Season 3, Episode 13 November 27, 2022

Hello! Welcome to season 3, episode 13 of the Listening Tube! I’m your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we’ll hear about American expansionism, the possible end to a 74-year-old mystery, and changing your mind!...but first, (not the headlines)!

Before I begin, this is the last episode in season 3, so we’ll start season four in a week or two. If you subscribe to the Listening Tube, you’ll know right away when the new one comes out.

Sometimes you run across a story that makes you feel good, and this one really did it for me. Where the tip of the index finger might be in the mitten that makes up the state of Michigan, there’s a small town called Rogers City. On the coast of Lake Huron, about 3,000 people make it their home. Despite it’s small population, it’s home to the world’s largest open-pit limestone quarry, and its port is one of the largest on any of the Great Lakes. A recent election for a vacant city council seat ended in a tie of 616 votes for both candidates. The tie-breaker was that each candidate would draw a piece of paper from a bowl. There were only two pieces of paper in there. One said “elected” and the other one said “not elected.” But the story here isn’t that the election ended in a tie, or what the final result was. The story is that each of the candidates for the vacant city council seat had confidence that the other would do a good job. No matter who won, Rogers City would be in good hands. Timeen Adair chose the piece of paper that said “elected.” Her opponent, Brittany Vanderwall gave the victor a hug and said there were no hard feelings, and said, “Do good work. I’ll see you in two years.” The winner, for her part, said the tie meant the town was happy with both candidates. “The people have spoken, and they said ‘Eh, either one.’” 

Wouldn’t it be nice if the whole country could be satisfied with either candidate on a ballot? Instead of having to choose between one extreme or the other, instead of having to choose between the lesser of two evils, wouldn’t it be great if we could be confident that all of our political candidates had the best interests of the citizens they represent as their priority? Imagine if voting for a candidate was like deciding which of them gets to take a few years off from their regular job to care for our community, and do what’s best for the people who live there. That’s what happened in Rogers City, Michigan. This tie vote didn’t signal a great divide among the citizens, but a general agreement on both candidates. The citizens of Rogers City were able to vote with confidence that no matter who won, the city would win, because they knew both candidates would make good choices for the city. Of course, there are people who have different ideas of what is best for any city. Some visions are short-term and some are long-term, and there can be many disagreements on what should be done next to get to the goals we set for ourselves. The people of Rogers City seem to have a common goal and agree on how to get there. Both candidates seem to meet the public’s standards equally, and so a piece of paper decided who would have the responsibility to act on behalf of the people.

So, why is this such an anomaly? Most of us agree on many issues. There are many common-sense rules and regulations that we all think are in the best interest of the society as a whole. It’s easy to come up with hundreds of examples of things on which we all agree, and a comparative few on which we have widely differing views. And when we examine those differences more closely, we discover that the sources of those differences are different from the forces that perpetuate them. If you take religion, for example, there are many different religions in the world, but almost all of them advocate for peace, with a few exceptions. So why are many wars fought because of religion? Governments create armies to deter war, yet political differences often create them. How does that happen? Well, wars have been happening since we’ve found reasons to want what isn’t ours. To conquer lands and subjugate people was a sign of power for thousands of years. How we represented our differences became a show of force, and as a society, we haven’t outgrown that stage yet. Our differences still count for more than our similarities. But Rogers City, Michigan has set a good example for the rest of us. Let’s find candidates we can all be happy with, even if the vote ends in a tie. 

So, did you ever watch one of the Terminator movies and think to yourself, “I wonder when that might actually happen?” Well, you should know that we’re at least one step closer, thanks to research being done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT News describes it as a fully autonomous self-replicating robot assembly system. It’s still in the making, but the goal is to create a system of tiny identical robots called voxels that carry both data and power, and are able to connect with each other to create just about anything, including buildings, cars and even other robots. These voxels are small. Very small. They have the same volume as a 2-D pixel. They will be able to manipulate themselves to create ways to manipulate themselves. In other words, they will assemble themselves to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. They will be able to be the walls of the building and the door of the car. They will also be the machines that lift and move and manipulate other parts. They will be able to tell when they need a larger machine to get to a higher place, and be able to assemble themselves to create the bigger robot to take the other robots to where they need to be. There won’t be any wires, as the voxels themselves will be able to transmit power to where it’s needed. The tiny robots would have the intelligence to know what step needs to be taken next in the process. They would know if they need to be part of the structure, or part of a larger robot, or part of another robot needed to do what other robots are already doing. Now, I don’t know from what materials these tiny voxels are made, but if the plan is to have them be the basic building block of future buildings and machines, we’re gonna need a lot of them. But certainly, one can’t help but wonder what might happen if robots are built with enough intelligence to decide what to build, and enough intelligence to know how to build whatever they need to build what they want to build, how long will it take before they decide to build something that serves their purposes and not ours? These tiny robots will be designed to work in swarms as a team. I would hope that the researchers at MIT will be smart enough to build in a way to stop the robots from thinking on their own. Because if they start to build larger robots that can kill us, then we’re in deep trouble. I’ll be back….

Let’s go back liner….

1803

In New Orleans, Louisiana, Spanish representatives officially transfer the Louisiana Territory to a French representative. Just 20 days later, France will transfer the same land to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase. The United States paid 15-million dollars for the land, or about 18 dollars a square mile. The Louisiana Purchase about doubled the size of the country, and eventually led to westward expansion all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 

1804

The Democratic-Republican-controlled United States Senate begins an impeachment trial against Federalist-partisan Supreme Court of the United States Justice Samuel Chase. Yes, the Republicans and Democrats were once in the same party. When they split 20 years later, most of them became Democrats, and the rest became the Whig party. Samuel Chase, for his part, was one of America’s Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. So why was he being impeached? 

Gonna look that up liner

The George Washington nominated Supreme Court Justice was impeached by the House of Representatives because they, along with President Thomas Jefferson, believed he was letting his political beliefs play a role in his decisions as a Jurist. No less than eight articles of impeachment were brought, all based on the judges work in the Circuit Court system, not his work as a Supreme Court Justice. He was acquitted on all of the charges, even though the Rebublican-Democrat party had a solid majority of the Senate, and the Judge was a Federalist. According to book cited by wikipedia by William Renquist, himself a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, most Senator didn’t think they should impeach a judge based on the quality of his work. Since then, all calls for impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice were based on legal or ethical lapses. Constitutional questions about the roles of the justices were shored up afterward, including judicial independence, limits of impeachment, the role of judges in criminal jury trials, and put in place the guidelines for judicial involvement in partisan politics. Justice Samuel Chase would continue to serve on the Supreme Court until his death in 1811.

1814

The Times in London is for the first time printed by automatic, steam powered presses built by the German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer, signaling the beginning of the availability of newspapers to a mass audience. Koenig felt compelled to take his invention plan to England, as it was ahead of Germany in industrial progress, and had a reliable patent program. But it was German engineers who continued to set the pace for printing presses well into the 20th century. The need for faster printing presses was growing as the populations of cities grew. Hand printing was a slow process, and couldn’t meet the demand for copies of newspapers. The early printing machines could print up to 800 impressions per hour. By comparison, today’s printing presses can create up to 80,000 fully-printed, cut and folded newspapers an hour, including full-color pictures. Sadly, though, the demand for printed newspapers has dwindled since digital access became available. Printed circulation of many newspapers has dropped sharply, changing the dynamics of publishing from the need for paper and ink to the need for the people to run the presses. I, myself, have run printing presses for newspapers across the country, including the Oxnard Press-Courier, the Leavenworth Times, The Shamokin News-Item, the Williamsport Sun-Gazette, the Lewistown Sentinel, and the Marshaltown Times-Republican. At least three of those printing presses are no longer printing. And no, it’s not because I broke them! 

1824, in the United States presidential election, no candidate received a majority of the total electoral college votes. The House of Representatives is given the task of deciding the winner in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. At that time, President’s didn’t have running mates. The vice-president was a separately elected office. So while John C. Calhoun was the clear winner of the vice-president post, America could not agree on a President. There were four men in the race, all of the same political party, the Democrat-Republican Party, although they did have different affiliations as a subset of the party. Henry Clay, William Crawford, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams were the four vying for the seat. Once none of them got the majority of the electoral college votes to win outright, and the decision went to the House of Representatives, the field was limited to three, so Henry Clay was disqualified as he received the least. He threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, who’s father, John Adams, was the second President of the United States. So while Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, as well as the most electoral votes, he did not become the President of the United States. John Quincy Adams did, and to this day, he is the only President of the United States to not win the popular vote or the electoral college. Today, the President and Vice-President run on the same ticket. Vote for one, and you also vote for the other. The 12th Amendment to the Constitution requires they each be from different states. 

1839

In Boston, Massachusetts, the American Statistical Association is founded. So, what were the odds of that happening? The American Statistical Association can probably tell you! But if you want to ask them, they’re not in Boston anymore. They’re in Washington, D.C. now. You can join the organization. If you want to step up your fantasy football game, they might be able to help.

1845

US President James K. Polk announces to Congress that the United States should aggressively expand into the West. It had been 42 years since the Louisiana Purchase, and the United States of America was still grappling with it’s identity. The Great Experiment that is America was still fairly new, and there were some who thought expansionism was the path forward. There were others who were against the idea for various reasons, including the possible expansion of slavery. What became knows as Manifest Destiny wasn’t so much a policy as it was an ideal. Popularized by columnist John L O’Sullivan, the phrase manifest destiny was used in an opinion piece by O’Sullivan calling for the annexation of Texas. He used the words again when he wrote that the United States should also control the territory of Oregon, saying in the New York Morning News that the, “... claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” 

Manifest Destiny resulted in the acquisition of Alaska, the expansion to the Pacific Ocean, and basically established the borders of the United States as they are today. 

1907

In Haverhill, Massachusetts, a scrap-metal dealer opens his first movie theater. His name was Louis B. Mayer. Russian born and Canadian-raised, he quit school at 12 to work for his father. At least, we think he was 12, as nobody is really sure what year he was born. From then on, he was self-educated in both practical and social skills. He worked his way out of poverty, and bought an old vaudeville theater, fixed it up, and eventually owned all five theaters in Haverhill. He moved to Los Angeles and 17 years later, he was a co-founder of a company called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, also known as MGM, which at one time was the most successful motion picture production company in the world. He also was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who bring you the Oscars. Unlike today’s Hollywood elite, he was a conservative and one-time chairman of the California Republican Party.

1919

Lady Astor is elected as a Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. She is the first woman to sit in the House of Commons. Born in Danville, Virginia, she was the daughter of a man who amassed two fortunes, one using slaves and the other after the Civil War. She moved to England with one of her sisters, and ended up marrying another American, Waldorf Astor. If that name sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Well, he was already a member of the House of Commons, but had to give up the seat when he became a member of the House of Lords. She ran to fill the seat, and won. She wasn’t the first woman elected the House of Commons,, though. That honor goes to Countess Constance Markievicz. She did not take her seat in Parliament, as she was an Irish Republican, believing that any British occupation of Ireland was illegitimate. 

1948

The body of an unidentified man is found on a beach in Adelaide, Australia. The man could not be identified. The labels from his clothes were missing. He was dressed nicely, in a tie, brown knitted pullover and a double-breasted jacket. He had no wallet or other identification. No dental records could be found to match. An autopsy could no come to no conclusion as to the cause of death, so poison was suspected. In a fob pocket on the pants he wore was found a scrap of paper torn from a book of Persian quatrains by Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131. Translated into English, the piece of paper said, “ended” or “finished.” Because of this, the case is sometimes called the Tamam shud case, while the man himself is referred to as the Somerton Man. It became the biggest mystery in the history of Australia, with professional and amateur sleuths joining in the hunt for answers. To this day, nobody knows how he died, how he got where he was found, can answer the myriad questions resulting from his discovery. One question may have been answered just a few months ago. In July, the middle of Australian winter, DNA from the man’s hair, which was still attached to a plaster cast of his head and shoulders, was used to run tests that identified the man as Carl Webb, an electrical engineer born in 1905. So he was about 43 when he died. He was from Melbourne, and there is no known death record for him anywhere. The last time he showed up anywhere in government records was in the year before he was found when his wife divorced him. There has been no official recognition of his identity, and the investigation continues. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t want the mystery to be solved. 

1952

The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgenson, the first notable case of sexual reassignment surgery. I would love to tell you the story about it, but I would probably get the pronouns wrong. By the way, I was recently asked by a medical transcriptionist what pronouns I prefer. My answer? “Hey, you.”

1955

In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws. The ironic part is that, according to the account on wikipedia, she was in the “colored section” of the bus. However, the “white section” was full, so the bus driver ordered her to move. She refused. She wasn’t the first black person to sit in the wrong seat of a Montgomery bus, but her arrest gave the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People an opportunity to challenge the segregation of the busses in court. It also led to a boycott of the Montgomery busses by black people for more than a year. A three-judge panel from the Middle District of Alabama ruled that bus segregation is unconstitutional. The city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama appealed, and almost a year after Rosa sat pat, the Supreme Court upheld that bus segregation was in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

1970

The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations. We needed the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Pollution was out of control. Raw sewage was drained into streams and creeks, air pollution was rampant, pesticides were poisoning people and wildlife. Hell, rivers caught on fire. There was the Rouge River near Detroit and the Buffalo River in 1968, and the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland in 1969. Something had to be done. The Environmental Protection Agency was the answer. Today, a quick look at the EPA’s budget overview reveals an overall budget of 11.2 billion dollars for 2022. Part of is to hire 1000 new Full Time Employees, or the equivalent thereof, and 1.8 billion of it is dedicated to something called environmental justice. I guess if it’s a type of justice, it must be good, right? Well, here’s what the EPA says: “This investment recognizes that policies

to tackle climate change must also clean up the legacy pollution that low-income communities and

communities of color have suffered with for far too long. In the process of tackling the climate

crisis there is a historic opportunity to make our communities more resilient to climate impacts,

advance environmental justice, and create good paying jobs.”

That statement in the EPA’s budget overview, on page 3 of the 75-page document, seems to indicate the EPA is more interested in posturing than real work on the environment. Plus, when did it become the EPA’s responsibility to create jobs? Not just any jobs, but “good-paying jobs.” I’m sure that there’s important work the EPA is and should be doing. Creating jobs and cleaning up neighborhoods that were dirty when the agency was created 50 years ago and claiming it to be some kind of justice by calling it “legacy pollution” is laughable. Don’t get me wrong, the EPA has done some great work, and today’s clean air and streams are proof. It seems to me that now they’re just looking for ways to justify spending 11-billion dollars. There’s an Environmental Protection Agency building in my city. It’s one of the biggest buildings in town. Several stories, many square feet and a lot of office space. Back in my days of printing the morning newspaper, I would go for a walk on my break, in the middle of the night, and I would sometimes walk by the EPA building. I couldn’t help but notice that every time I did, in practically every window on every floor, every office and cubicle in a large building where everyday employees with “good-paying jobs” financed by our tax dollars came to work, the lights were on. In the middle of the night. When nobody was there.

1973

The United States Senate votes 92 to 3 to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President of the United States, nine days later, the House would agree. He was, after all, the minority leader in the House of Representatives. Now, you might be thinking, “But Bob, I thought we voted for President and Vice-President?” Well, yes, we do. But President Nixon’s running-mate, Spiro Agnew, who was vice-president, had resigned after pleading no contest to a count of tax evasion. Suddenly, Nixon had no vice-president. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution came into play. Section 2 dictates the procedure: Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon the confirmation by a majority of both Houses of Congress. Gerald Ford was the obvious choice as leader of House Republicans. He was the only person ever to become vice-president through use of the 25th Amendment. When Nixon resigned in August of 1974, Gerald Ford became the first President of the United States who had not been elected to either the vice-presidency or the presidency. Not bad for a guy who was the original subject of an insult that has permeated the English language. I’m sure you’ve heard the term, “can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” Well, President Lyndon Johnson, who also was a vice-president who became president, was a vocal critic of Ford, once accusing him of playing too much football without a helmet. In another one of his rants against Ford, Johnson said, “Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” The press cleaned it up for general consumption by paraphrasing the quote as “Gerald Ford can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” So, if anybody ever accuses you of being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, what they’re really doing is telling you you should be President of the United States.

1989

During the Cold War: The Velvet Revolution takes place as in the face of protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announces it will give up its monopoly on political power. Then, the dominoes begin to fall as East Germany’s parliament abolishes the constitutional provision granting the communist party the leading role in the state. The Iron Curtain is beginning to crumble in eastern Europe. The cold war is at it’s most vulnerable, as tensions are high in both the east and the west. But soon the Soviet Union would realize there was no turning back for the satellite countries and the Warsaw Pact. 

Unfinished business liner…

Brittany Griner has been moved to a penal colony renowned for harsh treatment and mandatory labor. Elon Musk now owns Twitter. The company is undergoing a sea-change in staffing, strategy, policy, and management while Musk figures out how to keep the company profitable while changing the culture of the company and the political favoritism it displayed under the former owner and operators. We’ll see what happens with Brittany and Elon as the stories develop.

