034 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 034
Air Date: December 13, 2007
Host: Bob Metz

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

Clip (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Indiana Jones:
Archaeology is the search for fact. Not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Jones’s philosophy class is right down the hall. So forget any ideas you’ve got about lost cities, exotic travel and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never ever marks the spot.

Bob Metz:
Good morning London. It is Thursday December 13th. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where we will be with you from now until noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right.

And welcome back to the show after being away for a whole week. It went by so fast it felt like a whole minute almost. Welcome to the show. 519-661-3600 if you want to join in on the conversation where Ira Timothy, our show’s producer, will be picking up that phone if you want to get in on the debate or any of the discussion today.

Did you miss me last week there, Ira? Or were you happy not to have me around here?

Ira Timothy:
Oh, I was counting the minutes, Bob.

Bob Metz:
Now, is that true or are you just being polite?

Ira Timothy:
I’m trying to be good for Santa.

Bob Metz:
Yeah, okay. I’m going to talk a little bit about truth today. Sometimes it’s not what it seems. But other things on the show today, what we want to talk about is a bit about car safety and all the crazy regulations and laws that we have to deal with when it comes to car safety.

Christianity has been attacked once again, but believe it or not, this time by the Pope. So we want to talk a bit about that. And of course I’ve talked about this subject in the past. Just want to get at it briefly from maybe a different angle today. And that was all the talk coming out of Tokyo right now about high-tech robotics. Because we’ve been talking a little bit about robots and technology here. And if we can get to it and we have time, I want to talk also about the problem with being innocent.

And first off though, start off the show this morning. It’s truth. Truth is in the philosophy department, as was said in the opening clip, which came from an Indiana Jones movie. And it’s interesting because we’ve of course discussed truth is a fundamental basis of what philosophy should be all about. And in the past I’ve put some time into discussing Aristotle, and Plato, and even the earlier philosophers who basically began everything.

I found an interesting thing about Plato actually listening to a lecture this week by another philosophy professor. And I did not know this, but Plato is not really Plato’s name. In fact, it’s more like his nickname apparently.

And it actually means, it comes from the word plateau. That’s why we call him Plato because he sort of set a standard from which everybody rested their ideas upon. And that was a very interesting comment. And he never did say what his real name was.

That would have been interesting. Nevertheless, of course, Plato was a student of Socrates who we all know employed the Socratic method apparently. But truth versus facts. I read a fellow named John Macmurray from time to time. Difficult reading because he wrote around the turn of the century, the last century, early 1900s.

And of course some of the language is a bit flowery. But one of the things he always said was that, in the search for truth, one shall certainly miss it. And I think what he was implying was that one must search for not truth so much, but for what is real. Since reality really is the only standard and the objective standard we have of anything that we could call truth, or even fact for that matter. But most issues therefore should be viewed not in the context of what’s true or untrue, but in terms of what’s real or unreal.

And there’s an interesting psychology behind this, and John Macmurray points it out. One of the problems he says is if you’re afraid of being wrong, say you’re in a dispute and you’re afraid of being wrong, then you have to be unreal, he says. If you’re desperately concerned about your beliefs being true, if you’ve already known in your head what the truth is, then you’re already prejudiced your position, haven’t you? So therefore you run the risk of holding views that he would call as being unreal. And he says that’s why so many people want somebody else to tell them how they ought to behave.

They want some kind of infallible authority who will secure them against any kind of risk of error. But unreal thinking, he says, has no chance of discovering whether it is true or false. Real thought is marked by its readiness to change its mind as the increase of experience reveals its inadequacy. Or in other words, the evidence presents itself, and if you believe something that is not in accordance with the evidence, then you should be changing your mind.

That’s not as simple as it seems, though, is it? Because you can have two different people looking at the same evidence and drawing two different conclusions about it, therefore two truths. You can’t have two truths.

That just does not exist in nature. But there may, of course, be elements of truth and falsehood to every point of view. Real thought is marked by its readiness to change its mind, whereas unreal thought is very fixed and self-consistent. It refuses to admit it can be wrong. It twists and ignores evidence that’s forced upon it, because it’s already got its mind made up. It cannot really talk about any changes because it’s committed to a doctrine.

It’s committed to one point of view, and that is the ultimate truth from which it comes. So therefore, in order to defend that truth, it would have to become what Macmurray would call unreal. Now, he says truth really is the byproduct, the ultimate byproduct of real thinking.

Just as happiness is the byproduct of real living. It’s reality that matters, and if we take care that our thought is real, truth will basically take care of itself. And if unreality arises in our thinking, he warns us our freedom of action is destroyed, because you will act upon external realities in terms of a false belief about it. And then your action will have results that you didn’t expect or the opposite of what you expected. And of course, we see this happening in politics all the time, because politicians are so unreal about so many of the things they do. I suppose that explains why so often I do get the urge after I hear some politician give a speech to get real.

It’s almost a subconscious way of saying how detached from reality can you be? I’m going to talk a little bit more about that theme later on in the show today. But again, that’s all I wanted to say about this subject for today. Instead of always hearing, oh, what’s true and what’s false? Let’s work on really what’s real and unreal, and that always requires a bit more of an investigation. And of course, the truth takes care of itself in the long run. Subjects of reality and unreality, objectivity and subjectivity, how to know when you’re right.

