033 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 033

Air Date: November 29, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Station Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation – Q Who?):

Ensign Sonya Gomez: Hot chocolate, please.

Geordi La Forge: We don’t ordinarily say please to food dispensers around here.

Ensign Sonya Gomez: Well, since it’s listed as intelligent circuitry, why not? After all, working with so much artificial intelligence can be dehumanizing, right? So why not combat that tendency with a little simple courtesy?

Ensign Sonya Gomez: Ah, thank you.

Geordi La Forge: Someone who just arrived, you certainly aren’t shy with your opinions.

Ensign Sonya Gomez: Have I been talking too much?

Geordi La Forge: No.

Ensign Sonya Gomez: Oh, I do tend to have a bit of a motor mouth, especially when I’m excited.

Bob Metz:

Good morning, London.

It is Thursday, November 29, 2007. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right. On CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now until noon. Not right wing. Just right.

And welcome to the show today where you can call in to join the conversation if you would like at 519-661-3600. Or email us with your thoughts and suggestions at justrightchrw.com.

Today on the show, we’ll be taking one last kick at the TV season, maybe later in the show if I get time to get into it. Hoping to get a little bit of my reorientation on left and right, but depending how other things go, we might squeeze that in or not. I want to talk about a few current events, including infrastructure and tasers.

And we’ll start with a different subject, but first, a very important programming note. Just to let those of you who listen to the show regularly know that next week, Just Right will not be aired on December 6, but we’ll return to our regular weekly schedule in the following week.

This is being done to make way for some special programming planned by CHRW next week. And to give me my first week off appearing weekly on CHRW since last Christmas, when I was still coming in to do Left, Right and Center with Jim Chapman and Jeff Schlemmer. I don’t think there’s been a week that I’ve actually had off, at least doing one radio broadcast a week at CHRW since at least this year.

And in fact, even when Jim was doing a show, I sat in a couple of times and hosted for him when he was away. But nevertheless, just to let you know, we will be back in two weeks and next week will be some special programming.

But first off the top, it’s been a little while since I’ve touched on this theme area, topic area, basically science and technology.

And as you know, if you’re listening regularly, I like to talk about that a little bit. It has a lot to do with physics and understanding the nature of the universe, which is what proper philosophies have to be based on. And of course, it has a lot to do with our standard of living and the things we enjoy in life are the technologies that we enjoy.

And of course, on one of the shows in the past, I spent some extensive time talking about robots and robot technology, which I think is the big thing for the 21st century.

And it seems that my prediction is coming more true each day. I found an interesting item here in the London Free Press just appeared on the 15th. Shannon Montgomery writes under the heading, Imagine Falling in Love with Your Vacuum. Where she reports that James Young, a University of Calgary researcher, is studying cartoons, looking for ways to help people accept robots in their lives.

The doctoral student is working with robotic vacuum cleaners called Roombas, which amazingly is the very robot I was talking about last time on the show, analyzing how giving them cartoon-like expressions changes people’s reactions to the machines. If you look at a comic book or cartoon with very few lines, they can show emotion, anger, and almost as much as what a human can show.

For example, when the Roomba gets stuck, say in a corner, beads of sweat pop along its brow in the image, and its eyes screw tightly up as it tries to push its way out of the corner.

Robotic researchers weren’t surprised by a recent study by Georgia Tech’s College of Computing that found some people become deeply attached to their Roombas, naming them and even treating them like members of the family. More than two million have been sold since they were introduced in 2002. I don’t really know anyone who’s got one of these things, but two million sold. That’s not bad for starters.

Interestingly enough, a related product, but not about robots or that type of technology directly, came in National Post November 19th, where James Cowan writes under the heading, Lovable Products May Boost Profits. And now here they’re referring to University of Toronto professor who finds people respond to human traits. Well, what do you know?

A new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests people respond more positively to consumer goods with pleasant personalities than those without human characteristics. Want to sell a cell phone? Turn it into a little man holding hands with his friends. Interested in promoting an automobile? Slap a smile on its grill and turn it into your own salesman.

In fact, they had some pictures of the front grills of cars there that they actually tested, market tested. And you could see some of them had a sad look to them. Some of them had a happy look, depending on how the grill was actually formed. And it actually affected people’s psychological reactions to the machines.

And you can bet that the people who are going to build the robots and technology of the future are going to take all of these things into account. And we’re going to have a whole chunk of the population one of these days who’s going to think robots are real people too. And that’s going to create a whole new problem for us.

And on to another technology event or comment here actually.

The time in between seems to have flown past in the blink of an eye. We’d better be prepared to accept that there are children being born every day who will see our unnatural confinement to the desk as a bizarre and unfortunate way of life, just as some of us already have trouble understanding or even remembering what things were like before email and search engines.

Kaush predicts the end of the PC as we know it, which is a stationary box with a traditional keyboard and a generally fixed location, as new products are streaming onto the market which carry out many of the functions that the PCs held the monopoly on.

