What a fucking school district. It's a good senior prank that was clever and did not include any vandalism. What they rather have the place graffitied or toilet papered?

I know some Egyptians that I want to inform about that PhD student, but I'm afraid that receiving a text from me with that content could get them in trouble over there.

Most homeless people don't get counted, or noticed much. Researchers of the visible street people can only find a bunch of thieving, panhandling junkies and tweakers. Most homeless people struggle to escape back to some kind of normal life and keep their homelessness hidden as much as they can. They are just real people down on their luck.

Oscar López Rivera had his sentence commuted by Obama so as ugly as Dinesh's pardon is spare me the moral outrage

@4

Sorry for your Obama obsession, and thank you for recognizing that D'Souza's pardon is ugly.

@4) "What-Aboutism" is the best thing that ever happened to your world-view, huh?
"Hey Franklin, you are world-class hog shit!"
"Well what about Oscar Rivera?"

4 Trump supporters are strangers to morality so spare me the phony equivalence.

@8 - These dim bulbs actually believe that 'what-about-ism' is intelligent, logical reasoning to be used in debate.

@4 we are looking at you

@4:

Do you even know the difference between a commutation and a pardon? Because, I'm going to guess - no, you don't.

12,000 people, eh? So, if we gave each of them $1000 and a ticket home, we could send these people back where they come from for about $16m in direct costs.

I know some are actual locals that need help, but Seattle is not a homeless rejuvenation center for the nation. Many of these people are not locals or people who moved here and failed to establish themselves - the survey they use defines a local as having been here at least one year; I say they aren't locals with only a year in the area. These are people often from places that unironically tout their low taxes and self-reliance, while also creating policies shift the burden of dealing with their poverty to us. These people are getting defacto dumped on others. Seattle needs to stop being one of those places that gets dumped on.

The non-local homeless population needs to go home. No more red county refugees - let them take care of their own problems. Let them take responsibility for their own people. Adding 500 beds to the shelters or building some extra affordable units isn't going to solve this. This problem isn't just a result of an affordability crisis. This is a national problem that one city shouldn't be expected to deal with in a bubble.

What to do? Not what we are doing now. Allowing these semi-permanent tents on city sidewalks, a light touch on the heroin trade, and throwing money at it isn't working. Just letting it be isn't working. Things are getting worse and although just a couple thousand people, they are making Seattle dramatically worse for the other 690,000 of us who live here. We need to stop fucking around and attack this problem. A WADL or passport needs to be required for purchasing pot. Camping on the sidewalks needs to be illegal. It needs to be enforced. Drug laws, especially around heroin use, needs to be enforced. Non-locals arrested for these things need to be given a choice of exile (ticket home, active warrant in King County should they return) or a lengthy court case where all their shit is taken as "evidence". Locals given a choice between exile, rehab, or courts.

This has gotten rediculous. This needs to change. Building more housing (which will likely go to new people moving into the area, not down on their luck local stereotypes) isn't going to fix this. It isn't going to fix itself. Action is needed and I have run out of sympathy when needles start showing up in my neighborhood again on the regular.

Where is the outrage over Denmark, Austria, France, and Belgium's blatant anti-muslim dress laws?
Trump banned travel from six countries Obama had identified as security risks, a ban that affected 6% of the world's muslims, and the Left screamed "anti-muslim!".
These Western European socialist utopias are attacking every practicing muslim woman in their borders and the Left squeaks nary a peep.

African-Americans are less that 8% of Seattle's population but 48% of the homeless;
That is a stark brutal statistic for a city as rich and liberal as this one is.

Seattle is just the collector spot for the region's homeless folks. Most of the services are here. Somehow Seattle is responsible and burdened with helping these 12,100 folks?. This isn't Seattle's problem alone; this is Bellevue's problem, and Kent's problem, and Federal Way's problem, and Maple Valley's problem, Des Moines, Fall City, Black Diamond. The list goes on. I want to see these cities taking responsibility for pushing their problem on to Seattle and start hearing solutions to the problem that include these cities taxing their citizens or the businesses that are HQ'd in their cities. Want to build cheap permanent housing? Not gonna find it in Seattle, but there could be shit tons built in Maple Valley or Federal Way.

Banning burkas in public is a good step for women's rights. I know some Muslim women would disagree vehemently with that, but burkas - in final analysis - are an antiquated and ugly manifestation of male dominance.

