Ultima Generazione- Che branco di stronzi

"Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely want to stand. Now everybody that will not stand or not come out, I totally support them 100%. That’s our right, as an American in this great country,” she said.
Griner said her ordeal in Russian prison has instilled a new sense of gratitude.
https://deadline.com/2023/05/wnba-brittney-griner-stands-for-national-anthem-admits-song-means-more-1235375092/

You know she got high as fuck after that state enforced tolerance break.

Re: Moscow murders...

As a former Moscoweigian, (I grew up about a mile away from that house) I don't want him executed. I want him convicted and to spend the rest of his miserable life in a small room.
Capital punishment is the easy way out. Let him spend the next 50 years contemplating his life choices. Plus, apparently it's cheaper.

@4 You're trolling right? Also, was that the best you could come up with? I thought for sure you would have gone after the NAACP Florida thing.

“This reboot of the drug war is bad on its own, but it could become even worse if Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison gets her mitts on these cases.”

I don’t like drug prohibition either, but what exactly would be the downside to arresting anyone who smokes fentanyl on a Link train, Metro bus, or in a Link station? Do not all other riders have a right to clean air?

Shrinking Portland doesn’t surprise me. It was always a mystery what was driving that economy which, unlike Seattle, doesn’t have the same engines like Amazon, bio tech, Microsoft.

@6 yes, the steadfast defense and hand wringing by the stranger over criminal junkies is both not surprising and ridiculous. The street living junkies are most certainly robbing, stealing, shoplifting anything they can to support their habit - getting them off the street, if nothing else, gives the public some respite from re re re re repeat offenders for a bit.

Florida's ugly for sure, though it's not like the rest of the country is doing so hot either.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/us-news/world-cup-fans-told-dont-30011827

The US, Canada and Mexico are set to host the football World Cup in 2026, which will see 48 teams play 104 matches. But before heading to the States to watch the most prized sports tournament on Earth, even co-host Canada has warned its citizens. The official government website states: "The rate of firearm possession in the US is high. It’s legal in many states for US citizens to openly carry firearms in public.Incidences of mass shootings occur, resulting most often in casualties. Although tourists are rarely involved, there is a risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Familiarize yourself on how to respond to an active shooter situation."

Both the British and Japanese governments have issued similar warnings, while New Zealand told its people that the US harbours a number of “domestic-based extremists"

"... New Zealand told its people
that the US harbours a number
of 'domestic-based extremists'"

Most of our Terrorists
are Home-grown
& nra-Approved

also: why have
We no KKK
Museum?

why that's
Discrimination!

It seems like these Celebrity Grad Speeches are just big ego strokes for potential donors. Zazzy is a BU alum & Democrat Logan Roy w/ fashion sense of Kendall Roy. Just a corp douche with no artistic creativity. I don't understand the fascination with these types. What amazing life-changing advice could he offer.

@10 - there is Stone Mtn park, which is pretty close to your museum idea. Have you been?

@10 Shouldn't New Zealand worry more about Australian terrorists (see Christ Church mosque shootings) rather than American terrorists?

@9 Every grad speech should be this:
"You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you."

Kohberger will that no matter where the trial is moved, the jury will be ready to hand down a death sentence. It's Idaho.

Ann Davison wants to make it illegal to smoke Fentanyl on Metro, in front of children on Seattle streets, or in Westlake for the tourists?

Sounds good!

Laws made to hamper public drug use – particularly injectable drug use - may not solve the issue, but it holds the problem at bay. Anyone who has been around for a while can tell you that once heroin or any of its addictive cousins hit a neighborhood, there’ll be changes a-comin’. The community falls into deep, deep disrepair. It’s a death knell. Look at Harlem in the late 60s, 70s, and 80s. It turned from a jazzy, artsy, lively part of town to a place where you feared for your life – even in the daytime. Poverty was part of it, of course, but here’s an almost universal truth about drug users: The drugs start to consume your life. You lose your job, if you had one, because the period of “functioning addict” is short-lived. Hence, you have no money, but you need money for drugs so what do you do? You go looking for someone who might have $20 on them.

It's been that way forever. Why do we think it’d be different now? I’ll let someone else debate whether or not we should provide nice, clean places for people to fuck up their lives, but don’t expect much of a future if you allow them to do it on the streets.

Something just popped into my head. I remember an interview long ago with Dick Cavett regarding a similar subject. “Where on Earth,” he asked, “do people get the notion that life owes them a high?”