He observes that PC shipments in Japan, for example, have fallen for five consecutive quarters now and sales of laptops as well, despite dramatic price cuts are off almost as much as the desktop PCs. Enhancements in processing speed as any computer user knows are no longer really paying off in big productivity gains or exciting new functions at the application level on the desktop.

I’ve heard that comment more and more that computers are getting near almost the top speed that they would normally run or that you would normally need, but we’ve heard that in the past too and who knows where we’ll be going from there. Buyers seem more interested in improved high definition screens, new mobile phones, or smarter, more sophisticated cameras.

Meanwhile, the role of the desktop computer as a media device is being challenged on one hand by portable devices like the iPod and on the other by TiVo, and other innovative forms of media storage. For the moment, the old fashioned computer still has a role to play as a centralized manager of these devices, but that role is constantly attenuating, says Kaush.

Now, I don’t know, I think this argument’s a little bit like the, remember last week’s Star Trek, no more TV in the future, we’re not going to have TV in the future anymore. I think that’s basically saying the same thing.

Very few technologies, I mean the 8-track might be an exception, really go the way of the dustbin totally, and I understand there still might be a person or two out there with an 8-track, which by the way were very high quality recordings because they were running on a half inch tape, which was like a reel to reel. They weren’t like cassettes, but nevertheless, it just didn’t prove to be practical, whereas I think a desktop computer is just a box with components in it, and it’s very cheaply made because of its larger size and relative ease to work with.

I can almost put one of these things together now, and if I can do it, it’s got to be pretty easy to do. You just buy a component, slap in your card, and you can make your computer do different things in terms of whatever applications you like to use. So I don’t think the day’s over for the PC yet, although I do think that all those other devices are certainly going to continue to be popular, and compete for consumer attention always.

Now moving on to a different area of science, basically astronomy and physics. There are a couple of interesting developments, believe it or not, in the last little while.

And one of them was a very short article that just made me scratch my head a little bit, and it says in the National Post, Tom Spears writes under the heading, Astronomers Discover Biggest Empty Hole, It’s a Billion Light Years Wide. And he writes, Astronomers have known for years there are empty places in the universe, but they never expected one so big.

In our own neighborhood, there would be hundreds of galaxies in a region this size, each of them holding a few hundred billion stars as well as immense clouds of gas. So you get an idea of how big an area they’re talking about. I mean a billion light years across means it takes light a billion years to make the distance. That’s what that means, it’s a measurement of distance.

There’s really nothing special happening in that region, says Lawrence Rudnick, a University of Minnesota astronomy professor. Our view would be that this is accidental, he says. And I’m scratching my head when I read that. That’s the whole article basically, it was really short, and I’m thinking accidental.

On what grounds does he actually say that? I mean an accident would suggest it wasn’t supposed to be that way, right? And how do we actually know enough about the universe to be able to say something like that? How would anybody really know whether that was an accident or not? It might be unusual, maybe the discovery was an accident, maybe that’s what he was talking about, because he sure didn’t make it clear in that article.

But here’s the big science story I think of the year, and apparently this is going to occur sometime in Europe, late next year, it’s being scheduled. And here in Waterloo, Ontario, a whole bunch of very distinguished scientists and people in science and technology basically met at a high school auditorium, believe it or not, in Waterloo, because they had too many people for where they would have normally had the meeting, which would have been at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and they just couldn’t hold all the people there.

Now basically, they had all gathered to see John Ellis, 61 years old, the former head of the theory division at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is known by most people as CERN.

They were there to learn about Canada’s role in Atlas, the largest of four unprecedented experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer long circular tube buried 100 meters beneath the Swiss-French border near Geneva, lined with superconducting magnets that can accelerate a beam of particles to just shy of the speed of light.

And apparently, this has been going on for a while. People have been complaining that we should have had the experiment done already, but there have been all kinds of delays, and then they ask the question, well, why the delays? It’s taken 16 years and cost around $5 billion.

And why haven’t they turned it on yet? Well, he says they got some magnets from the Americans, because they needed certain kinds of magnets to run this thing, but apparently it seemed that the Americans had not taken into account the physical force exerted by the particle beam itself, which packs the force of a TGV, which is a high-speed train or a car, driving at 25,000 kilometers per hour. And he says, the magnets are just simply pushed apart when they’re subject to this kind of force.

And there have been worse problems, not all scientific. A construction worker was killed in a 2005 accident at the CERN site there. And another problem is that whenever it rains, the accelerator gets slightly bigger due to the waterlogged rock. And get this, the moon exerts a subtle gravitational pull on the land, just as it does at sea to create tides. And this distorts the tunnel.

So they have to be able to shoot this particle through the tunnel at a point when it’s not being disturbed by the moon. Can you believe that? I mean, you always know you’re under effect by these forces everywhere in the universe. You’re not aware of them. But when you get to these quantum levels, it becomes critical.

