The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Charles Mudede I’m not against Mayor Katie Wilson’s directive to place a bus lane on Denny Way to help Route 8 meet its schedule. But the deeper problem with that route is that its service area is too large: from Mount Baker all the way to Lower Queen Anne. So, the addition of a bus lane, though welcome, may prove to be inadequate. What’s also needed to make trips on Denny Way more dependable is an additional route that only runs between Lower Queen Anne and 15th Ave on Capitol Hill. This is the fact of the matter: The bulk of the riders who use Route 8 board in South Lake Union (the tech center) and exit around Broadway (where a lot of tech workers live). After those key points, the line is rarely crowded or faces bad traffic.  CHARLES MUDEDE The weather? Not looking good, mate. Expect a fucking high of 60 (in early February!), a little wind here and there, and, if lucky, a few scattered clouds. It seems we hardly had a winter this time around, and the days are already getting longer, and the chances of snow are being tossed into a furnace like that sleigh in Citizen Kane. Trump badly wants to shred to pieces an EPA report that was completed in 2009 and contained hard, scientific evidence of how “greenhouse gas emissions, including from vehicles and fossil fuel power plants, [negatively impact] public health and welfare.” What we must ask ourselves, however, is this: Can Trump’s ferocious determination to pollute our environment as much as possible be entirely reduced to the goal of increasing profits for fossil fuel capitalists? Or is there something more to it? The key concept presented in a 2008 book, Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution, by the late French philosopher Michel Serres, is this: Pollution is a form of ownership, a form of property. Structurally, this is one of the most original economic concepts conceived by a thinker who wasn't a Marxist. Quickly as possible: Serres asserted that pollution is a form of ownership because it's a form of power. Trump, for example, represents the capitalist’s right to pollute, the right to destroy trees, the right to make water undrinkable, to produce acid rain, to fill the sky with carbon. And so resistance to this less recognized form of property (“I can trash this, therefore it's mine”) also challenges the other and more conventional form: “I paid for this, therefore it's mine.” CNN reports that the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who paid $75 million for a worthless documentary about Melania Trump, laid off a third of its newsroom. The paper is dismantling much of the paper’s sports section, entirely gutting its books section, and reducing the size of its international coverage. What’s this about democracy dying in darkness? Look at the bright side: We still have Melania. New: Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray and HR Chief Wayne Connell tell employees to stay home for a zoom webinar ahead of “significant actions across the company.” Widely expected layoffs are scheduled to begin today.[image or embed]— Ben Mullin (@benmullin.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 3:13 AM Say It Ain’t So: Sir “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” the late Robin Leach, is in the Epstein files. He is alleged to not only have participated in orgies from hell but strangled a girl to death. One thing is for sure, if you are rich and famous, then tentacular Epstein likely had one or two or three or four or more hands in your business. The amazing celebrities and billionaires will be those who somehow managed not to be sucked into this gigantic-sized black hole, which, for the elite, has a satanic island as its center or power. This cosmological metaphor is reinforced by the good number of world-famous physicists who were attracted to Epstein. Into the Epstein black hole also goes one of my favorite Sesame Street sketches, “Lifestyle of the Big and Little.” Trump plans to reduce the number of ICE thugs in Minnesota from around 3000 to around 2300. Tom Homan, the border czar, stated that the reduction is due in part to an agreement he struck with state and local officials. They will now turn over arrested immigrants to ICE. But the real reason for the deescalation is found in the fact that Trump thought Minneapolis would be a walk in the park. But instead it became a right mess: people blowing whistles all of the fucking time, people resisting on every level, thugs killing US citizens. Why didn’t these city people just roll over like regular Democrats?    Seattle[image or embed]— The Web Optimist (@weboptimist.bsky.social) February 3, 2026 at 10:17 AM Speaking of Dems. The spending bill that ended a partial government shutdown yesterday, basically kicked the ICE can down the road. Dems and the White House now have two weeks to figure out the future of Trump’s private army.  Will it be fully funded? Will it be somewhat defanged? We can be certain of one thing: it will not be abolished. A friend who self-identifies as “dirty little rat, scurrying about looking for a community (and cheese),” has this to say to me and my city, Seattle: “Call the homies, they need you as much as you need them. Even unseen, we are all struggling and need each other. Full homo.”  Let’s conclude Slog AM with some cold dub tech by Iceland’s Yagya: ...read more read less