Season 7, Episode 7 January 14, 2023

On this episode, we’ll hear about Las Vegas, neon lights, underwear, and beautiful women in Let's Go Back.  Not the Headlines looks at Donald Trump's income and the Epilogue examines what it’s like to be a Gay at Harvard.

Transcript

S7E7

Hello!  Thank you for putting your ear to The Listening Tube!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley.  This is Season 7, Episode 7, and 7 is my favorite number!  On this episode, we’ll hear about Las Vegas, neon lights, underwear, beautiful women and genocide, plus what it’s like to be a Gay at Harvard...but first (Not the Headlines!)

You may have seen a headline recently about how much money Donald Trump made from foreign countries while he was President of the United States.  If not, I’ll read some of them for you.  A quick internet search has a list of them.  NPR says in their headline, “Democrats say Trump profited from foreign governments while…” and if you click on it, it takes you to a story with a different headline, which reads, “Foreign governments paid millions to Trump’s companies while he was president.”
The next one is from Forbes dot com, and says, “Trump Businessess Received $7.8 Million From Foreign...-Forbes”.  When you click on that one, you find the rest of the headline, which goes on to say...from foreign “Countries During Presidency, House Reports.”  So Forbes makes sure you know the source of their information is the House of Representatives.  And if you know that the House of Representatives has a Republican majority, it sounds pretty serious if they’re snitching on Trump.
The next on the list is the New York Times, and the headline reads, “Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds”
The Guardian and the BBC had similar headlines, as did bloomburg dot com, but Bloomburg was a little more honest when it’s headline read, “Trump Hotels Made Millions From foreign Governments During…”  When you click to the story, the headline says, “Democrats Say Trump Hotels Got Foreign Money During Presidency.”
All of those headlines lead you to believe one thing:  that Donald Trump was using his hotels as a cover to take bribes from foreign governments.  Even if he wasn’t taking bribes, the NPR story says it’s illegal for presidents to accept any money from foreign governments without congressional approval, citing the Constitution.  It prohibits any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.  It seems like the authors of that line wanted to cover all the bases.  Traditionally, when one is elected President of the United States, they divest from their business for their term in office.  But Donald Trump didn’t do that.  Instead, he handed responsibility of the business to his two eldest sons.  But just to be clear that there wouldn’t be any hanky-panky, he also pledged to make no new foreign business deals while in office.  He must have kept that pledge, otherwise I’m sure the story would have pointed it out.
What the story did point out was that over two years of his Presidency, Donald Trumps hotels made nearly 8 million dollars from foreign governments.  The story lists only the scary ones like China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but say the investigation revealed payments from about 20 nations altogether.  So, did Donald Trump break the law?  Since he didn’t divest from his business, you might make the argument on a technicality.  Although we knew he was a real estate mogul when we elected him.  What’s he supposed to do, say no foreigners are allowed to stay at his hotels while he’s President of the United States?  Well, that would be discriminatory!  Imagine what the press would have done if a Trump hotel posted a “No Foreigners” sign!  Maybe they’d run ads that said, “Trump Hotels...world class amenities but the world isn’t allowed in at the moment.”  I’m sure that would have gone over well. 
But eight million dollars is eight million dollars, right?  What the headline doesn’t tell you is that 5.4 million of it was from one customer that began renting space in New York’s Trump Tower way back in 2008.  That customer is a Chinese-owned bank.  So that leaves 2.6 million from hotel stays, and the story lists five countries that spent at least 200,000 dollars each.  Two-hundred thousand times 5 is a million, so 1.6 million came from the other 14 countries, or about 114-thousand each.   
 Let’s try to put that into perspective.  A Washington Post story from July of last year took a close look at Trumps income, based on financial records after his term as president.  It says the Donald has almost a hundred sources of income that amounted to over 1.2 billion dollars.  He and his wife made about 6 million from speaking fees alone.  The report by the Democrats on the House Oversight Commitee, is concerned that less than eight million dollars is enough to buy Donald Trump’s patriotism.  Just kidding, they’re not!  They’re just looking for a way to keep Donald Trump from becoming President again, and a way to draw attention away from the impeachment inquiry currently underway by the Republicans.
There’s something else the headlines didn’t tell us.  But if you read the story, you’ll discover that a spokesperson for the Trump organization told NPR in an email that profits from the hotel stays in question were donated in full to the United States Treasury while Trump was in office.  So, as it turns out, he didn’t really make a profit from foreign governments at all.  I guess they couldn’t fit that into the headlines.  The Washington, D.C. Trump International Hotel said at the time that they would not market to foreign delegations to avoid any conflict of interest.  But as we’ve already discussed, they couldn’t refuse foreigners either.
As for the Democrats conducting the investigation, they say it doesn’t matter that President Trump didn’t keep the profits.  He’s still in violation of the Constitution, and in order to complete the investigation, they’ll need access to more of Donald Trump’s financial records.  This isn’t about Donald Trumps hotel rooms being used by foreign dignitaries.  This isn’t about Donald Trump being swayed by foreign governments who spend money at his hotels.  You can’t buy Donald Trump.  He served as President of the United States of America and didn’t accept pay for it!  He donated his salary to charities.  If the Democrats think a report about Donald Trump’s hotels hosting foreign guests is gonna stick, they’re crazy.  But they don’t think it will stick anyway.  It doesn’t matter if it does or not.  It’s just another headache for Donald Trump, along with the four indictments and other lawsuits and decisions about ballot exclusions around the country.  Which is another story altogether.  I hear a lot of talk from the left about how democracy itself is threatened if Donald Trump is elected President this November.  At the same time, radical Democrats across the country are taking steps to insure you never even get the chance to vote for him.  Who’s the threat to democracy now? 

