It was also her birthday. And because Ann Davison is gone, it's kind of your birthday.
by Micah Yip
Every seat was taken at City Attorney Erika Evans’ swearing-in ceremony at City Hall Monday afternoon, and dozens stood at the back and sides of the room. Microphone in hand, Evans commanded the front of the room as her family and elected officials, including Mayor Katie Wilson and several city councilmembers, looked on. Coincidentally, it was also her birthday.
“I am committed to a Seattle where we can all feel safe and where we all thrive,” Evans said. “A city where dignity is non-negotiable. A city where we always fight back with urgency and with courage to protect our rights and values here in Seattle.”
Evans, Seattle’s first Black city attorney, said she’s in the process of creating a “new, reimagined” community court to connect people with services after their release so they don’t reoffend, fulfilling a campaign promise. Seattle had community court until former City Attorney Ann Davison shut it down in 2023.
Evans also said she’d be “laser-focused” on domestic violence and DUI cases—ones that her predecessor, Davison, was badly behind on. And Evans plans to put a dedicated prosecutor on bias crimes “to make clear that hate and discrimination will have no place here in our city.”
Before Evans took the oath of office, several people close to Evans spoke to her character and work ethic, including retired Washington Supreme Court Justice Mary I. Yu, campaign intern and University of Washington student Towa Nakano-Harris, U.S. District Court Judge Richard A. Jones, and Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown, who’d known her for a decade and endorsed her candidacy.
“I knew she had the skill set and the character to do something bold and visionary that would have an impact on more people,” Brown said.
Evans spoke of her grandfather, Lee Evans, a double-gold medal-winning Olympic sprinter and prominent leader in the Black power movement who famously raised his fist on the podium at the 1968 Summer Olympics.
“It is that same legacy that I carry forward, and why I am standing here today,” Evans said. And under the Trump administration, “when we were seeing clear rollbacks in civil rights, I knew I needed to make a decision just like my grandfather did to stand up and fight back what was happening. That is the vision I’m bringing towards this office.”
Democratic lawmakers are hammering President Donald Trump's regime-change operation in Venezuela, which he seems to have done to enrich the wealthy oil and gas tycoons who supported his candidacy.
Multiple Democratic lawmakers pointed to Trump's admission aboard Air Force One that he had briefed oil companies ahead of the U.S.’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—and before he notified members of Congress. Clearly, this has nothing to do with illicit drugs and everything to do with Trump wanting to line the pockets of his oil and gas donors. Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world.
"Trump risked American lives to kidnap Maduro just to have him replaced by one of Maduro's authoritarian cronies. This has nothing to do with drugs or ousting an authoritarian leader. It's a clown car of incompetence in an effort to enrich oil companies," Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, wrote in a post on X.
Other Democratic lawmakers echoed those sentiments.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, second from right, gets off a helicopter on his way to Manhattan Federal Court on Jan. 5.
"History shows that America's post-WW2 regime change enthusiasts are almost always wrong. And in Venezuela, it appears Trump has spent billions on a mission that has left the same people in charge. Just maybe with more favorable deals for Trump's oil buddies," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote in a post on X.
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington tied Trump’s Venezuela attacks to the chaos and cruelty Trump has inflicted at home.
"While millions of Americans lose health care and prices are surging here at home, Trump doesn't care and has no solutions. Instead, he is threatening to bomb half the Western Hemisphere, occupy Venezuela, and annex Greenland," she wrote in a post on X. "Is this America First?"
Others have pointed out that Trump’s argument that Maduro had to be arrested for drug trafficking makes little sense given that Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking.
“I have not seen a single Republican official or MAGA influencer offer a credible explanation of Trump's decision to pardon the drug trafficking ex-president of Honduras,” Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts wrote in a post on X. “You cannot credibly argue that trafficking sometimes gets a pardon and sometimes requires a war.”
Of course, there's one Democratic lawmaker who is marching to the beat of his very wrong drum: Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman.
