Life and death and the Teviotdale Truck Stop

 Me and my old pal Kipling have been getting together at the Teviotdale Truck Stop for quite a few years now, ever since I moved to the sticks up here. Teviotdale is kinda sorta half way, although my half of the drive is a little longer than his.

Not that I'm complaining; I get a pretty good price on Kipling's primo home-grown. In fact, if he's in a particularly expansive mood, I don't pay a cent, as was the case today. Thanks buddy!

The three-egg "Big Breakfast" is still only $10.95. Amazing how they can do this after that massive job-killing hike in the minimum wage. The "Breakfast Special," where you get peameal instead of regular bacon, is still $12.95. If you're ever in Teviotdale, check it out.

So we get together every few months, and the first order of business increasingly becomes comparing notes on funerals we've been to since our last breakfast. The conversation goes something like this...

Remember what's his name? His daughter died. Killed herself. Thirty-eight. Nobody seen it coming.

That's fucked up, man. Remember what's her name? Ya, her... I worked with her a few years. Had a boy, only child. Went off to college. Offed himself before the end of the first semester.

Aw, fuck man.

Ya, that's fucked up. And remember my pal what's his name? Took a package. Full pay and  benefits for two years. He was gonna sell his place and move up to Parry Sound and go fishing every day. Kidney failure. He's got a dialysis machine in his house now...

Aw fuck man... if he can't go fishing his retirement dreams just went for a shit.


And on and on in that vein... it could get seriously depressing if you let it.

But here's why it doesn't.

We've both, quite independently, come to the conclusion that there's no logical explanation for life's vagaries. One guy falls off a motorcycle at 20 mph and dies. Another guy falls off a motorcycle at 100  mph and walks away.

One guy goes to the gym five days a week and drops dead jogging at 50. Another guy goes to the bar five days a week, smokes two packs a day, and dies in his sleep at 90.

You can call it the luck of the draw. You can call it fate. You can call it random happenstance.


I call it the grace of God.

Corporate rule

Here's a question; why has our government worked so hard to make a "deferred prosecution agreement" (DPA) available to SNC-Lavalin?

Here's another one; why has no mainstream media outlet ever investigated how hedge fund sharpie Gerald Schwartz was able to more than double the value of Husky Injection Molding in less than four years?

And another; why was Hunter Harrison universally lauded as a hero in our mainstream Canadian media for eliminating over 5,000 excellent working class jobs at CPR?

Here are some tentative answers.

The purpose of a DPA is to allow corporate entities that engage in bribery, bid-rigging, and other nefarious business practices to get off by paying a fine instead of being charged with a crime. Corporations love it! Paying the fine becomes just another cost of doing business, just like the original bribe. The Trudeau government's rationale for having slipped a DPA provision into law last year, in the back pages of an omnibus budget bill, is that Canada needs to have a level playing field vis-a-vis our competitors. Ergo, if the UK and US go easy on corporate crooks, we must too, or we won't be competitive.

Husky was the life's passion of Robert Schad, a German immigrant who started out with a little machine shop in the mid 50's. He famously made Husky one of the most desirable workplaces in Canada by providing not only good wages, but unprecedented employee perks, from free meals to free day-care to on site gyms. Getting on in years, he sold his baby to Gerald Schwartz's Onex in 2007 for just under a billion dollars.

Less than four years later, Schwartz sold Husky on to another hedge fund for two billion. How did Schwartz add a billion dollars in value to the company that Robert Schad had spent a lifetime building up? He ripped out all that feel-good stuff that detracts from the bottom line, that's how. That's what "building value" looks like in the world of hedge fund operators. 

That's appalling, disgusting, scandalous... but Gerald Schwartz is a Very Big Deal who just donated $100,000,000 to the University of Toronto. No newspaper publisher, let alone reporter, is going to touch that story with a fifty foot pole, because it would be their last story.

Canadian news media lapped up every drop of mendacious idiocy that dripped from Hunter Harrison's lips as Harrison and his hedge fund boss Bill Ackman destroyed more than 5,000 working class jobs at the iconic railroad. Harrison was "the new sheriff in town," don't you know. He was going to "change the culture" at CPR.

And he did. He replaced a culture of collegiality with a culture of fear, and he and Ackman walked away with a cool two billion for their troubles. For that, they are regarded as business geniuses by our business press.

That's what corporate rule looks like. There are innumerable case studies to choose from. Eddie Lampert looted Sears Canada to the tune of billions, leaving 16,000 pensioners in the lurch, but our media claim the company failed because of changing consumer tastes and inept management. The same corporate media still proclaim NAFTA a resounding success, even as all evidence shows it decimated Canada's manufacturing sector.

Which brings us to our current Prime Minister. He serves as an invaluable cover for the greedbags who call the shots behind the scenes. All the talk about feminism and diversity and human rights is designed to take our eye off the fact that he's 100% committed to corporate rule.

