It is hopeful that King County is taking over the park by the courthouse since the city of Seattle doesn’t have the political will to maintain a functioning public space. Food trucks sound like a good start. Hopefully there is also a heathy police presence to restore order and arrest repeat offenders that assault people and kill dogs.

Have you waited for a bus in front of the courthouse, or tried to do any sort of normal-citizen activity near there, recently? It's about damn time they brought people and activity back to that neighborhood. I'm not a small guy and I have been pretty nervous just standing at the bus stop there the last few years. Food trucks and music is a great start. I hope it works.

Well done, Charles.

Where are the comments?

The site's comment display code is broken, probably due to a caching problem.

Here's a workaround: when you first load a page, take the the URL, e.g.:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog-pm/2022/06/07/74783670/county-to-deploy-food-trucks-in-war-against-homeless-south-dakotans-use-ar-15s-to-kill-prairie-dogs-todays-clouds-were-magnificent/comments

and add "?0" to the end, like so:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog-pm/2022/06/07/74783670/county-to-deploy-food-trucks-in-war-against-homeless-south-dakotans-use-ar-15s-to-kill-prairie-dogs-todays-clouds-were-magnificent/comments*?0*

Anything after a question mark at the end of a URL is called the query string. For SLOG comments, the query string is a comment ID of some sort. By specifying "0", an ID that doesn't exist, we're forcing the engine to pull comments out of the DB instead of hitting the (broken) cache.

If you have posted a comment and aren't seeing replies, Your URL will have a comment ID in the query string; just change this ID to 0 and load the new URL.

Hmm, my workaround didn't display correctly, whee. The edited URL should look like this:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog-pm/2022/06/07/74783670/county-to-deploy-food-trucks-in-war-against-homeless-south-dakotans-use-ar-15s-to-kill-prairie-dogs-todays-clouds-were-magnificent/comments?0

(with no asterisks)

Hopefully The Stranger's tech team will just turn off caching until they can find a fix?

City Hall Park, and the whole Pioneer Square neighborhood, really, have done their part over many years to give the homeless a public space. They’ve paid for it recently with big dips in restaurant/retail occupancy and the flight of businesses with office space, and over the long haul with lower tourism and foot traffic relative to the rest of downtown. Were it not for the stadiums, the whole place would basically be a hollowed-out shell. They’ve done enough. A vibrant park with food and music sounds exactly like the kind of urban space that area desperately needs.

OK, so now it looks like it's caching my workaround, resulting in the workaround not working for page loads after the first workaround...

So here's another way to do it: use extra path elements to specify a comment ID higher than the total number of comments, e.g., take the URL

https://www.thestranger.com/slog-pm/2022/06/07/74783670/county-to-deploy-food-trucks-in-war-against-homeless-south-dakotans-use-ar-15s-to-kill-prairie-dogs-todays-clouds-were-magnificent/comments

and add a slash and a number to the end, like so:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog-pm/2022/06/07/74783670/county-to-deploy-food-trucks-in-war-against-homeless-south-dakotans-use-ar-15s-to-kill-prairie-dogs-todays-clouds-were-magnificent/comments/72

Now, if the caching is really super busted, it might cache this workaround too, and break it... in which case we'll need to use a unique URL every time we want to see new comments. This is a pain, but can be done with a query string... add ?cb=12908345712905 to the end of your URL (just mash in random numbers there, different every time)

e.g.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog-pm/2022/06/07/74783670/county-to-deploy-food-trucks-in-war-against-homeless-south-dakotans-use-ar-15s-to-kill-prairie-dogs-todays-clouds-were-magnificent/comments?cb=2369087623490

Whew! All that just to look at ghost comments, ugh.

@1, @3, @8: Charles, the Stranger's resident urbanist, is actually complaining the government is actively trying to facilitate use of City Hall Park for the purpose of a public park, which is for the enjoyment of all who reside and/or work near that park. He believes this constitutes some kind of "sad" outrage. This illustrates just how far the Stranger has wandered from the norms of public discourse.

