Let's Go Back Through the Listening Tube June 22-26

Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history. I'm Bob Woodley from the Listening Tube. This week in 1284, the legendary Pied Piper leads 130 children out of Hamillin, Germany, never to be seen again. There are a variety of accounts of what actually happened to the children, but it's believed the tale is based on actual events. The most common story is that the town of Hamlin had a rat problem, and the Pied Piper showed up and claimed he could rid the town of rats for a fee. The townspeople agreed, and the Pied Piper used the lure of his music to lead the rats out of town. When the citizens then refused to pay him, he vowed revenge. The revenge was that he would use the power of his music to also lure the children out of town. There are accounts of the town actually losing all of its children, but for a few. One, the story says, was lame and could not keep up, one was deaf and could not hear the music, and a third was blind and did not see where the other children went. While the children did indeed vanish, there is no evidence of the premise of the story. There is no record of a rat problem in the first place, which leads some to believe that there was a much more sinister reason for the disappearance. Regardless, the street where the children were last seen is now called Bungalosenstrassa. According to ancientorigins.net, the English translation is street without drums, and even today, no music or dancing is allowed on the street. This week in 1633, the Holy Office in Rome forces Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. Using a telescope he built himself, Galileo could tell that the earth moved around the sun, and that Venus did too. And that other planets have moons. So the earth was clearly not the center of the known cosmos. As a civilization, we'd been looking at the night sky for thousands of years, and nobody even considered that the earth wasn't the center of everything. Until Galileo used his telescope and knew enough to see what the universe was showing. He published his findings and became a celebrity of sorts. That was twenty three years earlier. A story in Misthistory.com says that during the Inquisition, in 1616, Galileo was warned by a cardinal of the church that he could no longer claim his work to be true. Galileo didn't say another word about it for sixteen years. It seems like after all that time, Galileo had a lot of frustration built up, and he wrote and published something called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. In it, the characters debate the possibilities, and Galileo's model is the clear winner of the debate without actually saying so. Smooth one problem though, the character that does most poorly in the debate is named Simplicio, or the Simpleton, and the Pope at the time, Pope Urban VIII, felt that despite his personal friendship with Galileo, he was being portrayed by Simplicio. Galileo was 69 years old in 1633 and was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life and banned from publishing any more work. That didn't stop him, though. Galileo would write a manuscript that was smuggled out of Rome to the Netherlands, where it was published as Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. He died about four years later in 1642. The 1900s. But there was a problem. All of Berlin was in the eastern half of Germany, which was now under the control of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev once called West Berlin a bone in the throat of communism. It was literally an island of Western freedom and capitalism surrounded by communism and repression. The socialists didn't like that one bit. So they shut down all the roads and railroads leading from West Germany into West Berlin. It was about a hundred miles from West Germany to West Berlin, and now the only way to get supplies to the three Western sectors of Berlin was by air. The Soviets didn't think we'd do it, but we did. And we told the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that we would bomb them if they tried to stop us. The Soviets wanted to starve the people of West Berlin to the point of submission, but the Americans knew that a strong economy in the West was the best force for good in Europe after the war. And a thriving West Berlin would provide the evidence. Coal was the bulk of the cargo used to keep factories and power plants and sewer systems moving. Food was what kept the people from panic. For over a year, ending in September 1949, the Berlin Airlift landed a plane in West Berlin an average of one every three minutes, delivering about 4,500 tons of cargo a day. The blockade was actually lifted in May, but the airlift continued in case the Socialists changed their minds. Today, Berlin is once again the capital of a free, united Germany. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War and was dissolved. Capitalism won out over communism. Today, there are a growing number of politicians who call themselves democratic socialists. These are the same people who think socialism will work if we just try it again, refusing to recognize the failures of places like the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, and probably China too. Don't fall for these wolves in sheep's clothing. They'll promise you all kinds of free stuff and vague platitudes, but the system they preach only leads to hardship and despair. Here's the thing about socialism and communism. You can vote your way into it, but you can't vote your way out of it. You can hang your hat on that. This week in 1950, the Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea. Oh yeah. There is another prime example of the difference between the open Society of Western Culture and the Closed Society of Dictatorship. This week in 1972, Title IX of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 is amended to prohibit sexual discrimination to any educational program receiving federal funds. The original act in 1964 only prohibited discrimination in employment, not education. Title IX was the fix for the bug. It basically says that if your school gets federal money, it can't discriminate based on sex. And it specifically mentions any education program or activity. As you may know, Title IX is what led to girls and women's sports being recognized and promoted as equally important to boys' and men's sports. Multiple doors were suddenly opened for female students to participate in sports and get scholarships for post-secondary education. An education that could lead to a career in academics or sports. Women would finally get the recognition they deserve in both mental and physical disciplines. Now, more than fifty years later, those Title IX protections are being threatened. Boys are now claiming to be girls and competing against them in high school sports competitions, and overwhelmingly winning when they do. Not just winning, not just breaking records in girls' sports, but smashing records. These boys, and they are boys regardless of how they feel about it, are stealing opportunities from girls. The exact opportunities that Title IX was meant to provide. Unfortunately, there are politicians and activists who think boys should be able to compete with girls and steal their thunder. All of them are leftists and progressives, the same Democratic Socialists that are taking over the Democrat Party. I'm sure there are traditional Democrats who don't want boys playing in girls sports, but their voices are drowned out or suppressed by the radical wing of the party. This week in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual right, and that the District of Columbia handgun ban is unconstitutional. Urban districts have tried for years to restrict gun ownership, never realizing that gun laws only affect those who follow the law. In other words, gun laws don't work because criminals will still have guns. Back when I lived in West Berlin, you could own guns, but the ammunition was closely regulated. So if you wanted to collect guns, you could. And it wasn't one of those party line votes either. The tally was nine to nothing. The federal government claimed that anyone who uses marijuana is a danger to others, based on the government's own assessment. According to a story from NBC News, Justice Gorsuch rejected that argument while admitting that guns and drugs can sometimes make a dangerous mix. But casual or occasional use of marijuana doesn't meet the bar needed to show that such behavior is enough to ban a person from owning a gun. Besides, millions of people now use marijuana for medical or recreational purposes in many states, despite the federal opinion of the stuff. A rep from the ACLU says, the court has sent a strong message that the government cannot criminalize the conduct of large numbers of people by making categorical and unfounded assumptions about whether they are dangerous. From what I know about marijuana, when you're high, the last thing you want to do is hurt anybody. Or anything. Especially a bunny. Maybe a fly. But not Ozzie Osborne. I know he's dead, but I still wouldn't want to hurt him. He really likes he liked to clap his hands. I'm Bob Woodley from the Listening Tube. Follow the listening tube at thelistening tube.com.