Season 6, Episode 10 October 8, 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 the first place for the treatment of crazy people, the SR-71, and what the hell is going on in the U.S. House of Representatives?...but first, (Not the Headlines)!

Here’s a reason to be up-to-date about the laws in your state. Every state has different laws, and they can vary widely and not even make sense in some cases. I once read there was a Pennsylvania state law that said any military veteran who dies in the condom section of a drug store can’t be buried in a veteran cemetery. So, if you’re a war veteran from I’d say World War II, Korea or Vietnam, you might want to get some kid to go into the drug store to get your condoms. Odds are you’re not gonna die standing right there, but why tempt fate? Think of it as coming full circle. Remember, back when you were a teenager, and you would stand outside a bar hoping an older customer would get some beer for you? Now all you have to do is stand outside the drug store and wait for a cooperative young man comes by. Be careful how you pose the question, though. Anyway, an Alabama man knew his state laws, and although it took awhile, he’s won a court battle against police officers who arrested him for not providing a physical identification card. 

Emma Camp wrote a story for reason dot com about how it started: A lady calls a mechanic and says her car broke down in her church parking lot. A few days later, he goes to fix it. He has the keys to the car. Somebody else at the church sees a stranger pull up and open the door to the car and calls the police because they didn’t know the car was being cared for by the mechanic. The police show up and ask for ID. The mechanic says he doesn’t have to show ID, but offers the contact information of the woman who owns the car to explain situation. He just wants to get his work done. But instead of calling the woman, they arrest the mechanic. They charged him with “obstructing governmental operations." 

As it turn out, there are clear-cut and simple rules that every cop in Alabama should know. If you will tell a cop who you are, where you live, and what you’re doing right now, and you’re not clearly breaking the law, you’ve satisfied the three basic requirements to be let alone. 

The officers in this case never asked the man to tell them who he was. They never asked him to tell them where he lived. They did ask him to tell them what he was doing there. He told them he was fixing a customer’s car. Then they asked for an ID card or driver’s license. The man had no legal obligation to provide one, according to Alabama state law. The charges were dropped.

So, why is this important if you don’t live in Alabama? Because a lower court ruling dismissed the lawsuit the man brought against the Huntsville Police department. The lower court deemed that the police officers had qualified immunity, as they were simply doing their job. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit disagreed. Asking for an ID or driver’s license isn’t, in fact, a part of the job of police officers in Alabama. Asking you who you are, where you live, and what you’re doing there is. The court’s ruling means his lawsuit may move ahead, and the police officers have no qualified immunity. So, the mechanic will get his day in court, and the police officers who arrested him are going to have to answer to a judge and jury why they broke the law under the color of authority. I hope that their actions, which are available to watch from the point of view of the officer’s bodycams, are the result of poor training. Poor training about Alabama law in particular, and poor training during what should have been a high school social studies class. Because not only did the mechanic have Alabama law on his side, he also has the United States Constitution on his side. 

Here’s what the 4th Amendment says: 

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

This seems like cop stuff 101. First day of cop school. If it’s your job to enforce the law, you should know going in what limits and expectations there are. A good place to start is the 4th Amendment. The gentleman who was asked for an ID knew what his rights were, not only on the state level, but he also had the Constitution to back him up.

The story didn’t say what damages, if any, the mechanic might be seeking. Maybe he only wants to clear his name. I don’t know. What I do know is that may not have happened if the mechanic simply showed them his driver’s license when the police asked for it. According to the story, he did offer to show the license after they arrested him, but by then, the cops weren’t going to turn back. What was done was done, and this guy was going to get fingerprinted and photographed. Even though somebody at the police station should have known he didn’t break the law in the first place. Where was the desk sergeant? How did this even get past the clerk who booked the mechanic? 

I haven’t heard of Huntsville, Alabama being a hotbed of crime like L.A. or San Francisco or Philadelphia, so it seems like the police are doing something right, but you can’t do it while sacrificing peoples civil rights. Someone should have stopped this before it got as far as it did. The lesson here is know your rights, because you can’t rely on the people who enforce the law to know what the laws are.

