@hiker083@WallStreetApes Yes! It made things particularly interesting when flying with children. Luckily we were all able to sit together because we had kids under a certain age allowing us to go on after the VIP people.
The Lone Star tick is spreading rapidly and can make you allergic to beef!
The Good News is that thanks to billions in lab grown meat investment an alternative can be grown that won't trigger the allergy
What a perfect coincidence!
The ingredient that crosses the blood-brain barrier is polysorbate 80. And the reason it's in a cookie tells you everything about how industrial food manufacturing actually works.
Polysorbate 80 is an emulsifier. Pharmaceutical companies use it as a drug delivery vehicle specifically because it permeates the BBB. Researchers at Tianjin Medical University published a study in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity (2024) showing dietary polysorbate 80 disrupted the blood-brain barrier in mice, accelerated cognitive decline, and triggered neuroinflammation. The mechanism: P80 altered gut bacteria, which changed bile acid metabolism, which sent deoxycholic acid into brain tissue, which activated immune cells that damaged neural architecture.
Gut to brain. From an emulsifier in frosting.
Crumbl uses it in their heavy cream blend to keep the texture smooth and the shelf life stable. The same compound that neuroscience labs use to smuggle chemotherapy drugs past the brain's security system is doing double duty as a frosting stabilizer.
The sugar math is almost secondary at this point. A single Crumbl pink sugar cookie contains 76 grams of added sugar. The American Heart Association daily limit is 36 grams for men, 25 for women. One cookie is two to three days of sugar in about four minutes of eating. Crumbl listed the calories per quarter cookie on their menu boards, 180 calories with an asterisk. The full cookie is 760. More than a Big Mac.
Crumbl did $1.2 billion in systemwide sales last year across 1,059 stores. TSG Consumer Partners just bought a stake. Blackstone loaned them $500 million. The fastest-growing cookie chain in America is a private equity play built on a product that a Harvard-trained psychiatrist called "a recipe for metabolic disaster."
The 69 ingredients are doing exactly what they were engineered to do: make you eat another one.
I think I know why everything sucks...
...and it's because everything is fake
We are getting fake college degrees that cost 4 years and six figures that teach you fake education and get you fake jobs.
We are eating fake food, with fake ingredients, funded by fake research.
We are scrolling through fake lives, with fake relationships, who take fake, curated vacations to promote brands that make fake products.
We are voting for fake candidates, who run on fake promises, inside a fake system that was never designed to fix anything.
We are raising kids in fake schools that teach fake history, fake science, which quietly produce fake adults who can't think for themselves.
We are watching fake news, about fake crises, produced by fake journalists, for fake outrage.
We are borrowing fake money that was printed from nothing, to fund a fake economy that would collapse in an afternoon if people stopped pretending it was real.
We are buying fake organic food that's just a paid label, and drinking fake juice with two percent juice in it, and putting fake cheese on cheeseburgers that's just "cheese product" on fake burger meat.
We are donating to fake nonprofits where the moeny never makes it to the people and then funding fake foreign aid that buys real weapons to prop up fake governments.
We are going to fake therapy that teaches fake coping skills instead of telling you hard truths.
We are buying fake furniture made of fake wood that's actually compressed sawdust and glue that looks like wood, ships in fourteen boxes with instructions written in a fake language that isn't quite any language, requires tools it doesn't include, takes 4 hours to build, wobbles on day 1, and is totally destroyed in 6 months.
We are downloading fake "free" apps that charge a subscription after three days for AI features that don't work, hidden behind a paywall we didn't see, protected by a privacy policy we didn't read, buried inside Terms of Service written by lawyers specifically so we wouldn't read them, that we agreed to by tapping a button the size of a thumbnail, that gave a company we've never heard of the right to sell our data to companies we'll never hear of, to build a profile on us we'll never see, to influence decisions we'll never know were made.
IT. IS. ALL. FAKE.
And we all yearn for what was once real.
Don't you remember? Did you forget?
There was a time with a simple handshake between men was a contract.
When bread went stale because... well, that's what real bread does!
When kids played outside all day until it was dark, and nobody tracked them.
When a family could live off a single income.
When music was made by people who LIVED something real and you could feel it.
When schools was HARD... and that was the point!
When doctors knew your name and your family, they even came to your house,
When you bought something once... and it was yours forever.
When the chair your grandmother bought once lasted 70 years and she passed it onto your dad.
And now nothing is real, and that's why everything sucks.