Reading among the maggots

It's been nothing but bad news out of Alberta for the past year or so. First, the price of oil goes for a shit. Then Notley's socialist hordes seize power... That's pretty much gotta be the end of the road for the Wildrose province. I've got a soft spot for Alberta. Put in some time there back in the '70s. In fact, the all-time worst welding gig I ever had was in Edmonton. Worked at an outfit called Tandem Industries. Decent enough rate of pay, and, for the most part, a nice variety of work. Tandem did truck and trailer maintenance and repair. They claimed to be the only place in the West, north of California, to be certified in repairing the big compressed gas tankers. But, that wasn't the only stuff they repaired. The worst job ever was when an offal truck came in for a rework. In case you don't know, offal is the stuff left over at abattoirs after they've made every possible bit of edible protein into hot-dogs or chicken nuggets. I'm not sure where it goes, but they use tanker trucks to take it there. So with the gazillion doom and gloom stories festooning the nation's news platforms, I thought I'd pay a visit to Canada Job Bank for a look-see. Are there any jobs out there at all? What an eye-opener! Search "heavy equipment mechanic, Alberta" and there's dozens of open jobs! Search "welder, Alberta," and you get stuff like this; Jacobs Industrial Services has thirty welding jobs open. Right now. At $45.79 per hour. So it's not all doom and gloom after all. The 300 horsepower snowmobile and the 75 grand pick-up truck are still within reach if you've got the right tickets! But back to the '70s. That offal rig needed a partial re-skin. That involved mostly working inside the tank. As soon as this unit was pulled into the shop you had guys retching all over the place. Man, was it foul! Needless to say nobody stepped up for this assignment, so we drew straws. Me and Buddy got the two shortest. Buddy was probably the top gun in that shop, a can-do overachiever who had ambitions of opening his own shop. I was a pot-addled wanker with no ambitions whatsoever. So first day we had to climb into that tank, I was mostly pre-occupied with fighting my retch reflex. We drag in fans, O-A hoses, welding cables, more fans, and we're good to go. It's amazing how fast you acclimatize to the absolutely foulest of smells. After a couple of hours you didn't even notice it. Buddy the overachiever figures we can do this job in two days max. But because he's a favorite with the front office, he's privy to inside info; he knows they've told the client this is a two week job, and by God, we're going to live up to their expectations! So I'm clambering into that tank as of day two with a coffee in hand and a Edmonton Journal in the back pocket of my Big Bill overalls. Even though the unit was allegedly steam cleaned before it came into the shop, there's a two or three inch crust of petrified offal encrusted on the sides of the tank, which is literally seething with maggots. You'd sit there for an hour or two burning off the maggots with a rosebud before you could get round to any actual work. We realized from the get-go that there was zero likelihood of any supervisors paying a surprise visit to this particular job. I was therefore able to read the Journal cover to cover and mostly complete the crossword puzzle before we even fired up the torches. Buddy used to disappear for long stretches at a time... I think he was already getting his own business off the ground. But who wants to read the paper with the walls around them writhing with maggots? I didn't last long at that job. As for Buddy, I hear through the grape-vine that he went on to huge success in his own business and is a millionaire many times over. As for the prospects for young folks thinking about a career in Alberta today, get yourself the right credentials and it is obviously still a land of opportunity. Especially if you don't mind reading among the maggots.

Lessons from the Zone of Lost Souls

Spent a couple of days in Oshawa, visiting with a newly minted grand-daughter and her parents. No matter how generous the hospitality, I hate waking up in someone else's home. I'm ready for a 5k power walk at six a.m. when nobody else gets out of bed before 9, not even the grand-daughter. So this morning I head out for a drive, looking for a Sunday paper and a Timmies. Drove all the way up the main drag, from the lake through the downtown core and the elite neighborhoods immediately north all the way to the Durham College campus. Downtown Oshawa is the Zone of Lost Souls. At 6 a.m. the streets are full of folks who have gazed too long into the face of God. Whatever drug/alcohol combo it takes to pull that off, there's plenty of downtowners who know the secret. Some have clearly cracked the code for catastrophic personality disintegration, and wobble down the street raging at the sky. But here's something else I noticed. Three people trying to push a bicycle up the street. One woman, two men, two white, one black, and they're 100% working as a team to get this bicycle wherever they're going. They'd got about half a block when I came back down the street a half hour later, but by God, they were still giving it the old college try. Together! A totally fucked-up white dude with his arm around a black dude even more fucked-up, leaning on one another to get wherever they think they're going. White privilege ain’t worth shit once you’re living on the sidewalk. Those are typical scenes all through the downtown core. As you get further north it's mostly McMansions and condo towers. Up here, nobody's homeless, but a lot of people don't even know their neighbors. If nothing else, the homeless enjoy more community.

