Season 5, Episode Seven June 4, 2023

Hello! Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube! I’m your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we’ll hear about being Napoleon’s big brother, a brief history of gasoline taxes, and the weather….plus, we’ll try to answer the question, “What causes that?” But first, (Not the Headlines!)…

Well, I’ve been on vacation with my lovely wife, so I apologize for not producing a program for the last couple weeks. I had a good time. We visited Las Vegas and other sites in Nevada, including Valley of Fire State Park and Lake Mead and Hoover Dam. We also went to California to visit Death Valley, and reach the bottom of the continent, 282 feet below sea level with a temperature of 111 degrees farenhieght. I’m happy to have returned to my backyard, where the temperature today was a mere 92. For those of you who use the metric system, 282 feet is 86 meters, 111 degrees is 44 celsius and 92 is 33 celcius. Boy, it’s good to be back! A lot happened since we last spent time together. The long-awaited Durham Report came out. It showed that the whole Donald Trump/Russian Collusion story was a hoax created by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and that the FBI was either a willing participant in the hoax, or they’re guilty of not doing their job very well. The so-called Steele Dossier that was the premise for the entire investigation was fake. The Clinton camp knew it was fake, the FBI should have known it was fake, and probably did know it was fake, and nobody in the press was able to uncover this corrupt behavior. Will anyone be held responsible for creating a web of lies that dogged President Trump for his entire term and influenced public opinion with a deception that ran all the way through every branch of the federal bureaucracy? Probably not. But it’s clear that Hillary Clinton and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conspired to sway the 2016 election, and when that didn’t go their way, the mechanisms already put in place kept working to undermine the sitting President of the United States. Clearly, a domestic threat to the Constitution.

What the press told us was a bit different. The press dismissed the report by concluding that the Durham investigation resulted in only three charges, two of which were acquitted. Well, when you put it that way, it seems like only one guy did anything wrong. Well, that one guy was an FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying the email used to justify wiretapping a Trump campaign advisor. Of the two charges that were acquitted, both were charges of lying to federal investigators. Both of them provided fake research implicating Trump for working with the Russians. One guy never changed his story, so they couldn’t prove he lied, and the other was the guy the feds tried to pin the whole charade on. They claimed he was the guy who provided the information that ended up in the the Steele Dossier. American investigators said he didn’t tell them the truth about his sources. Of course he didn’t. Spies and journalists often keep their sources secret. So, why did the investigation result in only one conviction? Why is it that a plot to fool the entire country, a plot to discredit and bring false accusations against the President of the United States, does not hold more people accountable? Well, just look at the participants. The Clinton’s have so much political capital that they’ll be long dead before any investigation gets through all of their allies in the federal bureaucracy. After all, Bill once played saxophone on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. No Justice Department under a Democrat President would dare attempt to bring charges against the Clintons. The other participants in the scam were employees of the FBI, the very agency charged with criminal investigations. How convenient. There was another participant, though. The media. Whether or not their participation was voluntary can be debated, but the media took the Steel Dossier story and ran with it like Forest Gump. Showing us once again that the media is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. What we got was an echo chamber of lies about our president, and practically no independent journalism into the origins of the story the FBI and the Clinton campaign were feeding them. They were more than happy to believe the lies, as if fit right in with what they already wanted to believe.

Look, we know the people in the FBI are shady. It’s part of their job to spy and dig up dirt or evidence, to live in the shadows sometimes. We know politicians are shady characters, too. There’s as much backstabbing as there is compromise. The quest for power is a powerful force on its own. Great lengths are taken to occupy certain seats of government. But the media is supposed to be outside looking in, not inside looking in. The media was called the fourth estate for a reason. We have the three branches of government, and the media to watch over them all. The media has really let us down on this one. Even conservative media like Fox News and the New York Post couldn’t crack this case because of who the aggressors were. The rest of the media was happy to parrot back what the editors dictated. The editors were happy to blindly sing the Trump/Russia conspiracy song because it sold advertising and that made the publishers happy. All the while the American people were being misled by a Clinton campaign/FBI conspiracy for which nobody will be held accountable. 

That can’t be right liner

There’s a new way to separate ourselves from most others, and of course, it involves sexuality. As if gay and straight wasn’t enough, we also have bi and trans. But that wasn’t enough, either. There’s still queer, 2S, or two souls, plus intersex and asexual. It seem labeling ourselves based on our sexual preference has come full circle. Technically, the term is not new. It first appeared in the late 1970’s, but it’s found new roots in the gender and sexual confusion our society is currently displaying. Displaying, I might add, even though nobody really wants to know, and probably doesn’t care. But all of those other categories weren’t inclusive enough. The one thing missing was heterosexuals. Sure, maybe if heterosexuals are included in the alphabet soup currently used to describe our sexual preferences, even though nobody asked, they might be more receptive to the concept of something other than heterosexuality. Gynesexual, a word that my word processor doesn’t recognize, is someone who is attracted to femininity, or female body parts. Hey, that’s me! I’m a flaming gynosexual, mostly because it’s a lot more fun to say it that way! And here I thought I was just plain old heterosexual! I’ve been a fan of femininity and female body parts since the fifth grade. I just didn’t know why or what to do about it. I figured out why in seventh grade, and what to do about it in tenth. What to actually do about it is still a process I’m working on. Anyway, those of us who are Gynesexual have a bigger problem: The letter G is already taken in the lexicon of minority groups who want to proclaim their personal lives to the rest of us. The second letter in Lesbian, gay, etc. So here’s what I propose. Instead of LGB, whereas Lesbian and Gay mean the same thing, but separated by gender, oddly enough, we group Lesbian and Gay under the title Homosexual. That would leave the letter G open to describe people like me who are Gynesexual. So LGB would become HGB for Homosexual, Gynosexual, Bisexual, and so on. As a gynosexual, I want to be as inclusive as possible, so I also welcome lesbians who assume the male role in the relationship, and transexual men who aren’t homosexual. But what about people who are attracted to masculinity and male body parts? While most people call them women, there are exceptions. There’s also a name for it: Androsexual. That’s another word my word processor doesn’t recognize, and it’s an attraction to masculinity regardless of gender. So it would also apply to lesbians who are attracted women who display masculine tendencies. But, alas, there’s no room in the sexual identity alphabet for them, either, as the letter A is taken by asexuals, or people who don’t participate in sex. Wait, what? OK, assuming there are people like that, voluntarily, they don’t deserve a letter in the lexicon because they aren’t even participants! Apolitical is somebody who’s not interested in politics and doesn’t vote. Asexual can and should give up it’s initial to Androsexuals. So now we have HGBQIA2S+, whatever the plus may bring. Homosexual, Gynosexual, Bisexual, Queer, Intersex, Androsexual, Two-spirit + whomever wants to call themselves different from the majority in some sexual way that doesn’t involve other species. There! I think I fixed it! Now, everybody is included in the lexicon of letters meant to symbolize the way feel about other people who we would have sex with. There is no reason for those who before today felt isolated and alone. For those who didn’t feel understood, you’re now understood because everybody is just like you. Now that we’ve been able to include everybody in the groups of people who feel discriminated against, except those damn heterosexuals, who don’t understand us, we’ll be able to enjoy our sex lives in private, with no need to involve everybody else. Believe me, everybody else is more interested in their own sex lives than yours…

Let’s go back liner

1808

Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte is crowned King of Spain. It was Joseph who helped Napoleon gain control in France, but Joseph was never really able to cement his position as the ruler of Spain. Despite his tea-totalling ways, his detractors called him Pepe Botella, or Joe Bottle. Many Spaniards rejected what they saw as French rule. Five years after the appointment, he abdicated the throne. He was no slouch, though. He was a trained lawyer and diplomat, serving as the French ambassador to Rome, and, according to wikipedia, signed a treaty of friendship and commerce between France and the United States. It had to be tough, though, seeing your little brother become more powerful than you. It’s kind of like Donny Osmond becoming more famous than his older brothers, or Cooper Manning watching not one, but two of his little brothers win the Super Bowl. The success of Donny, and also Marie, doesn’t detract from the success of the Osmond Brothers, and Copper Manning is also successful in his own way. While everybody’s heard of Napoleon Bonaparte, it was his brother Joseph who, after being King of Spain, moved to the United States, where he eventually settled in New Jersey. His first estate burned down, so he built another out of the stables. It’s called Point Breeze, and today it’s on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

1822

Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot in the stomach while at a fur trading post on Mackinac Island of Michigan. His wound would be cared for by an Army surgeon named Bill Beaumont, who took the opportunity to do some research. You see, the wound never fully healed, leaving a hole in the injured man’s side that led directly to his stomach. The army doc thought his patient wouldn’t survive for very long, but he did. The doctor did experiments on his patient for 10 years. Part of the experimentation included tying different types of food to a string and dropping it in the hole for a predetermined period of time, then removing it to study the digestive process. During the ten years of experiments, St. Martin was also a servant to the doctor, conducting his chores with no ill effects from his open wound. 

Six years after the experiments ended, the doctor published his findings. Included were the discoveries that vegetables digested more slowly than meat, and digestion is enhanced by a churning motion inside your belly. He also confirmed that digestive fluids contained hydrochloric acid, and that gastric fluids were secreted by the stomach lining. St. Marin lived for another 58 years after being shot by a musket at close range, passing away in 1880. 

1882

More than 100,000 inhabitants of Bombay are killed as a cyclone in the Arabian Sea pushes huge waves into the harbour. “Climate change!” said no one.

1892

Benjamin Harrison becomes the first President of the United States to attend a baseball game. It wasn’t his first game, though. He’d attended games in both Indianapolis and Chicago before becoming president. He once told the Chicago Tribune, “I find a good deal of pleasure in watching a good game of ball.”

He’d been president since 1889, and finally got a chance in 1892 to make the two-mile trip to the stadium. The Cincinnati Reds were in town to play the Senators at Washington’s Boundary Park. He arrived in a horse-drawn carriage. A story on MLB dot com says the game was an exciting one, with the Washington Senators coming back from a 4-1 deficit to tie the game, only to lose by three in eleven innings. President Harrison wasn’t there for the end, though. He bailed in the 6th inning. But the Cincinnati Enquirer called the game an “excellent exhibition of the national game.”

Eighteen years later, the owner of the Senators got admitted sports fan President William Taft to throw out the ceremonial first pitch to begin the 1910 season in an attempt to cement Major League Baseball as America’s official past time. In case that didn’t work, he threw out the first pitch again the next season. He skipped 1912 because of the Titanic disaster. Woodrow Wilson was President by the time the next season began, and he continued what had become a long tradition. About a hundred years, with few exceptions. Jimmy Carter never did. Some presidents threw out the pitch to start multiple seasons, some just one. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it eight times. Harry Truman did it seven times. The last President to throw out the ceremonial first pitch was Barack Obama in 2010 to commemorate the Taft’s first pitch a hundred years earlier. It was the only time in Obama’s 8 terms that he threw the first pitch. No sitting president has done it since. 

1932

The Revenue Act of 1932 is enacted, creating the first gas tax in the United States, at a rate of 1 cent per gallon. Today, the rate is 18.4 cents per gallon. It hasn’t been raised since 1993. But the federal government wasn’t the first to levy a gasoline tax. That honor goes to the state of Oregon, which created a gas tax of one cent per gallon way back in 1919, 13 years before the federal tax. It wasn’t long before the other 47 states caught on. Within 10 years of Oregon’s tax, all the other states had one, too! While the federal tax has stayed the same since 1993, state taxes have increased for the most part. Some states have very low gasoline tax, such as Alaska, South Dakota and Hawaii, with the latter two rate at 16 cents per gallon, and the former at 8.95 cents. Would you like to take a guess at which state pays the most in gasoline tax per gallon? My first guess would be California. I would be incorrect. It’s not Oregon, either, even though they came up the idea before everyone else. As it turns out the state with the highest per-gallon gasoline tax is the state from where I’m speaking to you right now, Pennsylvania, with a whopping 57.6 cents per gallon tax as of 2022. 

1956

Elvis Presley introduces his new single, “Hound Dog”, on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.

1971

The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment. Wikipedia tells the story of how Cohen was arrested in 1968 for wearing a jacket to the Los Angeles courthouse that said “F” the Draft. I said the letter F, but the jacket had the rest of the letters, too. He was in the courthouse to testify in another case, and took off the jacket when he entered the courtroom. An officer of the court saw the jacket and the words thereon in the hallway, and suggested to the judge that Cohen be held in contempt of court because of the foul language. The judge wisely declined to take any action. Upon leaving the courtroom, the court officer arrested Cohen for disturbing the peace. He was sentenced to 30 days in the hole, as one might say in 1968. 

Cohen appealed charge, and won. The state of California requested a rehearing and lost, then appealed the lower court ruling to the California Court of Appeal. That court ruled Cohen was guilty, because the words on his jacket could provoke others to commit violence or otherwise disturb the peace. 

Well, we know words can’t provoke others to commit acts of violence, right? Well, that is, unless you’re President Trump on January 6th of 2020. Anyway, the California Court of Appeal opined that the state could determine certain language unsuitable for use in public, calling it an expansion of First Amendment jurisprudence. Next thing you know, the U.S. Supreme Court decided it wants to review the case. 

The Supreme Court hearing began with the Chief Justice suggesting the arguments didn’t need to include said F word by saying there was no need to “dwell on the facts.” Almost immediately, Cohen’s lawyer used the word to describe what the charge was all about. He felt he had to say it to prove the case, that there is no place in public where any word protected by the First Amendment can’t be used, including the Supreme Court. The State argued that conviction should be upheld because displaying the word was not speech but conduct. 

The high court’s ruling came on a 5-4 decision. In affirming, the majority opinion ruled that the conviction was based solely on speech and not on any separately identifiable conduct. It was then described why the F word did not fall into any categories of speech not protected by the First Amendment. Justice John Harlan stated, “while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."

The dissent argued that displaying the F word on the jacket in the courthouse was conduct, or an absurd and immature antic, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. 

These laws are still being challenged today. Critics of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have used the F word on displays and flags and in other places observable by the public. Sometimes the people get arrested for it, but eventually are acquitted thanks to the 1971 ruling by the Supreme Court about an arrest made in 1968, during the Vietnam war, when just about everyone said Fuck the Draft.

America no longer has a draft, but we do have Selective Service registration just in case we need one again. The way military recruitment is slogging along thanks to a variety of reasons, don’t be surprised if the draft is reinstated.

1981

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that five people in Los Angeles, California have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS. I’ll tell you what, it was a dangerous time for anyone who wanted to have sex, and as 20-year-old in the U.S. Air Force, that was one of my favorite things to do. Early on, though, the disease was reportedly only effecting homosexual men for the most part, so heterosexual men felt safe for the moment. Eventually, there came a point when everyone realized we were all potential victims. AIDS and HIV are treatable now. Some who had it show no signs of it anymore, so there’s progress still being made. 

1985

The grave of “Wolfgang Gerhard” is exhumed in Embu, Brazil; the remains found are later proven to be those of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death”. Mengele is thought to have drowned while swimming in February 1979. Many Nazi leaders fled to South America as the Soviet Union and the United States, along with other allies, closed in on Berlin more than 40 years earlier. Some were caught. I’s like to think those who weren’t lived in fear for the rest of their lives, with regular nightmares about what they left in their wake.

Here’s some weather news…

2001

Tropical Storm Allison makes landfall on the upper-Texas coastline as a strong tropical storm and dumps large amounts of rain over Houston. The storm caused $5.5 billion in damages, making Allison the costliest tropical storm in U.S. history. I read that the weight of all that water building up in Houston made the city sink more than 5 inches.

2003

A severe heat wave across Pakistan and India reaches its peak, as temperatures exceed 50°C (122°F) in the region. “Climate Change!” said nobody, because Global Warming was still the preferred term.

2005

The United States Supreme Court upholds a federal law banning cannabis, including medical marijuana, in Gonzales v. Raich. It’s about time the federal government catches up with the rest of the country when it comes to marijuana laws. You know what I noticed in Las Vegas last week? You hardly smell cigarette smoke on the streets anymore. It’s been replaced by the occasional whif of weed wafting through the air, as locals and tourists alike partake. 

Phone and email liner

I can’t recall what the situation was, or what we witnessed, but I have a distinct memory of my cousin Glenn turning to me and asking, “What causes that?”

We were just kids; maybe teenagers, so there was still a lot about the world that caught us by surprise, and this was one of those moments.

I’m sure it was something somebody did that was out of the ordinary. Behavior that was so outrageous that it made you scratch your head. A lessor mind might respond with, “Huh?” but my cousin Glenn actually made it a mental exercise by posing the question, “What causes that?” As I recall, I didn’t have an answer. I shrugged my shoulders and moved on. But that question stayed with me. What causes that is something I ask myself much more frequently lately. There are a lot of scenarios that make me wonder, “What causes that?”

While certain things are implied by simply asking the question, it’s basically an admission of ignorance. “I have no idea why that person is acting the way they are.” But by asking the question, you’re also admitting you find the behavior strange or out of the ordinary. It’s not a behavior of which you approve, nor would you act in such a way (under normal circumstances!)

The question doesn’t only apply to behavior, as there are a lot of things that happen in the world that we may not understand the first time we see it. Science if full of “what causes that” moments. But when we’re talking about behavior, there are parameters inside which most of us live, and anything outside those parameters might cause you to tilt your head in wonder.

But while asking the question might be an admission of ignorance, it’s also a sign of empathy. What led to that person behaving in such a way? What forces are at work here? Is it mental illness? Is it some sort of radical belief? Is it alcohol?

All three and many more reasons can account for such behavior. By wondering what the cause is, we demonstrate a genuine interest in the person, regardless of their actions. When you ask, “What causes that?” you excuse the person from responsibility for their actions by introducing the possibility of an outside force. No normal person would act that way. There must be a reason for it that the witness doesn’t understand. A causation that we can’t see. We give the benefit of the doubt to the subject because we know it’s not average behavior. I originally wrote normal behavior, but I changed it to average behavior because normal is too subjective. What’s normal for me might not be normal for you. Average, while not always accurate, is still handy when you need a baseline. But we’re not talking about normal or average. We’re talking about a question that has a different answer each time you ask it. No one set of variables applies to every situation. The causes can vary widely, from economic status to mental health. From environmental factors to drug abuse to the way you were raised. Erratic behavior can be the result of recent experiences like a job loss or a death in the family. That’s the ignorance part; we don’t know what, if anything, happened to cause such behavior. The empathy part is the willingness to ask why. What causes that? Granted, sometimes you really don’t want to know. Sometimes the answer is obvious upon closer examination or context. Did this behavior happen at an outdoor concert? Did this behavior happen in a classroom? On the street? There are occasions when the cause is more easily determined. Did the dude’s wife just leave him? OK, I get it. She’s really hot. When I say she’s really hot, I mean she’s aesthetically pleasing. Not in some weird way you’re thinking. But a guy can see how that might lead to unusual behavior. There’s probably a formula to determine the length of time it takes to get over a break up relative to the ex’s hotness. It might take longer if she’s really aesthetically pleasing. That formula might also include a variable for the possibility of unusual behavior. If we could determine the percentage of unusual behavior caused by hot women dumping their husbands or boyfriends, we could eliminate that number from the legitimate causes for us to ask the question, “What causes that?”

Then, we could focus our attention on other behaviors that make us shake our heads. For example, a state senator from Nebraska recently made a statement in front of the gallery that might make you wonder if it was caused by some outside force…

Soundbite

I suggest it might be some outside force, because normal, excuse me, average people don’t behave this way. Especially among the decorum of a representative body of government. What forces are at play here? In other words, what causes that? Well, first we have to examine the statements. “We love trans people!” Sure we do. Many of us know trans people who just want to live their lives as they see fit without any attention at all. But even the radical trans people are loved by somebody. Parents, siblings, spouses. So if you’re going to scream we love trans people in the state capital, you might want to be more specific, or at least explain why some people might not. “We need trans people!” is a bit more focused, but it’s certainly not true. We don’t need trans people in the same way we don’t need white people, or black people, or Pacific Islanders. All we really need as a species is male and female pairs who are willing to copulate in order to maintain the population. We can certainly do that without trans people. We can certainly do that without white people. While diverse races and ethnicities enrich our culture, they’re not needed. As the human race, all we really need is heterosexual couples. Or “breeders” as homosexuals call us. “Transgender people belong here!” Okay, this one’s kind of obvious. Only you can determine it you belong somewhere. That’s called freedom. When I moved to Port Hueneme, California in the 1980’s, I never felt like I belonged anywhere more. I loved it there. It was my decision to stay. This woman seems to believe she can determine where people belong based on their gender identity. She didn’t say, “trans people are welcome here,” she said, “trans people belong here!” The difference may be grammatically subtle, but the application is suspect. But her vow to keep fighting for something that the bill being debated didn’t effect seemed to indicate some type of confusion on her part, and makes me ask, “What causes that?”

So I’ve admitted my ignorance and empathy. I don’t know what caused her to display such an outburst. I don’t know her background, her other beliefs, her experiences. By looking at her I can tell she has the ability to be passionate about a topic. She doesn’t seem to be a trans person, whatever your definition of trans might be. She didn’t share a heartwarming story of a friend who’s trans and is making a positive impact on their community. She really didn’t make any argument at all. And her passion seems misguided, as the bill being brought to a vote didn’t make any laws about transgender adults. Betrayed by my own logic, my ignorance remains. My empathy, too, is misguided. I feel sorry not only for her, but for the people she’s claiming to represent. I know I would feel kinda weird if she stood up there and screamed, “We love white guys! We need white guys! White guys belong here!” I’d be slumping down in my chair, asking the same question: “What causes that?” If this woman in Nebraska was transgender, then you could attribute the display as an act of some type of pride expression. But, no. She’s just a woman. Being a woman doesn’t hold the same value we thought it had. Now, you can just claim to be one, and everybody else has to play along. Only because we don’t know if you actually went all the way and had your penis modified to your liking. We’re supposed to assume you did, but you probably didn’t. The dignity of a woman can now be usurped by anyone who desires it. It doesn’t matter how people who were born women feel about it. Maybe jumping on the bandwagon was more enticing than being left behind. Maybe she should learn more about demographics. After all, she needs people to vote for her if she wants the power to change laws. You’re supposed to do what’s right for the majority of your constituents. Standing up for minority constituents is honorable, but I don’t think she did that very well, either. 

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly.  Copyright 2023.  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube.  Subscribe today.  I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for thou ad infinitum.