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[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

What Everyone Missed In Leo’s Blow-Up👇

Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $30 billion (~67%) in a month.
The consensus post-mortem, from the Wall Street Journal to the replies on X, is that a young man used 4-to-1 leverage on concentrated positions and got carried out. While that is true, it does not convey any useful information. Leverage is certainly the reason Leopold lost so much, so quickly. But it is not the reason he lost. Leverage is merely a magnifying glass. It doesn’t pass judgement.
The reason the reason his fund was doomed was because he’s wrong. And no one, anywhere, has explained why.
On the morning of Thursday, July 30, before the opening bell, Situational Awareness LP sold its entire public stock portfolio — the long side and the short side together, roughly $16 billion of it — to Citadel in a single block trade.
Millennium Management and Jane Street bid for the assets. Ken Griffin and Citadel won.
That night, Aschenbrenner wrote to his limited partners. Net performance for the month, unaudited: down 67%. Net performance for the year: still up 80%.
"We let you down this month," he wrote. "We came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us."
Six days earlier, on July 24, he had written a different letter. That one reported a 439% net return for the first half of 2026, described the selloff in artificial intelligence stocks as one of the best buying opportunities since early 2025, and invited his investors to wire more money starting August 1. It closed with a postscript: "At times we call out opportunities that seem like a particularly good time to add funds, if you have been waiting for one."
Assets that stood near $45 billion at the start of July finished the month around $10 billion, and roughly half of what remains is a single illiquid private stake in Anthropic.
Leopold is 25 years old. He graduated from Columbia at 19, as valedictorian. He worked at the FTX Future Fund from February to November of 2022, then joined OpenAI's Superalignment team, then was fired in April 2024. Two months after the firing he published a 165-page essay called "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead," raised $225 million from Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and started a hedge fund. He had never managed money before.
Situational Awareness was constructed to express only two ideas.
The first conviction: the physical build-out of artificial intelligence — the chips, the memory, the power, the data centers, the neoclouds — was the trade of the decade. The fund's disclosed long positions read like an inventory of the second derivative of the AI boom. Bloom Energy Corporation (NYSE: BE), fuel cells for data centers. Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) and Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MU), memory. CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWV) and Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ: NBIS), rented compute. IREN Limited, Core Scientific, Applied Digital, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Bitfarms, Bitdeer — bitcoin miners converting their substations into AI compute.
The second conviction: application software was going to be destroyed by A.I. Not disrupted. Obliterated.
Leo explained why on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast, in June 2024:
"I'm so bearish on the wrapper companies because they're betting on stagnation. They're betting that you have these intermediate models and it takes so much schlep to integrate them. I'm really bearish because we're just going to sonic boom you. We're going to get the unhobblings. We're going to get the drop-in remote worker. Your stuff is not going to matter."
That was the whole thesis. Buy the compute. Short the stuff that runs on the compute.
By CNBC's reporting, the short leg included Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE). A 13F does not disclose short stock. It does not disclose swaps. We only know about Adobe because reporters were told… but you can look at the tape and, when you do, it’s clear that Leo was short software in a major way.
Between the June 30 close and the July 29 close — the last session before the block trade cleared his shorts — the two sides of his portfolio did this.
The longs:
· Sandisk: down 55.32%
· Nebius: down 46.33%
· Bloom Energy: down 45.90%
· CoreWeave: down 38.90%
· Micron: down 35.98%
· IREN: down 35.91%
The shorts, over the same 20 sessions:
· Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY): up 37.24%
· Adobe: up 28.49%
· Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU): up 27.64%
· Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE: CRM): up 20.25%
· Veeva Systems Inc. (NYSE: VEEV): up 17.15%
Over that same window the Invesco QQQ Trust fell 10.14% and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust fell 2.32%. Nvidia — the supposed epicenter of the AI trade — fell 5.04%, and finished the full month of July up 0.33%.
This was not an AI crash.
The S&P 500 stayed near its record throughout. This was a violent rotation out of the leveraged, capital-hungry, second-derivative end of the AI complex and into the profitable, cash-generating, asset-light end of it. Which is to say: the market rotated out of exactly what he owned and into exactly what he was short.
Then there is Microsoft.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) closed at $390.54 on Wednesday, July 29. It closed at $451.10 on Thursday, July 30. That is a gain of 15.51% in a single session on 110.2 million shares, against a July average of 37.1 million. Yes, Microsoft reported its fiscal fourth quarter after the close on July 29. But the results were nothing out of the ordinary. Revenue came in at $90.007 billion against a $87.62 billion consensus. That is a 2.7% beat. Earnings were $4.74 per share against $4.21. It was a good quarter. Not a historic one. A 2.7% revenue beat does not add roughly $450 billion of market value to the most widely owned company on earth in six and a half hours. Something else was in that tape.
And the answer is extremely important. Leo blew up quickly because of leverage. But he failed because he is simply wrong.
Aschenbrenner's software thesis rests on a single premise: that a company selling enterprise software is selling the work the software performs. If a model can perform that work, the company is worth nothing.
That premise is what a very smart 25-year-old engineer believes. It is not what anyone who has ever run a business believes.
Nobody buys Microsoft because Microsoft writes the best code. They buy Microsoft because Microsoft is the rail everything else runs on. Active Directory is where your employee identities live. Excel is where your board deck's numbers come from. Teams is where the compliance-recorded conversation happened. Azure holds a FedRAMP High authorization and Department of Defense Impact Level 5 clearance, which means a defense contractor cannot casually swap it out for something cheaper without re-clearing the entire stack with the government.
Veeva runs the customer relationship management and regulatory document systems of the pharmaceutical industry. Nineteen of the top 20 biopharmaceutical companies use Veeva's regulatory information management platform. Those systems are validated under GxP — the good-practice quality regulations that govern anything touching a drug — and 21 CFR Part 11, the Food and Drug Administration's rule for electronic records and signatures. Every major release is formally qualified. When an FDA inspector arrives, the audit trail in that system is the company's defense.
You cannot replace that with a model that is very good at writing code. You would have to re-validate a decade of regulated records, in front of a regulator, on a system with no track record, to save a fee that rounds to nothing in terms of the cost of building a new drug.
How small a fee? Veeva's licensing runs somewhere between roughly $1,800 and $6,600 per sales representative per year. A fully loaded pharmaceutical sales rep costs the employer between $134,000 and $219,000 a year. The software is 1% to 5% of the cost of the person using it.