And as they say, in an experiment that requires precision to within millionths of a meter, such problems are potentially fatal. The collider was due to be activated later this month, and then postponed to May 2008. And now they’re saying it looks like it’s going to be late next year at best.

But apparently what are they doing all this for? Because they’re looking for something that people have called the God particle. Trying to figure out the beginning of the universe. Science fiction stories have been written about this.

But here’s how they explain it in the story. They say, the amazing something that they’re looking for, which scientists have taken to calling the God particle, is the Higgs boson, whose existence is predicted by the standard model, the current best description of fundamental physics. The standard model though has several important shortfalls.

One is that it only works if all particles are assumed to be weightless. They must have no mass, no inertia, and they must zip through the ether at the speed of light. But they do not in reality.

So to explain mass, the property of mass, it fell to an Edinburgh physicist, Peter Higgs, to propose in the 1960s that there is a force field everywhere in the universe, like a big jar of honey, that’s how they describe it, through which all particles must pass. When they do, they distort this Higgs field, and they are slowed to varying degrees. And the resulting sluggishness is their mass, which in the presence of gravity becomes weight.

So isn’t it interesting that perhaps the stuff of which we are made is caused by going through this honey stuff that they’re trying to describe, which is a sort of a force field.

Now the prediction of the Higgs particle arises because in modern physics, particles and waves are flip sides of the same coin, like mass and energy. A good example is light, which behaves both like a wave and like a beam of individual photons, depending on which experiment you conduct on it.

So according to theory, there must be a particle, a boson, corresponding to the Higgs field. If so, it has not existed since just after the Big Bang, and will not exist again until those extreme conditions are recreated.

So Canada’s part in all this involved in this project, Atlas, is to develop the detector that can actually pick out this particle that they’re actually looking for, and then look for corroboration that it is actually that particle, because they’re going to get millions of particle collisions. And basically they say that if the God particle does not show itself in Switzerland, they’re going to just shut this whole collider down. And it’s a very extremely complex process.

So you can see the kinds of things that they’re trying to find out. I’m just wondering if we’re going to hear from somebody suggesting that they’re going to try and recreate the Big Bang in Europe, and there might be some kind of political protest against it or something.

But in an accompanying article, the last one I’ll look at under science and tech, it’s sort of celebrating the genius of Albert Einstein. And this article written by Tom Spears under the heading, As if a Genius Had a Bad Day, Einstein continues to be proven right on the theories he developed as early as the early 1900s.

And now they’re saying it is yet another scientific victory for Albert Einstein. And it only took the world of physics 102 years to prove it. Einstein was just a youngster when his special theory of relativity predicted something he couldn’t actually test, and that’s the idea called time dilation, which says that time moves more slowly as you approach the speed of light. And he came up with this idea back in 1905.

Researchers verified Einstein’s theory as far back as 1938 to a margin of error of 1%. And apparently now the accuracy has grown to 10 to the minus seventh or 10,000 times better than before.

They’ve actually proven Einstein’s theory that when two objects, one relative to the other, goes faster, its rate of time is slower. But what they do is, apparently atoms give off energy, but with the lithium atom, it’s a faint green light, and that light has a particular frequency, a number of light waves per second.

But when the atom moves really, really fast, 6% of the speed of light in his lab time slows down for it, as Einstein predicted, for anything that moves at ultra-high speeds. So they can actually measure that the time slowing down by the rate at which that frequency of the atom is actually moving.

Because it’s always going to move at a constant speed relative to itself, but not relative to us. And of course, instead of producing light at the usual frequency, the frequency of the light fell a little because time for the atoms was slowing down.

Special relativity says that a moving clock ticks more slowly for us. That means the frequency of that light has shifted, which is of course something they see in astronomy too, with galaxies that are moving away from us.

If the time dilation prediction from Einstein’s 1905 theory had turned out not to work, a revision of physics books would have had to occur everywhere, but it did. And of course, Einstein proven correct once again.

Now, when we come back on the other side of this break, going to talk a little bit about some current events, haven’t done that in a while, and one of those events is of course some of the Taser controversy, a bit about infrastructure as well. We’ll get back to that right after this break.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

I almost didn’t get into Montreal. I had some trouble at the airport. I got to customs and the guy said, do you have anything to declare? And I said, yeah, I hate hockey.

The guy goes, now come on, what’s your nature of your business in Canada? And I just looked him in the eyes and I said, I came to find a man who killed my cousin.

Clip (Back to You):

Speaker 1: I said, I’m going to the airport. Hey, Kel, what’s going on?

Speaker 2: You’re terrified, aren’t you? You got to get me out of this Taser piece.

Speaker 1: Just tell Ryan that you’ll interview the cop, but you won’t get zapped.

Speaker 2: You don’t think that comes off as kind of wimpy?

