Okay, it's Sunday, October 18, 2009, 20:11, and this Web page is done. I've updated this Web page with some stuff we did on the air and the venue of the next LSB meeting. Oh yeah, I'm sure that's going to be another dignified affair. What follows is the original header on this page. ⇒ Well, we have a lot to talk about tonight, so I hope my digressions don't go to far. Pickles of the North will be reviewing a book, and we'll have some science stuff. We'll be getting to some mail too, we hope. I also hope to update this Web page over the next number of days.

There was a sudden Town Hall meeting held on Monday, April 13, 2009, at 7:00 PM at The Fortune Society, 630 Riverside Drive at 140^th St. in Manhattan. Here's a flyer that was passed out at the event.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, October 14, 2009, at 7:00 PM, at the Judson Memorial Church Assembly Room, 239 Thompson Street (just south of Washington Square Park, between W. 3^rd & W. 4^th St.), in Manhattan.

There was a regular meeting of the WBAI LSB held on Wednesday, September 9, 2009, at 7:00 PM, at WBAI, 120 Wall St., 10^th floor. The meeting was held in the Conference Room.

So the FoBs came out for this meeting and had obviously planned to disrupt it as they'd done at the PNB meeting in July.

The close quarters of the WBAI Conference Room helped them to be disruptive because they were closer to the LSB members. The LSB members were seated around the tables in the Conference Room with the person chairing the meeting at one end. The non-LSB members at the meeting sat in various places around the room, mostly in chairs which lined the walls.

We got through the preliminary setting of the agenda, challenges to the legitimacy of the meeting and the disruptions, and we were about to vote to elect the non-LSB members of the Management Search Committee when one of the disrupters decided to get physical.

One of the mental defectives that the core membership of the FoBs uses to disrupt the meetings came charging up the narrow aisle with a chair held high and tried to force his way between another LSB member and me at the table. This idiot clipped Pickles of the North with the chair he was carrying. Pickles was sitting in back of me. Pickles told him not to sit there, but he threw down the chair anyway. Another LSB member reached over and tried to remove the chair and the idiot disrupter sat down without the chair. And he fell on Pickles! He wasn't hurt at all, but he and the faction made a big deal about it. He actually trapped Pickles' legs against her chair as he sat on the floor, and he wouldn't let her go! Pickles had to squeeze her way out from behind him as he pressed against her.

This idiot who'd hit Pickles with the chair and had faked some sort of vague injury had said he'd been coming up there to hear better. This is especially ironic since he was one of the people making so much noise in the room! One indicator that he was just purposely disrupting the meeting with his antics is that there were already empty seats up by the end of the room by the Chair. There were empty seats on either side of Pickles. If he'd really just wanted to hear better he could have stopped shouting and disrupting the meeting and he could have just come up and sat down in a chair that was already there, without trying to force his way between two LSB members who were seated at the table.

Despite the faction histrionics about his being injured he was sitting up on his own and was yelling belligerently at the member who'd moved the chair before he'd tried to sit down. At one point he said that he was going to bring that guy to the police with him and have him charged with assault. But a Worker's World Party acolyte came charging up the aisle and instructed him to stay down. The idiot on the floor continued to be disruptive and was even on a cell phone making a call for a while.

The Chair called a recess and the meeting never resumed. One FoB called the Fire Department to report that the station was over crowded. The idiot who'd been sitting on the floor then lay down flat, as instructed, but he kept on talking and grand standing. The Fire Department brought EMTs, and some FoB called the police.

That faction had someone with a video camera at the meeting. That video is posted here. He also misses the exact action of this Crea idiot charging up the aisle with the chair, but other actions get caught. I haven't looked at the entire video, but I did find a telling part at about 48 minutes into the video. You can see this Crea person saying he doesn't want an ambulance but wants to call the police. So a faction operative gives him a cell phone, and then dials 911 for him. And then another faction operative says, “Say your head hurts, or somethin'.” Yeah, they're coaching him in fraud. Not a new tactic for them.

Due to the behavior of some of the disrupters that night WBAI interim General Manager Lavarn Williams has banned a bunch of them from coming in to WBAI. Among those banned from the station are more than one candidate in the current LSB election.

What they really don't want is for the Management Search Committee to function. They know that if permanent Management is hired it will be harder for them to get rid of that Management and plug in their pal and faction boss, the former Program Director Bernard White, even if they control the LSB starting in December. So they want to stop that Management Search Committee from functioning. That's why the disruption crossed the line into the physical just as the LSB was about to vote in the remaining half of the Management Search Committee on September 9^th.