Lessons from the 'shwa on poverty, homelessness, and community

Spent a couple of days in Oshawa, visiting with a newly minted grand-daughter and her parents. No matter how generous the hospitality, I hate waking up in someone else's home. I'm ready for a 5k power walk at six a.m. when nobody else gets out of bed before 9, not even the grand-daughter. So this morning I head out for a drive, looking for a Sunday paper and a Timmies. Drove all the way up the main drag, from the lake through the downtown core and the elite neighbourhoods immediately north all the way to the Durham College campus. Downtown Oshawa is the Zone of Lost Souls. At 6 a.m. the streets are full of folks who have gazed too long into the face of God. Whatever drug/alcohol combo it takes to pull that off, there's plenty of downtowners who know the secret. Some have clearly cracked the code for catastrophic personality disintegration, and wobble down the street raging at the sky. But here's something else I noticed. Three people trying to push a bicycle up the street. One woman, two men, two white, one black, and they're 100% working as a team to get this bicycle wherever they're going. They'd got about half a block when I came back down the street a half hour later, but by God, they were still giving it the old college try. Together! A totally fucked-up white dude with his arm around a black dude even more fucked-up, leaning on one another to get wherever they think they're going. Those are typical scenes all through the downtown core. As you get further north it's mostly McMansions and condo towers. Up here, nobody's homeless, but a lot of people don't even know their neighbours. If nothing else, the homeless enjoy more community.

The Mighty Wurlitzer at work

Google “mighty wurlitzer” and you’ll get two definitions. I’m talking about the second one; a metaphor CIA official Frank Wisner used to describe the Agency’s influence over public opinion. Wisner may have been wielding that metaphor fifty years ago, but the mighty Wurlitzer plays on today. Mainstream and social media toot the same notes at the same time, whether the tune is about George Floyd or Greta Thunberg or Little Bana or Donald Trump or Covid. The CIA probably has more influence on public opinion today than it had fifty years ago. Of course, any hint of such a thing is nothing but a “conspiracy theory.” If I’m not mistaken, the term “conspiracy theory” was coined by the CIA, about fifty years ago.

CJ Hopkins goes to jail

Unless he pays a fine of 3,600 Euros instead. What was his crime? Hopkins is a satirist who runs "The Consent Factory" website. He used to show up at Counterpunch with some regularity, until they found his satire too unfunny for them. I discovered him during the lock-down years - one of the few happy take-aways of those bleak times. His crime was mocking a German politician. Going to jail for mocking a politician? Sounds more like Stalin's Russia than a modern liberal democracy to me. Sad to say, there's an awful lot in our liberal democracies that smells more than a little totalitarian to me. There's no finer virtue-signaler in the entire Virtuous West than our very own PM Fluffy, and by God when those truck-driving Freedom Convoy yokels unleashed their horn-honking terror on law-abiding Ottawa, he wasted no time declaring a State of Emergency. To hell with civil rights... those people have UNACCEPTABLE OPINIONS! And that's why CJ is up a 3,600 Euro stump over there in the cradle of fascism. Making sport of a German politician is simply a bridge too far in the age of wokery.

Ukraine war news: the ominous silence

After a year and a half of relentlessly trumpeting Ukraine’s military achievements, The Globe and Mail seems to have imposed a news blackout. I searched in vain for any mention of Ukraine in yesterday’s print edition. In the 20 pages of the news section, not a single headline reference to Ukraine. Ditto the 12 page opinion section. It’s not till you get to the business section that Ukraine gets a mention, and that’s a speculative article by Eric Reguly about how the “sanctions from hell” are about to kick in 18 months into the war. His opinion is based on the ruble/USD exchange rate and assumes Russia needs dollars to finance the war. Reguly should know better. So after regaling us for a year and a half with tales of Ukraine, thanks to superior western arms and superior NATO training, piling humiliation after humiliation on the hapless Russian forces, the Globe falls silent on Ukraine? This comes after numerous American media, including CNN, NYT, and the Washington Post, have labelled the vastly over-hyped and long-awaited counter-offensive a devastating failure. Perhaps the worthies at Canada’s newspaper of record have determined that Canadians can’t handle bad news and are better served by no news at all.

