Fall out from George Floyd riots in 2020

There is still a lot of fall out (deaths, crime) from the BLM/Antifa scourge of 2020 when they lionized an ex-con druggie and demonized the police. Seattle isn't the only city suffering. BLM only mattered to fill the wallets of a few. This nationwide crime spree is far worse than anything that happened on J-6, but since Democrats can't tie it to any but their own lackies, no one will be punished. Focus must remain on Trump for this cover-up.

Seattle homicides to surpass 3-decade high among nationwide crime spike (yahoo.com)

From 16 homicides in 2016 to 52 in 2022. "Per data compiled by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, homicides had been on a steady decline since 1994, reaching an all-time low of 16 in 2016 before beginning to climb. In 2022, per the department's end-of-year report, 52 homicides were reported, up from the previous year's 42. There were 53 homicides in 2020, according to the department's reports."

Gun control in Seattle

"Last Wednesday night, right around rush hour, gunfire erupted on a busy Seattle street near a bus stop with numerous commuters and pedestrians nearby. One person was killed and seven were wounded, including a 9-year-old boy. This wasn’t the typical gang fight that erupted deep in a bad neighborhood; it placed numerous commuters in the crossfire. Two Amazon workers were shot."
The three suspects among them had nearly 70 priors. Yes, it was illegal for them to have guns. The very people who want gun control are the ones who think that a system that already fails to confine violent gun felons and gangsters is too punitive.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/seattle-commuter-shooting-nearly-70-prior-arrests-among-three-suspects/

How to kill the gig economy

I've never used Uber or Lyft, but I can see the big hand of government regulation killing the gig economy. "The Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation Monday that will establish a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers and raise per-ride taxes to pay for city programs." All in the name of protecting the worker. So tell me again city officials how some of the poorest, but most ambitious people, are going to build your "affordable" housing ($52 million) and the City Center connector ($56 million) that is millions in debt and which you've failed miserably to build?

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/seattle-passes-minimum-wage-uber-lyft-drivers-raising-fees-rides/

Homeless in Seattle

I do not understand how a city can spend so much on the poor and yet have so little effect. What's the answer--it obviously isn't more money. "According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. By any measure, the city’s efforts are not working."

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness

Pathological altruism = altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm, . . ”.

Socialists know more money won’t help so the only answer must be to make the rich poorer.

Four years ago they were asking the same questions.

“Seattle’s liberal voters and politicians don’t mind spending money on social problems. And there’s a lot of money here. King County has the largest United Way in the country. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — the world’s wealthiest — puts money toward the homeless in its home town.

All told, King County officials estimate that a billion dollars or more has gone to help the county’s homeless over the past decade. Nearly 6,000 units of affordable housing have been built, more than in any city except New York or Los Angeles.”

http://www.invw.org/2015/03/02/after-10-year-plan-why-does-seattle-have-more-homeless-than-ever/

"On one night in the greater Seattle region in 2018, 12,112 individuals were experiencing homelessness, with 52 percent living unsheltered. In the Columbus region’s 2018 count, there were 1,807 people experiencing homelessness with 16 percent living unsheltered." https://www.geekwire.com/2018/cities-making-dent-homelessness-seattle-can-learn/

https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/7/31/16072102/washington-state-homeless-student-population

Seattle punishes success

Seattle is driving out its lucrative, job creating businesses by creating a "head" tax on each employee so they can create more homeless camps and hopelessness. Hope they come to the mid-west. I'm thinking whoever our governor or mayor will be, Democrat or Republican, they will be smarter than that!

The Left always eats it own.

Even for leftists, this is insane, but Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post which runs 8-10 anti-Trump articles everyday, so I guess he deserves it.



https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/seattle-head-tax-passes_us_5afa53d5e4b0200bcab82fea

So this is transformation of our country

Middle and high school students can’t get a Coca-Cola or a candy bar at 13 Seattle public schools, but they can get a taxpayer-funded intrauterine device (IUD) implanted without their parents’ consent.

School-based health clinics in at least 13 Seattle-area public high schools and middle schools offer long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), including IUDs and hormonal implants, to students in sixth-grade and above at no cost, according to Washington State officials.

Seattle school clinics

So seriously underage girls are being co-opted by the schools.  Does that make the participating public school system and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists which gave this atrocity a green light co-rapists in underage sex? Isn’t that a crime? And what about those poorly trained “clinic” workers who insert them? Isn’t that a violation of a child’s body? 