Let’s go back liner

1847
John C. Fremont is appointed Governor of the new California Territory.  So what, right?  Well, this was a lateral move for John Fremont.  He had already taken control of California as a Major in the Army.  He led three legendary massacres of Native Americans, leading to his appointment.  But once it became official, it didn’t last long.  Less than a month, in fact.  He was court-martialed and convicted of mutiny and insubordination, according to wikipedia, over who was the rightful governor of California.  Turns out his boss wanted the job.  So, like all great political leaders do, he had his opponent arrested.  After his sentence was commuted by President Polk, he resigned from the Army.
Fremont had purchased some cheap land in in the foothills of the Sierra mountains.  Next thing you know ol’ John’s a millionaire.  Turns out his land had a lot of gold underneath it.  In 1850, when California officially became a state, John C. Fremont was elected an original Senator from the great State of California.  He wasn’t done there, though.  In 1856, he was the first nominee for President of the United States from the brand-new Republican Party.  You know, the party that went on to free the slaves and make the United States a slave-free country.  They would have to wait, though, as Fremont lost to James Buchanan.  John C. Fremont led a roller-coaster life, with many successes and just as many failures.  He was also the Governor of the Arizona Territory from 1878 to 1881 after serving under President Lincoln as Commander of the Army for the area west of the Mississippi River, all the way to California.  President Lincoln relieved Fremont of his duties for insubordination.  After retiring from politics, he died, destitute, in New York City, at the age of 77.
Around the nation today, John C. Fremont, an illegitimate child born in Georgia, has named after him four counties, fourteen towns, including two in New York, eight geographical features in the western half of the country, a National Forest, a trail, a bridge, two avenues, one in New York and one in California, and perhaps the most recognizable, Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, home of the Fremont Street Experience and other than the Las Vegas Strip, the most famous street in the State of Nevada, a state to which I could find no other connection with John C. Fremont whatsoever.

