Cal Anderson Re-Opens... with Ping Pong Tables?



OK, who is up for the Seattle Ping Pong League?

Teams: Black Block Pongers, Nouveau Riche Pingers, Original CID All Blacks (open to all), 23rd and Union Fast Ballers, and many more ...

Let's make it happen!

No cops need apply. Firefighters welcome




Big brother is watching us. Just what kind of shelter options is the city offering the unhoused?
Its been musical deadly chairs in the past. Durkin and the elite love to play games.

They need to be totally transparent with what their housing options are. The city has yet to work for a successful housing program as Housing First. Why can't they? Greed, corruption including a bloated police department and a rogue mayor.


3 Hey, scrooge. Just before Christmas too. Well the 3 Christmas spirits may be visiting you soon to help you not to be so mean.


I hope the 12,000 people that live within a half mile of the park come out to enjoy and reclaim it as Capitol Hill’s front porch from the black bloc white kids that have undermined the BLM movement and warn out there welcome.


Special rights? Like decent housing and needed services such as treatment which are basic human rights which anyone deserves.


6 Cheap shot to attempt to split the movement and a dumb one.


@3 I already said no cops - that should take care of most of the "dipsos, druggies and homeless out who think they have special rights". I hear they register to vote at their precincts and try to get around school registration to get special benefits their million dollar mansions in Snohomish wouldn't qualify them for.


@4: Here are some helpful links for the shelter options for anyone uhoused:

Just not in our city parks!


You seem to be upset that people want to do park things, in a park of all places.
I mean, I could see if some bros barged into Mary's Place and threw up some beer pong tables and some shitty bluetooth radio blasting the latest garbage how that might be an issue. Ping pong in a park and your qualm is about how the city probably doesn't want people sleeping on the tables. OK then.


Can the city sweep Ballard Commons and Green Lake next?

Both have become overrun with vagrants.


Public schools are just sitting empty during the pandemic. The unhoused could move into those buildings, or just camp on the playgrounds.


@4, @5, @7, @8: The Poppe Report recommended a Housing First approach, starting with filling our empty shelter beds. It also recommended establishing performance standards for homeless service providers. Our City Council has responded by continuing funds to SHARE, without requiring SHARE to meet even the most basic accounting practices. CM Sawant has been SHARE's champion in avoiding accountability, perhaps because SHARE provides the rent-a-mobs to shout obscenities and threats at Council Meetings when other CMs disagree with CM Sawant. (SHARE provides these crowds via the simple expedient of threatening inhabitants of its camps with expulsions from the only home they have, if they do not agree to participate.) So, perhaps we could have more Housing First if we could get our Council to make SHARE play by the same rules as, say, Mary's Place does?

Please do let CM Sawant know what you think of all this. As you have voted for her, you can have little doubt she will be responsive to your missives. Trust me on this.


Nothing says community outreach like ping pong...


@19 Yeah it's heck of a lot more efficient when you ditch all that icky pluralism and democracy and just go with a nice stable despot instead, isn't it.


OK,, here's a question. IF (and I know this is a big if), everyone sleeping in the parks was willing to go to a shelter instead, are there enough beds in the county for them? Anyone here know? I don't.


In case anyone was wondering, the following passage was written especially with people like @3, @6, @10, @11, @12, @13, @14 and all our other resident concern-trolls in-mind:

should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who
common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common
comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.


still in operation?”

they were not.”


“Both very busy, sir.”

glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer
What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and
those who are badly off must go there.”


know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other

And special note to @16:

Why is it you-all demand OTHERS do the heavy lifting FIRST? I don't recall your Savior and "Son O' God" (tm) saying you had the option of waiting for someone else to do the right thing before you did unto others yourself. Or is it just that you don't REALLY believe in his exhortations to practice unconditional love and charity?

If you truly follow the teachings of Yeshua then step the fuck up already as he commanded and stop dumping your hypocritical, blasphemous procrastination onto others...


The MAGA RightWing Dipshit Brigade Humanitarian Theory being carefully outlined this Christmas season is something like:

If you're against, say, children starving or something — you have to run out and find a starving a kid and jam a sandwich down their throat yourself. Or make them a four course dinner, you bleeding hearts!

But what ever you do, do not try and craft a government policy that helps prevent systemic childhood malnutrition, you fucking commie!

Because you know what Mistral and all our other Trolling MAGA patriots were dong when m13 and ISIS were the big boogie man?

Oh. They weren't for socialist government policies to fight that evil. No way. That'd be dirty socialism. They were out there putting it on the line, man!

See, Mistral and the rest of our MAGA Dipshit Brigade was out there in Syria, eagle eye glued to the scope of his rifle, taking out ISIS one at a time! You can bet on it.

Thanks for your service, Mistral!


