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Video Find of the Day

Here's a sign that I may be recovering from my week of weak internet. I'm back to back-posting daily video finds! Here's a video from the Onion that was posted to YouTube in July, but is even better now, given the intervening stock market crash.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Presidency

Internet Terrorism

I keep hearing about concerns regarding internet terrorism. Do you know how many emails it takes to kill a man? Hint: It's exactly equal to the number of playing cards required to prevent the light from the sun from reaching the Earth.

Unfortunate Choice Of Words

Sarah Palin stirring up a crowd at a campaign rally today: "Are you ready to send John McCain on his last mission [for America]?"

I don't think the crowd caught the irony. But I did. (I'm very sensitive to that sort of thing.) Yeah, that's the problem, this could very well be his last mission.

We May Survive The Asteroid

Good news from astronomy today!

A meteoroid blew up yesterday in the earth's atmosphere over the Sudan releasing a TNT-kiloton of energy!

Why this is good news:

It was spotted "incoming" about a day earlier by an observer at the Catalina Sky Survey 1.5 meter telescope north of Tucson, Arizona. This was the first time in history that a meteoroid on collision course with the earth was spotted and tracked prior to collision.

The meteoroid itself was at most 15 feet across. This is wonderful news. If we can spot the little ones before they hit, we can spot the big ones.

We won't survive our own greed or gluttony & we'll destroy the planet we have, but we'll probably have plenty of warning before the Mother Of All Asteroids disintegrates us, in time to divert it with the very last of our resources.

Nickels Can Kiss My Pink Ass

Video Find of the Day

The latest news I've seen out of Nickelsville is that the city is prepared to start fining everybody involved for land use violations, and everybody with a name resembling somebody involved, or known to have talked to anybody involved, or having expressed support, or having been rumored to have done so. The Notice Of Violation specifically charges encampment residents John and Jane Doe. They, the Does, as the others, will be subject to fines of $150 per day. I immediately thought, "I'm a supporter. I AM John Doe." Next I thought of this scene, which bears recalling. Fuck Nickels.

Spartacus [Don't have a clue what language the subtitles are in.]

Precision Is Sexy

Video Find of the Day

KING5.com has a news story about the Nickelsville eviction which contains this sentence: "The event was a precision protest by homeless advocates, who insist the mayor has failed the city's most vulnerable citizens."

Now, I need to mention that Nickelsville has always been about survival first, and only secondarily a protest against the sweeps (that make it necessary by endangering survival.) It's like when someone tries to hit you, you might simultaneously duck and also yell "NO!" The ducking is the primary act, the yelling "NO" (the protest) is secondary. First you don't want to be hit. Only secondarily do you want to register your objection to being struck at in the first place.

Still, calling what went down "a precision protest" is pretty cool isn't it? It immediately called to mind Mission Impossible, and made me long for the theme song. And what do you know, some Mission Impossible fan with a VCR in the early 90s and a YouTube account today has edited together the intros to six episodes.

Mission: Impossible Opening Montage 1

Yay! -- Wait. Huh?

Great news out of Florida. According to an AP story, a federal judge has struck down Orlando's law against feeding the homeless in downtown parks on the grounds that it violates the rights of homeless activists. Yay!

But, wait a minute. The rights of homeless activists? Why weren't the rights of the homeless people to receive the food mentioned in the story? Were they not considered at all? I'm hoping the AP reporter just left that part out. Still, what would that say about the AP reporter then?

One way or the other I can't give this news a full five cheers. It has to be four cheers and one jeer.

Greg Nickels Is A Fool

The events of the eviction of Nickelsville from alleged city land yesterday felt a little like a Beethoven sonata to me: attack, release, attack, release. Except with a background drone. My description of it for YouTube users is intended to get the idea across to non-Seattleites:

Sept. 26, 2008. Nickelsville, a tent city with ambitions to become a shantytown for the homeless in Seattle. After three and a half days of existence, Greg Nickels, our mayor who hates the homeless, whom Nickelsville is named for, as a dishonor, orders Seattle police to evict the occupants and demolish the camp. The police don't want to do it. They tell the people privately that they know that the mayor is a liar and that there is not enough shelter to house them. They will have no choice but to find yet another place to camp. But orders are orders. In every scene the sound of news and police helicopters overhead nearly drowns out the human voices, but hopefully the sense of the hour is conveyed.

Eviction at Nickelsville

Nickelsville Video

Video Find of the Day

Not my video. I haven't got around to the editing yet. This one is by Aimee Curl and Laura Onstot (posting as lonstot) for the Seattle Weekly.

Nickelsville in Progress

Nickelsville

I went to Nickelsville today to take Anitra some boiled peanuts and to check out a news report. I heard that Mayor Nickels was sending homeless activists to do shelter outreach at the same time that he was sending police to break Nickelsville up. I wondered what homeless activists would want to circulate among 150 homeless people and try to tell them all that the meager extra shelter beds that the city has coughed up to justify the sweeps would suffice for all of them.

I found them; they were not really what I would call homeless activists. Social workers in the employ of the Department of Social Services are that: they are social workers. They do social work. They do not necessarily qualify as activists. When I asked one what they were saying to the campers, she told me that they were offering referrals.

So that's how they deal with the cognitive dissonance. They don't actually tell everybody that there is shelter for everyone. They tell each one, one at a time, you call this number on this card, and they can fix you up. They don't ever have to contemplate what would happen if everyone they talked to called the number on the card. Like I say, they aren't activists. Activists would think of that.

Meanwhile I took a bunch of pictures, and some videos. I'll try to post the videos later if they're any good. Here's a few of the still pictures.

When I first arrived I had to find Anitra, of course. She, in turn had to show me her precious pink tent.




Then I ran into some of the other usual suspects, like Joe Martin and friend Hap, and real Change Director Tim Harris, who I got to pose in front of the main area of tents.



Next, I asked just the tents to pose. I didn't photoshop this shot at all. That's how pink they are.

A Freedom Socialist wandered in with a nice sign that met with approval from the crowd.

Since yesterday, and right up to the police eviction today, some permanent structures were being built. Here Anitra is posing with Aaron in front of his pink sheltered pink shelter.

One of the No Trespassing signs the city installed three days ago was lying on the ground when I got there.

Then, the police arrived. There were "negotiations." Anitra took the task of relaying what the police offered to the rest of the "Nickelodeons." It basically boiled down to: if you want to be arrested stick around. If you don't want to be arrested go away.

As it happens, by the time the police came back to conduct the arrests, Nickelsville has word from the governor through her senior aide Ron Judd, that they could set up tents on a nearby parking lot , on state land, safe from Seattle police, at least for a few days. So that may have led some who had planned to let themselves be arrested change their minds. But still 22 people chose to be arrested. By the time I got this shot of the police peacefully, slowly, nudging the crowd back while making arrests, Anitra was already in a police van.

Maybe the last one to be arrested was our Real Change vendor Jewd. She was really into it. I think she ought to be the Nickelsville poster girl.

University Priorities

... or, The Propagation of Idiocy

Another email list I'm on is ALGTOP-L, devoted to algebraic topology news. I never contribute, I just read the posts to try to get a sense of what's going on in my former research field. There's also news about the people involved, some of whom I remember, and conference announcements.

Today there was a conference cancellation announced at a major Midwest university, with part of the explanation being, "With the tightly packed topology calendar this Fall and the hotel constraints imposed by the sports season, it proved impossible to reschedule."

In other words, one of the principle purposes of a university, the dissemination of knowledge, literally was canceled in this case to make room for sports fans.

Idiocy begets Ignorance, which propagates Idiocy.

Email to HPN

The Homeless People's Network is an email list for homeless and formerly homeless people to talk about whatever, and share information. A lot of the posts direct attention to items in the news about homelessness. Yesterday there were two opinion pieces noted. One was this Seattle Times Editorial, the other was this Las Vegas blog. Both were outrageous and I immediately wrote this in reply, only to find that my email reply function wasn't working. I think I worked around it and the email should be posted to HPN soon. In the meantime, it's here:

I'm having trouble doing email replies in this account, so I'll just respond to the gist of the two posts yesterday regarding Seattle's "pink tent city".

There's some bullshit in both that needs calling out. Both refer to Seattle as one of the most liberal cities in the country with respect to the homeless. This is crap. Until a year and a half ago you could make a case for that claim. In spite of the fact that we've never had more than about half the shelter beds we have needed, we could claim to be liberal because food was easy to obtain and homeless people sleeping outdoors were not often harassed if they stayed away from downtown and away from residences.

But in the spring of 2007 our current mayor, Greg Nickels, SECRETLY initiated a draconian policy of sweeps of outdoor homeless encampments. Even though our One Night Counts have determined that there have been as many as 2600 homeless people in the city in addition to the number that can fit into about 2700 existing beds (these don't count car campers and people who scored couches that night; if you count them there are fewer than half the shelter beds as there are homeless people), even though the mayor has not been willing or able to challenge those figures, he has ordered "cleanups" of homeless encampments. These "cleanups" consist of ripping up tents, sleeping bags, mats, even blankets, and trashing them. People were left with no survival gear, vulnerable to the elements, and no new shelter.