Phone and email liner…

Because I’m a registered Independent, I’ve been accused of not being able to choose a side, or make a commitment, or be passionate about a topic. The truth is, even to be a centrist, you have to establish a baseline. A middle ground or average for your own beliefs, then decide for yourself where you fall on the spectrum of liberal and conservative. I think if everyone did that, we’d discover that we have a lot more in common than we’re being led to believe. But instead, we’re told we have to choose sides. Are you red or are you blue? Well, my favorite color was red when I was an adolescent, but as a teenager, I changed it to blue, where it stayed for decades until about ten years ago. That’s when I changed it to orange. I realized that all of my favorite professional sports teams had orange in their logos, so I suspect I was a closet orange lover all my life, and just didn’t know it until I matured. Really matured. So I’m neither blue nor red nor purple. Being independent gives me a lot more freedom to change my position on a given topic. Granted, they’re not all as trivial as a favorite color, but it seems to me that belonging to a certain political party locks you in to believing what the party believes, and I have yet to find a political party that believes all the same things I believe. But just because I changed my favorite color, doesn’t mean I change my mind about issues as easily. But when presented with new or different information about a topic, all of us should have the right to examine the additional evidence and change our minds as appropriate. I’d rather not wait for a party leader in Washington to tell me how I should feel about a subject. I will certainly take their opinions into consideration as a source of information that I didn’t have before, but I still reserve the right, and I could argue, the responsibility, to decide how I feel, regardless of how a political party wants me to feel. 

Political leaders are allowed to change their minds, too. The problem is that when political leaders change their stance on a topic, you never know if that’s how they truly feel or if they’re just toeing the party line. Many of our political leaders have let the wind change their minds depending upon who’s in charge. When that happens, it’s often described as flip-flopping. The problem with flip-flopping is that as a politician, there’s a record of everything you’ve said as a candidate and an office-holder, and if you suddenly start preaching a different message, your hypocrisy will be quickly exposed. The problem is, they don’t seem to care. They’ll get called out on it, and just talk around the question with party talking points as if the question was never even asked. Follow-up questions are rare, as the reporter knows they won’t answer the question, plus they already know they have the politician on tape saying the exact opposite when the other party was in power. It’s not flip-flopping if you get new information, but as a politician, it would be great if you would explain why you’ve change your position. Don’t be afraid to change your mind, but be prepared to defend your new position by sharing the information that swayed you. Otherwise, you may deserve to be identified as a hypocrite and flip-flopper, just regurgitating the agreed upon language approved at a meeting of party leaders and advisors. You can almost tell that certain politicians know that what they’re saying is bullcrap, and we know it’s bullcrap, but they say it anyway, hoping that others in their caucus will repeat it enough times to make it sound legitimate. But when they all say the exact same thing, you can tell the jig is up, because that many people can’t possibly use the exact same words by accident. That’s how you can tell if your elected representative is representing the people, or just pandering to the party. Maybe it’s a good thing when politicians change their minds. It may be a sign that they’ve actually thought about a topic. In any case, I hope I made it easier for you to spot the phonies. 

I spent about 20 years as a disc-jockey. One of the things I found I didn’t like about it was that all my work just floated into outer space. I had nothing to show for my work, nothing I could see or hold in my hands. There was nothing tactile or permanent about it. But that was also something that made radio special. It was a fleeting moment in time, and people were either listening, or they weren’t. There was no rewinding (unless you recorded it), and there wasn’t much proof, if any, of what you said or played. If you said something wrong, you’d just have to wait a few days to see if anybody complained. If not, it never happened. But that’s not the case today, even for non-disc-jockey people. We’re often being recorded without our knowledge, while in public. Usually only video, as many states prohibit audio recording without approval of the person being recorded. But when you write and produce a podcast, it becomes about as permanent as if you wrote a book. There is no more farting in the wind, so to speak. So when I express an opinion on this program, you can bet I’ve thought about it. I’ve tried to look at it from different points of view. I’ve tried to understand why I feel the way I do, not just letting a coin flip choose for me, or obediently follow a party line. But I learn all kinds of new things as I research what we hear about on The Listening Tube. I won’t be surprised if I learn something that leads me to change my mind about a subject. That change can result in moving to the left of center, to the right of center, or maybe even result in moving to the center from a former left or right position. I have to keep an open mind, and I hope you will, too. This is my 40th episode of The Listening Tube. By creating this program I’ve left a permanent record of how I feel about an issue at the moment I recorded it. But that shouldn’t make me believe the same way for the rest of my life. I reserve the right to change my mind if new information requires it, and you should, too. It doesn’t mean what you believe has to change, it only means that it can. After all, I may have changed my favorite color because of my favorite professional sports teams, but I’ve never changed my favorite professional sports teams. From where I’m sitting right now, it doesn’t look like I ever will.

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly. Copyright 2022. Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube. I’m your host, Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.