“Why, as a Democrat, can’t we just acknowledge it was successful?” Fetterman said.
However, Fetterman is missing the point of Democrats' criticism. It’s not that Democrats think Maduro should be in power. On the contrary, they think he is indeed corrupt and evil.
Rather, Democrats have correctly said Congress should have been involved in authorizing this operation, and that the Trump administration needed to disclose its plans after Maduro's ouster to ensure this situation doesn't go south in the way that past regime-change operations have.
So far, it looks like Trump and his crew have no plan for what comes next, and that Americans will once again be left holding the bag.
"This is a moment for careful coordination with our allies and partners, and work with the opposition in Venezuela—not glib assertions about running the country and using oil revenues to pay for it. This is a moment for the focus to be on American families, not American oil executives who donated to Trump’s campaign," Sen. Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote in a post on X.
"We’ve got millions of American families wondering why their dollars are going to attacks in Venezuela instead of healthcare at home. You deserve answers, not premature victory celebrations,” he added.
Last week saw a spate of accusations of AI use in video games, ones where developer denials took strange turns when even the studios or individuals accused couldn’t say for sure they hadn’t used AI. The case of both Fortnite’s new sprays and a swiftly announced-then-cancelled Postal game are the latest signs of how the specter of AI is ruining all of our lives.
Last week, publisher Running With Scissors announced a new game in the Postal series, called Postal: Bullet Paradise. Viewers swiftly began lobbing accusations of AI at the game’s announcement trailer, which has since been pulled down, accusations that developer Goonswarm Games denied. People highlighted concern over the sprites’ mouths in the trailer and an apparently suspicious speedpaint Running With Scissors released, but none of it featured the telltale too-many-fingers or other undeniable signs.
On December 5, Goonswarm announced that the whole thing had gotten so out of hand that they were closing the studio, writing on Twitter, “Our studio was mistakenly accused of using AI-generated art in our games, and every attempt to clarify our work only escalated the situation… It’s tough to pour so much energy into a game and end up caught in the middle of an AI war by accident. We’ve decided to shut down the studio and end all future activities.”
I am a person who has zero interest in a Postal game, much less in 2025, but I found watching it all unfold concerning. If Goonswarm had used AI, it seemed unlikely to me that they would deny it so strenuously–what would be the point of lying like this, much less sticking to the lie so intently that you’d close the studio? I wondered if this wasn’t some new version of AI brainrot, where the bullshit technology has been forced down our throats so much that we can’t help but see it everywhere, just as its most strenuous boosters hope.
But then, on December 6, Goonswarm returned to Twitter with an update. It turns out that after “conducting an internal review, we agree with your criticism. The promo art does appear to include or be influenced by AI-generated material.” Goonswarm wrote that “We collaborated with external artists for years and never saw any sign of this” and that the files they received from these external artists “always looked legitimate within our internal pipeline, which is why our initial reaction was to protect our team and defend our innocence. We understand now that your concerns were valid. And we take responsibility for not catching this earlier.” The studio wrote that this possible AI use only extended to the game’s promo art, and that it will “replace all disputed promo art across our projects with pieces created entirely by human artists.” The studio concluded by writing, “We never intended to mislead anyone, and our earlier statements reflected what we honestly believed at the moment.”
Running With Scissors followed up on December 10 to say that while it had “needed to cut ties with Goonswarm Games on Friday and state the reason for doing so, our broken trust, we still wanted to give Goonswarm the time and space to be transparent about what had occurred… We wish them all the best as we both move forward our separate ways.”
The idea that an outside artist used AI and didn’t disclose it to the studio is more plausible than Goonswarm riding a lie into the ground, and highlights the insidious nature of AI’s forced ubiquity–how can you ever trust it isn’t being used? The situation bears some similarities to another AI dustup earlier last week, involving accusations of AI use in some new Fortnite sprays. Fans were already on edge about AI in Epic games over comments Tim Sweeney made that “AI will be involved in nearly all future [games] production,” and the sprays in question definitely have the signs, including the telltale too many toes. Other accusations centered on some in-game music.