They’re very fascinating and they’re very multi-dimensional, and they’ve been discussed since the days of Plato and Aristotle. And I plan to devote an entire show, or even more, to that general theme in order to do proper justice to the subject. But that won’t be today.

I just wanted to take it that far just to establish that one principle. Let’s look at reality more than worrying about what our truths are. But for now, let’s begin with an example of what I think is an unreal debate in politics. It’s both national and local going on here at City Hall and going on across the whole country. And I think I pretty well dealt with the whole subject and everything I really had to say about it.

On our last show two weeks ago, when we talked about the use of tasers, and I’m just amazed that it’s blown up into the proportions it is. Of course, the media is having a bunch of fun with it. But generally, why I say what’s going on now is so much of an unreal debate. It’s based on this false argument of using a taser versus a gun, which I dealt with two weeks ago, or arguing that the taser doesn’t kill the victims. It’s their condition that ends up resulting in their unfortunate deaths, which I think is a very unreal debate. I don’t think it even speaks to the issue.

And since my broadcast two weeks ago, the issues continued to be voiced in talk radio. And I think no less than three or four taser-related articles have appeared in the London Free Press. And I know some of that is as a consequence of the somewhat misguided debate on tasers that has been put forth by Ward 11 councillor David Winninger, who is very focused on what he calls the empirical results on the safety of tasers, basically. And it’s an unsafe device. And again, the focus is on the wrong thing.

He’s putting his focus on the object. I mean, are you going to get empirical evidence if you did a study? Is a gun safe? Is a billy club safe? I mean, what kind of weapons are you going to argue are safe when they are, in fact, meant to be used as weapons? Again, they’re turning the subject of the debate into the object, specifically all about its safety, when really the proper subject of the debate should be on how people use tasers, the proper use of tasers and policies and police policies that have to do with that.

It was, I have to say, it was a little bit déjà vu when I was hearing over the past week, London police chief Murray Faulkner, argue about the proven safety of the taser devices and how they’ve been approved by provincial authorities and other agencies. It just sounded like, remember the debate we had, was it last summer or the summer before, where a lot of local businessmen were arguing the same thing about responsible use of pesticides that were being used to protect the public.

And considered generally harmless and approved by provincial and federal standards, but nevertheless they still got banned. And interestingly enough, the same group of people seem to be on each side of this issue. Now, is that a coincidence or do you think it’s a philosophic consistency that we keep hearing that issue?

And again, even with the pesticide issue, it’s again an argument, are pesticides safe? No, they’re not. Nobody ever said they were. They have to be used properly.

Pesticides are poison because otherwise they wouldn’t kill the things in your lawn and in your garden that they should be killing. But there’s another issue that’s a little bit gone off the rails, I think, in terms of where it should be discussed. So we’ll take a break from that. And when we come back after this break, we are going to talk about what’s going on with car legislation and all the safety fascism that we’re getting regarding our vehicles and the vehicles we drive. It’ll be right after this break.

Clip:
Women, God bless you. Women care. A woman in Beverly Hills called the police a week ago screaming, crying hysterical. My husband disappeared. My husband disappeared. The cops said, calm down, ma’am. What happened? She said he was in Toronto on business and he checked out of the hotel two days ago. We don’t know where he is. Nobody. Calm down. Can you describe your husband? She said, yes, he’s short and he’s fat and he’s losing his hair and he sweats a lot. And he spits when he talks. You know what? Never mind.

Clip:
Oh, God. Even California, the state of California is on fire again. Oh, thank God they’ve got that new governor. No, he can warn them. Look out. Get down. Fire.

Bob Metz:
Oh, I got to tell you, when I heard that joke, that just reminded me of turning on the radio and television in so many cases. We just get warned to death. Everything from our microwaves to sitting in the sun to driving our cars is dangerous to us. And it’s like warning, fire, fire for everything that you can possibly imagine. Welcome back. It’s Just Right here on CHRW 94.9 FM.

I’m Bob Metz and you can call in and join in the conversation at 519-661-3600 if you are indeed inclined to do so. And with that in mind, I saw in a section of the National Post that I very rarely even leaf through. And although I do, I found a fascinating article and it was in all places in the automobile section of the National Post on November 30th.

Interestingly, some of the information on this is already outdated. But it was the heading read New Laws Beget More New Laws. And it’s written by Peter Kantor who wrote it for the National Post Canada West News Services. And the subheading sort of gives a theme. It says governments can’t tell drivers nicely that they’re idiots for not belting up.

Every little nuance in our life has to be somehow regulated and controlled by government. We have to have a law against it.

And of course the big screaming right now is about making it illegal to smoke inside your car while you have kids in the car, which is to me almost unenforceable and just trying to legislate common sense. And that becomes very dangerous. But as Peter Kantor points out in his article, he says that governments tend to micromanage. And it isn’t a matter of philosophy, they simply can’t help themselves. And I know what he means by that. It is a matter of philosophy by the way.

But once you set those wheels in motion, of course they’re difficult to stop. And as one rule or regulation falls into place, five others are required to prop up the unintended consequences of the first one. In fact, that’s already happening with the smoking issue. Smoking’s not illegal. In some jurisdictions, however, smoking in a car designated as a workplace vehicle, but not a bulldozer accessible to open air, is illegal. And in California, he points out it will soon be illegal to smoke while driving in the presence of minor children.

