Season Two, Episode Seven

 S2 Ep7

Hello! Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube! I’m your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we’ll Take a look at the Declaration of Independence, The death of Nostradamus and the answer to the question, “did he see it coming?”, and the bikini! But first...not the headlines..

There’s a lot of arguing in the media and on the streets about what is causing the inflation America is experiencing over the last year or so. The Biden administration hasn’t taken any responsibility for any of it, constantly blaming Russia, as in “Putin’s Price Hike” and telling us that inflation is as bad a problem elsewhere as it is here. We know that inflation began before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we know that inflation was partly caused by federal payouts to help people get through the Covid pandemic. We know that the policies of the Biden administration has stifled the fossil fuel industry. We know that the price of oil effects the price of everything that has to be transported on land and sea. We may not have even seen the full effect of Russia’s attack on Ukraine yet, as Ukraine’s contribution to the world’s food supply will be delayed, if seen at all. When asked what the Biden administration is doing to curb inflation, the standard answer is, “The President and his staff are doing everything they can.” There’s never any follow-up, though, like, “Could you be more specific?” Sure, the federal government has tried a few things, like releasing oil from the nations strategic reserve, but that didn’t seem to help much, plus it depletes our strategic reserve, which will have to be replenished at some point, probably at a much higher price than it cost when it was put there. Now there’s talk of a federal gas-tax holiday, which is yet another band-aid solution. All the while, the Biden administration is blaming the gas and oil industry for price-gouging, and summoning oil company executives to drop their prices to alleviate some of the suffering Americans are going through right now. There was a time when Americans wouldn’t tolerate a gasoline price above 4 dollars. Now, it’s gone over 5, 6, 7 dollars depending upon where you live. That’s one reason for the prices of everything to go up. The cost of energy is the driving force behind everything that’s already been created. It doesn’t matter what your company contributes to society, it takes energy to make it and get it to people willing to pay for it. That goes for electronic, or virtual products as well as physical products, especially food. Food prices are taking a double hit in today’s economy. Not only are the prices rising because of the cost of harvesting and transporting it, the cost of fertilizer has increased significantly. Ironically, Russia is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of fertilizer. We can’t buy it because of economic boycotts as a result of the war in Ukraine. You can call that a Putin Price Hike if you want, as the invasion predicated it, but it was our boycott that is ultimately responsible for the fertilizer shortage. Farmers had to decide what to dedicate to each crop. Predicting what to grow where is always a risky business, but having to factor in additional costs for, or a smaller supply of, fertilizer makes being a farmer all the more precarious. But energy is still the common denominator. The price of energy effects the price of everything. So if the oil companies are gouging us, as the Biden administration claims, then they must be making money hand over fist, right? Well, let’s take a quick look at oil company’s profits from 2010 through last year. According to statista dot com, in the very volatile energy sector, the return rate on crude oil investments had seven positive years and 5 negative years. Return on investment went from as high as 55 percent positive last year to a low of 46 percent negative in 2014. During the 12-year period, of which three out of the first four were positive, the industry overall only captures a positive return on investment of a little over 4 percent. I don’t know of a single industry making as little as four percent return on investment being accused of price-gouging except the oil and gas industry. Did it ever occur to you that the oil and gas industry is the only industry that has to use its own product to deliver its product to the consumer? It never occurred to me, either, until I started writing this. The energy companies, be it gasoline, or home-heating oil or even electricity, have to not only make enough for us to use, they also have to make extra just to get it to us. If your company makes baby carriages, they don’t deliver them to the store on a giant baby carriage, but the gas company needs gas to get the gas to the gas station. That’s why pipelines are such a valuable tool. With pipelines, we eliminate much of the need to transport fuel using the fuel itself! By closing pipelines, most notably the Keystone XL pipeline, you automatically increase the demand for the fuel. President Biden stopped the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, and now wonders why fuel prices are higher. The President’s press secretary says the Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t produce oil, it just transports it, so closing the pipeline has had no effect on the price of gasoline. What she fails to mention is that we’re paying the additional costs to transport fuel that would have been transferred via pipeline. The administration will argue that the pipeline wouldn’t even be operational yet, but the oil industry is built on expectation, not past performance. If the Biden administration is hell-bent on eliminating fossil fuels, as he promised in his campaign for President, then the industry is going to invest cautiously, and they’re going to take their profit while they can, even if it is only a 4 percent return on their investment. 