Kohberger seems to me to be a real case study in the way that, say, Ted Bundy was not. Bundy can be dismissed, almost immediately, as one sick fuck. I want to know how Kohberger went from being a troubled, aspiring criminologist to someone who thought it would be OK to kill some college students. Chilling. Obviously a blown circuit.

OK, first of all, I never partook of HoneyHole, but I had friends who raved. I thought the name was an unfortunate choice as it is too close to Honey Bucket – a brand that I don’t associate with sandwiches. It’s almost as if I opened up a lemonade stand and called it Urethra. All that aside, it’s never good when a restaurant’s employees go public about what’s really going on in the kitchen. In the life cycle of a business, whenever the original owners sell? You can almost always count on diminished service or quality like that wonderful local taco shop down the street that you love whose owners sell to a franchising conglomerate. It may take a few months, but good-bye great tacos.

Florida. I have some truly magical memories of a couple of summer vacations in Daytona Beach long, long ago. White sand for miles. Warm Atlantic in which you could walk yards and yards into from the shore and still only be waist deep in seawater. I wouldn’t even recognize the place now, I hear. We used to walk along the sand at night from our hotel up to the Boardwalk. Couldn’t do that now. Too dangerous. Anyway, it saddens me knowing that I have such great memories of Florida which could easily be obliterated by its current reality.

As for another beach, Galveston, I doubt that most of the people who live there would much care about all that jeep grease and oil on their sandy beach. But environmentally speaking, ew. The Bolivar Penisula is a working class, rabble-rousing, Alamo Beer-drenched conclave of chemical plant and oil-refinery workers mostly. They, too, are seeing that times have changed, and because public civility, even their flavor of it, is no longer much valued as an attribute, large gatherings of locals are going to be problematic. It’s a shame.

It’s also a shame when otherwise well-meaning people take the “desperate times call for desperate measures” adage to mean that they can mar Guernica, or the Mona Lisa, or the Trevi Fountain. These are things that belong to us all, and no one, not even the anti-fossil fuel people, of whom I count myself an ally, have the right to destroy glorious remnants of human civilization. And please, no graffiti at Yosemite either. Spray-paint and coal-dust Exxon and BP.

Too bad about the Honey Hole. That was such a great place back in the day. The only place in Seattle that served decent sandwiches. I loved living on the Hill and going to lunch at the HH.

@7 Portland's largest employer is OHSU (the third largest employer in Oregon). As for other economic drivers, Intel, Nike, and Columbia Sportswear are big corporations for a city the size of Portland. And make no mistake, Amazon is in Oregon, getting huge tax breaks on warehouses and data storage facilities. Oh and people visit Portland. A lot of people. In 2022 alone, the Portland metro area raked in $5.2 BILLION. That's a lot of tourism revenue and that's just Portland. Plenty of people pass through Portland on their way to vacations on the Oregon coast or other places in Oregon. PDX is an international airport.

@8, @16,@17: Seattle has banned public alcohol consumption, and tobacco use from parks. But banning fentanyl use will have uniquely horrible effects —- so bad, apparently, the Stranger cannot even mention them in this post.

Also, has the Stranger ever actually admitted to drug use amongst Seattle’s homeless population? I don’t believe they’ve ever explicitly done so.

Crime causes poverty

@5: How about this: There's no need to juxtapose the passion for art with the passion for addressing climate change. Instead they should create art that demonstrates their passions, not tear priceless art the world loves. Translating @1: "Last Generation- What a bunch of assholes", I'm sure you concur.

@6 those are all county owned systems and not city-owned systems, so why would the Seattle Prosecuting Attorney have ANYTHING to do with them?

JURISDICTION and STANDING - she'd have neither.

Nice try at deflection, though

xina @18, I hope you and your mother have fully recovered from COVID. I recall seeing your original post maybe a few weeks ago but lost track of any updates.

@23: Link is not “county-owned,” but rather owned and operated by Sound Transit — which is also not owned by King County.

If behavior is illegal in Seattle, and someone within the Seattle city limits engages in that behavior, then the city has both JURISDICTION and STANDING to prosecute.

Nice try at deflection, though. (RECALL DURKAN!)

@21 I am not sure why you had to throw the non-sequitor of QAnon in there. It reeks of Whataboutism.
I think their asshole nihilism stands alone on its own merits without comparison. I cannot imagine that it will grow their ranks nor awareness but instead cause more folks to turn against and tune out.

