Ryan Paulsen

Perfect night for an end-of-weekend campfire. Coyotes whooping it up in the fields around us too. Great stuff.

New episode for the first time in forever!

This feels like pretty much the perfect time to start caring about the #BlueJays for the first time since 1994, right? #MLB #baseball

It'd be tricky to make this any closer to a Stalin-era propaganda poster, really...

Did a Liberal MP go rogue and ban the Irish band Kneecap from our country?

Um, it sure sounds like it.

On The Line Media’s @smohyeddin.bsky.social first exclusively reported this jaw-dropping story:

Motherfucking wind farms…

destroying (10)

dwellings (9)

Them: Will there be a recession?

Anyone that doesn't have to back up their bullshit and has money to be made: No, of course not!

Lots Of Old, Some Things New, Something Borrowed That's Still Not True Poillievre's vaults over the new bare-minimum (thanks, Trump) but what he gets wrong is telling about Canada's understanding of itself

I'm giving #substack a try, so I wrote a thing there with some of my #CanadaVotes #Election2025 thoughts; particularly about how our system actually works and how it might work even better (hint: @fairvote.ca has the right idea, IMHO):
open.substack.com/pub/ryanpaul...
#CanadaPolitics #politics

If you like #podcasts, amateur #linguistics, or (even better!) the former hosted by revelers in the latter, good news: we've a new episode out! This time we're digging into the #etymology of #juggernaut and #blackmail, learning about Hindu effigies and unscrupulous landlords! www.lexitecture.com

When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, one of their first orders of business was to attempt a total reset of the country back to agrarian roots by forcibly transitioning those academics/experts they didn't kill to farming/labour jobs, with predictable results.

starting to think that centering your campaign around the most viscerally offputting man in history isn’t a reliable winning strategy

Just so everybody understands, Booker has been speaking cogently about the issues the entire time and Strom Thurmond famously spent hours reading from the encyclopedia, because segregationists were and are dumbshits

"I don't want a Disney vacation of our history! I don't a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness" -- 20 hours into his speech, Cory Booker is spitting absolute 🔥

Not-so-gentle reminder to, well, everyone: if "there's no due process if you break the law", all it takes is an *accusation* by the state that you broke the law to rob you of any and all "rights" you thought you had. In other words, when pols are free to say shit like that, you have no rights. #USA

At a 2015 campaign all-candidates meeting, I live-fact-checked our local MP, Cheryl Galllant, on a blatant lie she told about electoral reform. The newsroom I worked for at the time was *INUNDATED* with hat-wringing bitching from her campaign. My genuine sympathies, @rachelgilmore.bsky.social.

This just in - when you're sad, your mirror gets sad too! But your mirror can be made happier if you just smile at it! It's people too!

Imagine having the self-awareness to intentionally add the modifier "physically" to this tweet, but to have the unending and nauseating hubris to tweet it all anyway...

Toddler-wearing-an-ill-fitting-grotesque-approximation-of-a-man-suit fails at extortion attempts and throws public tantrum, now real-world hero and gifted leader is expected to grovel under Donald's high chair to make the toddler feel better.

The US is a failed state cesspool run by idiots.

I sure do love how this garbage league would rather wrap up exciting, nail-biting-finish games with basically just a coin toss. It's just so good. So much better than, you know, finishing the hockey game...

Dear diary, today at work I found an alligator clip that made me briefly question whether I'd been secretly shrunk...

because we don't have a realistic alternative to American imports. I don't care about nationalistic posturing; it's not worth "taking a stand" if all it does is make life worse for Canadians. Let's not get dragged into the idiot muck by the Idiot King down south... (11/11)

Finally, if I *AM* right about the general summary above, I deeply hope that Canadian politicians don't get suckered into slapping retaliatory tariffs on US imports that will, in kind, only serve to make Canadians' cost of living increase... (10/11)

Now, I'm open to being corrected on any of this (including/especially my assumption that suddenly sourcing all Canadian imports from elsewhere would be unrealistic; or at least no cheaper) so please let me know. But overall, I just don't see the point of panicking over this at this point. (9/11)

Without a corresponding (and correspondingly fast) uptick in American domestic production (which in many sectors has been declining rapidly for 30+ years) all tariffs will do is make life more expensive for Americans.
(8/11)

(which seems unlikely given that we're right there, and anything further afield would be more costly because of transportation and increased demand from the US) then they're simply stuck paying more for Canadian oil. In the end, it's US consumers that are the ones being punished. (7/11)

In the case of oil, for instance, Canada supplies something like 60+% of American crude oil use, which means at the most they can meet 40% or less of their demand domestically. Unless they can get crude oil internationally for less than 25% more than they currently get it from Canada... (6/11)

... but that would also be a fair bit in the future by the time those consumer choices start working their way up the supply chain. BUT, that only actually happens if there IS any domestic supply available.
... (5/11)

...prices will increase right away - in the US.

However it works, eventually US consumers will have a choice: to buy the now-higher-priced Canadian-sourced goods, or not. If not, and they start buying domestic stuff instead, those Canadian sectors will definitely start to feel a pinch,
... (4/11)