The 2009, WBAI LSB elections are under way at Pacifica. This meeting was another example of the FoBs trying to regain a majority on the LSB and the PNB in an effort to reinstall their faction boss and turn back the clock for WBAI and Pacifica, which would of course result in the destruction of both, which may be exactly their goal.

At its January 21, 2009, meeting the LSB voted to hold its meetings on the second Wednesday of every month and/or the last Thursday of that month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:

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.

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 months. When you first go to the Web page you'll only see the WBAI programs for the past 7 days. If you want to see older programs you can click on one of the “See ALL Shows” buttons.

Back of the Book is now one of the programs that you can download, as well as listen to on line.

I'm glad to announce that the archives have seen some positive changes. In the table on that Web page Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are both in the Show column. The “Date and Category” column shows the date of the program. After the program I go in and write the details of the program and say which program it is. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

The 2009 Local Station Board Elections Have Begun!

The Local Station Board (LSB) is the primary governance body for WBAI. When meeting as delegates the LSB members elect the Directors of the Pacifica National Board, which is the governance body for the entire Pacifica Foundation. The Pacifica Foundation owns WBAI.

Here is the official time table for this crucial election.

June 1^st: Nomination period begins
July 15^th: Nomination period ends – all candidates have their forms in. Confirmed candidates will be given air time to share their vision Candidates will be given air time to share their vision.
August 29^th: Ballots shall be mailed to all 95,000 members.
October 14^th: ALL ballots must be received by this date!
November 15^th: The election will be certified if the quorum for the election is met.

If you have not gotten your ballot yet you need to contact the Local Elections Supervisor, Ethan Young, about that immediately! You can call him at 212-209-2828, and you should definitely E-mail him at election@wbai.org.

This election is crucial for the survival of WBAI and Pacifica. WBAI and Pacifica are in a precarious position right now as current Management attempts to reverse the death spiral that the station and the network have been in for years. If some bunch of chuckleheads gets a majority on the WBAI LSB they'll be able to change the composition of the Pacifica National Board and revert to corrupt, incompetent and malfeasant Management, they might even sell WBAI.

We need decent people on the WBAI LSB who will be interested in preserving the station, not in selling it or running it into the ground. I hope that the listeners will educate themselves about the candidates and vote for good ones.

The official Web page containing the list of candidates and their statements is here. You'll have to scroll down the list to find the WBAI candidates.

The Pacifica National Board (PNB) met in New York City from Friday July 23, to Sunday July 26, 2009.

The meeting was held at the Beekman Towers Hotel, 3 Mitchell Place, in Manhattan, a couple of blocks north of the United Nations.

There's an election going on in Pacifica, so there were a few candidates attending and speaking during the public comment sessions. Some disrupted the meeting.

On our next program, October 18/19, Back of the Book will be participating in the WBAI 2009 Fall 'thon which runs from Wednesday October 14^th, to Saturday November 7^th.

WBAI is in financial trouble and we hope that you'll help out. There is hope for WBAI now that some important changes have been made. The Fall 'thon is one of the big ones here the station need to make money to stay afloat until early next year.

We hope that you'll pledge to WBAI while Back of the Book is on the air in the wee hours of October 19.

If you listen to the radio program on tape or via the archives you probably won't be able to pledge during the program, but you can send us a check ahead of time. A regular one year membership is $25. So, if you can, please send a check made payable to “Pacifica/WBAI” and send it to:

I should also point out that we'll need help answering the phones. In order to answer the phones you'll have to get into the building. The building Management now requires that you get your name added to a list so you can enter 120 Wall St. So if you want to volunteer to answer phones for this 'thon you should call the WBAI switchboard at 1-212-209-2800 during business hours and let the folks in charge know you want to volunteer so they can put your name on the list. We always need more folks to answer the phones so if you want to volunteer to answer the phones for another program during this 'thon the above procedure is the way to do it.

Some folks at the Pentagon are saying that the stupid “Don't ask, don't tell” policy of the American military be abolished. Other countries have openly gay people in their military's ranks, so America should grow up and and stop discriminating.

I'll be talking about this as someone who was in the military, involuntarily, and gay, sometimes openly.

The water was discovered when meteors struck the surface of the planet and excavated the dirt that usually covers the ice. The meteor craters were seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. One particularly large crater was big enough that the spectrometer on the orbiter was able to confirm that the bright patches in the new craters was water ice.

It turns out that had NASA's Viking Lander 2 dug about four inches deeper into the Martian soil in 1976, this discovery would have been made then.

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. UPDATE: The bleepin' blue board has had to add a step for folks to get onto it because it's under attack by spambots. When you click on the above link you may be asked for a username and password. Type in Username: poster Password: enternow

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.