It's Sunday night 3/25/2001 23:15:18 and thanks to various WBAI duties, including the beginning of renegotiating the Union Contract for the station, and Verizon blowing my DSL access for days, this is all getting done late. But this page appears to be finally done at last! And Mir missed us! Now we just have to hope that everything else misses us.
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 almost two months now, so I guess it's history. However, our colleagues from Off the Hook probably have an alternate web cast going. At 10:16 PM last night it was working, so good luck.
Spring is almost here! The first Spring of the 21st Century will arrive on Tuesday, March 20th, at 8:31 AM (EST). Seems like this one's been a long time coming. I have more about the seasons on this Web site.
So I read a really depressing piece in the New York Times about early onset Alzheimer's Disease. It's about a college professor who started showing signs at age 50 and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at 53. In the past few years he's gone rapidly downhill. Of course this sounds badly like my situation. I've been forgetting names of people for a few years now, and there is Alzheimer's Disease in my family. So this early onset stuff, which could mean that I wouldn't even know who the hell I am in a few years, is not a nice possibility for me to contemplate. Of course I may simply be troubled by a tiny fragment of brain lodged in my skull.
Speaking of getting something lodged in your skull, the Mir Space Station is set to come crashing down to Earth from it's orbit in outer space, euphemistically called a “de-orbit” on Tuesday. Say goodbye to the Mir tracking service.
Well, it's all over and apparently no one got hit with a piece of the Mir spacecraft. Maybe they just wanted to make sure that no one tried to open the Academy Awards from the wrong space station.
As promised, here's a general spacecraft tracking Web site.
China has decided that being gay is not a mental illness — at last. This conclusion was reached by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1973. Most people buy the propaganda that this was achieved by the group called the National Gay Task Force (NGTF), now the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, but that's not true. In fact this work was done by the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). When the NGTF was formed, by former members of GAA, they walked out the door with a load of things, including credit for the change of opinion by the APA.
An interesting little fact: The APA convention where this was accomplished was held in Hawaii in the Summer of 1973. The NGTF was not founded until the Fall of 1973. GAA spent over $4,000 on lobbying the APA. This was a huge sum in 1973. How much did NGTF spend on it? Oh, yeah, they didn't exist yet.
The scumbag Taliban have apparently made good on their threats to destroy every statue in Afghanistan.
A company was trying to get information on who had anonymously said things they didn't like on the Internet. But the company wanted to remain anonymous while doing this! I'm glad to say that they've been defeated in court.
The folks at the so called “Church of Scientology” have attacked Slashdot for posting one of their sacred scriptures, which are copyrighted.
As I was preparing the program I heard of the death of John Phillips of “The Mamas and Papas”. So I played some old tunes and remembered the group a bit. Half of them are gone now.
I really am catching up on the mail backlog. I read through several pieces of snail mail as well as some E-mail on the program. As per my usual practice I'll be putting only the E-mails up here.
The backlog goes back long enough the time that some listeners were still writing in about The Stolen Election of 2000.
The below message didn't get read on the air because it just didn't format well enough to get there. And now that I look at it, it obviously contains news stories from other sites. Besides copyright considerations, I figure that the link will be good enough for you to see the stories, if you're interested.
I mentioned my mother's breathing problems, now that she's quite advanced in years. She smoked unfiltered cigarettes for something like 60 years or so. She has very little usable lung left now and has to be kept on oxygen at all times. I don't think it's why I cough sometimes though.
I agree that all of the media in this country, and in the world, are getting bought up and controlled by a very few people. They are turning it all into one bland soup of homogenized mediocrity. I disagree about music. Music is all right, we just need for it not to be the only thing on the radio.
Next we have an E-mail from someone who sounds very young, and since he was a teenager last year I guess he is very young. And it's about my comments concerning The Stolen election of 2000 again. I should also mention, as I did on the air, that I am not against heterosexuals. After all, my girlfriend Pickles of the North is one!
I am smarter than you. In fact I am the last surving intelligent person in the whole world. I used to listen to your show all the time when I was a teenager(a year ago). I used to appreciate your interesting and alternative view point. Recently I have began listening to your show again and realized that you are as irritating as all the rest of the mouth breathers in the main stream media. On your last show you were bitching about how the supreme court is stealing the election from Al Gore. What a bunch of crap. The hand counts that you call for, are worst than just biased they are actually changing the will of the voters. There was a “snow fall of chads” under the feet of the canvasing board. Those chads fell out of ballots(Most likely Republican Ballots). Those ballots aren't built to be handled, they are built to be fed into counting machines. Yes the counting machines have a margine of error, but they are also unbiased. The hand counters are democratic operatives. This became very obvious when they changed the standard for counting dimpled chads half way through. They saw that Al Gore wasn't getting enough votes so they had to change the standard. Now that's stealing the election. Not to mention the unfairness of having different standards for counting in every county. The bottom line is that it is true that there is a possiblity that Al Gore may have won the election. The margin of victory was much smaller than the margin of error. But there is simply no way to determine who won for sure. But we do have laws and according to the laws as they existed on Nov. 7 Dubya should be our new president. I know that people like you have a lot of contempt for anybody who lives in middle america, likes to own guns, or pretty much all hetero sexuals, But their votes still count.
You have to understand that there is no such thing as two sides of an argument. No conservative or Liberal. There is only objective reality. All people in this country hold for the most part the same values and are for the most part tolerant of the small differences in their values. Only through stict logic can people agree.
I hope BAI gets demolished. It's a collection of self-righteous morons.This next, and final, E-mail relates to the Winter Solstice, and a couple of days after the program we got into the Vernal Equinox! For a couple of days the mail was caught up in terms of season at least!
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.
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