So if it isn’t the energy sector that’s making all the money, who is? Well, a website called tipalti dot com has a page that tells us how much well-known companies and different sectors of industry make by the second, minute, hour and day. It’s based on 2020 numbers from Fortune 500, but it does reveal some interesting statistics. I like interesting things, and above all else, I hope you find the Listening Tube to be interesting. The top 5 money makers among American companies are all technology and financial companies. Apple, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet are the top three, all raking in more than a thousand dollars every second. The next two, Bank of America and Wells Fargo both make more than 600 dollars every second, and the next in line is another technology company, Facebook, which pulls in 586 dollars a second. Still no energy companies among the top 6. The first retailer on the list is Walmart, followed by AT&T and Comcast. Amazon rounds out the top 10, making 367 dollars a second. Still no energy companies. In fact, of the fifty companies listed, not one is an energy company. If we look not at individual companies, but put them into sectors of related companies, a little more is revealed. Food and Beverages is the most profitable sector, followed by Technology, Telecommunications and Financial companies. Rounding out the top ten most profitable sectors are Healthcare, Aerospace & Defense, Media, Business Services, Transportation, and Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure. Still no energy sector. In fact, the energy sector doesn’t appear until 15th, just behind retailing and just ahead of Apparel. So it doesn’t appear that the oil companies are price-gouging. If any companies are gouging the American public, it’s technology companies and banks. Not oil companies. The Biden administration should just admit that their policies are causing energy prices to hit historic highs, and the following inflation of other products and services. Instead of telling the American public that they’re doing everything they can to lower prices, they should just confess that this is exactly how they want it! Put gasoline prices out of reach to encourage electric vehicles. Increase inflation to force employers to pay more. Only promote and support companies that are unionized. You can believe that the Biden administration is bungling it’s responsibilities to the American people, but more likely, these policies that are crushing the most vulnerable of us are the actual plan the democrats, and more accurately the progressive branch of the democrats have put into place to advance their agenda without regard to the damage they cause along the way. By the way, the cost to celebrate Independence Day with a cookout is up 17% over last year. 

That can’t be right liner…

It turns out, we like people who smell like us. Chances are you’ve seen a dog sniff another dog where we wouldn’t want to sniff another human, but just like dogs and other land mammals, we use our olfactory senses to accomplish the same thing, but we just don’t rely on it as much as a dog. We have other ways of communicating like speaking and facial expressions, body language and so on. But just because we don’t rely on it, doesn’t mean we don’t have it and still use it. But for most of us, it’s something we don’t consciously take into consideration. A recent article on phys dot org explains that people with similar body odors are more likely to become friends. Not lovers, just friends. The research was done at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and to test the theory, they found 20 pairs of same-sex, non-romantic friends, half male and half female. One condition of their participation was that they described their friendship as one that developed quickly without one knowing much about the other. To conduct the experiment, they were all given instructions, such as no pungent food and sleeping alone wearing a cotton t-shirt. The t-shirts were collected and tested with an electronic device that can detect the chemical composition of the smell. As it turns out, the odors of friends more closely matched each other than the odors of non-friends. To test the theory further, and using actual human noses, volunteer smellers were given three shirts, two of which were friends and one of which was not. The volunteers were able to choose which shirts belonged to the friends and which shirt did not. There was still another variable to explore. If people are friends and spend a lot of time together, they might be in similar environments that create their specific odor. So they came up with another experiment that seemed to confirm that smell can also be used to predict who would hit it off immediately and who wouldn’t. Seventeen people, all strangers to each other, took part in a test they referred to as the Mirror Game. They would stand about a foot and a half away from each other and were told to mimic each other’s hand movements for two minutes without talking to each other. Of course, the hand movements had nothing to do with the actual experiment, but was an excuse for two people to get close enough to smell each other without wondering why they were just standing there. The smelling machine used in the first experiment was able to predict which participants would click 77 percent of the time, and 68 percent of the times that both sides said they didn’t feel any connection. Plus, the more people smelled like each other, the more likely they were to say they liked each other, understood the other, and felt a better chemistry between them. An author of the study says they think the results imply that we may also be more like other land mammals in this respect than we typically appreciate. So before you reach for that bottle of cologne or perfume, you might want to consider the possibility that you might be deterring your next best friend from knowing you exist. But please, bathe regularly.

