🦤 Vox: Tucker Carlson’s show is back, and it’s on Twitter – “Two weeks after former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s stunning firing from the channel, he seems to have figured out his next step: Twitter.”

Yeah. Fox canned Tucker Carlson, and he decided to take his show to Twitter. Yes, that Twitter. The Twitter that’s been overrun by Nazis and fascists. The one owned by Elon Musk that is slowly breaking down and dying by inches. In order to take his show there, Tucker Carlson had to break some kind of deal with Fox News that would have finished paying out his 25 million dollar contract.

Carlson was already rich AF, I’m sure. I think he’s from money to start with. So maybe 25 million dollars doesn’t mean anything to him. But Twitter is dying. There’s no argument about that – the only thing in question is how much longer it’ll keep staggering down the road.

The reason I point this out is that sometimes I’ll hear people say, “Oh, these Fox News pundits are doing a bit, they don’t really mean what they say, they’re just scamming scared old people, blahblahblah.” I’m sure there’s some of that going on, but you don’t give up 25 million dollars and drag your garbage show to a dying site because you’re doing a bit. You do that because you’re a True Believer.

Either that, or Carlson thinks he can jump in and plug the Alex Jones-shaped hole in the rightwing “news” ecosystem.

🦠 Scientific American: Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments – “‘I now think of COVID as a neurological disease as much as I think of it as a pulmonary disease, and that’s definitely true in long COVID,’ says William Pittman, a physician at UCLA Health in Los Angeles, who treats Ghormley and many similar patients.”

The article is chock full of interesting reading about COVID-19 and long COVID, but the main thing I took away from it is that we’re going to be dealing with the after effects of the COVID pandemic for decades.

🤥 CNN: George Santos pleads not guilty to 13 federal charges, including fraud and money laundering – “Rep. George Santos has pleaded not guilty to 13 federal charges, including allegations of fraud related to Covid-19 unemployment benefits, misusing campaign funds and lying about his personal finances on House disclosure reports.”

I know you’ll be shocked to hear that an obvious con artist and liar was busted doing a bunch of crimes. Santos is claiming he won’t resign his seat and that he’ll still be running for re-election. He’s also calling this a witch hunt, because of course he is, we can thank Donald Trump for this dumb trend. There’s another thing we’ll be recovering from for decades.

💊 NPR: Advisers to the FDA back first over-the-counter birth control pill – “In a unanimous vote, 17-0, a panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration recommended that the agency approve the first over-the-counter birth control pill.”

This is fantastic news! Also, I’m calling it now, some MAGA cultist in one of these women-hating red states will move to block this from happening somehow or pass some legislation outlawing it before the end of the month. Don’t forget: these people hate us and want us trapped in kitchens, barefoot and pregnant and out of options, beholden entirely to men for everything. They will do anything to achieve that.

Photo Credit: Tucker Carlson, by Gage Skidmore. Source. (CC BY-SA 2.0)