At the initiative of some Unpaid Staff at WBAI, the overnight programs at WBAI are now being Webcast thanks to anomalies.net! Paul Williams of UFO Desk convinced the Webmaster of anomalies.net to do it. In fact, Paul has his radio going overnight, and it's hooked to his computer, which actually does the rendering of the program into a streaming format. This is then immediately streamed to anomalies.net in California where it's made available to anyone in the world who wants to listen to WBAI. The folks who do the program Off the Hook at WBAI are also streaming the station in real time so you can also listen to WBAI here.

On the program I spoke about some people spreading lies about Pacifica and the producers and all. I couldn't say it on the air, but the people spreading these lies are Pacifica Management! Members of the Pacifica National Board (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) are denigrating and disparaging the very people who've built up the network which they have now stepped into and taken legal possession of!

As I said on the air, one of the problems is a particularly catchy lie that Dr. Mary Frances Berry, Chair of the Pacifica National Board, put out when she commandeered the air at WBAI on August 4^th. She said that the entire Pacifica network had a total of 700,000 listeners. She said that this was only 2% of 2% of the possible listening audience. She said only 2% of the radio audience listens to public radio and that only 2% of them listen to the Pacifica network. Sounds damning, doesn't it? Well, it's supposed to. But the fact is that it isn't true!

If you divide 700,000 by 2% you get 35,000,000. Berry et al. say this is the number of people who listen to public radio. I don't know if all of the Pacifica transmitters combined can reach 35 million people, much less 35 million radio listeners. But then when you divide 35,000,000 by 2%, to get the base figure, you get the gigantic number of 1,750,000,000! That 1.75 billion! There are only about 260 million people in the entire United States. Maybe Dr. Berry's hiding one and a half billion extra listeners somewhere, but if she isn't then this is just a clever sound bite to make it look as if the entire Pacifica network is full of people who can't do radio.

Oh well, pardon the esoteric rant. I was just so angry that the Chair of the Pacifica National Board would do that to the people who have actually built the radio stations over the decades that I had to let it out.

This past week the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that openly gay Eagle Scout James Dale had a right to be a part of the Boy Scouts of America.

Chief Justice, Deborah T. Poritz, said Dale's dismissal was, “based on little more than prejudice,” and “The sad truth is that excluded groups and individuals have been prevented from full participation in the social, economic and political life of our country. The human price of this bigotry has been enormous. At a most fundamental level, adherence to the principle of equality demands that our legal system protect the victim of invidious discrimination.”

A guy named Tim Curran has a long standing court case against the anti-gay discrimination of the Boy Scouts of America.

The group “Scouting for All” is also fighting anti-gay discrimination in the Boy Scouts.

Here's a youth page that supports gays in the Boy Scouts

The last total solar eclipse of the 20^th century is coming! It will occur this Wednesday, August 11, at 7:08 A.M. (EDT). Unfortunately, those of us in the northeastern United States will only see a partial eclipse, but it's better than nothing.

Be very careful not to stare into the sun!!

Of course there's no telling if the weather will cooperate. The Sunday night prediction had been that it would be partly cloudy on Wednesday, but as of Tuesday morning they say it's going to be rainy! However, no matter what happens the National Aeronautics & Space Administration will have a ship in the Black Sea, in the path of the total eclipse, that will show it in real time as a Web cast for those of us who can't see it in vivo.

Here's a somewhat more detailed site on the eclipse for those who enjoy the technical side of things and are a bit familiar with astronomy. And here's Sky & Telescope magazine's page on the eclipse.

There's a Web site for those of you who really can't get enough about this eclipse stuff.

You'll notice that I sometimes link to pages that are deep within other Web sites. This is what those of us who've been on the Web for years have been doing since the start. And I know that some people link to pages deep within this site. And that's fine by me. But some jerks are on the Web simply to make a quick buck and they're objecting to deep linking. They insist that you, the public, navigate to the information you want by first going through several other pages of bullshit advertising. One such crowd is Universal Pictures, which has been harassing one guy named Jean-Pierre Bazinet who has a Web site devoted to movies. He details the problems he's had with these weasels from Universal Pictures at his Web site.

Atomic Bomb Earrings


top: “Fat Man” dropped 8/9/45, bottom “Little Boy” dropped 8/6/45

Just in time to celebrate the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs is the flap that's grown up around “atomic bomb jewelry” at the Atomic Museum. I do not share the common WBAI opinion of these war-ending bombings, but these earrings are in bad taste. How would Americans feel if Japan or Germany sold jewelry depicting their war time victories over Americans? As it turns out, the folks at the Atomic Museum have relented and taken the atomic bomb earrings off their site. But you can still get your atomic necktie!

The so called “World Chess Championship” is underway in that place known for its intellectual pursuits: Las Vegas, Nevada.

In the past there were head to head chess matches, usually around 24 games long, between the World Champion and the Challenger. For about 50 years the Challenger was selected through a grueling series of tournaments and candidates' matches over the course of three years. The Champion and the Challenger played and whoever won the match became the World Chess Champion.

Now some bandit named Kirsan Ilyumzhinev is President of FIDE, the international chess federation. He has dictated that there will be a knockout tournament to determine the next person whom FIDE will recognize as World Chess Champion. Chess is an intellectual pursuit. To choose the World Champion by some knockout tournament like this is like tossing dice to determine the Championship.

This event is so degraded that they actually have an official bookmaker to make odds on who'll win and to take bets!

The real World Chess Champion is one Gary Kasparov (Russia). The former World Champion, and at this moment the champion recognized by FIDE, is Anatoly Karpov (Russia), and the current challenger to Kasparov's crown is Viswanathan Anand (India). None of these players is playing in the Las Vegas travesty.

General coverage of this event and of chess in general can be had at the Web publication The Week in Chess

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 fill out the form, 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 the 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.