(For perspective, he could ask the workers at King County Courthouse who were assaulted by former inhabitants of the Park, but that would require him to care...)

I, for one, appreciate it when a judge makes a statement with the intent of casting shame especially towards offenders who acquire their victims' - perhaps naïve - trust and then shit all over it. Do the offenders really care about the public shaming? Probably not, or they wouldn't have attempted to defraud in the first place, but a court, it seems to me, shouldn't just be a place to dole out time in the penitentiary. It should also be a place for a judge to re-affirm verbally that this kind of wickedness is totally unacceptable in a civilized world.

speaking of Elephants in rooms

U.S. Mass Shootings Over the Weekend Leave 15 Dead and 60 Wounded

“They Could Have Saved Many More Lives”: Uvalde Mother Blasts Police Response

Spanish Court Summons Mike Pompeo over CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange

Katrina vanden Heuvel on How U.S. Media's "One-Sided Debate" on Ukraine Fans the Flames of War

“We Can’t Jail Our Way Out of Poverty”: San Fran. DA Chesa Boudin Defends Record Ahead of Recall Vote

for tonnes more
NON-Corporate NEWS:

https://mailchi.mp/democracynow/20180813-740823?e=7d6fa19aca

Also, I don't know what or how much damage prairie dogs do and to whom, but I do know that those prairie dogs have been on that prairie way, way, way longer than Senator Thune's white ass has been. I deeply resent animals being used as target practice - almost as much as I resent that act given as a reason to justify assault weapons. What a fuckface.

Maybe I'm overreacting. I mean, what possible harm can come from fucking with the eco-system of the Great Plains, right? Cough, cough. Where's all this goddamn dust coming from?

In addition to South Dakotans shooting varmints, Iowans blaze away at deer with their ARs

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2022/05/25/iowa-lawmakers-ok-deer-hunting-semi-automatic-rifles/9926908002/

Dilution is the solution in Pioneer Square. We make it way too convenient for the people who prey on the homeless (including the religious institutions) by concentrating many of the social services, the court system, and the missions down there.

Put the Frye, the Morrision, and Lou Graham's sporting house back on the tax rolls.

@10:

We can address that as soon as tools such as yourself admit that white-on-white gun violence in the U.S. is also a raging epidemic.

As for Texas' "no drag showz in front of teh kiddies", well, there go all those planned middle school productions of "Peter Pan"...

^^^ Whataboutism!

I got BINGO!

Ok. Address it how? Give specifics. What policies address specifically this “black gang violence?”

Oh. And. Make sure you include as many racist dog whistles as you can.

Sorry. That was for @10

Vis vis Prairie dogs: when populations explode they do tremendous damage to farmlands and irrigation and spread diseases that effect other species. Some species even carry diseases transmissible to humans like… Monkey Pox etc. So they are vermin.

Of course the reason humans have to cull them is due to the fact humans destroyed and polluted the habitats of their natural predators that kept them in check. We decimated raptor, bobcat, and weasel populations. So. No surprise there.

But when I was kid plinking on prairie dogs was a very common past time. And it was done with old fashioned .22’s. And no scope or any of that poseur bullshit.

And any one using higher caliber rifles (with much more expensive and wasteful ammo) was deemed an idiot and poseur.

@15:

A lot of folks forget that when AR's first became widely available after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004, many sport hunters laughed at the very notion of anybody using one for such a purpose. For one thing, if you need more than two shots to take down game, you're a pretty shitty hunter, in their opinion. Secondly, the relatively small caliber ammo they typically use doesn't really have the stopping power to kill anything much bigger than a coyote; they're almost useless for larger game, and, unless one is very, very lucky, would require multiple rounds to bring them down, which goes back to my first point. Even the NRA admits they're not very effective in that regard. Anyone who tells you they use them regularly for game hunting - as opposed to dispatching small vermin, such as rabbits, skunks & what-not - are either lying outright, or have a success rate that would make Elmer Fudd look like a champion sharpshooter by comparison.

Re allowing drag shows in Texas when minors are around: Better dead than in the wrong bed.