Web links related to the Back of the Book program of June 11, 2001

Here is the latest on the theft of Pacifica.

Here's my take on the current WBAI and Pacifica crisis.

And remember, there's still a gag rule at WBAI.

There have been some developments in the listener lawsuits, as well.

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Okay, so our colleagues from Off the Hook probably have both a RealAudio streaming web cast and the new, permanent MP3 stream going tonight, at least at 9:13 PM last night both of these feeds were working.

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The Summer Solstice will occur on Thursday, June 21, 2001 at 3:38 AM (EDT). For more see my Chart of the Seasons.

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Hey! I got the “Great Nigerian Scam” E-mail yesterday! Does this mean I've arrived? Does this mean that the Nigerians think I have a lot of money? Or has this scam, once reserved for the well off and greedy/stupid, trickled down to the spam stage along with all of those mortgage offers, chain letters and other crap we ordinary folk get?

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I spoke about AIDS on the program, from the perspective of someone who's dealt with it among his peers for longer than two decades. AIDS has been getting some attention from the media for 20 years now. It's been around in Africa for a whole lot longer than that. I recall hearing media reports about “the gay cancer” twenty years ago. And then the Centers for Disease Control (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) found that there might be other opportunistic infections among a small number of gay men, so they realized that they were dealing with some sort of immune system problem and labelled it GRIDS for Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Meanwhile, those of us involved in the gay liberation movement were noticing that some of our colleagues were looking a little the worse for wear. We chalked it up to certain of them living a really wild, partying lifestyle. But here and there someone who was in his twenties or early thirties would actually get sick and die in a very short period of time. We didn't know it then, but we were watching the earliest American casualties from what would become the AIDS pandemic.

After a year or two GRIDS got lobbied into AIDS, as it became obvious that the disease was not really limited to gay men.

In 1984, Dr. Luc Montagnier discovered the causative agent of AIDS. This retrovirus is now named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). HIV causes AIDS.

There are now groups lobbying for more research on AIDS.

There are also some people, whom I call AIDS cranks, who are trying to deny various aspects of the AIDS crisis. They tend to be all over the place, with some denying AIDS exists, some denying that HIV exists, some accepting that one or the other or both exist but denying that they have anything to do with one another and a whole lot of other wrong ideas. It's nonsense. Here's a site that has a bit of an overview of these. There's a lot of real information here.

The AIDS cranks sometimes cite a letter from years ago, signed by hundreds of people, as some sort of proof that they're right. Most of the signatories to that letter were just long term AIDS cranks who had no qualifications in biology or medicine. Tragically a number of people who signed that letter have since died of AIDS. “The Durban Declaration” is a document that was signed by 5,228 physicians and scientists from 84 countries at the XIII International AIDS Conference held in Durban, South Africa last year. That was one “interesting” conference.

A hell of a lot has happened regarding the disease syndrome we call AIDS in the past two decades plus. The bottom line, however is that AIDS is real and it will kill you if you catch it. Some advances against the disease have been made over the past couple of decades, such as protease inhibitors, but these drugs do not cure AIDS. There is no cure for AIDS. The protease inhibitors require a lot of work to make sure you take them at the right times of day. If you don't take them according to a rigid schedule they don't work. For some people they don't work no matter what you do. For some people the protease inhibitors are very toxic. Protease inhibitors also seem to only work for a few years, at most, after which they're ineffective. So be careful!

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I read through some conventional mail messages on the air, and of course those I can't reproduce here. So here's the usual E-mail bunch.

First, we have a missive from Fernando, who's been writing a lot lately. I must say, I don't know anything about this “Giganthropithicus” he's talking about. On the air I was speculating on whether or not he was talking about one of our not quite direct ancestors Australopithecus robustus. This guy was not something you'd want to meet in a dark alley, or even in a well lit alley, for that matter. Although under five feet tall this thing had jaw muscles that could probably take your hand off at the wrist with one bite. This species was a vegetarian.

And, no, I don't think this creature is “bigfoot” or “sasquatch” or any of the other silly sightings that people claim to have made. These creatures, like alien abductions, are figments of people's imaginations. Oh, and Fernando's part of New Jersey is one of those places where the native black bear population has risen greatly over the past decade. I'd sooner believe that a suburbanite doesn't know what a bear looks like than that they'd seen “bigfoot.”

Our next correspondent asks about Web casting. Well, there's a great deal of that going on these days. I'm not going to link to any of them because there are so many! Just plug the phrase “radio webcast” into any search engine and you'll get a load of links to what some are calling “radio on the Internet,” but which really needs a different name.

As for mainstreaming WBAI — why? Almost everything else is already mainstreamed, why add more? Even if you don't like 95% of WBAI, and there are some things on WBAI that I too truly cannot stomach, why get rid of something that's one of the extremely few broadcast entities, for which you need only a cheap radio and not an expensive computer, that's different from most? I just don't understand that argument.

Oh, if dog spelled backwards can't take the heat he should get out of the superstitious kitchen.

Global warming is already manifesting itself. As I've said before, if nothing is done about global warming then in about 2050 high tide on the East River will be lapping at the doors of 120 Wall St., from which WBAI broadcasts. Last year the North Pole had no ice on it for part of the Summer, it was only water! I'd say we're already seeing some really disturbing trends, but in ten to fifteen years even the Republicans will have to admit that global warming is real and must be dealt with. Of course it may be too late to head off some of the problems by then.

Mir space station missed me, I'm glad to say. Pretty interesting watching the videos of it falling into the Pacifica Ocean. Those videos were another illustration of how things look when they enter the atmosphere at high speeds. Lots of people saw it, it was captured on film and tape and it was hard to miss. This is in contrast to the UFO sightings we usually hear about.

Next we hear from regular correspondent North American Shirley. Unfortunately, I seem to have missed Nanook of the North on Channel 21. I've known about the movie for years, but I've never seen it. Pickles of the North, however, is her own person, and she sometimes makes me her woman. She is so named because she comes from the North Pole, before it melted, where she fought the oppressor Santa Claus.

Well, I've actually done as Michael requested a number of times since he sent his E-mail in to me. So I guess I've satisfied at least one listener!

And, in contrast to Scorpion's missive above, we have this from another listener.

As I said on the air, George W. Bush is not the president of the United States. He's the Usurper in the White House. I've already gone over, more than once, the fact that the Republicans grabbed something like 6,000 votes in Seminole County, Florida by “correcting” some mail-in ballots so they could be counted, but only after making sure that those ballots came from registered Republicans. Democrat ballots were not so corrected and therefore were not counted. That decided the election right there.

As for Walter Winchell, our Saddle Pal Maxwell J. Schmid has played a piece of tape from Walter Winchell's radio broadcasts from the McCarthy era wherein Winchell denounces the WBAI Union (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) as a bunch of Commies. Good grief.

Steve attached an amusing graphic, but it's way too large to put up here, and I don't know if it's copyrighted by anyone. But thanks, Steve!

Next we have a pair of missives from long time listener, correspondent and contributor to the program, Seth.

We'll have to see about the stool. WBAI Management is currently spening an apparent bundle on “security” measures at the station. Why can't they buy us a stool and a clock for Master Control?

As for the event Seth's talking about, I didn't go. I'm deeply embedded enough in the WBAI stuff that's been going on lately. I just can't let the civil war eat my life.

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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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