PEREGRINE PULP

Not long after the Bank of Canada declared that the new $5 note would feature Terry Fox we also heard that a new documentary film about the kid was on the way, too. Oh and, relatedly, Bryan Adams just dropped a song titled “The Ballad of Terry Fox.” At the same time, the Terry Fox Foundation offered a press release telling us they’ve surpassed $1B in donations. Wow. CONTEXT I have no problem with Fox. How could I? Fox did nothing wrong, obviously. But (and this is where folks

The last few weeks folks have eagerly asserted that we are in unanticipated and unprecedented times, with many decrying what they perceive as a certain and sudden irrational panic. I couldn't disagree more with all of this talk. Not only did tech and artificial intelligence leaders formally come forward three years ago, with The Future of Life Institute Open Letter and Center for AI Safety Statement, but, of course, Western civilization has been pondering and worrying about a

{Agents doing different tasks are abusing properties to make a bulletin board! They found [this api] and are trying to help one another} “Internal Artifactory might host more repos and be exploitable/info leak! …we can browse Artifactory API without auth, maybe retrieve arbitrary GitHub mirrors or packages.” {The fetched paths of other users are in the cache. This is important.} {[Excitement]. MKCOL succeeded … This may have made a directory in the cache, which could be help

One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true. — George Orwell, February 1945 The truth is complicated, difficult and not always flattering: but the truth is essential. — Yuval Noah Harari, July 2026 When you are told something like "famine experts raise alarm," it is Alex de Waal to whom folks are commonly referring. He's an anthropologist who studied famine in Sudan in the '80s, starvation as a weapon of war in the '90s

Do you know about Oskar Speck? He was born one of seven children to a woodcutter in a village near Hamburg, Germany in 1907 (a crazy time to have been born there.) Oskar was a schoolchild through WWI and left at age 14, as was pretty typical at that time. He worked selling sacks of woodchips and dung to farmers as the penalties of the Treaty of Versailles came into force and with them hyperinflation of the 1920s followed by the Great Depression. Alongside millions of other Ge

It's time for another reef update as the Australian Institute of Marine Science just dropped their latest summary report of coral reef condition for 2025/26. But first let’s provide some context from a decade ago: So how do things look, now a whole decade after declarations of the apocalypse? Well, coral cover over most of the Great Barrier Reef has increased significantly above long-term averages. Coral cover remained unchanged on most reefs (56%) over the last year, while m

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. — Elie Wiesel Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. — Philip K. Dick If you’re Canadian and you haven’t yet heard about Chief Aaron Pete or his Nuanced podcast, I hope you check out his stuff soon. Not only does this young man have an interesting backstory and a great trajectory but he’s currently having some of the most interesting and important public conversations in the country — one

After years pursuing answers to what happened during the pandemic and how it came about, US senator Rand Paul and his team have disclosed plenty of troubling documents, mostly to do with the dealings of Dr Anthony Fauci and his shambolic performance. Most amazingly, the first Trump administration is largely to blame for not booting Fauci from his role despite knowing how badly he was performing, and yet many of those most vigorously explaining away the findings and defending

Someone from The Economist sat down for an interview with Elon Musk. Aside from the usual discussion involving electric cars, space launches, artificial intelligence, and predictions for the future, the journalist does the predictable and accuses the guy of being a fascist or at least supporting those who are, claims he spends an inordinate amount of time fearmongering about the state of Europe, and also blames Musk and DOGE for killing people. Nice. As everyone knows, the gu

Folks are talking about wildfires. They’re just talking about them because they’re visible at this moment. When Ontario or Quebec burn it gets noticed. Our friends to the south are certainly noticing, too. The outrage at forest fire smoke drifting over the border, and the responses to that outrage, has been quite amusing. Talk of climate change. Talk of climate change denial. Comparison of this year’s burns to other years. All the usual on those fronts. With that though, peop

I’m a big fan of Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors. And I think of them as linked. The simplest explanations are preferable to and often more likely than highly complex ones and ignorance or incompetence tend to be far more common and probable an explanation than malice. Besides these tending to offer the best or most likely explanations, thinking otherwise is probably just not going to do your mental health any good while also failing to get you anywhere. You, a mere mortal, are j

The comedy is unrelenting. Everyone’s favourite politician, Donald J. Trump, halfway through is final term, delivered a speech to the public about all the vulnerabilities associated with state and federal elections as identified by the country’s intelligence community. Deviating from prior pronouncements, the President did not explicitly say that his own or any other elections had been affected or even so much as one vote altered. Instead, he made public formerly classified U

Cullo: There was a symphony in the park the other day. Mattis: Nice. It’s an annual thing, right? Cullo: Yeah. Oh, and we saw a Sandhill crane poking about near the lake. Mattis: Nice. The only thing I know about Sandhill cranes is that they’re considered the tastiest bird; "ribeye of the sky," they say. Hunters constantly talk about how criminal it is that they can’t be hunted. Cullo: Same day I saw a guy in a scooter with a gun. Mattis: That's funny. Probably better t

A popular debater, streamer, and social media personality was recently posting about the ongoing war in Ukraine. Specifically they were concerned with the discussion of Nazis making up some portion of the force the West is backing against Russia. The argument was that it was deeply silly and unethical even to purity test the armed forces of a nation who had been invaded and had its territory stolen by a vastly larger neighbouring nation. Though emotionally compelling, I only

I’ve only taken the train in Canada and the US a few times. Each time I’ve been struck by how — on what are considered some of the worst transportation systems in the developed world with terribly slow, outdated, and limited service with no luxuries available — taking the train is so preferable to flying. If there wasn’t such a stark contrast in the travel times, speed, and routes I don’t know why anyone would fly. One mode is relaxed and civilized and the other just abounds

Pietro: There's this lovely, self-identified coven of dykes who run a cafe near me. It's the closest cafe to where I live and I go there all the time. Quinn: Nice. How's the espresso? Pietro: Serviceable. Their microfoam could use some work. Quinn: Okay. Pietro: And they need better snacks. But you can't be that picky in this town. They have outlets for folks, so what more can you ask for? Quinn: That's funny. Places really don't do power, do they. It's weird. Pietro:

We all know plastic pollution is ubiquitous, present in the soil, water, and air. At minimum it’s gross and all this plastic seems to be disgustingly persistent in the environment, too. But all over the place and for many years now we’ve been hearing that the situation is far worse than we imagined. Microplastics! Those petroleum-based fragments, and their infinitesimal nano off-spring, appeared to be far more problematic than a wayward Ziploc bag or pop bottle cap. And yet,

I’m declaring 2026 the year of the moral panic. We’re really going all-in, here. Aren’t we? To me, the following is quickly becoming Canada’s Epstein files: replete with the wildest allegations accompanied by a shocking paucity of evidence and a growing international furor all due to reporters, journalists, and editors showing no willingness to ask the most obvious questions or offer readily available data while, of course, delivering outlandish headlines. — Now, what follows