7000 of these will do the trick...
7,000 of these will do the trick... Charles Mudede

And why is the new and very expensive Highway 99 tunnel closing this weekend? The answer, provided by Seattle Times' transportation reporter Mike Lindblom, basically comes down to this: It should not have been made in the first place. The tunnel has flaws "leftover from construction in early 2019" and it's also leaking. The whole Montlake Boulevard mess will also be closed this weekend due to construction. The things we do for cars, the things we do for cars.

Good morning, Seattle!

The Washington State Fire Marshall, Charles LeBlanc, says one thing (he is not an anti-vaxxer) and then another ("he believes [the vaccine is] just too dangerous for him).

The COVID situation in Idaho is getting worse, despite the entertainment the state's Lieutenant Governor recently provided.

Conservative Alaska, like conservative Idaho, is dealing with "a surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations and cases". And conservative northern British Columbia is sending its sick and dying to liberal southern British Columbia.

The shameless Kshama Sawant recall effort is now receiving international attention. The Guardian sees it is as a part of a movement that has "hit a fever pitch in response to Covid-19 and racial justice disputes".

And there's more:

Across the US, there have been at least 500 recall attempts this year, with the majority in the west, according to Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L Carey Institute at Wagner College, and the author of Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom. Although many have not qualified for the ballot, he said the number of attempts is already one of the highest in more than a decade.

I thought it was 12,000 steps, and many believe it's 10,000 steps, but a study by University of Washington researchers concluded that 7,000 daily steps is all a person really needs to stay alive for as long as possible. KIRO 7 is ready for you to read this informative story on their website. By the way, I achieved 8,000 steps yesterday.

The Seahawks’ 26-17 loss to the Rams left QB Russel Wilson with a "'badly sprained' middle finger" and possibly some dark thoughts about how his line of work compares to the deadly games in the Korean-language TV series Squid Games. But maybe he did not have these thoughts.

The spiders that are now making a big show of themselves in your crib did not come from outside. They've been inside all along. Seattle Times reports that "this time of year, they start making their way out of the crawl spaces, wall voids and storage areas they live in most of the year, to look for mates." Indeed, the things they do for love, the things they do for love.

Blame for the rapid deceleration of job creation in the US is being placed squarely on COVID-19. And we can expect another disappointing job report next month because the government checks have stopped while the pandemic has not.

Nevertheless, some see good news in the unemployment rate, which is, after all, just below 5 percent.

The Jan. 6 committee subpoena games have begun. The first contestant is, of course, that icky Bannon character. He will not have anything to do with the House committee's investigation of the Jan. 6 coup attempt. What will happen next?

Despite all of the corruption, all of those leaders from around the world who stayed at Trump's DC hotel for some sordid reason or another, it still lost a ton of money. CNN reports that the hotel "racked up more than $70 million in losses over a four-year period".

A new episode of David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is out:

Yes, that big bird is fucking his head:

In case you have not being paying attention: