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Weekly Photo – PG Pulp Mills
A new feature on the blog: the weekly photo! I have a large archive and will be sharing some of the clicks on a regular basis moving forward.
Today’s picture: Canfor’s pulp mill operations, just east of the main city core, as seen right after takeoff from Prince George Airport. The mills are contributors, alongside local wastewater treatment plants and landfills, to a distinctly rotten odor that tends to waver between “barely noticeable” and “oppressive”.
This article has more on the factors at play, for anyone curious about Prince George’s olfactory profile. This city rarely gets a comment on this blog; why not start local?
Canada, for those who did not know, is home to nearly a tenth of the land covered by forests globally. Big business for wood products and all associated industries. Incidentally, PG is hosting a provincial conference on forestry later this week. The ongoing trade war likely a key talking point for a struggling sector.
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Weekly Picks – March 30, 2025
Credit (left to right): Noel Celis/ AFP via Getty Images; Maria Medem; Eid SuleimanThis week’s collection:
- “It Is Neither Death, Nor Suicide” | In These Times
- My Fifteen Minutes As a Palestinian | The Progressive
- The Prehistoric Psychopath | Works in Progress
- Why uncertainty can be a superpower | New Humanist
- Duterte’s bloody drug war was really a war on the poor | Salon
Find out how these lists are compiled at The Explainer.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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A Comment on Material Consumption
Everyone has so much stuff.
I am blown away by it all. Every time I enter someone’s home. The amount of clothes, furniture, dishes, glassware, stationary, art, greenery, drapery, tools, toys, and collections. Piles of paper spilling over each other. The electronics! Appliances, devices, consoles, and ‘smart’ tech adorning surfaces. Boxes hidden away in corners or stashed atop shelves unseen. Things on the walls, ground, running along baseboards or dangling from cords. Objects slowly shifting around, following seasonal motions akin to planetary retrogrades. Their whirring, ticking, clicking, rattling, and cuckooing punctuating the enclosed din. A cozy clamor to which most are conditioned.
Stuff stuffing abodes, each a menagerie inviting a sift-through by Walter Benjamin wannabes. For this onlooker, genuinely mystifying stuff.
Let me clarify. We are speaking here of material possessions. All of us inhale different forms of cultural output. We frequent theaters, concert venues, museums, cultural sites, and share our love of art in public spaces. At home, we engage with films, shows, interactive media, etc. Some of the latter overlap with objects that must be owned. Fine; games are a collective tie. It is the rest of it – those bobbleheads in mint condition – that I cannot fathom. I often wonder about each item’s use-over-time-ratio. How many months go by between its uses? How long did it take to become ignored once its novelty wore off? How many pieces of crap have been left in that drawer untouched for years? Of course, most never track their consumption. And for those who would argue for the deep cultural attachments to objects, commentary here concerns our proclivity for excess.
I admit, if the average consumer had my spending habits, the entire economy may collapse.
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Weekly Picks – March 23, 2025
Credit (left to right): Michael Kooren/ Reuters; J. M. Simpson/ Jacobin; David PlunkertThis week’s collection:
- The internet that could have been was ruined by billionaires | The Real News
- The Violence Prerogative | The Boston Review
- War Architects Enjoy Top Academic Gigs 22 Years After Illegal Invasion of Iraq | Truthout
- An Autonomy Worth Having | Jacobin
- Going Soft | Harper’s Magazine
- Adjust your disgust | Aeon
- What’s the Matter with Abundance? | The Baffler
Find out how these weekly lists are compiled at The Explainer.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – March 16, 2025
Credit (left to right): Omar Ashtawy / APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire; hakanyalicn via Shutterstock; ProPublicaThis week’s collection:
- The Material Creation of Freedom | Philosophy Now
- What Happens When a Drone Strike Has No Killer and a War Has No Dead? | The Walrus
- Just Another Liberalism? | The Hedgehog Review
- Why I’m done talking to straight people about homophobia | Africa Is a Country
- The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram | ProPublica
Find out how these lists are compiled at The Explainer.
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Plus, a neat photo essay:
- The Bone Hunters of Siberia | The New York Times
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The Explainer
Regarding the Weekly Picks that are shared on the blog on Sundays.
Preamble – Some may recall a time when social media feeds were chronological. When posts from friends and pages were neatly arranged by time, sans algorithmic shuffling. The presence of the profit motive (advertising creep and predilection for alarmist content) was limited. That was a long time ago.