So that’s, you can hear Arnold just screaming there, out fire, in the back seat of the car there with your kids. But even already here in Canada, I think one of our provinces out east has just passed some legislation doing the same thing. Ontario’s planning to go that way, although McGuinty has been resisting it a bit.

And one of the western provinces, is it BC? I wasn’t too sure, is also considering it. And even as they are considering it, I’m already hearing talk about the more regulations we’re going to need to regulate the regulation.

You have to deal with enforcement issues. What are you going to do? It’s apparently the new suggestion is anyone 18 or under who’s a second-hand person that is considered a child. But what if you find an 18-year-old driving the car and smoking himself?

What do you do about that situation? I always think it’s funny that we have all this legislation against second-hand smoke, but not first-hand smoke. So maybe the thing to do is stick a cigarette in the hand of everybody in the car, if the police pull you over. We have arguments already about the nature of the fine. Some people think, and well, 50 bucks I think is what they’re proposing, is too little. And others want to throw the whole book at everybody.

Give them $10,000 fine. But in general, and this to me is the disheartening thing, the vast majority of the public supports this kind of stuff. Because they like to see laws that sort of reflect their own common sense and their own values. And they think that by passing a law to do that, they are in fact doing something positive.

When in fact, I think in the long term that just doesn’t work that way. All you’re doing is being vindictive. You’re punishing people for things that they have consequences for anyway.

And I’m not talking about it’s a bad idea to protect kids and stuff, but how far do you go with laws like that? It’s just like, again, back to Peter Kantor’s article who talks about rather than creating a comprehensive approach to tobacco, regulators find new ways to generate revenue so they can keep selling tobacco. And then create a whole unwieldy set of anti-tobacco legislation. I remember in the series Free to Choose that was hosted by Milton Friedman, how he illustrated in Washington, D.C. how you had one huge department of the government funneling billions of dollars to subsidize tobacco farmers so they could keep in business. While another department of the same government was putting out propaganda talking about how bad smoking was for you and the health risks and all the rest of it and trying to almost prohibit itself. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, but the guy in the middle, the taxpayer, pays for both sides of the argument.

That’s why you don’t want governments arguing issues like that because you pay for both sides. But it’s just that he says creating specific regulations for smoking in cars is just part of some huge bureaucratic disease and Canadians just seem to fall for it. He points out how originally seatbelts were looked on as an option in cars and then people, it was a selling point.

It would be a safety feature for your vehicle. And before you knew it, it became law. It became mandatory to have seatbelts in your cars.

The United States took a while to catch up, but it’s the same there now as it is in Canada. But anyways, I really like this part of his argument, of his article, where he points out, what can you do if you disagree with some of these overregulations and rules and things like that? And so he postulates this little argument back and forth.

And here’s the argument he gives. Argument, you have to wear a seatbelt because it is safer for you. Retort, I value my freedom more than I value my safety. Argument, you have to wear a seatbelt because the ones who love you depend on your safety.

Retort, oh yeah, what if nobody loves me? Argument, then you have to wear a seatbelt so that your body won’t act as a dangerous projectile in a car crash, harming other passengers. Retort, I drive alone. Argument, you have to wear a seatbelt because the medical bills you will incur as a result of injury sustained in a beltless crash have to be borne by society. Retort, okay, I’ll opt out of public health care. Argument, we can’t let you do that. If you were to seek private health care, it would drain the valuable human resources and expertise of doctors and nurses needed to staff our public hospitals, and the people who love you depend on those hospitals.

Retort, oh yeah, what if nobody loves me? And that’s where he sort of leaves it off, because it’s not an argument you’re going to win with someone who’s determined to see that kind of legislation in place. So basically it’s getting silly, that governments simply can’t find a nice way to tell drivers that they’re idiots for not belting up.

So they rely on all these tools of legislation and rules and laws and just things that tie up the courts and make life expensive for everybody. And traffic fines and stuff, just to get the message out to what he calls a recalcitrant few. And then he goes on and sort of in a joking way makes fun about what we might have mandated in our cars in the future. And one of the things he thinks is that we’re going to see mandated is actually cell phones mandated into cars, so that they will be built in, go by all these specifications, and they’ll be able to argue that, well, you have to have one because it’s a safety feature, and you can call for an emergency crew and stuff like that. And it’s ridiculous that that sounds today.

Or right now, I can see that happening when they go to the other extreme. Now, here’s something maybe some of you might be able to help me with, because this article when I read it reminded me of another article that I found very disturbing quite a while ago. It has also to do with safety legislation of automobiles. And it appeared in, of all places, I’ve had this clipping since 1999. I think it’s June 1999.

It was in Playboy magazine in the Playboy forum section written by James Petersen, which is their news section and updates. And it’s called Airbag Update. And although this is written in 99, I can’t believe that a lot of the stats and issues behind it have changed too much. And I know a lot of people have cars on the road that are either 1999 or before or even around that era. So I’m sure a lot of this might still apply.

I just haven’t heard too much follow-up on it. So I’m going into this a little bit blind just based on what he’s saying here. But this kind of bothers me a little bit. He begins by telling a story about a fellow.