Bruno meets an Irish wolfhound, in the back seat of his car

The back seat of the car being Bruno's space. We'd set up the garden chairs out past the marina, by the water treatment plant, for a couple of hours of gentle breezes and stellar waterfront views. Threw a few sticks in the water for Big-lips Bruno, which he dutifully retrieved. There was a guy throwing a line in a couple of hundred feet away. Had an Irish wolfhound with him. Seemed a youngish one, and noticed Bruno long before Bruno noticed him. As we're packing up, I open the door for Bruno while we stash the chairs in the back. Mr wolfhound can't contain himself. Comes bounding over to give Bruno the all-over sniff. Then he jumps in the back of our car. Bruno is giving me a look that says "what the hell goes on here?" Meanwhile, wolfhound's dad is running over yelling "Star Star Star." I assume that was Mr wolfhounds actual name. Star's dad had to retrieve his dog out of the back of our car. He was mightily apologetic. He needn't have worried. We would have been happy to take Star home with us!

The price of one F-35 is 500 public housing units

Canada has promised to buy 88 of them at approx $100 million a pop. The price we’ll pay for the fleet of new fighter jets is 44,000 public housing units. Build costs for a 4-floor walk-up in Toronto in 2023 run $200 /sf or there abouts. That’s a publicly owned asset that will last fifty years or more. Run as geared-to-income it will eventually recoup its costs. The F-35, on the other hand, will never recoup its costs. Instead, it will siphon off many hundreds of millions more in maintenance costs, estimated at $45,000 per flying hour. Buying one F-35 is a gift to Lockheed Martin that keeps on giving and giving… Buying 88 of them is a crime against the Canadian people. Let’s build public housing instead!

Canadians should realize that "standing with our allies" just means kissing Uncle Sam's arse

Former Defence Minister Peter MacKay had an op-ed circulating the other day about how Canada needs to regain the confidence of our allies, with whom we share the values of liberal democracy. Human rights, freedom of speech, a free press, and so on. The “allies” are primarily our NATO partners, the EU, and Five Eyes. While it’s a confederacy of liberal democratic equals, in reality one member is more equal that the others. NATO does America’s bidding and always has. There are no democratic debates within NATO. When Uncle Sam says “jump,” we ask “how high?” According to mainstream Canadian punditry, Canada has not been jumping high enough, and Canadians should be ashamed and resolve to jump much higher. We can worm our way back into Uncle Sam’s good graces with commitments to buy American F-35 fighter jets to the tune of $100 billions, and signing up for a US built nuclear submarine fleet for a few more hundreds of billions, like Australia has done. Only then can we truly stand with our allies in a meaningful way. Before we rally to this call for unbridled military spending, perhaps we should take a step back and ask ourselves exactly what are the values we share with America, the Leader of the Free World. Free elections? “Democracy” in America has become a non-stop clown show. The supreme court decision in 2010 that election financing was free speech effectively sold democracy to the highest bidder. The world’s exceptional nation and exemplary democracy is promising a Biden-Trump contest in 2024. Ponder that. For all the freedom of our free press, most people have no idea about the candidacies of RF Kennedy Jr or Cornell West. Why is that? Could it be that the free press isn’t free to give attention to candidates outside the official narrative? And why is America, the bastion of free speech, determined to forever punish Julian Assange for exposing its record of war crimes in Iraq and other victims of American meddling? “Standing with our allies” is shorthand for following orders from Washington. Vast swathes of urban America today resemble the shit-hole countries of the third world a former president once railed about. The American Empire is in obvious decline. Most of the world does not support sanctions against Russia, and the US-engineered war in Ukraine is clearly failing. America has nothing to teach anyone about freedom, democracy, or human rights. Meanwhile, Canada is facing a multitude of challenges on the home front. Let’s stop pissing away money “standing with our allies” and use those many $100s of billions to look after ourselves.

