Now we know who owns Tucker Carlson

It’s whoever buys the most commercials for his show. And right now, that’s Mike Lindell, the Minnesota pillow magnate? Wait, what? How do you get so rich shuffling pillows around?

Crap. If only I’d known that spending years in training in biology and spending decades teaching wasn’t a recipe for getting rich. I could have used my one life to buy foam, cut it into rectangles, and stuff it into fabric covers, and then society would have rewarded me with power, influence, and the ability to yell my crazy ideas at old people watching Fox News. I wasted my life, dammit.

Anyway, Tucker Carlson let Mike Lindell freely bellow lunatic conspiracy theories on his show, after the MyPillow guy had been banned from Twitter for being too dangerously wacky for even that medium.

On Tuesday night, pillow salesman Mike Lindell headed to Tucker Carlson Tonight, where his ads routinely kick in more than a third of the show’s advertising budget, to inform the world that he has been canceled. The night before, the MyPillow CEO had been permanently banned from Twitter after what a Twitter spokesperson called “repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy” related to misinformation pertaining to the 2020 presidential election.

I did a double-take on that one bit — so ads for pillows from one manufacturer constitute a third of the revenue stream for Tucker Carlson? I guess he would feel some pressure to avoid alienating the wild-eyed ranting buffoon.

He was, of course, on national TV to complain about cancel culture and being silenced. Irony is dead, but at least the corpse has a nice comfy pillow to lie on.

Lindell is also taking advantage of huge ad purchases on OAN and Eric Metaxas’s radio show to go on those programs to whine about how he can’t make himself heard anymore.

All this raises big questions in my head. Are pillows that big a deal for people who tune into Conservative Old People’s Media? I can’t remember when I last bought a pillow — maybe a decade or more ago, and I’m not feeling any pressing need for a new one now. I’m curious about cause and effect. Do people who need a new pillow spontaneously turn to Carlson and Metaxas to shop? Or does watching Carlson and Metaxas suddenly make one desire something soft to lie on? As I get older, will I start seeking pillows? We’re raising lots of flies in the lab right now, and fly larvae go into a wandering phase where they crawl up unto the side of their container to pupate — is this like a hardwired behavioral transition, too?

Lindell isn’t the sole advertiser, though. Other companies pouring money into the conservative trough are weight loss plans, Caribbean vacations, personal EKGs, and restaurant delivery services, which altogether paint an interesting picture of the typical Fox News aficionado.

The Republicans haven’t changed at all

Sure, Trump was dumped, but the prominent Republicans, like Cruz and Rubio, are still defending him, and the majority really don’t want to impeach…and you’d think if they were really unhappy with the lyin’ demagogue, they’d want to make sure he can’t come back and run against a Republican candidate in 2024.

Worst of all, though, they are entirely complacent about have Marjorie Taylor Greene in their ranks. You know, the delusional woman who thinks mass shootings are all false flags to justify taking your guns away.

Also the nutcase who thinks the California wildfires were started by lasers from space.

The fires were part of a conspiracy by Jewish bankers to clear the right of way for their rail project, don’t you know. She just likes to “read a lot.”

Of course, anti-semitism, racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and white nationalism are her brand. There isn’t a conspiracy theory she hasn’t embraced. She’s a 9-11 truther. She thinks pizzagate was a real thing. She loves the right-wing militias. She thinks Hillary Clinton had her political enemies assassinated. She’s a dangerous loon who worships at the altar of QAnon and the Trump Cult. She thinks the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings, in which children were murdered, was a staged event with “crisis actors”.

So what does the Republican leadership in the House do?

All of this has provoked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to let it be known through a spokesman that he finds her comments “deeply disturbing” and that he “plans to have a conversation with the congresswoman about them.”

In the meantime, McCarthy scheduled a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. He apparently hopes to smooth over any hard feelings the former president may have about McCarthy’s mild blandishment that Trump “bears responsibility” for the mob that he fed with false claims about a stolen election and then incited to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.

So it looks like a stern talking-to, followed by a make-up session, is the worst that can happen within the Republican family these days. And should anyone else try to exact a punishment, the party will protect its own, as all but five Senate Republicans proved this week, when they voted against even holding an impeachment trial of Trump.

They they appointed her to the Education Committee. I guess because she “reads a lot”.

The rot runs too deep. The Republican party must be dismantled and destroyed.

Not that the Democrats are flawless! Jonathan Chait, for example, thinks Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is the mirror image of Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is breathtakingly stupid. AOC hasn’t been preaching conspiracy theories and race hatred and the violent overthrow of the government; she’s working within the system to achieve progressive goals.

The leading Democratic mischief-maker is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who advocates some left-wing views I consider simplistic and impractical and, in some cases, poll badly. The top example of a conservative mischief-maker, presented in perfect symmetry, is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene’s views are just a bit more controversial.

“Just a bit”! Because some of AOC’s goals “poll badly”! Fuck these neo-liberal scumbags, too.

Giving vegetarian food a bad name

Do not want.