Microsoft raised the price of a Microsoft 365 E3 seat from $36 to $39 per user per month on July 1 of this year, and E5 from $57 to $60. Add Copilot at $30 and a fully loaded E5 seat costs $1,080 a year. Against a knowledge worker costing $75,000 to $120,000 all-in, that is roughly 1% of the employee.
This is the part the compute maximalists cannot see. These companies are not selling labor. They are selling the rails on which labor runs, at a price so far below the value created that the buyer never bothers to negotiate hard, and with switching costs so high that the buyer could not leave even if he wanted to.
Do people try to leave? Constantly. And they almost always fail. (Ask me how I know!)
Panorama Consulting Group's tracked studies of enterprise resource planning replacements put average cost overruns at 189% across industries. Gartner projects that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business goals. Ripping out a core enterprise system is one of the most reliably disastrous things a large company can attempt, and it was true before anyone had heard of a transformer model.
The incumbents are not being disintermediated by artificial intelligence. They are selling it!
Microsoft passed 30 million paid Copilot seats in the June quarter, up from 15 million in January. Tech wizards like Leo hate copilot. Just like they hated Windows ’97. And everything else Microsoft has ever built. So what? Accenture alone bought 740,000 of them. Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes-Benz and Roche have each deployed more than 90,000. Microsoft's commercial remaining performance obligation — contracted revenue not yet recognized, which is the closest thing software has to a railroad's signed freight contracts — stands at $678 billion, up 84% year over year!
Adobe's AI-first annual recurring revenue passed $500 million in the quarter ended May 2026 and tripled year over year. Salesforce's Agentforce went from $800 million of annual recurring revenue in the January quarter to $1.2 billion by April, up 205%. Veeva is giving its AI agents away free inside Vault CRM through 2030, which is the single most revealing data point in the set: Veeva does not need to monetize AI, because Veeva's moat is the validated record, not the intelligence applied to it.
Aschenbrenner thought AI would eat the applications. Instead the applications are selling AI as an upsell on top of a subscription the customer cannot afford to cancel – because it costs nothing compared to the value it delivers.
These software companies are computing toll booths: they’re what enterprises pay to implement compute. And, as compute gets cheaper, they will generate vastly more revenue, not less. The proof is sitting there in their earnings and cash flows: they’re riding on lower and lower cost of compute, which makes their business more and more efficient.
· Adobe: 36.6% operating margin, 35.6% return on invested capital, capital expenditure of $179 million on $23.8 billion of revenue — 0.75% — and $9.85 billion of free cash flow.
· Veeva: 28.7% operating margin, 68.5% return on invested capital, a 44.3% free cash flow margin, and effectively no capital expenditure at all.
· Salesforce: $41.5 billion of revenue, roughly $14.4 billion of free cash flow, capital expenditure of about 1.4% of revenue, and $72.4 billion of contracted backlog.
· Intuit: $18.8 billion of revenue, roughly $6.1 billion of free cash flow, $124 million of capital expenditure.
Veeva earns 68 cents a year on the dollar. And invests nothing it growing its business.
Adobe currently trades at about 11 times trailing earnings. Salesforce at about 13. Intuit at about 14. These are the multiples of a dying industry, applied to businesses converting a third to nearly half of every revenue dollar into free cash.
This enormous mispricing was manufactured by people who like Aschenbrenner, believed these businesses were doomed. But they aren’t.
And that’s not all.
Aschenbrenner assumed that because a technology is transformative, the capital that builds it will earn its cost.
There is no relationship between those two things. In fact, it’s more likely not to be true.
Leo’s own essay contains the tell: "Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans."
He wrote that as a bull case. But it isn’t. That is a recipe for a financial disaster.
https://t.co/gqUIUAzmYP, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) spent $131.8 billion of capital expenditure in 2025 against $139.5 billion of operating cash flow. That is 94.5% of everything the business generated, poured back into the ground, in a single year. Its 2026 cap ex guidance is $220 billion.
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) spent $91.4 billion in 2025, 55.5% of operating cash flow, and guides to $195 billion to $205 billion this year.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) spent $72.2 billion, 62.4% of operating cash flow, and guides to $125 billion to $145 billion.
Microsoft spent $115.9 billion in the fiscal year that just ended, against $182.9 billion of operating cash flow. Capital expenditure was 34.9% of revenue, up from 18.1% two years earlier. Free cash flow fell to $67.0 billion from $74.1 billion in fiscal 2024, on revenue that grew by more than a third over the same span. Microsoft is running harder and generating less cash. That is what a huge capital cycle does even to the best business in the world.
Moody's projects hyperscaler capital expenditure of $785 billion in 2026 and close to $1 trillion in 2027, funded in part by roughly $175 billion of debt issuance this year. Where will the money come from…?
Oracle: fiscal 2026 capital expenditure of $55.7 billion, free cash flow of negative $23.7 billion, capital expenditure at 82.6% of revenue, long-term debt up from $76.3 billion to $124.7 billion, and $248 billion of future data-center lease obligations not yet on the balance sheet.
CoreWeave: $5.13 billion of 2025 revenue, $14.9 billion of capital expenditure, negative $7.25 billion of free cash flow, net debt at 8.1 times EBITDA, term loans at 11% to 15%, a weighted-average short-term borrowing rate of 12.3%, and a $1 billion private placement in April 2026 at 9.75%.
Meta's Hyperion campus in Louisiana is financed through a special purpose vehicle in which Blue Owl Capital holds 80% and Meta holds 20%, funded by $27.294 billion of senior secured notes at a 6.581% coupon maturing in 2049. The noteholders have no pledge on the physical data center. Their credit is Meta's promise to pay rent starting in 2029, plus a residual value guarantee. Twenty-seven billion dollars of debt, secured by a lease, sitting off the balance sheet.
And… like the EU’s finance minister explained two decades ago… “when it gets serious, you have to lie.”
Microsoft extended server useful lives from three years to four, then to six, adding about $3.7 billion to fiscal 2023 operating income. Alphabet did the same, adding about $3.0 billion. Amazon added about $2.5 billion in 2024. Meta added $2.59 billion in 2025. Oracle added $573 million. Every one of those is a non-cash increase in reported profit produced by an assumption about how long a chip stays useful. It’s a lie.
But not everyone is lying. Effective January 1, 2025, Amazon shortened the useful life of a subset of its servers and networking equipment from six years back to five, citing, in its own 10-K, "the increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning." That cost it $1.4 billion of additional depreciation and $1.0 billion of net income.
Amazon is the operator with the longest and hardest-won experience running data centers at scale, and Amazon is the one telling you the hardware wears out faster than the schedules assume.
How could all of this spending possibly pay off?
Bain & Company's global technology report puts it at roughly $2 trillion of annual artificial intelligence revenue by 2030, and calculates that even if every dollar of on-premise IT budget shifted to the cloud and every dollar of AI productivity savings were reinvested, the industry would still be about $800 billion short. Sequoia Capital's David Cahn, who has been running the same arithmetic since 2023, has escalated his estimate from $200 billion to $600 billion to roughly $840 billion.