• Hormonal IUDs (e.g., Mirena®) contains the hormone levonorgestrel, which is a type of progesterone. A hormonal IUD prevents pregnancy in several ways: killing or harming the sperm, making the mucus in the cervix thick so sperm can't reach the uterus, and helping make the uterine lining an unappealing place for a fertilized egg to implant itself. About 2 in 1,000 women become pregnant during the first year of getting a hormonal IUD.
• Copper IUDs (e.g., ParaGard®) consists of copper wire wrapped around the stem portion of the T-shaped device. It can stay in place at least twice as long as a hormonal IUD--for at least a decade. A copper IUD works by causing a woman's uterus and fallopian tubes to produce a fluid that kills sperm. About 6 in 1,000 women become pregnant during the first year of getting a copper IUD.

For as long as they’ve been keeping track more contraceptives for teens means more sex which means more pregnancies which means more abortions or young, unprepared mothers.  But teach chastity?  OH horrors.  That wouldn’t work.  Someone might graduate from high school a virgin, and that would never do.  That’s not progressive; that’s not the Democrat way.  How many of these girls will get counseling on the psychological damage, say, if it’s incest, or an older man leading her to prostitution, or how many will get STDs. How qualified are these staffers who’ve had no training in counseling?

Do you suppose the President has had his daughters fitted with an IUD? He did say a baby is punishment.  But he also has a pretty good security detail to send on their dates.

3796

Training ground for biased big media?

The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper is one of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of struggling free circs, those piles of newsprint and skinny magazines you see in the lobbies of coffee shops, shopping centers and libraries. Technically, they offer an alternative, but if they become successful, a bigger paper usually buys them. I hear they pay well, and the slant is, well, very, very one way or the other. The Stranger is left, although I've only read one article. It's anti-religious right. Yawn. That's like an elephant being afraid of a mouse. There is not a single leftist program proposed since FDR that hasn't succeeded. Conservatives, at best, toss an occasional banana peel, and a baby might make it out alive in the Dakotas that otherwise would have been thrown in a trash can.

The article that was sent to me is "Cross Purposes" by Erica C. Barnett. For some reason she thinks it is sad that Seattle's old line, dying liberal churches are shrinking and becoming irrelevant. When we joined UALC [it's a conservative congregation within a liberal denomination] in 1976 our pastor had formerly been a Lutheran pastor in the northwest--can't remember if it was Oregon or Washington. But I remember him saying that the mountains were white capped from all the letters of transfer that never made it. That means, for you non-Christian readers, when people headed west, they left their relgion back in the east or midwest and started worshiping Mother Nature. If they needed a little familiarity for a wedding and cozy pot lucks, they could always join the Unitarians. So I don't know where Erica's been hanging out, but it ain't church.

So she writes a lengthy story about the "new conservatives." But she has a very odd hitch in her gitalong. Seems to really focus on externals, hoping I think, to turn off . . . who, exactly? In describing the people she's afraid of (i.e. conservative Christians) seen at two different gatherings, tiny Church on the Hill, and big Mars Hill:

T-shirts and jeans
overalls and sweats
casual sportswear
bearded guy in sweats
blond man in sneakers and faded blue jeans
brown long-sleeved t-shirt
thrown-together, house-party-ish scene
heavily gelled hair [preacher]
sloppy, untucked dress shirt
wooden bead necklace
trendy wide-strapped brown leather watch
girls in glittering half-sweaters
sloppy emo boys with tattooed arms
disheveled hair
pregnant women in stylishly expensive maternity jeans
loud and a bit slovenly [preacher]
Jimmy Kimmel-esque comedian [preacher]

I haven't seen that much fashion description except in my own complaints about what people wear to church these days.

When describing the liberal Mainline Methodists in Ballard, WA she says. . . not much about their appearance, but does cite their criticisms of the new kids on the church block, and they have a serious case of edifice envy.

"Very much your father's conservatism"
"women are the nurturers who should go home and have babies"
"negative, almost misogynistic view of women"
"emergent or emerging" [these are 2 different terms, but she doesn't distinguish]
"They've built a show that attracts masses of people. That legitimates it"
"it's possible they are simply not paying attention"
"an astonishing number believe in reincarnation, which is not a Christian doctrine"
"we're in a time when people pick and choose what they want from their religious experience"
"appeal to people who think we live in apocalyptic times"
"creates a system where people can have a feeling of control"
"they see themselves as cutting edge, whereas mainline churches are struggling to keep their doors open"
"theology of fear"
"they're cool and they can go out into the world"
"they'll outgrow it"

Oddly (or, not so odd since she wants a job with a "real" paper), Erica sees the mainline church goers (most with gray hair and canes), as more tolerant and diverse because there is a sprinkling of gay couples, and some female pastors. She thinks it is quite OK for the Methodist pastor to be preaching on the "evil empire" the U.S. is becoming with obscene tax-cutting, but not OK for the Mars Hill guy who's preaching that the suburbs have just as much evil as the city. She calls the conservatives intolerant with retrograde political leanings (she only sites homosexuality and women as evidence of "retrograde"), and apocalyptic, rebelling against the pop culture while appropriating its language and styles.

Yes, Erica's looking for a job with a playa.