The Pacifica National Board met this weekend and here's what information I have on it.

Here is the latest on the theft of Pacifica.

Here's my take on the current crisis.

The usual WBAI Web cast has been down for more than five weeks now, so I guess it's history. However, our colleagues from Off the Hook probably have an alternate web cast going. At 7:08 PM last night it was working, so good luck.

So we hurried in and were all bundled up and it turned out that the monster storm that was going to bury New York city was bogus! It's just another example of herd journalism.

So there's the story out of Pakistan about some editors who may be facing the death penalty there because they printed a letter that some Pakistanis consider to be insulting to their dog spelled backwards. There is a blasphemy law in Pakistan and it can carry the death penalty.

It's usually a sure sign that the guys in charge don't believe in the phony baloney excuse they have for being in power when they have to resort of killing people, or severely punishing them, just because they challenge that excuse. And in this case it was just the result of some guy who was feeling too messed up to do his job. But this is the sort of crap you get when you have a theocracy.

Speaking of a wacky theocracy, the Taliban, who currently lord it over about 90% of Afghanistan, have gone on a statuary destruction spree. They are destroying all statues in Afghanistan. They say that they've already destroyed whatever was in the Kabul Museum, and as I write this they're equivocating about whether or not they've destroyed the world famous standing Buddhas at Bamiyan, which at 120 and 175 feet high are the world's tallest statues.

This is all being done because these Taliban scumbags say that their dog spelled backwards, the same one as in the above story where blasphemy is a capital offense, doesn't want these “idols” around because people may one day worship them. Pakistan has tried to dissuade the crazy Taliban from their war on art. Hell, even the pariah state of Iran is telling them that their religion doesn't require this sort of destruction of other religions' art works.

I have to wonder if Mayor Rudy Giuliani might ask George W. Bush's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to give a grant to the Taliban to have them clean out the Brooklyn Museum!

The update of this story is that the big Buddha statues may well be destroyed by now, but it's still hard to tell because there are mixed signals coming from the Taliban morons.

As I said on the air, the notorious tour bus company Big Apple Tours has finally gone out of business. There isn't much left of their Web site.

And we did manage to get to some of the mail backlog on the program. First we have two missives from Dorothy, formerly “Dorothy From the Heights.” She's had some bad news lately, but she's also gone from paper letters to E-mail. Her sometimes prolific correspondence can now be posted.

Jeez, I don't think this Susannah Martin was a relative of mine, but I'm sure I would have met the same fate as she had I been running around annoying people 300 years ago!

Well, I'm leery of discussing my security arrangements either on the air or on line, but I have both a physical firewall and a software one. I highly recommend at least a software firewall for everyone who goes on line.

Next we have another E-mail from Dorothy/DJpoet25. I've left in the link even though she sent along an impossibly large URL. If the below link doesn't work, here's Dr. Seven's Science Fiction Journal.

Did I actually get to this next one on the air? It was sent as other than plain test and didn't really print out. I have to confess that the mail is about the last thing that I print out before rushing off to get in to the program on time. My printer has paper feed problems, which is why it cost so little when I bought it used off Citibank nine years ago, and an e-mail that needs a lot of sudden processing is liable to get left out. Anyway, here it is.

What he's talking about is my comment on someone having called up some years ago saying that he knew that something was flying across the horizon at extremely high speeds, yet he didn't know how big the object was. Of course if you don't know how far away something in the sky is and can't find any independent evidence of its distance then there's no way you can tell how fast it's moving. While using the Doppler effect works fine, you need to be using something like radar, sonar or something else that you're sending out and getting back. Human eyes simply cannot do this.

Ah, the holidays. I'm glad they're over. The aurora is dynamic. A permanent move would mean that we were getting a permanent increase in the electrons that are hitting the earth and getting funnelled to the poles by our planet's magnetic field.

The last E-mail above relates to my talking about using a pencil that was in a pencil extender that regular listener and correspondent Seth has sent me to write a short story. I really think that people shouldn't read their poetry and fiction on the air. Others disagree, of course. If the story is any good it'll get published somewhere sometime. And if they throw me out of WBAI I'll have plenty more time to pursue writing.

This next E-mail is not from me. It's from a listener who used to send me a lot of mail signed “The Lord and Master of the Universe.” It's an interesting example of how easy it is to fake an identity, at least superficially, in e-mail.

There are a lot of issues that we can't talk about on the air at WBAI. But there is an Internet list called “Free Pacifica!” which you can subscribe to, and these issues are discussed there. If you subscribe to it you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

If you want to subscribe to the “Free Pacifica!” list just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. Could open your eyes a little bit.

The above list has occasionally produced a high volume of E-mail because of the attention that these issues have drawn. If you would prefer to subscribe to a low volume list that only provides announcements of events related to these issues then subscribe to the FreePac mailing list.

Back to the Back of the Book page

Back to my home page.

The contents of this Web page and subsequent Web pages on this site are copyright © 2001, R. Paul Martin