For what it is worth, the school suspended the kid because in the ad was that the reason for the sale was for "disappearing students," which in our dumbass zero-tolerance society meant the school had to assume it was a violent threat.

Still stupid, but it is not really accurate to claim he was suspended just for a prank.

In regard to the D'Souza pardon: the guy was getting five years probation for giving $10,000 to a senate candidate. You would have to really be straining to dredge up any purely-for-show partisan rage about that one.

@16: I agree in regards to burkas, but it should also be mentioned that many Muslim immigrants in Europe live in fairly cloistered communities, and it can be hard, if not impossible, to know if women are wearing the garment by choice, or still because a male in their orbit is demanding it. Some communities in the UK do have Sharia councils that exercise voluntary power over people in this communities. I am aware that the rulings from these councils do not carry legal weight, but they can carry immense religious and moral weight to people in those communities.

I think that aspect is what is driving many of the burka bans. When governments realize it will be extremely difficult to discern legal A from illegal B, they tend to just ban both.

Is social pressure dictating how women are to dress unique to Muslim communities?

There is nothing “blatantly misogynistic” about that Post cover. Kardashian’s ass is her brand. If a guy became famous for having a giant dick and made a viral video in which he poured champagne into a glass balanced on his cock, then met with the president about some random cause, I’d fully expect a headline along the lines of “Don Meets Schlong.”

RE: D'souza pardon

This was done purely as a signal that Trump will use his presidential powers to grant favors to those who kiss his ass. He's flying the cronyism flag at full staff.

He wants those who may be imprisoned for concealing evidence of Russian interference to know that he's got their back so long as they do as he commands.

Making America Great Again. Draining the Swamp. Ha!

I spied a crow in a box near the sidewalk in someone’s yard yesterday.

He wasn’t moving much and his mouth was open. He didn’t look happy.

I poured water on him. Yes, him. I poured water on him, trying to get some in his mouth.

I tried to give a wounded goat water one time too, and was told after the fact that goats don’t really drink water.

I walked by again a couple hours later and he had moved about a foot, over the inch-high rim of the box and to the right. He still wasn’t looking very happy. His mouth was still open.

A few hours later he had vanished, which could be mean as little movement as three feet into the yard over a berm or into the bush to his left.

Crows like the people who live around them and make trash for them - if this is the case they are in your team and if you can communicate noncerbally with animals you can notice this.

I also would never think of collecting their feathers.

In short, collectors edition shit.

"Insect infestation could worsen wildfires"

One wouldn't know from the shitty reporting at the Seattle Times but insect infestations are known to be more frequent and of greater magnitudes due to climate change.

The NY Post again? why not send traffic to fucking FOX "News" (same owner) while you are at it?

@24: Yeah, it is basically just one of those impossible situations where people are either going to be abused at home, or abused by the government in public.

My guess would be that western societies are not really primed to view a woman wearing a hijab or burka as being "harmed" if she is forced to take it off, although of course this is untrue in many cases.

So the government defaults to what they see as causing less overall harm: forcing women to remove what they see as "oppressive" clothing, in order to protect those who are being forced to wear it.

@24: Oh, and of course governments are going to lean toward solutions that adhere more to their own national values, which of course in the western world means that women's personal freedom is more often equated with less clothing, not more.

It's "experiencing homelessness". Please try to keep up, you insensitive classist twit.

@27 owes those "experiencing classism and insensitivity" an apology.

@17

It's easy to see how those words could imply an impending attack, but if that's what the school actually assumed then it's even worse because they have an obligation to call the police in that case. If all they're doing is barring him from his graduation ceremony then they aren't punishing him for a possible threat.

@23 - I came to mention the same thing.
"Insect infestation could worsen wildfires". Backstory: the warming climate has both increased insect ranges to the north, and stressed trees with hotter, drier weather, causing them to release more pollen, and making them more vulnerable to insect attacks.

So bugs are able to reach more stands of trees, and those trees are already stressed by the changing clime.

Also, fuck Trumpf & his Corporate-Only agenda... "denying" climate change. Asinine.

@29: I doubt you are going to read this, but according to the story I read, he was visited by police (unsure if he was actually arrested), and after an interview they deemed him not a threat. So the school likely did call the police.