Seattle, get ready for a faster and louder me during the 2021 Seafair Weekend Festival.
Seattle, get ready for a faster and louder me during the 2021 Seafair Weekend Festival. U.S. Navy photo/Nolan Pennington

Can Joe Biden Do It? This is an obvious echo of a 1929 essay co-authored by the brightest economist of his day, John Maynard Keynes, “Can Lloyd George Do It?” The essay promoted very big government spending to pull Great Britain out of a slump that began at the end of World War I and was worsened by Wall Street’s 1929 crash. We can, it seems to me, apply this same question on Joe Biden, who enters the White House after the US's conventional economy (which is called the real economy, as opposed to the fictitious economy—finance) entered its expected second slump (we have finally ruled out the V-shaped recovery nonsense).

There are two reasons why Biden can. One, thanks to the hard work of Stacey Abrams, and Trump's mania, Georgia is sending two deep-blue Dems to the Senate. So, Biden has both houses in his pocket. Also, Biden is an uninteresting moderate Dem facing the kind of exceptional difficulties that can only be met with bold policies. Now, here is the weird thing about history: Often it's the uninteresting people, rather than the very interesting ones (for example, Obama), who make the most radical moves while in power. Biden is the first white VP for a black president, and the first white president with a black/South Asian VP. He is already a very odd ordinary Joe.

The Government Spends a Stunning $3,000: A month to rent a bathroom for the Secret Service agents assigned to Jared and Ivanka. Though the brats have a half-dozen bathrooms in their house, they will not let the secret service use even one of them. No way. It is not happening. Secret Service agents must relieve themselves in a basement apartment rented by the government.

Let's Recall The Scene In Lolita: That happens right after the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is dumped by his wife, Valeria, for "a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut."

...I stomped to the bathroom to check if they had taken my English toilet water; they had not; but I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon.

Isn't That Interesting? MLK weekend is also Trump's last weekend in the White House. Let's relish this fact. We have overcome.

Is The New and More Infectious Version of COVID-19 in Washington State? No one really knows because, according to Seattle Times, the "surveillance in the state is falling short of what’s needed to quickly spot new variants." Though 70,000 Washingtonians tested positive in December, when the China Virus became the Bulldog Virus, "fewer than half a percent of those cases have been sequenced so far." What's up with that? Why can't we just do the thing right and spend the bloody money? Seriously. We just can't go on like this forever.

Judging from King County's COVID Data: Seattle’s 7-day average (127.0) is back to where it was at the beginning.of a holiday season that the whole of the US should have put on hold. Nevertheless, Seattle still has a mighty long way to go before returning to the lows (around 20.0) of early September.

So Much for Warp Speed: Trump did absolutely nothing right. Not even the vaccine, which nutty Geraldo Rivera wanted to name after him.

Parler, the Right-Wing and Whiter Twitter, Is Still in the Wilderness: There’s been some talk about the social media platform moving to a "Sammamish-based web-hosting company Epik" after being booted out by Amazon. But it seems there's not much substance to this talk. That said, why doesn't Parler just drop the first "r" in its name?

UW Medicine: "[Has] handed out over 25,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to its employees and community partners." When will I get my shot? When? America sometimes.

The Blue Angels: Will return this year with brand new jets, the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet. According to KIRO 7, the new war machines "will replace the Navy’s Legacy Hornet jets that the team flew for more than three decades." Fine, fine, fine. But is the Super Hornet more or less louder than the Legacy Hornet? The answer: "[It] is a little bit bigger and louder than the Legacy Hornet."

The Woman Rolled Down Hill In a Car: And after she hit a house hard, she rolled out of the car and gunned it. This woman has yet to be found. But all of her rolling business made me recall these lines near the end of the very problematic novel Lolita: "We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us."

That Pigeon's Life Will be Spared Because It Did Not Fly From Oregon to a Backyard in Melbourne, Australia: Biosecurity experts have determined that its whole damn life has been spent Down Under. It is just another Australian bird. No need to name it after the incoming American president, Joe the Pigeon. The bird did not fly no 8,000 miles. The blue band on its leg is fake "and not traceable." Therefore, the bird is now free to live because it presents no biological threat to the land Down Under.