Against that: OpenAI's audited 2025 revenue was $13.07 billion, with an operating loss of $20.92 billion. Anthropic's 2025 revenue was $10 billion. Combined, $23 billion.
And of every dollar spent on Nvidia systems, roughly 72 to 75 cents is Nvidia's gross profit. Data center is now 88% of Nvidia's revenue. The margin is not in the build-out. The margin is in selling to the build-out.
What’s about to happen is obvious, because it has happened before.
Between 1865 and 1873 the United States built the most consequential physical network in its history and destroyed an enormous amount of capital doing it.
Track mileage went from 35,085 miles in 1865 to 52,922 in 1870 to 74,096 by 1875. Construction peaked at 7,439 miles laid in 1872. Railroad capital reached roughly $4.5 billion at a time when the entire banking system's capital was $720 million and the federal debt was $2.3 billion. In January 1870, of 896,596 shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, 781,340 — 87% — were railroad shares. From 1870 to 1874, roughly 70% of all railroad securities issued in London were American. American rail bonds paid 6.5% when British consols paid far less, and European capital came for the yield.
Every argument you hear today was made then, too. The railroads will transform the country. Yep, they did compress distance and cost of transportation in a way that seemed impossible only a few years earlier. And it didn’t make any difference.
On September 18, 1873, Jay Cooke & Co. failed. Cooke had contracted to place $100 million of Northern Pacific 7.3% gold bonds, but sold less than $20 million. He ended up effectively owning 75% of the railroad he was supposed to be financing. And it failed. The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days — the first closure in its history.
By 1876, 134 railroads were in default on $500 million of bonds out of roughly $2 billion outstanding. By 1877, 20% of American railroad track mileage was in receivership. European investors are estimated to have lost around $600 million between 1873 and 1879.
A very large fraction of the capital that built the American rail network was lost.
And where the roads survived, competition took the returns. Revenue per ton-mile fell from 1.88 cents in 1870 to 0.73 cents in 1900, a decline of about 61%. Rate wars on the New York-to-Chicago corridor drove the through rate from $1.88 down to 25 cents, then 20 cents, and no pooling agreement stabilized the worst of it until late 1885.
Every additional mile of track made the network more valuable to America and less valuable to the men who had paid for it.
The AI build-out will have the same problem – but it will be much, much worse. Compute will be a pure commodity.
Nobody disputes that the models are transformative. The problem is, that’s true of all of them.
Which of the second-derivative names Aschenbrenner owned has route control, like a monopoly railroad? Bitcoin miners with retrofitted substations? Rented compute resold at a spread? Memory, an industry that has never once earned its cost of capital through a full cycle? Those are not toll booths. Those are the Northern Pacific just before bankruptcy.
The railroads made a fortune – but not for their investors.
Adams Express Company was incorporated in 1854 with $1.2 million of capital. It did not own a single mile of track. It bought space on other men's trains and moved parcels, money and valuables on them. By 1866 its capital was $10 million and it was paying an 8% dividend quarterly. By 1875 its capital was $12 million. It paid an unbroken $8 per share annual dividend from 1869 forward — straight through the depression that put a fifth of American rail mileage into receivership, and straight through the next one in the 1890s.
American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) declared a $6 dividend in 1869, cut it to $3 in the depression year of 1877, restored it to $6 by late 1881, and held it there for the rest of the century. An 1888 board report showed ten-year net earnings of $26.24 million.
By 1890, the express companies were handling more than 115 million packages a year over 174,535 miles of railroad and steamship routes. And they didn’t own a single locomotive or a single boat.
Pullman's Palace Car Company was organized in 1867 with $1 million of capital. It did not own track either. It owned the sleeping cars and leased them to the railroads. Capital grew to $36 million by the early 1890s with nearly $25 million of accumulated surplus. Dividends ran 9.5% to 12% from 1867 to 1871 and 8% annually for decades after. In 1879, with 464 cars out on lease, it earned gross revenue of $2.2 million and net profit of almost $1 million.
Pullman put out $1 million of equity and earned $1 million a year on a network that cost other people billions and bankrupted a third of them.
Adams Express converted itself into a closed-end investment fund in 1929 and is still listed today as Adams Diversified Equity Fund (NYSE: ADX). The company that rented space on the railroads outlived almost all of them.
I’d bet a lot of money that Leo had never heard of any of these businesses.
But for people who are experienced in putting capital at risk, the pattern is not subtle or hard to understand. When an economy builds an expensive new network, the capital that builds the network earns a poor return because competition, obsolescence and overbuild strip it away. The businesses that ride on the network at near-zero incremental capital cost, and that own the customer relationship, the data or the standard, keep the profit.
I’ve seen this entire act before, during my career.
In the five years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, carriers poured more than $500 billion into fiber, switches and wireless networks. By the early 2000s no more than 2% of North American long-haul capacity was in use. Global Crossing raised roughly $20 billion, built 100,000 miles of undersea fiber, filed for bankruptcy in January 2002, and saw its assets change hands for about $250 million — roughly 1.25 cents on the dollar of invested capital. WorldCom filed six months later, at the time the largest bankruptcy in American history.
Who got the value? Google, Amazon and Netflix, which built businesses on top of bandwidth that had become nearly free because somebody else had already gone bankrupt providing it. By 2018 and 2019, Google and Facebook were funding roughly four of every five dollars of new transatlantic cable investment — buying the rails only once the rails were cheap and only once they owned the applications that made the rails worth owning.
Leopold Aschenbrenner is not stupid. He is the opposite of stupid, which is part of the problem. He is a brilliant technologist who has never had to make a payroll, never had to explain to an auditor why the electronic records changed, never had to decide whether to spend eighteen months and $40 million ripping out a working system to save $200,000 a year in license fees.
He looked at enterprise software and saw code. A businessman looks at enterprise software and sees the thing his company cannot operate without for a single day, priced at 1% of the employee who uses it, backed by a validated audit trail he would have to rebuild from scratch in front of a regulator, and running on a contract he signed for three years.
An investor who has read a balance sheet from 1874 sees $220 billion of annual capital expenditure, an 8-times-levered reseller of rented compute borrowing at 12%, $27 billion of data-center debt hidden in a special purpose vehicle, and useful-life assumptions that the most experienced operator in the business is quietly walking back.
The kid believed the technology determines the return. But it never has.
It’s the capital structure that determines the returns: who controls the standards, who controls the customer, and who owns the data? Yes, the A.I. models will change everything. But that does not mean the people building the machines will be paid for it.
The money will be made where it was made in 1874 and again in 2004: by the toll booths riding on top of somebody else's ruinous capital expenditure.

