Back of the Book links for the March 10, 2008, program

It's Saturday afternoon, March 22, 2008, 14:41, and I've updated this page with the location of next week's LSB meeting and noted that it will not be the first meeting of the Fourth WBAI LSB. There's also an update of the information about the elections below. This was a regular radio program, no pitching. Besides talking about things that have happened during the past fortnight we're also going to see if we can slip in some of the stuff that we'd wanted to talk about but didn't have time for in February when we were pitching for the entire month! We got to the below topics and more. We also read some of the mail. If there are any more developments regarding the WBAI elections I'll update this page.

UPDATE as of Monday, March 17, 2008: The balloting in the 2007, WBAI elections is over at last.

On Saturday, March 15, 2008, Local Elections Supervisor Dale Ratner, who is now solely in charge of election supervision at WBAI, took the box of ballots that had been sealed by court order on November 19, and the ballots collected on November 16, and brought them to WBAI to be counted.

A quorum for the listener part of this election was 1,552 ballots. It is reliably reported that about 2,482 listener ballots have been cast.

A quorum for the Staff part of this election was 66. It is reliably reported that approximately 96 Staff ballots have been cast.

So the quorums for this election had in fact been met in November.

Here is a more detailed description of the ballot counting.

There is still the issue of those people who had requested replacement ballots before the bylaws mandated close date of November 15, who had sent their ballots in later on. The Local Elections Supervisor and the company which has been chosen to actually tabulate the ballots are going to have to pull those ballots out from the plethora of other ballots that have been cast in the 4 months since the election legally closed.

If you've already asked for a replacement ballot you should have gotten one in time to vote. But, if you are either a listener member or a Staff member of WBAI and you did not receive a ballot and/or you requested a replacement ballot then you need to immediately contact Frank LeFever Ph.D. and Mitchel Cohen and let them know if you didn't get a ballot and whether or not you got a replacement ballot. This information may still affect this election.

There has been a lawsuit filed about the way this election has been handled. Now that the balloting is over I can put in a link to the Web page that has the most detailed information about the lawsuit. Here is a posting about some of the later details of the case. The counting still has to be done and there's still the possibility that there could be further legal action, so I'll continue to update this information until we finally have certified election results.

There's a regular LSB meeting scheduled for March 25^th at 7:00 PM, in the Bread and Roses Art Gallery of Local 1199, at 310 West 43^rd St. between 8^th & 9^th Avenues, in Manhattan. ~~Since the election results ought to be in by then this should be the first meeting of the Fourth WBAI LSB.~~ The ballots may not be counted until March 31, so this LSB meeting will consist of the same bunch of holdovers.

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.

WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to the program any time for the next couple of months. When you first go to the Web page you'll only see the WBAI programs for the past 7 days. If you want to see older programs you can click on one of the “See ALL Shows” buttons.

Back of the Book is now one of the programs that you can download, as well as listen to on line.

I'm glad to announce that with a new person doing the archives there have been some positive changes. In the table on that Web page Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are both in the Show column. The “Date and Category” column shows the date of the program. After the program I go in and write the details of the program and say which program it is. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

The Vernal Equinox will be on Thursday, March 20, 2008, at 1:48 AM (ET). We'll be glad to see it. I have a Web page with seasonal details.

We have previously reported that Nicole Sawaya had been selected as the Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation and that she was supposed to have started in that position in November 2007.

It was then reported by The Berkeley Daily Planet that Ms. Sawaya had seemingly resigned after one month on the job, but that discussions were going on between her and the PNB. Exactly what the nature of those discussions might have been about was not known by anyone outside of the principals involved. Dan Siegal, Pacifica's General Counsel, continued to act as Pacifica's interim Executive Director.

The Pacifica Foundation has issued a press release dated March 4, 2008, saying that, “Nicole Sawaya has accepted the offer of the Pacifica National Board to return as Pacifica’s Executive Director. She will resume her duties as of March 5, 2008, and will attend the Houston meeting next week.” The press release is signed by interim Executive Director Dan Siegal.

So there is a new Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation and there is a new General Manager of WBAI all within days of each other. How all of this will impact the unperturbed decline of the Pacifica Foundation remains to be seen.

The government of Pakistan shut down access to YouTube this past week because they were trying to block all Pakistanis from seeing it. Apparently there was a video which showed some of the cartoons about the so called Prophet Mohammed (real name Abul Kasem Ibn Abdullah) up on YouTube and the government of Pakistan wanted to censor that.

This could be the prelude to a new type of effective attack on Web sites that various people don't like. This could result in another cyber war scenario, a variation on the one that happened when Russia shut down the Estonian state's access to the Internet.

Meanwhile YouTube took down the “offensive” video, while leaving up various videos that extoll what the muslim censors agree with.

Pickles of the North did a segment on some disturbing findings regarding our drinking water.

There is a lot more in our drinking water than most of us ever knew. The Associated Press funded testing of many municipalities' drinking water, including New York City's, and the results have now prompted a possible Senate hearing on the matter. There are traces of drugs and caffeine in drinking water world-wide. Yikes.

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.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Carrier Wave alternates with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.