Gary Sherslapsky: And finally, a shocking new development in the fight against crime. For the latest in police technology, let’s go live to Gary Sherslapsky. Sherslapsky, Chuck.

Gary Sherslapsky: I’m standing here with Officer Pete Thurston, who’s holding in his hand the next generation in non-lethal weaponry. In a moment, if I don’t lose my nerve, I’m going to take a blast from it myself. But first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the device?

Officer Pete Thurston: Sir, the WS-430, which stands for Whale Stopper, by the way. I did not know that. Basically, it scrambles your central nervous system. You momentarily stop breathing and your kidney thinks it’s a heart. Tell you what, why don’t you hit me with that right now?

Gary Sherslapsky: Well, uh, do you have a question? How about later? Let’s just do this. Well, legally I’m supposed to warn you. Just do it! Fire in the hole!

Officer Pete Thurston: Wow, that was impressive. How are you feeling? Good. I’m a bit okay.

Gary Sherslapsky: So, where’s Chuckerson at?

Officer Pete Thurston: I didn’t understand that. Are these commercially available? No, they’re much too dangerous. Any other questions? No. Oh, thank you, Mr. Sherslapsky. Sherslapsky!

Bob Metz:

Wow, I couldn’t believe it when I saw that skit. That was from the show Back to You, which is one of the new shows. I don’t know if it’s already been canceled, the Kelsey Grammer show. They must have filmed it before the controversy that arose in Vancouver, the Vancouver airport.

And of course, as you know, there are a few cases in the news about the use of tasers and the appropriate use of tasers in law enforcement. By the way, you’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM. You can call in 519-661-3600 if you want to join in on the discussion.

Listening to the whole taser controversy, there’s two what I call sort of illogical arguments that I keep hearing repeated about it. And the first one is that tasers save lives and that they’re better than a gun. That’s basically what they’re saying.

Now, if this is true, think about this. Then one is arguing in the case of the taser tragedy that occurred in Vancouver and in a few elsewhere, that were it not for the taser, the victims in these cases would have been shot dead by police. That would have been their other option.

And I don’t think this is what I want to hear. That some guy standing alone in an airport without a weapon, maybe grabbed at a stapler or something like that. I don’t think that’s the reason to shoot him dead. And I think you can even use the gun in a way not to shoot somebody dead, which might cause less damage than the taser in a given situation.

Now, while I accept the argument that a taser is less deadly than a gun in a given situation, I simply cannot apply that logic to anything that’s come to my attention with regards to the whole Robert Dziekański case in Vancouver. It just seems to me self-evident that this argument enables poor judgment in potential conflicts between police and security members and the public.

It has to be tempting to want to avoid any physical confrontation whatsoever, even if it was minor and a taser just seems to make that kind of approach an expedient one. And I think that’s what really the issue is all about, is that it makes it expedient.

And no, I do not support banning tasers. But nor do I believe that tasers are necessarily safe. And that brings me to the second argument I keep hearing about this issue.

In the cases where somebody dies, the first thing they want to say is that it was the victim’s condition that resulted in the death and not the taser itself. I can understand why they would make that argument, but let’s look at that logically.

It’s a little nonsensical. That being struck by a taser will not kill most people and that most people will recover from the shock. I think it’s a wholly different thing than saying tasers are safe in the sense of being totally harmless to the targeted victim.

If someone has a heart condition and dies as a consequence of being struck by a taser, it’s outrageous to me to solely blame the death on the person’s condition and to totally avoid accepting responsibility for shooting someone with a weapon. One would assume that at least there would be some level of accountability on the part of those who inappropriately use a weapon.

But if the choice actually is between shoot to kill and a taser, then I think that level of responsibility drops off precipitously. That’s really what I think the whole issue is about. We’re going to see this plastered into news for much longer time to come. The taser debate will not go away.

Here’s another one that won’t go away either.

I’ve talked about this occasionally on the show and I’ve certainly discussed it throughout my whole political career. And that’s the issue of infrastructure. Ontario infrastructure is in trouble, reports warn, in a National Post November 21st, written by Will Tremaine.

And this article almost says it all in a very brief summary. And it says, city infrastructure in Ontario and across Canada is in serious trouble. Two different reports released on November 20th have warned. Ontario’s construction industry said in one report that bridges in the province need an estimated $1 billion worth of repair now. That’s today. And about another billion more in the next five years.

In Toronto, 20 of 500 bridges need repairs now, costing about $30 million. And 100 more need repairs in the next five years, costing about $150 million, it said.

And in a separate report released in Ottawa, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities said that close to 80% of Canada city infrastructure is past its service life. Think about that. Past, not just getting old, but we’re already past, should have been replaced, 80%.

It said the physical foundations of Canada cities are near collapse and sets the price for eliminating the municipal infrastructure deficit nationally at about $123 billion. If we don’t act soon as a nation to tackle this deficit, we’ll see more catastrophic failures in our roads, bridges, water supply and other vital infrastructure, said Federation President Gord Steeves.