@22 "Nobody is installing a tyrant to govern us..."

Nobody but your fucking Republican Party and your shit-fer-brains Cult Leader!

Who are still, after recounts, certification AND electoral counts — not recognizing a free and fair election.

Jesus fuckign Christ.. I realize your mildly reee-todd-did and have like a gold fish memory, but Der Pumpkin Grüpen Fuhrer just addressed your Death Cult of morons an hour ago about how he will still be president after January 20th.

You assholes very much just attempted to install a tyrant. You pile of shit.


Well perhaps if the Cal Anderson campers had the courtesy to construct a nativity scene for the community instead of all that awful graffiti, unusable furniture and blight, COMTE and the prof might have a point.


@23: Something written long before anyone now alive was born could not possibly have been written for a specific person alive today. That's kind of obvious, but in case you're still confused, we offer shelter to the homeless, not work houses (which, BTW, no longer exist). Criminals should go to prison, yes, but if it salves your conscience any, we did not put chronically-homeless, chronic-offender Travis Berge in jail, even after he rejected many offers of drug treatment. In return, he seems to have assaulted Lisa Vach and left her for dead.

Was she part of the "surplus population" you mentioned? If so, did her removal meet your moral requirements for efforts to "decrease the surplus population"?


@27 it's estimated that almost 2 million children are homeless.

But. You know. A mentally ill person killed somebody that time. So fuck them, am I right?

Do you understand what drug court offers as "drug treatment?" Have you ever even investigated this shit? Do you picture like Betty Ford or something?

It is the lowest of the low bar to be considered "treatment" at all. Most out right ban medication-assisted treatment. And if you agree and fail a test you get 60 days in jail automatically. Many of these programs do not come overnight shelter. Most that do are essentially prison.

And you know what one of the treatments often is? Occupational therapy! That you get paid pennies on the dollar for and if you miss it... JAIL!

You know. It's a fancy word for: Work houses.


"Hey protesters, go protest somewhere where we don't have to hear what you're protesting about."

Jesus... and I thought the government in MY town was tone deaf


@23 The teachings of Yeshua??? Um whst?



This is a really great fundamental question few ask. People bring so much personal ideology to this topic that they fail to look at basic information and ask fundamental questions.

Perhaps the best podcasts on this topic is by local Journalist Michael Hobbes, who unlike most "experts here actually volunteered to work with the homeless for several monhs before writing this excellent podcast:

Another great podcast that interviews the lady who was a driving force behind what was achieved in places where government has been effective "homelessness is solvable."

If you aren't in the mood to listen to 2 + hours of podcast, the answer in practice is no. Not only is their limited temporary housing available, but like all social programs in the US nominally designed to offer help to the poor we attach draconian expectations before access is granted that often exclude the very people who need the help. American's loooooooove the idea of means testing everything.

Sure, if you are Little Orphan Annie, of a blond haired, blue eyed girl with no drug addiction, no criminal history who dreams of someday starting a school library, or visiting a wholesome dairy farm before spending a day saving whales and picking up trash off the street before trying to access a homeless shelter, than yes. Otherwise, the very person who most need the help are always excluded for not living up to our privileged ideals of how those in need must behave.

"According to the press release, 51 houseless people living in Cal Anderson were connected with other shelter options in the last week and outreach work continues."

There are few things more disgusting than officials telling the media after a violent police response "we placed them in touch with housing and food resources" or even worse, "victim advocates." In practice this is rarely more than handing the homeless a card with a phone # to a place that is either full, or they are not eligible for. Often it is some shady NGO that profits off of "raising awareness" without offering any actual help.


Not true.


@27: Poster: Cops seem to have a problem with violence and rape:

"Justice Department Finds Rampant Sexual Assaults and Constitutional Violations in Country's Largest Women's Prison"

Cop’s Body Cam Was Off Before Killing Innocent Man Holding a Phone, But It Caught Him Anyway

Tensor: Oh, that's just a few bad apples. There is no problem that can't be fixed through reforms like more money and less accountability for the police.

Poster: A few bad apples? Hmm, the problem seems to be widepread and systemic and reform as you define it doesn't seem to work:

A Very Brief History of the Seattle Police Department's Greatest Hits

Tensor: Cop hater! Cop hater! How dare you say cops commit violent crimes with impunity based on nothing more than several examples of cops committing violent crimes with impunity! You're a cop hater! This is why cops who rape and murder are beginning to question whether the public really has their back!

Also Tensor:

So, no matter how many examples of rape, murder and corruption we get from the police it's just a few bad apples, but the single worst offender among the homeless is representative of most if not all homeless people which is why they can't be helped.

Consistency much?


