Web links related to the Back of the Book program of September 10, 2007

This was Back of the Book's 21^st anniversary program! It's Saturday, September 22, 2007, 12:44 AM (ET) and I've added the link to the page about the seasons and the details of how people can get involved in the upcoming WBAI elections. I think this page is finished.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of many of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do. And I've updated them recently!

The September 5^th, 2007, WBAI LSB meeting was in many ways farcical. The biggest dopey thing that happened centered around a motion regarding WBAI's budget for fiscal year 2008 (FY08). At the previous meeting the faction currently in charge had passed a motion that was supposed to be about the station's budget but was really about not doing anything but posturing. Well, the National Finance Committee rejected that budget. So we were supposed to vote on a new budget with “additional savings” which the interim General Manager would submit to the LSB.

There are a number of interesting things in the budget. It calls for a total income of $3,948,478 which is projected to result in an “adjusted excess income” of $250,808.

Of this quarter million dollar figure half is to be held in reserve and half is grant money for a digital transmitter, and that money will be paid out over some years.

It's a budget that gives me some worry. A lot of the increased income is supposed to come from a higher fulfillment rate, and I'm not sure that we can boost fulfillment by that much. Oh, and the Program Director is being put in charge of the management of the Premiums Department. That's a laugh.

During this part of the meeting the Treasurer and the interim General Manager layed out the details for the 'thons for FY08.

But in the end we never voted on the budget!

The faction currently in charge didn't want any more motions or discussion of the budget because they were starting to look bad by refusing to vote for a motion that would have made WBAI and Pacifica Management bear the brunt of the salary cuts, thereby leaving the WBAI Paid Staff to suffer.

So they ran out the time and the Chair said no more amendments, even though one non-faction member had been trying to get an amendment in for a while.

After saying that no one else would be recognized for anything and that we were going to an immediate vote one faction operative was allowed to get the results of a roll call vote reiterated, and then the Chair recognized another faction operative, who is the Vice Chair, who raised her hand to make a motion. Still, the guy who wanted to make an amendment was not allowed to be recognized.

And then the Vice Chair moved to adjourn the meeting! The faction all voted for it and the meeting ended.

Of course we'd never voted on the final budget. The faction members had been so intent on shutting up people who weren't in their faction and in railroading through their stuff that they just reflexively voted to shut down the meeting without thinking, which is a frequent mode of voting for some faction operatives.

After the Chair declared the meeting adjourned I pointed out to everyone that the LSB had failed to vote on the budget! The Chair tried to get people to come back so that she could stage an illegal vote, but I strenuously objected, pointing out that the meeting was over and that no business could legally be conducted anymore.

Click here to go to a video of the entire meeting. And since this video is on Google you can pick the parts you want to look at without having to go through the entire meeting. The ending of the meeting starts at the 2:36:40 mark in the video.

And so the WBAI LSB has not passed a budget for FY08 and now the interim General manager of WBAI will bring the budget to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Pacifica and the CFO will then bring that budget to the National Finance Committee and the process will all pass beyond the WBAI LSB's control. On the other hand, maybe the faction wanted this to happen, so that they could avoid blame for the budget. But they can't avoid that blame, they've caused the conditions that are destroying WBAI.

The next LSB meeting will be on Tuesday, September 18, 2007, at 7:00 PM at the National Action Center, 106 West 145^th St., corner of Malcolm X Blvd. Take the number 3 train to the 145^th Street stop.

And if you want to run for the WBAI LSB you need to contact the Local Elections Supervisor Dale Ratner. You can E-mail him or call him at 1-212-209-2828. But remember that the deadline for getting all of the election materials in is September 25, 2007. Mr. Ratner will be collecting the candidates' materials at WBAI from 7:00 PM until midnight on Tuesday night.

And if you want to hear more about the elections and the election process you can listen to the Election Forum Special this coming Sunday, September 16, from 2:00-3:00 PM on WBAI.

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.

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WBAI has an official Web stream of what's on the air at any time! You can go here and pick which type of stream you want! If this stream isn't working let me know. It was working all right last night.

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The Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, has something called the Pacifica Lounge where you can post messages about Pacifica, WBAI and other Pacifica radio stations. This may be a good thing, and of course there are other, long term fora in which to participate.