We’re going to be doing a bit of traveling today, so I thought I’d start us off with a traditional hearty breakfast. Bacon and eggs, that’s the ticket! We’re ovo-lacto pescatarians, vegetarian easy mode, so the eggs are fine, but bacon is forbidden. Fortunately, we had picked up some Morning Star Farms Veggie Bacon Strips, so I thought I’d try those.

Big mistake.

These are perfectly rectangular, thin, flat sheets of something marbled with pink and white. A serving is 4.5 grams of fat, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of carbohydrate. You cook them in a frying pan, as if it were real bacon, and they sit there and get crispier, flatly. There’s none of the shrinking you get with real bacon, so after they’re heated through, you’ve still got an array of pink and white flawless rectangles.

Then you bite into one. They’re flavorless! They have a uniform texture which is nothing like bacon, lacking any fat. It’s exactly like thin strips of cardboard.

It’s my own damn fault for buying something that pretends to be meat-like. There’s nothing wrong with vegetarian food, and in fact it’s really tasty and flavorful and textured and complex, except when someone tries to make a pale imitation of something that relies on the complexity of animal tissue, and fails.

Even these Beyond/Impossible burgers have set themselves a low bar of emulating a meat that has a lot of the complexity ground out of it, and they’re not bad, but you can still tell the difference, and who knows how much effort has been put into the chemistry to get an approximation to ground meat flavor.

I should have just made a plateful of beans.

I get email…from Portugal

It’s good to get the Portuguese perspective on something I wrote about Portugal.

I am writing to you from Portugal. As you may imagine, this has to do
with your Pharyngula post “We could be another Portugal!”. I thought
that you might find interesting the attached cartoon. It was published
in an underground newspaper in 1934, that is, at a time in which Salazar
had been prime minister for only two years. It shows him teaching Hitler
and Mussolini how to deal with the opposition. One might think that it
happened to be a Communist newspaper, but no; it was a Republican
newspaper (in the sense of Republican values, not in the sense of the
American Republican Party).

That’s the kind of man American conservatives want to run the country. Yikes.

As was brought up in that other thread, we aren’t even talking about Salazar’s terrible colonial abuses yet.

So, Hadrian’s Wall stops transphobia, too?

I’ve been bewildered by the rapid spread of transphobia across the UK — I know it seems bad everywhere, but it seems to have been caught by more politicians and celebrities and even skeptics in the southern part of the country. I suspect social media is partly to blame, but then, a country that elected Boris Johnson has got some deeper issues, too (the US elected Trump, and I won’t deny the depth of our problems).

So it’s nice to see that Scotland is staying sane. At least, the part that elected Nicola Sturgeon.

Is this another sign of the rifts breaking the UK? How is Wales feeling nowadays? Are we going to have to drop the “U” and just call the place “K” someday?

We need bigger spiders in Minnesota

Poking around in the weeds as we do every summer, looking for spiders, one thing we turn up a lot are frogs. Big frogs. They like to nestle in some nice shady leaves during the day, and we occasionally part some leafy foliage to find a frog looking back at us, as if wondering how dare we intrude on his home. I’ve often thought they need a good predator to teach them a lesson.

Like a clever huntsman spider.

Retreat and predation event near retreat of Damastes sp. (a) Spider specimen of Damastes sp. (THC140, adult female), the prosoma and opisthosoma are approximately 1.5 cm in length (smallest square = 0.1 cm)—Observation 1; (b) Damastes sp. feeding on Heterixalus andrakata (frog) inside of the retreat, built of leaves of Tambourissa sp.—Observation 1, (c) Predation event where Damastes sp. captured Heterixalus andrakata near the retreat—Observation 1; (d) Damastes sp. hiding in the retreat, built of leaves of Cedrela odorata—Observation 4

These cunning ambushers from Madagascar use silk to stitch together a few leaves, making a nice shady refuge that might appeal to a frog looking for respite from the daytime heat. The frog snuggles in, not noticing the large-fanged venomous arthropod lurking in the back, and then snicker-snack, he’s a juicy piece of meat being sucked dry by Damastes.

I don’t know about you, but if I poked my face into a local bush and saw a big glorious spider instead of a fat frog, I’d be delighted. It’s not likely, though, since our harsh winters tend to kill off most of the spiders, giving them only a short growing and breeding season.

Maybe this would be a bright prospect from global warming? Do you think Republicans would be even more resistant to the idea of good legislation if they thought climate change would create a better environment for big hairy blood-suckers? They do have some things in common.

Seattle will allow you to rot!

Yay for the Pacific Northwest! The first official human composting service in the US has opened. They stuff your corpse in a cylinder with wood chips and rails that automatically rotate your rotting body to maximize the rate that you decompose.

I am impressed with how quick the process is — two months, and then you get to be put into the garden.

The Recompose process takes 30 days in a vessel full of wood chips and straw, then another few weeks in “curing bins,” large boxes (one per person) where soil is allowed to rest and continue exhaling carbon dioxide. Once that process is complete, friends and chosen family can either retrieve the soil themselves, or donate it to an ecological restoration project at Bells Mountain near Vancouver, Washington. So far, most have elected to donate.

What I also find appealing is that the service is based in Kent, Washington, which is where I grew up. There’s nothing special about the location except that I like the symmetry of being recycled back into the place I began when I end.