The very first homeless people on record were from Nazareth.
They were forced by the occupying army to travel to Bethlehem and spend endless hours waiting in line at a government office.
Because of lack of space in the shelter, they were forced to huddle in an unheated stable, in the dead of winter.
The pregnant fiancee gave birth there, with no "health care" or medical insurance.
The incessant racket from all those apparitions overhead kept them awake all night.
They were hounded by 3 illegal aliens from the far-away land which is now known as "Iran", who left three packages of trash and told them they were "gifts".
The 3 illegal aliens then lied about them to the appointed puppet ruler, who issued instructions of violence to the police and SWAT Teams.
While the police were murdering ever every single child under the age of 2, the young family fled west to the next country over, where they became illegal aliens themselves.
They had to remain in that neighboring country, until the appointed puppet ruler died himself, and the epidemic of police violence ended.

Some things never change.


@21: The short answer is King County's shelters have not been full, not even during five solid years since then-Mayor Murray declared a homelessness crisis. There has always been space for anyone who wanted it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is flat-out lying to you. The relative emptiness of our shelters was a point directly and repeatedly addressed in the Poppe Report:


The report went on to say we already have capacity to shelter everyone who needs it:

"Seattle/King County has sufficient emergency shelter capacity to shelter all unsheltered single adult and family households within one year by combining three initiatives: (1) eliminating low and moderately performing T[ransitional] H[ousing] projects and repurposing funding to more effective uses; (2) reaching recommended system and program performance targets; and (3) implementing a well functioning coordinated entry and diversion system."


Our problem is not a lack of money from Seattle's citizens, who want to see homeless persons in permanent housing. Our problem consists entirely of a failure of leadership from our elected officials, some of whom seem more intent on cruelly playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable populations than with solving our humanitarian crisis. (E.g. creating an "Amazon Tax" to procure funding we don't need.)


@21 - It is hard to get a reliable answer to that question, because it depends on how you define “shelter.” Options are scattered across government-managed facilities and non-profits (or public-private, like the municipal COVID shelter in SODO being run by the Salvation Army), some of which are housing-first and others which have conditions that need to be met. It also depends on whether you lump King County and Seattle together. I personally don’t think a homeless person in Seattle will get to a shelter on the far side of Lake Washington, so I tend to look at Seattle separate from the rest of the county.

As noted above 89-90% of shelter beds are occupied. According to the point-in-time homeless count, roughly half of the homeless population is in shelters or transitional housing. That implies a shortage of shelter beds by roughly half. According to this article, though, there are 2,700 shelter beds with 4,000 homeless individuals unsheltered:

Courts have consistently ruled that you can’t deprive someone of their property and a place to sleep without having shelter available to them, absent a pressing public interest (such as public health and safety, the primary legal justification for sweeps).

The most recently opened municipal shelter in SODO (opened as a COVID response) prohibits use of drugs or alcohol, so it is not suitable for people with severe alcohol or drug dependencies.

Just two examples of why “solving” homelessness is extremely challenging. Anyone who tells you otherwise - anyone who suggests it is as simple as a couple of minor adjustments - is flat out lying to you.


I should add - we are a rights-based society. The bar for depriving someone of their property or liberty is set high by design (unless you’re black, but that’s a topic for a different day). The procedures around forcing someone into treatment are onerous in order to protect anyone from being involuntarily committed on a pretext of danger to themselves or others. The same shield that protects you or me protects the homeless, which is why housing-first is the right way to go. Get people off the streets first - don’t condition it on making addicts give up their addiction - then treat them once they’re somewhere you can do case work effectively; but then you get taxpayers - usually the same ones decrying lawlessness and the state of our parks - complaining that we are paying for addicts to do drugs and they’ll never stop using and isn’t this a sweet deal for them blah blah ad nauseam.

It’s a catch-22 for the city. I’m not saying the city can’t do better - it undoubtedly can - but it is a very difficult problem driven by macroeconomic forces way beyond our power to control.


@35: 'It is hard to get a reliable answer to that question, because it depends on how you define “shelter.”'

Actually, it is easy to get a reliable answer, as shelter occupancy rates are tracked, just as the Poppe Report noted.


Indeed, one of the major points in the Poppe Report is that Seattle/King County's efforts to end homelessness have been disorganized, and therefore wastefully ineffective. Properly organizing our efforts in the way the Poppe Report recommends could bring many more persons off the street, but our City Council would rather misplace blame for homelessness upon Amazon (longtime patron of Mary's Place, BTW) than help solve our humanitarian crisis.


Also absent from City Council's (and The Stranger's) rhetoric are the drug dependency and mental illness which are actually driving our homelessness crisis. Those are far more difficult to address than, say, providing rental assistance or below-market-rate housing for persons who can actually hold jobs. We can't even begin to address a problem unless we're willing to talk about it, and our City Council, supported by The Stranger, won't even talk about it. Hence the mess we're in, spending ~10,000 dollars per year, year after year, on each homeless person, without even coming close to getting them stably housed.