That old way of reading the web is still how I consume news. Notably, forcing the information flow to be chronological through settings, then clicking based on topics of interest. This digital grounding helps keep me sane in a world where so much information is so easily accessible. Without strong digital literacy skills combined with a solid baloney detection kit, it is difficult to develop an informed or critical view within the battleground of the internet.
The ’Weekly Picks’ that you see are the latest incarnations of social media posts that I used to make many years ago. A collection of usually longer but always engaging commentaries that prompted good discussion. Amongst friends, these were fodder for fun, serious, and sometimes heated discussions. I would create bookmark libraries of these articles, which I still maintain to this day; my own digital archive of in-depth analysis, searchable via key terms. A way to support dialogue-framing between non-experts.
We know that the multi-media specialists and companies dominate the fourth estate. The old-fashioned investigative journalism and longform reporting guided by independent interests is dwindling. Space, time, and money for incisive writing is becoming concentrated as our species navigates its digital infancy. I have noticed, since I began this sharing exercise more than a decade ago, how much the online information landscape has become adulterated. It is appropriate to find it all overwhelming.
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Weekly Picks – March 9, 2025
Credit (left to right): Nicolas Nova (Flickr / CC BY); NASA/ Johns Hopkins APL/ Ed Whitman; Seguace di hieronymus bosch, cristo al limbo, 1575 ca. 02 (CC)This video below is a few years old, but was featured this week on Aeon. It made me think back to those occasional late nights and early mornings my friends and I used to spend at cafes and diners. Plugging in the laptop, sharing meals, or grabbing some drinks; our own little community-making. Extending the liminal hours, buoyed by company despite being sleep-deprived. The film continues the showcase throughout one cycle. This is the kind of everyday I hope is never lost.
This week’s collection:
- Asteroid Hunters | The American Scholar
- AI Search Has A Citation Problem | Columbia Journalism Review
- Slumlord Empire | Protean Magazine
- Is There a Mainstream Media? | The Point Magazine
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Blame Canada
We used to joke back in 2015 how unbelievable it was that the real-life embodiment of Eric Cartman’s personality – thankfully lacking in his intellect and ambition – was gaining traction as a contender for the most powerful post in the world.
Fast-forward ten years – much suffering later – and placating of that individual’s ego by the greedy and powerful is dragging everyone down a degenerative path. A bitter pill to swallow considering that nonvoting citizens continue to outnumber those whose ballots elect winning candidates across democratic nations.
This gangrene will affect the soul as much as it does the body politic.
Your Measures entry for a daily news cycle fueled by tariffs, trade wars, and nonsense: a twenty-six-year-old cartoon satirizing censorship, unintentionally reflecting the zenith of U.S. foreign policy in 2025.
Carrying prescience as darkly comical today as it was at the turn of the millennium.
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Weekly Picks – March 2, 2025
Credit (left to right): Rhett A. Butler; Jeffrey St. Clair; Sutthichai SupapornpasupadThis week’s collection:
- Why Big Pharma wants you to eat more meat | Vox
- The Invisible Costs of Upward Mobility | Jacobin
- ‘Some people will die’: Conversations with Nigeria’s gorilla hunters | Mongabay
- The End of Oil and Empire | Counterpunch
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Not from the past week (and sans excerpts), but also well worth indulgence:
- The Algeria Analogy | Jewish Currents
- A Memorial at Lety | Places Journal
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Echoes in the Night
Credit: melodysheep a.k.a. John D. BoswellIn the basement of the Koerner Library at the University of British Columbia, there exists a large collection of microfilms. Among them, reproductions of print publications dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. Perhaps earlier.
The types of materials that would come in handy, say, if you were asked to compile a dialectical montage of the history of Stanley Park. A mix of phantasmagorical edifices and natural forests standing adjacent to an industrial port, a microcosm representing landscapes long-since overrun by urbanization.
Facsimiles that could also assist with the study of archives, say of weekly magazines, in order to craft a narrative of their evolving purpose over time. A beguiling exercise of evaluating many ships of Theseus as they undergo fundamental shifts in response to changing media ecosystems.
Or maybe, if the two assignments above were found to be too cumbersome or tiring, the microfilms could offer an escape. Through a wormhole of irrelevance and fun that would carry you from the afternoon to late evening. For example, from a 1905 editorial considering Martian life forms (floating down canals, as they were at the time) to an in-depth analysis of how affordability of the television may result in humanity’s downfall.