He doesn’t say what state this happened. And that I found a little odd. But nevertheless, the guy’s name was Dwight Childs, and he had a pickup truck.

It came equipped with a driver’s side and passenger side airbags. And apparently on May 16th in 1998, he ran a red light and crashed into another vehicle. He had his two-month son on a seat next to him belted into a rear-facing child carrier. And apparently as a local reporter described it, the child was in the bag’s line of fire when they deployed, killing the baby.

Now, you’d think it might end there. But the tragedy was compounded. And apparently his truck at the time had a cutoff switch that could have disabled the airbags. And because he neglected to activate it, a judge apparently found him guilty of vehicular homicide and sentenced him to two days in jail, one to be served on his dead son’s birthday and the other on the anniversary of the fatal accident. Sounds like, boy, talk about vindictive. I don’t know what that’s about. And he also ordered Childs to make public service announcements regarding airbag safety.

So, first people resisted these things and then they became mandatory and now people are getting punished for turning them off. That’s what he’s basically saying. Now, this was interesting out of his article. He says, apparently automotive giant Lee Iacocca has spoken against airbags. And in his autobiography, Iacocca told of a retired safety engineer who wanted to use airbags as a humane alternative to the electric chair.

Isn’t that interesting? Quote, in his application to the U.S. Patent Office writes Iacocca, the inventor stated that by inflating an airbag directly under a condemned person’s head, the force of 12,000 pounds can snap the guy’s neck far more effectively than the hangman’s noose and so quickly as to preclude any pain whatsoever. I’m not sure I would want one of those gizmos in my car, he says, end quote. So, it’s not a one-way street with a lot of these safety devices and some of these statistics are a little alarming too. Apparently, from their introduction in the late 80s until August 1998, which is close to when this article appeared, airbags apparently, and these would be American figures, I assume, deployed about 2.6 million times. And in doing so, they saved the lives of about 3,448 people, about 3,448.

Sounds pretty accurate to me. And 965 belted, 2483 unbelted. Of course, many places in the States maybe still didn’t have belt laws at that time. But in the same period, airbags killed 113 people, 47 adults and 66 children who were not involved in collision car accidents that should have been serious enough to do anything. And so, in other words, airbags killed one person, one innocent person, for every 30 lives that they save. And I guess he’s arguing that if you had any kind of safety device that killed one in 30, that thing would be banned in a hurry. It’s interesting, this almost sounds a little bit like the whole taser debate as well, that some of the things that can happen. Now, you can talk about it being like, oh yeah, we can use this instead of the electric chair. I guess that drives a point home.

But it’s true that these airbags can either kill you or save your life. Let’s face it. But here’s just another statistic that’s alarming. Apparently, airbags, again, deploying when they shouldn’t have, have caused around 300,000 minor injuries in that period that we’re talking about, ranging from broken bones to shattered eardrums.

And the government found all sorts of bad behaviour to blame. Victims were not buckled in. They’re sitting too close to the front dash or steering column. They’re too young, under 12, to ride in the front seat and stuff like that. And I’m reminded, if you ever opened up your auto manual, did you ever see the warning they have there about your airbags in your car?

It sounds like you’ve got heroin in there or something like that. You better watch out. Don’t get close. You’re going to get killed.

Either very dangerous. Don’t put your kids in the front seat. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. It just becomes outrageous because we’re really playing the odds, aren’t we?

And I don’t know. I always felt a little less safe with an airbag. I agree that like so many things that in the right conditions and the right collision, it would certainly be an asset.

I wouldn’t deny that at all. But I think the risk on the other side is high. And I think it should be up to individuals to decide whether they want to take that risk or not. I understand that airbags are among the most expensive part to replace in a car when they either deploy or fail to deploy in an accident. They can’t replace them with new ones.

I’ve heard they cost around 5,000 bucks a piece. Another interesting side issue is that I was talking to a fire department friend of mine who says sometimes airbags that fail to deploy in a car accident slow the rescue effort because they’ve got to make sure those airbags are not going to hurt one of the rescuers. So, it comes down to choice, I guess. You can say statistically in a given circumstance, you can always say that something’s beneficial and then you look at it a different way and it might not be.

I just think that it’s always a little unjust when people are forced to suffer when perhaps they on their own accord would not have done so. So, as Petersen concludes, he says, sort of without admitting that airbags might be a bad idea, the government and the auto industry adapted to the grim statistics. And then they started introducing second generation airbags that deploy with 20 to 35% less force and stuff like that. But basically, I guess you just have to, just like tasers and so many other devices in our society, you have to get used to the idea that not everything is safe, not even the things that are created to protect us from other stuff. That’s it for that part of the subject. Now, when we come back after this break, we want to talk about why would the Pope be attacking of all things modern Christianity and we’ll be back right after this.

Clip:
I work in a local television show in Calgary. I get up to go to work at 4:30 in the morning. That sucks. But I do find that the freeway opens right up. I’ve gotten pulled over a couple of times, driving too fast. I got out of the tickets by being funny. That’s the best thing. I get pulled over. There’s nobody else on the Deerfoot there in Calgary. I’m doing 137 kilometres an hour in a hundred. The cop pulls me over and he goes, what were you thinking? I said, well, there’s only two of us out here. I missed you.

