Albert Speer at His Nuremberg Trial in 1946
We covered the below topics and more on this program. Along with the usual Covid-19 statistics we talked about R. Paul getting his Covid-19 vaccination. We linked some analysis from Nazi Albert Speer to the Trump Presidency and the events of January 6, 2021. Pickles of the North read a piece about Valentine's Day. I do plan to update this Web page pretty soon.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings?
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee on this Web site. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 11 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, February 10, 2021.
We welcomed a new member who replaced a member who resigned from the LSB. We had a debate about the legally required report out about the executive session from last month. I maintained that this was a violation of the rules laid down in the Communications Act. Nothing that was actually confidential was discussed. The report out was required to be posted by January 27. So it was quite late no matter what.
Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:
All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
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.
•
Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
•
WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. There is another program in the alternate week's time slot.
•
Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
•
We talked about the trial of ex-President Donald J. Trump in the Senate. We read a small passage from the book Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer. Speer was a close personal friend of Adolph Hitler. He ended up being the Minister of Armaments, among other duties, and he kept Nazi Germany organized when everyone else was goofing off or hiding.
The passage I read from Speer's book related to how people like Hitler could not trust the people they were supposed to be leading. I noted that this was because they had never been elected and did not think that the people would be behind them unless they bought those people off. Now Trump did get elected once, albeit with help from Russia and a crooked FBI Director, but I think that Trump was very surprised when he found himself winning the election in November 2016. I think that it completely floored him. He had, after all, only planned to use the campaign to promote a cable channel to be named after him. He knew that he had lost the popular vote in 2016. He saw that his poll numbers during his presidency were about the lowest of any president in the modern era. He knew that he had lost the popular vote again in the 2020, election and so he behaved as a dictator in trying to stop the vote count in Congress.
Yeah, Trump had his supporters but they were not the majority. He kept pumping up his ego with rallies of his supporters and he kept holding the rallies after he'd lost the election. He fits the pattern of a dictator who cannot trust the people because in this case he knows that he had outside help, and he lost the popular vote by a lot. But we're lucky that most of the American people, and so many people in various offices, prefer a Constitutional democracy as the model for their republic rather than a dictatorship.
Trump should go to prison, not just get found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors by the Senate.
•
R. Paul got his Covid-19 vaccination this week! We talked about that, all right.
•
Pickles of the North read a piece about the origin of Valentine's Day. Yeah, it's a story of a crazy Roman Emperor, a suicidal Bishop, and anti-sex Catholic Church and superstitious nonsense.
•
There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. 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.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
•
Back to the Back of the Book page
Back to my home page.
The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2021, R. Paul Martin.
