Interesting contrast: the Bloc Québécois party’s official position is for Quebec sovereignty, yet a large plurality of BQ supporters - nearly half - would still fight to defend Canada. As so often the case, Conservative Party supporters are way out there on their own.

The idea that health equals virtue is extremely dangerous. Who doesn’t like natural foods and clean water? But the idea that if you’re fat or sick or disabled, it’s your fault is dehumanizing and wrong. We’re all only ever one serious illness or accident away from disability. And life is random.

This industry has been essential to the rise of American fascism. It helped rewrite the history of COVID after Biden’s election and it’s fully enmeshed itself in MAGA with Kennedy’s MAHA movement. Its promise of hackable health fits neatly into the eugenicist worldview. Call it a modern iteration.

Wellness as an industry far outpaces pharmaceuticals in terms of value. It’s because pharmaceutical companies have to show that their products work and get them approved. Wellness is the Wild West.

Right now, the wellness industry is largely accepted and surprisingly trusted. It thrives off of our broken healthcare system. You don’t get this kind of acceptance of junk science without deep, deep structural problems. But it’s chock full of grift.

American auto industry: Consumers don’t want EVs so we’re going to keep making dirty, polluting gas vehicles. Also American auto industry: if we drop the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, it will destroy our business and drive us to bankruptcy.

Because it's absolutely true: if there's no point in doing anything at all, why would you do it? It's humans who make meaning. The events are just events. We make them mean something. What that is is entirely up to us. Story is uniquely human. Story is our one superpower.

It all sounded very woo-woo to me. But the science backs it up: if you think you won't succeed, you never even try. Your brain is building a hallucination of your world all the time. If you REALLY want to focus on something you can control, the stories you tell about the world and experiences are it

When we have the feeling that we can do nothing, that we are under the control of others... that's good old "learned helplessness." That wrecks people. That's the dog in the cage getting electric shocks who never moves to the other side of the cage, even when someone opens the door to let them out.

You shouldn't wait for your art to be good. For the most part, it'll never be good. If you only show the stuff that you feel like is great, then you will never show anybody anything. Just make art. Show it to people. Make more art.

If you are anxious and sad about the state of the world, that's fine, and there are plenty of strategies for dealing with that. But I think you already know that drive-by online dooming isn't a strategy. It's selfish and adolescent. It's a contagion that only spreads the worst of you, not the best.

Second, and probably most importantly, it's tactically wrong. "No point discussing political opposition to fascism, there won't be elections anyway" cedes victory to your enemies. It's defeatism and nihilism.

“Every time we look at the science it looks more worrying, and every time we look at the technology it is more encouraging. In an increasingly insecure world, countries and industries will be seeking independence from fossil fuels and the great volatility such dependence brings.”

The science around vaccines has not changed. What has changed is that the United States elected a man who is hostile to science, who then hired people who are hostile to science, and are therefore now doing hostile things to science.

I watched the new TVO documentary on CFNY last night and loved it! CFNY was a huge part of the soundtrack of my youth. youtu.be/lmm50PHkU8c?...

Can you imagine people's reaction if Trump went on TV and said "I am asking every American to give $20,000 to the noble goal of rebuilding Venezuela's oil fields and refineries to ensure Chevron and Exxon are profitable." Well, he just did.

“Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences.” –Michael Ignatieff, talking about a regime change operation

So far the Mamdani administration’s strategy is “we have all these ideas about how to help people so let’s try to do them” which seems like such a rare thing and which then makes you say “wait why is that a rare thing?”

Climate advocates lost some political battles in North America last year, but technology and economics are winning the war everywhere else. 2026 will make the inevitability of the energy transition even more difficult to ignore. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/01/02/o...

🧵Day 3 and we have a new meaning for "running Venezuela," courtesy of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the nation's top diplomat, who is in charge of Venezuela as well as the National Archives. We're going to insist they do what's in the US national interest. Time for some principal-agent theory. 1/

“If someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders.” –Cory Doctorow

Between its nakedly imperialistic stance toward the whole hemisphere and its open support for antiliberal regimes and parties, the “Donroe Doctrine” outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy is a grotesque embrace of the ugliest caricature of traditional US foreign policy that you can imagine.

don't sleep on Ryan's favs

Here’s my year-end list of my favourite new songs of 2025: quandyfactory.com/blog/287/my_...

Translation: Russia keeps Zaporizhzhya and graciously allows Ukraine to buy back its own electricity.

Make a Bond film casual. Try To Avoid Saying Never But Don’t Stress It If You Mess Up

Make a Bond film casual. Dr. Nah

My first song blew up with literally tens of streams, so I’ve released a new single, “Crunch Time”, a somewhat harder, more alternative sounding track. You can listen to it on all the major streaming services.

I need some of the people insisting that attacks on Jews worldwide are the fault of Israel to explain the absence of attacks on Russians worldwide.

A lot of the people who fall for the scam know it’s a scam, but it gives them a permission structure to indulge their hatreds.

this is not behavior becoming of a FIFA Peace Prize recipient.

Someone needs to do a mashup of Tina Belcher panicking and Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”

Most people REALLY don’t appreciate just how harmful it is to have millions of literal fires burning in our cities all the time. Between traffic calming, public space reclaiming, increased walking/cycling/transit and vehicle electrification, we could enter a golden age of air quality in our cities.

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

In places like Pakistan, surging cheap solar power is pushing the country to renegotiate LNG contracts and cancel cargoes. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

The report also rests on bad economic arguments. It assumes that all LNG projects currently under consideration get built. But currently, there’s a supply glut emerging in global LNG markets and cheap renewables are beating out fossil power at a blistering pace.

Wow... NYC's congestion pricing has led to big drops in PM2.5 and real improvements in local air quality.

One theory I have is that competence, self-control, responsibility, and expertise have all been feminized, leaving “masculinity” with the realm of impulsivity and petulance. So the divide is not really between “femininity” and “masculinity” so much as between adulthood and childishness.

Not the main point but when you scroll to the bottom of the quote-posts, you get to see this:

Lysenko overhauling Soviet agriculture

How about a correct headline: “How RFK Jr. is working to destroy vaccines, despite objections of the scientific and medical communities”

Oops forgot my Alt text

So I did a thing. I started making music during the pandemic and realized I’d better start releasing it at some point, so you can now find my first single, “Bots”, on all the major music streaming platforms under my name, Ryan McGreal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Apple Music: music.apple.com/ca/album/bot...

A new wave cover band based in the neighbourhood just southwest of downtown #HamOnt called Durand Durand.

Insulting to have to point this out, but if you have spent even 30 minutes reading US history, you realize that every decade has been dominated by racist hysteria that the "new" people won't ever fit in. This exact prejudice would have been applied to Miller's forebears, when they fled pogroms.

Canada actually speeding up the construction of high speed rail?? Do my eyes deceive me?? “This will enable construction on Alto to begin in four years — as early as 2029 — instead of the original timeline of in eight years, towards the middle of the 2030s.” www.blogto.com/travel/2025/...

The new book by @billmckibben.bsky.social just came into my local bookstore and I’m super excited to read it!

Gonna check in on Canada, where politics is more normal... I see there is a convoy headed to Ottawa to avenge a flock of dead ostriches

Putin’s anti-western ideology is built on the premise that liberal countries are venal, cosmopolitan and decadent and their leaders are weak and gullible. The best thing the European democracies can do to disavow that is by sustaining their resolve against Russia’s lawless invasion of Ukraine.

The American peace proposal for Ukraine sounds better in the original Russian.