Web links related to the Back of the Book program of January 2, 2006


It's Sunday afternoon 1/8/2006 16:50:29 and although this page isn't done yet, it has been updated a bit. More updating to come. Merry New Year! We're going to cover the below stuff and more on this radio program. And I really am going to try to get this, and other, Web pages updated soon!

The next WBAI Local Station Board meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, January 11th. There will be a WBAI Delegates meeting at 6:30 to elect a members to the Pacifica National Board . The Local Station Board meeting is at 7:00 PM. All of this fun will take place at the Brooklyn Neighborhood Office of the Legal Aid Society, 111 Livingston St., 7th Floor, Brooklyn. (Take the 2, 3, 4, 5, to Borough Hall, or A,C,E,F to Jay St./Borough Hall or the R to Court St. in Brooklyn.)

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do. And I'll be updating it soon.

The December 20th, LSB meeting was held in Brooklyn. The transit strike was on and so the meeting started nearly an hour and a half late. The faction currently in charge elected their pre-determined candidates and it was mostly a dreary and boring meeting.

We also still have the issue of the member whom the faction has illegally suspended. I pointed out that his six month suspension was in its ninth month, but the faction likes to use their majority to exact revenge on people for their faction boss.

The guy who always denounced me denounced me, along with another Staff member who's demanding fiscal accountability at WBAI. He may be very surprised at the next Finance Committee meeting.

I have written a statement about the constructive removal of a LSB member and sent it to the PNB, the WBAI LSB and various public mailing lists and bulletin boards.

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.

Our colleagues from Off the Hook now have both a RealAudio streaming web cast operating, and a new MP3 stream. The MP3 feed is now the preferred feed. Both feeds were working at 10:35 PM last night.

The Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, has revamped its Web site and now has something called the Pacifica Lounge where you can post messages about Pacifica, WBAI and other Pacifica radio stations. This may be a good thing, and of course there are other, long term fora in which to participate.

WBAI also has a forum on its Web site now. You have to register to post messages, but anyone may read the messages.

WBAI is now archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to the program any time for the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, Back of the Book is not one of the programs that you can download, you can only listen to it on line. But maybe someone will change that at some point.

Well, for regular listeners this is probably the most interesting development of this radio program: Pickles of the North proposed marriage to R. Paul Martin on the air! R. Paul accepted.

And so an actual marriage will take place, not on the air, in the next few weeks. And, yes, this was a surprise. Pickles has said in the past that she was going to do this but this time she actually did it.

For those who want to hear the event for the first time, or who want to re-live it, here's the audio of the proposal. And for those whose browsers won't deal with that, here's the audio file, just click on that or try to download it and listen to it.

Limbo's current status is, well, in Limbo. The Roman Catholic Church is looking into eliminating this bit of doctrine or non-doctrine.

When I was a kid going to Catholic school we had the idea of Limbo drummed into us. There was no equivocation about it, Limbo was doctrine! We were told that babies who died without having been baptized went to Limbo. We were later taught that good people who hadn't been baptized, like Moses and other luminaries from the Old Testament, had cooled their heels in Limbo until Jesus H. Christ died and then they finally got let into heaven.

In Catholic school we were taught how to baptize anyone who needed it. This in an effort to save babies from having to go to Limbo. In fact we were given questions about Limbo in our religion tests and those questions had to be answered correctly or you were marked wrong on them, as in any other test.

St. Augustine had the position that unbaptized babies just went right to Hell! Nice guy, no wonder he's the special hero of Jozef Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger said in an interview in 1984, that Limbo has never been doctrine, just a “theological hypothesis.”

So now that there's a new Vatican commission dealing with this it is generally thought that Limbo is going to Hell! Which is interesting because in 1905, Pope Pius X said that, “Children who die without baptism go into limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but they do not suffer either.” So much for the infallibility of the Pope on matters of faith! Clearly that infallibility thing can be gotten around when it becomes inconvenient to current political motivations.

Pope John Paul II took mention of Limbo out of the latest Catholic catechism. Of course what this is really about is the Catholic Church's battle to prevent women from having a choice about whether or not to have abortions. Ratzinger wants to be able to tell women that if they get abortions then their aborted fetuses will be standing around with dog spelled backwards condemning them. What a nice guy.

Until it gets decommissioned by the Catholic Church Limbo is just in Limbo.

This also calls into question the Catholic Church's stand on Purgatory, a sort of temporary Hell where people who don't die in mortal sin get tortured, sometimes for centuries or millennia according to my old religion teachers, until they've paid for their minor, venial, sins. Gosh, what a fun supreme being some people enjoy. Anyway, Purgatory is not the the Bible either. Purgatory is really only an agreement among Bishops from about a thousand or so years ago. But I guess it's a case of one thing at a time. Limbo wasn't something that you could threaten people with, Purgatory is. Also, the Vatican can sell indulgences, basically plea bargains to get less time in Purgatory, and the well known plenary indulgences, a get out of Purgatory free card. The selling of indulgences was part of what sparked the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th Century.

We're going to talk about this Bush spy crap, and some of the consequences of it. We'll also talk about the transit strike and how Pickles of the North and I dealt with it. We'll also talk about some science news and other things.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even now that the gag rule has been lifted. 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.

Probably the most popular list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 subscribers coast to coast.

Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list and official announcements are 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.

This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.

There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand.

When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.

And then there is the historic “Free Pacifica!” list, which has been used to help organize resistance to Pacifica Management hijackers since the mid-90s. It's become a low volume mailing list because it's been eclipsed by some of the newer, more technologically advanced, lists. Just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. This is a mailing list only, it doesn't have a digest option nor does it have a web interface.

My voice mail number at WBAI is 212-209-2996. Leave a message.

You can also send me E-mail.



WBAI related links

Free Pacifica Web site

WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site


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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2005, R. Paul Martin.