WBAI also has a forum on its Web site now. You have to register to post messages, but anyone may read the messages.

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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 weeks. Unfortunately, Back of the Book is not one of the programs that you can download, you can only listen to it on line. But maybe someone will change that at some point. NOTE: The archives have not always been behaving properly of late. They have been fixed, but we can't guarantee their condition. If Back of the Book isn't archived this time I'll post an archive myself. Also note that they have been calling the Back of the Book archive the Carrier Wave archive. You should go by the date of the program until this gets rectified, or just listen to both programs in this time slot!

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We plan to celebrate the 21^st anniversary of Back of the Book tonight!

This radio program began airing back on September 8, 1986. It's been a hell of a time.

We'll be reading that Franz Kafka short story “Before the Law” again tonight, an anniversary ritual. We read it at the start of the very first program.

And we'd really like to thank everyone for listening, some folks have been listening for most or all of the 21 years that Back of the Book has been on the air.

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I'm seeing stories on line that say that the storm.worm botnet is going to rival supercomputers in its distributed computing power. But it's something that most anti-virals can stop from every getting onto your machine.

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I'm going to have a few things to say about Senator, for now, Larry E. Craig. Wow, what a homophobic creep he is. And wow, what creeps the police are to be still entrapping gay men, and maybe others as well, in the 21^st Century!

I've known people who've been caught up in things like this, but that was many years ago. People have lost jobs, families, careers and some have even committed suicide after being entrapped by the police.

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And at WBAI the rainbow flag, a gay symbol, has been torn down by some homophobe.

We've had this happen before at WBAI. That was three years ago when the flag was torn down in the Staff Lounge in the back of the station. This time the rainbow flag was torn down and stolen from its place in the Reception area of WBAI during the daytime, possibly by a guest who was going through the halls ranting about “deviates” and mentioning the word “flag.”

Well, the next rainbow flag at WBAI may be painted on the wall. Let the bigots try tearing that down!

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And Autumn will arrive on Sunday morning, September 23, at 5:51 AM (ET). You can find more about the seasons here.

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My computer is a wreck. If you want to see it here it is, with a 10" box fan trying to keep the CPU from overheating.

The main problem I have is that it's an old computer. In fact it's pretty much ancient by contemporary standards. I've had this computer running for most of the day almost every day for the past 7+ years. I think that its “up time” has been 99% during those years.

Of course it's also obsolete both in terms of hardware and software. I'm still running Windows 98 SE on it, and everyone declared that operating system (OS) totally obsolete and non-supported as of July 11, 2006. And long before that most software that's been released has either considered Win98SE as an afterthought or has ignored it entirely. As a consequence I'm quite limited in what software I can run. And some software just won't run right within this old hardware and even older OS combination and so the computer has frequent lockups and crashes.

To make matters even more fun one of my hard drives has now started to develop bad sectors on it, probably as a result of all of those crashes. Two of the partitions on that hard drive are now no longer accessible by the OS at all. And I can't find a reliable source for a new hard drive that I could replace it with because they're just not making these old hard drives anymore.

My backup computer is in even worse shape!

This backup was given to me by a friend who was moving to Wisconsin. He'd built it himself using the skeleton of an old server, putting a motherboard and some hard drives on it and starting it up. Not shown in this photograph is the 10" fan that had been keeping that computer's CPU from overheating. Yes, this is another 10" fan, not the one that I'm using for the same purpose on my computer.

Well, this computer has now started to act up too. It's had a chronic re-booting problem for the past month or more. So something is wrong with it physically. It might be that motherboard he picked up cheap. Also, as a result of my own stupidity, I managed to get the OS on it, Windows 2000 Professional, to stop seeing the hard drives. And of course my friend has since moved from Wisconsin to California and no longer has any of the installation disks. However, a kind listener has volunteered to help by giving me a setup disk for this OS, which is also pretty much obsolete these days.

So this is the current state of my computer woes and I'm hoping that I can get back to the point where I can have things operating as they used to. At some pint I need to buy a new computer, which will have the most recent Windows OS on it. Yeah, I know that Linux us great stuff, and indeed there's a Linux distribution on the backup computer, but I just need to be able to do things on the computer. I do use OpenOffice, but I need the universality that the Windows OSs give me, even though I dislike Microsoft. Such is my life at present.

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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.

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