[Van Jones @VanJones68]

I'm tired of being told that, to be a progressive, I now must swear allegiance to crazy ideas.

I'm a strong Democrat, with a winning bipartisan track record. I'm rooted in progressive ideals and policies: criminal justice reform, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free education, clean air and water. These are ideas I have fought for my entire adult life.

But some people in groups like the DSA are pushing an agenda FAR outside those ideals. Supporting Hamas is not progressive. "No police, no prisons, no borders" is not progressive. Celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians is not progressive. These ideas are REGRESSIVE.

If there were no police or prisons, if anyone in your neighborhood could do whatever they wanted, while politicians cheered on terror groups — would that represent PROGRESS to you? No, that would be a step back. Those are REGRESSIVE ideas.

On the other hand, if everybody could see a doctor when they got sick, get a good, free education and breathe clean air — would that represent progress? Yes. Those are PROGRESSIVE ideas.

They are NOT the same thing. And the difference matters.

Some defend the far left by claiming they only want Nordic-style social democracy. If that were true, I might applaud them. I want those policies, too! But what does universal healthcare have to do with Hamas? With abolishing all law enforcement? With erasing all borders? With treating every wealthy person as a villain? Ideas matter. And these are terrible ideas.

Right now, extremists are trying to sneak backwards proposals into our party, hoping mainstream Democrats are too frustrated with MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment to notice.

But we see you.

Yes, we want our Democratic Party to be a big tent. But we don’t need "party poopers. So STOP pooping in the punch bowl — and telling us the turds are ice cubes.

They aren't. And we are smart enough to know the difference. 💩

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Cliff is one of my favorite people to call, ask some big questions, and then shut up, and listen.

[david friedberg @friedberg]

they’re not jobs if they’re not valued. they’re not valued if there aren’t customers out there willing to pay them for their great work. needing the government to “create” a job is tantamount to welfare and that level of welfare resolves these individuals to a dependency on the government and lack of economic mobility. and chains our people, collectively, to a more indentured future.

you may be well intentioned but you have, and always will, fail to see the destitute folly of government as a job creation engine.

i have tried to engage you on this topic, in good faith, with empiricism and reasoning, but you have only dodged my points and pivoted to some populist refrain about the importance of taxation and the evils of productivity-driven success.

i can only assume you’re dodging these truths because you and the rest of the politburo leadership have deemed the conversation unsafe speech and put your oligopoly at risk.

let’s leave it at that then.

perhaps if your ways get their day, we can all bask in the glories of the dark ages ahead.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

People mistakenly believe peptides are only good.

Peptides can be bad, too.

They can cause adverse effects. Some dangerous.

I did a peptide experiment and measured its effects in my body. The results are complicated.

I tried a peptide called CJC-1295.

It pushed my growth hormone up by ~8x. That’s good. That’s what it was supposed to do.

But, it also came with adverse effects:
> increased my morning fasted blood sugar up 20%
> increased stress hormone by 12%
> tanked my REM sleep by 23%
> made my pancreas work 53% harder and was still losing to rising blood glucose
> increased my insulin resistance by 50%

These were the most obvious side effects, and I only ran a very narrow panel for this experiment.

So I’m sure there’s more.

I stopped after two doses, without even reaching the intended target dose.

For those of you new to peptides, your body sends instructions to itself using tiny chemical messengers called peptides. There are thousands of them.

For example, GLP-1s are drugs that take an existing class of short-lived peptides and modify them to extend their activity duration, which turns them into drugs, following rigorous clinical testing.

CJC-1295 is one of those peptide-drugs. It tells your brain to release more growth hormone. Growth hormone is your body's signal to build muscle, repair tissue, and recover.

However, and like most grey market peptides, CJC-1295 did not succeed its clinical trial, and hence never became an “official” drug.

There is a version called CJC-1295 with DAC. DAC is an attachment glued onto the peptide that makes it last for days in your body instead of hours. One shot, longer effect, just like GLP-1s.

Why people use it: more growth hormone could mean better recovery, leaner body, faster healing.

The experiment I completed.

Two injections a week of CJC-1295 with DAC:
> 1.2 mg
> 1.8 mg

48 hours after the first injection I was nearly comatose. It felt like severe jet lag, the type you’d feel after traveling nine time zones. My sleep was wrecked and I felt continuously awful.

My REM sleep dropped by 23%. REM is when your brain processes memories and repairs itself. Less time for my brain to repair itself. During the experiment, I never felt rested and always fatigued.

Why we chose CJC-1295 with DAC.

Some will say we picked the wrong peptide. They will say I should have used a different version, CJC-1295 without DAC, mixed with another peptide called Ipamorelin. We went with CJC-1295 with DAC instead as it has the most controlled studies.

CJC-1295 with DAC has 2 controlled trials in healthy adults. Ipamorelin alone has 1 controlled trial in healthy adults, plus 1 study that failed when they tried it on bowel surgery patients. The mix of the two has zero controlled trials.

