Don’t worry, Seattle. You haven’t mistakenly clicked over to Slog. I just couldn’t resist posting this story. BoingBoing reports that two women are claiming a ghost has been having sex with them in Federal Way. One woman says this has been happening for 2 years!

Perhaps it’s due to the increased patrols on 3rd and Pine that pushed these kids up the Downtown corridor a bit. My friend Gabriel posted this on his blog moments ago:

Anyone else witness this?

I’ve heard reports from a friend of mine that apparently 3000 First Tech Credit Union members were victims of an ATM scam. The gist of the scam is that someone had a scanner in the parking lot of the main branch ATM by Trader Joe’s in Bellevue and obtained the ATM codes there. The same reports state that First Tech members weren’t the only ones hacked. There’s a Washington Mutual branch right across the street and I wonder if some of their members were affected as well.

I’ve yet to find confirmed reports of this, (other than my friend’s first hand statement), but if you’re a First Tech member, you might want check your bank account balance and contact your local branch to see if you should get a new ATM card.

If anyone has more concrete information, post it in the comments.

You simply cannot lock someone away because they might do something wrong. To do so violates the very idea of liberty and is one of the foundations for which our justice system was built upon. What do we (as a society) do when someone who is clearly mentally unstable/deranged/psychotic commits a crime that causes the pain, suffering, and/or death of another human being? How do we prevent this from happening when the mentally ill offender has shown previous willingness to inflict harm after they’ve served their time but has already paid their debt to society for previous infractions? It’s not like with a violent criminal who was behaving in a manner that had rational roots (rational being action taken for the benefit of personal gain. i.e. mugging, burglary, assault, etc.).

Clearly this case (the murder of Shannon Harps) in particular is about a person who was not in control of his own mental faculties and surrendered to the deranged impulses that arose from that. For starters, just the possibility of someone being that imbalanced and wandering around is frightening, but it goes further than that. How do we differentiate between those who are willing to listen to the voices in their head and act upon their impulses vs. those who recognize the fallacy of their condition and struggle to fight them? Even the ones who are fighting (and in so doing, meeting the expectations of society) their impulses may lapse, just as easily as the one who has no will to suppress their psychotic tendencies. I don’t have an answer to this question, and I’m not sure anyone does. It’s intractable because any answer will either impinge upon the liberty of the community and the people living on the edge of sanity (and really, who isn’t these days), or it will put the larger community at greater risk for random violence from those who are just too far gone to want to help.

James Anthony Williams, charged with the first degree murder of Shannon Harps, has an extensive history of mental illness and interactions with law enforcement.
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I watched the evening news tonight in vain for more details on Tuesday morning’s assault of a UW student just north of campus, near the sorority buildings at 18th and 45th.

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It’s a pretty scary story for those of us who are on campus every day, and the specifics of the story are even weirder: it happened before 7am, when few people are on the street, and the victim was dressed in what seemed like indoor clothing (pajamas) despite then driving all the way down to the guardhouse south of 45th street. No mention of any kind of inside information on the usual student sites either, but the UW Police are supposed to be releasing some more info in the next day or so.