The average price a worker pays to commute in the Seattle area? $10,018 a year, according to a study by Consumer Affairs. And the amount of time a worker spends driving to and from a job? An hour, which is “roughly 10 full days spent [in a car annually].” Altogether, only four metropolitan areas are above ours when it comes to bleeding through the nose to get around. Automobile freedom not only doesn’t exist, it’s not cheap.
But how is the new bus lane on Denny Way going? Over the past two weeks, I’ve taken the 8 bus 10 times during rush hour, and not a single bus was late. None. Not only that, traffic jams appear to have vanished from this part of Denny Way. Where did they go? What kind of sorcery is this? Losing a lane has actually loosened rush-hour traffic? Maybe I’m just seeing things. Time will tell.
It rained on Sunday. And it was almost like real rain, the kind of rain that falls for days and makes this region dark and green like the forests in the Twilight movies. But the rain on Sunday departed around noon and, so far, refuses to return. What a tease. Today will be mostly clear and sunny. Expect a high of 75.
U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez does it again. She voted with Republicans on a measure that advanced their priorities. She was one of two defections on this matter. If both “Democrats” had voted against the measure, it would have failed. The problem is this: The GOP is no longer a party. It’s just Trump. So, if you support a Republican measure, you are only supporting Trump and his massive anti-democratic project. Perez is not a centrist, as the Seattle Times keeps calling her. There is nothing like a center in US politics today.You are with Trump or you are not. It’s that simple, Perez.
Downtown Seattle is once again far from dying. It is in fact thriving. Last month, this part of town, with its waterfront, its markets, hotels, galleries, stadiums, and Link stations experienced 9.2 million visits. This is, according to data collected by an organization that has it in for Mayor Katie Willson, the Downtown Seattle Association, the busiest the downtown has been since July 2019. The DSA also reported that consumers spent an estimated $165 million in July.
Well, Trump did not get his wish—cheap cash—from the very man he placed at the top of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh. Yesterday, he raised interest rates “for the first time in more than three years” because inflation is a real thing; something, anything has to be done to cool it. Rates went up by 25 basis points and are now in the 3.75 percent–4 percent range. The inflation Warsh is now battling by raising the cost of borrowing was entirely caused by Trump’s war and tariffs.
Black holes not only consume everything in sight but also expel large amounts of gas. Astronomers at the University of Florence verified this phenomenon while observing a black hole at the center of a galaxy, NGC 1066 (also called the Squid Galaxy), which is 45 million light-years from us. This black hole is a monster. It’s between “8 million and 17 million solar masses,” and it ejects much more gas than scientists expected. (This extra gas is hard to detect because it is dust poor.) But get this: The astronomers also “checked whether this gas could ever fall back toward the black hole. Comparing the outflow’s speed with the galaxy’s escape velocity, they found the gas is moving several times faster than needed to escape entirely.” The mystery of black holes only knows how to grow.
Let’s picture this. Some physicists believe, understandably, that the universe is actually the interior of a black hole. But how to make sense of this hypothesis? For one, it means the beginning is a singularity, the collapse of a dead star, and we are not moving toward it but bouncing from it. This means that in fact we are moving back in time. What we feel to be the past is actually in the future; and the past, where the singularity is located, is actually moving forward in time. This explains the nature of memory and computation. It is the future from which we are receding. And the actual past is the event horizon, which, as we approach, appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. We call this acceleration toward the black hole’s past dark energy.
Macklemore keeps winning his war with Robert Kraft, the billionaire who forced Ed Sheeran, a coward whose music is to my ears what a wet stone is to my mouth, to drop the Seattle rapper from his Loop Tour. Macklemore challenged Kraft to match his $1 million pledge directly to Palestinian organizations, and, according to NYT, Kraft pledged $2 million to “the region.” Make of that what you will.
Linton Kwesi Johnson (also known as LKJ) is a dub poet. Dub is an abstract form of reggae, and in the late ’70s, Jamaican poets like Prince Far I and Mutabaruka used the echoing and reverberating dub rhythms as backdrops to their politically charged poems. LKJ was born in Jamaica, raised in the United Kingdom, educated as a sociologist, and was once a member of the British chapter of the Black Panther party. He used the dub-poem form to address the social and political realities of Britain’s depressed inner cities, particularly during the Thatcher years.
LKJ read (and still reads) his poetry with a thick and sometimes impenetrable Jamaican accent. For example, on “Reggae Fi Dada” (Making History, 1984), he opens with these lines: “Galang dada, galang gwwaan yaw sah/yu nevvah ad noh life fi live/jus di wan life fi give/yu did yu time pan ert/yu nevvah get yu jus dizert” (translation: “Go on daddy, go on, go on sir/you never had no life to live/just the one life to give/you did your time upon the earth/you never got your just dessert”). Some of LKJ’s dub poems surrender all meaning to the hypnotic pulse of the reggae rhythm, such as the title track of the 1978 album Dread Beat an’ Blood, which moves to a slow and bouncy reggae beat.
Today is your last chance to see the documentary about LKJ, Dread Beat an’ Blood, at the theater that won this year’s Genius Award for film, the Beacon Cinema. Because I can’t say enough about LKJ, let’s conclude AM with his masterpiece, and atheist anthem (yes, this enlightened dread does not believe in Jah), “Reality Poem.”
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