The report cited recent catastrophic bridge failures in Laval, Quebec and Minneapolis and highlighted the partial collapse of a bridge on Highway 11 near Latchford in 2003. Interestingly, that was all the article said, but it did not mention New Orleans, which is a failure to look after it. But of course, that debate has been taken over by the environmentalists and the global warmers who want us to believe that what happened in New Orleans was caused by global warming rather than by a failure in infrastructure.

And that’s one of the problems with this issue, is how we get our attention deflected from where we should be putting our priorities. Nor, of course, did this article mention London’s own sinkhole, which has become a topic of conversation among Canadian politicians. With some suggestions, London has become the poster boy for the nation’s infrastructure crisis.

Infrastructure is capital and thus requires a capitalistic approach to its financing and its maintenance. And I think as long as we keep financing things the way we do, we’re going to run into problems and I’ll be getting into a little more of that shortly.

But another article very quickly here from the Toronto Star, October 11th, and Anne Golden President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada in her memo to the Premier of Ontario under the heading Rebuild Infrastructure to Re-energize Economy, writes, One part of the infrastructure solution lies in closing the well-documented shortfall between Ontario cities’ spending requirements and their ability to raise revenue. This fiscal gap has left cities unable to make the investments they so desperately need, not just in infrastructure, but in all of the other areas that will make or break the competitiveness of our cities in years to come. As gridlock worsens and water mains burst, voters understand the need and will support bold political leadership in modernizing Ontario’s infrastructure.

Well, I think there’s a little bit of political doublespeak in that statement. Because when I see the word bold political leadership in this context, what that means to me is more spending higher taxes, but don’t touch my favorite social programs because that’s why she wrote not just in infrastructure, but in all of the other areas.

And when they use the word fiscal gap, we don’t call it fiscal gap when we’re short of money. I got a fiscal gap. It’s the inevitable result of spending more than you’re earning. That’s the gap. If you spend $100 and you’ve only got $50, well, the gap is $50 and it’s well-documented. It’s very well-accounted for. That’s what I get a kick out of.

I see this constantly. It’s a well-documented shortfall. But really, all they’re documenting is numbers, accounting records. The cause of the shortfall is not documented in any meaningful way.

Most such documents, take a look at Chip Martin’s How We Got Here in the Free Press November 14th. It’s just a further accounting of the same numbers, but stretched over more years. So you see the pattern.

And that should make us ask a question too. Nowhere in any article I’ve seen of late does the writer document why the political masters of their time did not address these vital issues. The problem didn’t arise overnight after all.

I want to know what the discussion around the municipal council tables was when the subject of infrastructure was raised in years past and how one level of government allowed itself to become hopelessly addicted to the revenues of another level of government.

And the question I want to hear answered is not who, what, when, where and how, but why? I mean, what was the thinking of governments at the time, or today for that matter? I don’t really think that much has changed.

And now when I get that answer, only then will I accept that the fiscal gap has been well documented.

Now further to this subject, on Tuesday, November 13th, couple of weeks ago now, I appeared on the Crossroads Television System’s live television broadcast open line show called On the Line, hosted by Christine Williams and featuring various guests appearing on a panel discussion. I’ve done this for many years now. I’m pretty much a regular there.

And this was the first time we’ve done it live in a while with callers calling in. But on that day we were joined by Rabbi Stephen Wise and the first subject for discussion that arose was Canada’s infrastructure, interestingly enough.

So on this subject, I will leave you with the following clip, which runs about six or seven minutes. And it was excerpted from that show.

And bear in mind that this is a show that plays to a generally Toronto national audience. And on the day in question, another major water main break was being reported in the media that day while I was driving to the CTS television studios, and I was hearing of a second break here in the London area, which I don’t know what has happened to that one since. I understand our other sinkhole might be filled up by maybe this time next week. So that would be good news.

But nevertheless, here’s how that little blip on the Christine Williams show On the Line went a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday. Here it is.

Clip (On the Line – Crossroads Television System):

Christine Williams: I must say off the top, I had a little bit of fun with this headline with the Toronto Star. Let’s show our viewers. It shocked me when I first saw it.

Take a look at it. Prime Minister to cities, drop dead. And just look at the expression on our Prime Minister’s face. Now, when I first saw that headline when I came to work, the first thing that came into my mind was, what kind of a Prime Minister will tell our municipalities to drop dead?

But when I went on to read the same article by the Toronto Star as it turns out, he didn’t use those words. He didn’t say to drop dead.

There was a meeting with McGuinty that the Prime Minister had who pleaded for help from the federal government, given the economic boom that we’re having. The answer back was basically this. Well, we’ve already transferred some $43 billion to the provinces and it’s up to the provinces to fund the municipalities.