Like the laws of the United States Constitution are always being challenged by new ideas and points of view, the laws of physics are being rewritten as we speak. Well, as I speak. It seems the James Webb Space Telescope has observed a never-before-seen phenomena when it comes to the behavior of planets. I hesitate to call them planets, as they don’t revolve around any star. They are somewhat free-floating celestial bodies. And I say bodies because the condition is dependent upon having a partner. They are planet-sized bodies that move in what scientists call a binary orbit. In other words, they just circle each other, each keeping the other one in it’s gravitational grasp. Out in the middle of nowhere, but a relatively short 1,300 light years away. And the people studying the Webb observations didn’t just find one pair. The story that was unattributed says they found what could be as many as 75 pairs of binary-orbiting planet-like objects. Now, when I say planet-like, or planet-sized, we’re talking Jupiter sized, not Earth sized. These aren’t little wimpy things. These are giants, with their own gravitational forces. But this phenomenon is so new that somebody got to name it. They’re now called Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBO’s. If you think the name is fun, just imagine being an astrophysicist right now, trying to explain something that shouldn’t exist. Ever since Galileo, we’ve believed that stars form and planets form around them. Well not everyone believed it, and some people still don’t. Either way, these JuMBO’s don’t fit any current understanding of how our universe works. The study explaining these JuMBO’s hasn’t been peer reviewed, but the observations seem pretty solid. I suspect the James Webb Space Telescope will be making groundbreaking discoveries for at leas the next decade, but probably longer. Just as the Hubble telescope gave us a new view of what’s around us, and continues to do so, the Webb telescope is far better. I’m sure this analogy is mathematically incorrect, but if the Hubble was a human nose, the Webb is a dog nose. Yes, it seems improbable for interstellar space flight right now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep learning from right here. When you and I look at the night sky, there’s only so much we can see. If you live in a city, the ground light hides most of the stars. If you live in the desert, you can see a lot more. Unless, of course, the desert in which you live also contains Las Vegas, Nevada. Then the only stars you’ll see are Donny Osmond and Bono. Those of us who see the same sky every night, regardless of how big a sky you might have, sometimes forget that there are other views of the sky, and with the right tools, like a telescope out in space that you can point anywhere in the universe you please, we’re bound to discover things and behaviors someday soon, maybe even species that we never thought possible or even imagined. I’m not sure we’ll ever make contact with another intelligent planet, though. Something tells me that God doesn’t want us to mingle. We’ve discovered that the universe is expanding, making contact less and less likely. Perhaps the universe is expanding at the same rate as our understanding of it, keeping each life-supporting planet away from the others by design. In any case, we now have to worry about these binary-orbit behemoths in the way if we need to go through the Orion constellation to get there. 

I can see it now, we’ll finally make radio contact with another planet, and it turns out they’re one of these binary orbit things and their partner has a slightly stronger gravitational field. It’s being pulled into it, and we have to go rescue the people before they collide with each other. We have the technology and the materials to make an attempt, but we don’t because we’d have to go through the constellation Orion to get there. Our understanding of physics is based on planets that orbit around stars, and we haven’t yet mastered the concept of binary-orbit planets. Unless you can fax over instructions how we can get there, it’s too risky. You live in a bad neighborhood. The next thing you know, Earth gets a reputation as discriminating against binary-orbit planets, and the rest of the universe starts calling us non-binaryphobic. Then all the non-binary people on Earth will be goin’, “Hey, wait a second! You can’t lump us in there with all those gay and straight people!”

You never know what marvels the universe has yet to reveal! We might be the last intelligent life forms in the galaxy to still rely upon the tedious and often messy act of sex to produce progeny. On the other hand, we might be the first planet to develop a way to make it feel good, binary or non-binary orbit.

Let’s Go Back liner

1773

America’s first insane asylum opens in Williamsburg, Virginia. Called the Public Hospital for 'Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds,’ it was 24 cells, each of which contained shackles in case the patient needed to be restrained for the safety of others. Straight jackets were often employed, as were restraining chairs. The chairs, as seen on only in your state dot com, resemble electric chairs, but have a padded seat that resembles a toilet, so the patient could relieve himself while still being secured to the chair. Drugs, shock therapy and bleeding were the treatment methods of the day, as well as being dunked in cold water while your hands and feet were bound. 