The other one, I’m on my way to work and it’s one of those slushy days. That really heavy slushy snow stuff. But you’re still able to make pretty good time. I’m coming down the hill. I’m coming down this hill to a stop light. And it’s green, then it goes yellow. And when you have that thing in your head going, it’s yellow, I should stop.

And then for some reason, the bad cousin says, no, you can make it. And so I figure anyway, it’s slushy. And if I hit the brakes, I’ll just slide, right? And if anybody’s coming from this way, they’re going to jump the green and hit me. Be safer for everybody to gun it. So I gun it and I’m going through the intersection.

I look over. The only car sitting there, cop car. I immediately pull over because you don’t want to take him off with a high speed chase in slushy snow. So the guy comes over and goes, what were you thinking? I said, well, I was coming down the hill and then it’s slushy and stuff. The light went yellow and I thought, if I hit the brakes, I’ll just slide. And then you’ll come up through and hit me. Be safer for everybody to romp on it and go. And he says, well, that’s a lot to think about at 115 in a 60. Isn’t it?

Clip:
I’m not gay. I’m a little Roman Catholic breeder boy. Basically the Catholic religion is if it feels good, stop.

Bob Metz:
Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to CHRW Radio 94.9 FM where you can call in at 519-661-3600. We’ll be with you from now till noon. And by the way, referring back to that little clip on speeding, I think the conditions outside today are almost like the conditions he described. So don’t be doing any driving like that. When I was coming in, it was getting pretty slick. So I got to assume it’s still doing that right now with that snow coming down out there. So I headlined in the, now what date was this?

This would have been over December 1st. London Free Press. Headline reads, Pope attacks modern Christianity. Well, that kind of attracted my attention. It was a very short article, not too detailed. So everything I’m talking about is basically out of that article because I didn’t get into more detail.

I’m sure you can get more detail on this. But basically the subheading implied that the modern focus on individual salvation misses the message of salvation for all. That is the message according to the Pope.

And here’s basically what the article says. Pope Benedict criticized modern day atheism in a major document released yesterday saying it has led to some of the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice ever known. And in his second encyclical, Benedict also questioned modern Christianity saying its focus on individual salvation had ignored Jesus’ message that true Christian hope involves salvation for all. Spe Salvi is the theological exploration of Christian hope in the afterlife. That in the suffering and misery of daily life, Christianity provides the faithful with a journey of hope to the kingdom of God. In the 76-page document, Benedict elaborated on how the Christian understanding of hope had changed in the modern age. The Christian concept of hope and salvation, he says, was not always so individual-centric.

Quoting strict scripture and theologians, Benedict says salvation had in the earlier church been considered communal using the case of monks in the Middle Ages who cloistered themselves in prayer, not just for their own salvation but for the salvation of others.

Now, it’s very interesting that the Pope would attack both atheism and Christianity in the same breath. And to begin with his attack on atheism saying that it had led to some of the greatest forms of cruelty and violations, I’ve dealt with this before, this is a philosophic question. It’s not what you don’t believe in that determines your actions and the consequences of your actions. And I can’t actually say I’ve ever heard of a great atrocity or anything like that where somebody came, oh, it happened because he didn’t have a belief in a certain deity or other. It’s what you do believe in that determines what your actions are.

And I want to get a little more into that in a moment. And of course, actually think about what would they have believed in people that created all these cruelties and violations of justice. Well, they actually did believe in anti-individualism the same as what the Pope’s talking about. They believed individualism was always the cause of whatever evil was in their country. You look at every single dictator, that’s exactly what they attacked. They hated individualism because they were all collectivists. They didn’t want anybody to think for themselves. And that is unfortunately part of what the issue is. That’s basically what they’re saying here. Don’t think for yourselves as a Pope.

Let us do it for you. Communal praying so you can have the chanting and the communal repetition of things, which basically, and I don’t mean this in the negative way it might sound right now, but that’s the context. It’s basically to turn off the brain.

It’s to not get you thinking about things because independent thought is, of course, one of the things that they are most afraid of, that if somebody thinks independently, they’re going to go off on their own way. I often wonder if, also, he’s attacking Christianity on the same basis, and it’s interesting that what concerns the Pope here is not a belief in a deity or not, but whether you believe in the individual or whether you believe in the collective, and that just, again, to me, demonstrates the political agenda behind a lot of religions. Remember, I often wonder if, in this case, Christianity as well as being used as a euphemism for really the Protestant religions.

It may be. Remember the Roman Catholic Church, and I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, Roman or Catholic rather, the word just means universal, and Roman, of course, refers to its place of origin and the concept of Roman law. There’s nothing about Roman Catholic that says Catholic Christianity or Roman Christianity or anything like that. In fact, the word is noticeably missing from the name of the religion. And, of course, the whole history of the Roman Catholic Church I’ve discussed before goes back to the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, when Emperor Constantine basically founded the Roman Catholic Church as it is basically known today. But there’s a secondary argument here which I think is somewhat harmful, and that’s the whole idea of hope.

I looked up the word hope in a dictionary and it basically said that hope is to desire with expectation of fulfillment, or to wish, or to want, or to have desire or expectation, usually with the word for attached, like you hope for something, you hope for this or that. And interestingly enough, there’s another application of the term to hope against hope, is actually to continue hoping even when it may be in vain, which I think is just a roundabout way of saying hope again. Listen, I’m hoping for $100 million right now to fall into my lap by the end of this week. Okay? Now maybe if I hope hard enough, and I’m just really thinking about it, I might get that $100 million. And I just know there’s some of you who are thinking after hearing this wish, my $100 million wish, and you’re asking yourself, why $100 million? And I’ve heard the reactions. And then at this point you get two different kinds of people.

And first of all, there’s a guy that’s thinking, what are you doing? Why didn’t you just wish for $1 million? I mean, your odds of having your hope fulfilled would be that much greater. So here’s a person who’s thinking about hope in terms of playing the odds, and that the closer to reality what I wish for is the better my chances of getting it. Well, of course, if I hope, for example, that the sun’s going to rise tomorrow, I got a pretty good chance of my hope coming true, don’t I? But does my hope actually have an effect on that event occurring? And then of course, there’s the people on the other side of the hope diamond, if you will. And that’s the person who’s thinking, why did you just wish for $100 million?

Why not a billion or a trillion dollars while you are at it? And of course, between these two extremes, I would have to say the latter person is a little more of the realist. And the former person is the one who’s being not so real, as we were talking about earlier.

So, that person’s a little more cynical. He’s going, listen, your hope for $100 million is just as good as your hope for a billion or a trillion. Why not just hope for that?

So, you can see where that is leading. And so I’m actually still hoping for $100 million. And Ira, if I actually get that cash by the end of this week, I will definitely give one of them to you, okay?

Ira Timothy:
I’m going to hold you to that, Bob.

Bob Metz:
You see how generous and altruistic I can be when I’m in a state of hope? Isn’t that great?

Ira Timothy:
Well, I do know that if I win the money too, I will definitely consider giving you a dollar.

Bob Metz:
Consider it away. Now, of course, we all hope for things from time to time. And who doesn’t hope for good things to happen? And that’s just a feeling of goodwill. I mean, that might be a little bit about what Christmas season is about. But to assign some kind of mystical power to hope can be very damaging.

And it’s almost fraudulent. I remember hearing Dr. Laura Schlessinger way back when on her own radio show. She used to remind her listeners all the time, there is no power in hope. Because what often happens is a person who’s hoping will not act.

Because they’re hoping for something to happen to save them. I remember back in the 60s or when? There was a singer had a song out. I think her name was Dusty Springfield or something like that. And she sang this song called Wishing and Hoping. And it was about, had these lyrics stressing that sitting around and wishing and hoping that you’ll get a boyfriend in this case of the song, is no substitute for action. That if hope is the only thing that you’re working on, then you’re no longer in control of the situation.

So, that’s basically the issue of all I can really say about hope. But very significant is that the Pope would criticize both atheism and Christianity for their individual-centric perspectives, preferring some sort of communal primitivism instead. Now, I think this is understandable because, of course, the enemy of the Pope and of a lot of religions in Roman Catholicism, when it gets down to their basic doctrine, is the power of reason. And reason can only reveal itself through the individual mind.

There’s no collective consciousness, there just isn’t. A cloister of monks, whether praying either for themselves or praying for other people, is, after all, just a cloister of monks. The direct consequence of all their praying will really, in reality, be zero. It amounts to nothing other than maybe feeling better for themselves, which becomes for themselves again.

But even if something that they might have been hoping for actually happened, it doesn’t make any difference. Now, remember, this belief originates essentially from Plato, as we’ve been discussing over the past weeks. Plato essentially held in stark contrast to Aristotle that the mind and body could be separated and that this concept of mind and body separation is really the stuff of which a lot of religions, not all, and some great science fiction and fantasy movies have been made of. There have been some great shows based on that theme, from ghosts to afterlives, to out-of-body experiences, to so-called mind reading and telepathy and things like that.

All these concepts originate from a Platonic belief that the consciousness sort of can continue to exist separate from its physical realm, a belief for which, unfortunately, and I haven’t found it yet, and if you know different, you can let me know, but I don’t think we have any evidence for that. And if you’re not sure about that, for those who do believe differently, I’m sure the news will not be too welcomed, as reported in an August 25, 2007 edition of The Economist, just this past summer, that science seems to have not solved, but at least uncovered the principle behind what many of us call the out-of-body experience. But the article, interestingly enough, is titled Out of Your Mind, Not Out of Your Body, and they now know that they can create out-of-body experiences at will, and in studying them, it shed some light on the nature of our consciousness.

According to this article, apparently way back at a 1902 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Anadamus Charles Cedric Minot said in his opening address, quote, I hope to convince you that the time has come to take up consciousness as strictly a biological problem, end quote. So now we move ahead to 2007, 105 years later, and one of that same association’s August editions of its House Journal Science. They published two papers, and each paper was published quite independently of the other, but they were both about investigating consciousness by studying what we call out-of-body experiences.

One of them was Dr. Olaf Blanke of the Geneva University Hospital, and the other was Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Now, Dr. Blanke apparently works with epileptics, and I didn’t know this, but in reading this article, it says that occasionally people who suffer from epilepsy report having standard out-of-body experiences, the ones in which an individual looks down upon himself from above. Five years ago, Dr. Blanke found that he could induce such experiences at will in one such person by stimulating a particular part of her brain, the right angular gyrus, with an electric current. A small current made her feel as though she was sinking into her bed a little more, had her floating close to the ceiling, or seeing her legs kicking up towards her face. If this area of the brain is overstimulated during the electrical brainstorm that is known as an epileptic fit, the consequence is what we have been terming an out-of-body experience.