Speaking of Las Vegas, it was this week in 1915 that...
Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube.  Yes, those neon lights that made Las Vegas visible from miles away in the dark of the desert.  Monsieur Claude was a Frenchman, and had been working with gasses for quite a long time.  In fact, his first demonstration of neon lighting was at the 1910 Paris Motor Show.  But it wasn’t until he got a patent in the United States that his company, Claude Neon Lights, began to make an impact.  The best part was that neon gas was merely a by-product of his air liquefaction business.  Until neon lights, neon gas was just stuff in a scientific junk drawer.  
At first, he made signs for businesses that would surely stand out!  Gradually, it would lead to the product signs we see on the Las Vegas Strip, as well as Fremont Street, Times Square, and in the windows of every bar and tavern on the streets of practically every county in every state and all around the world. 

1935
Coopers Inc. sells the world’s first briefs.  That doesn’t mean men didn’t wear undergarments until 1935.  The jock strap had already been invented for bicycle riders to keep their junk in one spot.  But men’s undergarments prior to the Cooper Jockey Y-front briefs were more like pantaloons or long-johns that buttoned or laced up the front.  Cooper’s briefs inverted Y design created allowed for the fabric overlap and what we now know as the fly, according to an article on the Victoria and Albert Museum website.  
Cooper’s briefs were the industry leader in men’s undergarments for nearly fifty years, until 1982, when a guy named Calvin Klein introduced his own version of what men should be wearing underneath.  Although similar, the story says the Calvin’s had a closer fit and the name on the waistband, along with a lower rise.  That must be fashion speak.  If you’ve never heard of Cooper’s briefs, that’s okay, because Cooper’s changed their name to Jockey Meanswear in 1971, and today they even make intimate clothing for women.   

1945
The Nazis begin the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp as Soviet forces close in.  The people protesting on college campuses and in large cities across America claiming Israel is committing genocide must have no idea of the scope of an actual genocide.  And it was the genocide attempt by the Nazi’s to rid the world of Jews that is, and will forever, I hope, be the closest mankind ever comes to succeeding.  Those who are claiming Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians need only look to Auschwitz for what a genocide really looks like.  Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and thousands more were spared only by the timing of the Soviet advance.  Today, over 70 years later, there are people trying to identify people in photographs left behind at Auschwitz.  If you’re going to protest and accuse a country or an entity of committing genocide, first take a look at what happened at Auschwitz.  Then just sit your ass back down.   

Speaking of genocide, it was this week in 1951 that Ilse Koch, “The Witch of Buchenwald”, wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprison by a court in West Germany.  But for this woman, witch was an understatement.  She had other nicknames, too.  The Beast of Buchenwald, Red Witch of Buchenwald, and The Bitch of Buchenwald.  This woman was so evil, even the Nazi’s put her in jail.  By the way, Buchenwald was another place where Jews were executed simply because they were Jews.  Ilse and her husband were both investigated by the Nazi police, or SS, and were charged with embezzlement of more than 200-thousand reichs marks and other crimes for which her husband was executed at Buchenwald, ironically just days before it was liberated, according to wikipedia.  She would serve 16 months in prison.  About six months later, she’s recognized on the street by a former Buchenwald prisoner and arrested by the American occupation forces in Ludwigsburg.  She was tried for war crimes committed at Buchenwald and sentenced to life in prison.
But her story wasn’t over.  The commander of the allied occupation, General Lucius Clay, determined upon review of the case by American Army lawyers, that there was not enough evidence to hold her for war crimes.  General Clay later said he got more abuse for that decision than for anything else he did in Germany.  The U.S. government urged the West Germans to put her through their judicial system, since it was crimes against the German people for which she was most notorious.  She was arrested upon being released by the Americans.  She was indicted on more than a hundred charges, including incitement to murder and grievous bodily harm.  She was found guilty of nine counts, and sentenced to life in prison by the German court.  While in prison from 1951 to 1967, she began to have delusions that Buchenwald survivors were coming into her cell to abuse her in retribution for her sins against them.  She would commit suicide in her prison cell at the age of 60.

1961
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the “military-industrial complex”. Huh.

1977
Snow falls in Miami, Florida. This is the only time in the history of the city that snow has fallen. It also fell in the Bahamas.  Climate change!  Said nobody.

