WBAI Producer and fellow Shop Steward Errol Maitland was brutally beaten and arrested by the police at the funeral for Patrick Dorismond last weekend. After days of being handcuffed to his hospital bed in the cardiac intensive care ward at Kings County Hospital they finally uncuffed him. We're hoping that he'll get well soon.

There's a job action ongoing by the freelance reporters and stringers for Pacifica Network News. Look at the Pacifica Theft Menu to find out more.

The Web cast of tonight's program should be working for Back of the Book. Unfortunately, this may not be the case for much longer. WBAI's wacky General Manager, Valerie Van Isler, has not paid Porus dot com the $2,500 she'd promised to upgrade their carriage of WBAI. This feed may cease to exist soon.

Paul Williams of UFO Desk is arranging for this feed. And we thank Porus dot com for this feed.

“Emmanuel Goldstein” of Off The Hook is maintaining this feed.

So the Metropolitan Transit authority (MTA) did it again! As I got to the train station for Sunday night's program I found a brand new sign up saying that they were doing track work again and this shuttle bus crap was going to be implemented again. They didn't have those signs up last Tuesday, I know. They'd previously done this same thing for more than a month, but those signs said that the “shuttle bus” stuff would end on March 26^th. So I got to the train station in time, but all I saw were shuttle buses and that new sign. When I got to Franklin Ave. I was able to glimpse a #2 train pulling out of the station as I ran down the steps.

Maybe the MTA just doesn't like radio.

In a sort of “Web only special,” here's something that I found about the the number 666 that appears in the Book of Revelations, a part of the Bible that even many superstitionists cringe at. Someone's got a lot of time on his hands.

I eventually got led there from an initial listing at MEMEPOOL.COM, a really great Web resource. I plan on doing a program in the near future about MEMEPOOL.COM.

It's been nearly two years since I first talked about the cottage industry of one Dr. Laurence Godfrey. Apparently he's making a business of filing libel suits, and threatening to file libel suits, in England. As this New York Times article details, Demon Internet has capitulated and will pay this vulture about $25,000, plus six figures in court costs because people said things about him in USENET news groups and Demon Internet refused to censor the news groups.

His similar suit against Cornell University is still pending. But the ruling by the English judge that Demon Internet was responsible for what was carried may hurt them too.

In the United States an ISP is considered a common carrier, such as the Post Office or the telephone companies are. You can't hold the Post Office responsible if someone mails something defamatory or libelous about you; neither can you sue the phone company for carrying defamatory or libelous phone calls. But the English judges and courts are apparently even further behind the times than their American cousins are.

The search for extra solar planets has reached a new level of sensitivity in discoveries of planets that are only the size of Saturn. Previously they've only found planets that were bigger than Jupiter.

This raises hopes of eventually being able to find planets the size of Earth. As I've said in the past, they're only seeing what their equipment is biased towards seeing, that's why they've only found such large planets.

I spoke on the air about this “Quark Gluon Plasma” that high energy physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) believe that they were able to create recently. They've been working on this for six years, but the proof that they've achieved this new state of matter, which is the condition that the universe was in about 10 microseconds after the Big Bang, isn't satisfying to some scientists.

I used information from the New York Times, wire services and Scientific American for this segment of the program. Of those sources the one most accessible on the Web, which is also the most link rich, is the story in Scientific American.

The next step, which scientists hope will provide better evidence of a Quark Gluon Plasma than the CERN results did, will take place at the Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island. They're going to use a facility they've spent some years building named the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to smash gold ions together at nearly the speed of light. RHIC will produce ten times the energies that the CERN experiment did. Not to be outdone, CERN will leapfrog RHIC in 2005 with an accelerator that will produce 30 times the energy of RHIC.

Some folks, who apparently don't quite understand the issues, have been trying to get people excited for the past year or so over the next step in this quest. Unfortunately, they want to get people excited enough to stop it. There's this seriously uninformed scare going around that the RHIC facility will produce a black hole that will swallow the entire Earth. The author of an article in London's Sunday Times, NOT to be confused with the mainstream London Times, has taken the usual, diffident speech habits of scientists and tried to make it sound scary. If anyone has some sort of proof that the danger is real, they should publish it. So far all I've seen is Luddite rhetoric and what look like willful misinterpretations by people who are trying to sell books and stories.

There are some serious things to be worried about coming from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, such as radioactive materials and chemicals contaminating ground water, but the end of the world is not one of them.

Reform Rabbis have approved gay marriages. Well, that's a good thing.

Of course I read some mail on the program! I made a bit of a dent in the backlog. Here's some of what we got through.

Actually, I bribed the existential void. Cost a couple pounds of karma, but I'd pilfered the karma from a government dump anyway.

That geocentrist's Web page is a hoot! Full of superstition and wild suppositions. Oh well, at least it's relatively harmless, as compared, say, to the Uganda mass murders in the name of those “Ten Commandments.”

I did talk about Dennis Lee on the March 20^th, program. He's got a lot in common with the right wing Christian who did the geocentric Web page.

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 © 2000, R. Paul Martin