Friday night, woot-woot.

Today was yet another day of severely reduced productivity as more potentially historic news took place in rapid succession. The FBI started raiding the homes and offices of the most recognizable 1/06 terrorists. (Some of them, apparently, were state-level elected officials. Ho hum.) Vice-president Pence has apparently decided not to invoke the 25th Amendment, even as more former loyalists announced their resignation. House leader Pelosi held meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to see what options there were to keep Trump from launching nukes. (Either because he’s losing his mind, or just so he could create an even bigger distraction than his failed attempted coup.) Pelosi also announced that the House will start impeachment proceedings on Monday. It’s really rather disappointing that that they didn’t do so right away: it will have been five whole days since the attack.

Speaking of the failed coup… One of the four victims was a woman who got trampled by her fellow terrorists. Apparently, she’d been carrying a flag that said “Don’t tread on me.” Really, now, if this were a work of fiction, the writers would’ve been laughed out of the room for such crude and insensitive satire. And another dead traitor perished after accidentally tasered himself and had a fatal heart attack. The details are unclear, but he might have tasered his own balls. That, right there, is just plain old comedy gold.

To make things even more interesting, around 6pm Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account. After his robotic concession speech (where he did not concede), Trump posted two more tweets. In the first one, he wrote (in ALL CAPS, of course) that his voters will not be defeated. In the second tweet, he wrote he wouldn’t attend Biden’s inauguration on January 20. (The first time that would happen since 1869.) Everyone is on edge right now… Those messages may have been interpreted as a not-so-subtle hint to his traitorous supporters that they can attack the inauguration. Or maybe he was just rage-tweeting as always. Regardless, his account got shut down for good just to be on the safe side.

In a saner world, that would’ve happened years ago. Trump had violated every single rule Twitter has, but Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey took no measures to stop him: Trump’s tweets generated a lot of traffic and new customers for the platform, and the money was just too good. Someday, someone will do some fancy math to estimate how many people died of covid specifically because of the misinformation and mask-mocking that Trump had posted… It’s impossible to describe just how much having that Twitter account helped him destabilize the US, the economy, and the world overall. When he posted a two-part tweet about banning transgender Americans from serving in the military, the entire military was on edge because he’d said he was making a vital announcement, and didn’t follow up until several minutes later. That’s how wars can begin: some generals thought he was about to declare war with a tweet…

Regardless, the petty tyrant’s favourite toy is gone. I wish I could see just how much he is raging and crying in the half-abandoned White House, with his children and the very last of the loyalists trying to keep him sane. (Or relatively sane, in any case.) Meanwhile, the online chatter of his supporters states they’ll try another attack in the days before the inauguration. It’s hard to say whether they’re serious or just blowing hot air. Following the social media bans, Google removed the Parler app (like Facebook, but for the far-right) from their store. Apple is about to do the same, after demanding they find a way to self-moderate. (Not gonna happen.) It’s nice to see social media companies finally grow a spine, but they did so far too late. The Capitol was breached. People died. (Traitors, but people nonetheless.) A cop got his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher… They are at least partially responsible and certainly complicit. They’re only doing this now, in the last weeks of the lame duck session, because they know there won’t be any consequences from this petulant bully of a president.

…I yearn for the day when I will no longer have to worry about Trump destroying the world or overthrowing the government. Hopefully, he’ll lose all his media access on the 21st. Hope everlasting, eh.

And during all of this, of course, the lame duck administration did nothing at all to combat the pandemic. Organizing remarkably intricate attempts to overthrow the legislative branch and possibly set up a dictatorship? (Emergency inauguration postponement, etc.) Sure thing. Helping your fellow Americans get through this dark winter? Nope. There wasn’t so much as a single acknowledgement after the US passed 4,000 covid deaths in one day for the very first time…

In far more mundane news, I’m just about packed up. The spackle that just arrived in the mail (because hardware stores are closed and all) helped me patch up the many nail holes from my wall art. Packing all the little things and knickknacks (I seriously need to declutter) took up more time than all the rest, as always. (The 80/20 principle in practice.) The physically hard part will be rolling up my mattress and fitting it in my car without having it explode all over the place. Heh. This is my last night in this giant rental room, in this house in the Mississauga suburb of Ontario. Two more trips tomorrow and that’s it – a new start, a new chapter, the beginning of the final act of this here pandemic diary. I can’t wait.

In covid news, Biden has announced his plan to distribute all the available vaccine doses ASAP instead of dealing with the logistics of ensuring enough doses remain to give people their second shot three weeks later. Doing so would simplify things a fair bit, but people won’t be guaranteed to get their second shot in a timely manner, and it wouldn’t do much about the last bottleneck. After vaccines are shipped from the feds to the states, there’s the question of distribution: the logistics of setting up a vaccination site and having enough people (and time, and announcements) to actually administer it. Telling them to start using up all the vaccine supplies would not help defeat that particular bottleneck. We’ll see.

A few friends of mine, back in Reno, have caught covid. One of them is a prolific Facebook user, and she’s been documenting the progress of her disease. It started out as nothing more than a plain cold, followed by muscle pain, followed by the loss of smell. (Though she still has her sense of taste.) Reno isn’t a huge city, and over a thousand Renoites follow her account. For many, she might be the first person they know who got the virus. It’s herself, her adult son, and her partner. This is the same friend of mine who tested negative recently… I hope she and hers fully recover.

It’s hard to believe we’re only eight days into 2021. I really, truly hope things will become more bearable 12 days from now, when adults are back in charge and there are actual anti-covid measures backed by the full might of the US government. Here is hoping…