The only difference between the work houses of Dicken's day and those of today is that in his time you became poor first and then were thrown into the work house, whereas our modern version is to put someone into a work house (for example: check out the conditions at pretty much any major agricultural concern that requires hands-on harvesting or processing) and keep them perpetually poor.



Well, it's not surprising most Christians don't even know Jesus real name:,to%20%22Jesus%22%20in%20English.


@38 plus we double your car insurance, because your credit rating drops.

It's like redlining, but worse. Because you're living in your car now.


@39: A distinction without a difference.


What so many of the vapid virtue-signalers here conveniently forget when they try to shame those who express exasperation with the vagrants and wannabe revolutionaries who take over Cal A. park is that the taxpayers of Seattle already shell out about $100 million a year for homeless programs. The problem is that very little of it actually goes to homeless people - the bulk is 'overhead', a sort of 'full employment scheme' for people who couldn't be bothered to take the hard classes and became Sociology majors (fun fact: LIHI head Sharon Lee pays herself a tidy sum of over a quarter-million a year in pay and bennies. Who says you can't do well while doing 'good'?

When you consider we spend about $80,000 +/- per vagrant, it's obvious that there's gold in them thar tents - if you're the one running the programs. What's worse, Seattle reputation for largesse and lax policing (plus the clement weather and legal weed) makes us a top destination for 'vagrancy tourists'. According to the Poppe report, over half our 'homeless' aren't even from Seattle. Is it fair to ask Helen the home-health aide, who's working two jobs to afford her Beacon Hill bungalow to shell out for a no-barrier 1bd/1ba apartment downtown for Andy the addict from Albuquerque?

All the virtue signalers here who wonder why their rent keeps going up might want to look at City Hall's spending. You can rest assured that when they jack up the property taxes, your landlord ain't gonna eat it. If you want to know who's paying, look in the mirror, Sparky.


The LIHI has a program expense ratio above 92%, meaning less than $1 out of every $10 spent goes to “overhead.” It has an annual budget of roughly $20 million. Its executive director has 30 years of experience in role. The organization maintains over 2,000 units of housing, as well as hygiene stations.

Her salary is only unreasonable if you think we should simply do nothing and spend nothing. Even if you view the homeless as nothing but a nuisance to be managed, that nuisance will be a thousand times worse without anyone trying to manage it.

You want even more people camping in parks? Get rid of those 2,000+ units. You want those campers to be even more unwashed? Take away LIHI’s hygiene stations.

If homelessness ended tomorrow, i am sure someone who’s run an efficient non-profit would be perfectly happy (and perfectly able) to find a different executive directorship.



Oh, there's quite the difference: "Yeshua" (ישוע) is the name he was given by his parents; "Jesus" is a Jacobian English transliteration of classical Latin, which itself was a transliteration of an ancient Greek translation of the original Hebrew. It's like playing that old party game "Telephone": pass a word or phrase through enough intermediary stations and what comes out at the end frequently bears scant resemblance to what it was in the beginning.

One has to wonder that the religious scholars who were commissioned to create the King James Bible at the turn of the 17th Century couldn't be bothered to include a more accurate translation of the name of their most sacred figurehead, which inevitably leads to the question of how much of the rest of their work was sloppily maladapted to suit the socio-religious and political dogma of the time, and then to imagining how the sum of all those compounded errors, omissions and deliberate alterations have rippled down through the subsequent 400 years of belief and doctrinal practice.

That's how Christianity went from Yeshua telling a rich man to "sell your possessions and give to the poor" to contemporary "prosperity theology" where believers don't even question why their blond haired, blue eyed, Aryan Jesus would want an already wealthy preacher to have a private jet as a "reward" for all his hard work on behalf of the Lord. They don't take the time or deliberation to go back to the source material and get things right, or at least see what's been gotten wrong. Far easier - and certainly far more lucrative - to continue perpetuating the warped funhouse mirror version they've been handed, especially when it's been deliberately manipulated to tell them exactly what they want to hear and not what was actually written.


@44 meant for @41:

Happy Holidays everyone, even you dumbass trolls!


@43: Thank you for bring hard numbers and your knowledge to this conversation.

One challenge in understanding the homeless population is that there is not just a homeless population, such as "just people with drug addiction" or "just the mentally ill.

Not only is what we see on the street the tip of the homeless iceberg, but the overall demo of the homeless shifts constantly. I understand there has recently been a large increase in homeless among those over 50. These people are not necessarily going through the same life scenario as someone in their early thirties who has been homeless for a decade. That's why "and THIS is why there is homeless" tropes never seem credible.