If you wanted to do a comparison, I think the Taliban would apt one. They destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in the name of their "cause."

You’ve had de-facto decriminalization of drugs in the wake of police staffing issues and the Blake decision, yet, as we see in yesterday’s Seattle Times (which TS hasn’t noted) fentanyl deaths among the unhoused has skyrocketed. So is the argument now is that having incarceration as a one tool is going to make the problem worse? I have yet to see anyone rational make the argument that jail first or jail alone is going to fix the issue.

TS seems to make the same argument around drugs as the gun rights lobby does around gun control - “The law can’t fix it, so don’t even bother”. This isn’t a binary, black and white world. You need a variety of tools and solutions. Jail (or the threat thereof) is just one.

@17, @18: While there were plenty of places in Seattle which made great sandwiches (Smarty Pants, in Georgetown, was our favorite at Boeing Field; Homegrown, on Capitol Hill, was amazing), Honey Hole consistently had great recipes, and made them with verve. Taking their name from the honey mustard they loved, they produced great sandwiches, from their opening in the late ‘90s, through at least the next fifteen years. It’s sad to think they’ve declined to the point suggested by this headline post. Yet another great thing I once loved about Seattle, gone.

@26 Only as a strawman argument see the Slog's post on the deaths from fentanyl in the Snohomish County jail. Most of the arguments for the criminalization is to prevent other crime from happening. Not unlike pulling over someone for a broken taillight.
The argument against that is that it targets the poor, which is true but as Jesus said, " You will always have the poor."

Greedy corporations cause poverty... Vampires who suck the life out of a once magical place.

The UW steam distribution system is not the problem. The problem is the fuel source. Change the fuel source to a non-fossil source, and the problem is solved. Heat pumps on large academic buildings doesn't make sense. Also, the steam is almost certainly used by laboratories and the hospital.

@26, @28: Drug criminalization is terrible policy, but Seattle’s de facto drug decriminalization, done without consent of the citizens, has been far worse. Decriminalization should be done the way we did it with cannabis: via popular vote, with a clear path from the criminal status to the legal status. The Stranger’s complete failure to admit how many homeless persons use drugs has contributed greatly to the very problem the Stranger now decries.

@29 Ignorance, corruption in our legal system, drug use, living beyond your means, having too many kids, crime, assuming nothing changes and not adjusting to the environment causes poverty. Corporations exploit government regulation and people's stupidity to get rich. Using your logic one could argue that The Stranger causes poverty by arguing that it leads people to believe they have no agency so their actions are not their own and thus there should be no consequences for their actions but in reality there are consequences that lead them to drug addled, homeless, and poor. Hashtag: LateStageCapitalism

I had no idea Ann Davison held so much power. Last time I looked a police officer has to actually arrest someone first before her office could look to prosecute and even then a judge still had the final say whether someone did time or not (spoiler alert - they probably won’t). So the grand total of drug heads who go to jail will most like remain near zero. If the threat of jail causes someone to leave Seattle though it will totally be worth it.

One other note. In the past these offenses were felonies thus handled by king county. By making them a gross misdeameanor the state also shifted the jurisdiction to the city.

@23, We haven't, but thank you for saying as much. We're only two weeks out from showing symptoms. We are still coughing and neither of can smell or taste. Neither of us had to be hospitalized, thankfully and that was my biggest fear (other than, you know, COVID killing me). Despite being told to contact your health care providers if you contract COVID, neither of us received help from our health care providers. Neither of us could take Paxlovid (for medical reasons). My doctor wanted me to travel to Portland and stay in Portland for 3 days to receive remdesivir infusions (3 hours each). How? I live with my primary caregiver (who also would have to drive me to Portland) and it's not possible for us to do that trip back and forth in one day when not sick. Travel with COVID? Stay in a hotel with COVID? It was a fucking joke.

The biggest challenge will be fully recovering. Not being able to smell or taste ito s EXTREMELY disturbing. We are doing "smell training" (you have to sniff 4 essential oils for about 20 seconds each as many times a day as you can).

The hope is not suffering any serious fallout post COVID. We don't want to catch it again, obviously, but we have no idea how we got it this time after more than three years of total isolation, always masking if having to go out to get groceries, not socializing, etc. No one who had been anywhere near us had it or got it after we did.

