Comments

1

That was pretty sweet from the mayor. I still miss your Wednesday morning updates from the sketchy alley behind that haphazard UD house you lived in.... Good luck, Nathalie!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2

Floods are not just in China, but every continent incl Europe, Africa, North America, Australia. Check out all the floods just in June and July 2021 alone: https://floodlist.com/europe

Nature Bats Last. And She's pissed.

4

"State troopers say what's difficult is multiple people are doing these crimes"

Multiple people committing crimes is difficult for the police? Isnt it like, their jobs to deal with such things?

5

Wish you well in your next endeavor and hope you enjoy the time off.

7

@4: Yes, horrible evil people dropping rocks onto cars from various locations at any time of the day or night is difficult to stop. If you have a miraculous solution, give them a call.

These crimes merit life with no parole.

8

@4 they probably mean it is difficult to get the evidence for a conviction or even book someone in jail when it is multiple people dipping in-and-out of various wooded encampments who go by street nicknames and the only witnesses are DOT cams perched high-up and people driving 60+mph who just had their lives flash before their eyes as some asshat on the side of the road is throwing shit at their windscreen.
State Patrol can't be everywhere all the time, luckily some fed-up motorists are taking things into their own hands and tracking said shit-heads down and hopefully making them eat rocks before the police show up. Oh really, "Skooter McMash", you were just trimming blackberries by the side of the freeway at 4am in the morning? Not chucking shit at cars? A likely story...nonetheless, hard to prove it was that person unless they were caught in the act is what their public defender would say.

9

Hey Nathalie, before you go, could you do me a favor and stop sourcing news links from NYT? They're paywalled. Not all of us want to give money to that blighted institution colloquially known as The Grey Lady.

Oh, and please tell your fellow copy-pasters in the newsroom to do the same. It seems your entire outfit has a recurring problem with chronically linking to paywalled sites. Kinda sometimes seems like you want us to get our news from other sources instead of putting in the work yourselves. Weird, right?

Thanks in advance!

10

@9: Well, if you're too cheap to pay for subscription you can always delete its cache in your browser and go right to it.

11

@9: Grow up and buy subscriptions, cheapskate.

12

Obviously the homesteaders of the camps are enforcing their property rights, seized by eminent domain, on the native population who continue to do their traditional modes of life.

Just hope they don't call in their own army, like we did to the First Nations ...

13

Flooding:
I can't believe how calm folks were in that subway. I won't say I would have been panicking, but god damn, I would have been really nervous! It even looked like the water was another foot higher outside the train window.

14

I think the solution here is to give these people a safe rock throwing space. I'm sure this behavior is a manifestation of their anger against the capitalist system that forced them out of their homes so we should not be suppressing this outlet for them. I would suggest we move them outside Seattle City Hall and provide them a large box full of rocks and let them work through their issues.

15

@9: "Hey Nathalie, before you go, could you do me a favor and stop sourcing news links from NYT?"

@9, would you kindly do the rest of us a favor and stop making inane requests?

I wanted to say something like, "Would you kindly do the rest of us a favor and go fuck yourself?" But I figure that would be a tad impolite.

16

Wishing you a Thelma and Louise future? That's pretty ungracious of Her Honor, I must say.

I'm thinking of Joni Mitchell's "Down to You":

Everything comes and goes
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes
Things that you held high
And told yourself were true
Lost or changing as the days come down to you

Thank you, Ms. Joni (heart heart heart).

And thank you, Nathalie. Very best wishes. Stay in touch.

18

nice note from Jenny
it means you’re gonna
go off a Cliff somewhere
but before you Do you’ll be meet-
ing up with Brad Pitt so there’s that

& thnx! 4 all
the Fishwrappings!

adios amiga &
via con Diosa

19

Can an entire state be nominated for a Darwin Award?

Asking for a friend.

20

Man, tough choices. Do we do the moral thing and try to save the unvaccinated or do we cut our losses and try to save ourselves from those who seek to destroy our nation?

22

Alabama is gonna Alabama. Am I right?

25

That's a nutty farewell.

26

Also, we'll miss you Nathalie! I'm guessing jenny mistook you for Charles and sent that photo thinking you'd appreciate a nice image of two fine ladies murdering a gasoline powered car.

28

@27 There are a few holes in the plan:
1. We don't have enough shelter. Building more costs a giant pile of money.
2. If we did this, we'd end up filling the jail too. Another even more giant pile of money.
3. That might get a few percentage points out of our hands. I'd guess that if the warrants are low-level, the receiving jurisdiction might well not want them back for trial.
4. Not enough mental health beds either. Another giant pile of money slightly smaller than the jail.
5. A 1/4 day standard probably requires a significantly larger police force. Not sure how giant this pile of money is, but it's not small.

You good with $200+ million in new taxes for this plan? What's your funding plan?

29

@28
1. You're assuming the shelter has to be in Seattle. It does not.
2. You're also assuming arrest = jail. Again it does not. Sometimes arrest can be the only way to get someone into a diversion program or somewhere that can diagnose their needs. Repeated arrest also wears on people and those who have no desire to actually improve will inevitably move on to a more lenient jurisdiction.
3. I'd add to this a concerted effort to connect people back with family/friends. Many of these people are homeless because they have burned their support bridges but there is also no way they are going to return to society without that support. Involving family/friends will also lower costs and improve recovery rates.
5. Not necessarily. Once word gets out that camps will be swept and not tolerated people will self sweep and move on.

35

@32 $200M was a lowball guess. I would have said $500M except people would have complained about overestimating and gold plating.

I'm sure you can find $40M in FraudWasteAndAbuse. Because every time people shake that couch cushion, they find so much money there. Yup, definitely.

36

Best wishes for your future endeavors, Nathalie. I can appreciate your wish for a break.

37

Fun fact - "some baseball player" Eddy Alvarez won a silver medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics in short track speed skating. Yes, he is a baseball play now for the Florida Marlins.

38

Good luck, Nathalie! And "Graduation" is a fantastic record. No need to apologize.

39

Nathalie, you are amazing and I will miss your wit and wisdom. Good luck!

40

@33 and there IT is. the moral superiority that comes with allowing people to live in filth and squalor until such time that we can solve the issue and magically build custom homes for every one of them in Seattle. That is never going to happen even if the will was there to make it happen. There are no good guys and bad guys in this story and sneering in contempt at those who suggest that we don't have the resources to solve this crisis and never will only serves to make you feel like you are better than everyone else, but you aren't. Your "solution" is to allow the filth and rot to continue with no end in sight. The sad truth is and always will be that we have limited resources to deal with this problem and some people aren't going to change unless they are compelled to do so. Even officials know this when they say we need regional solutions. Once you stop sermonizing and start acknowledging some of the actual truth in this crisis maybe then your voice will carry some weight in this discussion. Until then you're just another pompous, progressive blowhard who gets off by demonizing their neighbors.

42

Seems to me that if there is a problem with homeless campers next to a highway throwing rocks at passing cars, you clear out the homeless camps along the highways, immediately, with force if necessary. That is the minimum response I expect from the state. Innocent motorist lives are in clear danger at the hands of irresponsible and criminal campers. Clear them out. Arrest those that won't move on, immediately.

Does this solve the homeless problem? Of course not. But it does directly address the problem of rock throwing at cars on the Interstate highways.

You can now go back to yelling at each other about what to do with the homeless. But, one thing you don't let them do is camp or hang out next to the highway. You can at least fix that, and let the professor and his ilk howl as they will. But, fix it. Because you can.

43

A thousand best wishes to you, Nathalie!
You will obviously be missed!

44

@40:

"...sneering in contempt at those who suggest that we don't have the resources to solve this crisis and never will only serves to make you feel like you are better than everyone else..."

If you believe this, then why are you even arguing about it? If you've already made up your mind that nothing can be done, then your ONLY option is to learn to live with "the filth and rot", because you've as much as admitted there IS NO SOLUTION - it's never going away. And when has compelling anyone to change worked, ever? If that's the best you've got: let's force someone to do something against their will; something that history and experience has proven time and again won't make them change; something that won't actually solve whatever problem you see in them, aside from sweeping it under the proverbial rug so YOU can feel comfortable knowing you'll never again have to encounter it - then how does that make you in any way, shape or form superior to those who do in fact offer tangible solutions, albeit ones you yourself don't approve of? Because, if WE, living in one of the richest cities in the richest country in the history of recorded human civilization don't have the resources to solve this problem HERE AND NOW - what makes you think anyone else, anywhere else DOES?

As the saying goes: if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. And throwing up ones hands, and then turning around, and in practically the same breath proposing to make it someone else's problem is most definitely NOT a solution anyone with half a brain or an ounce of compassion in their body would recognize as such.

46

Some choice data on housing from today's WSJ - I knew small starter homes were not being built to the extent they were decades ago, but wow look at the decline:

"Homeowners from previous generations had access to smaller homes at the start of their financial lives. In the late 1970s, an average of 418,000 new units of entry-level housing were built each year, according to data from Freddie Mac. By the 2010s, that number had fallen to 55,000 new units a year. For 2020, an estimated 65,000 new entry-level homes were completed."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shortage-of-starter-homes-extends-beyond-major-cities-11626872400?mod=hp_lista_pos1

47

there's Alway bound to be
some Collateral Damage
in Capitalism's War on
the Poor* and Home-
lessness is just a-
nother Symptom
of Greed trump-
ing Humanity.

*you're Next
'middle class.'

48

RE: The homeless

Any so-called "solution" to homelessness is just a band-aid on a gushing wound.

The problem is that the wealthy control too much and the non-wealthy have been indoctrinated from birth to praise their oppressors. We could very likely solve many of the world's most terrible problems, homelessness and drug addiction included, if only humans were a little less self-centered and a little more empathic.

