Odesa…

🇭🇺 "Russians, go home."

Pay attention to Hungarian elections: they signal how things in the US will go in 2028. There's 3 possible outcomes

1. Fidesz successfully steals the election

2. Fidesz tries to steal and fails

3. Fidesz steals the election, and it results in a revolution 1/n snyder.substack.com/p/the-hungar...

👀🇺🇸 Investors placed a huge ~$950 million bet that oil prices would fall just hours before the U.S. and Iran agreed a ceasefire, selling large volumes of Brent and U.S. crude futures ahead of the announcement, - Reuters

Midweek Update #5; This Is No TACO: This Is Complete US Strategic Failure Trump Agrees To Iran's Victory Conditions

Just sent out this free midweek update. This was no ordinary Trump TACO, this was Trump accepting Iran's victory conditions as the basis of negotiations. It looks likely that Iran will emerge stronger from this war than before; a total US strategic failure. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

This is a real post by the President of the United States (on Easter, no less). It's unhinged, vulgar, and lends credence to the suggestion that he has frontotemporal dementia.

It also signal how the US is going to lose this war by falling into an escalation trap. 1/n

The traditional print editors I know are very there-but-for-the-grace-of-God on this one - it will have been the worst moment of someone’s professional life, maybe career-ending.

IIRC the Ukrainians do a version of this with the Warsaw Pact Yak prop-driven trainer, with a gunner in the instructor seat.

Remember how the argument against renewable power was that it wasn't reliable?

she was knighted and then became a bishop? choose ONE chess figure, dammit

We Asked The Mayor Of Ottawa Why He Keeps Posting Such Grim Photos | Defector Lumpy, dirty piles of snow, shading to slush and then water, surround an unused rink. In the background, a featureless wall of grey, and a swollen cloud that threatens if not rain then no immediate pr...

Glad to see American news outlets writing about Ottawa. defector.com/we-asked-the...

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

The Narwhal is hiring a BIPOC reporting fellow in Ontario We’re hiring an Ontario reporting fellow to cover Queen’s Park and the ways Ontario government policy affects people in racialized communities

Hey GTA! @thenarwhal.ca is hiring a BIPOC reporting fellow to help us explain how Ontario government policy affects people's actual, everyday lives. More info here, drop questions in the chat if you have them. thenarwhal.ca/ontario-repo...

OUT: doomscrolling
IN: stressmaxxing

My own French is quite limited, but then again I'm not running a national airline based in Montreal. Dude has a staff - they can translate his message, rent a teleprompter, polish his pronunciation a bit in rehearsal, only release a video they're happy with. I can see why this feels very 1955.

I mean, in this case I do see the point, largely because one of the pilots was a Quebec francophone, the CEO has been called out for this kind of thing before, and it wouldn't have been hard to read something off a teleprompter with sort-of-okay pronunciation.

Oh just a plane time arrival, would be a text now, or something you could look up yourself on your phone. That generation used telegrams sort of like email

In, I don’t know, maybe 1980 an extremely old-fashioned relative sent us a telegram. I was bitterly disappointed when this turned out to mean that someone at Canadian Pacific read it aloud to you on the phone - I had visions of a half-sheet of paper typed in ALL CAPS or something.

Imagine being behind that guy at the pump -

In Dubai, the World’s Luxury Brands Face a Wartime Crisis

this is so darkly funny to me. Won't someone think of the brands??? gift link!

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/b...

Watching Trump teeter on the edge of blowing up the world economy because of a combination of hubris, strategic incoherence, mendacity and outright stupidity, might be the most extraordinarily depressing thing I have observed in my entire life, or read about in any other period.

Reflection: What's at stake in Canadian transparency tussles - Investigative Journalism Bureau One of the best ways to lose friends at a party is to bring up freedom-of-information legislation.  Try it the next time you want to escape an awkward social interaction. “Oh, that is so interesting. ...

Across Canada, politicians are betting you don't care about restricting access to information.

Prove them wrong.

ijb.utoronto.ca/news/reflect...

A mobile UAV intercept team with the Kremlin as their backdrop.

More and more, Trump is making US institutions behave like Putin’s Russian versions. This was an immediate military coverup of something that should have been admitted:

More and more rot.

In response to popular demand after creating an arc diagram of rides between stations on the TTC’s Line 1, our Data Viz Lead has created one for Line 2 that displays which pairs of stations see the most trips, and which pairs have very few between them https://ow.ly/hjUa50YntwO

If we could just raise sea levels by 150 meters we get a backup Strait of Hormuz

things have been soooo rough, can we please declare this to be Derek Covers the Whole Shoe Thing At Great Length week

bsky.app/profile/zeno...

It’s fine for Russia to use drones to freeze out your population — by the way, can you give us your drone defenses? This is the actual US position.

The Rot Is Real And There Is More To It The Atlantic Piece Just Scratched The Surface

Just sent out a free piece to expand on my article in @theatlantic.com yesterday. The signs of rot in US military and diplomatic capabilities are real and even more extensive than I could say in that article. Here are more-and a gift link to the original article. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...