On Ipamorelin, it copies a chemical called ghrelin, the one that makes you hungry. On its own it gives you a quick burst of growth hormone that fades fast. It does not keep your longer acting growth signal (called IGF-1) up. Clinics mix Ipamorelin with CJC-1295 no-DAC because the two together are supposed to work better. But we don’t know if that’s accurate because we don’t have trial data.

This is a problem with peptides. Almost none of them have been tested properly. We are flying blind. Most of what people use is based on what someone said online, what a clinic claims, or what a friend reports from their subjective feelings.

Peptides have the potential to be great when well-studied.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Hello Julia, sans aucune ironie, c'est top que tu prennes le temps de te renseigner. Mais le problème quand on lit Marx aujourd'hui, c'est qu'on prend pour acquis sa prémisse de départ, alors qu'elle a été démontée scientifiquement il y a plus de 150 ans.

Toute la pensée de Marx repose sur la théorie de la valeur-travail. L'idée que la valeur d'un bien vient de la quantité de travail nécessaire pour le produire. Si tu acceptes cette prémisse, alors oui, tout son raisonnement tient. Le capitaliste "vole" la plus-value du travailleur, l'exploitation est mathématique, la révolution est inévitable.

Sauf qu'en 1871, trois économistes (Menger en Autriche, Jevons en Angleterre, Walras en Suisse) découvrent indépendamment la même chose : la valeur n'est pas objective, elle est subjective et marginale.

Un verre d'eau dans le désert vaut une fortune. Le même verre à côté d'une rivière ne vaut rien. Le travail incorporé est identique. Donc le travail ne détermine pas la valeur. C'est le consommateur qui valorise un bien selon son utilité marginale dans un contexte donné.

Exemple concret : tu peux passer 1000 heures à tricoter un pull moche que personne ne veut. Selon Marx, ce pull a énormément de valeur (beaucoup de travail incorporé). Selon la réalité, il ne vaut rien. Parce que personne n'en veut.

À l'inverse, Bernard Arnault crée des milliards de valeur non pas parce qu'il "exploite" mais parce qu'il a su anticiper et organiser des désirs humains à grande échelle. La valeur est créée par la coordination, pas extraite par le vol.

Cette découverte (la révolution marginaliste) a invalidé tout l'édifice marxiste. Pas pour des raisons idéologiques, pour des raisons scientifiques. C'est pour ça que plus aucun département d'économie sérieux au monde n'enseigne Marx comme un cadre d'analyse valide. On l'enseigne en histoire de la pensée.

Maintenant, le truc important. Si ton intention en lisant Marx c'est d'aider les pauvres (c'est une intention noble), alors tu vas être surprise par ce qui suit.

Regarde les chiffres de la Banque mondiale. En 1820, 90% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Cette chute historique ne s'est PAS produite dans les pays qui ont appliqué Marx. Elle s'est produite dans les pays qui ont libéralisé leur économie.

Chine post-1978, Vietnam post-1986, Inde post-1991, Pologne post-1989. À chaque fois qu'un pays libéralise, des centaines de millions de gens sortent de la pauvreté en une génération. À chaque fois qu'un pays applique Marx (URSS, Cambodge, Corée du Nord, Venezuela), c'est la famine et les goulags.

Ce n'est pas une opinion, c'est l'expérience la plus massive jamais menée en sciences sociales. Plusieurs milliards de cobayes humains, sur un siècle.

Donc paradoxalement, si tu aimes vraiment les pauvres, la position la plus cohérente n'est pas d'être marxiste. C'est d'être pour la liberté économique. Parce que c'est empiriquement la seule chose qui a jamais sorti massivement les gens de la misère.

Pour creuser, je te recommande trois lectures qui vont changer ta vision :

"La Loi" de Frédéric Bastiat (court, lumineux, gratuit en ligne)
"La Route de la Servitude" de Hayek
"Économie en une leçon" de Henry Hazlitt
Bonne lecture, et vraiment chapeau de chercher à comprendre plutôt que de rester dans tes certitudes. C'est rare.

[Siaxares 🇮🇷 🇺🇸 @siaxares]

Speaking as someone inside Iran who stayed connected through Starlink during the total internet blackout, I want to say this loud and clear:

President Trump’s recent video on Truth Social — showing Iranian protesters writing “President Trump please help” on walls, waving Lion and Sun flags alongside American flags, replaying raw footage of the revolution and saying “I’m with you, I will fight for you and I will win for you” — is music to our ears.

The flames of the Lion and Sun uprising have not died down. They are simply waiting for the right moment to roar again.

It was @realDonaldTrump, alongside @netanyahu and @PahlaviReza who told us to stay in our homes, stay safe, and wait until help arrives and Operation Epic Fury is complete. That’s exactly what millions of us have been doing.

There is enormous pent-up anger, grief, and anxiety inside Iran right now — but also real hope. All of it is ready to be unleashed the moment the opportunity comes.

The Iranian people are deeply pro-America. We need America’s support to finally envision a free Iran — a nation where values very similar to American ones can flourish once more, just as they did before 1979 and the arrival of this cursed, evil regime.

Make no mistake: this is not a regime that will fade away or soften its terror on its own. Trust me when I say we have tried every possible path short of war. We exhausted every peaceful option — massive street protests, open resistance, attempts at gradual reform, dialogue, you name it. None of it worked. The regime’s only consistent answer has been bullets, executions, and fresh waves of fear.

Right now there is deep internal fighting among regime figures. Mullahs and the IRGC are turning on each other, while the so-called “reformist” faction is nothing but the same old Islamic Republic in nicer clothes and smoother language. Do not be fooled by them. The only reason they are clashing is because their money flow has been disrupted, so they blame one another and scramble for more power.

We tried to bring this regime down before, but we were mostly unarmed while they were armed to the teeth. Over 40,000 were slaughtered in cold blood, with many more executed, tortured, or thrown in prison. We need help to level the playing field. Then we will rise again—and this time, we will succeed. When we do, we will never forget who stood with us; our debt will be paid in full and more.