Beyond recovery from the infection itself, COVID likes to wreak havoc with your internal organs. No data on what COVID does to people with neuromusuclar disease. I'm "fortunate" in that my disease is ascending (started at the feet, working it's way up) instead of descending (starting with breathing/eating/speaking problems). Plenty of data on COVID causing cardiac events in the year after infection. Same for diabetes. Only time will tell. They honestly have no fucking clue what this virus does to people.

Right now I'd simply like to be able to smell and taste my morning coffee. As would my mom.

@29
"Microsoft and Amazon forced me to get addicted to opioids and made me shit on the sidewalk!"

"...the Republican who leads Seattle's law department..."

Do you mean the choice of Seattle voters to lead Seattle's law department?

@36: “Do you mean the choice of Seattle voters to lead Seattle's law department?”

No. That require admitting Seattle’s November 2021 elections happened, and that the Stranger simply will not do.

xina @34, I appreciate your getting back to me. Not that I'm telling you anything you don't already know, but if one loses one's sense of smell and taste during the regular acute phase of the illness, normally it comes back. Hardly a guarantee, I realize. And as you say, that's not your greatest worry.

All the best to you. I'm about the least affected person there is by COVID, and even I, when I stop and think about it, get bitter.

@35 lol, yeah, that’s pretty much one of the main excuses isn’t it?

It’s gotten to the point where there needs to be another Green Book for travel throughout the US, with expanded sections for women and darker skinned people of whatever background.

Or non-local accents, for that matter.

@40 -- nra Highly
recommends Armed
Escorts until we can get
armored personnel carriers
& wee pistols for the children

it's just another Step
in the race to
Fascism.

xina -- it's
AWESOME
to see you back!

Glad you & your're
Mom are doing well so
far! Best of Luck to you both.

nyt;
E. Jean Carroll
Seeks New Damages From
Trump for Comments on CNN

The former president’s repeated denials that he sexually abused Ms. Carroll “show the depth of his malice” and merit heavy damages, her lawyer wrote.

E. Jean Carroll, who this month won $5 million in damages from former President Donald J. Trump, is now seeking a “very substantial” additional amount in response to his insults on a CNN program just a day after she won her sexual abuse and defamation case.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/nyregion/carroll-trump-cnn-defamation.html

hit the trumpfster
in the Mouth by
going thru his
hip pocket.

Excellent.

perhaps he'll
Triple down?

Travel to Florida and Texas? That's a hard pass on both, despite my having friends residing in both states.

@18 and @36 xina: Welcome back! It's wonderful to hear from you. Thank you and bless you for the updates. Wishing all the very heartfelt best in full recovery from COVID to you and your mother. Hopefully you can regain your sense of taste and smell again soon.

@42 kristofarian: We can only hope. Go, E. Jean Carroll, GO! Griz forecasts that the Fall of the Orange Turd will merit global celebration.
A bit off topic, but do you offer gluten free pasta Alfredo? Oops--there goes my diet! ;)

@17 Bauhaus I: Thank you and bless you for another splendid and spot on post.
I have been to Florida, and traveled through Alabama and Mississippi back during my U.S. Navy basic and technical training 34 years ago. Once in the Deep South was enough for me. I can't imagine visiting there now. Mississippi is home to insects the size of B-52 bombers that I swear can carry off small children, and Florida is the Thunderstorm Capitol of the World.

nyt:

Imagine a Renters’ Utopia.
It Might Look Like Vienna.

Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it?

Calls for a federal social-housing plan in America might sound far-fetched, but make no mistake: The United States government intervenes heavily in the housing market. It’s just a two-tiered system, as Gail Radford, the historian, argues.

There’s generous support for affluent homeowners and deliberately insufficient support for the lowest-income households. In 2017, the United States spent $155 billion on tax breaks to homeowners and investors in rental housing and mortgage-revenue bonds, more than three times the $50 billion spent on affordable housing.

That $50 billion isn’t nothing. In fact, in many U.S. cities, public spending per capita on housing and community-development subsidies is higher than in Vienna.

But it seems clear that much of this money is misspent, whether through inefficient private-public partnerships like the low-income-housing tax credit; or through distortionary vouchers; or, most dubiously of all, through subsidizing homeowners, the people who need it least.

“If you give everyone demand-side subsidies, like vouchers, and there’s a supply shortage, it’s going to drive up prices,” Chris Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. It costs the state more, and landlords often wind up pocketing the profits.

Though the Gemeindebauten represented a large initial government outlay, Vienna’s social housing is now self-sustaining. Guess how much of the residents’ salary goes toward the program. One percent. Social housing drives down rents in the private market by as much as 5 percent.

