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Usually, when we hear about drugs gaining popularity on the black market, people are looking to party, get high, or feed their related addictions. But these days, perhaps unsurprisingly, the drugs shooting up black market sales charts are being purchased by people interested in looksmaxxing, improving fitness, or extending their lifespan. Tonight, we’re gonna party like it’s 2026. Getting ripped (muscular) is the new getting ripped (wasted). Forget meth, opioids, coke, or weed. The new class of drug users is looking for peptides, “a loose cohort of amino acid-based drugs that bond to receptors in the body to toggle various physiological processes on and off. Some peptides are legal and widely used, including insulin and GLP-1 drugs (the ‘P’ is for ‘peptide’) ... the [blackmarket peptides] consist of cryptic jumbles of letters (BPC-157, CJC-1295, TB-500) and promise all kinds of benefits: Want to sleep better? There’s a peptide for that. How about heal your tendinitis faster or lock in at work? There are peptides for that too. Need a tan? Sure. Then there are the ‘stacks,’ such as Wolverine, KLOW and Phoenix — combinations of peptides meant to max out users’ results.” The big question is whether or not peptide aficionados are getting ripped (off). Or worse; doing self harm (getting R.I.P.ed...) One alarming sign is that, in addition to influencers like Joe Rogan, RFK Jr is a fan, and that means prescriptions could soon be moving from the black market to a compounding pharmacy or profit-obsessed telehealth provider near you. Whether you (or your liver) are ready or not, the peptide is about to turn. Bloomberg (Gift Article): The Billion-Dollar Peptides Gold Rush.
2
Nice Going...
“We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational, I mean, they were nice to deal with.” That’s how Donald Trump described his Iranian counterparts, the regime members he was determined to remove (until he wasn’t). I’m guessing victims of the regime’s terror, countries like Israel that the regime has long been determined to destroy, and soldiers tasked with risking their lives to fight against it, are surprised to hear how nice they are to deal with. But not as surprised and saddened as the Iranian people. At the beginning of the war, Trump said, “To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Instead, “the war without has since compounded Iran’s war within, in ways that the world has hardly reckoned with.” Laura Secor in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on The Betrayal of the Iranian People. “’Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach,’ Trump told the Iranian people the night he started the war. ‘This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.’ What a misreading of the moment that was. War has instead done what it usually does: empowered the powerful, rallied the faithful, and allowed an apparatus of repression to present its imperatives in terms of national security.” (Read the first couple paragraphs of this article and see if nice is the first word that comes to mind...)
+ “Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? ‘I never cared about regime change,’ he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.” Tom Nichols: Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost. (It turns out that reality is not so nice to deal with.)
+ Meanwhile, Trump now says, MOU with Iran ‘not final,’ we’ll go ‘back to dropping bombs’ if talks fail. “If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head, okay?”
+ “Iran affirms that it will never seek, develop, or acquire nuclear weapons.” That’s the key line from the agreement that Trump tore up during his first term. And he’s been bombing and bombastic in an effort to get us back anywhere close to that deal again. Here’s the Memorandum of Understanding, annotated by the WSJ (Gift Article).
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Boom Box
Forget cloud nine. Today’s cloud goes to eleven. Data centers are generally unpopular these days. Particularly so among those who live within shouting (or thrumming) distance of one. NYT (Gift Article): The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers. “Yes, the cloud has a sound, and some who live closest to data centers that emit the noise have reached their wit’s end trying to block it out. Residents in three small cities last month filed lawsuits against data centers specifically about noise.”
+ When it comes to these lawsuits, some datacenter owners have a very big thing on their side. The US government. D.O.J. Seeks to Halt Air Pollution Lawsuit Against xAI Data Center.
4
Words Worth
“For the past six years, Casey Harrell’s life has felt like a slow-motion car crash. At 42, he began to lose his voice to the neurodegenerative disease ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. His world shrank as his ability to sing to his young daughter, give a presentation for work or tell a joke eroded. Three years later, researchers at the University of California at Davis placed experimental implants in his brain. He gained something incredible: ‘The ability to talk from my brain.’” WaPo (Gift Article): Two years, 2 million words: How a brain implant transformed an ALS patient’s life.
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Extra, Extra
Snap Decision: “As a House committee debated President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last year, Republican backers repeatedly emphasized that its changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, wouldn’t affect vulnerable people.” Apparently, hungry kids aren’t vulnerable anymore. ProPublica: More Than 770,000 Children Are No Longer Receiving SNAP Benefits After Trump Changes Federal Food Program.
+ Friendly Fire? “President Donald Trump on Wednesday derailed the confirmation process of his own nominee to head the nation’s intelligence agencies, an extraordinary move that upended Senate efforts to renew a crucial surveillance program that expired last week and fueled fresh tensions with fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill.” Trump delays his own national intelligence nominee. (It’s all about pushing the voter ID bill because it’s all about finding ways to tilt the midterms.)
+ Going Steady: After all the attacks on Jerome Powell for not cutting interest rates, the first Fed meeting with Kevin Warsh at the helm ends with rates holding steady. And they may rise later in the year.
+ Serial Sentencing: “The sentence, the maximum the New York law allows, was handed down by Judge Timothy Mazzei after a morning of grueling victim’s family impact statements on the effect Heuermann’s murder spree had on the children and relatives of his victims.” Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann sentenced to life in prison without parole.
+ Messi Job: “Soccer, like much of life, is a team sport, and teams don’t go far unless there’s unselfish cooperation, etc. Everyone knows what to say: no player is bigger than the group, blah, blah, blah. Same in the workplace—don’t eat all the doughnuts in the kitchen, Jason, they’re supposed to be for everyone, blah, blah, blah. Every coach, every boss, you’ve ever had says stuff like this. They’re right. They’re mostly right. Some days…it really is all about the stars.” And the stars showed up big time in early World Cup games, including a ridiculous hat trick from Messi. Messi! Mbappé! Haaland! The World Cup Gets a Starry, Scoring-Filled Spectacular.