Western Standard - June 01, 2023


CMS: Message to Premier Smith: Don’t blink!


Episode Stats


Length

52 minutes

Words per minute

186.12343

Word count

9,811

Sentence count

475

Harmful content

Misogyny

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of The Western Standard, host Corey Morgan talks with Gabrielle Bauer about her new book, "Blindsight is 2020: A Year in the Life of Alberta's New Premier, Danielle Smith." They also discuss the similarities between the 1993 election and the current election, and why Smith's victory in that election is so similar to the current one.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Thank you.
00:00:30.200 Good day. Welcome to the Corey Morgan Show. I am Corey Morgan. This is my weekly show
00:00:36.360 with the Western Standard going out to a number of channels out there to get my opinion on
00:00:42.360 things, run through some news items, maybe a little ranting and raving. And of course,
00:00:46.600 I always have some fantastic guests coming on. So yeah, I've got a good guest coming
00:00:51.960 on today as usual. Her name is Gabrielle Bauer and she's from Toronto. She's a health and
00:00:58.780 medical writer, and she put out a book that was published by the Brownstone Institute called
00:01:02.640 Blind Sight is 2020. So she's been looking back on the pandemic policies, social aspects to it,
00:01:10.600 and well, what worked, if anything, and what failed, and there's plenty of that. So I mean,
00:01:16.700 you know, we can't let that go too far in the rearview mirror. We got to examine what happened
00:01:20.880 and why there. So let's get on to other things, local things. Of course, the election finally
00:01:26.760 ended in Alberta. What a long, ugly, nasty campaign that was. In the end, we do have a UCP
00:01:32.880 government. Daniel Smith pulled it off, but I got stuck with an NDP MLA. Shamefully, in my rural
00:01:39.420 riding, I have an NDP MLA. I'm quite boned about it, but whatever. I guess it could have been
00:01:43.840 worse. We could have had a whole whack more of them. Good to see you all checking in on the
00:01:47.340 comment scroll, guys. Stuart, Shirley, Jason, all the rest. I appreciate it. Use the comment scroll
00:01:51.860 if you're watching this live. Send questions my way, the guest's way, and, you know, converse
00:01:58.020 with each other. Just keep things civil. We can fight on Twitter if we want. We don't need to do
00:02:01.720 it in this comment scroll. All right, I'm going to talk a little bit about that election. Offer my
00:02:05.320 advice, and I'm sure she's getting it from all directions. My advice, though, to Premier Danielle
00:02:10.620 Smith. So, Danielle Smith, I mean, she's gone against all conventional wisdom and political 1.00
00:02:14.920 advice. She's defied and ignored polls, pundits, and academics that all predicted her political 0.99
00:02:21.500 demise, and in dismissing those naysayers, she's found herself elected as Alberta's premier of the
00:02:26.300 majority government at her disposal, albeit a reduced one. Now, the night of the election,
00:02:32.360 Daniel Smith invoked the late Ralph Klein in referencing what was called his miracle on the
00:02:37.760 prairie, and she wasn't drawing an unfair parallel. The similarities between the 1993 general election
00:02:43.760 won by Klein and the 2023 election in Alberta are remarkable when you look at them. When Klein took
00:02:49.780 the reins of the Progressive Conservative Party in the early 1990s. Their party was in serious
00:02:54.840 trouble. It was polling down at sometimes as low as 20% against Lawrence DeCore's liberals, and
00:02:59.760 many were declaring the PCs as electorally dead in the water. The elites, of course,
00:03:05.180 in the chattering classes dismissed Klein as an uneducated bumpkin who stumbled his way into the
00:03:09.900 premiership and would become a little more than a footnote in political history. Voters, though,
00:03:14.720 they felt otherwise, and gave Ralph Klein a reduced majority government on June 15, 1993.
00:03:20.460 The Alberta establishment, of course, they were aghast, but at least somewhat humbled.
00:03:24.720 Now we come all the way up to 2022, and we've got the governing UCP, and they were polling as low
00:03:30.040 as 22% under the leadership of Jason Kenney. That led to the end of Kenney, and among a number of
00:03:35.220 things. And when Kenney was replaced by Danielle Smith, the usual establishment suspects were all
00:03:40.060 but confident this would be the beginning of the end of the UCP's reign in government. There's no
00:03:44.600 way a leader with such a controversial history as Smith could turn around the fortunes of a party
00:03:48.740 in such trouble, right? Well, Smith proved her detractors wrong and pulled a reduced majority
00:03:54.140 win from what was the most personal and negative provincial campaign and living memory. And while
00:04:00.280 she may have fewer seats than the 1993 PCs did under Klein, she actually has a larger segment
00:04:06.320 of popular support. I mean, Ralph Klein won 44.5% support in 1993. Smith's UCP took 52.6% of the
00:04:14.080 electorate. Her opponents can no longer claim she doesn't have a mandate from Albertans.
00:04:19.840 Now, if Premier Smith wants to continue down a Klein-like path, she needs to take another one
00:04:25.100 of his favorite sayings to heart. Don't blink. The election might be behind Smith right now, 0.99
00:04:31.680 but her opponents are far from gone. Notley's remaining is the leader of the NDP for now,
00:04:35.980 which ensures the negative tone of the opposition against Smith is going to continue. Legacy media
00:04:40.980 is as biased as ever against Smith, and they're going to pan every move she makes. Just the other
00:04:46.260 morning, I listened to a local talk radio station begin its newscast saying, Notley's NDP wins the
00:04:52.140 largest opposition ever. Since when is the second place celebrated in a two-party system? They won't
00:05:00.820 even give Smith a win in headlines when she just had a literal win. I mean, you mentioned that the
00:05:05.840 NDP won the largest opposition. After you mention the UCP won a majority, but not in the media
00:05:13.300 environment of today. Unions, academics, and media will all oppose Smith's every move, just as they
00:05:18.900 did with Klein. There's going to be people within Smith's own party. They're going to get nervous.
00:05:23.220 And as her opposition to her policy starts mounting, they're going to put pressure on her.
00:05:27.640 She needs to ignore her opponents and reassure her allies. Most of all, though, or again,
00:05:32.660 she can't blink. Klein was counseled to back down as he put Alberta's finances back in order.
00:05:38.640 He was told by the experts he was moving too far, too fast, he was upsetting the apple cart,
00:05:43.400 and surely he'd be punished at the polls. He didn't blink, though. And political pundits
00:05:48.100 assured us he'd be punished dearly in the next election. Well, in 1997, Ralph Klein increased
00:05:52.280 his majority with another 11 seats on top of that, and took 51% of the popular vote.
00:05:57.500 Ignore the experts, don't blink. Smith has a mandate, and she needs to pursue it. 1.00
00:06:02.660 She can't succumb to the temptation to pull the political reform band-aid off slowly through minor incremental policy changes.