Iranians are more pro-America than many Americans on X, because we have seen American values and said: “Yes, that is what we want too.” That includes the First Amendment — which needs no explanation — and the Second Amendment, which hits especially close to home. An armed Iranian people could never have been oppressed like this for so long. No one should ever have to surrender their guns, and no one should have to hide like a criminal just for having free internet. I should not be forced to run and conceal myself for simply owning @Starlink.

The Iranian diaspora has been our voice when we had no internet. They have accurately represented us during these protests while the talks were happening, making it clear we reject any negotiation with this regime and want Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to represent the Iranian people — because no one inside this regime ever can.

We are anxiously waiting for the opportunity. Let’s see if it comes. But make no mistake: the majority of Iranians feel exactly as I do. Make Iran Great Again.

The world will soon understand why we say:
Anything for freedom. Anything to end this evil.

#IranMassacre‌
#IranRevolution2026‌
#KingRezaPahlavi‌ForIran

[Reza Pahlavi @PahlaviReza]

We will Make Iran Great Again.

"I begin today in the memory of my fallen compatriots.

The heroes of my country who have fought, bled, and died not only for their own freedom and for the liberation of Iran from the clutches of an evil, depraved regime that has held us each hostage for 47 years, but for the freedom, peace, and security of the world.

When I speak to these heroes, as they come off the streets from protests or as they prepare for the final battle, they often ask me: “Tell the world, we are not just fighting for ourselves. We are fighting for them, too.” So it is in that spirit and in their honor that I ask you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine a free Iran.

No more nuclear threats;
No more terrorism;
No more hostage taking;
No more closing of the Strait of Hormuz;
No more blackmailing of the global economy.

Imagine an Iran that—instead of exporting terrorism—is promoting freedom:

Freedom to its people;
Stability to its neighbors;
National security and economic opportunity for the United States and the free world.

Can you imagine Iran going from “Death to America” to “God Bless America”?

I can.

Because I have seen the true soul of my people. On 9/11—one of America’s darkest hours—when your enemies, and even some who claimed to be your friends, celebrated those horrific attacks, the Iranian people did something the world wasn’t supposed to see. They risked their lives to hold candlelight vigils in the heart of Tehran.

They didn’t do it for a camera. They did it for a friend in pain.

That is the true face of Iran. Unlike the regime that worships death and destruction, the Iranian people celebrate life and liberty.

That’s why I can imagine an Iran that exports engineers instead of extremists.

Startups instead of suicide bombers.

Energy instead of hatred...

I can imagine a Middle East where Iran is no longer a source of chaos… but an anchor of stability.

An Iran that does not fear its people, doesn’t threaten its neighbors, doesn’t isolate itself from the world.

Imagining this is not difficult, because this is exactly what Iran once was. And what it can be again.

When Iran is free, the Middle East changes.

When Iran is free, America regains a great friend.

A free Iran represents the single largest untapped economic opportunity of the 21st century.

A nation of 93 million people—highly educated, entrepreneurial, and pro-West—finally unleashed.

Over the next decade alone, a strategic U.S.–Iran partnership could generate more than $1 trillion for the American economy.

Imagine a new Middle East where Iran is a friend of Israel. Where the Abraham Accords are extended into the Cyrus Accords, named for Cyrus the Great, the Iranian king who issued the first charter of human rights, and whose vision of religious tolerance inspired Thomas Jefferson.

Today the Islamic Republic tramples upon Iran’s millennia-old legacy of tolerance for religious minorities, and wages a war on them. In a country with the fastest rate of growth of Christianity in the world, the regime and its IRGC storm into and ransack underground house churches, detain and torture pastors, and persecute and execute evangelists and Christian converts. This is the Islamic Republic. Not the true Iran. Not the vision we have for the future.

Under this vision, Iran, the United States, Israel, and our Arab neighbors are bound together in peace and prosperity rather than conflict and terror.

A Middle East where we will be able to handle our own affairs and manage our own backyard– where we can put an end to the endless wars and allow our American friends to bring back their sons and daughters in uniform and focus where they want to: back home.

A free Iran is not a fantasy.

A free Iran is within reach—right now.

But as we all know, freedom never comes free. My compatriots have shown this. They are not asking for a handout, and they do not expect their freedom to be handed to them on a silver platter. The Iranian people have already paid an unimaginable price for their liberty.

In January of this year, I called on my compatriots to go out and protest against the regime that has oppressed them for 47 years. Millions of them responded, igniting the largest wave of protests in Iran’s modern history—sweeping every single one of our 31 provinces.

On January 8th at 8 o’clock, they took their lives in their own hands and took to the streets to fight against the occupying regime. At that exact moment, Khamenei, Larijani, Ghalibaf, and the rest of their mafia shut off the Internet.

Under the cover of darkness, and with a depravity that shocked the world, they massacred more than 40,000 Iranians, and injured over 300,000. They did not stop their terror on the streets.

Wounded protesters were hunted down in hospital beds and shot in cold blood. Men and women were raped in secret prisons. Even nurses, ambulance medics, and doctors who dared to help protesters were tortured, raped, and killed.

Families were forced to search through thousands of unmarked body bags, and the regime even charged grieving parents for the bullets used to kill their own children. To this day, mothers still search for their sons, and daughters still ask when their fathers will come home.

To this day, 29 days to be exact, Iranians have been cut off from the world with almost no access to the Internet. Fearful of my courageous compatriots, Khamenei Junior and his cabal of criminals, have dragged Iran from the 21st century to the Dark Ages. They are afraid that when they do, the world will again see the defiant will of a nation united and determined to topple it.

Life can never go back to normal. There is a sea of blood between the people and the regime. After all the massacres, after all they have sacrificed, they will never agree to swap one tyrant for another.

And another anti-American tyrant will not serve American interests either. The only thing that the remnants of this regime can be relied on to do is to buy time, to cheat, and to steal. They will never be honest or true partners for peace. President Trump was right when he said, “We don’t want to come back every two years.”

But if a faction of the regime is left in power, that is exactly what will happen. It will buy time. It will pretend to negotiate. And then, it will return to its old, jihadist ways of threatening America, its security, and its interests.

They might promise a short period of artificial calm. But it would inevitably be followed by the same terrorism, the same nuclear blackmail, and the same cries of “Death to America.”

Because the truth is simple: The Islamic Republic cannot reform itself. You cannot reform a snake. Venom is in its DNA.