Real Change, the street paper I work with, had to use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what was happening. After we uncovered the policy, which had been hidden even from the city council, the mayor's office "revised" the policy to "take into account public concerns." The revised policy has the appearance of meeting objections, but the fine print contains major loopholes. We have already seen the loopholes exploited since the revised policy went into effect early this year. We have also seen safeguards advertised in the revised policy turn out to be lies.

The revised policy brought with it new shelter, that was touted as the place people swept could go. How many new beds did they provide for the more than 2600 at risk? TWENTY! Not even one percent of the need.

In the meantime, we already have had at least one confirmed case of a man who has died as a direct result of the sweeps. He was driven from a safe spot under a bridge and died from exposure soon after. The fact that they are continuing the policy in the face of that death, a death that was predictable and certainly not the last, is proof that Nickels is a criminal who must be stopped. This policy amounts to attempted genocide, and it has succeeded once so far.

The Seattle Times says Nickels is no Hoover. Given what he has been doing, he is worse than Hoover. He is engaged in nothing short of criminal, unconstitutional, harassment of the homeless population. He has attempted to carry out government policy changes without public view or legislative oversight, a violation of democratic principles of open government. There's nothing liberal about Greg Nickels on this issue, and if Seattle as a whole lets him get away with carrying out these crimes, then Seattle will have lost the right to call itself liberal, too.

As for the pink tents. They're temporary. The plan is to use them only until permanent structures can be built. As for whether they came from a breast cancer charity, I don't know, but I know that Real Change got them earlier from the Girl Scouts of America, and we turned around and gave them to the Nickelsville people. Maybe the Girl Scouts got them from a breast cancer charity, but it's not like a breast cancer charity handed them directly over to Nickelsville.

-- Wes Browning, Real Change News, Seattle

Noise at City Hall

Women in Black usually do silent vigils when homeless people die outside or by violence. Today they made noise by banging pots and pans around City Hall, with help from WHEEL and the Church of Mary Magdalene and others. I was there, living out my dream of some day participating in a Chinese funeral procession.

The purpose of the rally was to speak out about the extreme need for the planned Summer Emergency Shelter for Women. With only $9,500 of city funding it could be open by the beginning of next week.

After marching around City Hall 4 or 5 times with the sun beating straight down, all collected in front of the building, and I got the camera out.

Noise at City Hall

Condo Park

Alley of the Week

In Lipstick On a Pig, Tim Harris writes, "Urban centers now exist as centers of upscale consumption and culture for those who can pay the price." One of ways that manifests itself is in the construction of private parks for the well-off.

Belltown had a park at 3rd and Bell that anyone in the public could use, including outcasts. So the neighbors got up in arms about it and turned it into a dog park. One of the main ways homeless people had used the park was to eat food purchased from the adjoining grocery. It's now against the rules to have open food in Regrade Park because the dogs might fight for it. Meanwhile, two blocks away, between Battery and Bell and between 1st and 2nd, two condos stand back to back sharing a park between them. Here's how it looks from space. An inviting plaza with trees and gardening, and probably benches. A great place to picnic.

Here's how it looks through the alley from near Vine Street.

And closer, looking up from inside the alley near the Wall Street entrance.

As you can see, the residents here have no need for the Regrade Park. They've got their own. If you're homeless and frequent the alley you know it's there, but you can't reach it.

They build their own parks, and, not satisfied with that, take ours away.

Pleasant Hearsay

I haven't been able to confirm it, but one of our vendors at Real Change told me yesterday that he was listening to a local call-in talk show on the radio when a discussion broke out about "some idiot" who had posted "in a blog" that the government should give homeless people free guns.

Now, in my column this week, I never said the government should give guns specifically to homeless people. I said POOR people who couldn't otherwise afford guns should get free firearms. I do not assume that all homeless people are poor. Some of them are surely rich people taking advantage of the system to shirk rent payments.

But upon questioning of this vendor there remained no doubt that the idiot's blog post in question was in fact my column of July 2. I can't tell you how proud that makes me.

One of the callers said that my comparison of firearms to lawyers was a comparison of apples to oranges, or tomatoes to broccoli, or something of that nature.

