After watching Trump’s historically shambolic response to COVID, 49.9% of American voters gambled that there would be no global crises in the next four years - let alone global crises of Trump’s own making.

A reminder that the more an economy invests in renewables and less dependent it is on fossil fuels, the more resilient it is against geopolitical supply shocks. And that’s without even considering the enormous positive externality of reduced air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Tristan Harris to Kara Swisher: “What happens is the incentives dominate the psychology, meaning the system selects for psychopathic tricks, because the only people who continue to propagate this incentive of the race to the bottom of the brain stem for attention and hacking kids' attention…

WTI has nudged past $100/barrel. Is the market finally starting to take the magnitude of the oil shock a tiny bit seriously?

This epistemological divide exemplifies how MAGA is an anti-democratic movement. The impulse to try to understand (even if critically) one's political opponents is democratic...we share the country, we should try to understand each other. The impulse to dehumanize is anti-democratic.

This whole essay is a poignant reminder of @jamellebouie.net’s observation that Trump et al. seem incapable of understanding that other people have agency.

Yesterday I reposted an article positing that gender studies turn out to be important and valuable after all. This is a corollary of sorts: an argument that history and literature and the humanities also turn out to be valuable in the face of technocratic myopia.

It’s no coincidence that prominent men are devaluing and disparaging higher education just as it comes to be dominated by women.

One of the great policy wins of our time. Undisputed at this point.

My copy of Enshittification by @doctorow.pluralistic.net just came in and I’m excited to get started reading it!

NYT quoting AOC when she says “um”: This dumb girl can’t talk NYT quoting Trump after sticking a fork up his nose into his brain and rambling about sharpie pens: Doth thine lion howl with instincts known not learned by man, or sound his sonorous roar as prophecy to gaze back upon history itself?

Anyone else notice that Pete Hegseth’s monologues all sound like those melodramatic blue-check long-form tweets riddled with AI tells?

I’m about five minutes into Ezra Klein’s interview with Chris Caldwell and not sure if I can sit through an hour of Caldwell complaining about how Trump refuses to adhere the political ideology that intellectual Zambonis like Caldwell retconned onto whatever Trump decides to do in any given moment.

People keep bringing up Trump’s age and declining faculties as if the man hadn’t spent an entire lifetime shamelessly bullshitting his way from one reckless impulse and catastrophic failure to the next and leaving a path of destruction for others to clean up. This is who he has always been.

Every fascist authoritarian regards the truth as a bitter enemy to be vanquished.

You’d think expensive oil would make our government focus on solar and wind energy, you would of course be wrong

Notwithstanding his ever-shifting rationales, for Trump to “win” his Iran war in any meaningful sense of the term, he needs to achieve a set of military and political objectives that are impossible without a major ground invasion (and effectively impossible even with one). 1/

Wish I’d bought that before he jacked the price up and took out all the good bits. 😕😂

It’s great to see @doctorow.pluralistic.net on Bsky! I’m excitedly waiting for my ordered copy of Enshittification to arrive at my local independent bookstore.

Think of a luxury EV that gets 600 km of range, goes 0-100 in 4 seconds, and costs around $60K to buy and around $15-20 a month to charge. Meanwhile, the American legacy automakers are withdrawing manufacturing from Canada and killing off their already-meagre EV offerings.

Yup. All options are possible. He could declare victory and strut away, like the proverbial pigeon on a chessboard, or he could order a ground invasion or a nuclear strike. Because he only wants to “win” which for him means attention.

The problem with trying to figure out what Trump is going to do next is that he himself has no idea. He is a perfect storm of petulance, shamelessness, unquenchable greed, feckless caprice and susceptibility to manipulation. And he’s surrounded by people who know how to profit from chaos. 1/2

Given the increasingly asymmetric nature of recent wars, I find myself revisiting this story by Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1951, which perfectly articulates how a party can have vastly superior weaponry and still lose - not despite but because of its superiority. www.baen.com/Chapters/143...