00:06:10.500 For one thing, her opponents are going to go wild no matter what she does, even if they're minor changes.
00:06:14.340 So you've got nothing to lose in going for the big ones.
00:06:16.520 Secondly, that's how Jason Kenney tried to govern, and look how well that turned out.
00:06:20.960 Albertans are willing to embrace positive political changes, even if it comes to the health system and the pension plan. 0.92
00:06:26.820 Smith needs to bring about all these reforms quickly and offer no quarter to her opponents in her work.
00:06:31.920 Changes need to be made in the first two years in power 0.98
00:06:34.220 so the results can be measured in the second two years 1.00
00:06:37.040 before she faces the electorate again. 0.90
00:06:39.120 She can't let the civil servants, union heads,
00:06:41.120 or even her own advisors slow roll her mandate.
00:06:43.680 Hesitation will be her undoing.
00:06:45.920 Premier Smith isn't showing any indications
00:06:47.860 of being a shrinking violet in office.
00:06:49.920 I don't expect her to tiptoe around with policy.
00:06:52.840 I mean, Smith's historical biggest mistake ever, though,
00:06:54.840 was to crumble under strong headwinds
00:06:57.020 and led the disastrous floor crossing
00:06:59.460 from the Wildrose Party
00:07:00.420 to the Progressive Conservatives with Under Prentice in 2014.
00:07:03.840 The pressure got to her back then, and she sought an escape hatch.
00:07:07.240 Now, Daniel Smith's been given a second political life
00:07:09.320 that nobody would have expected of her for her
00:07:11.940 after that catastrophic lapse in judgment in 2014.
00:07:15.780 She's clearly learned a lot since then.
00:07:17.920 Let's hope, though, she's absorbed the most important lesson of all,
00:07:20.900 especially when you're getting tired of swimming upstream.
00:07:23.620 Don't blink.
00:07:25.380 That's all I can offer for Premier Smith right now.
00:07:27.660 And then, like I said, she's getting advice all over the place
00:07:30.320 from all sorts of quarters, but, you know, stick to your plan. Don't let them push you off it
00:07:36.020 because you won't win. They just see the weakness. They'll smell the blood in the water
00:07:40.300 and they will keep coming after her. All right, let's see what else is going on in the news and
00:07:45.000 check in with Dave Naylor, our news editor. Hey, Dave, how's it going? I don't know, Corey. I think
00:07:50.580 I'm going to need your help in the next week. I think I'm suffering from PWS. PWS. Pole
00:07:58.740 withdrawal syndrome we used to get four or five polls a day who was gonna who was gonna win the
00:08:05.540 election and now for two days we've had none i can't i can't deal with it cory i mean where's my
00:08:11.620 polls uh anyways thank goodness thank goodness the election's over uh newswise busy morning as
00:08:22.580 always uh at the western standard uh leading off the site right now is bad news for the uh
00:08:28.100 for the oil patch uh massive norwegian oil company has uh not pulled the plug but has delayed
00:08:36.020 the uh massive uh bay du nord project off the coast of newfoundland uh for at least three years
00:08:43.140 that's a 16 billion dollar project that is is now on uh corey our education uh columnist uh john
00:08:52.100 John Hilton O'Brien has filed a piece on the fact that even though the UCP has won, the parents still need to fight for what's happening in the education system.
00:09:03.540 I don't know about you, Corey, but when I was growing up, there was nothing I liked more than a Duke of Hazards episode with the, you know, following the tales of Bo and Luke Duke and their very Daisy Duke short friend, Daisy.
00:09:19.920 car chases and whatnot they they were all part of life in the dukes of hazards and there was a real
00:09:25.040 life one recently down in georgia which was caught on tape which some driver flew off the back of a
00:09:32.240 of a pickup truck and went hundreds of meters or hundreds of feet in the air barrel rolling so
00:09:37.120 that's a good fun to check out uh our educational and there's uh nico playing it uh playing it there
00:09:44.720 for you now. What else do we have? Our real estate expert, Mike Thomas, has got a piece
00:09:54.600 looking at the June 7th Bank of Canada interest rate. Interestingly, the GDP that is higher
00:10:00.820 than expected could cause the bank to raise the rate on June 7th. And we've got also video
00:10:07.800 of the dramatic incident yesterday involving a Chinese fighter jet, which buzzed right in front
00:10:15.580 of an American aircraft. And that's up there for you to see. And coming up in a few minutes,
00:10:21.580 Corey, we'll have a story. We'll reveal who becomes Hollywood's oldest dad lately. Which
00:10:27.760 Hollywood legend has just become a dad at 83 years old. We'll have that story up in just a
00:10:34.160 couple minutes. All right. Well, thank you for the updates, Dave. And we're looking forward to
00:10:40.420 the full story on the geriatric breeder there. Yeah. And if he's doing it at 83, you have any
00:10:48.480 thoughts of maybe getting back in the baby making game? No, I got neutered back when I was 27 and
00:10:54.400 there's no reversing that for me, but maybe some others might want to take up the challenge later
00:10:59.040 on there you go all right thanks dave the show that is our news director dave naylor again
00:11:06.480 covering everything from the important to the fun and trivial such as uh celebrity child birth and
00:11:14.220 uh dukes of hazard style crashes going on but also of course we're covering the election federal
00:11:19.240 politics provincial politics like any good large news site this is when i remind everybody get on
00:11:24.660 there and take out a subscription that's how we stay independent that's how we pay the bills that's
00:11:28.660 how, again, most important of all, we aren't beholden to the government for a nickel. We do
00:11:33.280 not take any tax dollars. And that's thanks to you guys who have subscribed. $9.99 a month,
00:11:40.040 $99 a year. You get full access, get beyond the paywall and see all of those news stories as
00:11:46.720 they come out. But we've got a large news crew across the country here putting stuff out. I mean,
00:11:51.300 it's one of the things that came out recently, you know, where, or as we saw during the election,
00:11:57.280 And Calgary has next to nothing left with Canada, the Calgary Sun and the Calgary Herald for newspapers.
00:12:04.980 These were the two heavyweights here.
00:12:06.740 They were here, you know, forever.
00:12:08.940 They had, they couldn't file their stories until quite late because they don't have any copy editors apparently out this way.
00:12:16.080 They're down to putting out just about a flyer.
00:12:18.540 I saw somebody on Twitter talking about that today too.
00:12:21.380 Yesterday's Sun, a post-election Calgary Sun, it was like 24 pages long and had two ads.
00:12:25.800 They're hurting.