1979
The Shah of Iran flees Iran with his family and relocates to Egypt.  This is when the religions leaders of Iran took control.  You see, the Shah was an ally of the United States.  Iran was more like a western country than a middle east country back then.  Women had the freedom to dress the way they wanted.  They could wear two-piece bathing suits in public.  And they did.  I don’t know what experiences you’ve had, but I can honestly say that every woman I’ve ever met from Iran was beautiful.  Is beautiful.  Sure, America and Europe have beautiful women, too, but if we could only see the women in Iran, it might be no contest.  It’s no wonder the women in Iran are forced to wear burkas.  Otherwise, men would be forced to violate their religious beliefs if the beautiful women of Iran were just walking around with their ankles showing.

1982
“Cold Sunday” - in the United States temperatures fell to their lowest levels in over 100 years in numerous cities.  So, from 1977, when snow fell in Miami, to 1982, during a once-a-century cold snap, we were probably worried about the Earth getting too cold.  Ice age coming!  Now, it’s just the opposite.  

1990
Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry is arrested for drug possession in an FBI sting.  But racism still got him re-elected.

1994
1994 Northridge earthquake: A magnitude 6.7 earthquake hits Northridge, California.  I remember that one.  I was living in southern California at the time.  It came early in the morning.  But it didn’t hit all at once.  I remember it shaking just enough to get you to wake up before it really let you have it.  I jumped up on the bed and looked around for Emmit Smith to come crashing through the bedroom door.  He didn’t.  But the place was rockin’.  I lived in an apartment on the second floor with my wife and two daughters.  The first thing my wife did was stumble into the girls bedroom to make sure they were okay.  I just started to put on my pants because I remembered that the girls weren’t in their bedroom.  They had spent the night at a friends house, so I knew we’d be making our way over there as soon as my wife realized they weren’t home.  That began a day of aftershocks, which the girls were just thrilled about.  Later that day, after coming home from an errand and missing a good one because you can’t feel them when you’re in the car, the girls excitedly told me that they were playing in the aftershock and the water in the pool splashed them.  Good times. 

2009
During the Gaza War, Hamas announces they will accept the Israeli Defense Forces’s offer of a ceasefire.  Oh, thank goodness the Israel/Hamas war is over.  Oh, wait.  Did I just say this week in 2009?  Fourteen years ago?  Well, yes I did!  Those who forget history are destined to repeat it...  

Speed of sound liner

I hope to see you at Podfest 2024 in Orlando, January 24th through the 28th!  If you see me, say hi!