This extends to the corrupt and brutal thugs of the IRGC. Because the IRGC is not Iran’s national army. Indeed, it does not even have the word Iran in its name! It is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It serves its own poisonous ideology of terror, not Iran’s national interests. So it can certainly never be a partner to serve America’s interests.

The only path to lasting peace and stability runs through a clean break with this regime.

For the first time in 47 years, President Trump’s strategy has given us a real chance to achieve that outcome. For decades, every American president since Carter chose to try to manage this looming threat rather than resolve it. Each of them has failed. They have only made the problem worse. The result has been more dead Iranians and more dead Americans.

So the mullahs operated on the assumption that America didn’t have the stomach to confront them decisively.

That assumption began to collapse when President Trump ordered the strike on Qasem Soleimani.

And once the myth of the regime’s invincibility was shattered, possibilities began to move in a different direction.

Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury have done something extraordinary. The killing of Khamenei and many of his henchmen, the destruction of more than 80% of the regime’s ballistic missile arsenal, and the obliteration of the nuclear sites have leveled the playing field.

This did not happen by accident. It happened because of President Trump’s resolve and the courage of American troops. On behalf of millions of Iranians, we thank them.

Their sacrifice was not in vain. For the first time in nearly half a century, the Iranian people have a fighting chance to end this regime’s terror and chaos. The regime’s repressive machine has been degraded, its terror network cut off, and its leadership decimated.

But for this all to be worth it — the sacrifices of both Americans and Iranians— for the goodwill between our two peoples which you see on vibrant display here today, to continue — we must finish the job. This regime, in its entirety must go.

If we do not finish the job and leave a rump of the regime in place, the threat posed by this Islamic Republic will not be solved. It will only be made worse. Those who have spent 47 years sewing chaos, cannot be trusted to bring about stability. Terrorists cannot be trusted to bring peace. If they are left in place, they will bring only more of the instability, chaos, and destruction they have brought for 47 years.

They are not pragmatists. They are thugs. They are not deal makers. They are agents of chaos.

But the other path, the path which finishes the job once and for all, will leave a legacy of peace and prosperity that historians and scriptwriters could only dream of.

That legacy will belong to the heroic people of Iran and to the only President of the Untied States who had the courage and the character to see the mission through. Today, that is the precipice on which we stand. The precipice of true greatness. Iranians are ready to play their part.

The final blow will be delivered by the people of Iran themselves. They are already on the ground, and they have already demonstrated their extraordinary courage. They are ready to fight again But they must be given the chance to do so.

As President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and myself have urged, they are taking shelter while the bombs are falling. But when the right moment arrives—as in January—I will call on them to rise up again. And when they do, I have no doubt they will put an end to the dark chapter of the Islamic Republic once and for all and reclaim their homeland, their dignity, and their future.

But bringing down a regime is only the beginning. What matters next is whether the nation can unite around a leader with broad legitimacy.

Across Iran and throughout the diaspora, millions of Iranians have called on me to lead the transition to democracy. I have accepted that call not to serve myself, but to serve my nation and my people.

In recent years I have unified a broad coalition of dissidents—republican and monarchist, left and right, men and women of all ages, religions, and ethnicities. Even people who were former political opponents, have joined the movement to free Iran under my leadership.

Equally important: Iran’s armed forces and bureaucracy will follow me. Thousands of the regime’s military officials—some very senior—have signaled their readiness to join me through a digital defections platform my team established several months ago.

Many of these officials have refused to obey the orders to kill civilians during the January uprising. That’s why the IRGC had to import thugs from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon to do the dirty work. With my leadership, they and others who don’t have blood on their hands will play a role in stabilizing the country during the transition.

Iran is not Iraq. We will not repeat the catastrophic mistake of de-Baathification. There will be no dissolution of bureaucratic institutions, no power vacuum, no chaos.

The transition will be orderly. My team of experts produced a detailed plan called the Iran Prosperity Project, or IPP. This is a roadmap for national recovery, including the first 100 days after the regime’s collapse and the longer-term reconstruction and stabilization of our country.

What we ask of America now is simple: stay the course. Do not throw this crumbling regime a lifeline. Pave the way for the Iranian people to finish the job.

Because freedom is not an American story alone. It is the story of all people who refuse to live on their knees. It is the story America wrote in 1776. And today, it is the story the Iranian people are writing with their courage and their sacrifice. We prefer to die standing than to live kneeling.

2026 marks the 250th birthday of the United States. It is my hope and my belief that history will also remember 2026 as the year of Iran’s rebirth. What my people are fighting for is the rebirth of our 2,500 year old civilization. When the black page of the illegitimate Islamic regime is turned, that is the tradition and the heritage to which Iran will return.

So in 2026, our two nations are reaching for a new chapter, both determined to be great.

President Trump rightly observed that the Iranian people are the Iranian regime’s longest-suffering victims. He told them: the hour of your freedom is at hand. And they are ready to meet this moment.

The Iran story is not yet finished. Great civilizations outlast even their most vicious occupiers. With your help and with the courage, sacrifice, and heroism of Iran’s greatest youth, our best, latest chapter is being written right now. When it is done, a free and democratic Iran will stand alongside the United States as a partner, an ally, and a friend.

President Trump is making America great again. I intend to make Iran great again. Together, with my brave compatriots, that is exactly what we will do.

Thank you. God bless America. Long live Iran."

Remarks at CPAC 2026 in Dallas, Texas

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

Going to leave you with this tonight:

The best thing you can do for yourself is actively increase your surface area for luck to hit you.

Go outside, travel more, go to new cafes, museums, events, take a new route home, go for hikes, see cities, countrysides, take your notebook, speak to people, ask questions, start businesses - go on more side quests.

You can literally just do things, and the more you do, the more serendipity and synchronicity will find you.

Night gang.

[StoicStack @StoicStack]

@ClubWPTGold @WPT @WynnLasVegas @tylerpoker

[StoicStack @StoicStack]

@SolanaXMario 3WKT6RQ5pVhqS4zoeX76JsPmEEGYzJDi9Dk9WjgvWnRT

[Based Bandita @BasedBandita]

@elonmusk @xai

[Fabs 💹🧲 @Fabale2246]

@DXY_6900 @MattyBoi9619 $DXY only for the believers!