A helpful tip for Bruce Trail hikers

As you're navigating the trail on the Bruce Peninsula section, you'll pass right by the Wiarton Water Treatment plant. Little known secret; on the water-side of that plant, ie around the back, there's a fabulous waterfront campsite. It's not an official campsite, but the odds of you getting rousted out of there for illegal camping are pretty much zero. As an added bonus, there's a 110 outlet right there on the wall of the building, in case you want to charge up your devices. You're welcome!

In Ukraine, corruption saves lives

Specifically, it saves the lives of draftees who are able to buy their way out of military service. In yet another belated attempt to curry favour with his Western sponsors, Zelensky cracked down today on the military recruitment infrastructure that has been utterly corrupt throughout the war. Seems those who can get their hands on a few thousand USD can buy their way out of service, and who wouldn’t want to? A trip to the front lines is a one-way trip three out of four times. Word is 3,000 USD gets a prospect a “white letter,” a fully legit doctor’s note declaring you unfit for military service. That’s a small price to pay to save your life. The loot is spread around amongst crooked recruiters and crooked doctors. If a recruiter has 100 names on his daily draft list and even 10% cough up the cash, that makes for a sizeable stash. This scheme has been an open secret for a year and a half. Why would Zelly be clamping down on corruption at this late hour, when the war is obviously lost? The shmucks who can’t come up with three grand are the ones saving the democratic world.

High hopes and wishful thinking

The not-so-dynamic duo of Allan Rock and Lloyd Axworthy graced us with an op-ed in the Globe today, all about how we need to bring NATO to the Arctic to make the Rooskies back off. It's OUR Arctic, after all. In what was essentially a pro-NATO anti-Russia screed, Roxworthy claimed the Ukraine war proved the importance of NATO. Really? Looks to me a lot more like it has proved the impotence, incompetence, and irrelevance of NATO. NATO's war on Russia isn't going very well, in case you haven't noticed. For a year and a half we've been told our erstwhile flunkies in Ukraine need just a few more months and a few more billions worth of weapons, and the forces of freedom and human rights will prevail. We're at 18 months and about $150 billions by now, and by all accounts things seem to be trending in the wrong direction for the Nations of Virtue, the forces of freedom and democracy, etc. But not to worry... a few more years and a few more trillions should make things right...

Disappearing Ukraine

For months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine every hourly newscast at Al Jazeera opened with and was dominated by war news. Eighteen months later other wars have taken the spotlight. On the 7am news this morning Niger, Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Israel all took priority over Ukraine, and that was over twenty minutes into the broadcast. At the CBC News website at the moment there are fourteen more important stories before Ukraine gets a mention. They do put the most important stories first, don't they? I scrolled through dozens of stories at Fox News in search of a Ukraine mention. "Nose-picking spreads COVID" but nothing about the war. Ukraine also absent from home page at BBC and MSNBC websites. CNN was the outlier; "Woman detained in plot to assassinate Zelensky" is the number two story. So what up with Ukraine? Could it be that the managers of the "Ukraine-is-winning" narrative are having a rethink?

CBC finally notices scandals swirling around Hunter Biden

Almost three years after Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from hell’ first made headlines in the New York Post, CBC News is on top of the story. It’s rather a long read by CBC standards, so let me save you some time. Rest assured the scandal is nothing more than unproven allegations that Hunter made some deals with people, some of whom may have been shady characters. Nothing is proven, and besides, most of these alleged deals occurred when “the Big Guy” wasn’t even in politics, so nothing to see here! It was news to me that Sleepy Joe was ever out of politics so I did a little research. Yes, it’s true - for 27 months after he stepped down as Obama’s VP in January 2017 until he started his campaign for the White House in April 2019, Joe was in fact “out of politics.” Citizen Joe was just a regular guy holding down a full professorship at University of Pennsylvania. Unlike most professors I know, Joe’s gig at UPenn required no pesky things like office hours or teaching classes, leaving ample time to fundraise for his 2020 campaign. Oh, and it paid $900k per year! But he was out of politics, so any insinuation that Hunter was running an influence peddling campaign on Joe’s behalf is clearly nonsense fabricated by deranged Trump supporters who hate democracy.