The Stranger has a new editor-in-chief: It’s Eli Sanders, who you might recognize from winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Stranger a while back. More on that news here.
As one wall falls, another rises: Yesterday was Indigenous People’s Day in Washington, which our political class doesn’t take seriously enough to give people off from work, much less return all the land they stole through genocide. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe is at least getting a sliver of their land back as the Elwha Dam removal project is complete, which you can read the details of in the Seattle Times. A quick note from me: the lucrative dam removal project went to Barnard Construction out of Bozeman, Montana, a politically-connected contractor which also got the contract to build the canceled Keystone XL tar sands pipeline which threatened the drinking water of the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine in remote Northeast Montana. Barnard also has US Customs and Border Protection contracts to build border walls across the Southwest, which the Tohono O’odham Nation has sued to stop.
Philadelphia’s city council backs Starbucks Workers United’s call to boycott the coffee chain: Why hasn’t Seattle’s? The fast food company is moving its headquarters anyway, so the council and the mayor might as well get their licks in. Mayor Katie Wilson called on consumers to boycott Starbucks in November of last year shortly after her election due to union busting, then in May broke her own boycott by ordering a disgusting blueberry muffin latte. In September, Starbucks Workers United actually called for a nationwide boycott campaign until workers get a fair contract. But now that the chips are down, it’s been crickets from Seattle’s political class, even as Starbucks closes more local union stores.
Wizards of the Coast unionization campaign expands: The in-house team that handles the local tabletop gaming powerhouse’s online version of Magic: The Gathering voted to unionize last July, and now even larger divisions of the company want to join them. The rest of the MTG team is now looking to unionize, as is the Dungeons and Dragons team. Today is the last day the company has to voluntarily recognize the union before they roll the dice on a vote (sorry).
Important Frasier news: Jane Leeves, who played Daphne, has a new book out, Daphne and Me, which she will be presenting at Town Hall this Sunday. KNKX caught up with Leeves earlier this month.
The National Firearms Act got gutted by a federal judge, and since the Trump administration announced they’re not going to appeal the decision, you no longer need to register things like suppressors, or sawed-off shotguns, or short-barreled rifles with the feds. State law still applies, which in Washington is awkwardly tied to federal law regarding some of these weapons, as our close friends and ideological allies at conservative talk radio explain.
French high school teacher says phone ban contributed to student rebellion because they finally saw how shitty things are: From Le Grand Continent:
This year, without their phones, my students are livelier, more endearing, more disorganized, more excitable, and more childlike. They are also more of a handful. Yet, it is quite possible that the absence of mobile phones has played a part in all this. While the rebellion of these adolescents may stem in part from an addict’s reflex—craving a fix and growing agitated without their dose—it is also possible that, by looking up from their feeds, French high school students have opened their eyes to a situation that suddenly struck them as intolerable. They saw that the adults who claimed to be guiding them were constantly humiliating them. They saw that their generation was locked down for two years during Covid to save their grandparents, only for those grandparents to vote against their interests.
Seattle Public Schools is in its first school year with a cell phone ban. Your move Seattle children.
And now on to Hitler News.
Triumph of the Won’t: A one-woman Leni Riefenstahl show at the Intiman Theater asks of the infamous Nazi artist: “But what if things were different? Leni proposes a thought experiment: Imagine if those striking low-angle tracking shots and soaring crane wide shots didn’t have any sieg heils in them. Couldn’t you love and appreciate them then?”
According to George Lucas, yes:The color is black mustard yellow, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
Hitler Mussolini elected: In a stunning loss for the right-wing, Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores won the Queropalca mayoral election in Peru running for the center-left Ahora Nación party, the BBC reports. Hitler Mussolini, was not endorsed by the Stranger Election Control Board (he’s too inexperienced).
And now a statement from the Prime Minister of Samoa on the “Heil Hitler” issue: It was a private event, and he’s sorry.
Ukraine bombs Russian refineries after Trump signs diesel deal with Putin: We always have to talk about the oil war, we do not get a week off. While the illegal US war on Iran is the primary cause of skyrocketing global oil prices, it is not the only one, especially when it comes to diesel, the fuel that delivers all our useless knickknacks and curios and food. A lot of diesel comes from Russia, which cut exports earlier this year after repeated Ukrainian strikes. Trump, desperate to lower inflation ahead of midterm elections, just cut a deal with Russia to get the diesel flowing again, but there was someone he forgot to ask, the Ukrainians. They launched more strikes on the Russian oil industry in response. The Ukrainians can do this because Trump gave them targeting data on the Russian oil industry last year, escalating the war, which in hindsight looks like a poor decision for a great power invading Iran during an election year.
Frasier isn’t the only set-in-Seattle-but-shot-elsewhere show I’m watching lately: True Justice was produced at an interesting time in Steven Seagal’s career. He’s clearly in his mumbling-in-AAVE-while-doing-aikido-sitting-down phase, but not yet in the era where every film of his is shot in Eastern Europe. True Justice, which somehow ran for two seasons, is set in a similarly interesting point for Seattle: the post-Recession pre-tech boom years of the early 2010s. Seagal stars as a katana-wielding federal secret police commander whose squad of talentless D-list actors protects Seattle’s immigrant community from corrupt local cops and evil white trash Cajun refugees from Hurricane Katrina. I figure that description might not be convincing enough to get you to watch two full seasons of the show, but at least watch the intro:
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