All right, it's Sunday night, September 19, 2010, 21:29, and this Web page is finished. I've updated some of the topics we touched on during the radio program, and I've updated the information about the next LSB meeting. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ This is our 24^th anniversary program! We'll be whooping it up for a while over that, and then we'll start yakking about other stuff. We hope to get to all of the topics below on this program, and we also want to put a big dent in the mail backlog. Will we be able to get to all of that stuff? Listen and see.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Thursday, September 23, 2010, at 7:00 PM at a location to be announced.

There was a LSB meeting on Wednesday, August 11, 2010. We had a report of sorts from Tony Bates the interim Program Director. He was adamantly averse to having his picture taken at this meeting. There was a lot of back and forth, and I suppose some thought it was a revelatory segment of the meeting. This report lasted an hour.

Faction operatives tried once again to shut down the Management Search Committee. They just want to see if they can stop it from hiring a new General Manager and then they think they can plug their larcenous faction boss into a position at WBAI where he can reign over a kleptocracy and reward his cronies with the fruits of listener donations.

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 this program any time for the next couple of months. You may need to scroll up one line to see the audio archive. Let me know if you find this feature useful.

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

In the table on the archive 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!

And the PNB has also met in Houston from Friday October 9^th, through Sunday October 11^th, 2009. The official audio archive of that meeting is here. It was not disrupted as the New York meeting was, although some of the same miscreants got out there to say stupid things.

The Executive Director of Pacifica, Arlene Engleheart, appointed another new interim General Manager of WBAI on June 24. So far there's been a Staff meeting to introduce Berthold Reimers as the new iGM, but Pacifica Management has not issued anything in writing yet. When they do I'll post a link to it.

The 2010 Local Station Board Elections Are in Progress!

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, to ~~midnight June 30^th~~ The nomination phase was extended to 6:00 PM on July 19^th. The official announcement is here.
July 19^th - All Nomination package materials should be complete and returned to the Local Election Supervisor by 6:00 PM (ET).
July 1^st - Campaign Phase begins. Candidates are given equal airtime with respect to candidate cart rotation and on-air forums. In person forums are also an integral piece of the campaign.
August 16^th - All ballots are mailed. If you do not receive a ballot, please contact Local Election Supervisor Nichole Justice Hylton.
September 30^th - Ballots are due by midnight. All stations will hold special hours to receive last minute ballots.
October 1^st - The local election supervisors will make the final P.O. Box pick up.
October – specific days TBA Ballots are Counted. The final ballot count will take place in a secure, public location TBA.

This election is crucial for the survival of WBAI and Pacifica. The Sixth WBAI LSB, which will be created by this election, will last for two full years. WBAI and Pacifica are in a precarious position right now as current interim 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 where you can see updated information about the election is here.

The 2010, election campaign has officially started. I got my ballot already! Pickles has not. The ballot arrived with no booklet about the elections. And the return envelope has no stamp on it. The lack of a stamp on the envelope will affect both the Staff and listener elections, but it will potentially really affect the listener election. This, I think, favors a certain faction on the listener side a lot.

The listeners may not even realize that they've gotten a ballot! And then they will not know who the candidates are at all, but there will be at least two names that they'd have heard on the air. And those are faction candidates.

The lack of a stamp on the envelope will get a lot of people to NOT bother voting at all.

This is the 24^th anniversary program of Back of the Book! I find that just amazing.

We plan to have the usual ritual of reading “Before the Law” by Franz Kafka.

We'll talk a bit about the program itself tonight. And we'll try to convey our amazement that we've survived this long, and that WBAI has survived this long! We are very glad to still be broadcasting to our listeners.

Water is essential for life as we know it. Some scientists have discovered that ultraviolet light from stars may be a primary catalyst for making water around the universe. This could mean that water is even more plentiful than had been thought. And it may be preferentially present in newly forming planetary systems, where it would be more likely to become liquid water on the surface of a planet.

We talked a little bit about the Communist dynasty, not the one in Cuba, the one in North Korea. Kim Jong-il is reported to be getting ready to present his youngest son Kim Jong-un to the other commie nut cases that run that nuclear armed insane asylum. This will be at a future meeting of the ruling “Worker's Party,” which hasn't met in about 30 years. Yeah, things have been going so well there that they haven't had to bother.

So will this young kid be yet another nut case, is that why his father's choosing him over his older brothers? Or is this the son who at least knows how to wave to people?

If you wish the on-air fund raising marathons could be shorter (and don't we all?) here's your chance to contribute to the station and maybe shorten those 'thons.

The WBAI book Fair runs from Wednesday September 8^th, through Sunday September 12^th. Come on down and get some books, or something. The flyer on the right gives all the information.

We talked a little bit about an article in the latest Scientific American, the August 2010, issue, about humanity barely surviving at a place called Pinnacle Point on the southern coast of Africa during an ice age that lasted from about 195,000 years ago to about 123,000 years ago. All of our ancestors were among that very small, probably just hundreds, group of people who eked out a living on tubers and shellfish. Had they not succeeded in doing that for tens of thousands of years none of us would be here today.

When the Viking Landers set down on the surface of Mars in 1976, they performed some experiments designed to test for signs of organic compounds necessary for life on the planet. The landers dug up little scoops of soil and heated these soil samples to see if any organic compounds showed up. All they got were chlorine compounds. So the conclusion was that there were no organic compounds in the Martian soil, and so Mars could not have any life on it.

When the Mars Phoenix experiment landed on the red planet a couple of years ago it found a chemical called perchlorate right under the surface. In a new experiment some scientists put some perchlorate in with some soil dug up from the Atacama Desert in Chile and when they treated it the same was that the Viking Lander had treated the Martian soil sample they got the same results. Now the Atacama Desert is a pretty severe environment, and it is not all that different from Mars in some ways, but it definitely has organic compounds in its soil.

So now scientists are thinking that perhaps the Viking experiments in 1976, just destroyed the organic compounds when they heated them up along with the perchlorate.

The next rover that is scheduled to land on Mars in 2012, will sample the soil in a different way in order to see if it can discover organic molecules.

So here's another bunch of flowers. These were in a flower bed on someone's front lawn in Brooklyn.

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.