036 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 036

Air Date: January 10, 2008

Host: Bob Metz

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation S01E13 “Angel One”)
Riker: When you spoke of the prisoners, you used the term revolutionary. Indeed, death has been known to stop revolutions. But I suspect it’s not a revolution that Angel One is hoping to stop. It’s evolution. Mr. Ramsey and the Odin survivors did not initiate the waves of dissent that are rippling through your planet. Their presence here merely reinforced the change in attitudes between men and women that was already well underway. They became symbols around whom others who shared their views could gather. You may eliminate the symbols, but that does not mean death to the issues which those symbols represent.

Bob Metz: Good morning London.

It is Thursday, January 10th, 2008. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now until noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right.

And welcome to our first live show for 2008 here at CHRW. You’re listening to Just Right, 519-661-3600. If you’d like to call in and join us on some of the subjects we’ll be talking about today, which include a call to action to help out with Marc Emery’s extradition case to the United States. I’m going to be talking about an open letter to Canada’s Justice Minister by Karen Selick later on in the show. Is global warming over, as Laurie Goldstein so interestingly suggested, just going out at year-end in the London Free Press?

And I’m going to be looking at a couple articles that I think fall into not the Just Right category, but the Just Wrong category a little bit later on. But first of all, I just want to say welcome to everyone in the new year.

Ira, it’s nice to see you. I hope you had a good holiday and got a little bit rested up.

Ira: I got a brand new laptop for Christmas.

Bob Metz: Oh, you’re kidding. Didn’t you already have one?

Ira: I had one, but now I got a new one and I have named it Mike.

Bob Metz: Oh my goodness. Good for you. Well, I got to tell you, it’s nice to be back and give up all my free time to put the show together, you know? That’s what we do here.

Ira’s been there laughing. But to start the year off, I think I started a little on a positive note. I actually saw a great article in the London Free Press, January 5th, which to me, I don’t know if you recall, back on our December 13th show, I posed the question about truth and truth versus reality. And that really, you know, you shouldn’t be talking so much about truth as about reality. The truth part kind of takes care of itself.

Well, it’s interesting that there was an article by Salim Mansur on January 5th. And it was titled, Let’s All Get Real in 2008. And at first I thought he was kind of, you know, just playing a, doing a play on words. But he was literal. He was being literal about this. So I thought I’d bring that to your attention because I thought it so concisely expressed much of what I’ve been even saying on this show over the past year in the sense of just an overview of the world issues. And he says, this is, now this is Salim Mansur. I just highlight some of the best part of the article here.

And I quote, Welcome to the New Year, he says. Take a deep breath, savor the moment, and be an adult in a world awash in a rising tide of bigotry and the noise of political drivel pouring forth from our media as news. Being adult means being a realist. It means looking at the world as it is and recognizing that the fundamental attributes of human nature reflected in politics remain mostly unchanged from the age, for instance, of Thucydides, some 25 centuries ago when he chronicled the Peloponnesian War that consumed the city-states of Hellas or ancient Greece. The envy of failure against success, the loathing of others, the praise for one’s God over those of foreigners, the bigotry born out of self-righteousness, and the evil that readily plays upon the good in our world would be instantly recognizable to Thucydides if he appeared among us.

He wrote, What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta, because for Sparta, Athenian democracy was an existential threat and sufficiently loathed to spark a war. There have been other states since the Athens of Pericles, Britain, for instance, in the age of Gladstone in the 19th century that were driven by these ideals, but none more so rather than the United States from the moment of its revolutionary beginnings. Democracy and freedom together as irresistible power generate envy and loathing among people who are intolerant of both. Freedom and democracy on many occasions have stood perilously alone as flickering lights on a continent made dark by tyranny as was once lonely Britain across from the Nazi-dominated Europe, or as is present-day Israel surrounded by the Arab dictatorships and the barbarian frenzy of radical Islamists. When freedom fails, the lesson is obvious. The internal foes of freedom have succeeded in their subversion. It is hence worthy of being mindful as another year begins, how foolish it can be taking for granted democracy and freedom when enemies stalk them with their deadly fangs exposed, how well expressed. And that’s end quote there. And that was Salim Mansur in the Free Press on January 5th. Now, though this was written with an international perspective, I can’t help but be forced to observe that the same principles apply within nations and even within communities.

The same human traits are always there, and sometimes we exercise them incorrectly, particularly when we turn to government to do so many of the things that we may just want to do for ourselves. But that’s all I really have to say on that. I just thought it was a great perspective. And I really think, I know a lot of people don’t like Mr. Mansur’s columns, but I generally find myself onside most of the time. I think he’s one of those writers that actually seems to understand very much about the nature of freedom. It certainly reflects a lot of his work. And for that I respect a lot of what he does.

And he brings a new perspective to me that I’m not always aware of as well. But that’s it for that. Just dealing with another odd item that crossed my path over the past couple of weeks, there’s so many of them, of course. And with doing the show only once a week and being away for a couple of weeks, my files started piling up. So I picked some issues that we’ve touched on throughout the year in 2007. And way back on July 5th, those of you who are listening, you might have heard me talking about Gary Kasparov, the ex-Russian chess champion who was speaking in Toronto, I guess, and he was warning people to be wary of Putin. I found that a very interesting thing because they’re in the front page or in the big headline, December 20th, London Free Press, the headline reads, He’s not a good guy, end quote, but Time Magazine still names Putin its person of the year. Now, of course, you don’t have to be a good guy to be the Time Magazine person of the year. Adolf Hitler was back in 1939 as well.

It’s just a matter of picking who influenced the world greatly or the most in that year. He’s not a good guy, but he’s done extraordinary things, said Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel. Putin, a former KGB official, has turned his country from chaos to the table of world power, though at the cost of democratic principles, end quote. And in a separate article that I saw in the National Post, and it wasn’t even about Putin, but he did mention him within an article, that’s Lawrence Solomon talking about living freedom.

He’s talking about various conditions in and around the world, and he dedicated this paragraph to what the state is in Russia under Putin. Quote, Vladimir Putin, also the picture of good health, stands to live much longer than his countrymen, whose average lifespan is declining under his dictatorship and is the lowest of any of the major countries. Russian life expectancy peaked at 68.8 years in 1965 and fell about nine months by 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. It plunged in the chaos that followed with the life expectancy of Russian males falling to 59 years of age. With the rise of hope and liberty under Boris Yeltsin’s budding democracy, lifespans rose steadily in the latter half of the 90s. The progress ended with Yeltsin’s decline and Putin’s rise.

And isn’t that exactly what Gary Kasparov was trying to tell Canadians at that club? Also, we did a show way back, aired November 29th on, I think you remember, all the controversy around tasers, and we played that little clip where the guy got tased, which was kind of funny, but it all worked out the way I kind of predicted. You know, Restrict Taser Use Report Demands says a national post in December 13.

Public Safety Minister says he’ll review it. Well, of course, that’s what they did. Notice there haven’t been any great incidents in the paper lately, maybe because they’re using them as often, at least for this time being. But here I found this very interesting.

Quote, reclassifying the taser would mean it could be used only in situations where a person is being combative, or poses a risk of death, or grievous bodily harm to the officer, him or herself, or the public. Now, end quote. Now, I thought that was always the rule, right? That’s why we were all surprised when things like what happened at the Vancouver Airport happened. But if this is a change, then obviously a policy review was necessary, and maybe it was time to tell us, you know, just to tighten up the rules on use in tasers.

They’re not safe, although they’re not deadly in most cases either, and we dealt with all that on that show. And just on a last little aside on here, just on our last show, on the Christmas show, just before, that was December 20th, just before Christmas, I was talking a lot about the whole spirit of giving and what might be involved in charity, and how there’s a lot of hidden motives behind charity, including power plays and stuff. And one of the things that I did mention, it surprised me too, was from a study in The Economist that talked about how the type of giving of huge philanthropy, where people give away billions, right? It seems to be an entirely male-oriented phenomenon, and they talked a lot about how a lot of philanthropy is exercised differently between men and women. And it’s almost exclusively men who give away fortunes to charities.

And that was from the Economist magazine. Well, sure enough, an example of that happened, of course, just shortly after when the Paris Hilton fortune was pledged to charity by her grandfather, you know, U.S. Hotel Paris Hilton’s potential inheritance dramatically diminished after her grandfather, Barron Hilton, announced plans yesterday to donate 97% of his $2.3 billion fortune to charity. Of course, Paris Hilton was not immediately available for comment. But anyways, the same story ran again the next day in the free press, just another recap of it. And that’s just an example of what they were saying in The Economist, how that happens. And you often wonder, you wonder, what’s going on in that family, and was this a statement by somebody to somebody, you know, or was it just true charity, you know, or was it just setting up another business? Anyways, that’s enough for some of those issues. Now, when we come back after this break, we want to talk about a couple of things that I think are just wrong.

And it’s basically, you know, getting into the whole shopping thing, saw a couple articles in the free press about the new Walmart opening up for 24 hours a day. And I guess that seems to be a disaster to some people. But we’ll talk about that when we come back right after this.

Clip (comedian, unidentified stand-up routine): The problem is what’s happened now is we’ve gotten to the point of political correctness where we’re earnestly stupid. All right, this is an example I’m going to give you. They opened a new grocery store right behind my house. Really, I love new grocery stores, right? I go out there and I’m like so excited. And I look around and there are all these empty parking spaces up front, completely empty. And I think to myself, those spaces can’t all be reserved for people with disability. Of course, I would never park in a space reserved for someone with a disability, right? But the other 500 spaces close to the front, reserved for people with children. Okay, I just want to say this about that. No, no, no, no, no, people, we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. I’m drawing my line there. Why not reserve those spaces for people who are dead tired from work? Because that’s what I am!

Clip (comedian, unidentified stand-up routine):

I went down to Mexico. I’ve never been down there before. That was fun down in Mexico. It was just a different culture entirely. You’re kind of a laid back Canadian, you know? And the Mexican, the shopkeepers, they just come out at you. They want your money, you know? They’re just very aggressive. This guy comes right over to me and goes, Come in my shop! I have everything you like! That cracked me up. What a sales pitch.

I have everything you like. I was like, no way! In that a little wee shop? You get everything I like. You got Heather Locklear fried ballony and hockey fights in there. Are you kidding me?

Bob Metz: Everything you want.

Welcome back. This is Just Right with Bob Metz on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you till noon. 519-661-3600 if you want to call in. And those two clips sort of had something to do with shopping, I guess you could say. And, you know, a lot of people, for them, shopping is part of their recreational activities.

And almost the way of life, even people not in retail. But not everyone’s happy about this situation. And I had to…you know, this might not seem to be a big issue, but I really think that what I saw here in a couple of articles, one of them just noticed this morning, and it was in yesterday’s free press. But these are articles that I just think are just wrong about everything.

I mean, a completely wrong attitude. And I often wonder if maybe the writers are a little bit feeling down or a little depressed or something. But one of the articles was by Ian Gillespie, appeared on January 5th. And it was right beside the article that I started the day off with by Salim Mansur.

So I look over, there’s this great article, and right beside it’s this article that just clicked every button with me. And he’s talking about Walmart 24-7 Shopping Madness. You know, convenience is another word for no rest.

And I’m thinking there, well, first of all, that’s a contradiction. Convenience is another word for more rest. And if something’s convenient, you have more leisure time. That’s the whole point of making something convenient. But here’s his argument. And I just took out the basics of it.

Quote, and this is Ian Gillespie talking. If you ask me, the news that Walmart will operate 25 of its Canadian stores, including the Clark Road site in London, for 24 hours a day, is far from good. I think it is madness. I’m sure it makes good business sense, but so does clear cutting of forest, says Jeff Hopkins, an associate professor at UWO right here.

It doesn’t make environmental or social sense. Hopkins teaches in the Faculty of Social Science, and he admits that in some ways shopping serves a beneficial social purpose. What bothers Hopkins about having Canada’s first round-the-clock department store is that our lives are growing more fast-paced and frantic, and this latest trend simply spins our daily hamster wheel of activity life a little bit faster. It just adds to the pace of life, he says. Psychologically and socially, human beings need breaks, he says. And when you have a city going 24-7, it’s only a highly disciplined person who will actually take that break. We have so much to do, whether it be shopping, checking emails, dialing cell phones, or desperately running hither and thither to obtain, install, or update the latest time-saving digital gadget that we’ve simply forgotten how to be.

But in the end, I think we’re heading down a road of convenience and consumption that leads to nowhere but despair and fast, end quote. Man, I just had to shake my head after that. Every line was a joke. It’s all backwards. What’s going on in this person’s mind? You know, I hadn’t heard arguments like this since the days of Sunday closing laws in Ontario, which ironically, I, Marc Emery, who you’ll hear about later, and Paul Magder basically conspired to end in the province of Ontario.

But the arguments were just the same and they were just silly. First of all, if a store is open 24 hours a day, it’s the store that’s open, not people. People still work five days a week, still get the regular hours.

You’ve just got more store. It’s not like everybody’s running at the same time. You know, as a person who hates shopping 24 hours a day, seven days a week, myself, I think this is a great thing because everyone benefits from decreasing the congestion even during the daytime. Anybody who’s shopping at night is likely not going to be out shopping during the day and that gets one person, you know, more out of the line in front of you. And, you know, I remember when we used to campaign on the Sunday shopping issue, there was a side issue that arose that a lot of people tried to push under the carpet. And to me, it’s a tremendous social issue and it was, it had to do essentially with the loneliness experienced by so many seniors and people who live alone when Sunday closing laws were in effect. It was, it was, some people from the societies based on people like that were making submissions to the government that that day, you know, on Sunday, that was when the stores closed, they didn’t see their friends. That was where they did their resting and did their socializing. It was done at the malls. It was done at the store. Shopping is an activity, especially for women, if not so much for men, you know, in that terms. But you can see, he’s talking about environmental or social sense.

What does that mean? You know, it’s this left-wing environmentalist mentality, proof of, which I think is proof of the anti-industrial and anti-technological mentality behind this kind of thinking. It just scares me. You know, and I think when he says that, you know, it’s going to make our lives faster, I think it’s got it backwards. It’s going to slow it down. The fact that the store is open, it’s not running anywhere.

It’s just a building sitting there. And he says, you know, people need breaks. Yeah, of course they do. These are the breaks they take.

It’s exactly where they go to be part of the social fabric. And I cannot imagine what he means when he says, we’ve simply forgotten how to be. To be? To be what?

To sit there like a lump on a log and stare at the wall? Like, what does that mean? What’s he talking about, this despair?

He sounds like a guy who’s depressed, doesn’t he? And then, on top of that, I wake up this morning, I pick up yesterday’s paper, and there it is. Take a look at it on page A6. Editorial is timed by Paul Burton saying the same thing.

Only this time he admits to his depression. And the top of it says, so sad, we never grow weary of shopping. Why would anyone grow weary of shopping?

Shopping is a human activity, folks. That’s what we’re all about. We are the trading animal. It’s our social fabric. It’s the way we survive for heaven’s sakes. And the fact that shopping is a win-win situation, the retailer likes it when you give them their money, and the consumer likes it when he gets the product that he wants. It’s just amazing. But listen to the mentality. You can hear it. This is Paul Burton, who basically I disagree with 99.9% of everything he writes anyway.

But this really exposed to me was a philosophical confession almost. He says, one of the truly wonderful things about Christmas is that stores are closed, okay? It forces, there’s the word, that’s that operative force, an operative word. It forces most of us to spend time doing something other than shopping. Well, thank you for walking into my home with your gun, sir, and forcing me to do what you think I should be doing. But I just can’t even understand that mentality. But perhaps we spend it with family members in solitary contemplation, doing community service.

Oh boy. Whatever it is, it’s better than shopping. A day or two without retail therapy just might help the human spirit and improve society. And then he talks about why this Walmart store opening 24 hours a day is, quote, so depressing.

He’s depressed by this. And it is an indication that Western civilization is truly on the downward slope to ruin. If that isn’t hyperbolic, I don’t know why. That’s just outrageously, it’s almost like a mad magazine parody.

But this is interesting. In the latter half of his editorial, he goes, it took a 1959 Royal Commission to allow stores to stay open past 6 p.m. The fierce battle over Sunday shopping, meanwhile, has been a slow victory for the voracious consumer. Well, I got news for him. The voracious consumer didn’t fight for Sunday shopping.

It only takes one, two, or three people. And the people who ended Sunday shopping in Ontario were myself, Marc Emery, who went to jail. He had to break the law. Just like that’s how you change the laws.

This is a theme that we’re developing here. And Paul Magder, the Toronto Furrier, who also broke the law. And they paid their prices and now the laws have changed. And so, you know, Marc actually had to go to jail. Technically, he wasn’t there for Sunday opening. He was there because he was employing too many people on a Sunday. So we punish people in this country for giving jobs.

Just because it’ll fit some agenda of somebody who thinks like these two editorialists. You understand how intolerant this all is? And, you know, it’s just terrible. And then you hear the environmentalism coming out of it. And at the end, Paul Burton says, the planet is bending under the weight of relentless consumer demand for more product. Is there not another way?

Well, yeah, there is another way. Poverty and despair and unhappiness. I don’t know about guys. Give your heads a shake. This is such a negative sense of life. It’s spiritually depressing and it shows.

You’re just depressed about a shopping center that’s opening. Holy smokes. This is taking that anti-commercial attitude to just the heights. It just can’t get any worse than that. And, you know, a question could be asked, you know, does depression cause this kind of thinking? Or is it the reverse?

I think Burton suggests the latter. So come on, smarten up. Think a little bit straight.

Connect to reality. People aren’t working 24 hours a day. It’s just a store. It’s there 24 hours a day.

The shifts change. People go home. They’re not in the store 24 hours a day.

They go there for 10 minutes and then they spend the rest of their time at home doing the things that you might want them to do. But my goodness, I just couldn’t believe it. That was just something else. Now, moving on to the main, my main concern for the day. And it’s a big issue.

It’s coming up. I did a show back on November the 1st under the expectation that my former political compatriot and good friend Marc Emery is facing extradition to the United States for selling pot seeds to Americans. And at the time we did the show here, his hearing was expected to be near the end of November. Of course, it got pushed forward.

I guess it’s a week Monday now that it’ll be coming up. And the Minister of Justice in Canada will have a decision to face. And it’ll be very interesting. It’s going to really open some eyes and I think expose some sore points between Canada and the United States in terms of their relationships. But I will come back to you right after this where you will hear a little bit about this. And we’ll come back with the open letter to Canada’s Justice Minister.

Clip (comedian, unidentified stand-up routine): And I have to tell you, you know I have the best of both worlds. Because I do. I have two passports the whole thing. And I know this, okay? But right now I’m a little bit schizo, people. I’m a little bit schizo because there’s a bit of an American Canadian rift going on if you haven’t noticed, okay? The Americans are mad at the Canadians because like we have gay marriage.

Okay, we talk about decriminalizing pot. We fail to invade other countries. We’re so crazy that way. And the Canadians are like to the Americans, why don’t you have a big cup of mind your own freakin business? Yes! Really?

Clip (Marc Emery, speaking at University of Western Ontario, summer 2000): Twenty years ago when I had the epiphany, I was wrong in my backyard about all that I held true up till then.

I thought, I read The Fountainhead and I said, this is the fellow I want to be like, Howard Roark, this is the job for me. And I have that job. There’s a hundred million to a hundred and twenty million people worldwide who smoke marijuana with some degree of enthusiasm. And in every country in the world accepting one, Switzerland, it’s illegal. So these people are all needing a Howard Roark because there isn’t actually a single advocate, well, rarely an advocate, that’s in parliaments anywhere or in governments anywhere that’s recommending that the war on drugs or the war on marijuana be stopped. So these people are definitely in need of a champion. And I love having that job.

Bob Metz: And that was Marc Emery speaking right here at the University of Western Ontario on the summer of 2000. And it probably, I think, was probably the last time he, myself and lawyer Karen Selick actually appeared in the same room together. We were all there. It was a big conference on a number of issues.

I think Karen Selick was here talking about human rights commissions. And Marc was here, of course, talking about his basic enterprises. And this occurred back in 2000. So the quotes relate to events then.

And he hadn’t been indicted by the United States government at that point in time. 519-661-3600 if you want to call in and if you have a comment on this. But the main thing is that on, in the National Post, now what was the date of this actually? I’m not even sure when it ran.

Oh, January 2nd, I guess. Karen Selick, lawyer Karen Selick who’s known for a lot of her commentaries in a number of journals. And I know her personally as well.

I had the honor of actually introducing her at the conference in 2000. But she wrote an open letter to Rob Nicholson, who is Canada’s Minister of Justice. And in that open letter she refers to Marc Emery, who will be facing an extradition hearing in Vancouver on January 21st, which is a week Monday. And if convicted under U.S. law, he faces possible life imprisonment without parole. Now here’s the question she asks in the open letter, should Marc be extradited to the U.S.? The Canadian court will almost certainly say yes.

It has little choice under the Extradition Act. Marc openly admits selling marijuana seeds over the internet to customers around the world including the U.S. for years. His conduct would have been grounds for criminal charges here, although Canadian authorities never chose to charge him. But that’s enough under the act to make it mandatory for the judge to commit him for surrender to U.S. authorities. That is where you come in, Mr. Justice Minister.

Once the court has ruled the Extradition Act gives you discretion to refuse to surrender Marc if it would, quote, be unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances, end quote. And then she goes through a lot of the relevant circumstances. I went through a whole pile of them on our November 1st show. In fact, I’m pretty sure now what I’ll be doing between now and next week I’m going to be sending a copy of that show to the minister. Because this is all part of, I think, I want people to sign as a petition online.

I’ll be giving you a website where you can go and sign a petition preventing the extradition of Marc Emery to the United States for this particular crime. Now, basically what Karen Selick is arguing, and I can’t read the whole thing because we don’t have time for the whole thing, but I want to get to the last half of it. She’s arguing that Marc is not your typical marijuana seller.

He’s claimed what he does to the government for years, reported it, paid his taxes, etc., etc. And then she says, but there’s more, quote, go to any internet search engine and enter marijuana seeds, end quote. You’ll find many seed vendors still operating without prosecution in British Columbia and in other Canadian provinces. Why is the US government not seeking the extradition of these vendors?

Why just Marc Emery and his two employees, Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams? I think the answer is obvious, she said. The so-called BC3 have taken a principled public stand against the U.S. government’s war on drugs.

Marc in particular is a highly effective spokesman for his cause. He was never in this business primarily for financial gain and generally kept only enough of his seed profits to live on. Instead, he has donated over four million dollars and countless hours to fund court challenges, establish compassion clubs for medical marijuana users, pay medical bills for activists, sponsor conferences and protests, fund ballot initiatives, fund political campaigns, and so on.

For over a decade, he has been a huge thorn in the side of politicians and bureaucrats who disagree with him on the political issue of legalizing marijuana, and many other issues by the way including Sunday shopping in the past. The Extradition Act requires you, Mr. Justice Minister, to refuse to surrender a person if the request for Extradition is, quote, made for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing the person by reason of their political opinion, end quote. Please consider Marc’s long history of idealistic activism and tell the U.S. government that you won’t let them haul this politically motivated Canadian hero off to their jails. And I agree wholeheartedly, Karen, that was a great thing to do and I want to support that effort. And for those who are interested, there is a website online which I’ll hopefully find here, the actual address of, ah, here it is. And it is petitiononline.com slash emery, that’s E-M-E-R-Y, slash petition.html. And you can either sign the petition yourself or you can actually see everyone else who signed the petition because their names and addresses are there and they’ve all been able to leave comments, some of which I brought with me because they’re very interesting. I spent an hour going through them yesterday. I’m actually signature number 4087.

You can actually print that off. So they’ve got a few thousand signatures already on this issue. Now there was, of course, reaction to this, not all positive, and in the national post, I mean, and I had to bring attention to a couple of them because, of course, they were in a national post.

A lot of people saw them. And one appeared right the next day, January 3rd, under letters of the day, the folly of marijuana use. And it was written by a fellow named Doug Tweet out of Calgary.

And here’s what he had to say, quote, I read with great amusement Karen Selick’s flimsy argument to stop the extradition of Marc Emery, the marijuana legalization activist to the U.S. And no, we don’t have to concede that this criminal has been a huge benefactor to the Canadian people. I was 18 years old when I shut down my marijuana plantation on Vancouver Island after a deep pense of consideration of what the drug was doing to my friends and others, to whom I sold it to from age 11. I recently visited one friend who, after 30 years, has finally concluded the same and has quit smoking pot. This intelligent and capable fellow began heavy pot use at the age of 11 and is now only capable of part-time work and lives in a rundown motorhome in the bush.

He thinks it’s time for a change. So do many Canadians who have witnessed the damage that marijuana has caused to friends and loved ones. Marc Emery shall henceforth stand as a highly effective spokesman for the cause of law and order and the folly of marijuana use. How could anyone be so naive whether they’re stoned on pot or not? Smoke another one, Marc, and good riddance, end quote. Talk about mean spirit, my goodness.

I gotta tell ya, it’s difficult. Before I say more, there was another quick one also from Calgary, a guy named Brian Rushfelt. He goes, hmm, a lawyer condoning criminal acts. Karen Selick’s illegal ill logic that Marc Emery paid taxes so his crime should be ignored is frightening.

And she calls Marc Emery a Canadian hero. This case is not about political opinion. He broke the law.

He’s a criminal, not a hero. Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah. You know, it’s difficult a little bit for me to contain the contempt I have for this kind of uninformed and openly vindictive opinion making. First as to the latter, Guy Karen Selick didn’t condone any criminal acts. She’s requesting within the law to, you know, the only process open to her, which is to the Minister of Justice, right? And quite within the law that Marc Emery not be extradited to a foreign country, period, end of story. The Mayor wanted issues not even part of this. Karen Selick did not say that Marc Emery’s crime should be ignored because he paid taxes. It should be ignored but not because he paid taxes.

You know, the set up false arguments and knock them down is kind of a sleazy debating tactic and I see it used all the time. And as to Doug Tweet, you know, the guy who in the pages of the National Post admits to selling pot to 11 year olds and that he was doing it himself from the time he was 11 until he was 18. He’s the guy we should be sending to the United States, not Marc Emery for heaven’s sake.

Marc would never advocate drugs or alcohol for children. It would be among the first to condemn Tweet for his actions. I tell you, the hatred that this writer expresses towards Emery I think is maybe he’s reflecting his own guilt for his own actions, like, you know, that religious experience where he wants Emery to die for his sins kind of thing. You know, I’m going to throw my sins on you and a curse on you.

But boy, the vindictiveness that comes out of some people. And then again, again in January 4th, I’ll tell you how the controversy is starting, it’s day after day, okay, National Post. Colby Cosh joins in on the debate under an article called A Matter of National Sovereignty, where he correctly, you know, zeroes in on what the key issues are.

And he opened his editorial by referring to Karen Selick’s open letter and then he continued. And he says, quote, Emery was not arrested until July 2005 when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration filed federal charges against him in Washington State. Now Mr. Emery faces the possibility of lifelong imprisonment in a U.S. federal penitentiary without parole. Needless to say, it is a fate he has done much to tempt. He has been an overt opponent of the DEA and the U.S. government and has never concealed his seed sales to the United States or made any effort to avoid selling to American customers. He has taken his battle to the propaganda front, too, making highly visible donations to anti-prohibition groups in the United States. It’s no surprise to him that the Americans wanted to clap him in irons. Many of those who consider Mr. Emery’s plight get distracted by what sometimes seems like a desire for martyrdom on his part or by the ethical and medical considerations surrounding the use of marijuana. The plain fact is that Canadian law never practically considered the seed business a major peril to public order or to morals.