I want to hear what the two of you have to say on this, but it sounded a little bit to me or reminded me of a scenario that we sometimes see with siblings where one manages their income perhaps. I don’t know. You may not agree with me. I’d love to hear from you. Manages their money, does what they need to do, balances the budget, and another sibling perhaps spends the money in a certain way, gets angry when that other sibling seems to be more prosperous? I don’t know. Is that the case? Perhaps I’m accusing the municipalities of not handling the money.

Maybe it’s a little bit of that together with a need, a genuine need. But the issue I have is our Prime Minister did not say to the municipalities flippantly to drop dead. I’m going to start with you, Rabbi. How did you feel about this article?

Rabbi Stephen Wise: Well, you’re right. The title is very shocking and I don’t think our Prime Minister would ever tell anyone to drop dead, let alone our cities. But as you say, as I read through it, I’m concerned. I live in this area and I can see that the government has a surplus and it would be nice if it trickled down to the cities. I know we certainly need it. What about you, Robert?

Bob Metz: Well, first of all, speak to the headline. I happen to know that most newspapers, even if you’re an editorial writer, you don’t pick the headline. The newspaper picks it for you.

So sometimes I can’t imagine anybody being covered in a story getting an accurate headline if an editorial writer doesn’t. But I think Harper is generally acknowledging the fact that the federal government doesn’t have the proper constitutional jurisdiction to fund provincial municipalities in a direct way. The federal government just doesn’t have that jurisdiction.

Municipalities are definitely creatures of the province. They’re created under the Municipalities Act of Ontario and that’s basically a provincial creature. So to get the federal government involved with the provinces on that level, I think it’s a mistake and I think it’s a mistake we’ve been making in this country for quite a while is one level of government mandating certain programs that other levels of government are responsible for or other levels of government starting programs that they can’t pay for and they look to other sources. I think that’s just a formula for destruction.

Christine Williams: Now here’s another headline that we also grabbed a hold of in fact today and it’s a lesser one. It’s a small commentary and it’s entitled Harper to Cities Grow Up. Quite a different response that we see there if you can get that article up. There we go.

Grow Up. Very different wording. But I want to go back to this whole issue about funding the cities because when the articles came out it was plastered across the headlines everywhere about our government, Flaherty slashing from the point of view of the GST and let’s face it that was an election promise.

But immediately the criticism followed and I see this article as a bit of a continuation of that the criticism followed. How could a government in its prosperity start slashing taxes although it was an election promise given the kinds of need that we do see in our municipalities.

Now I’m going to say money could always be managed better we know this but we do have a need when it comes to community based issues of funding social issues. There has been a lot of criticism involving education. Many moms would like to see particularly for certain groups better education for their preschool children. A lot of money needed. Poverty issues. How do you feel about this?

Rabbi Stephen Wise: I mean certainly if the money can’t trickle down from the federal government to the cities then maybe they could take over some of the issues that affect the whole country like a national preschool plan that the federal government could fund or a national poverty plan and so that way they wouldn’t be transferring money to just municipality but be able to handle some of the crisis that we’re facing.

Christine Williams: Now Robert how do you feel about the government when it comes to handling these issues with community with the poverty issues?

Bob Metz: Well that’s a general question I think in terms of the federal government I think again it’s jurisdictional. Look at the municipalities in our city where I come from the city of London Ontario.

The city municipality, the city councillors want to spend in the excess of 50 to 100 million dollars on a new arts entertainment center. Meanwhile, what just happened in London last week? We have a huge sinkhole at the corner of Dundas and Wellington, the main intersection of the city and it’s going to be closed for another month. Has been closed for three weeks already. This morning as I left another section of road collapsed somewhere else creating another water main break.

And this is something that I locally in London have been complaining about for 20 years infrastructure. It’s just not a sexy issue. It doesn’t get people elected. But here you have municipalities that refuse to fund their own.

We have politicians on our municipal council running to Harper as well. Please fund our municipality. We want money from the others. And I quite frankly have to ask why someone in Vancouver should be subsidizing someone in Toronto.

Why someone in Toronto should be subsidizing someone in Vancouver? It’s all going back and forth. Now what’s the connection there? It’s a middle man. Do we need that middle man or should we just keep our money in our own communities?

Which is why we live there because one community should have an advantage or disadvantage or something different about it. And why our cities all look the same from coast to coast. If I go downtown Vancouver it doesn’t look any different than London Ontario on a main street and because it’s all funded the same.

Christine Williams: You bring up some good points but I’m going to be asking you after we get to our caller there that.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

They say the oldest game we play is basketball because it dates back to the time of the Incas but I think the oldest game we play is obviously bowling because it dates back to when we only had three fingers.

Bob Metz:

Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM where you can join the conversation at 519-661-3600 and before I forget, programming note again, remember, Just Right will not be here next week. CHRW is going to have some special programming but we’ll return the following week to resume our regular weekly broadcast.

