Ryan McGhoul 🎃👻💀

*SOME experts

I GIVE YOU THE MEDIAN VOTER

They’re just blowing the regular frequency whistle now.

FWIW I got 5/16.

U.S. ambassador to Canada goes on expletive-laced tirade at Ontario’s trade representative, witnesses say | CBC News The U.S. ambassador to Canada delivered an expletive-laced tirade at Ontario's trade representative at an event in Ottawa on Monday, multiple witnesses tell CBC News

Important to keep in mind that Hoekstra’s little performance is intended for an audience of one www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings : Foundation says it won't compromise policy of inclusivity even if that cash would've really helped

Really positive sign that open source projects are standing up to do the right thing. Kudos to the Python folks: www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/p...

Feeling extra pleased to be a Python user today.

A huge part of Trump's success is that he is able, because of the fragmentation of his base's media ecosystem (and their unwillingness to trust regular sources) to say multiple, contradictory things to different groups and have them all believe him.

She said the thing.

NDs and creative minds have always been threatened most by bullish jocks.

Dodgeball never seems to end.

A novel cancer vaccine that stimulates the immune system to target one of the most common cancer-driving mutations has shown encouraging early results in patients with pancreatic and colorectal cancer, two of the most difficult-to-treat malignancies, according to a study led in part by researchers

If you’re wondering whether Democrats moved too far to the left or Republicans moved too far to the right, consider that Ronald Reagan is now credibly held up as a champion of liberalism in opposition to the Republican president and his party.

& What's happening: Elon Musk confirmed that X will delete all heuristics from its recommendation system within six weeks. In other words, the familiar logic of likes, replies, and reposts that shaped Twitter for years is about to disappear. In its place, Grok, the platform's in-house Al model, will read and watch more than one hundred million posts and videos every day to decide what users see. At the same time, X is testing a new interface that keeps users inside the app even when they open external links.

How this hits reality: This marks the first time a major social platform has handed full control of content discovery to an Al model. Engagement farms, trend-hacking accounts, and traditional growth tactics may soon lose their edge. The new winners will be those who write in ways that Grok interprets as engaging, turning social media optimization into a new form of prompt engineering. This shift could reshape influencer strategies, ad targeting, and even political communication in a matter of weeks. • Key takeaway: X did not just change its algorithm; it replaced it with an Al reader. Your reach will soon depend on how fluently you can speak Grok.

Brace for another wave of x refuges

Canada’s status as a country without endemic measles can now be revoked Canada is poised to lose its international status as a measles-free country now that an outbreak that began in New Brunswick and spread to other provinces has hit the one-year mark.

For 25 years people were protecting themselves and their children, then they started listening to propaganda BS, two children died this year, remember that anti vaccine nonsense caused this. #Canada

/1 thread

www.ctvnews.ca/health/artic...

Re: the Dean Scream: “[N]othing sticks like that anymore. And I do think that that's something that the right has internalized a little more than the left has, particularly because Donald Trump is just so sociopathic and, like, has no remorse.”

“Whereas, if you say something and then the next day you do five more interviews, and the day after that you do five more and you do five more, and you get asked about it a bunch and you wipe it away or whatever, the stuff just comes out. No one can remember anything anymore.”

“Which then confirms the fears of the people who are urging fewer appearances.

PS1: Hayes: “One of the things you can get trapped doing is: the less media you're doing, the less you are out there, the more amplified every individual hit is, and the more possibility there is for some gaffe to go viral or to get a lot of attention.”

Harris had very little time to solve for attention, and her campaign went for broke on a targeted paid media strategy, which in retrospect seems to have been a mistake. But if she had more time, she could have tried more attentional tactics to break through. 3/3

Democrats Need to Care About Getting Attention Podcast Episode · Offline with Jon Favreau · 2025-10-25 · 1h 9m

Hayes: “[O]ne of the big takeaways, I think, from the campaign is, from 2024 is, unless people are hearing that message, unless you're somehow breaking through, the message is not going to matter that much.”

@chrislhayes.bsky.social makes an interesting point in his Offline interview with @jonfavs.bsky.social - Kamala Harris shrank Trump’s lead the most on places she campaigned the most, suggesting that her biggest problem was actually reaching voters rather than having the wrong platform. 1/3

File under: sentences that would have been incomprehensible just a few years ago:

“Don't tell me that you need to release the infinite slop machine that makes Bryan Cranston cry in order to build your machine god.”

cc. @caseynewton.bsky.social @kevinroose.com

As a sidenote, true swing voters are a sliver of the electorate. Some 80% of independents clearly prefer one party and among the rest, most have low interest in politics. American elections are won on the razor’s edge and true swing voters, while small, are dispositive in a winner-take-all system.

Photo of a young girl, dressed in blue soccer kit, walking past a lifted white dually pickup truck next to a soccer field. The top of the girl's head is several inches below the truck's hood.

4'11, almost 12 years old, still not big enough to "be seen"

#TruckBloat

I haven’t seen any polling showing him below 39% - can you share links to the polls you’re seeing showing him falling toward 30%?

At least he raised the quarter billion dollars to do it by taking personal bribes so that it wouldn't use public funds, and also has asked the people who work for him to wire a quarter billion dollars from the Treasury to his personal account.

You guys, the person exercising the powers of the presidency is constitutionally disqualified from holding the office and he’s having the White House bulldozed. This is true and it’s happening, right? I’m not dreaming this?

All the polling across an array of methodologies indicates that he retains ~40% public approval. That is his core base and it doesn’t seem like anything can break through with them. He seems to have lost the swing voters who swung for him last November, but his grip on the GOP remains solid.

FWIW I agree 100% with you that the message itself is bonkers

Photo looking up an outdoor staircase on the Bruce Trail in Hamilton, Ontario, with a goldendoodle standing at the top with the late morning sun illuminating the dog’s silhouette from behind.

Penny bestriding her domain