Slog AM: Former Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes Now Has a Bullshit Job, Trump Wants Iran to Nuke LA and San Diego, Autumn Is Here

Former Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes will now bring home the bacon by way of the private sector. He joined MissionRT, a company that “advises law-enforcement agencies on leadership, technology, and organizational change.” Why does all of this remind me of that book by the late anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, A Theory? In Graeber’s words: “Provisional Definition 2: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”

Bruiser, the only elk on Whidbey Island has died. He was beloved by the community, who, according to the Seattle Times, fed him “apples, corn and potatoes” during the 14 years he spent on what must have appeared to him to be pretty much heaven. He didn’t have much to do but go this way and that, and never once attempted to leave the way he arrived on the island: by swimming. The lone elk, a local icon, was famous for his tangled antlers. Earth, receive an honoured guest, Bruiser the bull is laid to rest. 

For the next few days, expect what you will experience today: morning mists or fogs, and sunny afternoons. Also, have you seen the trees around town? Autumn is finally here, and the leaves, red and gold, are soon to fall, or are falling, or have fallen. There are few things more beautiful than the sight of summer’s glorious death. In fact, I wish it lasted longer. Lasted until late November. I also wish people who don’t like walking on summer’s demise would use a rake instead of that loud gas guzzling machine. Expect a high of 66.  

What’s Trump up to now? During some rally in Nebraska, he recommended that Iran nuke San Diego and Los Angeles. Of course, he has nothing to offer rural voters—who are feeling great pain at the pump and grocery store—but more and more of the same anti-urban and anti-diversity “psychological wage.” The president, however, failed to mention San Francisco. Why? My guess is fromYahoo Finance: “Nvidia stock rises to new highs as market cap closes in on $6 trillion.” LA just makes movies, and San Diego only has military bases. 

What a 21st-century mess this is. The sister of an Arizona road rage victim, Christopher Pelkey, who was shot to death by Gabriel Horcasitas, used an AI video of her brother to ask the judge to go easy on the defendant. In the words of AI Pelkey: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: It is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances… In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness.” Though the AI Pelkey was “loved” by the judge, he still gave Horcasitas the maximum sentence. But the court was so bewildered by this novel use of AI, that it ultimately threw out the ruling and “[remanded] for resentencing.” Unlike the court in the film Rashomon, which is set in 12th-century Japan, modern US courts have yet to accept testimonies from ghosts (AI or otherwise).  

Dr. Paul Allen (yes, there is more than one of them, and some are still alive), a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center suspects that “the botched execution of Christa Pike,” resulted from the executor’s failure to place the needle into a vein. As a consequence the poison only reached “peripheral tissues in the arm.” This apparently explained the “arm throbbing” witnessed by observers.

Now let me tell you something. If you’re going to execute me, you must use electricity or a gun or rope because I, too, have veins that are nearly impossible to find. (If you want my blood, you have to abandon the inside of the elbow and instead go for the wrist, which, for some reason I’ve never understood, is not ideal and even despised by nurses and technicians.) Well, Christa Pike regained consciousness yesterday. She is even talking to the living, but sustained “severe damage to her arms.” Her lawyer expects a “long recovery.” Well put. Let her recovery last for as long as she lives. In short, the death penalty must be abolished.

A quick thought. Though the future for Christa Pike is presently unclear (will they or will they not make a second attempt to kill her?), this nearly unprecedented situation has nevertheless entered a metaphysical zone. Meaning, Pike’s predicament is no longer just legal, but now also has a supernatural aspect. This matters because we live in a very superstitious society, and so many will see the failure to execute Pike as nothing less than a sign from the other side. The Old One is clearly saying something to us mere mortals. And do you want to be the one who dismisses a message from the Old One? He clearly said: Let Pike live goddamnit. And, amazingly, she is still here, still in the world. Now, who are you “to go against the wind?”

Let me tell you a great ghost story. It involves a black hole. The question is this: Where does a black hole’s gravity come from? The rough answer: From the ghost of a star. A star that’s no longer around. What happened? During the collapsing process of forming an event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return, time around the star became slower and slower, the greater and greater the collapse. Finally, the dying star’s gravity froze, stopped in time, and became a ghost of gravity because its fallen star no longer communicates with the universe we observe. End of story.

There is a whole movement of philosophical thought—indeed, the dominant movement since Kant—that is convinced that all things require a relation to exist, correlationism, because how can anything, even numbers, exist without an observer. Yet, we know there are places in time and space that exist without relationships or encounters. For example, once, before the explosion of the star whose dust is our sun and before us, there was simply nothing where I am now (in my home office on October 7, 2026), and, if the open universe theory is correct, or if the big crunch theory is correct, there will also be in the future nothing where I am at this moment. 

What I find most fascinating about the mind is it can relate with things—a lonely piece of ice drifting through space five billion years ago; the terrific density of a neutron star that is a billion years away from now. And yet, the mind knows these things can never be seen or exist in any sensible way. A big part of our real is wholly impossible.

Let’s end AM with Cold Cut’s trip hop version of the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves”:

The post Slog AM: Former Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes Now Has a Bullshit Job, Trump Wants Iran to Nuke LA and San Diego, Autumn Is Here appeared first on The Stranger.