It took nearly seventy years for the patients to finally be treated as such. Therapy migrated to games and music and interaction among those being treated there. About two decades later, the Civil War came along, and threw a monkey wrench into the whole operation. The Union take over of the facility caused the chief administrator to commit suicide. Probably not the best example to set for patients in an insane asylum, but suicide is often a selfish pursuit. 

1780

The Great Hurricane of 1780 kills 20 to 30-thousand people in the Caribbean. Climate change! Said nobody,

1911

An accidental bomb explosion in Hankou, Wuhan, China leads to the ultimate fall of the Qing Empire. That’s q-i-n-g, Qing Empire, and it was the last imperial empire of China. What came after was the Republic of China. Now known as the People’s Republic of China, it has gone from a rural, agricultural country of bicycle-riding people to America’s biggest threat, both economically and militarily, all thanks to cheap labor and the theft of intellectual property from other countries, but mostly the United States. As I’ve said on this program before, the communist Chinese government has the patients to wait. But so far, it looks like their plan is working pretty well, and the United States seems content being their biggest financial supporter.

1920

The Carinthian Plebiscite determines that the larger part of Carinthia should remain part of Austria. Just in case you were wondering where “rich Carinthian leather” came from. Actually, there is no such thing as rich Corinthian leather, as touted to be a feature of the interior of a car produced back in the 1970’s. The rich Corinithian leather was actually produced in New Jersey. But, hey, some of those New Jersey cows might have been pretty soft.

1929

JC Penney opens store #1252 in Milford, Delaware, making it a nationwide company with stores in all 48 U.S. states. Today, any business that has a website is open in all 50 states. State laws may vary.

1944

During the Holocaust, 800 Gypsy children are murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Nazi’s weren’t just fixated on the Jews. Anybody who didn’t resemble the physical description of the mythical master race were potential victims. It may have started with the Jews, but everybody else was next.

1950

The Goyang Geumjeong Cave Massacre started. Huh. I wonder what that was.

Look that up liner

Very little seems to be known about this massacre, but it happened in Korea. What is now South Korea. I found a small article about it on wikipedia, and other websites had the same story, written in the same way. It says the massacre lasted until October 31st. Almost a month of massacre. Today, massacres seem to happen in a very short period of time, beginning with the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, right up to the most recent mass shooting. But this was a drawn-out massacre. Nowhere in the information I found does it say why the 153 people killed were in a cave, nor why it took so long to kill them all. Imagine the horror of being trapped in that cave, knowing dozens have already perished. The wounds of the Korean war struck deep, which is why North and South Korea are still technically at war. 

That’s not where this story ends, though. The bodies of the victims were exhumed, or to be more realistic, excavated from the site in 1995. Ten years later, the South Korean government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Within a year, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called upon the South Korean government to apologize for the massacre and erect a monument to the lives lost there. Nothing happened. A year later, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission again called upon the South Korean government to apologize for the massacre and erect a monument to the lives lost there. Nothing continued to happen. Then in 2011, the Seoul central court ordered South Korea to not only apologize and erect a monument, but also to pay reparations to the families. Whether or not those demands were met was not among the information I could find.

1967

A man who’s image adorns all kinds of items from lighter and phone cases to purses and mostly t-shirts, a day after being captured in Bolivia, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Guevara is executed for attempting to incite a revolution there. Some view that as dying for an ideal you believe, and revere him. But most people who would wear a Che Guevara t-shirt have no idea he was Fidel Castro’s enforcer and chief executioner. Few of the people sporting Che Guevara t-shirts know that he was the idiot who bought snowplows from Czechoslovakia while Castro’s Economics Minister, because he thought he could use them to harvest sugar. He also ruined Cuba’s farming by limiting the size of farms and then running them with communes. Cuba still doesn’t yield the harvest they did before Che Guevara “reformed” Cuban farming. The only thing it seem Che Guevara was good at was killing. After he helped Fidel Castro, he tried to create revolutions in Africa before returning to the Americas. It was the government of Bolivia that finally caught up with him and ended his reign of terror. How he ended up on consumer goods is an interesting story. It’s ironic because he was a communist. Although there is a report that after the Communist revolution in Cuba, it was Che Guevara who claimed the most luxurious mansion on the island, not Fidel Castro. So, it seems he was a poser, too. The next time you see somebody wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, you might want to ask them if they had to settle for it because the t-shirt store was out of Hitler t-shirts.

1976

George Washington’s appointment, posthumously, to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States by congressional joint resolution Public Law 94-479 is approved by President Ford. 

“Oh, thanks!” said George Washington’s ghost. “I’ll spend that hefty raise I got for more padding in my coffin.” Really, George? I thought you might want to restore the bottom portion of the portrait of you. You know, the part that looks like someone tore off the bottom?

1999

The last flight of the SR-71. What a marvel of an aircraft. One was never shot down. It couldn’t be armed because it outran anything it would fire. To this day, it’s hard to get a good photograph of it, even in a museum. It flew so fast, it had to use the stars to determine its position above the earth. Other countries could only claim they thought we flew over their country today, because by the time a blip showed up on the radar, it was gone. All it did was take pictures. That narrow scope of usefulness was its undoing. Satellites became the go-to tool for capturing photographs of anywhere on Earth, without risking a pilot or getting caught taking pictures of places other countries don’t want you to see. The panels on the fuselage only aligned properly after the aircraft heated up from flying at supersonic speeds. The fuel it used leaked onto the runway prior to takeoff, as the parts weren’t yet expanded enough to seal. The aircraft itself expanded several inches by the time it got up to temperature. During flight the windscreen, which was made with quartz and ultrasonically fused to the frame, would reach 600 degrees, or 316 Celsius, according to wikipedia. The tires on it were inflated with nitrogen. This thing flew at more than three times the speed of sound. That meant the fuel on board didn’t last long. About 90 minutes. That was after in-flight refueling. They never took off with a full fuel reserve. They could only fly once a week because of the required maintenance.

It took three retirements to finally ground the SR-71. It was finally NASA that flew the last two SR-71’s.

2009

First lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS spacecrafts as part of NASA’s Lunar Precursor Robotic Program. To be a little more precise, one of them crashed into the moon, then the other one flew through what was ejected from the impact, sent the information back to Earth, then it, too, crashed into the moon. So, what was the purpose of the lunar demolition derby? Well, a space craft orbiting the moon that was sent up there by India had detected the possibility of frozen water on the south pole of the moon, in a permanently shadowed crater. The United States figured it could get more data by smashing into it and taking samples of the resulting plume of debris. The space craft circled the moon three times before slamming into it, with the explosive power of two tons of dynamite, according to wikipedia, as if anybody knows what that even means. But it hit a crater creating a new crater inside the original crater that measured 10 feet deep and 60 feet in diameter. Or 3 meters by 18 meters. After analyzing the data, NASA announced on November 13, 2009, that water was detected on the moon.

