Thursday, a typical day based on police reports and aid calls, there was one “drug-related casualty” down the block and a dozen other calls for either narcotics or “behavioral/emotional crisis.”

That same day, while I was there, a man collapsed face-first on the sidewalk around the corner from the now-shuttered Amazon Go. When I asked his mates if they needed me to call 911, they daubed the back of his neck with a wet T-shirt and said, “No, no, he’ll pop out of it.”

He did. Later, though, I saw him shouting and bashing a wooden pole against a Pike Street building front.

Police have been trying to crack down. One day a week ago they busted eight people here for selling fentanyl and meth. The futility was acknowledged right in the news release: The cops said they ran down a 16-year-old who was selling fentanyl and had a gun, only to realize they’d just arrested the same teenager, pushing fentanyl with a different gun, at the same Third and Pike corner a few weeks earlier.

Danny Westneat
August 13, 2022
There are sprouts of hope in downtown Seattle, but they are wilting
[Via a comment from Chet who said, in part, “I am reminded of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and other stories of wickedness including Proverbs 16:27-29 that I heard so often when I was growing up.”

What you see here is the result of politicians who are either out of touch with reality and/or deliberately trying to destroy our nation.

This is what Barb calls Mugme Street.—Joe]

You must’ve just woken up from a 5-year propofol coma and completely missed the Russia hoax, Steele dossier, FISA warrant, Kevin Clinesmith, Hillary paying fusion GPS, and your boss asking Susan Rice to write “by the book” in an email to herself on the last day of his presidency.

Rising serpent @rising_serpent
Tweeted on August 8, 2022
[This hints at the latest misunderstanding between the peons of the evil party and the stupid party. Both sides are running on high emotions and yelling at the other side.

One side is rejoicing that President Trump had his personal residence searched by the FBI and mocks the peons on the other side when they say things such as, “If it can happen to Trump it can happen to you!” And they get a response of, “Well, of course if you commit a crime and law enforcement presents sufficient evidence to a judge, they will sign off on a search warrant. It’s called ‘due process’, DUH!”

Apparently the Trump supporters have all the false accusations and manufactured evidence instances hard wired into their psyches and no longer think any reference need to be made. The Trump haters apparently never got the memos that all those years of claims of “Trump is going to prison any day now!” were just wet-dreams and not reality.

I would like to believe, but I’m a hopeless optimistic, some of the high emotions and agitation would dissipate if people would patiently explain the reality as they see it while the other side patiently listened. Then they might attempt to resolve their differences with reason and examination of the evidence rather than by yelling louder.—Joe]

Time’s editors showed in July 1994 that they believed their job was not to uncover the truth but to provide political cover to Democrats in Washington. It’s only gotten worse since then, but I believe this incident formally marks the end of the “mainstream media” as we once knew it. Like many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, we now have a politicized media in the United States. But unlike other countries, in all but a few cases our media refuses to acknowledge its ideological affiliation. So added to bias, you have hypocrisy.

Kenneth R. Timmerman
August 6, 2022
Ex-Time reporter: The day I knew journalism had died in America
[It may have been the day Timmerman recognized journalism was a propaganda arm of the Democrats but that kind of crap was happening long before that. I have heard first hand stories from the late 1970s. It probably wasn’t new then. I suspect journalism has always been biased and hypocritical.—Joe]