Thats Das Capital on my app...
That's Das Capital on my app... simon2579/gettyimages.com

Cars, you have finally met your match. Our crooked society no longer sacrifices the blood of its young to your temple of doom first. Those days are over. You must now play second fiddle to the religion of guns, which is even more bizarre and possibly fanatical than that devoted to cars. The Washington Post: "Firearms killed more children and adolescents in 2020 than car accidents, which had long been the leading cause of death for young people."

By the way, there is no hyperbole in my description of gun culture as a form of blood sacrifice. I actually believe this to be true. Something about American guilt? American fear? Something in this society's primary root of being feels a Lacanian real that pulses as an unrealizable urge to do something that can't be done or undone without the destruction of what is known: the self up to now. This is indeed a metaphysics of absence. And because nothing of substance can be done about the unimaginable, sacrifices have to be made to an unknown God.

Brother John Legend got something to say:

Child labor is on the rise in the US. Or, put another way, businesses are hiring teens at a fast clip. But I do not see good news in any of this, because in my scheme, which is a socialist appropriation of aristocratic values, work should not be anywhere near the center of a life, and it should not take up so much time. Work must always be the last thing one should do, if they have to do it. In this picture of affairs, a working teen is nothing but barbaric. Work for a young person should at bottom begin at 22 and at tops 33. Puget Sound Business Journal: "Teen employment is surging. And they have more choices than ever."

Seattle City Council passed PayUp, a bill which has the goal of transforming those who use apps to make money from "entrepreneurs" to workers with benefits and a minimum wage.

Speaking of workers, Jas has a union update:

SAM/SAAM guards win their union: Today, security guards at the Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Asian Art Museum voted to unionize under an independent union, the SAM VSO Union. Out of 57 eligible voters, 38 voted for the union and four voted against. One ballot was challenged ballot and two were voided. The union will cover around 65 security guards. The vote comes almost nearly five months after the workers announced their intentions to unionize earlier this year.

Initially, the workers tried to unionize with the International Union of Painters and Allied Traders, but they were prohibited from doing so. That’s thanks to a rule in the National Labor Relations Act that prevents the National Labor Relations Board from certifying a union that represents both security workers and non-security workers alike. In response to that situation, in January the organizing workers announced they were going independent with their own SAM VSO Union.

In a phone interview, union organizer Josh Davis said it was 'really awesome to see such a decisive number' in favor of the SAM VSO Union. He said the union’s next steps were to vote on a bargaining team and to get their contract goals in order before heading to the negotiation table. Earlier this month, the workers told Crosscut they were looking for job improvements like higher wages and a bigger say in workplace decisions and shift scheduling. In light of the rise in workers organizing at art institutions across the country, Davis said he’s 'excited to see folks in these jobs start to recognize their worth and improve their workplaces and lives at work.'

A museum spokesperson said the institution 'recognizes and respects the right of all workers to seek representation.' SAM said its goal was to ensure that a 'true majority' made this decision, and it is 'grateful that such a large percentage of our security officers participated in this secret ballot election.'

Thank you for the update, Jas.

Our Mayor. Some dashboard thing. Homeless crisis. Hannah wrote about it.

David Horsey has such perfectly bad timing. Just as police funding is being reexamined in the light of the mass killing at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas (the cops did nothing for nearly an hour as an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers), the political cartoonist decides to draw a hire-more-cops cartoon. Horsey wants more police officers to be the solution just as we are learning that the police in Uvalde, a town of 17,000 people, commanded 40 percent of its budget. 40 percent! It's hard to be more fund-the-police than that. But what did Uvalde get when a tight situation hit? A whole lot of nothing for their money.

The UK wants people with monkeypox to know that now may not be good to time have sex. Best that you wait or wank or walk the dog during this period of body-wide pustules.

Here is an example of where Trump was better than Biden. At least Trump knew that the Federal Reserve bank was not an independent institution and so he aggressively pushed its Chair, Jerome Powell, to lower interest rates at a moment when the US economy was faltering. Biden, on the either hand, believes in the independence of the Fed, and he will permit it to make its own call about interest rates targeting inflation. But the only tool the Fed has for fighting inflation is raising interest rates, and this will directly hit voters, who in the main hold large amounts of debt. Inflation is not about an overheated economy. It's just one sector of the economy claiming an unusually large portion of the income in another sector. This appropriation almost always has a class character.

I think the Georgia Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Hershel Walker, is trying to go mainstream and dump Trump. If such is the case, then he is finished. He cannot win without MAGA. Raw Story: "Walker said this week that he is 'mad' because former President Donald Trump has allegedly lied about asking him to run for office. In an interview with Revolt TV host Michael Santiago Render, better known as Killer Mike, Walker revealed that it was God, not Trump, who inspired him to run for U.S. Senate."

The cougar that mauled a 9-year-old girl near Fruitland, Washington? Dead. People found the animal and taught it its final lesson: The human is the animal you do not fuck with. The girl fought for her life in the forest and won. She is now recovering from "multiple wounds to her head and upper body."

Today, the crows exploded in a tree near the middle of the section of Genesee Park that connects with Lake Washington Boulevard. They wouldn't stop. They got louder and louder. And finally I looked up from my work on a computer and saw a coyote 30 or so meters from me. The crows were like: This is insane! What is this cousin of the wolf doing out here in the day! It's 11 am! The sun is out! The coyote looked at me for a moment, turned, and ran into some bushes that lined a backyard on 45th Avenue South.

Because Stranger Things' fourth season has retuned Kate Bush to the top of the charts, with the 1980s tune “Running Up That Hill,” we end PM with Chromatics' utterly lovely cover of it: