042 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 042
Air Date: February 21, 2008
Host: Bob Metz

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

Clip (Firefly Episode 1)
Book: A man can live on packaged food from here to Judgment Day if he’s got enough rosemary. Captain, you mind if I say grace?
Reynolds: Only if you say it out loud.

Bob Metz: Good morning London. It is Thursday February 21st 2008. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM. We’ll be with you from now till noon. No, no, not right wing. Just Right.

Welcome to the show today. You’re listening to Just Right here on CHRW. Our topics today, basically three themes. One of them being the end of the world.

If you listen to all the Malthusian theories going on out there and what our government seem to be wanting to do about it. Some more follow-ups on human rights commissions and some of the reaction of both the public and new developments actually. And of course there’s a new wrinkle in the whole religious, racist, whole theme that we seem to be having lately in this country. And that’s of course the whole issue of the Lord’s Prayer either said in the schools or said in the legislature and that’s something we’ll be looking at.

519-661-3600 is the number you can call to join us and answering the phone will be Ira Timothy, our show’s producer who I have just learned very sadly for today for the first time is going to be his last show doing the show. Is that right Ira?

Ira: That’s right. Sadly I’m out of here Bob.

Bob Metz: And well we’re going to miss you.

Ira: Oh I’m not going to miss you. I mean I’m going to miss you too.

Bob Metz: Well I hope your replacements do as well as you. You just get into the swing at this thing. We just got to know each other’s cues and all the little minutiae and then it’s time to move on. I guess that’s the nature of the university environment isn’t it?

Ira: Yeah unfortunately but education comes first and that’ll push ahead.

Bob Metz: There you go. Well we’ll be missing you Ira. Hope we can see you. Join us again sometime and visit and maybe be back in the future. I know a lot of people do turn up back at the station a year or two after they leave.

Ira: It’s written on our soulless contracts.

Bob Metz: Volunteer radio. That’s what it’s all about. And of course that’s what I’m doing here.

So look at the new thing I want to look at now.

Looking at some of the reaction and actions I guess. I guess Mr. McGuinty has decided that the Lord’s Prayer is not in tune with the times quote according to the headline in one of the newspaper articles and it says Lord’s Prayer recited by the speaker at the beginning of each Ontario legislative session does not reflect Ontario’s diversity. Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday and yesterday being the 13th of February in this case and called for a new approach to begin daily proceedings. He says it was time to move beyond quote the Lord’s Prayer to a more inclusive custom that better reflects Ontario’s multiculturalism.

Boy if you there isn’t any evidence that we are obsessed with race and culture I just screams at us from the papers daily. I don’t know what moving beyond means either but they want of course put together an all party legislative committee that will seek input from citizens and religious groups. You might as well just go out and buy a can of fuel and toss it on the fire if this is the approach you’re going to take to this thing. And you would think that maybe they would have learned from the whole faith based school funding thing from the election. Here’s McGuinty doing the same mistake as Tory although Tory is continuing to do it because he says oh it’s completely unacceptable to us Mr. Tory says. Part of respecting the tradition of the legislature is keeping the Lord’s Prayer. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be open to other prayers being added.

Well boy that’s again opening that door to more reasons for arguments and disputes. It’s interesting to see what other provinces do. Alberta uses a selection of non-denominational prayers and on certain occasions uses special prayers. In British Columbia the practice is to rotate among the members who can use a set list of non-denominational prayers. Saskatchewan has used the same prayer which was established by an all party committee in 1931. Well Manitoba is also a daily prayer that was established years ago. Isn’t it interesting how these prayers quote end quote are being written by governments and legislatures which is no different than the religious prayer that we’re talking about. Because of course it was put together by Constantine in Nicaea way back in 325 AD.

And religions are born of these things. The speaker of the Nova Scotia assembly recites a prayer written in 1972. Doesn’t say by who but it is also followed by the Lord’s Prayer. And in the New Brunswick legislature the same prayer has been recited since 1801 by a chaplain or the speaker followed by the Lord’s Prayer. Which is also recited in Prince Edward Island legislature before the doors are open to the public.

That’s interesting. They wait till the doors are open. The doors till the prayer is done. Londoners want hands off Lord’s Prayer as a headline on February 14th Thursday of the London Free Press. And even Liberal MPP Khalil Ramal a Muslim gave at best lukewarm support to the idea of changing the daily recital of the traditional Christian prayer in the Ontario legislature. Doesn’t bother me to say it Ramal said. Taking away the Lord’s Prayer isn’t a good way to reflect Ontario’s diversity. Says Mary Williamson, Executive Director of the City’s Cross Cultural Learning Centre. And again this article repeats McGuinty saying that you know it doesn’t, we’ve moved on, we’ve got to move on etc. And interesting comment here. Diversity aside, the majority of Ontario residents from all faiths believe in the basic tenet of the Lord’s Prayer. The existence of a supreme being says former conservative MPP Bob Wood. Why would that not be recognized?

Wood said. Well I would answer who says it isn’t being recognized but do you recognize that in a legislature? Now of course he’s adding he thinks it would be a big mistake to remove it but doesn’t mind if other prayers would be added. And John Tory again says he agrees it’s time to revisit the Lord’s Prayer in the Legislature but shouldn’t be removed. It’s completely unacceptable to us he writes.

But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be open to other prayers being added. Well that’s the basic story as covered by two different newspapers, a National Post, London Free Press. Here’s some reaction I saw in some of the letters to the editor and by the editors themselves.

In fact I was surprised that I actually found an editorial by Paul Burton that I generally agree with. No room for prayer amid politics. You know he says the fact is that on the 21st century there should be no place in daily recital of any prayer in the halls of government. Religion simply has no place in politics and the removal of the Lord’s Prayer from the legislature is inevitable. Better sooner than later. Politicians should know by now the difference between right and wrong.

Perhaps a moment of silence would be the best compromise. And he thinks governments at all levels around the world already get along fine without any prayer. Although I don’t know which governments he’s talking about.

We go right across Canada. You see almost all the legislatures have some kind of prayer going on before they go into session. And here’s just a sampling of some of the reaction to this. This is from the All From One Days page in the London Free Press. February 16th when they box a whole bunch of letters that are all about the same subject.

And I thought this was interesting. Frank Van Veen of London, the headline says it all, why create an issue? Like he’s saying we didn’t have an issue. Why bring it up? So that’s kind of suspicious, isn’t it?

It makes you think something’s going on there. Julie Lamb of London writes, and I’m just of course highlighting the key points here, quote, I think the majority of Canadians believe in a God, so keep the Lord’s Prayer in. And SL Payne of London writes, church-state separation often misunderstood. And he goes on to explain that the intent of the separation of church and state is twofold. First, it prohibits the establishment of an official state religion, which is true and advisable, I would say. And second, it prohibits the government from interfering in private religious practice. And I think up to a certain point, unless those private religious practices actually begin to violate individual rights, that’s as far, that’s where the state has to draw the line. I don’t think it’s about religion per se at all.

I mean, you could have any sort of practice. It doesn’t have to be religious, as long as you’re not violating someone’s rights and you’re operating within an environment of consent and mutual respect. But he also adds that it does not prohibit religious practice or support within the government, as many incorrectly assumed today. It offers the freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

Now, I understand what he means. Of course, true freedom of religion means freedom from religion, but you can’t separate a person’s faith from the person himself. And while he may sit in a parliament or a legislature, you know, the values that make that person hold a certain faith will be generally the values on which they will legislate. And the few people that don’t do that, they’re the ones that always say, well, I’ll do what the public wants. It’s like, you know, my values don’t matter.

I’ll do what you want. And I often think they’re a little scarier than the ones that may have a set of values that even that I don’t believe in. Saying prayers are archaic, says Melissa Bell of London. And she says, the Lord’s Prayer is still being recited in the legislature. How archaic are these rituals? And so she just sees it as a useless ritual, I guess. And J. Kirby Inwood of London also writes, stop forcing your religion on others. If you want to recite religious incantations, do so in private, he says.

Dalton McGuinty isn’t going far enough. Ban public prayer, no matter what the form or the God, he says. Well, that’s pretty an absolute statement there, and we know how a lot of people probably feel that way.

But here’s the clincher. And this is from none other than Mohamed Elmasry, the national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress. Same fellow that got involved in one of those Human Rights Commission’s complaints. And he says, I’m just highlighting here the letter is much longer. He says, the Lord’s Prayer should be replaced, not by another prayer, but with an inclusive and purposeful pledge to serve. Put the interests of the people above personal interests, he says.

Above all, we who are privileged to serve in government must pledge not to misuse our power and to spend Ontarians’ tax dollars only for the public good. Now, you know, I often see statements like this put the interests of people above our personal interests and things like that. Well, who are the people but a bunch of other people? It’s one person versus another. We’re all people. And if we’re all being asked to sacrifice to the other guy, what’s the other guy being asked to do? Who’s he sacrificing to?

Back to us? It’s a completely contradictory logic and all it does is place a third party in between, namely some representative of the state or some such, who gets to have the power and that’s what it’s all about. It’s about power and people want to have that kind of power. But of course, the issue of the whole Lord’s Prayer thing isn’t so much about the fact that people can’t pray in the legislature.

They can’t. It’s actually about being, the prayer being said aloud as part of an official ceremony. And the reason so many religious people of different faith are saying, oh no, leave it there. We don’t mind, is because they know that just by having any kind of religious ceremony, that it serves as a recognition of the state that it actually reveres some alleged supernatural being and is guided and obedient to it. And the ethical commandments are just come into being by God said so without any rational grounds. And I think that’s a very dangerous place to go.

You don’t want that to be the reason. I think for the most part, the Lord’s Prayer is totally a symbolic thing. And just to wind up on that, there’s a real humor about the whole Lord’s Prayer thing. And I just want to conclude with a quote from a book called The Heathens Guide to World Religions.

It was written by William Hopper about 10, 20 years ago, maybe longer. But he talks about all the various world religions, their histories and some of the things that we’re going. He’s talking about the life of Christ in this one example. Apparently this was just during his later life when he was getting more followers and disciples.

And here I quote, quote, one noteworthy event in particular happened about this time. While he was teaching his disciples and trainees, one of them asked how he should pray to Yahweh. Yezu told him not to recite prayers or learn things by rote. Instead said, Yezu, you should just talk to Yahweh. He then went on to give an example of how a person should speak respectfully with a divine being. His example is what is now called the Lord’s Prayer and is learned by rote in most churches and is recited daily around the globe.

Talk about missing the point, says Hopper, end quote. So I’ll leave you with that thought on the whole religious prayers in schools and in the legislature. And when we come back, we’ll talk a little bit more about human rights commissions and some follow-ups on that.

Clip (Monty Python’s Life of Brian)
Brian: Please, please, please listen. I’ve got one or two things to say.
Crowd: Tell us, tell us, both of them.
Brian: Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourself. You’re all individuals.
Crowd: Yes, we’re all individuals.
Brian: You’re all different.
Crowd: Yes, we are all different.
Man: I’m not.
Brian: You all got to work it out for yourself.
Crowd: Yes, we got to work it out for ourselves.
Brian: Exactly.
Crowd: Tell us more.
Brian: No. That’s the point. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Otherwise, oh no.
Brian’s Mum: That’s enough.

Comedy Clip:
I can’t figure out the relationship thing. I’m married, sort of, but you can’t… Just once, I’d like to see a movie that gets relationships. I read that movie Monsters Ball the other day, and it was supposed to show you that love can triumph over racism, which is a great message, but the casting was ridiculous. You got Billy Bob Thornton playing a racist corrections officer, who somehow manages to overcome his racism enough to have sex with Halle Berry. Wow, good to see people rise above the hate like that, huh? It’s Halle Berry. I’m pretty sure even the Grand Wizard of the KKK could have walked across that bridge.

If they wanted to make a big statement, it should have been Brad Pitt and Whoopi Goldberg.

Bob Metz: Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now until noon.

519-661-3600, the number to call if you want to call in.

Talking about some more follow-ups, don’t want to spend too much time on this, because we’ve spent the last two or three weeks on a lot of these related subjects. And of course, we’re talking about the two Human Rights Commission’s cases, based on all the same themes, basically, that, there’s Ezra Levant and there’s Mark Steyn, and both being taken to task by various Muslim groups. Now, what’s interesting, and this is a big development, is apparently, according to the headline in the National Post on February 13th, Muslim leader drops complaint against Levant. Calgary Muslim leader, Syed Soharwardy, whose letter I just read, incidentally, says he’s withdrawing his Alberta Human Rights Commission complaint against former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant, which is, I think, they’ve been maybe hearing some of the complaints against him, and this is not doing them much good, as I said the very first day I heard about this. And, however, Mr. Levant says he’s not buying Mr. Soharwardy’s promise, calling it only a temporary tactical truce.

Levant said he plans to launch a civil lawsuit against Mr. Soharwardy to recover the tens of thousands of dollars he has spent battling the complaint. Well, you know, on one hand, that’s a good development, on the other hand, you can already see some of the damage that’s been done and why it’s going to just carry on again, you know, it’s like the mid-east war coming to Canada. You can just see it all building up. Speaking of overseas and Denmark, it’s amazing, the reaction’s almost going the other way, if you recall, when that Muslim cartoon first came out and drove all kinds of people crazy, no one would publish it. Well, because they haven’t resented, finally the media’s waking up and saying, look it, we’ve got to publish these things, because every time we give in, they want more.

So that’s what’s happening now. You’re seeing several Danish newspapers, according to Associated Press on the 14th, have reprinted the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in a gesture of solidarity yesterday, after police revealed a plot to kill the creator of the caricature that sparked the deadly riots in the Muslim world. Muslim groups think Danish papers are seeking to rekindle the fiery debate over free speech. And apparently in the Netherlands, lawmaker Geert Wilders plans to make a film portraying the religion as fascist, as fascist, sorry, and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals. So I guess he’s going to be asking for a bit of trouble there.

But I guess the big issue is, here’s some of the other reactions that we’ve had. It’s VG Hearst, February 16th, London Free Press. Martin Luther King Jr. said, in the end we will remember not the word of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. And again, DJ Pattinson of London, or Wilderton, sorry, says something that sounds very much like what I said on a previous show, you know, the Muslims should try publishing themselves.

Faisal Joseph and the three students could pool their resources, raise thousands more from investors and advertisers and publish their own magazine. You know, and he’s worried that the Human Rights Commission didn’t dismiss the whole complaint at the first thing. Of course, I go further than that, I don’t think we should even have Human Rights Commissions. In fact, it’s interesting to note that in BC, according to this very tiny little article I clipped from the National Post on February 6th, BC man jailed for hate crimes, including willfully promoting hatred online in Prince George, BC. A 31-year-old man has been sentenced to four months in jail after being found guilty of hate crimes.

Keith Noble convicted Monday of willfully promoting hatred against identifiable groups, namely Jews, blacks, homosexuals, non-whites, and persons of mixed race or ethnic origin. Well, not just about everybody, this guy’s mad at the world. You’re going to throw him in jail for that. You know, the fact that we even take these guys seriously and put them in jail is a frightening thing to me, because what it tells me is the government’s not afraid of these morons. They’re afraid of all the people out there in the public who they think agree with these morons, and there’s a lot of them out there.

Because boy, if you can get a whole bunch of people joining something like Scientology, I guess anything is possible. Columnists miss their mark with free speech, writes Grace Chung. Anti-hate laws and bodies such as the Human Rights Commission give ordinary individuals a voice to speak out against dehumanizing offenders. Now, she’s in favor of Human Rights Commissions, of course. And she says it’s hypocritical that Michael Korn and Jacobs believe it’s only right that they have a column space every week to spread their conservative opinions, but wrong for people to speak out against the media or other bodies by complaining to the Human Rights Commission. Well, Grace, sorry to disagree with you, but you don’t go to mummy and daddy to get your point across and force it upon somebody else. You speak with your own resources, just like the other people did. You know, they went through that too.

They didn’t run to the Human Rights Commission or anything like that to get their foot in the door. If you want to be opinionated in this world today, man, you can be sitting right here at CHRW if you want to and become a volunteer, right? I mean, radio stations, I found this everywhere. They’re looking for people who want to be online and talk more publicly. I remember back in the days when Mark Emery and I were very well known just for calling in on open-line shows. And at that time, the only open-line show in town was at CFPL Radio 980. That was, you know, the Wayne McLean days, Bill Brady and stuff like that.

And I remember the station then ran a campaign. They actually wanted other people to come in. Some of their regular callers, come on in. We’ll give you a whole show.

We’ll let you talk for an hour. You know how many people they got to sign up for that? Two. Me and Mark. It’s always the same people. So, you know, for all the talk that people say, I need a voice, I need a voice. Very few of them really want a voice. They just want to shut the other guy up. And that’s, you know, isn’t that really what it’s all about? And finally on this subject, oh, not finally, one other thing.

This was interesting. Mark Steyn’s own Letter of the Day in the National Post. Now, this of course is not the Ezra Levant situation. This is the McLean’s article situation. And basically the headline with his big picture, sitting there, Letter of the Day, Mark Steyn, why don’t you sue me? And so he’s basically challenging the people who have taken him to the Human Rights Commission to sue him. And he says, quote, it’s precisely because the article is not defamatory that the plaintiffs, and he puts that in quotes because they’re really not plaintiffs, have had to rig the game by going to at least three of Canada’s many human rights pseudo courts. And none of their plaintiff reprises protesting that they’re only looking for a chance to quote, start a debate.

Have they, or their patrons at the Canadian Islamic Congress, questioned the accuracy of a single specific fact, quotation, or statistic. And of course this is what I said in the last few weeks. I said, listen, just give us one example. One example of what you’re objecting to. If they wanted to start a debate, they could start one via a blog, a column, or a book. Instead, they started a human rights complaint, which is what people do when they want to end a debate. And he also predicts that McLean’s and my book will be convicted because that’s the only menu option available. And that’s pretty true about Human Rights Commission. And then, of course, finally, I have to really thank Bessie Borne of London to say the most obvious thing.

I just can’t believe this one got by me. And the headline kind of says that, you know, condemning terrorism might help foster some trust. And she says, you know what fosters mistrust is the failure of the Muslim community to loudly and clearly condemn terrorism and suicide bombing everywhere, without ifs and or buts. And I think it’s our not hearing that that makes us all a little, you know, a little more uneasy. Enough of that.

When we come back, we’ll be looking at what some people think our future is going to be like, and it doesn’t sound too good.

Clip (Star Trek Enterprise):
Speaker 1: What happened to you the other night?
Speaker 2: Oh, you must mean the nothing more than an instinctive defensive response.
Speaker 1: So you’re going to stay aboard the ship because of some loudmouth and a bar?
Speaker 2: My presence could provoke another incident. Someone could get hurt.
Speaker 1: This isn’t the way to deal with prejudice. The best thing is to show your face and remind people that there are aliens who don’t want to blow up the planet.

Comedy Clip:
I hate donut shops. It was very dingy inside. Do you ever go to these places? Every virus in the world hanging in the air? I don’t want your coffee boiling. Put it in a baggy. Don’t touch it with your hands, please. Use your elbows if you have to. Thank you.

A lot of depressed people in donut shops. The poor guy in front of me today. How do you want your coffee, sir?

Black like the future.

There’s a jar on the counter. Need a prozac? Leave a prozac.

Bob Metz: Welcome back. I’m Bob Metz.

This is Just Right. You’re listening to CHRW Radio 94.9 FM 519-661-3600. The number to call if you want to join us on our last subject heading, which I think will carry us to the end of the hour. That’s basically the whole theme. End of the world.

Notes from the endarkenment side, if I may. A lot of people do see the futures being black, especially among the people in the whole environmental movement and some of the situations that are coming up. Last week I made a reference to an editorial in The Londoner written by Gord Harrison in which he encouraged his readers to reject, quote, a market first or a market driven future based on the faulty assumption that the planet has an almost unlimited ecological capacity to support development and industrialization, end quote, and to support, quote, proper global management, end quote. Citing as his reasons for supporting this totalitarian green global movement, Harrison, referred to a little green handbook written by Australian nuclear physicist Ron Nielsen. And yes, it’s actually called the little green handbook. That’s not a nickname.

That’s actually the name of it. And Ron Nielsen argues that the seven critical trends that are shaping the future of the planet are the population explosion, diminishing land resources, diminishing water resources, destruction of the atmosphere, the approaching energy crisis, social decline in conflicts, and the increasing killing power. Now I dealt with a lot of those issues last week and I’m not going to go into them in great detail this week, but had regular listener, Gord called me up after the show and he suggested that I should research the famous bet that apparently happened between two people, Julian Lincoln Simon versus Paul Ehrlich on population explosion. And Paul Ehrlich, of course, was the author of the popular book, The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growing quickly, you know, outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources, whereas Simon on the other hand was very skeptical of such claims, Julian, or yes, Julian Simon, who by the way has passed away since. Now the face off apparently occurred in the pages of the social science quarterly where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that, quote, if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000, and quote, a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with, Simon countered with a quote public offer to stake US $10,000 on my belief that the cost of non-government controlled raw materials, including grain and oil, will not rise in the long run. And he said to, he said, you can name your own terms, select any raw material you want, copper, tin, whatever, and select any date in the future, any date more than a year away.

And Simon would bet that the commodities price on that date would be lower than it was at the time of the wager. Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals. Now remember, the guys are, they’re getting to pick which metals that they think are going to go up.

It’s like the house, you know, they get to be the house in this case. And that they thought would undergo big price rises. And they picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. And then on paper, they bought each $200 worth of each of these metals for a total bet of $1,000. Using the prices on September 29, 1980 as an index. And then they designated September 29, 1990, ten years later, as the payoff date. If the inflation adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference.

If the prices fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Now between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. And still is, by the way. So that means the next decade wasn’t as large. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich’s selective metals had fallen.

And in some cases had dropped right through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for 390 a pound in 1980, was only down to 370 a pound in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later. So as a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon’s favor.

But it’s interesting too, because it’s a significant that according to an article in Wired, now we’re quoting from Wired magazine here now, all of Ehrlich’s grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. This is one of the things I see that demographics is very weak on. They always take the assumption that whatever is happening today will continue to happen. Like, you know, if we keep growing at the today’s rate of X, then Y will happen. And that’s probably true if you’re just thinking linearly and think that people never change their mind, never change their actions, and never turn left or right, but just keep going straight without even slowing down.

And it just doesn’t work that way. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about quote, famines of unbelievable proportions, and quote, occurring by 1975, about quote, hundreds of millions of people starving to death in the 1970s and 80s around the world, and entering a genuine age of scarcity in 1990. For his having promoted the greater public understanding of environmental problems, Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Award, Foundation Genius Award. And Simon always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the science piece, nor his public wager with Ehrlich, nor anything else that he did, said or wrote, seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything. They were immune to contrary evidence just as they’d been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse Cassandra effect operating in the universe. Whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days, experts, quote, end quote, spoke awful falsehoods and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker. And I think that pretty much explains Al Gore in a nutshell.

He’s in the same category, totally. And you wonder why anybody who’s even listened to Al Gore himself can go on believing what he has to believe. So while Simon was proven correct, Ehrlich goes on and gets all of this stuff and went on to get this whole situation on getting all these awards, just like Al Gore got.

What do you get? Oh, I forget what award he won. Nobel Peace Prize, of course, that’s what it was.

Now, okay, so Ehrlich wins these awards for his population explosion, which was wrong, wrong, wrong all the way down the line. In fact, I have an article here, it’s a clip from the Economist just this morning. You know, a lot of parts of the world are now dealing with drain of population. Even here in North America, particularly if you’re looking in the Midwestern states, the populations are going down dramatically. A large part of that is people shifting to other areas of the world.

But if you’re looking to get away from it all, it seems like there’s going to be more and more places available for you because population is on decline in several areas, including Canada in general, which is one of the reasons we require immigration, which creates all sorts of other issues as well. But, you know, Ehrlich went on to win this MacArthur Foundation grant based on his career of all these apocalyptic predictions that never actually came true. And Simon’s work, which has influenced people to challenge the corruptions of such environmentalists and doomsayers, never happened. So you wonder how that can happen. And one fellow here, I don’t even know who the writer is here, he’s got this off the Internet, has an interesting comment here. He says, the explanation can be partly attributed to the reversion in our culture to various forms of supernaturalism. Increasingly, people are professing faith not only in God, but in New Age mystics, psychics, faith healers, and astrologers. That is, our culture is increasingly dispensing with objective reality and reason for faith in an alleged supernatural, paranormal phenomenon, i.e., in the absurd. And at the root, environmentalism is a pseudoscience that must therefore engender faith. Americans of all faiths increasingly are looking at the environment through a spiritual lens, reports Carly Murphy of The Washington Post. For them, quote, care for creation end quote, is much more than preserving wildlife and pristine scenery. It is a religious mandate, and that’s quoted from The Washington Post in 1997. Ultimately then, environmentalist doomsayers are a logical outgrowth of religious apocalyptic and their believers are just another set of mystics basically.

Now, again, when you throw the facts at people and they see that their ideas aren’t working in practice, sometimes they just want to reject. You know, if you actually look at each of the metals that we mentioned before, I had a breakdown of the five here just to give you an idea. They were all $200 for a pound in 1980, and in 1990, for example, copper was down 18.5%. Chrome went down 40%. Nickel went down 3%. Tin dropped by 72%.

Tungsten dropped by 57%. At a time when the world’s population was increasing. And of course, people wanted to analyze why the prices went up down or why things didn’t work. And of course, basically, prices fell for the same reasons they always fall, entrepreneurship and continuing technological improvements. Prospectors found new loads such as nickel mines around the world that ended Canada’s pretty much near monopoly of the market.

Do you ever go up to the big nickel in Sudbury there? Isn’t as noisy as it used to be these days. Thanks to computers, new machines, and new chemical processes, there were more efficient ways to extract and refine the ores for chrome and other metals.

And for many uses, the metals were replaced by cheaper materials, notably plastics. That’s another thing you hear too. People always think that we have to use this.

One particular metal, even oil, they talk about like that. As though when the time is right, we won’t just switch over to some other kind of alternative. And it’s already happening.

It’s just not happening fast enough for the environmentalists. And of course, you can go to plastics. Telephone calls went through satellites and fiber optics instead of copper. So you can imagine what that did to the copper market for a while there. And ceramics placed tungsten and cutting tools. Cans were made of aluminum instead of tin. So clearly, it wasn’t just a matter of more production.

It could have been a matter of less demand for the things that already existed because of alternatives coming in that might have been deemed to be better. And however, of course, the naysayers keep on not wanting to believe that there’s any lesson to be learned. And one person here writes, the bet with Simon doesn’t mean anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going. So far as he passes the 10th floor, he thinks all of those metals will go up eventually.

And so the faith is there, you know. And interestingly enough, both Simon and Ehrlich offered new criteria for a second bet that you might have heard about. But they were unable to agree on the terms of that bet before Simon’s death in 1997. Simon originally offered to repeat the original bet, but Ehrlich, despite his insistence that, quote, those metals will go up eventually, declined.

In the ultimate resource two, Simon offered this blanket wager offer. He says, I’ll bet that just about any environmental and economic trend pertaining to basic human material welfare will show improvement in the long run. For their part, Paul Ehrlich and Stephen Schneider offered a series of 15 items pertaining to material human welfare that they were willing to bet would worsen over the next decade. And the criteria included rapid climate change associated with global warming could pose a major threat of increasing droughts and floods, more nitrous oxide, emissions of the air pollutant sulfur dioxide in Asia will be significantly greater in 2004 than in 1994. There will be less fertile cropland per person in 2004 than 1994. Less agricultural soil per person in 2004 than 1994. Less rice and wheat grown per person in 2004. What else they got here? Less firewood available in 2004 than in 1994.

Virgin tropical moist forest would be significantly smaller. There’s a lot I’m skipping here. More people will die of AIDS in 2004 than 1994. Sperm counts of all human males will continue to decline. And the gap in wealth between the richest 10% of humanity and the poorest 10% will be greater in 2004 than in 1994. Now interestingly, the items, they’re totally different.

The items offered by Ehrlich and Schneider dramatically highlight a different approach between them and how Simon would look. The first five items, for example, don’t even really pretend to measure human welfare. Like who’s talking about all these specific gases in the atmosphere? And some of their suggestions are even odd or the proposed bet on income inequality, for example, seems strange. Because income inequality between the top 10% and the bottom 10% will be much higher on January 2000 than it was in January 1st, 1900. Yet by every measure the bottom 10% is better off than they were 100 years ago, and that’s absolutely the case.

Another issue too is we might have less fertile crop land and we might have less land like in terms of growing food. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Epcot Center down in the Disneyland and Disney World complex in Florida, but boy, if you go and, I think it was in one of the, I’m trying to think of the name of the pavilion we went into because it was definitely done by a food producer. It might have been one of the chocolate companies actually, but they had this place there where they actually grew the food that they served in the restaurants inside right there on site. And part of the trip was they take you through and you’d watch this food growing and it didn’t grow in land. It grew above the land in all this hydroponic type of stuff and it was just amazing how much they could grow in a very tiny area.

And it was stunning that they could feed all those people going through this place. And so the idea that again, you know, we’re going to be running out of land when we don’t even need the land for agriculture as much as we did before, I think is a little spurious. Even one of the other issues, the depopulation again in the mid-states, one of the reasons cited for that is because of increased efficiency in farming.

You don’t need that many people working the farm anymore when you’ve got these huge machines that are working on the land, et cetera, et cetera. Now, basically, of course, this bet never came to pass. Of course, Simon died before they actually came in to agree to any terms. And the problem was that they wanted all 15 propositions as a package deal and that was just something Simon wouldn’t accept when Ehrlich and Schneider insisted that that be the case.

So that way they could argue, you know, even one of our little minutiae points were correct, were right, and you’re wrong. Now, in keeping with all of this, there is an interesting further development, and that’s, I don’t know if you heard about David Suzuki and what he has done lately. National Post, February 11, 2008, Lorne Gunter, David to Torquemada was the headline. Quote, David Suzuki delivered a scathing and powerful speech to a packed house at McGill University, which called on, quote, young people and business leaders to reverse the demise of ecology at the hand of short-sighted economic theory. There’s that economic theory coming out again. That’s what they’re opposed to.

They don’t like free markets and they don’t like capitalism and they don’t like the whole productive cycle. What I would challenge you to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing on the environment is a criminal act, says Suzuki. End quote. Don’t blame Dr. Suzuki, though, says Lorne Gunter, his instinct to imprison those who disagree with him as old as science itself. Never mind that Dr. Suzuki is defending a secular faith rather than a theological one. He’s merely picking up the time-honored tradition of Thomas de Torquemada, Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition.

Over its active run of approximately 140 years, the Inquisition tortured, tried and imprisoned some 14,000 people for heresy, 4,000 for superstitions, and another 4,000 for crimes against the Inquisition itself. Give a skeptical review to Al Gore as an inconvenient truth and end up in some Suzuki-ite reeducation camp in the wilderness of northern B.C., he says. The Dr. Suzukis of Galileo’s day sentenced him to house arrest for nearly a decade, had his books banned, and forbade him to lecture on science because he believed the earth revolved around the sun. The inconvenient truth for Dr. Suzuki is that sometimes the heretics are right, concludes Lorne Gunter. And then, of course, in the leading national editorial post of the post, says, has Dr. Suzuki crossed a fatal line now by injecting such a disturbing note of authoritarianism into his mother earth medicines show, end quote, asks the editor.

And, of course, national post writers certainly responded. And again, in another box, climate stability is a fairy tale. writes Professor Timothy Patterson, director of the Ottawa Carlton Geoscience Center at Carlton University. Quote, David Suzuki is reported as telling a McGill University conference, quote, you all think growth and climate change is normal.

It’s not end quote. Our ridiculous climate change is completely normal. The only constant about climate is change.

The quest for climate stability is one that belongs in fairy tales. My own work and that of hundreds of others in the field, I’ll already outnumbers everybody on Kyoto, show that on all timescales there’s very good correlation between the earth’s climate and natural phenomenon such as changes in the brightness of the sun. And in the case of what causes climate change, there is massive new scientific evidence that is totally ignored by Suzuki and the federal government, a strategy that is taking Canada in an entirely wrong direction, end quote. I commented on this on an earlier show, it must have been a couple of months ago, where a lot of people came and said, look it, since Kyoto was signed, we’ve done more research on the environment than we did in all the years previous to that. And they learned a lot of things that just were not valid that Kyoto’s operating on. And I think that’s, you know, you’re getting into dangerous territory there. And writes Tim Ball, chair of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project from Victoria.

And we had a guest from that group on the show here very early on last year. Quote, David Suzuki has repeatedly presented one doomsday scenario after another, many far removed from reality. About 20 years ago, he said we had 10 years left before environmental collapse. He also toured Canada saying two species an hour were going extinct.

When challenged to name one, he was silent because it is not happening. While claiming to care about the environment, he has created a poisonous atmosphere in which our leaders are forced to make decisions that are bad for Canada and the environment. And quote, and that’s interesting using that term poisonous atmosphere. That’s the same term that human rights commissions use in term when they prosecute people.

They call it poisoned environment, you see. And finally, from letter writer Jeffrey Richards of Victoria, quote, if Galileo were alive today, he would understand Pope Suzuki very well. And that’s it for that. Now we’ll continue a little more on this on the other side of these comments.

Comedy Clip:
Recently had like a little family get together. That’s always fun. Usually it’s just, you know, 10, 12 of us. This time my cousin found out every relative in the phone book that he could find invited them over.

So 53 of us. And the whole purpose was he wanted to introduce his new fiance to the entire family at once for the very first time. Brave or stupid, I don’t know, but he did it. Having met her, I have to tell you, she’s a lovely, lovely woman. However, she told us that she was a vegan. I had no idea what this was. I’m like, a what? She’s like, I’m a vegetarian to the next level.

I’m like, wow, are you in deep trouble, sister? Our family thinks veal is a vegetable. We’re pretty sure it rubbed up against the carrot as it frolicked through the garden.

So now she’s all mad. She’s educating me.

Well, vegans, we don’t need any meat. No fish, no eggs, no poultry. All we eat is organically grown fruits and vegetables and wheat. Here’s the kicker.

She’s bigger than me.

Bob Metz: Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right on CHRW. I’m Bob Metz and I’m glad you’re with us today. Our resource is infinite. This is a big issue. I think that’s part of the big deal behind the whole population concern. We’re really not talking about population. We’re talking about supply and demand, aren’t we? Is there too much of a population to make a supply adequate of anything for them?

Well, you’re talking about food, fuel, wood, metals, etc. And that question was asked by a writer online whose name is Brian Carnell on a column May 18, 2000, where he actually asked the question. And he talks about economists, Julian Simon’s claim that all natural resources are infinite, which of course has provoked a lot of discussion and debate. And when an economist says that, it does not mean that there’s an infinite amount of gold or copper atoms on the earth, because of course the mass of the earth is finite. And you might argue that the universe has a finite mass as well, although that would be irrelevant to being the smallest us compared to the universe.

But what we really mean when you say that you have infinite resources, it means that human beings will never run out of them for whatever purpose they decide to use them for. And it kind of contradicts what environmentalist activists are always saying. And we’ve already given a couple of examples where people switch from one metal to another, where the prices have gone down. And the basic issue of course is, as Brian Carnell says, that the insight Simon has here is that people don’t buy resources. Instead they buy services. People don’t, for example, buy large lumps of iron. They buy cars, which perform a service, quick and efficient transportation. They don’t buy copper wire. They buy telephones and allows quick communications.

So if you can replace the metals or whatever is of concern with something else that can serve the same function, the problem really doesn’t even exist. I found an interesting person who kind of disagreed with the whole thing. It’s interesting what he has to say here.

He didn’t give a name, but this opinion I’ve seen before, quote, God has given us all the resources we need. I think there is much validity and technical optimism, even though it should not be looked upon as some sort of false God or magic cure all. I think Julian Simon is a wee bit of an idiot if he really claims that human population can go on forever on a finite planet.

But the extreme scenario is hardly relevant to anything. Human population growth can, in fact, go on, at least as far out into the foreseeable future. The Earth is far from full of people, and if the Earth perhaps could hold some 200 billion people, if need be, or even more, why worry if human population rushes pell-mell into 30 billion? It would only be helping solve the underpopulation problem and make better use of the resources and space on Earth. While I like the idea of humans colonizing other planets and having more room to grow our numbers, I don’t think it’s practical with current technology, nor likely as I don’t see it in the Bible. So the most reasonable answer to the population concern is for the burgeoning billions to grow denser and denser. I think they are getting denser.

Urbanize the world to whatever extent needed, he says. Well, that’s interesting. But way back in 1989 already, I remember we had a dinner in Toronto. Actually, not a dinner, it was a breakfast brunch, and we featured Dr. Walter Block, who was then senior economist at the Fraser Institute, and he gave a speech to our group at Freedom Party. And interestingly enough, we invited David Suzuki at the same time to debate Walter Block because the Fraser Institute had just come out with a book called, Economics, a reconciliation between environment and economics. And so we figured David Suzuki would be quite on hand to want to debate Walter Block, senior economist at the Fraser Institute, but he turned us down saying that he was not available, couldn’t be in the area.

Ironically, that same night, and we held this at the Toronto airport in Toronto, I saw David Suzuki at the airport, so he was right in the same neighborhood. But I can see why he wouldn’t want to have a debate. Interestingly, though, Walter Block made a fascinating analogy that I just want you to hear before we leave because we only got a couple of minutes left. And he says, quote, there are some statistics that might convince you that we have no overpopulation problem. One of them is that if we took everybody on the earth, all six billion of us, and put them into Ontario in the form of four people to a family household, where the house is the usual middle class sized house with a front yard and back yard and two stories at 8,200 square feet, everybody on earth would fit in Ontario.

Isn’t that amazing? And that’s just one instance to illustrate how empty the planet is. It’s also not true that poverty is correlated at all with overpopulation. You know, we’re speaking of the teeming masses of India and that all the Indians are poor, but what about the teeming masses of Toronto or the teeming masses of Paris or London or Manhattan?

They’re teeming there, but they’re pretty rich. And then we have people who are dying like flies in the desert, like in Ethiopia, where there are hardly any people at all per square mile. So he says, if you make a table where you put rich and poor and population density side by side, you can fill in all the boxes, which means you get some poor concentrated countries, some poor empty countries, some rich concentrated countries, some rich empty countries.

Poverty has nothing to do with overpopulation. He says what it’s got to do with is the big G. Too much G, he says. And of course, that’ll get you every time. And by G, he means government, too much government. And interestingly, he concluded, he said, and this is Walter Block speaking, he says, my long run perspective is that one day, not soon, but in a couple of billion years, the sun will go out. And by that time, we’d better have technology and enough spaceships or beam you up Scotty machines or whatever it is to get to the next planet.

Beaming machines and technologies of the sort that only science fiction writers can now imagine are things that can come about only through a couple of geniuses, lots of geniuses, like Einstein’s. And he says, the more billions of people we have, the more likely it will be that we get a few Einstein’s. So he’d like to see the world with, he says, instead of six billion people, have 60 trillion. And I think we’d all fit very happily if we didn’t have any zoning laws that say you can’t erect any more than 10 story buildings. And he says with technology, we’ll be able to build 150 story buildings, etc, etc. And of course, he talks a big factor too, is that we’re still not populating the oceans, nor managing them correctly. And that that is a place that mankind still, I mean, if you look at the planet, why are we called Earth?

We should have been called water, especially if you look at it from the Pacific Ocean side, you can hardly tell there’s any land on the planet at all. But there you go. That’s basically a quick summary and look at some of the doomsday scenarios that are going on in the world today.

And I think that’ll be it for this week. I got lots more I can do, but we just are out of time for today. Ira, I’m going to miss you. I’m going to miss you. Take care. And I’ll be back next week. So until then, do right, think right, act right, stay right, and take care.

Comedy Clip:
People from big cities, I was going to make funny if you’re from a small town. People here from small towns? Do you find that you go to a big city like Toronto or something, they got to make fun of you. Or they got to the real patronizing. I was living in Toronto for a while and people would find out I’m from Tisdale, Saskatchewan, and they’d be like, oh, don’t go down to Jane and Finch or whatever. Oh, don’t go to this area town. You wouldn’t last five minutes. You’re probably right, but at the same time, I’m looking at this guy thinking, I don’t know how long he’d survive at a gravel pit party outside Weyburn either, you know? Probably not.