Those who work with the homeless often get a bad rap for earning a living doing it, but that is one tough ass job few would do at any price. There are those who don't work nearly as hard (myself included) who make far more. I'm grateful they are there to help. I certainly feel better about paying them than those who got rich tanking the economy in 2008.


On this wonderful day all the giving services, both religions and non- profit, are serving free, hot meals, offering shelter, giving warm clothes and blankets. This is all done by volunteers. People who go out of their way to help others in need. Thanks to those people.
Merry Christmas


Nathalie, I really don't get why you prefer Cal Anderson as a third world dump of human suffering. Is it like poverty porn for you? Makes you feel better about your own situation working for what I'm sure is next to nothing at the Stranger?


@42 I'd rather signal virtue than broadcast a daly spew of seething hatred for the poor and destitute.

In fact I'll wear that shit as a badge of honor.


@49 Oh. Fuck off you raging cunt. It's called reporting.


@28: 'It is the lowest of the low bar to be considered "treatment" at all.'

My point was not to claim drug treatment, court-ordered or otherwise, is some magical cure. My point was, with Travis Berge, we never even tried to break the cycle of catch-and-release -- a cycle which failed him so miserably, it seems to have killed someone else as well.

He lived miserably outdoors in the Pike-Pine corridor for years, intentionally making an anti-social nuisance of himself in ways both legal and illegal. With some persons, this is a cry for help, for intervention, but we'll never know in his case because, again, we never even tried. Our homeless policy failed him and Lisa Vach, failed them as horribly as failure can fail, and yet anyone here who dares even to question our obviously failed homeless policy gets attacked for lacking "compassion." Not helpful.


Using Travis Berge as the yardstick for our policy on homelessness is like using John Wayne Gacy as the model student for clown school curriculum.

The typical homeless person is not a meth-addicted beatboxing accordionist who came to Seattle to pursue a lucrative busking career. Mentioning him over and over (and over and over and then over some more) proves nothing other than your willingness to swallow the signal emanating from Fisher Plaza. Is it true what they say, that Eric Johnson’s junk still tastes like Fun Forest caramel corn?


And I’m not attacking you for a lack of compassion. I am attacking you for a lack of basic reasoning and your inability to explain in any coherent way what you want the city to do. You like the Poppe Report, but you also love citations (Ticket them all!! Enforce the law!! Roll those RV’s back to, um, RV-ville!!). You wuv’d Murray, but you also like Durkan, who seems to have taken Murray’s plan (which largely followed the Poppe Report’s recommendations on accountability and coordination), crumpled it up into a little ball, and lit it on fire to announce the first of many purges by the navigation team before COVID spoiled all the fun.

You can perhaps forgive me if I’m a little confused about exactly how you see your vision of supreme compassion being realized. I am still 100% confident that you are motivated by compassion and not just a desire to punish people or exact revenge over your stolen tricycle.

55’re welcome for paying attention to you again. I think luddite5 is already well on his way to knowing better than to waste his time. Hiztory forgot himself here lately, but I’m sure he’ll remember not to engage. So it’s just me again, and that only because I enjoy watching you try to match my wit. I think age has taken its toll on you. You used to be so much more flexible circa 2000 comments ago. Me, on the other hand, only getting nimbler, Benjamin Button style. The calendar, it may march on, but damn if i dont feel spry.


@53: "The typical homeless person is not a meth-addicted beatboxing accordionist who came to Seattle to pursue a lucrative busking career."

A majority of the homeless reported drug use; 17.2% said they used meth'.

I mentioned the tragic cases of Berge and Vach because they are obvious failures of our homelessness policy. (Perhaps, if they were "typical," our wretched failure of a policy might have been changed by now.) Strangely, none of our self-appointed local compassion shamers seem to recognize this.

@54: My policy is very simple. Follow the Poppe Report and enforce our laws. Sweep every encampment, every time. Tow the illegally-parked vehicles. (And, for your edification, most American cities, Seattle included, have had vehicle-impoundment infrastructures for about a century now.)

Oh, and offering inhabitants of a filthy, illegal encampment free shelter is a "purge"? Damn, CM Sawant's Kool-Aid must taste sweet!

@55: Especially in your final two sentences, you provide sadly eloquent testimony as to the insidiously deceptive onset of senile dementia.


In your younger years, you didn’t repeat yourself so badly. You’d interact, converse. The cognitive decline is alarming. And sad. It’s alarmingly sad. Now all you do is say “Poppe Report” and “Travis Berge” over and over like it proves something.

It proves you can’t fucking read or that you never read the Poppe Report. Take your pick.

Direct quote from Barbara herself:

“The solution is not going to be arrest and incarceration, because we know that doesn’t work.”

Source, if you care -

And then she went on: “And this tensor guy who keeps using my report to justify a get tough policy - tell him to fuck the fuck right off and never mention my name again, because I want nothing to do with him. I think he’s kind of fucked in the head. Even the other trolls, like raindrop, ignore him. That’s how awful he is.”


@32: "Tensor: Oh, that's just a few bad apples. There is no problem that can't be fixed through reforms like more money and less accountability for the police."

Hmmm... I don't see any url to a comment where I wrote anything of the kind. Once you provide that, we can discuss. Because, you see, there can be a great big huge gap between your stated opinion of what happened, and the obvious, documented reality of what actually happened. For example:

"A Very Brief History of the Seattle Police Department's Greatest Hits


If you'd actually read half the comments to that post, you might have seen this:

"Matt, you missed a few:

"-- SPD illegally spied upon citizens who opposed LBJ's dirty little war in SE Asia. This resulted in anti-surveillance laws in Seattle.

"-- WTO, Day One (N30, 30 Nov. 1999): SPD officers attack non-violent protesters downtown;

"-- WTO, Day Two: SPD Officers shove rowdies up Capitol Hill (because setting up police vans and collecting rowdies at Pine & Boren would have required competence), resulting in property damage and stun grenades at night;

"-- WTO, Day Three: More fun on Capitol Hill, this time on Broadway. SPD officer ass[a]ults a man out getting laundry quarters;

"End of WTO: Broken glass everywhere downtown. Merry Xmas shopping season, everyone!"

tensor on December 19, 2020 at 5:37 PM

So, I'm not just willing to admit "cops commit violent crimes with impunity," I promptly provided a few examples Matt had not included of cops committing violent crimes with impunity. But you were far too busy making up your "facts" to notice I was actually doing the very opposite of what you wrongly claimed I was doing.

(Hmmm... making up evidence, attacking someone without justification, ignoring actual facts -- maybe you hate the police so much just because they can do these things successfully, and you can't?)


I just heard the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling that 100% of homeless people are identical to Travis Berge and that the precogs have foreseen every last one of them murdering Lisa Vach. This is now considered probable cause to arrest anyone who is (a) smelly, (b) owns a tent, (c) looks “methy,” or (d) has ever beatboxed, in order to prevent them from committing future crime. Barbara Poppe has said she views this as a tremendous victory. Bill Murray has announced he’s running for mayor to preside over the mass arrests. Our civic nightmare is nearly over!!


@57: Glad to see your ctrl+f'ing skills remain strong. Now, there's this little matter of context, which is what you sacrifice when you search for only what you want to find, and don't bother reading anything else. Poppe, in the quote you've mined, was clearly saying that homelessness itself should not be criminalized, and no one here has advocated doing such a thing.

What I have been saying, so clearly that you've repeatedly complained bitterly about it, is that we should not play catch-and-release with homeless persons who actually commit multiple crimes against fellow citizens. The reasons for this should be pretty obvious, but all you've done is whine about how easily facts eviscerate your ideology. Why was Travis Berge never remanded to a drug-treatment program? That's a very simple question, and no, I don't expect the self-proclaimed compassion brigade here ever to answer it.

To the rest of us, a homeless woman dying violently in an illegal encampment, almost within sight of a police station, is per se evidence our $100M/year homeless program is a dismal failure, even on its own terms. It appears you'll continue to attack me personally for saying that if it makes you feel better, but please don't be surprised if even liberal Seattle decides $100M/year will fix a lot of bridges, and that our sadly necessary work of removing illegal encampments from our parks is something we already pay SPD to do. At least then, the homeless won't be dying violently right in front of us, as our police (and self-proclaimed compassion brigadiers) do nothing.


@60 - You continue to wield the Poppe Report as a blunt weapon against all the things you consider misguided. You're misrepresenting it really badly and making your avatar look like a fucking jackass in the process .

The report says nothing about "catch and release." It doesn't even address law enforcement's role in reducing homelessness - the contributions of other departments (including the police) were specifically labeled "out of scope." The Poppe Report was unabashedly housing-first, and it made clear that substance abuse treatment was to be provided after housing needs were addressed, not as a strategy for removing unsheltered individuals before they could commit a crime.

Travis Berge is an outlier who probably belongs more appropriately in a discussion about the criminal justice system, the relationship between SPD and KingCo prosecuting attorneys, and how we deal with repeat low-level offenders (which is largely what he was until his monstrous denouement). He doesn't belong in a discussion of homelessness. The Poppe Report would have likely called for someone like him to be taken into shelter and provided personalized interventions for mental illness and substance abuse. As a side effect of that, he might have been less likely to commit additional crime, but that wasn't the Poppe Report's aim.