00:12:26.320 They're hurting really bad. And, you know, I'm not celebrating, you know, there's a lot of good
00:12:33.300 jobs being lost. We've got a lot of challenges to local coverage going on. Actually, we've got,
00:12:38.200 you know, who is going to cover these things? The news is important, but they've got to,
00:12:44.080 they've got to change how they're doing things rather than trying to keep asking for more and
00:12:48.680 more money to shore up what's a broken, obsolete system. You can't carry the weight of an old
00:12:53.900 traditional style media outlet any longer. I mean, that's where the why the standards expanding as
00:12:58.960 well as it is and other independent outlets, because we're starting from scratch, and we
00:13:02.460 didn't have to try and carry all that weight and reinvent the wheel. We're working with modern
00:13:07.040 types of technology and layouts and ways to source stories, you know, edit stories and get them out
00:13:12.540 there. And that's why we put on a lot of them. And we can put on fast and their quality, their
00:13:16.400 quality. But there was a council, some meeting of, let's see, this is a crisis of local news is a
00:13:22.220 really harsh reality this was a to canadian media directors at a conference uh recently that was
00:13:27.780 held and you see they understand it they said the decline of local news outlets is deeply concerning
00:13:32.060 not only does it disrupt the lives of journalists and industry professionals but as far-reaching
00:13:36.740 implications for the communities and there's truth to it but i mean we got to remember
00:13:40.080 do we need that many outlets anymore do we need the local ones i mean for those of us old enough
00:13:45.940 to remember pre-internet days you know if you were living in a small town or a large city
00:13:50.700 even the local little baseball team where else could you find out if they won or lost if you
00:13:55.120 weren't at the game yourself and opening the local paper or what was it with that house fire down the
00:14:00.240 street or any number of these smaller news items but now you can still find out it didn't disappear
00:14:06.300 it's just the local news outlets did so you can go on Facebook and you can find these things you
00:14:12.820 know you can go on Twitter I mean part of the problem though and I've said that before too
00:14:16.240 We've got more access to quick, ready information than we've ever had in our lives.
00:14:22.460 But at the same time, we've got more access to BS as well.
00:14:25.860 So that's where we've got to be really, really careful.
00:14:28.820 And, you know, we've got to sift.
00:14:32.220 I mean, some of it puts the responsibility on our laps.
00:14:35.220 So we do have to take that responsibility and just make the most of it.
00:14:40.940 But again, I mean, we can't use that as an excuse to shore up unsustainable media models.
00:14:47.700 It's a time of the past.
00:14:48.920 So we've got to evolve and evolve upwards.
00:14:51.840 So, okay, I see my guest is getting set over there. 0.91
00:14:54.820 We're going to have her on deck right away.
00:14:57.460 And as I said, her name is Gabrielle Bauer.
00:15:00.100 She's a health and medical writer.
00:15:01.880 She's won some awards.
00:15:03.100 She's written a number of books.
00:15:05.200 And we are going to predominantly speak, and I've been looking forward to this,
00:15:08.320 on her recent one on the pandemic and responses to it.
00:15:10.940 It's called Blindsight is 2020, and it was published by the Brownstone Institute just a few months ago.
00:15:16.680 So let's bring her in and have a conversation about this.
00:15:22.140 There we go. Hello, Ms. Bowery. Thank you very much for joining us today. 0.99
00:15:26.180 Oh, my pleasure.
00:15:28.280 So, I mean, I guess I'll get right into it.
00:15:31.040 You know, the book is talking about hindsight.
00:15:33.160 It's, I guess, a review. It's looking at what the responses were, how we reacted to the pandemic,
00:15:39.300 how governments reacted, people reacted, and I guess maybe if you could kind of sum up in a
00:15:43.800 nutshell what you're covering in this book. Okay, it's a little, I've read a lot of pandemic books
00:15:49.620 as part of my research. This one is a little bit different in that it really focuses on the
00:15:54.360 psychological, sociological dimension. So it's not as much about, you know, data, this fact or that
00:16:01.420 fact, although there certainly are some of those, but it's, you know, why did the world go mad?
00:16:06.960 what happened you know why was there this level of fear why was there this level of groupthink
00:16:12.880 why was there this level of shaming and snitching and where did that all come from and so in order
00:16:17.840 to make my case i don't just talk about my own views but i enlist the expertise of people 46
00:16:24.960 people from various disciplines not just science and that's really important because i think you
00:16:30.640 know novelists and artists and lawyers and philosophers they all have really important
00:16:35.520 things to say about a pandemic so i bring together all these people including scientists and through
00:16:40.880 them um you know i make the case for some of what happened and why it did yeah and i mean it was at
00:16:48.400 46 uh dissenting thinkers i believe is what you've got listed in that book who have come out and we
00:16:53.120 can't dismiss the the people on the grounds the musicians the novelists i mean with that they've
00:16:57.760 traditionally been part of our social fabric they've uh put out social trends from their you
00:17:03.280 you know, periods of observation historically.
00:17:05.900 And it is very important to hear what they say,
00:17:08.100 not just the fella in the lab coat
00:17:09.520 in the back of a room somewhere.
00:17:11.960 And I mean, as you said,
00:17:13.340 it was almost a temporary madness the world went into.
00:17:17.120 I mean, we'll be studying this for a long, long time,
00:17:19.880 but I mean, now at least we're allowing
00:17:21.660 some of the voices to come out and even talk about it.
00:17:23.520 I mean, that was part of the trend.
00:17:24.620 Everybody was being shouted down
00:17:25.880 if they swam against the current.
00:17:27.980 I've never seen anything like it.
00:17:29.560 I mean, I'm 66 years old now,
00:17:31.480 so I'm old enough to be a grandma,
00:17:33.040 although I'm not one yet, and I was 63 when this all started, and so, but I never, you know, even
00:17:39.600 though you think I might be in a demographic that wanted to stay home and say stay safe, no, never,
00:17:43.880 that never made sense to me, and in fact, I could not understand why my friends and colleagues and
00:17:50.280 family were so on board with this. I could not understand it, and it troubled me mightily,
00:17:55.020 and the first few weeks, I tried to sort of understand this and start some conversations
00:17:59.740 online and the degree of outrage and vitriol I received, I've never seen anything like it.
00:18:06.460 I mean, no one had called me a sociopath before, you know, or a mouth breathing Trump tart or,
00:18:12.180 you know, people telling me to go lick the virus. I mean, it was unbelievably toxic, you know.
00:18:18.360 And it was damaging, you know, and I mean, I think everybody's sort of seen it. I hope some
00:18:23.660 are looking back shamefully, but some rifts haven't been healed. I've seen that within some
00:18:27.440 aspects of my extended family, a couple of siblings who couldn't talk with each other over
00:18:33.720 the period of this because they were on different sides of the vaccination and masking issue. Like,
00:18:37.660 we shouldn't have a political issue ripping apart tight family units. Well, it's not a political
00:18:42.800 issue. It shouldn't have turned political. And that's something that's interesting, too,
00:18:46.340 was the left-right divide. I mean, you'd think this was all just based on health and data,
00:18:50.560 but there was a very distinct split between people who were traditionally, I guess,
00:18:55.800 lean towards conservative views and people who weren't.
