The bottom lines of Yellowstone

In vitro: "(of a process) performed or taking place in a test tube, culture dish, or elsewhere outside a living organism."

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my first piece on substack.

Almost anything could show up here. Pork cheeks. NASCAR. Domino collapses of Gestapo vaccine mandates. Scuzzbucket starlets on Entertainment Tonight.

You’re here, and I hope you keep coming back. And I hope you’ll pay for a subscription. I’m aiming to put up 5 new articles a week, every week, on this page. Actual articles.

And with that, let’s get down to business. This piece is about the wildly successful Paramount series, Yellowstone. The Dutton ranch. If you’re unaware, you’ll just have to catch up. I can’t hope to explain four righteous seasons of mayhem and misfits and unbridled revenge on this page.

Yellowstone has a few bottom lines. I want to crystallize them. They run counter to most if not all current—what do people call them?—cultural norms.

Here we go.

If you’re riding a crazed bull and your balls get ripped off, keep riding.

After the ride, as you walk past your balls on the ground, pick them up, put them in a box, and drive yourself to the hospital where the docs will fix you up.

Don’t SAY anything to anybody.

I endorse those bottom lines.

Also, don’t ever look at Beth. As you walk by her in a bar or a restaurant, don’t even sneak a glance. And NEVER, under any circumstances, eat a meal with her.

I like that as well. I don’t favor sitting down and having dinner with people. They talk. I want to chew. I want to taste. I want to find out what this chunk of meat on my plate really is. Because you never know. Of course, the burger in the middle of the lettuce and tomato and peppers and onion rings and pickle and sauce and three cheeses could be cardboard or a combination of stale beef ass and soy. We understand that. But even a rib eye, unwatched from inception, could drop you like fucking venom from a baby rattler.

Force yourself to read this description of, yes, IN VITRO meat, and think about the Yellowstone Cattlemen’s Association surrounding a lab and setting up grenade launchers:

“The objective of this process is to recreate the complex structure of livestock muscles with a few cells. A biopsy is taken from a live animal. This piece of muscle will be cut to liberate the stem cells, which have the ability to proliferate but can also transform themselves into different types of cells, such as muscle cells and fat cells”.

“The cells will start to divide after they are cultured in an appropriate culture medium, which will provide nutrients, hormones and growth factors. The best medium is known to contain fetal bovine serum (FBS), a serum made from the blood of a dead calf, which is going to be rate-limiting, and not acceptable for vegetarians nor vegans. More than one trillion cells can be grown, and these cells naturally merge to form myotubes which are no longer than 0.3 mm; the myotubes are then placed in a ring growing into a small piece of muscle tissue as described in different reviews. This piece of muscle can multiply up to more than a trillion strands. These fibers are attached to a sponge-like scaffold that floods the fibers with nutrients and mechanically stretches them, ‘exercising’ the muscle cells to increase their size and protein content…”

“Throughout this process, the cells are kept in a monitored environment that replicates the temperature inside the body of a cow, for example, to speed up the development of the lab-grown meat.”

“Finally, we are still far away from real muscle, which is made up of organized fibers, blood vessels, nerves, connective tissue and fat cells. This is why the different start-ups working in this area have developed different strategies: some of them work with stem cells or muscle cells to reproduce unorganized muscle fibers, which is the simplest approach, while others are trying to reproduce thin slices of muscles (i.e., muscle fibers and other cell types quite well imbricated together). Nevertheless, the production of a thick piece of meat like a real steak is still a dream, due to the necessity of perfusing oxygen inside the meat to mimic the diffusion of oxygen as it occurs in real tissue.”

Bottom line: If you’re a tourist and you fly into Montana and land at a truly shocking new-ass airport built on Dutton land, and you sit in an Indian casino restaurant eating a slab of in vitro beef, and later that afternoon you relax sipping Johnny Walker in a carriage pulled by dogs through snow-covered Dutton hills and valleys, against a holographic 3-D sky-high backdrop of 1883 wagon-trainers fighting off a band of horse thieves, and Rip and his crazed bunkhouse boys and girls ride down on you with lassos and chains, you’ll get every goddamn thing you deserve. And so will the wolves. Here they come. Like Beth, they skip dinner conversation and go right to the flesh tearing and the bone crunching.

Hail to Yellowstone Season 5.

Memo to Taylor Sheridan: Do not under any circumstances drive Beth completely insane and force her into a psych ward in a straitjacket with a Thorazine drip in her arm.

She’s all we have between us and the scythe-carrying fuckheads who are bent on erasing independent ownership of private property.

I’ve seen them in their offices. They’re not alive. They eat data and models and abstractions.

They’re the in vitro people.

-- Jon Rappoport