To the extent he committed crimes, the Poppe Report would have been silent on how the criminal justice system dealt with him. Whether the criminal justice system should have forced him into drug treatment is also something the Poppe Report would not have registered an opinion on, because the Poppe Report was not a strategy to protect the sensibilities of moderate sheltered voters in Seattle. It was a procedural piece for getting the most out of the investment in addressing the symptoms of homelessness.

As long as you continue to conflate the city's response to crime and homelessness with the Poppe Report, you'll continue to have zero credibility and be regarded as a law and order crank/troll, not someone advocating for a more effective form of compassion. That's why people here largely ignore you, present company obviously excluded. I get that you hate the City Council and the "compassion brigade" on Slog. Kewl.

I agree with you about the need to get more out of the $100 million investment in our homelessness response. The Poppe Report's recommendations still ring very true today, but they have nothing to do with crime prevention. Presumably, if followed, they might reduce the need for sweeps and the number of folks the criminal justice system would need to manage, but that is an entirely separate response happening outside of the services the Poppe Report sought to organize.

Finally, I'll add: there are three ways to get someone into drug treatment. 1. Voluntary. 2. Diversion. 3. Involuntary. The first is rare, but most likely to succeed. The second is predictably ineffective, because the individual is only doing it to avoid a punishment, not out of a desire for a positive outcome. The third has a high bar, because of civil rights, which even homeless people enjoy (sorry not sorry). The same thing that prevents me from showing your comment history to a judge and getting you placed in a halfway home for people with lingering brain injuries is the same thing that protects a Travis Berge from being locked up in a detox facility and given aversion treatment until he can't stand another hit of meth. As much as I want to see you get the help you need, the value of our collective freedoms is greater than removing the menace you pose to civil discourse on Slog. Likewise, that commitment to freedom means someone like Berge can refuse treatment. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make, especially if we actually provide the kinds of interventions that would get someone like Berge the help he needs voluntarily.

Sadly, there's likely nothing we can do to help pedantic shitheads like you who lump a bunch of things they don't like into one big bucket and then attempt to blow that bucket up in an incoherent stream of wishful thinking that boils down to "just fix it."


@61: The Poppe Report is an incisive, detailed, coherent set of recommendations, not a blunt instrument. I've referenced it extensively because Seattle is trying, with occasional obstructive actions from our City Council, to implement it. That you've never read it, and consequently do not understand it, is not anyone else's fault. For yet another example: "It was a procedural piece for getting the most out of the investment in addressing the symptoms of homelessness."

No, it is a coherent set of recommendations to support then-Mayor Murray's goal "...for homelessness to be rare, brief, and one-­‐time..." -- a phrase which appears in bold text in the first paragraph of the Executive Summary, and in other forms, in multiple other places throughout the document, which explains how you missed it completely. You don't know what Seattle wants to do, you don't know how Seattle is trying to do it, you won't read the recommending document, you complain about other commenters even mentioning this recommending document, and yet you can somehow still imagine yourself minimally qualified to comment on Seattle's homelessness policy. You're part of the problem, ignorantly yelling that you can tell others the solution, and hurling risibly failed attempts at insult whenever you encounter anyone who actually dared to learn anything.

Back to your abject ignorance of your chosen subject:

'The report says nothing about "catch and release."'

No, it does not. If you'd only taken your incredibly awesome ctrl+f'ing skills to this very comment thread, you just might have seen how it actually describes how our criminal-justice system failed Travis Berge, and also failed everyone who had to endure his chronic, unwanted, destructive presence in our Pike-Pine corridor. We had multiple chances to put him in drug treatment, but he continued taking meth' until he killed himself, and apparently someone else. During your long-winded non-answer about our failure, you glibly noted court-ordered treatment is "predictably ineffective," without providing any citations for actual treatment success rates. You know what has a very predictable, and even lower, level of effectiveness? Doing nothing at all, not even trying. Whatever rate of success court-ordered treatment has, it is 100% more effective than what we did for Travis Berge. (Yes, even though your own personal level of success has proven chronically and stubbornly insensitive to the level of effort you put into it, other people and programs can, in fact, succeed -- but they must first try.)

"Travis Berge is an outlier who [...] doesn't belong in a discussion of homelessness."

An "outlier," by definition, does not belong in any majority. @56, I referenced the Homeless Needs Assessment (which you also didn't read, because doing so might have put you at serious risk, however remote, of having the slightest useful knowledge to address what you're yelling about here). In it, we see that over two-thirds of homeless respondents said they were not originally from Seattle, a majority said they arrived here already homeless, a majority said they were unemployed or unemployable, and a majority reported using meth' or other drugs. Travis Berge was a member of all four of those majorities (!), and so an "outlier" he was most definitely not. You might not want to throw around fancy terms you clearly do not understand.