Let’s go back liner…. 

1566 French astrologer, physician and prophet Nostradamus dies in Salon. Here’s a guy who lived through two plagues, lost a wife and two children to the first one, had six children after the second one, and lived to the ripe old age of 62. Most people know him as a prophet, having written a book of over 900 quatrains, or poems about future events. Scholars today attribute any accuracy of his predictions to be misinterpretations or mistranslations. He did, however, accurately predict his death. He told his secretary one evening that “You will not find me alive at sunrise.” He was found dead the next morning. 

1644 William Gascoigne introducer of telescopic sights is killed at 24. Probably by a jealous husband... 

1776 Twelve of the thirteen original colonies of America voted to approve the Declaration of Independence. New York abstained, as the delegate hadn’t yet been given the authority to approve. The United States became a nation. Almost. The fifty-six signatures on the Declaration of Independence surely did not all happen on July 4th as is legend. Most historians agree that the actual signing began on August second, with the last signature being added as late as November. In any case, the document was dated July 4, 1776. A few days later, the Declaration was read aloud to Gen. Washington's troops in New York.

Here’s what it said: 

 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." 

1826 The 2nd & 3rd Presidents of the United States, John Adams & Thomas Jefferson died. Both of these men were signers of the Declaration of Independence. July 4

1831 James Monroe the fifth president died July 4

1850 Zachary Taylor the 12th President of the United States died during his term in the White House. He served 16 for months. July10 Vice President Millard Fillmore would become President.

1891 Travelers checks are patented. If you’ve never heard of travelers checks, they’re a way to travel with something equivalent to cash, but can’t be used if lost or stolen. Plus, if you’re traveling where other currencies are being used, you can lock in an exchange rate before you go. You don’t hear much about them anymore, but you can still get them. When I was in the Air Force, I flew home from West Berlin for my Grandmother’s funeral, and wanted to rent a car at the airport. There were three car-rental companies where I landed, and the first two wouldn’t let me rent a car without a credit card, the third company, National, let me use travelers checks as a deposit. 

1896 William Jennings Bryan delivers his 'cross of gold' speech at the Democratic convention

1926 US Army Air Corps is created. Today it’s knows as the United States Air Force, but it didn’t become a separate service until 21 years later.

1946 Louis Reard's Bikini swimsuit design debuts at a fashion show Paris. Ah, yes, the bikini...there was a fabric shortage after World War Two, and the bikini seemed like the perfect solution. Much of the general public found the two-piece woman’s bathing suit to be scandalous, as did the Catholic Church and some of the media. By the time the 50’s and 60’s rolled around, though, actresses like Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner discovered that the more they were seen in a bikini, the more famous they got. The history of the bikini doesn’t begin in the 1940,s, though. According to Wikipedia, bikini-style clothing goes back to before the pyramids were built, 5600 BC. 

1959 America's new 49-star flag honoring Alaska statehood is unfurled.

One year later, in 1960, America's new 50-star flag honoring Hawaiian statehood is unfurled. However, many flags were still adorned with only 48 stars, as production and distribution of the new flags lagged behind. 