00:18:58.720 Well, yeah, absolutely.
00:19:00.200 I do want to address one thing you said.
00:19:01.660 You think it would all be about the science and data.
00:19:03.860 One of the points that has always been important to me and that I make in the book is that
00:19:08.100 managing a pandemic is never just about science and data, no matter which side of the divide
00:19:13.700 you're on.
00:19:14.080 There's always values that go into it, you know, and in a chapter on kids and schools,
00:19:20.580 I talk about that.
00:19:21.560 How important is it to the society for children to go to school?
00:19:25.080 You know, there are no formulas to tell us when to close schools and when not to.
00:19:30.120 It's always going to be a value judgment.
00:19:31.900 I mean, data can inform that value judgment, but it's never just a question of the science,
00:19:37.020 so to speak, no matter how good the science is.
00:19:39.840 So, and yes, as far as the political divide, and that's another issue that I address in
00:19:44.460 the book, you know, about this ridiculous left-right thing, because traditionally the
00:19:49.120 left has really paid attention to um the working class and the struggles and the need to earn a
00:19:56.240 living and a dignified living and all that stuff and that completely went out the window and um
00:20:01.920 there are so many people like myself that i've met through all this that came from perhaps a more
00:20:09.120 left-leaning um background and and just got thoroughly disillusioned with the left over
00:20:17.600 the past three years three years and and now find ourselves politically homeless you know i mean we
00:20:24.480 we've come to appreciate some things from the right but we still are kind of in this no man's
00:20:28.400 land and and we disrupted socially disrupted an entire generation at some of their most formative
00:20:34.640 periods i mean that the fear and and the division and some of the things imprinted upon children
00:20:40.560 when the schools were shut down and so much fear was being spread around and even when the numbers
00:20:44.720 were coming in. I can understand some panic in the early part of a crisis. Okay. We don't know
00:20:49.060 how this is going to move. We don't know who it's going to hurt. We really don't want to act and see
00:20:52.900 if we can't get under control. But I mean, after a year, we had a pretty good idea that thankfully
00:20:57.420 children were virtually immune from harm from this virus. But even then we couldn't get them
00:21:03.740 back into the schools. We had hazard tape going around playgrounds. We wouldn't let them get
00:21:08.080 outdoors and socialize and that's going to affect them for the rest of their lives.
00:21:12.860 yes and then and to add to that all the guilt that we lay on them that was another thing that just
00:21:17.980 really disturbed me from the start is this idea of telling children well don't do xyz or else you
00:21:24.060 might kill grandma well no i mean if you inadvertently transmit a virus to someone
00:21:29.760 you're not killing anyone you know of course we try to be careful and we don't do these things
00:21:34.300 on purpose but humans and viruses have coexisted since the beginning of time you cannot make a
00:21:40.560 child feel guilty for inadvertently doing something that is just biology you know so i found that
00:21:47.920 outrageous and i think that really affected a lot of children and i'm still hearing about it today
00:21:54.160 where they just you know oh my god if i take off my mask who am i going to kill you know it's just
00:21:58.320 just crazy stuff um it really was like the world it's the title of one book that i quote in my
00:22:04.320 own book the year the world went mad by an epidemiologist a mainstream epidemiologist
00:22:10.000 and that is in fact what happened the world went mad i believe for three years without doubt and
00:22:15.040 rationality went out the window and so many things that we can't take back you know we had family
00:22:20.160 members who might be passing away of something that is clearly terminal nothing is going to save
00:22:24.400 them the most important thing in the last period of their lives is to try and see some loved ones
00:22:29.280 one more time before they go and we kept loved ones out who cares if you're going to give them
00:22:34.400 an infection of covid when they're going to die of cancer in a week they just
00:22:37.600 exactly somebody's hand one more time and exactly that it just amazed me that that people lost sight
00:22:44.560 of that you know and that is a theme that i return to a lot in the book you know what is
00:22:48.720 what are we here for you know and what is um what do we want in the last moments of our lives do we
00:22:54.240 want to be you know protected from humanity or do we want to reach out and and sort of look over our
00:23:02.160 lives and think and connect and make memories you know it just it was such a monolithic response
00:23:09.840 you know there's these epidemiologists with with their hammer is just looking for this one nail
00:23:15.040 and that is you know probably the central theme in the book is that this is not just an
00:23:21.520 epidemiological problem it's a human problem that has mental health dimensions social dimensions
00:23:26.480 spiritual philosophical dimensions and the response just swept all that aside which really went
00:23:34.000 against all previous pandemic guidance you know and that's why i enlist even the the sort of the
00:23:40.480 thoughts of a comedian some musicians um several novelists i found that novelists often had the
00:23:47.120 deepest insights about the pandemic you know obviously they can't advise us on virology or
00:23:53.200 transmission patterns but they can tell us a lot about sort of the philosophy of of managing a
00:24:00.080 pandemic and what needs to be done and what shouldn't be done well and these things matter
00:24:04.880 i mean the distrust in the entire system and authority in general i mean we were ill used or
00:24:11.760 a lot of us certainly feel we were and if an emergency comes down the road i imagine there's
00:24:17.120 always another one coming there's going to be a lot of people resisting possibly perhaps resisting
00:24:21.680 on the wrong side but they've just lost so much trust in the authorities and the establishment
00:24:25.840 that they won't listen to them when when the time comes that they probably should
00:24:30.080 well that's right you know and and i didn't see any sense of restraint it was always you know
00:24:36.800 great overreach um i didn't see any sense of restraint oh well things are looking better
00:24:41.760 you know let's pull back now let's talk let's bring in some expertise from other areas um
00:24:46.480 um and of course we all know you know the whole the push the insane push toward vaccines is the
00:24:53.680 only solution now I'm vaccinated myself I'm boosted like I personally didn't have an issue
00:24:59.200 with the vaccines I worried about the vaccines as little as I worried about the virus which
00:25:03.760 might seem strange to some people but you know it's how I'm built so it wasn't an issue for me
00:25:08.080 personally but as the months went on in 2021 2022 and I just saw how insane the vax wars became a
00:25:16.420 us remember that cover spread on the toronto star um with quotes from the people who wanted you know
00:25:22.580 the anti-vaxxers to die and go to hell and wanted their children to die i mean like what is this
00:25:27.700 that just seemed far far more harmful to me than any virus you know and one thing that i guess i
00:25:32.420 take pride in is that you know although i got vaccinated myself i i resolved very early on
00:25:39.460 that i was never going to question or shame anyone for their decision because i trust
00:25:45.700 that my friends who decided not to get vaxxed have good reasons for it and so i never asked them i
00:25:52.020 never made socializing contingent on it and it became also clear very soon that the vaccine was
00:25:58.100 not stopping transmission which really removed any ethical justification for the mandates
00:26:04.900 um so i just didn't get into any of that you know so many of my friends are you vaccinated
00:26:09.620 are you not you know and i remember meeting a friend who was not vaccinated and um we were
00:26:16.660 walking outside and she burst out crying in the middle of our walk i described this episode in
00:26:21.540 the book and she she just said she was so afraid of meeting me because she thought maybe that i
00:26:25.700 wouldn't want to hang out with her once i found out she wasn't back we were outside walking you
00:26:29.300 know i just thought wow yeah and then another aspect that turned into almost a bizarre measure
00:26:37.140 of I think two degrees virtue signaling maybe began with some medical rationale but was masking
00:26:42.660 I think part of it's because you wear a mask you're showing your visible effort that you're
00:26:46.900 trying to stop this despite the fact that it was showing that it wasn't doing a heck of a lot to
00:26:52.460 stop anything but it was annoying the heck out of people it was dividing people and again it just
00:26:57.560 came down to I think a symbolic thing of uh of just showing authority and pushing down on people
00:27:03.460 Absolutely. And as you say, virtue signaling, and I have to admit, I have a little bit of an allergy to that, you know, the holier than thou, look at me, I'm a good person, you know, and that was so much a part of this. So I've written quite a lot about masks, like, you know, if anyone looks online, they'll find a lot of my articles about masks.
00:27:21.320 um because ultimately it my most recent one of my most recent ones was it's it's really not
00:27:27.560 even so much about the data you know you go on twitter and you're gonna see these endless
00:27:32.840 arguments masks work no they don't yes they do no they don't yes they do no they don't and
00:27:36.760 both sides just fling data at each other and stats and studies and all that underlying all this i
00:27:43.000 firmly believe and have from the start is really a difference in world view you know and the side
00:27:50.680 that just believes that protection from a certain threat from a biological threat trumps everything
00:27:59.000 else in life that side is going to justify masking they're going to interpret a five percent
00:28:04.840 reduction as well it's worth it even if it's a one percent reduction whatever it takes the side
00:28:09.960 that sees humanity in what i call a more holistic way and sees safety from a biological hazard is
00:28:18.280 only one dimension and who also appreciates human connection and um in that holistic way
00:28:27.800 is is going to resist the idea of a perma-masked society and so that's why i've always believed
00:28:35.640 that there are what i call data agnostic arguments behind all this you know there's just two sides
00:28:41.320 that see the world a little differently and that want a different kind of world and my book sort
00:28:46.600 of argues for side b you know this is the kind of world we want and this is why you know yeah
00:28:53.000 and in the battles unfortunately you're still going on but i mean a part of what we can hope
00:28:56.440 for the most we can hope for is that we learn from it and correct some of our past actions the next
00:29:00.680 time we hit a challenge uh so i mean that's part of i guess what you kind of go through and come
00:29:05.240 towards in the book we've kind of run out of time but where then i i see the brownstone institute
00:29:09.880 you have plenty of columns there where can people find copies of blindside is 2020 along with with
00:29:14.760 your other boards um well you can always go on my website gabriellebauer.com and all the information
00:29:21.880 is there blindside is 2020 i mean brownstone institute is a non-profit so the book is
00:29:28.040 available through all amazon stores on lulu as well um so it's very easy to find you just google
00:29:34.840 the book google my name you can find ways to order the book if anyone speaks spanish it has
00:29:41.720 also been published in spanish by a madrid publisher so all that's uh available on my
00:29:46.520 website and just by googling my name well excellent well thank you for writing that
00:29:50.840 we really need to examine what we've done to ourselves and and try to do better in the future
00:29:55.640 and this this book's an important part of that and thank you for coming on today to to share part of
00:30:00.200 that uh with us uh well i thank you all right well i hope we get the chance to talk again soon i'm
00:30:06.200 I'm certain there'll be more to discuss.
00:30:08.060 Okay. Thanks, Corey.
00:30:09.180 Thank you.
00:30:10.660 So that was Gabrielle Bauer and, or Bauer, I should say.
00:30:14.020 I'm terrible with the reading on there.
00:30:16.140 And the book again is hindsight or blindsight is 2020.
00:30:20.760 And again, yes, it can be found at brownstone.org.
00:30:24.280 There's connections, Amazon, all over.
00:30:27.020 We really need critical discussion of what happened.
00:30:31.660 We need to look in that rear view mirror and scratch our heads.
00:30:35.360 and hopefully, you know, some people are letting some of those shields down a little bit. You know,
00:30:40.780 we've got to watch it too. What I've hated the most, what I've despised seeing was the social
00:30:45.980 division, the people who got so upset and fought and haven't talked with each other since. Well,
00:30:52.280 it doesn't matter if the other person wanted you to mask or vaccinate. If you can get over it
00:30:58.840 and start talking again, it's worth it. Okay. Let it get behind us. We can discuss the other
00:31:03.600 things. We could fight about other stuff later, but seeing lasting damage, seeing family split,
00:31:07.680 seeing friendships lost, social circles broken. You can't measure these things. And that's part
00:31:13.080 of what was important with this book, with talking to artists, comedians, people though,
00:31:17.640 who look, observe the social aspects of us, because you can't clinically measure social
00:31:23.740 damage. There's no easy way to do that. So you can't get a list and see just what happened
00:31:30.760 to that family over there or that sports team or those friends from school. But there was damage
00:31:37.420 a lot and with so little benefit. And that's, I think, a lot of what was lost in this whole thing
00:31:43.680 too. Gabrielle kind of covered a little of that at the end, talking about, you know, if the masks
00:31:49.080 helped with 1% or 5%, somebody could come up with some data to say it helps. Okay, fine, fair enough
00:31:54.820 if you're reducing it a little. But everything comes with a cost. And when it comes to cost
00:31:59.320 benefit analysis, we threw the cost part out the window. There is a cost to wearing a mask. There's
00:32:04.980 the social aspect. I mean, some of it's just somebody saying, I don't want it on my face.
00:32:09.620 Well, you have to respect a little bit of that. That's important. I myself, and as my wife will
00:32:14.140 remind folks, I'm supposed to have hearing aids. I don't have good hearing. I've really, during the
00:32:19.180 pandemic, discovered just how much I come to rely on seeing a person's lips move when they speak to
00:32:23.680 me. And when they're behind a mask, I'm asking them to speak up a lot. Now, imagine somebody who
00:32:28.180 was fully hearing impaired. What was that three years like for them? For what benefit? To protect
00:32:33.400 them from a 1% or 5%, you know, a little less of catching, again, a virus which was definitely
00:32:39.760 real and definitely dangerous, but to most people, not so much that perhaps it was worth the cost of
00:32:46.220 imposing the masks. And the other part that was thrown out was any concept of bodily autonomy
00:32:53.560 or individual choice. You have to respect somebody else's choice. Even if you disagree with it,
00:32:59.260 you can even yell at them to disagree, but don't have the state step down and get on them. People
00:33:04.020 got on my case. I remember that during the show and it's bad on both sides. I've never hesitated
00:33:09.060 to point out that I got vaccinated twice as well, but I've always supported choice. And yes, I don't
00:33:16.020 see coercion as choice because yeah, that's what people say. Well, you never were forced to. Yeah,
00:33:21.480 No, as long as you're willing to lose your job, lose your ability to travel, lose your ability to go to a restaurant, you lose your ability to be on sporting teams, have post-secondary education, it's your choice.
00:33:33.160 That's not a realistic choice for a lot of people.
00:33:35.820 And when we talk about bodily autonomy, and I'll throw in the hand grenade when it comes to it, if it's a choice that really, why can't an employer, say, who has deep-seated feelings about abortion say,
00:33:48.340 well, you know what? I want to have access to the medical records of my employees and any who've
00:33:52.240 participated in abortion, I want the right to fire them. It was a choice and there's consequences, 0.90
00:33:55.860 right? Choices have consequences. Now that employer would be brought up in front of a
00:34:00.340 human rights commission so fast your head would spin if they pulled that. I don't want to see
00:34:07.840 something like that, of course, but that's what I'm talking about. That whole principle is it's
00:34:13.060 very personal. Somebody who strongly, strongly feels that they should not be vaccinated as none 0.96
00:34:18.140 of the employer's business, particularly once it was clear that it didn't stop transmission.
00:34:22.320 There was no more moral argument anymore. He wasn't going to make co-workers sick by not being
00:34:26.600 vaccinated, wasn't putting anybody at risk. Why do you still have the gun to that person's head?
00:34:31.360 And there's still some places doing that. It's absurd. It's wrong. And I know people are almost
00:34:36.040 sick of hearing of it. It was a horrible period of time for everybody. And we don't want to talk
00:34:40.800 about it. We can't forget about it. We can't stop talking about it. Because as I said, there's going
00:34:46.360 to be another crisis. There always is. So all we can do is hope that we do better in the next one.
00:34:51.740 So let's learn from the last one. What did we do wrong? Let's not repeat those mistakes. We can
00:34:56.820 make a whole bunch of new mistakes when the next crisis comes. But we've got to study these things
00:35:01.840 and we can't let them go. All right, I'm going to move on to some other news items to cover some
00:35:07.060 things. As I said, I can only handle so much COVID talk after so many years. It's so important,
00:35:11.260 but I can only take on so much per session. Let's sort of lighten things up. But an interesting
00:35:16.960 when it comes to individual choice, this ties in. We had a plebiscite that was held during the
00:35:23.100 Alberta election down in Southern Alberta in the town of Cardston. Now people not familiar with
00:35:28.260 Alberta, we have a very strong Mormon population in a lot of those Southern towns, Cardston,
00:35:33.840 McGrath, Raymond, predominantly Mormon individuals living down there. Cardston has not allowed 1.00
00:35:40.780 liquor sales for over a hundred years in that town. So they finally, yeah, you can't get a
00:35:47.500 drink anywhere. You can't go to a bar. You couldn't get a, uh, uh, go to a liquor store
00:35:52.720 because they could use the ability of, uh, you know, local business licenses. So booze wasn't
00:35:57.460 banned, but you had to go elsewhere to get it. You couldn't get anywhere. And, uh, it was still
00:36:01.840 close. Uh, uh, 49, 491 people voted, uh, 53% of them to say, yes, we should allow some liquor
00:36:08.980 sales to 441 who voted no. We'll see. It depends on who's on the town council and whether they'll
00:36:14.320 drag their feet and still allowing and giving licenses. But this again comes down to why,
00:36:20.120 guys? Why? It's a legal product. If you're not into it, your faith says you shouldn't drink it,
00:36:25.480 so on. Then don't. But don't use the arm of the law, the state, to stop other people from having
00:36:34.000 that choice. It's ridiculous. And even to this day, it gets too far. I mean, you know, go door
00:36:41.940 to door. We know the Latter-day Saints certainly have no shyness about that. Try to create converts
00:36:48.300 and get people to choose not to drink. I'm not one who's saying that, you know, excess booze use
00:36:54.340 and then liquor is a good idea. I've had my challenges with alcohol. I haven't had a drink
00:36:58.420 in years, but it's not good for everybody, that's for sure. But I don't begrudge somebody else
00:37:04.120 from responsibly enjoying it. If you can go out and enjoy a drink or a few, or even, you know,
00:37:09.560 go on a bender now and then have some fun with it, go to town responsibly. It's not for me,
00:37:14.240 that's all. But we as a society, we've got to get better at that, don't we? We've got to get better
00:37:19.980 being able to say, I'm not into this. This other person's into this. I just won't do it with them.
00:37:26.580 I'm okay with it, though. I don't have to stop them. I don't have to intervene on them. It gets
00:37:30.440 back to the libertarian principles. If it's not hurting somebody else, stay out of
00:37:34.580 it, particularly the state, particularly
00:37:38.800 the state. Now, some people, and fair enough, I'm going to go on one
00:37:42.600 of my sidetrackings, because that's what I do. When we talk about
00:37:46.760 decriminalization of hard drugs, fair
00:37:50.620 enough, you know, if you're saying that that way, Corey, why are you on the case of
00:37:54.560 it, you know, so much as it's happening in Vancouver? Well, that's a fair question. Very
00:38:00.100 much a fair one. Part of the problem, and I do believe to a degree in decriminalizing, going
00:38:06.400 after the ground level consumers of drugs, even the hard ones, what point? What point in arresting
00:38:11.980 and fining a heroin or a fentanyl junkie that has no money, that are really at bottom already,
00:38:19.040 and going after them? You're not doing them any good. You're not doing the state any good. You're
00:38:23.740 not stopping the dealers. You're not stopping the mayhem that the drugs are causing. The problem I
00:38:29.720 have is with the enablement, with the trying to say that you can functionally live and exist on
00:38:36.860 drugs because drugs, those drugs aren't directly comparable to alcohol. Now, alcohol, as I know,
00:38:41.880 can be very, very dangerous. It can be abused. It's ruined millions, millions of lives for some
00:38:45.420 people who can't responsibly consume it. But there's no responsible way to be a recreational
00:38:50.000 consumer of fentanyl. Way too powerful, way too addictive, way too damaging. There is no safe
00:38:56.340 amount of methamphetamines you can take. Meth is not safe. You know, putting a rail to blow up your
00:39:03.480 nose is never a good, healthy idea. Should it be illegalized, though? You know, that's not necessarily
00:39:09.140 the route to deal with it. But what we need is treatment. What we need is intervention. And that's
00:39:14.940 that gets into another area that, you know, people can say is a double standard. I've talked about
00:39:18.860 that we need to when people have hit that point i mean we we do have that and i talked about with a
00:39:23.900 family member i had to deal with recently when a person is clearly in a position where they may
00:39:28.220 harm themselves or others we can intervene and that's typically that's under the mental health
00:39:32.940 act every province has one when a person is taking fentanyl to the point that they're scrawny and
00:39:38.780 have sores all over them and have lost bowel control and are passing out behind dumpsters
00:39:42.940 i don't think it should be that hard to be making the case that they're going to
00:39:45.500 harm themselves if we just leave them as they are it's one of those rare cases where infringing on
00:39:51.020 individual liberty i think is a social obligation on our part we have to be careful with it you don't
00:39:56.620 you don't want to do it frivolously but we can see enough of the zombies on the streets those
00:40:00.300 are somebody's children's cousins brothers sisters i mean somebody put it in the most
00:40:05.820 crude of ways in some of the online discussions with someone saying you can't take their liberty
00:40:09.900 what if it's your daughter out there who's servicing men to get her next fix
00:40:15.500 Would you as a family member want some sort of intervention to get her off there?
00:40:20.400 Even if treatment is difficult and doesn't have the highest success rate,
00:40:25.260 you know that leaving it on the street has pretty much a zero success rate.
00:40:29.520 Wouldn't you want to intervene if it's your son who's out there
00:40:31.980 who's putting his life at risk, stealing from people to get his next fix,
00:40:35.380 pacing up and down the roads, begging on street corners?
00:40:39.400 So, yes, yes, that's compassionate conservatism.
00:40:43.520 We've got to be careful with it.
00:40:44.680 you know, and others have pointed out, yes, these addicts aren't, they don't have personal
00:40:48.660 liberty. They don't have freedom. They are slaves to the addiction. They're slaves to the drugs.
00:40:53.220 They don't have the liberty already. So this is a, one of the things I'm very excited about
00:40:59.320 with Premier Smith, because she didn't back down on that. And that's part of what I said at the
00:41:02.380 start of it, when she was talking about bringing in treatment systems where we're going to directly
00:41:06.480 intervene and get them in. And I've seen some experts and others are saying, oh, there's only
00:41:10.620 a 20% success rate if you force treatment, 50% if they come in willingly. The bottom
00:41:14.640 line is treatment's essential. When you're in the late stages of addiction, not just trying it out,
00:41:19.540 when you're one of those, again, when you're on the streets, when you're a meth addict,
00:41:22.640 a fentanyl addict, a heroin addict, your odds of surviving without treatment are very, very low.
00:41:29.140 So even 20% is a hell of a lot better than what you had. And I want to try it. People point to
00:41:35.020 Portugal, look at them, they've decriminalized the drugs and everything. Yes, they have, but they
00:41:38.860 overlook the other part. Portugal has a very, very advanced, and I would say, yes, almost
00:41:44.020 coercive treatment system. You want to get in and get access to some of that clean supply. Yes,
00:41:50.800 but they also say this is also the first step on your road to getting treatment and getting off
00:41:55.120 the crap. It's not saying you can live and just keep consuming it. It's a disease that needs to
00:42:00.780 be treated, not something that needs to be enabled. So, you know, as others have been pointing out
00:42:07.040 with the Aaron Gunn's documentary, Canada is Dying. Yes, I think it's well worth watching.
00:42:12.600 And we have our own Arthur Green, who's always putting pictures up of attics in rough states and in difficulty on the streets.
00:42:18.380 And people get upset with that. 1.00
00:42:19.760 And they should.
00:42:20.860 That's the point.
00:42:21.640 We want you to get upset.
00:42:23.400 But it's not just to get you upset.
00:42:25.280 It's to make people realize how ugly it's getting out there, how bad it is, how much worse it is.
00:42:29.860 Because most people don't go downtown.
00:42:32.660 Most people don't ride public transit.
00:42:35.460 So most people don't understand just how awful it's gotten.
00:42:38.660 and this is happening in every city and also in the smaller towns and areas across the entire
00:42:42.680 country. Fentanyl, it's like something we've never seen before. It's so much, it's prevalent,
00:42:50.500 it's relatively cheap, it's incredibly powerful, very, very dangerous. And we didn't have to deal
00:42:57.500 with that. You know, in the 80s, the 90s, we had addicts, you had your drunkards, you always had
00:43:02.020 that part of town, but you didn't have this wave of zombies that's killing people like this.
00:43:07.380 and we have to do something about it.
00:43:10.260 Enabling isn't working.
00:43:12.940 And again, you know,
00:43:13.580 it's just down to responsible or not.
00:43:15.100 It's not a good recreational drug.
00:43:19.180 When I, as many pointed out,
00:43:21.900 shared too much
00:43:22.600 when talking about my colonoscopy.
00:43:23.960 For example,
00:43:24.500 part of what they gave me
00:43:25.340 is the mix to knock it out
00:43:26.780 to make it a less unpleasant experience
00:43:28.800 was fentanyl.
00:43:29.820 There is a medical use for it,
00:43:31.620 but it doesn't mean that a person
00:43:33.360 can take it themselves
00:43:34.860 in a safe manner
00:43:35.940 in any sort of way.
00:43:36.820 And it certainly gave me an impression of just how powerful that stuff is because, yeah, you know, the little bit injected into me and I barely remembered anything.
00:43:44.880 And they're wheeling me out of the room a little more humbled and a little tender in the backside, but no worse for wear.
00:43:53.100 All right. Well, enough of that.
00:43:54.920 Let's turn the page on to something quite different and talk to Jim Boosicum of Marketplace Commodities and get some updates on things.
00:44:05.340 we're starting to see a drought starting to intensify and people are starting to get
00:44:09.380 concerned. Before the last time I talked to Jim, Jim, there you are, you were saying, you know,
00:44:14.760 producers shouldn't be sweating the weather patterns quite yet, but now it's a, is it
00:44:18.840 starting to entrench a bit? Yeah. So we're roughly about one month into the North America growing
00:44:24.660 season. That's both here in Western Canada and most of the United States. So while some areas
00:44:32.520 have been getting more or less regular precipitation we've also seen areas like
00:44:38.680 southern alberta eastern side of alberta um you know actually become drier this conditions when
00:44:46.600 they were planting the crops was good they had you know plenty of moisture to germinate the crops but
00:44:53.080 now that those crops are growing they require more moisture to mature properly to produce the seeds
00:45:01.080 and um yeah we're starting to hear some rumbles about uh you know production issues if this
00:45:08.920 weather keeps up the way it is so it's very common i mean we do go through most growing seasons where
00:45:16.200 it's there's always imperfections there's always issues and these things affect the markets so
00:45:23.160 So what we have seen, though, is that we had really high prices in 21, 22, and even the start of 23, and these markets are actually continuing to go down.
00:45:36.640 So one might ask, well, what's going on?