On the other hand, Dr. Ehrsson’s experiments relied on fooling a person’s senses by creating illusions for test subjects. And one of those illusions, they call the rubber hand, and this shifts someone’s sense of owning his own body away from his real hand to a prosthetic one. And it works by allowing him to view only the rubber hand while both it and his real hand are being stimulated in some way, stroked or in synchronicity with one another. And apparently that coincidence is enough to fool the part of the brain that integrates inputs from different senses, and the result is to redirect the sense of self from your real hand to the rubber hand. So the person actually thinks the rubber hand is their real one, and the real one is the fake one. And apparently they say this is analogous to how a ventriloquist would redirect your attention when he makes his dummy speak.

With these results in mind, both Drs. Ehrsson and Blanke wondered if they could design experiments that would induce complete out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers.

And the answer was in both cases, yes, they could. So the article basically concludes that astral projection this is not, but it is a demonstration that one aspect of consciousness can be modified in a reproducible way. So that’s what I guess what we’ve been calling an out-of-body experience would be more accurately called an out-of-mind experience. I just thought that was a very interesting commentary on that. Okay, after this break, to re-comment on a few other technological issues that we’ve talked in the past and just some updates on robotics, but that’ll be right after this.

Clip:
I like to say it used to be a lawyer, now a human being. Lawyers hate when I say that. I had to quit. Okay, after nearly 10 years I was losing my mind. I was like insane.

Stuff was so stupid, there was some stuff that made no sense to me. How about this? Multiple life sentences. Is it just me or is that going to be lost on everyone but say a Buddhist or Shirley MacLaine? Do you know what I’m saying?

Clip:
It’s funny, what I like about coming home this time is I have a 92-year-old grandmother still living here in East Cologne. Go visit her. She refuses to get a touch-tone phone. She has a dial phone, a rotary phone, not a plastic one, one of those old steel phones. The phone rings, I forget I answered, I almost knocked my own teeth out.

Technology makes you lazy, doesn’t it folks? I’m sitting there having a cup of tea with her and I realize I have to phone a buddy. So I pull the phone number out of my pocket, 3-8s and a 9 in it. I get up to the rotary phone and I’m like, I got things to do today, huh? When’s the last time you dialed a rotary phone? You’re out of practice, you get to that last 9 halfway through, your finger slips out, you know? Get a touch-tone phone grandma, whack, whack, whack, whack.

Bob Metz:
I still actually have a rotary phone, never use it, but it’s sitting there in my kitchen, I’ve had it for 10, 20, 30 years. One thing about those old rotary phones, I gotta tell you, they were really good for the sound quality that they had and I think they were almost indestructible. Those early ones that Bell used to rent us for a fortune, they must have made a fortune on those things.

They had to have paid for them after the first couple of months. But nevertheless, you’re listening to Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where we’ll be with you from now until noon and 519-661-3600 is the number to call. I talked about this subject before, it’s one of my not interests to such, but I’m fascinated with watching this industry develop because I really think this was, if you’re a person with a lot of money and know a little bit about an industry, I’m telling you, this is the place you gotta put your money. Robotics, even back in the 90s I was talking on air that that would be the coming trend of this century, just as computers and everything from the internet on was a product of the previous century. Now we’re going to take some of what we did in the computing field and turn it back to the physical, putting it on to moving parts.

And there were three articles that appeared very close to each other in the London Free Press as a consequence, I think, of a trade show that’s occurring over in Tokyo, Japan right now. One of the headings of one of the articles said, Robot hits right notes with one of its latest playing a violin, Toyota asserts they will be a core business in the coming years. Robotics called Next Hot Field, Associated Press on the Free Press, November 30th. Japan a master in robotics, November 29th, Associated Press on the Free Press.

And basically what these articles are all saying, I’ll give you an example. Toyota Motor Corporation has shown robots that roll around to work as guides or have fingers dexterous enough to play the trumpet. And Toyota has this new robot that apparently plays a pretty good pomp and circumstance on the violin. It’s a five foot tall all-white robot which was shown on December 5th at this fair and it used its mechanical fingers to press the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.

If you saw a picture of this, a picture of it appeared along with that article in the Free Press on December 6th. It’s a very modern kind of look in robot if modern is even applicable to a concept that’s just being introduced. But Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota president said robotics will be a core business for the company in the coming years. Toyota will test out its robots at hospitals, in Toyota related facilities and other places starting next year, he said. And the company hopes to put what it calls partner robots to real use by 2010. We want to create robots that are useful to people in everyday life, he says. Now apparently the Japanese government’s been pushing companies and researchers to make robotics a pillar of that nation’s business. And Honda has been working on robots since 1986, recognizing that technology is critical for its future in developing mobility. And they had their latest showing, they have their own robot, it’s called the Asimo. The humanoid robot which apparently was going to be displayed this week. It might be today or yesterday that they did it. I don’t know if there’s been any news about that yet. But apparently Asimo stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility and is a play on a Japanese word for legs.