1962, Telstar, the 1st geosynchronous communications satellite is launched. Built by Bell Telephone Labs, it relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls and telegraph images. Telstar One, and it’s sister satellite, Telstar Two, weren’t very big, less than a yard across their spherical shape, but they were huge in what is now world-wide communications for just about anybody. Although no longer in service, both satellites still orbit the earth.

This week in 1964, President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. Originally proposed by President Kennedy, the bill couldn’t get past a Senate filibuster. It was filibustered again when Johnson pushed for it, but after a 54-day filibuster, the Senate passed it. It wasn’t the first Civil Rights Act, though. President Eisenhower signed one in 1957. Even before that, there was the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It became nullified when the Supreme Court decided that Congress didn’t have the power to to prohibit discrimination in the private sector. 

In 1966, LBJ signs the Freedom of Information Act

and one year later, in 1967, the Freedom of Information Act goes into effect. The Freedom of Information Act only applied to the federal government, but all state and most local governments have similar laws like open records laws and notices of public meetings. These laws are designed to allow the media access to the inner-workings of our governments, and help keep the people informed. It has become a type of cat-and-mouse game among some government agencies that try to hide information that the public is legally entitled to have. Some agencies have even claiming the documents are copyrighted and charging exorbitant fees for them. Others claim delays in finding the requested information or deter requests by charging large fees for simply making copies of public documents. News organizations, especially local newspapers with limited resources, have been fighting the Freedom of Information battle for generations. District courts, however, have the power to compel a federal agency to produce requested documents, and places the burden on the agency to sustain its action. 

This week in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is not inherently cruel nor unusual. So why did they have to rule on that? 

Look that up liner…

Well, in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman vs. Georgia that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment if it was too severe for the crime, if it was arbitrary, if it offended society’s sense of justice or if it was not more effective than a less severe penalty. All of those prerequisites essentially made capital punishment unconstitutional. Six-hundred twenty-nine death row inmates had their sentences commuted to life in prison. But individual States fought back, changing their laws to abide by the Furman vs. Georgia decision. Three states, Florida, Texas and Georgia brought arguments to the Supreme Court in 1976 that satisfied the 1972 ruling, and the court ruled that the new death penalty statutes in those three states were constitutional. In addition, the court ruled that the death penalty itself was constitutional under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

1985 French agents sink Greenpeace's ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. Greenpeace is an environmental group. They used the ship to protest and interfere with with whaling and seal-hunting, as well as nuclear testing, which was still being done above ground at the time. In this case, greenpeace was there to protest an upcoming nuclear test by France on an atoll in the South Pacific. While the Rainbow Warrior was docked at Marsden Wharf in New Zealand, French agents attached two bombs to the ship, and detonated them a few minutes apart. The first bomb was intended to get the crew off the ship, then the second one would finish the job. But before the second bomb was set off, some of the crew had already returned to the ship to assess the damage. The second bomb resulted in a photographer dying by drowning. At first, the French government denied any involvement, but New Zealand investigators quickly uncovered who the culprits were. Six agents were identified as being involved, but only two were arrested. The rest were aided in their escape from the area. The two who were caught spent less than two years in prison for manslaughter. France eventually owned up to their involvement, and formally apologized. 