This record-obliterating heatwave is pretty much mathematically impossible in the absence of human-induced global heating.

“Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. … “[I]f you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a rake – forever.”

I love the analogy that watching a robot do pull-ups at the gym doesn’t make you any stronger.

Love it. The lyrics. That baseline. Really good.

I’ve released a new single, “There’s No Way” by Ryan McGreal, streaming on all the platforms. Links to major platforms and lyrics available on the song’s home page: quandyfactory.com/blog/294/new...

Chuck Norris didn’t die. He roundhouse kicked so hard that he broke through the spacetime continuum into the next world. RIP.

My newest single, “There’s No Way” by Ryan McGreal, as just dropped and is streaming on all the major platforms youtu.be/-qxMOOLwpVw?...

"The evidence shows that restoring lanes for cars will not result in less congestion, as it will induce more people to use cars…”— Court decision If your local government is lying about protected bike-lanes “causing traffic congestion,” you might find this court case in Canada interesting & useful.

Just got my copy of Such Great Heights by @chrisdeville.bsky.social and can’t wait to start reading it!

Hot take, but you can explain his irrationality in terms of his narcissistic personality disorder. His self-image is under threat and he is incapable of (a) admitting he made a mistake to invade unilaterally or (b) having the vulnerability to admit he needs help rather than bullying his allies.

Gotta love @maddow.bsky.social “All the stuff that RFK tried to do to vaccines, the judge has blocked it. RFK fired, you'll recall, all the experts on the vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with everybody in the Star Wars bar scene.“ podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/t...

Donald Trump’s AI Czar thinks introspection is a waste of time and confidently asserts that the great history makers didn’t waste any of their time on introspection - a belief that can only be sustained in the total absence of introspection.

Today in The Climate Catastrophe Has Arrived news, Southern California is facing temperatures as high as 38°C (100°F) in (double-checks calendar) mid-March. For the curious, typical mid-March temperature in Los Angeles is 18-21°C (65-70°F).

The Oscar acceptance speech from David Borenstein, the director of Best Documentary winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin, is absolutely must-watch youtube.com/shorts/P_J0b...

Trump trying to bully other countries into helping police the strait of Hormuz: ‘We broke it, you fix it.’

Watching How to Get to Heaven from Belfast and it’s quite good but tonally all over the place - a bit Derry Girls meets Yellowjackets.

I see this as a yes-and situation in which two things can both be true. On the one hand, there is a lot of bad software that affects you negatively even when you don’t directly interact with it; and also there are classes of problems that exist outside the space that software can fix.

Nice to see Commander-in-Chief Bone Spurs wore his best ball cap to the dignified transfer of the first American soldiers killed in his imperial war of choice against Iran.

“We’re gonna have peace like no other time, we’re gonna have prosperity unlike anyone could ever imagine.” Notice how all the sycophantic MAGA ghouls end up mimicking Trump’s superlative-riddled rhetorical style.

This story is pretty wild. I’m starting to wonder whether, despite the historic investments in advanced A.I. data centres, the best neural networks might turn out to be … networks of actual neurons.

Annual reminder that Daylight Saving Time is cutting the end off a piece of string and tying it to the other end to make the string longer.

It is 1991. I am 15 years old. The US has gone to war in the Middle East. It is 2003. I am 27 years old. The US has gone to war in the Middle East. It is 2026. I'm too old for this shit. The US has gone to war in the Middle East.

I guess Trump got bored of peace.

Not to worry, everyone: AI will either: - end scarcity; - wipe out humanity; or - boost annual GDP growth by 0.2%

“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions. I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”

Not for nothing, but Republicans are cruelly politicizing people’s identities at the same time they’re promoting a deliberately obstructionist voter ID law that is calibrated to disenfranchise legitimate voters rather than ensure they have the right to vote.

New single just dropped: “I’m Not OK (And How Are You Doing)”, now available on all music streaming platforms