Phone and email liner

While it took a while to shake out, the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, resigned her position there to step down to another position at the University, at a reported salary of about 900-thousand dollars a year.  Her downfall, say many, was that she became the target of conservatives, and now the right wing has a new tool to use against progressives:  plagiarism.  The first thing I’d like to point out is that the people who the elite consider to be stupid are the ones now using academic standards to make a point.  Yea, put that in your atomizer and spray it on your neck.  But since the left can’t admit that they’ve been outsmarted by the right, they go back to the same old argument that’s worked since the 1960’s; racism.  And they’re right.  This whole situation is the result of racism.  If it weren’t for racism, President Gay might have gone through a more thorough vetting process, and the dozens of plagiarism accusations would have been discovered prior to her appointment as the head of what is perhaps the most prestigious university in the world.  If the Harvard corporation was concerned with the reputation of Harvard as a place of learning, she might not have been hired.  Instead, Harvard was more interested in appointing a figurehead to demonstrate it’s commitment to diversity.  To be more specific, Inclusion, Equity and Diversity.  The false equivalencies that demands you succumb to the wishes of those who wish to insert beliefs other than yours into the equation of your everyday life.  
For some, it’s not enough to offer you the option of changing your life, be it for the better or not.  For some, it’s a requirement.  Your lack of options is justified because the options of others have been restricted for so long.  In order to correct what was wrong, we have to put people into powerful positions who are anything but the people who got us to where we are now.  Because God knows, life sucks for a lot of us, and we have no one to blame but the white old men who got us here.  You know, the most powerful country on the planet.  What a bunch of screw-ups!  
So we end up with people like the former President of Penn, and the former President of Harvard and the current president of M.I.T in charge of higher education.  And what makes me shake my head the most is the fact that the first one of the three to resign her position because of the cookie-cutter, attorney-inspired responses to the questions about anti-Semitism during a House hearing was a white woman, yet all the media is telling us is that the whole thing against President Gay is nothing more than racism and bigotry.  So, it must have been black people complaining that caused the lilly-white president of Penn to resign first.
The only thing that kept President Gay in Harvard was the fact that she was the first black female President of the University, and to fire her would be a stain on the whole Inclusion, Equity and Diversity push that performative activism requires.  But when it comes to President Gay, it wasn’t just the piss-poor answers she gave about protecting Harvard students, it was also the scores of plagiarism accusations that led to her downfall.  The leader of Penn could see right away that she screwed up, but President Gay played the race card as long as she could.  She continued to play the race card in her resignation letter.  Not once did she mention her testimony on Capitol Hill, nor the racism she enabled on her campus, but blamed her resignation on outside forces instead of her inside failures.  Not only did this woman fail to protect her students, she also provided a way for other bigots to exercise their beliefs by telling the whole country that calling for the elimination of Jewish people was acceptable depending upon the context.  What exactly did she mean by that?  Did she mean it’s okay to call for the elimination of all Jews as long as it’s caused by a tornado or some natural event?  
“Well, like it would be okay if the Red Sea had collapsed on them before they could get to the other side.”  What other context could she have meant?  Maybe she thought it was okay for her Jewish students to be killed as long as the context didn’t include the Harvard campus.  But what she said or what she meant doesn’t matter anymore, because the whole reason she had to resign was because of her race and gender.  Only because she was the first black woman to be president of Harvard was she a target of conservatives, according to various new sources.  While it may have been her congressional testimony and her plagiarism that led to her getting knocked down a peg at Harvard, the story you’ll hear is that she was a target of conservatives because of her skin color and gender.  Because everybody knows conservatives hate people of color and women.  Especially women of color.  Which is so mysterious, considering the fine example Vice-President Harris has demonstrated as the leader of controlling our borders.  
So, yes, there’s no one to blame but conservatives for the condition of Harvard University.  Because if it wasn’t for the Republican’s threat to democracy, there would be no need for Diversity, Inclusion and Equity programs.  If it wasn’t for conservatives, there would be no need to appoint a plagiarist to lead Harvard.  If it wasn’t for conservatives, there would be no need for diversity, as we all know only white people are conservatives and only colored people are diverse.  If you want diversity, you have to discriminate against white people.  I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you that, but that’s just the way it is.  White people had a good run, but they’ve hit a dead end and the only way to move forward as a society is to exclude white people from the vision.  White people have been leading the way for far too long, and the only way to make the world a better place is to put anybody but a white person, especially a man, in charge.  That will fix everything.  Or so Harvard thought.
Now, I’m not saying the next President of Harvard has to be a white guy.  I’m also not saying the next President of Harvard needs to be a Hispanic nymph.  What I’m saying is that the right person for the job is out there somewhere, and you might be excluding that person because he or she might just be a white person, or a slightly pink person.  That’s what I am.  Sometimes in the winter, my hands turn purple.  By that measure, I’m more colorful than most of us.  But I’m not the right person to be the President of Harvard.