And it first became available for rental in the year 2000. It’s considered one of the world’s most advanced humanoids. It is seen often at Honda and other events. It can walk, jog, wave, avoid obstacles, and even carry on simple conversations. That’s kind of getting scary.

Data here we come, eh? Another company named ZMP of Japan began selling a two-legged walking robot yesterday. It runs on Microsoft new robotic software. A product the company said will make it easier to transfer technology from one robot to another. Japan has a thriving robot culture, partly because of a history of animation. And TV shows have generally depicted robots as being friendly.

That’s what I was talking about a couple weeks ago. I was talking about how strong the efforts are on the parts of companies to make their mechanical devices look friendly to people. Even automobiles, they even look at the way the grill looks at the front.

Does it look like it has a frown to it or a smile? That’s the kind of thing that they were even considering at that point. But of course the Japanese government is pushing robotics as its way to push the nation ahead of the world. The robots are already used in schools there and they have robot competitions, very popular. We have something similar here in North America.

I think it’s called a smash-’em-up derby that they have on TV. I don’t know if that’s in the same category though. But there’s another robot that apparently is a math whiz and can breeze through a Rubik’s Cube, and it uses its metal hands to twist and turn that little colourful toy. And they’ve got a panda robot that uses sensors to detect when people are laughing. And then it joins right in with you and laughs along with you. Here’s a robot, a robot that laughs with you.

You can put it beside you on the TV, laugh at your favourite comedy show, and you’ve got your audience sitting there right with you in person. And of course there’s a dentistry student who peers into the mouth of a new patient, which is a humanoid practice robot with a complete set of teeth that they can kind of work on. Now Japan showed off all its cutting-edge robots in this past week at the country’s largest robotics convention. And of course the country has set to become the world leader in both service and industrial robotics. And this brings to me, I’ve talked about this in a science and technology level before, but let’s look at it a little more on the economic front right now. What have we been hearing a lot about in the news lately here in North America? Meanwhile, back in North America, while the Japanese are walking around the streets with robots, what are we talking about? We’re talking about a failing automobile industry, about people being put out of jobs because people aren’t buying cars.

Why? Where’s our robots? I haven’t seen, what’s the best North American robot? Anybody know his name?

I haven’t seen that guy. Where are we in this competition? It used to be Canada and the United States was always the leader on anything like this. And you can see where that’s going to go in the future. I just haven’t heard much complaining from the CAW and some of these other unions about Japan stealing our robotic jobs. And I got news for you, those jobs are going to come right back over here. The things that Japan is creating today will create jobs in North America in the future. We might become the service industry to Japan, but nevertheless, you can see that that’s going to be a tremendous power to have in the future. The first country with advanced robots, I think, is going to become the next military superpower. You don’t even have to send your men into battle if you can start doing that with machines. Boy, to say nothing of the obvious domestic and civilian advantages of robotics. Some countries like South Korea want a domestic robot in every home by the year 2020. It gets a little creepy when governments are making strategies like that because I wonder, well, what are they going to put in those robots? Can those robots report back to the government and tell the government everything you’re doing? Maybe they’ll be like smart meters that they’re putting in our homes now so the government can keep an eye on things more directly. Anyways, that’s very interesting. Just one last comment on a quick, very quick commentary. I’ve got two minutes left, Ira says there. See, Ira, I just did it again.

I went way over time and everything. But quick riddle for you. What do Conrad Black, Robert Latimer, Vladimir Katriuk, and Marc Emery all have in common? And I think the answer is that each of them will be treated a little worse than perhaps most criminals in their situation for the sin of showing no remorse for their crimes. Each one believes himself to be either innocent, morally justified, or more importantly, maybe believes that the court is wrong. And I don’t care what you think about each of these individuals, whether you think they deserve what they got, whether you think they don’t deserve what they got. But what makes them, I think, distinctive from most people in their situations is their adamant sticking to their arguments and sticking to the reasons that they even went to jail.

Vladimir, of course, I’m shocked that they were worried about whether he felt sorry and remorseful for his acts, when in fact the only reason he went to jail in the first place was because he felt it was the right thing to do. You think he’s going to change his mind about that? And of course, Black says the same thing. He thinks that he’s very innocent and he’s been not running from the system. There’s a lot to support the sincerity of his view, if not its accuracy. And of course, then there’s Marc Emery, who not only doesn’t deny his guilt, but openly challenges the law that would punish him for what he does, that he doesn’t regard as doing wrong. And of course, we have a big issue there with the issue of jurisdiction. But while we’re going after these people, get this, we’ve got Karla Homolka walking out free in Canada among us. Has Vladimir served as much time as she has? But she’s a model criminal because she goes along with the justice system, makes deals with them instead of telling them that they’re not legitimate or they’ve done something wrong. And even Jack Kevorkian is already out of jail in the States, that horrible justice system south of the border.

So there’s certainly a lot of inconsistencies and stuff to be addressed here. Well, that’s it for me today, folks. I think my time is running out. So, next week, make sure to join us again next week because we will be celebrating Christmas, only we’ll be doing it the right way. So, join us again next week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. Until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right. And we’ll see you then. Take care.

Clip:
I don’t think I got the job at Microsoft. They haven’t responded to my telegram. Dear Microsoft, stop. When do I start? Stop.