Now I don’t know how my time is doing here. I think I might be able to still get all of this in with a bit of luck but you may recall that it was this last week or the week before. It might have been two weeks ago. I began, I promised to do this first of all when I started the show once again in the summer because I’ve done it before, just a quick reorientation on left and right and why, for example, at the beginning of the show I always open up with that same statement where I say not right wing, just right and why I think there’s a difference between what I think is right wing per se because right wing is to me conservative, republican type, left wing can be liberal, can be NDP, whatever.

And of course we talked about, when we were talking about philosophy where I wanted to bring in some of the more fundamentals that Plato, Aristotle are the beginning of all of this. And Plato of course, we would typify on the left and Aristotle we would typify as being on the right. And basically that’s where it all starts and as I explained a couple weeks ago, don’t want to get into all of those specific details but do want to say that for example under Plato you would have unreality and under Aristotle you’d have reality.

Plato believed in mind over matter whereas Aristotle believed more or less in matter over mind and we got into that fairly heavily at that time. Plato more on the side of whim or the left let us say, the right more on the side of reason and principle and I know people on the left might argue with me on this but that’s what this show is for if you want to disagree.

Generally the left means involuntary, the right means voluntary and remember again always that by right I am not talking necessarily conservative.

Under the left column no or limited choice, under the right column freedom of choice, under the left you have social justice, on the right you have individual justice. On the left you have almost anti-science or junk science. On the right you have actual science and a firm base in physics and astronomy which is one of the reasons I cover that a lot on the show.

On the left you have government controlled economies. On the right you have economic freedom. On the left you have basically the use of force. On the right you have persuasion and consent. On the left you have statism. On the right you have freedom. On the left you have group rights and on the right you have individual rights.

And on the left you have growing intolerance and on the right if you’re going by principles of a free society you have respect and tolerance. Basically the big picture is the left generally views government as a player and the right views government more as a referee. It’s not that force is eliminated from the equation entirely. It’s the proper justifiable use of force.

Now since last looking at this list I was thinking about something else too. We have these terms liberal conservative new democrat. Well I can use all three of those terms in different ways basically. You can have capital L Liberal, capital C Conservative and New Democrat. They would be on the left all of them.

But if you had a small l liberal and a small c conservative and a small d democrat they could all be on the right and in fact if we look over our history we can see that the whole political spectrum such as the public generally understands it has shifted from their Aristotelian base over to the Platonic base again where during the 19th and 20th century the swing was really the other way which is why we had our first real meaningful increase in the standard of living and individual rights and in peace and prosperity and all those good things.

So basically what they’ve done is turn the adjectives to nouns and proper names instead of having a liberal idea you became a Liberal. Instead of having conservative ideas you became a Conservative. Instead of having democratic ideals you became a New Democrat which isn’t about democracy it’s also about majority rule which many people do not understand the difference but we’ve done that on the show before too.

But basically each of those groups the capital L Liberal Conservative and New Democrat basically practice the values that I’ve expressed under the Platonic column under the left but each preaches the values under the Aristotelian column you’ll hear them all giving lip service to everything from free markets to freedom and the public hearing them do this comes to associate all the negative consequences of Platonic thinking with the ideas of freedom in a free society and I think that just adds to the confusion.

Anyways that’s a quick review of left and right and coming up next on this clip is Walter Williams talking about the frog in the pot little dressing an American audience on how our liberties are eroded slowly and it’s certainly an analogy I used once in the past as well the frog in the pot analogy when I was talking about fascism and frogs on a show past and we come back after this break just a few want to take a last shot at the TV season that we are rapidly losing under our feet this coming fall but we’ll be back right after this break.

Clip (Walter Williams):

Walter Williams: Well maybe a better way of looking at what is happening to us is to look at the description by my late colleague and friend Leonard Read the founder of the foundation for economic education in New York. Leonard Read said some years ago he said that if you wanted to take freedom away from Americans you had to know how to cook a frog and Leonard Read said that you cannot cook a frog by putting on a pot of boiling water on the stove and then throwing the frog in the water.

He said because the frog’s reflexes are so quick that as soon as his feet touched the boiling water he would hop away and he’d be free.

Leonard Read said that the way to cook a frog is to put on a pot of cold water put the frog in the water and heat it up bit by bit and by the time the frog realized he was being cooked it was too late.

Now that’s the same thing with Americans if anybody came over here talking about taking away all of our liberties all at once we would righteously rebel but they can talk about taking away our liberties bit by bit and by the time we realize it we may not have enough liberty to do anything about it.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

American celebrities have to worry about crowd control. Canadian celebrities have to wear name tags.

Bob Metz:

Welcome back it’s Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM and we’ll be here with you for about another five or six minutes as Ira tells me I’ve got about that amount of time left and in that time because we will not be returning until the week after next I thought I’d take one last shot at the whole television season thing again before there won’t be anything left to talk about what with the writer’s strike and all that which we discussed last week but most of the actual individual shows I mentioned last week I had to admit I really hadn’t had a chance to see and so I relied on the opinions of various reviewers to give us their impressions of these shows.