Or it would have done something about it. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of mail order growers, are continuing in the trade in B.C. even now. Marijuana recognizes having medical benefits by our government as it is in the law of nearly a dozen U.S. states. The U.S. is using the technical presence of an unenforced law on our books to carry its drug war onto our soil. If the Honorable Mr. Nicholson allows this to reach its logical conclusion, and Mr. Emery has sent south for crimes committed entirely on Canadian soil, it will constitute a blow to our national sovereignty. And, quote, Cosh then argues that if the roles were reversed, of course, if Canada was doing this to the U.S. Americans, would not tolerate our laws being enforced on their territory. And then he concludes, he says, quote, the principle of extradition between friendly neighboring democracies is an important one.

But where ideas of justice are expressed in such a different manner as they are on a point like this, where the people of two countries so plainly disagree about what is right, cooperation is tantamount to a surrender of values. Wow, that’s well put. Well expressed, Mr. Cosh, and I’m totally behind you on that one. You know, as I said on the show on November 1st, I said this is really a challenge and an opportunity for the Harper Conservatives to demonstrate some kind of rationality and discretion by turning down the U.S. request to have Emery extradited. It’s really funny, I’m talking to my mom about this yesterday, and she goes, he’s a criminal, they can’t have our criminal, he’s ours. You know, we get to keep them.

And even in that humorous tone, there’s a point there, isn’t it? Even if he did commit a crime, isn’t it our job to take care of that on our soil? I could see if Marc got in trouble if he had ever been in the States, but this is the whole point, it’s one of the reasons he stayed in Canada. That’s why we have countries. So that if one country doesn’t like you for your opinion, there is another one to go to. Certainly our early, you know, many people in history like Galileo, scientists and philosophers had to escape from country to country because the country that they lived in was intolerant of their points of view.

And so they were always at risk breaking the law. Now once again, I want to encourage everyone to check out petitiononline.com, Emery slash petition.html where you can sign up. I just went online just to review a couple of the comments I saw from some of the people who signed this petition. And there were all kinds and many of them qualified their support as not supporting marijuana or not supporting drug use or anything like that, but they were very concerned about what this meant as a precedent in terms of just Canada-U.S.

relations and basic jurisdiction. But interesting, here’s one, here’s a person just like that, Neil McDonald in Toronto. I’m signing this not as a comment on our current laws governing marijuana use, but to demand that our government act protect our sovereignty and to prevent a gross injustice. Darren Fuller of Toronto Ontario writes, beside his signature online, quote, shame on the world. If you’re a critical Canadian government, if we allow this to happen, you can’t pick and choose who to prosecute.

If seed selling is a crime, stop taxing it, close all the seed merchants and stop the industry or allow it. You can’t have it both ways. Like no kidding, isn’t that the basic point? They want to have it both ways.

Pick the guys that they want to prosecute. Here’s a great one from a fellow named Logan Fraser in Ottawa, Ontario. And he says, or he asks rather, what becomes of Canada? When we let the USA arrest our politicians for their political stance. That’s one of the very questions I asked on the November 1st show.

Now here is one that I found a bit informative and perhaps useful. And it was by a fellow named Dwayne Lewis, a Canadian address. I don’t see a city, but I see an address in a postal code, but so it’s Canada. Extra edition, he says, is meant to apply to relatively serious crimes. Under Canadian law, the threshold is specific.

To qualify for extradition, Canada will not allow anyone to be extradited unless the offense involved could have resulted in a jail sentence of two years or more had it taken place in Canada. And he says he got that from a CBC news article that apparently aired in 2006. And the last of the bunch that I will sample here was written by a fellow Norm C., I think he’s Canadian or American, not even sure. He’s Canadian. And he writes, he says, never in my 58 years of life have I heard of a more reprehensible possibility than the extradition of Marc Emery to the United States for selling seeds.

Ages cost me my health, he says. After 10 years and nearly 50 different prescription drugs, many with horrid side effects, I opted to try marijuana as a last resort. Four puffs later, and any emphasizes and brackets read, four puffs in the capital letters. My nausea was quickly slipping away, the pain had eased substantially, and the shaking head had ceased completely. I used to spend every day hugging the big white bowl in the bathroom, emptying the contents of my nauseated stomach. Since I started using marijuana, I’ve used the bowl twice over a seven month period.

The only thing that makes me sick now is thinking about Canadian citizen spending time in an American jail for selling seeds from a plant that literally saved my life. And I can understand why he wouldn’t be too happy about that. Now, that’s about all I’ve got to say on this. I’m going to leave you with a word from Marc Emery again. And when we come back on the other side of the show, back to the environmental issues and thinking about future generations and what we’re going to do for them and global warming and all that fun stuff that will never go away. So we’ll see you in a little while. This is a longer clip than usual. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Clip (Marc Emery, continued from earlier speech): Let me just tell you what I do. I have one of the first, if not the first, Internet television network. You can see it every night. In fact, I was hoping we could hook it up to the, it’s called Pot Television, the Pot Television Internet network. It’s at pottv.net. It’s one of the many things that I do. And every day we broadcast worldwide five hours of programming that’s designed to unify all the cannabis activists in the world. We take calls every day from around the world and we take video clips and we broadcast them on the Internet. And one of the other things that I’m particularly proud of that’s five and a half years and still growing is Cannabis Culture Magazine, which emanates out of Canada and is distributed worldwide, but principally North America. It started out six years ago with 4,000 copies printed bi-monthly and now we print 75,000 copies and they sell pretty well bi-monthly.

And it’s very, very successful. The most key thing of all that, as I’m particularly, not only do I feel myself as the cannabis Howard Roark, but we help a lot of other people too because I do one other thing that’s very distinguished and I’m the world’s probably leading marijuana seed genetic specialist, that is I sell marijuana seeds. Now of course this is illegal, actually most of what I do is illegal, maybe all of it’s illegal actually. And I’ve been told that and I’ve certainly been arrested enough. I’ve been arrested on ten occasions and I’ve been jailed eight times and I’ve had all my assets forfeited four times. That’s just in the last three and a half years.

Well that’s all right, actually the asset forfeiture, those things are actually very useful. I often tell people some of the worst things that ever happened to me were the best things. You know I built a house in Indonesia, lost all my money, went broke and I had to come back to British Columbia where I founded this. So those bad things had to happen to get the good things. So I don’t even mind the asset forfeiture. I mean I’m a happy victim.

I’m probably the only one you’ll find here because usually when I’m victimized something good comes of it that is even a better strategy than when I was working. I used to, the revolution I like to think we started in cannabis started by being a retail movement and then I realized gee with all these goods and assets around the police can just walk in and take them all and that’s what they did on several occasions. So you know by the fourth one, and I’m not a quick learner in some instances, but by the fourth asset forfeiture I said I’ve got to get into another line. So that’s where we got to become a media organization where there’s a lot less to seize that has any real value and because the value is in the production and the broadcast and the existence of the ideas whereas a bunch of retail stores which we were having have huge amounts of assets there which when they raid you and take away your stuff and in many cases don’t even charge you they just take them and say, ah it’s all proceeds of crime anyway, sue us. And which is what they’ve done on a number of occasions and this is in Canada by the way if you think it can’t happen.

Clip (Walter E. Williams):

You know back during the energy crisis in the 1970s and I might also add United States government sponsored energy crisis, you know they used to have these little commercials, public service announcement commercials and it would show some bratty kid on TV whining saying don’t be fuelish, save some energy for future generations. Every time I saw that advertisement, it really annoyed me, every time I saw that advertisement I felt like throwing my ashtray at the TV and the kid and people have asked me, when I told them this, they say, Williams don’t you care about future generations?

I say no. I don’t care about future generations and then they ask me, sometimes they ask me why? I say what have future generations ever done for me? I mean some kids going to be born in 2050, what has he done for me? And if he has not done anything for me, how then am I obliged to do anything for him?

Where’s the quid pro quo? Well, but however, if you watch my behavior, my behavior would be lie, that sentiment. That is, as I suggest I have a couple acres of ground around my house in Valley Forge and a number years ago I took $300 that I could have purchased at least two nice bottles of Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes wine that I could have consumed selfishly all by myself. That 2050 kid would not have gotten a drop of it, but instead I took that money and I bought some seedlings around my property. Now apple trees and pear trees, all other kinds of trees. Now when those trees reach their full maturity, I’ll be dead. There will be some 2050 kid swinging in my tree, eating my apples.

My wife has made extensive improvements on her house, a number of additions, an addition of a 20 by 30 foot room. That’s going to outlast me. That room is going to be there while I’m in the ground. There’s going to be some 2050 kid tracking mud in my sun room. Now what’s at least some of the reason why I made the sacrifices of current consumption to produce something that’s going to long outlive me that there’s going to be some 2050 kid enjoying?

It’s easy. The nicer my house is, the longer it will provide housing services, what? The higher the price I get for the house when I go to sell it. That is by pursuing my own narrow selfish interest. I can’t help but make a house available for future generations whether I mean to or not.

Now I asked you so as a following question. Would I have the same incentives to care for my house and prolong its existence if the government owned my house? Would I have the same incentives if there were a 75% transfer tax when I went to sell my house?

No. Whatever weakens my private property rights to that house weakens my incentive to do the socially responsible thing, namely conserve on the scarce resources of our society. That is in a free market with private property rights, a person’s wealth is held hostage to his doing the socially responsible thing.

Bob Metz: It’s too bad that those are the very kinds of ideas that are under attack by the whole global warming movement. It’s really capitalism and the ideas of private property and ownership and thrift and business. Because all of those things, although they produce things, are done as efficiently as possible by the people who do them because they don’t want to waste. The waste that we see in the worst part of the world is almost invariably the result of governments not doing their job in protecting private property rights. Now of course we don’t get that kind of exposure to what the issue of the environment should be all about. What we hear about of course is global warming. That’s been the anti-industrial catch word for quite a while.

I dealt with that quite in detail in one of the shows last year. But in his year-end editorial in the London Free Press, Sun Media editor Laurie Goldstein had an editorial titled, Is Global Warming Over Already? In which he cited a British Weekly News Statesman, or sorry, out of the magazine, British Weekly News Statesman, which contained a column by award-winning British science journalist David Whitehouse on climate change.

And he was also a BBC science correspondent from 88 to 98, holds a doctorate in astrophysics and all that kind of cool stuff. But in any case, he argued, and this is Whitehouse, that with only a few days remaining in 2007, the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 06, as well as every year since 2001, he writes, global warming is temporarily or permanently ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming, the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what, or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.

Of course he’s speaking in Britain, so he’s talking pounds. Finally, he warns, I’ve heard it said by scientists, journalists, and politicians, that the time for argument is over and that further scientific debate only causes delay in action. But the wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists, and they must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, end quote, and I agree wholeheartedly. Now, you know, in one of the responses to this argument, to Whitehouse’s argument, it ran a couple days later in the London Free Press, and it was written by Richard Phillip, emeritus professor of pharmacology and toxicology here at the University of Western Ontario. And he was in the January 5th London Free Press, be heading there, I saw global warming naysayers ignore evidence. So I guess I’m one of those global warming naysayers, and all the evidence that I’ve been presenting on this show for the past year, I’ve been ignoring it, you see.

I haven’t been looking at it. But here is his argument against Whitehouse. Whitehouse appears to have ignored the fact that the term climate change has largely replaced global warming to recognize that change does not occur evenly over the Earth’s surface.

Mean annual changes in surface temperatures are not the best indicators of climate change if the Earth has stopped warming, no one told the glaciers. Columnists are concerned about promoting circulation. They can provide fuel to those who choose to ignore any evidence that doesn’t support their preconceptions. Already, as a result of the Whitehouse article, there have been letters to the editor calling Al Gore a liar, and hinting at conspiracies.

There is no lab experiment to test the hypothesis that human activity contributes to global warming. There will always thus be criticism by skeptics. Now I’m looking at that article, I’m going, huh? What? What?

What was that? First of all, I think if you want to be taken seriously in any scientific sense, stick to the message. Don’t attack the messenger or external motivations or whether a business is making profit. You wrote an article too. How come your article isn’t just looking for money and looking for circulation and stuff like that? The issue is controversial.

That’s what makes it interesting to people. Especially in the light of the fact that no misrepresentation or inaccuracy has been reported by anyone here. And, you know, for the record, global warming naysayers like myself are not ignoring the evidence. We’re looking right at it, but arriving at a different conclusion based on the same evidence and on each person’s piece of the particular knowledge by or even how they might think.

And please, please, don’t. You know, the issue is not about whether warming has actually taken place recently. Our weather has certainly warmed, but whether our climate has changed is an entirely different question. And, of course, the issues about mankind’s contribution to the production of a single element, carbon dioxide, CO2. You know, an awareness of that perspective alone negates three-quarters of Philip’s argument, which nowhere addressed CO2. Instead, he presented as his evidence, melting ice, which he called, quote, the most vulnerable substance on earth to warming trends.

Now, I found his observation may, in fact, be perfectly consistent with what Whitehouse was finding, who he was criticizing. But I have to admit in all the hundreds of, if not thousands of newspaper clippings I’ve read on this subject, I’ve never heard anyone say that mean annual changes in surface temperatures are not indicators of climate change. So am I to assume that global warming refers to the temperature what, beneath the surface of the planet? And if it’s true that surface temperatures are not the key factor and that the glaciers are actually melting, then what’s being suggested is that the planet’s supposed warming is being generated internally.

Is that what he’s saying? Like volcanic activity or changes in the core or something? He doesn’t say anything about this. So he’s saying like the ice is melting, but the air isn’t showing the temperature it should.

So something else is warming it up. As Whitehouse, and not Philip suggests, something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend billions needlessly. So it sounds like Whitehouse wants to know the answer.

Philip doesn’t want him to speak, but there’s no mention of anything like this. And where Whitehouse goals team myself and others continue to argue that the debates never over, proponents of global warming say, oh, climate change, that’s what they call it now, climate change. So if it goes up or down, they can still carry on with their arguments. They express an entirely unscientific intolerance to contradicting evidence, contradicting opinions, differing conclusions.

And that’s not science, that’s religion and politics, neither of which fits into the real world that I and others like Salim Mansur would like to open a few eyes to. There was another quick little letter to the editor yesterday that correctly focused on this fellow’s editorial as well by Robbie Smyk in St. Mary’s, who wrote, first of all, putting it in perspective.

We often forget that and just put under the carpet. The overall rise in global temperature since 1945 is two-tenths of one degree. And he’s talking about, for all the ice it’s melting and being lost at the North Pole, an almost equal amount of ice is being generated and formed at the South Pole. And he concludes by saying there is much more evidence that it is the changes in the phases of the sun which are responsible for apparently changing weather patterns more so than anything human activity could ever generate.

And I agree. This whole global warming issue is just a laugh. And if you ever want to see some realism suddenly rubbing against this whole fantasy is watch newscasts occasionally. I’ve seen this on two or three times. Now, first on CNN, and I saw it locally here, and it’s how TV and radio weathermen react to global warming and that whole issue when news commentators are talking to them.

And you can see the disappointment in the news commentators. I recall in one time on CNN they were reporting some fairly violent weather. The U.S. gets hit with some pretty bad storms from time to time. And the commentators were saying to the weatherman, it’s all it’s a cause of global warming. This is all because of global warming.

And every time I see the weatherman just sort of smile, he looks at them and he goes, no, no, no. He says, we’re having a warm weather trend, but whether it’s climate or not is a separate thing. They always separate climate from weather and they are two different things.

You can have warm weather periods without the grand climate being changed. And locally here, one of our weather people, I forget who it was, heard him on a radio station. He was making a very interesting suggestion. He said, take a look at the power of a single thunderstorm. He says the energy released in that thing is just in one storm.

We have nothing to compare to it. Humanity’s contribution to the whole global warming issue. And that of course, that’s the way the earth finds its equilibrium as well. Some people say, well, these storms are proof of earth’s warming. Well, they might be, but they also cool the earth in the process. And there are a lot of other perhaps benefits that people see to CO2 warming as well, which is also pointed out one by Robbie Smyk that, you know, plants live on CO2 and reward us with good old oxygen, which is good for us.

So that’s about all I’ve got to say on the whole global warming thing. It’s been fun getting back in the new year. Let’s all get, you know, get real in this new year. And I hope you will continue to join us in our journey in the right direction in weeks coming ahead.

So join us again next week when we’ll continue our journey in the right direction until then. Be right, stay right, do right, act right and think right. See you then. Take care.

Clip (comedian, unidentified stand-up routine): Did I already do my deja vu joke?