Say Goodbye To Lukewarm Coffee! Tabs, Thurs., May 19, 2022

Um. drink it faster? It's Tabs!

Federal health officials warn that a third of the American populace lives in areas with rising rates of COVID-19, and should consider masking up indoors in public again The riskiest areas are currently in the Midwest and the Northeast US. Why no, Republicans have not agreed to pass COVID funding. [ PBS Newshour ]

The Biden administration still has lots of free rapid home COVID tests for you, so you can request another eight free test kits at the easy to remember covidtests.gov. Yes, even if you already received four tests in each of the two previous rounds! [ NPR ]

Now that genuine insurrectionist and Big Lie promoter Doug Mastriano has won the GOP nomination for governor in Pennsylvania, you may want to go back and read Eliza Griswold's May 2021 New Yorker profile outlining his "Christian nationalist" beliefs, which boil down to Jesus made America to be a Jesus country, so let's do theocracy! Gahh! [ New Yorker ]

They're still counting votes in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, but that didn't stop Donald Trump from jumping in with some advice for his endorsed candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz. On his MAGA social network, Trump wrote that Oz "should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they just happened to find," After all, why bother counting votes when you can just insist you won and other Republicans cheated? Hell, maybe Trump thinks the other primary candidates are Democrats. [ CNN ]

George W. Bush had a pretty terrible Freudian slip in Dallas Wednesday. While condemning Russia's authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin, he seemed to admit a hell of a thing:  

Speaking in Dallas this afternoon, former President George. W Bush made a significant verbal slip-up while discussing the war in Ukraine. He tried referencing what he described as the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” — but said Iraq, instead of Ukraine.pic.twitter.com/tw0VNJzKmE

— Michael Williams (@Michael Williams) 1652918774 

The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq ... I mean, of Ukraine.

Bush then joked "I'm 75," as the audience laughed.

4,431 US service members and several hundred thousand Iraqis, most of them civilians, were unavailable for comment forever. [ Reuters ]

The US Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the government watchdog set up to monitor the US military adventure in Afghanistan, released an interim report on the collapse of the Afghan military last summer, concluding that the US decision to withdraw from the country and to make a deal with the Taliban led to a catastrophic collapse of morale. The Afghan military also relied heavily on US contractors for logistical support and maintenance for the advanced weapons systems the US provided, so the US withdrawal meant those awesome war toys were next to useless. As is typical with SIGAR reports, this one found plenty of fault to go around, from corruption in the Afghan government to a lack of coordination in the US agencies that were supposed to be preparing the Afghan military to fight on its own. [ NPR ]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is being a butt, and has blocked bids by Sweden and Finland to join NATO. He accuses the two Nordic countries of harboring militants who belong to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which seeks an independent Kurdish state in Turkey. He's demanding they be extradited (so he can execute them, one assumes) before he'll consider letting Sweden and Finland join NATO. So that's going to need some diplomacy. [ CNN ]

Now here's a thing that's never going to happen: An Apple autonomous car with no windows, also no steering wheel or pedals. It's all purely conjectural at this point, but hey, concept art:

Apple's self-driving car could feature VR technology and no windows: https://vrscout.com/news/the-apple-car-could-feature-vr-technology-and-no-windows/ …pic.twitter.com/YCwrVrJRjc

— VRScout (@VRScout) 1652821148 

Thank goodness for smartasses with photoshop:  

pic.twitter.com/0EPGr74uFt

— Jo (@Jo) 1652906887 

Grubhub has apologized for a boneheaded promotion that offered $15 off any order to customers in New York City for three hours Tuesday, which meant lunches costing less than that would be free. Just one little problem: Grubhub neglected to tell restaurants about the plan, so many were slammed and unable to meet the sudden deluge of orders that started coming in, causing hourslong backups. As many as 6,000 orders a minute were coming in to the hub of grub, which had its own server failures to add to the confusion. Thank goodness Grubhub is very sorry . [ NBC New York ]

LOLOL a group called the 65 Project has filed a complaint with the Texas bar association seeking the disbarment of Ted Cruz for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in office. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy! Maybe make him ride in one of those windowless Apple cars, too. [ Seattle Times ]

Also, about that lukewarm coffee in the hed: it's one of those glass Chemex things, so maybe try a Chemex cozy, really hot water to start with, or putting it on the stove on very low heat. Or get a Mr. Coffee and drink coffee like it's 1975, as God intended. [ NYT ]

Looka this little dang Thornton and his little dang kittyhands!

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