The freelance artist of one of the sprays responded to the accusations on Instagram, but rather than clearing things up, they made the situation even more confusing. They wrote that “I think the culprit is a clock in the background. I grabbed some clocks off image search, collaged them, and halftoned them. The numbers are bad, entirely possible I grabbed an AI clock and wasn’t paying attention.” Epic has yet to comment on the situation.
Putting aside the idea that a whole cadre of professionals might not notice an AI clock, a ubiquitous and straightforward object that is designed to be easy to gauge the accuracy of, this response highlights a deeper problem with AI. Even if an individual isn’t actively using it, it’s increasingly easy for it to slip in under our noses if we’re not constantly on alert. As AI becomes more convincing, and as it’s forced into more and more places, even if we aren’t trying to engage with AI, we can’t be sure we haven’t.
It’s no wonder that widespread paranoia over all this has taken hold. If even the people making things can’t be sure they aren’t using AI (or at least claim they aren’t sure), how can their audience be confident? And while vigilance is healthy and warranted, what does it mean–especially these days–when we feel like we can’t trust anything we see? False accusations of AI use can harm a person’s academic or artistic career, and it’s also just bad for all of our souls and brains to be constantly on high alert. It makes us prone to distrust and dismissiveness, leaving us less open to other people’s creative works and making it harder for them to share it, especially if they’re still developing their skills. AI is already eroding trust, and our heightened suspicion can make us hostile not just to the work, but to each other. It’s not good for creators or their audiences to live like this, and it’s certainly not a good environment for anyone to try to make things in.
But! “Let’s all show each other some grace, huh?” is not a lesson I can impart to you in the situations above, both of which prove that suspicion was warranted and that the accusations might have been correct. If anything, they suggest that even more suspicion is called for, when the people denying AI use themselves might not even know if they can truthfully deny it. So now how are you supposed to live, pinned between the slow spiritual death of thinking everyone around you is full of shit and the world-eating encroachment of the full-of-shit machine?
Honestly, I don’t know. As we wait for the AI bubble to gloriously burst and all of this to go the way of NFTs and the metaverse, I think the best we can do is remember who our common enemy is: the AI companies and the people who stand to get rich off the tech, who need us to believe all of this is inevitable. We can double down on our commitment to proving them wrong, refuting their bullshit claims and making our displeasure known when AI products get forced into our tools without our consent. No one wants to take the extra time to make sure some reference art or a freelance pitch isn’t AI (ask me how I know!), but maybe we can motivate ourselves by seeing it as one more way to tell the Sam Altmans of the world to get fucked. It wouldn’t prevent the situations above, and it doesn’t help us navigate a world increasingly full of AI slop, but it can at least be a small act of resistance against their shit.
My Spotify subscription has been cancelled but I'm not so naive that I think any alternative is that much better. Royalty rates on Apple Music, Amazon and Tidal are the top 3 but they're still abysmal. There are some alternatives like CodaMusic that look interesting but are unvetted (to me) at this time.
The majority of my listening happens via Bandcamp and Ampwall; two platforms that are decidedly not streaming services but benefit artists much more directly and sustainably. As I previously mentioned, I picked up about 208 releases last year on Bandcamp alone - paying for each one. That's not a brag, its a conscious choice!
All that said, I am not ditching streaming entirely. I already pay for YouTube Premium, so that makes YouTube Music my new platform of choice; simply because I'm already paying for it. I'll be keeping a playlist of 2026 Enjoyables over there, as well as albums I'm trying out. I think if I can get the embeddable playlist to be a little nicer, it won't be such a bad option.