By the way, while we’re on the subject, if you’re a regular listener to the program, you probably already know that I always give credit to my sources.  You’ve heard me many times citing wikipedia and other sources like the Associated Press and even individual authors.  I’m not here to steal credit from anybody.  I’m happy to tell you where I found the information I use here.  The facts I repeat are sourced as well as I can source them, and the other nonsense comes entirely from me.  I hope you know by now that I’m not here to lie to you.  Claudine Gay could learn a thing or two from me.
Getting back to the accused racism that led to the resignation of Claudine Gay from Harvard, the only racism that led to the position she’s in now was the racism that led to her getting hired in the first place.  Had she been a man, or more specifically a white man, she may not have been in the position of President of Harvard.  She wouldn’t have had to testify before congress.  If her standards had been equal to a white heterosexual male, she might not have been given the job of President of Harvard.  If she had been investigated in the same way a non-diversity hire would have been, Harvard might not be in it’s current position.  But the Harvard corporation chose looking good over being good, which is a mistake a lot of corporations have been making lately.  Bud Light and Target come to mind.
But universities have a lifeline commercial enterprises don’t:  Alumni donors.  It didn’t matter what political side the education came down on, as long as the donors were happy.  Now, at least Harvard knows where to draw the line.  Harvard can be as elite as it wants, as long as it upholds the equality mantra it echoes.  It wasn’t doing that when it came to Jewish students.  Why?  I don’t know.  People seem to fear Jews for some reason.  Small groups of White people and people of color seem to agree that they’re allowed to discriminate against Jewish people.  The leaders of three prestigious learning places, Penn, M.I.T., and Harvard, seemed to agree that discrimination was alright as long as it was aimed at the right people and in the right context.
All three of the women who where summoned to the House of Representatives to testify on the response of their respective institutions to Anti-semitism thought that they were saying the right thing.  Two of them weren’t.  One resigned and the other was demoted.  Only one of the women were the subject of racism, and that was the black woman.  The only racism in play when it comes to her employment at Harvard was the racism that got her hired in the first place.   
In her resignation letter, Gay said it was, “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am.”  What a joke.  She had plenty of opportunities to confront hate on the campus of Harvard, but instead chose to tolerate it.  She had the opportunity to confront hate when she testified in the House of Representatives, but instead she chose to play word games about hate being dependent upon the context.  As far as upholding scholarly rigor, her dozens of incidents of plagiarism would indicate any scholarly rigor doesn’t apply to her, nor has it.  Then she goes on to play the victim by saying it’s “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”  Was it race that made her copy the work of other people?  I would say other scholars, but that would indicate she, too, is a scholar.  Right now I’m not so sure.  Was it her race that made her ignore the personal attacks against her Jewish students?  Was it her race that made her insist that calling for the extermination of the Jewish state was allowed as long as it was in the right context?  I would hate to think so!  But Claudine Gay, left-wing media, and radical progressives will insist that none of this would have happened to her if she wasn’t Black.
Claudine went on to say that recent activities at Harvard show that work needs to be done to build a future at Harvard, “to combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.”  Shouldn’t Harvard already be all that?  Well, it obviously wasn’t under Claudine Gay’s watch.
In the final paragraph, Claudine tells us how she wants her brief tenure as President to be remembered.  She wants it to be seen as “a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.”  Rancor and vituperation?

Look that up liner

Rancor is defined as bitterness or resentfulness, especially when long-standing.  Maybe she means that the problems at Harvard go back before she took the helm, you know, blame the last administration.  You were going to fix it, but you ran out of time, I guess.  As for vituperation, that’s defined as bitter and abusive language.  Well, Claudine, it was you who allowed such language as “from the river to the sea.”  If you wanted to rid Harvard of vituperation, you could have started there.  As for how your Presidency will be remembered, it’s very presumptuous of you to think that anybody will want to remember it at all.  You’ve embarrassed the University, enabled antisemitism, insulted education standards, and plagiarized your way to place where your deceit became obvious.  You put the Harvard corporation between a rock and a hard place, and the board found itself in quite the pickle.  They were too embarrassed to admit they made a mistake by promoting you, so they stuck up for you at first.  But when all the evidence of plagiarism came to light, regardless of who revealed it to the public, they had no choice but to try to find a way to save face, and the only way to do that was to demote you.  I’m actually surprised they kept you at all.  But once again, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity policies came to your rescue.  Instead of blaming racism for your demise, you should thank racism for your ascent.  

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly.  Copyright 2024.  Thank you for putting your ear to The Listening Tube!  Subscribe today on the website!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley, for thou ad infinitum.