AMAZING NEWS! We finished giving the first round of #CovidVaccine to all residents in nursing homes across WA today! Still working on the rest of long-term care, but this is a major milestone. Shout-out to the many pharmacies helping us protect the most vulnerable Washingtonians.
— WA Dept. of Health (@WADeptHealth) January 22, 2021
Parler looks to Russia: Of course they do. Parler, the embattled right-wing-beloved tech platform with a kink for conspiracy theories, started working with DDoS-Guard, a Russian company, a few days ago. The publicly available information shows Parler's data going through a DDoS-Guard server in Belize, a tactic that cybersecurity experts think is a way to protect Parler's web host's true identity and location. "Most people would be afraid of being fronted by Russians, but Parler actually signed up for it," a security engineer told Bloomberg. "It’s a little crazy."
Biden laid the groundwork so the minimum wage for federal workers can raise to $15 an hour: Glad that the feds have finally caught up to Seattle (almost). The requirement for federal contractors to raise their wages won't happen immediately (within the first 100 days, says the White House), but the order also restores collective bargaining and other worker protections revoked by Trump. This is your friendly reminder that $15 an hour still doesn't cut it.
Continue reading ».@JanetYellen on $15 min wage, in written responses to senators' questions:
"I believe the workers who have risked their health to provide necessary services to American households should be paid a wage that allows them to afford basic necessities like food and rent."
— Ylan Q. Mui (@ylanmui) January 22, 2021
NEW OPENINGS AND RETURNS
The Boss Tea and Banh Mi Deluxe
This new bubble tea and banh mi spot opened inside the Vietnamese restaurant Rainier Restaurant and BBQ (which is still open for takeout and delivery) on Beacon Hill earlier this month. The drink menu features an extensive selection of beverages, including "hurricane matcha" (a swirled drink), tiramisu and brown sugar lattes, butterfly pea flower drinks, Vietnamese coffee, watermelon jasmine tea, and much more. Toppings include tapioca pearls, cheese foam, egg pudding, aloe vera, lychee jelly, and even Oreo cookies. On the banh mi side of things, there's banh mi stuffed with crispy roasted pork belly, grilled pork, Cantonese barbecue pork, grilled lemongrass chicken, Vietnamese meatballs, beef bulgogi, lemongrass tofu, and more, with an option to create your own custom sandwich.
Beacon Hill
Pickup, delivery, outdoor seating, or drive-through
In his first week in office, Biden's orders primarily focused on bolstering the federal government's coronavirus response, reversing Trump's ass-backward environmental rollbacks, halting paranoid immigration policies, and attempting to provide a wee bit of economic relief. These executive actions can be pretty dry, so we're hoping to make this a little fun for you. Note: We just said a little fun, not a lot of fun.
Grab some coffee and let's get to work.
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There are so many excellent releases that I want to talk about this week that I’ve split them into two separate posts. You can read the first batch here, concerning fairy tales gone wrong; secret lesbian romance in the servants’ quarters of an Edwardian estate; and a supergenius kid’s lemonade stand. As if that wasn’t enough, next up we have a hard-boiled reporter solving supernatural crimes in 1970s Detroit; Wonder Woman’s sinister future; and a heist gone wrong involving psychic food. I can’t even stand how good these books are. Please make time to read them by abandoning your previous life (not like you were doing anything with it anyway).
As always, a big thanks to Phoenix for helping us pick out our favorites this week! Do remember to visit your local comic book shop this weekend.
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SHOP LOCAL
Stack up a post-inauguration reading list. The sighs of relief are palpable now that Trump is no longer the president, but the vastly improved Biden-Harris administration is no reason to let individual social justice work fall to the wayside—especially after witnessing the impact of such work over these chaotic past four years. In addition to keeping up with the events on our activism & social justice (FKA resistance & solidarity) calendar, start by educating yourself about the policy reform Biden has planned for his first 100 days in office with books that address everything from the ongoing pandemic to immigration to climate change. Portland's Powell's Books has put together a reading list that includes Evan Osnos's biography Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, Anthony P. Carnevale's The Merit Myth (which argues for top-to-bottom public education reform), Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works, Zach Norris's We Keep Us Safe (which deals with criminal justice reform), Michael E. Mann's The New Climate War, and other essential tomes. For more options, be sure to tune in to Third Place Books' Social Justice Syllabus Book Club, which meets virtually on the last Sunday of each month to discuss books dealing with topics from immigration to the patriarchy. Next week's book is Asim Jabari's Stop and Frisk: American Poems.
Throughout Washington, the situation was far worse. Hundreds of fires burned 800,000 acres, destroyed nearly 300 homes, and killed a civilian, a 1-year-old boy, for the first time in state history, according to Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz.
Fire seasons up and down the West Coast are out of control. In Washington, fire season is stretching on for longer and impacting more parts of the state. Each year, fires creep further west and closer to cities. Bonney Lake, right outside of Tacoma, was evacuated last year. The problem isn't going anywhere.
For the third year in a row, Franz is bringing a bill to the Washington state Legislature that will set aside $125 million every two years to shore up firefighting resources, maintain forests to keep fires under control, and equip with adequate defenses communities most likely to, uh, well, burn to the ground.
She's just asking the legislators to stop the Evergreen state from "turning charcoal black."
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But this catastrophe can be prevented, and our city’s elected legislators have the responsibility to act. It’s imperative that the Seattle City Council pass Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s citywide eviction moratorium through the end of 2021.