Which misses the point, which was that the Supreme Court's decision already in effect declared apples to be oranges, and tomatoes to be broccoli, by establishing that individuals have as much right to firearms as legal counsel in a trial. I didn't write their decision; Scalia wrote it. I was just carrying it to the next logical step.

I live for the moments when I'm called an idiot by the satire-blind.

The Seattle Times Sucks

Last Thursday the Seattle Times editors offered up an opinion piece titled "Tent City: pointless" that was full of deliberate lies and propaganda. I've written this week's column about those lies. It will be in the paper that comes out on Wednesday, and I'll post it as close to 9 AM Wednesday morning as I can over on Adventures in Bloggery.

In the meantime I want to highlight the Seattle Times editors moral bankruptcy by contrasting a passage from that editorial with one from today.

"Tent City: pointless" ended with this paragraph:

"Itinerant tent camps are not acceptable in a modern city. We didn't have them before the 1990s, and most other American cities don't have them now. They look at us and wonder why we ever allowed it."

Today, in opposition to efforts by the mayor and the Parks department to ban bonfires on public beaches, the same editors gave us "Bonfires of the Seattleites", containing this paragraph, one from the end:

"Cities are complicated. Urban life is messy, not entirely manageable. Not all behavior has to be by the book. Some things citizens do are amusing, traditional and relaxing."

So, there is the morality of the Seattle Times editors. If the things the citizens do are amusing, traditional, and relaxing, hey, what's the problem? But if what the citizens do is necessary as a matter of life vs death, why do we allow it?

The dissonance between the two views is easy to understand. The people roasting marshmallows on the beach include the middle and upper class neighbors of the editors. You know that as soon as they're referred to as citizens. In "Tent City: pointless" homeless campers were not called citizens.

I'm opposed to a ban on beach bonfires. But if it's a choice between something that's done for fun in a public space that adds to air pollution vs camping in greenbelts, something that's done for survival safely away from the general public that creates nowhere near the environmental harm that bonfires do, then camping is what needs to be preserved.

Human life comes first, then recreation.

The Seattle Times has no moral compass.

Homeless in Seattle & Noa Noa

Last night I slept again in a tent on City Hall Plaza in protest of the inhumane sweeps of homeless encampments on public land. The lives of homeless people are endangered by the destruction of their survival gear, done in the name of "public safety" and "hygiene." This morning that protest was followed by a civil disobedience. Fifteen of the protestors obstructed a downtown street in Seattle, a street that just happens to lie precisely between the offices of the mayor and the county executive.

First, there was a memorial service conducted by Women In Black of Seattle. They read the names of 283 people who died on the streets in King County from 2000 to date.

Homeless remembrance Service, Seattle



In the Polynesian traditions a law (taboo) can be broken only if rituals are carefully followed. It's called Noa Noa in some places. Sometimes translated as Freeing, or Release, or, Declaration of Freeing. The rituals demand a statement of purpose, and the invocation of the god governing the taboo, petitioning for release from it. That's exactly what you see in the next video, plus initial arrests.

Stand Against the Sweeps



The rest of the arrests, including a scene in which Anitra, my woman, appearing in the role of a hooded gang banger, is processed for arrest outside of an SPD bus, while I explain to someone that her being arrested and me filming is all part of the plan. "Division of labor" as I call it. Her arrest was well planned by the Real Change Organizing Project, and was joined by participants from SHARE/WHEEL, Women in Black, and members of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, and others.

The Usual Suspects

Reverse Graffiti

I subscribe to Google News Alerts of news containing the words homeless or homelessness, so every week I get 80 to 100 emails alerting me to an average of 3 such news items each. I usually ignore them until a few hours before the weekly column is due. I then race through the 200 to 250 summaries of stories looking for one or two that I might riff on. There's usually nothing in it but the same repetitive old dreary crap: So many families homeless because of a building fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or whatever. Homeless man/woman arrested and charged for something. Teenagers who set fire to sleeping homeless man arraigned. Bush Homeless Czar congratulates city for its homeless plan. So there's not much to work from.

This week I again found nothing to use for the column, but I found this item on AWEARNESS, a blog about social issues by fashion designer Kenneth Cole. The story tells about a London campaign to raise awareness of the "hidden" homeless, those not sleeping outdoors.

A feature of the campaign are these reverse graffiti created by power-washing already dirty city walls. The symbolism is strong and apropos, but what I really love about it is the way it abuses the anti-graffiti laws. Can you vandalize a wall by cleaning it?

The message says, "Most homeless people have moved on but their problems haven't gone away."

