2,300, according to GeekWire. Those getting the boot will be “software engineers, program managers, product managers, and designers, as well as a significant number of recruiters and human resources staff.” Apparently AI can now do all of those things now. No need for humans, who, unlike AI, always complain about this and that and have needs, and feelings, and even dreams.
What turned out to be better than The Stranger buying the famously wacky right-wing Uncle Sam Billboard in Chehalis? It being purchased by The Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation. The Native American organization has sent all of that cranky nonsense packing and replaced it with just the truth. Seattle, now we have a town to visit on our way down to Portland. Show Chehalis the love it now deserves.
A controversial billboard on I-5 between Seattle and Portland has a new owner, the Chehalis Tribe, and a simple message: “Native land.”
— KUOW Public Radio (@kuow.org) October 27, 2025 at 3:56 PM
This week: Maybe a ceasefire today; maybe no ceasefire tomorrow. This will likely become the pattern of the war on Gaza. NBC: “Israel says ceasefire back on after strikes kill more than 100 in Gaza.”
The Federal Reserve is apparently “in a fog” about the present state of the economy because Trump’s administration either provides bullshit data or none at all. The job market? Likely in a slump. Inflation? Probably skyhigh. Growth? Unlikely. A recession? Likely. What should the Fed do in this fog? Maybe lower interest rates “to the 3.75%-4.00% range.” Why? God only knows.
After doing a number on Jamaica, the island that gave the world soul of dub music, Hurricane Melissa is crossing the island that gave the world the sorrows and thrills of Afro-Cuban jazz: Cuba. Hurricane Melissa, whose winds reached, at one point, an astonishing 185 mph, has so far claimed 7 Caribbean lives.
Trump keeps pressing South Korea to, in the words of Politico, “pony up $350 billion in an “upfront” if it hopes to reach a deal with him. That figure is one-fifth of that country’s total GDP. Meaning, if it made such a commitment, it would destabilize its economy and weaken its currency. But what are these outrageous demands and erratic tariffs really all about?
You will remain in the dark about Trump’s trip to Asia (to make “deals”) if you simply do not put his own wallet at its center. And what that wallet wants is all international business transactions to go through the White House (or what remains of it), the current home of his wallet. This is what dictators—a capitalist form of the trans-historical tyrant—never fail to do: make their country’s business their own business. But Trump overestimated the economic power of the US, and underestimated that of China, which recently signed a free trade agreement with “the ASEAN bloc of Southeast Asian nations.” And so the deals he hoped to quickly pocket are now dragging on and on (even Canada refuses to play ball); and, as a consequence, he is dragging the whole economy into what will turn out to be a very long recession.
Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, who is having something of a moment—at a time when such moments are in great demand—had this to say “to Chicago’s Latino community”: “There’s not a Chicagoan that’s by themselves right now. We will use every tool available to us to defend the humanity and dignity of every Chicagoan.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon
Johnson accused the Trump administration of horrific acts, saying
“Black babies are being thrown in the back of vans” and “zip-tied in the middle of the night.”— Raider (@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social) October 29, 2025 at 7:49 AM
The city as we know and feel it is very new. Its cultural essence cannot be found in ancient Rome or Tikal or Kyoto. We are less in a city than in capital, which is expressed by our culturally specific modes of working, moving, and consuming. Nevertheless, the major owners of capital constantly live in fear of the key engine (or attribute, in the Spinozist sense) in the accumulation of privatized wealth: Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York. Why? And why is Trump hell-bent on spiritually crushing the major nodes of America’s GDP?
Maybe there is something about the city that keeps swerving, not outward, but inward. I’m now thinking of a line I caught while watching Kahlil Joseph’s BLACKNWS at the Orcas Film Festival: “The only way out was in.” This “in” is certainly the obscure urban, which can be pictured, though not precisely, as the force, gravity, that pulls the materials of a star inward as pressure forces the photosphere outward. The urban pull inward is found in our human-specific sociality, in Brandon Johnson’s determination that no one in his city is “by themselves.” This kind of feeling is confirmed by the ease with which we gravitate to others, who are often strangers. ICE brings out the best in cities. And so, the effort to impose fear only intensifies what those in power most fear: a growing sense of community in urban areas.
We have entered the season that makes Seattle the queen of cities: Fall. The leaves (both red and gold), the sudden showers, the low and moody clouds, the blanket-warm dreams that bring back the dead we will never stop loving. This is the time to listen to this underappreciated piece of Japanese jazz by the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio, “Autumn In Seattle.”