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Trump's impeachment trial could begin next week: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will transmit the Article of Impeachment to the Senate on Monday, Axios reports. The Constitution requires the trial to begin the day after the Senate receives the Article, but lawmakers can delay that process if they want to. The move lends national reporters a Trump content lifeline after exactly one day of the disgraced dealmaker not leading the news for once in four years, and it also pisses off Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, who was hoping for a February trial. Both Republicans and Democrats think the proceedings will take three weeks.
Lazy Senate Republicans rely on dubious formalist argument to escape work: GOP Senators will try to dismiss the impeachment trial before the body takes it up. Their argument is, "Uhhhhhh, you can't put an ex-president on trial because you can't put a private citizen on trial and so ha," according to Politico. Legal scholars, including some wackos from the Federalist Society, disagree, and Politico points out that "federal courts have consistently deferred to Congress’ 'sole power' to set its own rules and procedures, including over impeachment proceedings."
I've made this mistake so many times I cannot even count:
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Amazon has partnered with Virginia Mason to run a pop-up vaccination site at the Amazon Meeting Center in South Lake Union from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. this Sunday: Bless its heart.
President Biden (aaaaah), after sadly noting that the nation's COVID death toll will probably top 500,000 next month, announced his “full-scale wartime effort” plan to get the country's pandemic under control: The plan includes invoking the Defense Production Act, as well as asking for more workplace protections, requirements for masks on planes, trains, and buses, and quarantines for international travelers coming into the United States. It's a plan! LIKE, AN ACTUAL PLAN!!
Equity is at the core of our COVID-19 response. That's why today, I signed an executive order to establish the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, protect those most at risk, and address racial and other disparities.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 21, 2021
Biden's been busy signing executive orders: We'll have our own overview of the first two days of executive orders up tomorrow morning on the blawg.
FAUCI UNLEASHED: Now that he's finally out from underneath the anti-science thumb of Trump, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a new man, and casting some shade on his former corrupt boss. Is that a new hairstyle? It's fresh.
Continue reading »Fauci moods: Biden briefings vs. Trump briefings pic.twitter.com/rNS6sIu9ZF
— The Recount (@therecount) January 21, 2021
At the one-day event, Virginia Mason volunteers plan to administer 2,000 vaccines to anyone who is eligible regardless of insurance status. Find out if you're eligible for the jab with the state's PhaseFinder tool, and hop on the hospital's waiting list here.
Amazon's senior vice president of global corporate affairs, Jay Carney, announced the temporary site at Governor's Inslee's press conference on Thursday. The company will also lend one of its executives to the Washington State Vaccine Command and Coordination Center to, ya know, "leverage our operations, information technology, logistics and communications" in ways that can help put more vaccines in arms, Carney said. Carney concluded by mentioning a plan to pay a third-party occupational health provider to administer the vaccine to eligible recipients at their own fulfillment centers.
I didn't hear much about Amazon coming out in support of any statewide or federal taxes to help pay for chronically underfunded public health departments tasked with standing up mass vaccination sites all over the state while using antiquated and disparate systems in an already hopelessly fragmented health care system, but I do want to take this moment to thank them for chipping in. (At the press conference, Gov. Inslee said "[Amazon has] not asked for any recompense" for their assistance, and he's "hopeful they’ll continue to help us...in additional ways." So I guess there's still time for growth, but I'm not holding my breath.)
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Some of those nightmares can be waved away with an executive order, and indeed Biden has begun the process of cleaning up, like a weary parent coming home to discover that their teen has thrown a party that left the house in quite a state. But some puke stains are not so easily scrubbed off the walls, and it’ll take a lot of very tedious work to undo the damage.
Don’t worry, though. Washington’s got a plan for cleaning up Trump’s mess—ninety-seven separate plans, in fact.
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2021 HUMP! Trailer from Index Media on Vimeo.
After fifteen years of bringing HUMP! to movie theaters—after fifteen years of making it possible for people to be porn stars for a weekend in a movie theater without becoming porn stars on the Internet for life, after fifteen years of getting people together in theaters to watch porn the way their grandparents did—we faced a tough choice after the pandemic hit early last year. We obviously couldn't pack people into theaters. That meant we could either cancel HUMP! 2020 or make HUMP! 2020 available—for the first time—on the dreaded Internet. Last year's HUMP! Film Festival started before the pandemic hit so we reached out to the filmmakers and performers and asked them what they wanted to do. They'd made their films to be shown in theaters, not streamed on the Internet, and we were willing to cancel the festival. But the filmmakers wanted their films to be seen! So thanks to them—thanks to HUMP! filmmakers and performers—the show went on and HUMP! fans were able to enjoy HUMP! 2020 in the comfort and safety of their own homes!
And that's how HUMP! fans will enjoy HUMP! 2021: in the comfort and safety of their own homes! And we've got a great new lineup of fun and hot and sexy and crazy and interesting and moving HUMP! films, all made during the quarantine, all streaming online starting January 30th. More than 120 films were submitted for HUMP! 2021 and being locked up for the last ten months really inspired people to make some amazing dirty movies for this year's festival. This is not only going to be one of the best HUMP!s ever, it's also the most diverse HUMP!s ever and one of the most visually interesting and entertaining HUMP!s ever! Check out that trailer! (Trailer by Shane Wahlund, music by Erik Blood.)
We've added a number of special viewing parties to the lineup—I'm hosting the opening night viewing party on January 30th—and tickets are on sale now!
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