"Travis Berge ... belongs more appropriately in a discussion about the criminal justice system, the relationship between SPD and KingCo prosecuting attorneys, and how we deal with repeat low-level offenders..."

Well, no shit, Sherlock; hence my reference to our catch-and-release of him. Oh, and "[t]o the extent he committed crimes..." have you some question about this? His criminal record was extremely long and detailed. And with each release, he learned just that much more contempt for our criminal-justice system, until he feared it not at all. His shock when the SPD finally arrived in force for him explains his panicked flight, and how it ended in a vat of bleach -- why not just another catch-and-release, this time? Our longstanding catch-and-release non-treatments set him up to die.

'I get that you hate the City Council and the "compassion brigade" on Slog.'

By the same token, you must love them. From Saving the Showbox to de-funding the SPD, our Council's record of accomplishment is one you deeply respect. Likewise your fellow erudite commenters who smugly deplore liberal Seattle's uncaring attitude toward the homeless as being totally inferior to their own elevated social consciousness concerning welfare of the homeless (Lisa Vach excluded, of course) and the classy ways in which they express it. And both are the reason Seattle's homeless problem will never get a humanitarian solution. You touched upon it yourself, but of course you failed utterly to understand it:

"The Poppe Report was unabashedly housing-first,"

Yes, it was. First we would shelter everyone, eliminating the need for all encampments. Then, we'd provide housing during drug and mental-illness treatments. And THAT would be hideously expensive in modern Seattle. Our local virtue-signaling commentariat would become even more nastily foul-mouthed at the very suggestion they pay our of their pockets for all of this, and then, as @42 noted, why should even decent people be asked to pay for expensive housing and treatments for persons who have contributed nothing to our city? A City Council which put getting us sued at The Showbox over actual work would never, ever be able to sell such a deal to voters, and even if they could, they lack the technical competence necessary to pay for it afterwards. The only possible solution is first to pay for huge amounts of rental assistance, below-market housing, and mortgage assistance, and the Mariners will win the World Series before our current Council grows the brains required to pay for all of that.


@62 - Three days working on a response and the best you can do is double down on the same logical fallacy i already ripped to shreds? At least you used a lot of keystrokes to do it!!. So. Many. Words. What a colossal waste of time...and a missed opportunity. I’m actually discussing the Poppe Report with you. You just want to rant about the City Council.

Again, that’s all well and good, but it makes you a troll. Go back to playing your games and stop wasting my time and Slog’s page space.

Ctrl +f +u.


@63: "Three days working on a response..."

No, but I can understand how you'd have to think so.

"...logical fallacy..."

You might not want to throw around fancy words you clearly do not understand.

"So. Many. Words."

And I know what they all mean, and I use them all properly -- even the fancy ones! How the heck could that possibly have happened? You just don't understand.

"What a colossal waste of time."

Again no, but again, I can understand how you'd have to think so.

"I’m actually discussing the Poppe Report with you."

No, you're not "discussing" it, not any more than your drawing rainbows and unicorns on it would constitute a "critique" of it. You really shouldn't throw around fancy words you clearly don't understand.

"You just want to rant about the City Council."

You're free to point out anything I got wrong about them. Good luck with that.

"Go back to playing your games ..."

Meanwhile, you'll have no choice but to continue demonstrating how Dunning and Kruger were optimists.

"... wasting my time and Slog’s page space."

That first word doesn't actually apply to either of the entities to which you attempted to apply it. (You, fancy words, etc.)


If you so smart, when was the last time anyone here commented to agree with you or compliment something you said? Let’s let the people decide who is or is not suffering from Dunning-Kruger. You post all the time and you seem to think quite highly of yourself, so presumably something you said would have struck someone as valid at some point.

In my case, I know offhand that three people have agreed with me just in recent memory. Can you top that? Show me four positive responses to comments you’ve made in the past month and maybe just maybe I’ll reconsider what you are.


@65: "...when was the last time anyone here ... compliment[ed] something you said?"

In this very thread, @32, Luddite5 paid me the highest compliment he possibly could bestow upon me. As I documented @58, he fabricated outright lies and attributed them to me. That's a roundabout and wasteful way of admitting he can't argue with the facts I presented, but that's the way he chose to do it, and it's definitely a compliment.

"In my case, I know offhand that three people have agreed with me just in recent memory."

Your sockpuppets are not "people," dear.

"...and maybe just maybe I’ll reconsider what you are."

Whatever, dude.


If @32 here is the only example that comes to mind, i’ll translate it for you: NO ONE LIKES YOUR SHIT.


@67: It's an answer even you could read easily, if you would just go ctrl+f yourself up there. ;-)

(Interesting, you haven't an unkind word for Luddite5, despite his false statements. I thought you were concerned about "...civil discourse on Slog." If even outright lying doesn't menace your precious civil discourse, what does?)