In longwinded summation, there's no perfect choice. I'm not shaming anyone for sticking with Spotify. They're bad because they're vocal about how bad they are. Every single other streaming platform - even the beloved Tidal - is negotiating to pay less. Pick your battles and support artists where you can! Your choice of streamer is not your 100% participation in the arts. Just make sure you go see a live show every so often or pick up a t-shirt.
What accounts for the U.S. government’s intense interest in the nation of Venezuela?
Chart via Visual Capitalist.
That’s all. Not drug trafficking. Many nations, including America, are full of drug trafficking. Donald Trump has pardoned multiple large drug traffickers. It’s not about drug trafficking.
Is it about how Maduro is not a uhhhhhh…. legitimately elected leader? Did the guy who in 2020 tried to foment a violent overthrow of the United States Congress in order to reinstall himself as president after he lost an election just attack a small nation because he cares about pure democracy so much? No. That did not happen.
The extent to which the national conversation about what just happened focuses on drugs, or on Maduro’s personal corruption, rather than on the world’s most powerful nation attacking a less powerful nation in order to protect its own economic interests—that is the extent to which the national conversation has been derailed by propaganda, and is meandering in a useless corner rather than shining a spotlight in the face of reality.
For those of us interested in reality, the question becomes: Might there be some downsides of kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation, because he is not sufficiently in America’s pocket? One thing we have done is to supercharge the urgency of almost all smaller nations on earth to unite with one another to protect themselves against our aggression, and to seek out competing superpowers—China, most obviously—to align themselves with in order to have some protection against what just happened to Maduro. It is easy, for the sort of shallow, power-drunk, unwise people who currently control our government, to imagine that because we have the biggest military, there can be no consequences from us attacking a much smaller nation. But anyone who has read history, and who is able to conceptualize its progress in time frames longer than an election cycle, knows that strong nations who imagine themselves to be invulnerable and therefore decide to exploit everyone else at their leisure plant the seeds of the coalition that will one day overtake them on the world stage.
What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today. Not in the sense of being charming rogues or alluring antiheroes. We are the bad guys. Americans, as a people, are extremely allergic to the belief that our nation is a malign force in the world. It goes against our national mythology, it goes against our national education, it goes against the natural human impulse to imagine ourselves as good people. Additionally, under our current regime, it goes against a deliberate program of quasi-religious nationalist propaganda now being rolled out as fast as possible through every channel of the government’s power. Even the most credible news outlets in America can rarely bring themselves to portray us in the cold, accurate light that our conduct deserves. And the number of credible news outlets is shrinking as they are systematically being taken over by regime allies in order to broaden the larger propaganda campaign we are all living through.
The most generous interpretation of the U.S. as a global actor in 2026 is that we are in the hands of a bunch of amoral, dangerous gangsters, and that the stability of the world depends on the political opponents of Trumpism winning back control of the US government before too much damage can be done. The less generous interpretation is that the many systematic political and economic flaws built into our nation—investor capitalism, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the antidemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court—are now, at long last, bringing about the final end of the age of American global dominance. That we are, in other words, on a ship whose thin hull has finally rusted through in too many places, that is going down no matter how fast the passengers desperately try to bail it out. Which of these interpretations you believe is mostly a matter of attitude. What is not debatable is that the United States government under Donald Trump is the most dangerous force on earth, and a serious potential threat to every other nation, and the leading cause of geopolitical instability. That usually causes a backlash.
It is hard for me to imagine being a member of the Trump administration, and even harder for me to imagine the Trump administration caring what I have to say about anything, but if I could leave them with one though to ponder today, it would be this: You are establishing the precedent that it is okay to take out the leader of a nation that has not attacked you, and that you are not at war with, just because you feel that he threatens your interests somehow. How might every other nation in the world think about applying this precedent to the current leaders of the United States?
Has a violent gangster boss ever suffered a devastating backlash to his iron-fisted rule? Something to research.
The more lawless, murderous, and belligerent the US government becomes, the greater the need to not be a member of its military and find yourself fighting for unjust causes. If you are a soldier, leave the military as soon as possible.
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