Phone and email liner…

We’re back…

Unfinished business China Edition

United States Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr has sent a letter to the CEO’s of Apple and Google alerting them that tic-toc is in violation of their own policies, and requested that both companies remove tic-toc from their app stores. Carr said in the letter that the app itself is the sheep’s clothing. It went on to state that, “at it’s core, tic-toc functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal in sensitive data...everything from search and browsing histories to keystroke patterns and biometric identifiers, including faceprints, and voiceprints. It collects location data as well as draft messages and metadata, plus it has collected the texxt, images and videos that are stored on a device’s clipboard. The list of personal and sensitive data it collects goes on from there. Withing its own borders, the People’s Republic of China has developed some of the most invasive and omnipresent surveillance capabilities in the world to maintain authoritarian control. The commissioner then lists a half-dozen documented violations of privacy polices committed by tic-toc, including accessing users passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses and personal messages. Tic-toc has already paid nearly 100-million dollars in fines and settlements for privacy violations in the United States. Tic-toc’s parent company, bytedance, is a Chinese company. Any Chinese company falls under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, if you download the tic-toc app to your phone, you’re helping the Chinese Communist Party in their quest to take over the world. 

But there’s more! A Chinese company has just bought 300 acres of land near Grand Forks, North Dakota. The plan is to build a milling plant there that will employ more than 200 people and cost 700-million dollars to build. But according to CNBC, the project is raising serious security concerns in Washington, D.C. You see, the new milling plant will be about a 20 minute drive from Grand Forks Air Force Base, home of some our country’s most secret drone technology, as well as a space networking center, described by a North Dakota Senator as, “the backbone of all U.S. military communications across the globe.” The guy who sold the land to the Chinese company got 2.6 million dollars for it, and since then he’s become a target for people opposed to the operation. He’s been threatened, had other people put signs in his yard, and he says he’s been called every name in the book for selling the property. The Air Force hasn’t made any comment about the proposed milling operation, but an Air Force Major has circulated a memo that says the project is located where passive receiving equipment could intercept dron and space-based communications both to and from the base. He said any such data collection would present a costly national security risk causing grave damage to the United States’ strategic advantages. One North Dakota Senator agrees. Senator Kevin Cramer says “I think we grossly underappreciate how effective they are at collecting information, collecting data, using it in nefarious ways,” he said of the Chinese Communist Party. “And so I’d just as soon not have the Chinese Communist Party doing business in my backyard.” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, of Virginia said, “We should be seriously concerned about Chinese investment in locations close to sensitive sites, such as military bases around the U.S.” Sen. Marco Rubio, of Florida, agrees. “It is dangerous, foolish, and shortsighted to allow the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies to purchase land near U.S. military installations.” He’s co-sponsoring legislation that would give the Biden administration the power to stop the purchase of the land. The CNBC article says, “Debate over the project has roiled the small community, with emotional city council hearings, local politicians at odds with one another, and neighborhood groups gearing up to block the project.” I agree with those neighborhood groups. As I’ve said before, any Chinese company is at the beck and call of the Chinese Communist Party, and they’ll stop at nothing to gain superiority over the west. If you doubt that, just consider all of the Americans that have been poisoned by Chinese-supplied fentanyl. About 250 people die every day in America because of fentanyl. These aren’t all drug addicts. Most of these people didn’t even know they were taking fentanyl. A man who lost his son to one fentanyl-laced pill in 2015 told Fox News that the number of daily deaths in America from fentanyl is like a jet airliner crashing every day. If that were the case, what would we do about it? Well, we’d probably ground every jet airliner until we figured out what the problem is. In this case, we know what the problem is, but it still isn’t getting fixed. Now the news media likes to call these “overdose” deaths, but these people aren’t overdosing, they’re being poisoned. They’re being poisoned by the Chinese Communist Party with the help of Mexican drug cartels. Fentanyl is coming across our southern border in such quantities that the border patrol can’t keep up. It’s being used to kill our young people. The organization Families against Fentanyl wants the federal government to designate fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. They say this will empower the United States shift the focus from jailing the people who survive to what it describes as an all-of-government approach to cut off the supply chain at it’s source, stopping the flow of poison from getting here in the first place. The Drug Enforcement Agency says only two milligrams of fentanyl can be a lethal dose. The sooner our federal government confronts China over the manufacturing of the drug, and addresses the disaster at our southern border the better. In the meantime, a jet airliner goes down every day we wait.

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.

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