Back of the Book — April 18, 2020


We're locked in, you probably are too. If this program appears to not be on it is probably because the pre-recorded programs in front of us did not end on time and so we are getting on some minutes late. Stay tuned and we'll come on. We covered the stuff below. It really is strange doing the program this way week after week.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings?

I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.

The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on May 13, 2020, it will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the March 11, and April 8, 2020, meetings were because of the pandemic.

The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, April 8, 2020.

The LSB met via teleconference. People were elected to the Program Director Search Committee and non-LSB members were nominated for it. Oh, it was a bit of a rocky meeting due to the technical limitations of meeting via a certain service that has privacy and security problems. Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.

Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:

All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.

WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.

Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.

WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.

This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display, and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.

For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display, and find Specify Date, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.

Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. There is sometimes a pre-recorded program in the alternate week's time slot.

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!

Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?

More to come.

This is a recorded program. We have to pre-record it (but isn't pre-recorded a redundancy of recorded?) because of the Pandemic lock down, and WBAI Management has made the station off-limits to all but the Operations Staff.

We talked about the current Pandemic, and about staying home. Pickles of the North talked about what she's seeing when she goes out once a week to buy groceries. R. Paul talked about just staying home so as to avoid getting killed by this thing.

We talked about the new, daily Trump reality show and how some networks are no longer carrying it since they frequently make no sense and are just campaign rallies. He announced a long list of names on one of them of people who are on his task force to reopen the economy, and it turned out that some of them had never heard that they were on it.

In the midst of this pandemic Trump announced on one of these campaign rallies/press conferences that he was defunding the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) because they hadn't reacted to the crisis quickly enough! When reporters asked if he hadn't been the one who hadn't reacted quickly enough he berated and belittled them. Why do the reporters put up with this above? Here's one answer.

We talked about a piece in the New York Times that outlined how Vladimir Putin has had Russia attacking the American information space for yeas. They have been creating and fomenting the crazy shit like anti-vaccine campaigns and suggestions that HIV, H1N1, SARS and the Novel Coronavirus 2019, were either American military operations or fake claims of diseases. We talked about seeing some conspiracy nuts on at least one unofficial Pacifica-related mailing list going on about how the entire COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax and that there's really no one in those hospitals and no one is dying. yeah, these conspiracy nuts want us to believe that hundreds of thousands of people all around the world are engaged in a massive hoax and after months of this hoax no one is blowing the whistle on it all. And the Russian media are just feeding the conspiracy nuts these and other crackpot ideas to spread around and affect the behavioer of Americans in a detrimental way.

We talked about the discovery of what seems to be some twine at a site in southeastern France. The reason why this is news is that the twine appears to be about 50,000 years old and was unearthed from a Neanderthal site. The sample of twine, or cordage as they officially call it, is only about a quarter of an inch long. If it does turn out to be cordage then it will show that Neanderthals had a lot more on the ball than had previously been thought. They probably were able to count.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.

One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI specific Goodlight Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board, owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people board that was just totally out of hand.

In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.

Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board during the program.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.

One formerly popular mailing list is the NewPacifica mailing list. Founded October 31, 2000, this list has been moribund for a couple of years due to de facto censorship by the group owner. As of February 2019, it had 696 subscribers coast to coast, but postings on it had become very infrequent. During the WBAI Coup of 2019, traffic picked up on that board again, for a while.

Back in the day it sometimes also got a bit nasty. All sorts of things used to happen on that list and official announcements were frequently posted there.

You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the NewPacifica mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.

There is the option to receive a digest version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

You can also send me E-mail.

And now you can even reach me on Twitter Twitter logo


WBAI related links

A WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site

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