Vouchers may appear cheaper in the short term, but directly financing well-regulated public and limited-profit construction is the only way to mitigate speculation and hedge against ever-increasing housing costs.

In 2020, New York and California spent $377 and $248 per capita, respectively, in housing development, while Vienna spent just $124 — and approximately half of Vienna’s spending is on low-interest financing that will be repaid and then re-lent.
--by Francesca Mari; May 23, 2023

tonnes more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-housing.html

NAACP is being melodramatic. Non-profits generally are to keep the donations pouring in.

Just to play Devils advocate I wonder if the NAACP has put a travel warning out where black on black crime is rampant like Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, etc. etc?

@45: To implement Vienna’s housing model in Seattle, you’d need a cultural shift sufficient to have lawyers residing in “public housing.” You’d also need to turn Americans into the patient rule-obeyers common to Austria and Germany. Good luck with all of that.

Even after those huge changes in how Americans have long been taught/allowed to behave, none of this would help Seattle’s chronic homeless population, most of whom arrived in Seattle unemployed and homeless because of addiction. European democracies have national health-care plans; we do not.

@47: I also wonder if they called attention to the blatant racism when the University of California at Berkeley hosted a "black only graduation ceremony," contradicting the very laws established during the Civil Rights movement, which vehemently outlawed racial segregation.

PEARLS! DAHHHHHHHH!!! MY PEARLS!!

@50: Figures, your sincerity on racial and social justice issues was never real - but you can put on a good act.

@50. No, that's pure projection. The fact that you would raise a graduation to celebrate African American graduates to the same level as Jim Crow and segregation shows how fucking ridiculous your ability to parse scale is.

@51, sorry too much magnetism to my own comments.

I don't know why I even have to say this. But any time a group of people that share common traits do so in their private lives or organizations on campus, and celebrate their own culture and identity, there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it feels excluding, but it's okay to do it even for white people if that's what concerns you. Segregation is using the power of the law to guarantee that there is no ability for those communities to have a mixed ceremony or they will be punished, arrested, or killed (lynched). The fact that you would raise such a benign thing to the level of that horrible period of history is a backhanded way to distract and diminish the enduring impacts of our checkered past.

@52: No, it's not a ceremony in honor of graduates, is the actual graduation ceremony for blacks only. Now, as an intellectual expertise, would you feel the same way about a whites only graduation ceremony?

https://opoyi.com/usa/uc-berkeley-faces-heat-for-hosting-black-only-graduation-ceremony-as-video-goes-viral/

https://www.merca20.com/uc-berkeleys-black-only-graduation-ceremony-sparks-debate/

@54: Yeah, but this is not like campus community group, this is the whole class! Also weirdly presents Black students with a quandary of which ceremony to go to.

Spin it however you want, but if racial harmony isn't a societal objective of yours - please let me know that so I don't continue wasting pixels on this matter with you.

https://youtu.be/-4IletJ7-Tw

That's would be just fine with me. Why not have a special German or Scottish ceremony separately? No skin off my back. But such an event would look something like the above. But that's perfectly legal and doesn't exclude the ability for everyone to have an integrated graduation if they so choose. Besides, they aren't mutually exclusive, are they? Everyone who graduated has the right to walk the stage (or not) in the manner they wish, hands down. Especially since so many during the pandemic couldn't even walk the stage for their diplomas, including my family members.

"If racial harmony isn't a societal objective of yours..."

vincemcmahonmeme.gif

@48
yeah
all them
lockstepping Goosesteppers

"It would certainly not be easy to do the same thing in America given the way our housing system has been structured for decades.

Implementing such a system now would drastically lower the value of existing homes and real estate and would be fiercely opposed by current homeowners, landlords, and don't forget Wall Street investors, who fear the loss in value of their homes and investments, with their home being the principal source of wealth for most Americans.

I wish this were not so."

--Hydraulic Engineer; Seattle

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-housing.html?login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock&login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock&login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock#commentsContainer

and who said
anything about it
Ending Homelessness?

the Vienna Model
removes the Stress of Continuously
having to Fight for your ever-priceyer Commodity

but what about
the Cruelty?
one won-
ders

“Someone will have to do some journalism around here.”

And when someone does, I presume The Stranger will summarize it in a Slog blurb.

@59: One reason Americans move as their incomes increase is to get away from shitty neighbors. Again, your tedious abuse of the NY Times’ copyright ignores the huge cultural differences between Seattle and Vienna (!).