[DXY 6900 US Degen Index 💹🧲 @DXY_6900]

"It's unreal", "So damn Awesome" @MattyBoi9619 ♥️
LFG legend!!💹🧲

[Jared Kubin @JaredKubin]

2025 Investor Manifesto: Variant Views + Changes in Vol

Throw out everything you have read in textbooks. Throw out history heuristics. Throw out comps. Just torch it all. Modern Portfolio Theory is dead.

Hubris is the downfall of mankind. Hubris in investing is being static. Not being curious. Not continually searching for upgrades to your process. “This is expensive”. “This is dumb”. “I only invest in quality companies”. Hubris is saying my process is perfect and it doesn’t need to change. Those people are dead man walking.

I see lots of crying on X about TRUMP Coin. Why? “It doesn’t make sense!”. Market cap is telling you YOU ARE WRONG. Willing buyers transacting with willing sellers. Everyone should be in AWE of the technology + liquidity + transparency we are seeing. Never in history has transacting been so seamless and clear. Never before in history could you make bets that 100x overnight. It makes people uncomfortable because they have to actually put RISK ON. They have to ignore what they learned in their Ivy League finance class. It’s hard to let go of your ego.

The world has changed over the last 5 years. COVID was the major catalyst. WFH, liquidity, online betting, crypto, public markets, consumer behavior, bond markets, factors, the speed of information, your competition… it’s all different. Forever changed.

To thrive over the next 10 years it’s going to take radical reprogramming. You have to be open to ideas that you previously laughed at. You have to push yourself to learn new technologies… to at least understand. ML + AI + speed of liquidity will leave you in the dust if you aren’t evolving. And fast.

What is everything you believe in the investing world? You better do an inventory and really figure out FAST what is truth and what is a sacred cow that will get you slaughtered.

The world is moving towards LIQUIDITY + THEMES + CHANGES IN VOL. That is a very different world from a comp sheet with PEs and doing reverse DCFs. Cycles are faster and more violent than ever before. The opportunity cost has never been higher. The ACTUAL cost of being wrong will cost you your savings or career. VOL SPIKES and VOL CRUSHES are the norm now. Money can be made both ways!

Now, for the important part … there are THREE fundamental truths that will not change. ONE: having a unique view is the foundation for any investor. Variant view + the willingness to put on risk capital is your immediate feedback loop to if you should be investing your own capital / someone else’s or just BOGLING into etfs and never think about markets. TWO: changes in VOL are the opportunities. The theme of 2025 is going to be “follow the VOL”… marry your variant views with changes in VOL and you have an ALPHA MAP. THREE: Always manage risk. I should have put risk as ONE. But I wanted you to read it last. ALWAYS MANAGE YOUR RISK. When the probabilities change so should your risk.

Now a WARNING: The cost of change is pain. Pain leads to emotions….. GREED will crystallize this cycle. Greed + Hubris is poison. Only through deep daily reflection can you attempt to avoid both. We are going to see unimaginable GREED this cycle. It will whisper in your ear… ignore your variant views, IGNORE risk management. Your friends are APING into coins and making millions, you could to… no research necessary. Put your kids into a coin you have done no work on but your buddy sends you screenshots on his account balance. Resist. Do the work. Build the variant view. Manage risk. TAKE YOUR SHOTS when your views and VOL align. Waiting for 100% confirmation will be too late… ignoring ONE TWO THREE above you will lose it all. Everyone is going to want to sell you a product with the GREED part of your brain lighting up. Resist the substack FURUS. Resist the “short cut”. THERE IS NO EASY BUTTON. There is no shortcut. Do the work. Be prepared. Be open to new ideas. And above all… always manage risk. Bull and Bear markets are BOTH opps.

God Speed 🏴‍☠️

[DXY 6900 US Degen Index 💹🧲 @DXY_6900]

Another ATH for $SPX 💹🧲

$DXY is stupidly undervalued. People aren't ready for what's coming 🚀🚀

[DXY 6900 US Degen Index 💹🧲 @DXY_6900]

#DXY6900 is quietly building a movement of believers that will flip the DOLLAR.

Are you ready for $DXY anon?

[DXY 6900 US Degen Index 💹🧲 @DXY_6900]

#DXY6900 has arrived!💹🧲
A mission to break the Matrix.
A currency for the degenerate believers!

[Saud @DruBat95]

Marriage, at its core, is a voluntary covenant, a profound act of courage and responsibility that binds two souls in the face of life’s chaos. You ask why we marry? It’s not merely for love, though love is the spark. It’s because we crave a partner to stand with us against the abyss of existence, to share the burden of being. We seek someone to witness our struggle, to affirm that our trials—our victories and defeats—are not in vain.

Man is a creature of meaning, and marriage is a crucible for forging it. You marry to have someone to turn to at day’s end, to wrestle with the weight of your thoughts, your doubts, your aspirations. It’s a commitment to face the dragon of life together, to build something enduring—a family, a legacy, a microcosm of order in a world that tilts toward entropy. This isn’t sentimentality; it’s a pragmatic necessity.
Alone, you’re vulnerable to despair.

Together, you’re fortified, not because life gets easier, but because shared suffering has purpose.
Consider the alternative: a life unwitnessed, where your joys and sorrows echo into the void. Marriage says, “I see you. Your existence matters.” It’s a vow to hold each other accountable, to call one another to higher virtue, to confront the flaws and shadows within. It’s not about fleeting happiness—happiness is a byproduct, not the goal. It’s about meaning, the kind that emerges when you sacrifice your selfish impulses for something greater.

Critics might claim you can find meaning elsewhere—in friendships, in solitude. And there’s truth there; the individual must stand upright before entering the union. But marriage is a unique crucible, a sacred pact that demands you integrate your being with another’s, not just for your sake, but for the world’s. It’s the foundation of civilization itself.

families, communities, cultures rise from this bond. To marry is to say, “Despite the chaos, I choose to build. I choose to love. I choose to fight for order.” And in that choice, life’s troubles become not just bearable, but noble.

[@jason @Jason]

We need to take money out of politics

We should put the max contribution at whatever the average American salary is

… and ban superpacs from doing canvassing or political ads above $1m per year.

… and we should provide $330m ($1 per American) in budget to the top five candidates from a primary process