Must the Military Disobey Unlawful Orders? Pam Bondi Has Said Yes. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/u...

You mean to tell me, Trump’s own actions meet the standard of wrongdoing his own administration has used against opponents? I did *not* see that coming. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Atomic Age fact-checking walkthroughs are always fun. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSfJ...

This week’s Olympia Time newsletter looks at what we preserve and what we let go: the erased town of Tono and what its absence teaches us, and why the Marcus Whitman statue’s mythmaking legacy is overdue for retirement. Plus, recommended reading and listening. buttondown.com/OlympiaTime/...

Sometimes you’re not preserving history for importance but endurance. Tono was once a thriving Thurston County coal town, but it was scraped away so completely its grid is now two ponds. Yyet its story lives on in maps, records, and curiosity. olympiatime.com/2025/12/06/t...

Tech should nourish, not exploit The Resonate Computing manifesto urges moving beyond hyper-scale toward private, dedicated, plural, adaptable, prosocial systems, using AI to build human-centered tools that deepen attention, agency, and connection Resonant Computing Manifesto resonantcomputing.org

I'm not exactly sure how Post Alley keeps going. Anecdotal columns that are so clearly rebutted by actual data... I mean I don't know. Why not just search for Seattle crime data by neighborhood? www.postalley.org/2025/12/05/w...

Yesterday, the @washingtonstatestandard.com published my oped on destroying the Marcus Whitman statue in the capitol building in Olympia Tbh I'm surprised this isn't a more obvious step or that it already hasn't been considered washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/12/05/i... /1

Right-wing extremists beat a soldier with a hammer as they try to steal weapons from an army base in Western Washington. www.theolympian.com/news/local/a...

Team Melt Whitman down, reporting in. washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/12/05/i...

The complete year in transgender politics in Tumwater WA that ended in mixed results. www.thestranger.com/news/2025/12...

Zillow pulled climate-risk scores from listings after agents and homeowners said they hurt sales. Buyers will be flying blind as climate-driven disasters, rising insurance costs, and a stressed housing market collide. grist.org/housing/zill...

I was reminded of how Walsh keeps defending lawmakers accused of serious misconduct (from “domestic terrorism” to harassment) framing accountability as a “circular firing squad” and praising the very behavior that got them sanctioned in the first place. www.investigatewest.org/wa-gop-chair...

Known bad boss and end-of-times-Matt-Shea supporter tried to buy his way into small-time elected office and face planted. Letter to the Editor | The people have spoken www.gigharbornow.org/opinion/lett...

Dusk Olympia WA

Explore Olympia’s 130-year loop from bike paths to highways, updates on the Olympia Standard podcast, and why locally hosted social spaces could shape our info future. Dive into history, community, and what’s next in this edition of the Olympia Time newsletter buttondown.com/OlympiaTime/...

I'm inordinately excited about this: Roundabout is a community-built local digital space now in closed beta across five diverse towns. Designed for real relationships, trusted info, and local stewardship, an antidote to enshittified social media. newpublic.substack.com/p/introducin...

Funny how when a person is killed in traffic, according to the Post it’s the “car” that did it but when anyone comes along to make streets safer it’s an attack on “drivers.”

Olympia’s roads were once so muddy Tacoma cyclists turned back, spurring locals to build 1890s bike paths. The craze faded, but its leaders later helped create WA’s early highways, paving over the bike era. Today, we return to bikes, rebuilding what cars replaced olympiatime.com/2025/11/29/f...

A public official claiming First Amendment protection while attacking a newspaper is ironic because the First Amendment was created to protect the newspaper from the government official, not the government official from the newspaper. www.thecentersquare.com/washington/a...

Portland’s inclusionary zoning finally works as intended after the city fully funded it in 2024. With larger tax abatements, developers stopped skirting the 20-unit threshold, more mixed-income projects entered the pipeline www.sightline.org/2025/11/25/p...

What. No way. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

Army veteran and longtime U.S. resident Zahid Chaudhry has been detained by ICE since August, worsening an eye disease that could leave him blind. A court may order his release before Thanksgiving, but conditions and lack of care have already caused severe harm www.thestranger.com/news/2025/11...

Spokane’s Flock cameras were queried 2.3M times in early 2025, over 95% by out-of-state agencies, including states targeting abortion and aiding immigration enforcement. A new investigation shows how this always-on ALPR network enables broad, unregulated surveillance rangemedia.co/flock-spokan...

When a political movement is built on conspiracy theories, it's ironic to worry that no one believes you when you're trying to do a thing. Comer Worries No One Will Believe His Epstein Report politicalwire.com/2025/11/26/c...

Meta internal docs say it may earn ~10% of its revenue from scam and banned-goods ads, showing users 15B scam ads daily. Meta often flags scammers but still lets them run ads, sometimes charging them more instead of banning them, despite global regulatory pressure. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Substack is boosting and profiting from both Nazi/extremist content and dangerous health disinfo. Algorithms, categories, and leaderboards push anti-science creators mediaanddemocracyproject.substack.com/p/substack-h...