00:45:39.260 Like usually if you have a drought situation and you have potential production issues, you should actually see prices start to react to that and go up.
00:45:48.380 Well, I think the issue is today it's still too localized.
00:45:53.160 The trade, as you might want to call it, or those that are speculating on the markets are saying, look, we're not we're not buying it yet.
00:46:01.100 It's still too small of a drought. So it depends what happens for sure as we go into the next two weeks.
00:46:08.920 By the middle of June, it'll it'll set some ground as to where it's going to be.
00:46:14.400 Yeah. So, I mean, a producer, of course, can't control the weather.
00:46:17.180 but but i guess watching those trends can really impact how a producer uh what they're going to
00:46:21.740 going to produce or plan for seed or uh i guess in finances yeah so i i think what a producer
00:46:29.180 needs to do in this situation is uh understand that there's two markets out there so the futures
00:46:35.980 market is more forward thinking it sees the overall whole market not just your localized
00:46:43.580 area or even one province it sees basically all of western canada it really sees the whole world
00:46:49.420 and at any given time when that market is open whatever the bias is of that moment that is priced
00:46:56.140 into the market whereas in the cash markets where we're buying from a farmer selling to a feedlot as
00:47:02.380 a just the easiest example you may have a bias on that market but i think we tend to forget that
00:47:08.780 that's priced in almost immediately.
00:47:11.320 That's how efficient the market is.
00:47:12.780 It prices in the bullish news, the bearish news right away.
00:47:16.840 So that's where it's at today.
00:47:18.840 All right.
00:47:19.640 Well, thanks for the update.
00:47:21.560 It's appreciated.
00:47:22.640 And we'll talk again soon then, Jim.
00:47:25.260 Thanks.
00:47:25.780 Thanks, Corey.
00:47:26.280 You take care.
00:47:27.080 Hey, thanks.
00:47:28.380 So that is Jim Buzicum of Marketplace Commodities.
00:47:30.940 Yes, for producers.
00:47:32.000 I mean, it is the old days of a small facility and production are gone.
00:47:36.820 You know, it takes a lot of skill, business planning and work to make sure that you can maximize what you're doing.
00:47:43.620 So check them out at marketplacecommodities.com.
00:47:46.500 And there's certainly a lot they can offer there in what's obviously a fluid sort of market and business world.
00:47:53.520 All right.
00:47:54.300 Well, let's see what else we're going to get on to.
00:47:56.480 You know, I'm going to drop the bomb.
00:47:58.160 I expect you to go to the Western Standard to get the details, of course.
00:48:01.820 But Dave talked about that.
00:48:03.080 who was this celebrity at 83 who has knocked up a young lady? It's Al Pacino. And yes,
00:48:10.500 his 28-year-old girlfriend is eight months pregnant. I guess he's kept it secret for
00:48:14.960 quite some time. So, you know, speaking of some of the advantages of pharmaceuticals,
00:48:19.380 I very much doubt that Mr. Pacino at that point, but who knows, maybe he's got some super virility,
00:48:25.320 managed to pull that off without some sort of blue pill or something along the lines.
00:48:30.120 And, you know, it's along with his friend there, De Niro.
00:48:32.560 I think he's 79, and he's got his young girlfriend with a bun in the oven as well.
00:48:37.300 I'm sort of mixed with that, especially guys like De Niro.
00:48:39.540 He likes taking the big compassionate, left-wing, caring thing and so on,
00:48:43.480 and how the rest of us are all uncaring jerks.
00:48:46.340 Well, whilst he's out there at, you know, the age of pushing 80 and producing children,
00:48:52.840 you know, good on you, I guess, if you're getting the young ladies at that age.
00:48:56.020 But how fair is it to the kid when your father, if they manage to live until your graduation, is going to be pushing 100?
00:49:04.300 There's not going to be playing any ball in the backyard or, you know, experiencing much.
00:49:10.360 We've already got a society that's already suffering a lot from families that don't necessarily have parents.
00:49:15.900 I mean, I guess these guys will certainly be able to pay the bills for them.
00:49:18.720 But will they be able to present themselves as the father figures?
00:49:21.620 you know, maybe just add a little to that blue pill and then throw a little something on the
00:49:26.540 tip of that old thing before making more kids, guys. But whatever, it's their business, their
00:49:31.880 bodies, their choices. And that's what those fellas did. I like Lisa Webster. Say hello to 1.00
00:49:40.400 my little offspring. Ah, nice. So yes, if folks remember Scarface, that is a play on that portion
00:49:49.580 there from that movie. Okay, so let's see what else we've got going on. It's not too much to
00:49:55.620 cover. There's a lot more that I can't get into because it's just too big. We can't forget it's
00:49:59.580 getting bigger and bigger with O'Toole now, the leader of the opposition. It's been confirmed
00:50:04.740 that it seems that the Chinese Communist Party was most, stuff we already knew in a sense,
00:50:09.760 directly trying to interfere, make him lose the election. Again, Trudeau and his little lapdog
00:50:15.900 johnson are trying to whitewash this and cover it up we just couldn't talk enough about it with
00:50:21.320 what's left in the show today i'll work on that a little more next week because this is a huge issue
00:50:26.300 in canada a massive one we can't let it get forgotten over the summer of course there'll
00:50:30.660 be lots more to cover and updates and things next week as well so thank you all for tuning in today
00:50:37.280 guys and uh yeah we can finally start talking about stuff other than the provincial election
00:50:41.240 for a while but i'll still be a bunch of politics and me ranting and raving in future shows so come
00:50:45.360 in again next week at this time and we will do it all over again thanks
00:50:49.680 here's an update on commodity prices in lethbridge for today cash barley is down two dollars at 403
00:50:58.300 feed wheat is down two dollars at 404 and corn is down three dollars at 393 for metric ton
00:51:04.140 in the milling wheat markets july minneapolis futures are lower 11 and three quarter cents
00:51:09.000 at 781 per bushel with local hard red spring bid for may movement at 1047
00:51:14.680 Looking at canola, nearby futures dropped $7.60 at $6.50.60 per ton, with delivered values per
00:51:22.980 June movement at $14.97 per bushel. In the pulse markets, nearby red lentil prices are trading at
00:51:28.540 $0.33 per pound, and yellow peas are holding at $11.25 per bushel. And in the cattle markets,
00:51:34.900 August live cattle added $0.175 at $1.6735 per hundredweight. For more information on pricing
00:51:41.720 or picked up options, give me a call at 403-394-1711. I'm Matt Busiekum at Marketplace
00:51:48.660 Commodities, accurate real-time marketing information and pricing options. Canadian
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00:51:59.100 long ago. These guys are on the front lines, helping to draft smart and intelligent firearms
00:52:04.740 regulations and legislation in Canada, and more importantly, educating the public about how we
00:52:10.740 keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people.
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00:52:14.620 worth every penny.
00:52:40.740 You