However I don’t want to leave the issue without actually touching on a few of the shows I have seen and which I kind of think I would recommend to most of you if you’re looking for something new to watch Christmas and reruns are just around the corner and who knows this might be your opportunity to get a chance to check some of these out. And these are shows I’ve actually seen at least a handful of episodes on. I might not be right up to date on all of them but I’ve seen enough of them to have some kind of informed opinion I guess you could call it.

And one show I failed to mention last week at all in any of the discussions which was promoted. The only reason I checked it out was because I saw it under a column in the Free Press it just said new shows with one word names and that’s the criteria and the name of the show was Chuck. If you haven’t seen this show I strongly recommend you check it out.

Stars Zachary Levi as Chuck Bartowski, Yvonne Strahovski as Sarah Walker, Adam Baldwin as Major John Casey many of you might remember Adam Baldwin from the Firefly series he played Jayne.

Now Chuck is a very funny fast moving fast paced it’s a roller coaster ride and it’s a lot of fun it’s basically a comedy that sort of touches on drama a bit more comedy than drama.

And to give you some idea of the episode titles I don’t think they put the titles right on the show I wasn’t too sure about that but as I told you last week I get them offline and here here’s the titles of the first handful of episodes of Chuck which kind of might give you an idea of what the show is about. And they all run like this Chuck Versus the Helicopter Chuck Versus the Tango Chuck Versus the Wookiee Chuck Versus the Sizzling Shrimp Chuck Versus the Alma Mater Chuck Versus the Truth Chuck Versus the Imported Hard Salami I think I missed that one Chuck Versus the Nemesis that was on this week and next week’s will be called Chuck Versus the Crown Vic.

So they’re unusual titles to say the least the show has a James Bond-ish theme music to its opening and closing it’s all sort of done in spoof and interestingly enough most episodes are produced and directed by Robert Duncan McNeill if you know who that is he’s the guy that played Tom Paris on Star Trek Voyager and of course he directed a lot of those under Star Trek as well and this seems to be largely his project at least he’s one of the main names that comes up in it and it’s largely a comedy it doesn’t have a laugh track or anything it’s an hour long I can’t tell you exactly what night it’s on but if you want to check it out I think you’ll have a fun ride with it it’s a lot of fun.

On the more serious side and a show I never expected to like did mention this last week thank you Ira you were the one that brought it up when you told me you actually went to check it out and that was Moonlight which is actually based on the whole vampire theme something I don’t usually watch but I got to tell you this show is very well acted well written well directed and strangely enough it’s believable there’s this intense chemistry between the main characters it just works great and there’s a subculture of vampires that are created in this show that could well lead to another spin-off assuming of course that Moonlight itself survives the ratings because ratings do not tell you whether the show is really good or not.

This show is passionate it’s hot it’s got that forbidden love theme with an underlying story that sort of transcends all the other stories and yet ties them all together at the same time and nothing you see in this show is there for no reason and then of course there’s this explicit struggle between right and wrong and good and evil with the main character being the moral center of his culture in a way around which swirl all these amoral vampires who they have this benign attitude towards humans but I think it has a little more to do with self-interest than it does with particular respect for human life in that sense.

I think the morality issue it reminds me a little bit of if you ever used to watch this show Highlander which used to be a great show with Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod but that was a whole other thing great show something I should talk about again in the future but so far the series has taken its plot developments further in its first few episodes than many shows go on a whole season and it actually left me with some surprises and unexpected surprises.

Other shows that I would quickly recommend and these are certainly in a different realm don’t have much time to get into them but I think they’re fun to watch and there’s Desperate Housewives Ugly Betty and Men in Trees which I almost put in the same category they’re all fun they’re kind of comedy drama they’re farces in a way if you know what that means in the literary sense almost an exaggeration of real life in a way and they’re a lot of fun.

But Men in Trees I think is a little bit more down to earth and what I like that I think it’s different about this show it’s kind of a gentle dramedy about gentle men and I don’t mean gentlemen okay maybe they might not be gentlemen but they are gentle men no macho stuff in this show and it’s just a more realistic view of men they have their problems and all that and the main character Marin Frist who’s played by Anne Heche she falls in love not with just one or two men in this town but basically falls in love with the whole Alaskan town and she co hosts an open line talk show on personal relationships on that show and it’s a lot of fun to watch.

So there’s just a handful of shows that have actually seen that I think you might enjoy watching and I guess that wraps it up for me for the next two weeks remember we won’t be here next week some special programming but we will return in two weeks so join us again in two weeks when we’ll continue our journey in the right direction so until then be right stay right do right act right and think right take care.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

But I don’t understand sports when they say things like they’re a great ball team but not on the road or he’s the best tennis player in the world but not on clay you’re either good or you’re not like me saying I’m a great boxer except when my opponent is facing me if only he’d look away and I had a bat.