Here's a bold prediction. SNC-Lavalin will yet get their DPA. Our media, both corporate and the state broadcaster, will keep hammering away at the credibility of JWR and the (completely bogus) claim that 9,000 jobs are at risk.


Corporate rule will prevail.

Why the old order is doomed

The "American Dream" is dead.

And it's not just dead in America. Thanks to the ubiquity of US pop culture and its usurpation of native cultures around the world, the death of the American Dream has global repercussions.

Hard work and making sure your kids get a decent education, so that they'll make an even better go of things, well, that might still work today, if you're lucky.

But in all probability, it will not.

Hard work don't mean shit if the place you worked for thirty years gets bought and stripped bare by the hedgies. That happens over and over again, and it's just considered business as usual. Look at what happened to Sears Canada once that asshole in Florida got his hands on it.

Goodbye pensions! Goodbye jobs!

As for getting an education, good luck with that.

The recent Ivy League admissions scandal is just a step beyond what always goes on. Certain schools have a more prestigious degree than others, and that can make all the difference in a career. The stupid children of the rich are far more likely to get into those schools than the smart children of the poor.

Not that all rich kids are stupid, and of course poor folks have lots of stupid kids too. But unless you've got the right credentials from the right place, that university degree you owe $40,000 in student loans on is gonna take a big bite out of your paycheck as a barista or an Uber driver.


And, horror of horrors, the kids are figuring this out.

Are you that happy to see me?.. or is that just a chainsaw in your pants?

My golly, it's a f@cked up world, isn't it? What with climate change, an ever-growing international refugee crisis, the global economy on the brink, American exceptionalism running amok as never before... holy moly, sometimes it's a struggle to summon the willpower to get out of bed!

That's why I love Fox News. Yup, there's nothing like the news feed at Fox to make you thankful to be alive. After all, if I'd died in my sleep last night, I would have missed this story. Buddy's out shopping for a chainsaw, spots one that might work for him, and decides to save himself a few hundred bucks by tucking it down his pants!

I've been chainsaw shopping a few times in my life, and the idea that such a thing was even possible had never, ever, even once crossed my mind.


Thank you, Fox News!

That was never about justice; it was a crime against humanity

Big news out of Texas yesterday; all outstanding charges in the four year old Waco biker ambush outrage have been dismissed.

Suffice it to say the charges being dismissed should never, in a free country governed by the rule of law, have been laid in the first place. By dumb luck I happened on the live broadcast that Sunday in May, 2015, where Waco police spokesman Sgt. Swanton was hyperventilating about the evil of "outlaw bikers." My first reaction was, this guy is full of shit.

I've never owned a Harley and my only knowledge of "outlaw bikers" is that it wasn't unusual to find yourself working next to one in one of the two dozen or so welding shops I did time in over the years. I never knew any of those supposed biker drug kingpins you read about in the papers. "Satan's Choice" was the crew we had in the K-W area back in the day. They eventually amalgamated with the Hells Angels. The guys I knew were just regular folks working in the welding shop to pay their bills, same as me. If they were big-time criminals, they hid the fact very well.

The best source by far on the Waco tragedy is The Aging Rebel. I've never read anything there that would lead me to believe those guys caught up in this Waco business were any different than the guys I used to work alongside. Regular working folks trying to make their financial obligations. You know, pay their bills and feed their kids, that kind of nefarious stuff.

Even if it's true that it wasn't police bullets that killed every one of the Waco casualties, there is no question that the entire incident was orchestrated by law enforcement agencies. A local cabal of smug law enforcement careerists took it from there. Many otherwise law-abiding people who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time had their lives destroyed.

And now they get a "oops, sorry, guess we'll drop the charges..."


That's not nearly good enough.

Should Canada's state broadcaster be trusted?

I'm curious why this story doesn't appear on the CBC "Top Stories" page. After all, they do mention that Trudeau would be addressing a gathering of young women. A lot of youthful feminist types are flocking to Trudeau's feminist agenda?

Maybe not so much.

You'd think that when dozens of young feminists turn their backs on PM Trudeau, the story would be front and centre.

Trudeau's name also comes up in the latest Wilson-Raybould story. Once again, the former Justice Minister and AG is portrayed on the CBC as a vengeful and conniving woman.


Why is the CBC doing damage control for PM Fluffy?

Set the bar high!

Here's my dear 86 year old father setting up to do a little tree pruning.



Now that he's stone deaf he always wears hearing protection! Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

You park the loader just so, lift the bucket to max height, set up the extension ladder, and you're good to go!




Dad's tree-pruning expertise has been honed by trial and error over decades. I remember when he was first experimenting with the bucket & ladder method, he had his John Deere crawler-loader parked on an incline to get at an offending branch.

While he was up in the bucket doing his chainsaw work, the brake slipped and the loader slowly meandered down the hill with nobody at the controls and Dad in the upraised bucket hanging on for dear life.

Now that would have made for some great family photos!