About 100 people protested ICE arrests in Longview WA, decrying detentions as cruel and unconstitutional. Demonstrators shared fears of profiling and family separation, while one counter-protester argued for “legal” immigration. andrestepankowsky.substack.com/p/longview-d...

Local elections aren’t failing, our information ecosystem is. This week’s Olympia Time digs into how confusion beats big ideas when local media is thin, plus updates on The Olympia Standard’s new direction and what to read next. Subscribe for clarity. buttondown.com/OlympiaTime/...

X’s new tool exposed that many top MAGA influencers were actually foreign-based, a classic step one of the War on Pineapple playbook: fake “locals” stoking division. The reveal shows how overseas operators fuel U.S. political polarization. www.thedailybeast.com/top-maga-inf... /1

Grand opening, grand closing. X quietly disabled a new feature that showed which country an account was posting from when it revealed that lots of popular right wing MAGA accounts were being run from foreign countries like India and Nigeria.

Some incredible details in this piece *one DOGE faction was planning the future of the US government at a venture capital firm *illegally communicating on Signal to avoid transparency laws was deeply embedded into organizational culture to be taken for granted

WSU approved anti-trans CME courses through a detached accreditation process that relied on outside standards and ignored months of student and faculty warnings. The courses were only suspended after major backlash from LGBTQ+ groups rangemedia.co/after-pushba...

The section at the bottom of the post about how to achieve "no jerks" seems to be the most salient thing I've taken from watching Seattle politics from afar. I've seen a lot of decisions made that can most easily been explained as products of strife and drama. publicola.com/2025/11/21/h...

Deep cut. Man Exploring London Names Clocktower ‘Tahoma’ After Mountain 5,000 Miles Away at Home theneedling.com/2025/11/21/m...

WA lawmakers will revisit a bill requiring unions be allowed to bargain over government use of AI when it affects wages or working conditions. After passing the House but stalling in the Senate, supporters say early bargaining builds trust washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/11/20/w...

Kirkland voters rejected an anti-growth slate, reelecting pro-housing incumbents and adding Shilpa Prem. Despite heavy outside spending for slow-growth candidates, the city stayed its pro-density course, signaling strong support for walkable neighborhoods. www.theurbanist.org/2025/11/21/k...

Colorado-style pizza never took off because one restaurant trademarked the term and scared everyone else away from making it. A reflexive IP grab, done simply because a lawyer said they could, locked the style in place, stifling its spread www.techdirt.com/2025/11/19/h...

SEA airport? Listen to it, she actually says ES-EE-AY Am I missing something? It's this a thing now? www.kuow.org/stories/mond...

Deep in a critical piece of how the NYT covers youth tech bans, @mmasnick.bsky.social pulls apart the entire scheme: bans don't reduce harms, they actually make everything worse www.techdirt.com/2025/11/17/n... /1

Do it, coward. The World Cup doesn't serve the host communities. Tickets are not accessible to local supporters. I don't care if this cash crab does leave Seattle. mynorthwest.com/local/trump-...

A Republican said he changed his views about Arab Americans after spending 72 hours meeting with residents and visiting three mosques. “You have all been lied to with the propaganda that’s going on about Dearborn, Michigan,“ he said.

The irony of Chris Rufo complaining about misinformation spreading in the right makes me think it's less about information quality than it is about his own control of the message. www.city-journal.org/article/left...

You wouldn't think actual government officials in Seattle would play the "just asking questions" election denier game after all this time, but they do. www.thestranger.com/news/2025/11...

Olympia loosens single-family zoning, allowing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, cottages, courtyard apts, and ADUs citywide. But strict parking and large minimum lot sizes limit impact, adding only ~1k–1.9k homes over 20 years. Still a major step forward www.sightline.org/2025/11/14/o...

What hasn't been considered, and I'm totally serious about this, is the statue of Marcus Whitman, which was created because of a racist myth to perpetuate white supremacy, not exist. We should cut it apart and destroy it. washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/11/13/w...

Spokane may adopt a 12% tax on surface parking lots and 6% on garages to fund road and sidewalk repairs. The plan aims to push redevelopment of downtown lots into housing and businesses, reducing blight and car dependence while boosting vibrancy and tax revenue. rangemedia.co/spokane-city...

Marion County, KS will pay over $3M and issue an apology for the 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record, which led to the paper’s co-owner dying the next day. Officials admitted the raid was illegal and poorly investigated. apnews.com/article/kans...

POLITICO’s poll finding that 24% think political violence is sometimes justified is probably BS because they didn't ask what they meant by political violence. Most likely misunderstood the question and refer to the American Revolution, not today’s politics. www.politico.com/news/2025/11... /1