Angry Grandpa Look

Video Find of the Day

Tuesday, a bunch of us from the Real Change Organizing project (RCOP) and friends went to a meeting of the Public Safety, Human Services, and Education committee of the Seattle City Council, and spoke during the public comment period. Committee chair Tim Burgess was very generous with the time, letting us speak nearly 20 minutes, twice the time we were supposed to have.

[Above: Anitra tells 'em what for.]

When we planned it, we planned two designated speakers who would use time reserved by others in the group. Apparently that's how its done for other council meetings, but we found out they don't do it like that at the old PSHS&E so we adapted on the fly, and instead of two speak long, eleven of us took turns at it, trying to cover all the points we had previously discussed.

I can't or don't know how to embed the video, but I will have a link to it below. It's at the Seattle Channel website for now and will probably be there for at least a few months.

The whole video runs over 2 hours and 40 minutes. I've only seen the first 23 minutes of it that has the public comment period. I'll be wanting to look at some of the rest of it, because it should have some comments by Bill Block on the Ten Year Plan to Plan Planfulness, and I'm sure I would benefit from seeing that.

Some notes regarding the public comment portion:

The public comments start at about 2:30 (2 minutes 30 seconds) on the video.

The first guy who speaks about his proposal, to put to death 4 time drug crime convicts, is not one of our group. We never saw him before in our lives. All the other speakers came in with us.

The first RCOP speaker is vendor Michael Garcia, at around the 4:50 mark. He was one of the two original speakers we had intended to take all our time. Burgess let him run longer than the two minutes alloted. I was next on the list but deferred as planned to my woman, Anitra Freeman, who was our other designated speaker, and that was when Tim Burgess said they don't do things that way. So Anitra adjusted by giving a shorter speech than anticipated, although it still went over two minutes. She starts about 7:20. You should definitely see that part, because you don't always get to see Anitra so angry in public.

After that they ran through the list of the others of us who had signed up. Each person spoke around a minute or two. When the list was used up Burgess let others who hadn't signed up also speak. That included Real Change Director Tim Harris who appears at about 18:30.

Doug McKeehan follows Tim, and I rounded up the lot of us, speaking last at around the 21:00 mark for a mere one minute 15 seconds. For Cindy Holly is my Muse, and she is the Muse of Few Words. It may look like I'm reading a script but the paper in my hand is just a crossword puzzle I was working on. My eyes are lowered because I'm channeling a scolding grumpy grandpa.

[Above: Grandpa is very, very, disappointed with the behavior of you children.]

For the record, and to make up for not bringing the mic up closer, here's a transcript of my off-the-cuff remarks with the "uhs" and "ahs" deleted, and with some attempts at added clarity:

"I would like to agree with Tim -- I think that the protocols are illegitimate.There's [been] no input from the community that is affected by the rules. The rules of [a] government should reflect the participation of the people that are ruled over."

"Also, there's a lot of secrecy involved in this. We didn't even know about the protocols that were originally established until months after they were established, and we found out because of a FOIA -- by using the Freedom of Information Act -- and that's outrageous. That we're talking about it now at all is because we raised hell about that [forcing the administration to revisit the protocols in a more public way.]"

"And there's still secrecy involved. We don't know how many people have been swept in all of this [or how many camps.] We haven't been able to get that information. I think the City Council has an obligation to make sure that the secrecy ends."

The video is here.

This Is TOMORROW!

Video Find of the Day

I was sent notice of these videos by Justice Works. They're all the videos posted under the username unite4justice. They concern a pending Washington State law going by the name of "the gang bill" that would, among other things, establish a database on gang suspects, to be run by the state patrol, that will achieve a very serious ratcheting up and legitimizing of police profiling if it is allowed to pass. It has already passed in the House as HB 2712, it is in committee in the Senate as SB 6608. There is a public hearing TOMORROW, 3:30 PM, Feb. 27, at the Capital Building in Olympia, which may be the only chance to speak out against it in person. Phone numbers to call are listed at the end of video #3. There will be a caravan to the Olympia meeting leaving from the Starbucks at 23rd and Jackson at noon tomorrow.

The point made by Priest Amen in #1 about men harassing youth is solid. Also listen to James Bible's story in #2 about how a false jaywalking charge followed him into adulthood, and don't think it was a fluke. That's how the system is set up, and this horrible law will make it worse.

The bills and legislative reports are available here.

WA Gang Bill - Pt. 1



WA Gang Bill - Pt. 2



WA Gang Bill - Pt. 3