Phone and email liner

On Tuesday of this past week, the United States House of Representatives voted to allow another vote that would require another vote for a new Speaker of the House. It’s the first time something like this has happened. One other similar attempt was made about a hundred years ago, but it was unsuccessful. This time, it was successful. So what does it mean? Well, the Democrats are going to say that the Republicans can’t even choose a leader, so how are they going to lead the country? Republicans are going to say they chose the wrong guy the first time. It did, after all, take 15 votes to elect the former speaker. There was even an agreement that made it easier to dethrone him if need be. That tool has been utilized. So what triggered the ejector button on the former House Speaker? If I had to boil it down to one word; money. I’m not talking about influence from special interest groups or Political Action Committees. I’m talking about spending. There’s a small but mighty group of Republicans that have serious concerns about our national debt. And it does deserve a large measure of concern. This small group seems to be the only group dedicated to getting America’s books balanced. Granted, most voters on the right are in favor of less spending, but this group believes that the former speaker wasn’t doing enough to limit spending when he got help from Democrats to pass a temporary spending bill to keep the federal government from shutting down. They believe he should have demanded more spending concessions. They believe he should have shut down the government in order to bring financial stability. America’s debt is way too high, so these guys have a good point. They saw the former speaker as someone who was just towing the same old line, not doing enough to save the country from suffocating debt. With a Democrat led Senate, this powerful group of representatives saw the former Speaker as their only hope, and he capitulated. Ironically, every Democrat voted to allow the seat to be vacated, which means the group holding the Speaker responsible for working too closely with the Democrats needed the Democrats to help them oust the Speaker. If only that kind of cooperation could be found when it comes to solving the real problems facing America today. If only a hand full of Democrats would have voted to keep the speaker, we would have kept him. But the Democrat leadership sent the word out that none of them should vote to keep him, and none of them did. So, while it’s easy to say the Republican party is in disarray, the Democrats took measures to make sure it looks that way. Figuring there’d be about eight Republicans in the small group lobbying to vacate the speaker’s chair, the Democrats could have easily maintained the status quo. Considering the former speaker was willing to work with them, which is why the extreme right of the Republican representatives wanted him out, you have to wonder what the Democrats had to gain by agreeing with the extreme right of the opposing party. All of the Democrats and eight of the Republicans voted to oust the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. But what it looks like is the Republicans are unorganized and not at all united. It makes is look like the Democrats have their act together by comparison, that there’s no disagreement among democrats. But should that be what they want? To an independent like myself, it makes it look like the Democrats have no independent thinkers; that they’re all on the same page like some kind of party robot. Somebody, somewhere is operating the brain of the robot, and we all know it isn’t the President, and everybody in the political web knows from where the instructions come, but not quite from whom they come. That’s certainly not what an Independent looks for in a government. If the Republicans have a few loose cannons, that can present problems for the party, but if those loose cannons have a legitimate gripe, then maybe they’re not loose cannons after all. Maybe they see a problem in a way that we don’t. Maybe it takes a loose cannon to shine a light on a problem like the budget deficit. It shouldn’t, but maybe it does. Sometimes we become complacent with the status quo. We get comfortable, and if the world around us isn’t crashing down, then things must be going well. But these representatives seem to be hell-bent on taking care of the problem at the risk of making their party look bad in the near term. 

So, we’ll get a new Speaker. Maybe budget talks will be more frugal in the future. We’ll see. Whether or not you agree with the tactic, we can’t deny that America’s debt is out of control, and spending needs to be reigned in. We cannot continue on this path of making money appear wherever it’s needed. Fiscal responsibility of the federal government seems to be a thing of the past, and the American people are paying the price. When you see pitchmen telling you to buy gold and other precious metals, anything not connected to the U.S. dollar, then you can tell there’s a problem. When other countries are banding together to use other currency to conduct business instead of the U.S. dollar, there’s a problem. When the U.S. credit rating is fluctuating from anything other than excellent, there’s a problem.

So, what caused the problem? Well, two things off the top of my head. We became a service economy instead of a producing economy, and government spending is out of control. You might find that hard to believe if you watch the network news, because they keep telling us how many jobs have been created, and showing us President Biden telling us how many billions of dollars he’s eliminated from the federal deficit. While at the same time, there are already more job openings than people to fill them, and the deficit clock continues to climb at a rate of a million dollars every minute of every day.

I’m not surprised there have become representatives in the federal government who feel it’s necessary to do whatever it takes to stop the endless cycle of government debt. That debt, after all, will be paid by the citizens of the United States in one form or another. Right now, we’re paying through inflation and high interest rates. Oh, and a large portion of our debt is to China. That’s a situation that we need to get straightened out. We can’t completely decouple from China economically, but we can’t be carrying debt to our most hostile adversary. Undoing our budget deficit with China would be a good start in reclaiming our economic independence. Perhaps Wednesday we’ll find out if we have a new House Speaker. Then the House can get back to doing what it’s supposed to be doing. You know, conducting business, making budgets for things, making laws, trying to figure out why Hunter Biden was being paid millions of dollars by foreign governments. Perhaps the new speaker will also investigate why the eight Republicans who voted to oust the Speaker instantly had fundraising emails sent to possible contributors. There’s some speculation that the eight of them voted to cause turmoil in our government for the sole purpose of fund-raising. If it was successful and the funds they raised came from people other than the people they’re supposed to represent, then they’re clearly benefiting themselves instead of working for their constituents. 

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.