Natalie River

Wife, mom of 4, Christian, lover of politics, gourmet lattes, fair weather outdoor enthusiast

[Canada Proud @WeAreCanProud]

Liberal MP Shaun Chen said he's resigning because health factors made it difficult for him to travel to Ottawa.

Yet investigative journalist @RealAndyLeeShow found evidence on Chinese social media that he was in China just two weeks ago.

Not healthy enough to travel from Toronto to Ottawa, but he can cross the Pacific Ocean?

Something is off here.

[Natalie River @Natalieriver3]

@PParseyan Horrible

[Robyn Urback @RobynUrback]

It’s pretty incredible that you can kill a cop in Canada (after holding him hostage and taunting him about the wife and three daughters he’ll leave behind) and even have to opportunity to be arrested again

[Scott Robertson @sarobertson_]

Hoekstra: If Canada decides, "No, we'd rather ship that oil somewhere else and we don't want to ship it to the US," again, that's a decision that Canada can make. But America is not going to wait for that decision. We will go to other places in the world to look at where we can get that oil from.

[Lila Rose @LilaGraceRose]

In a world that destroys children with Down syndrome, listen to this brave girl:

“You can try to kill off everyone with Down syndrome by using abortion, but you won’t be any closer to a perfect society. You will just be closer to a cruel, heartless one."  

Charlotte Helene Fien speaks before the United Nations

[Natalie River @Natalieriver3]

Huge storm at the airport mall #yegweather

[Natalie River @Natalieriver3]

@elonmusk Hey @grok if you invested $2,600 at NVIDIA's IPO what would it be worth today?

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

What I don't get is how lethal injection is both expensive and horribly painful and protracted when it's condemned criminals in the USA, and also so cheap and easy a Canadian MD can assess someone for MAID outside Tim Horton's then drive him to a murder centre for despatch

[kevin smith @kevin_smith45]

These Spencer Pratt videos keep getting better and better

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

Imagine a Christian cult suddenly had millions of members across Canada, with members all easily identifiable because the women had to cover their hair in order to avoid triggering male sexual temptation. Go to any mall, and there's that hair cult. Does anyone doubt the reaction would be anything except 24-hour apoplectic outrage?

So ... why are hijabs the favourite thing of Canadian progressives?

[Robyn Urback @RobynUrback]

The best thing about this is that it's a *pilot* program

We're going to try counting people who enter and exit the country, to see if it's something we should continue doing

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

Poor Americans who attend church regularly are happier than rich Americans who never go.

Behavioral scientist William von Hippel thought he'd made a coding error. He hadn't.

"Regularly attending services has a bigger impact on your happiness than wealth," he writes. "Money buys a fair bit of happiness but connection gives you more bang for the buck."

What's happening? Rich people already have most of what money buys. What they lack is what churches provide for free: weekly, repeated contact with people who know your name.

Von Hippel is direct about the cost: "I suspect that wealthy, educated urbanites are paying a steeper price for their lifestyle than they realize. Many of us have paid too great a price in connection for our increased autonomy."

[Natalie River @Natalieriver3]

@jengerson Great reporting

[Michael Inzlicht @minzlicht]

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.

What went wrong?

In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:

1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.

The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.

This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.

Link to paper: https://t.co/ucoGyhEuAj

[Kevin Pacitti 🇨🇦🇮🇹🇬🇧 @kpac_15]

We’re at the point where they’re bragging about a 67 billion dollar deficit.

Let that sink in.

[Morley Scott 🇨🇦 @Morley_Scott]

Good take here by Messier on the Oilers series …

[Kyle Brittain @BadWeatherKyle]

Sick bragging rights for Alberta and Saskatchewan this week...

Outside of Antarctica, we have the coldest temperatures relative to normal on the entire planet!
🌎🥶

[Jesse Brown @JesseBrown]

Ordinary people don't become Nazis when they suddenly turn evil. They become Nazis when they think they are doing good.

[Robyn Urback @RobynUrback]

Father sentenced to 18 months house arrest.

It also took seven years (!!) to deliver that sentence.

Canada what are we doing??

[David Staples @dstaples]

What are the Jr. Oilers and why does $1 million from Edmonton minor hockey go to them? And why are human resources costing more than $500,000 a year?

There may be good answers here. I'd like to hear them.