@45 makes a jab at it, but runaway capitalism really is fucking the world up. And spare me the platitudes like "capitalism's brought more people out of poverty... blah blah." Capitalism's got its uses, but it's not the panacea the wealthy make it out to be. It may be great for them but it's failing everyone else.

49

@44 C'mon man. No one is saying throw your hands up and waive them all around like you just don't care. We're simply acknowledging that Seattle doesn't have the resources to support EVERYONE. Activists act like we need to take in every case that rolls into town. Don't give me the bullshit about how they are all from around here. That is not true in the slightest. Many are from around the region and there is a good chunk from even farther away. They all need to go home. If you want services in Seattle you should be able to prove that you lived and worked in Seattle BEFORE you became homeless and by that I don't mean that you rolled up here on the Greyhound, stayed at the Y for a days while working at Burger King and then decided that was too much for you and threw up a tent. I want a tax return that shows you had an address and a job. And you're right, you can't force people to change but you also know what? People aren't going to change if you enable them either. No one should be forced into rehab but what should happen is if you commit a crime you should be held accountable for that crime, if you are a threat to yourself and others then you should be removed from society until that is no longer the case, if you don't want to get better or commit to being part of the social construct then you should go somewhere else. As you rightly note if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem and its pretty clear to a great many of us the activists on the council and in the homeless community are not part of the solution. There is also the corollary that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity and that my friend is exactly why the Compassion Seattle amendment is currently polling at 60%.

53

Happy trails, Nathalie. I hope you find your bliss. I always enjoyed your writing.

55

@49:

Why shouldn't we take care of them? Why does it even matter where they came from? They're HERE, and so that makes it our problem to deal with, whether you like it or not. A person in need is a person in need, regardless of where they were born. Establishing some sort of "former residence criteria" is simply another tactic for people like you use to further separate the "deserving" (locals) from the "undeserving", when in fact you've demonstrated time and again with your statements that you don't really want to help ANY of them - you just want them all to go away, to be someone else's problem, or at the very least to remain out of your sight so you don't have to be constantly reminded they exist.

Last I checked, unless Seattle is being overrun by unhoused AND undocumented people, they're citizens of this country, not to mention fellow human beings. In Mark 10:21-22 Yeshua didn't exhort the rich man to give his money ONLY to the poor who could prove they were born in Jerusalem. Hell, if people like you had their way you'd "reducto ad absurdum" this down to individual neighborhoods or even streets - anything to avoid taking care of other people.

56

@55 that's an admirable take on the situation but I don't think there is any realistic way you could actually make that work. We have finite resources and good governance demands you allocate those resources and that is going to be mean you just can't help everyone and will need to prioritize. Even if funding wasn't an issue you still could not build enough "affordable" housing to meet demand. After all why wouldn't anyone who wanted to live in Seattle just show up and ask for a subsidized place? I respect your opinion but labeling me some cold hearted bastard simply because I'm acknowledging there are realities to the situation won't make things better. If anything its those types of attitudes that are going to push the charter amendment to pass this fall.

57

@56:

You sound like that character, the appropriately named Glum, from the 1960's "Banana Splits": "It'll never work! It's hopeless!" You never have anything positive to contribute yourself, but you're always absolutely certain nobody else could possibly ever find a solution to any given problem.

If we left things up to people like you, The Wright Brothers would never have built an airplane, NASA would never have sent astronauts to the moon, Jonas Salk would never have invented the polio vaccine, Ada Lovelace would never have written the first computational algorithm. You apparently lack any of the qualities necessary for solving problems: imagination, perseverance, adaptability, or the ability to seek out people with more knowledge, expertise and experience than yourself. So, of course YOU find the problem intractable, because you don't seem to have the capacity to envision it any other way.

58

@57 I never said the problem was unsolvable simply that Seattle lacked the resources to do it themselves. Do you honestly think if we build 20,000 units of affordable housing and say there are no residency requirements to qualify for such housing you won't be flooded with 100k applicants from all over the country? You can be noble. Just don't be naive.

59

Interesting Thelma & Louise film image Mayor Jenny Durkan sent you with her farewell wishes, Nathalie. Perhaps a wild night of reckless passion with Brad Pitt (oof!)?
Nonetheless, wishing you all the very best in your new endeavors, Nathalie. You will indeed be greatly missed.

@19 COMTE: Congrats again for beating me to it.

@20 Tmplknght: I vote for Door # 2.

No surprise that blood-red pro-Trumpist Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate and the highest percentage of misinformed citizens in the U.S. How sad, too, that dying patients seeking vaccinations there are now told by doctors that it's too late. They were warned, at least by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC if nobody else (certainly not Kay Ivey!). They refused to get vaxxed, wear masks, and practice social distancing, claiming it's their "right". And now these same people, among those guilty of extending the COVID-19 pandemic into extra innings are paying the price for their willful ignorance.


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