One Old Bacterium
It's Monday afternoon, July 12, 2021, 15:51, and I've updated this Web page with the news that the second attempt to hijack Pacifica by a referendum has failed. There will be more updates on that topic pretty soon. I have also put in the link to the archive of this radio program. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ A lot of this program was about an article that described microbes that may actually be 100,000,000 years old, or at least they've been living in a sediment layer that's that old. The article talked about the revivification of those microbes. We talked about other things as well, but I'm going to leave this page as it is right now. I will be updating this Web page within the next week. So check back for the updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do, and I've recently updated some of that.
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, July 14, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 19 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, June 9, 2021.
The LSB meeting didn't have much drama this time, that was good. Ahem.
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.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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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. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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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?
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We spent quite a bit of time on this program talking about an article in the June 2021, issue of Scientific American.
The article is about scientists drilling cores from the marine sediments beneath the Pacific Gyre, also known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Quite a place.
Anyway, it's pretty dead there, except that the sediments pile up very slowly, at a rate of about one meter in a million years, because the area has so little life in it. The author of the article is Jennifer Frazer, a science journalist. She wrote of drill cores taken at the bottom of the Pacific Gyre that pulled up sediment that is 100,000,000 years old. And when scientists put some nutritious stuff in with that very old sediment the bacteria that were there ate and started to reproduce. Talk about suspended animation!
Since current technology doesn't allow the scientists to actually figure out how old an individual bacteria is they can only go by the age of the sediment where that organism is trapped. It's pointed out in the article that when those oldest bacteria were deposited on the bottom of the ocean plesiosaurs were swimming overhead.
One interesting note from the article is that a microbe called Chroococcidiopsis was found in the core sample. This particular creature is so robust that it is being considered for the role of terraforming the planet Mars!
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July 12, 2021: As I was writing this update of this Web page the information came in that the attempt to hijack the Pacifica Foundation by a small group of well-funded people has failed, but just barely.
The referendum on the bylaws is over. It ended this past Wednesday night. I hope you all voted NO.
They slapped the gag order on after one of our programs, so we couldn't say anything about it. The people who want to hijack Pacifica were spreading lies a lot. They also did things like say that Jane Fonda had endorsed their hijacking attempt. Turns out that she didn't. They also lied by saying that Pacifica is selling the KPFT building to make money. But the reality is that the old KPFT building was in bad shape from neglect and from things like flooding of the premises that happened to it during the pandemic.
And in fact Pacifica is now caught up with its audits, something the attempted hijackers tried to ignore. Pacifica got its FY20 audit in to the California Attorney General's Office on June 30, which was the deadline. The audits had not been done on time for about nine years, but now they are. And some of the people who are trying to hijack Pacifica were a part of preventing audits from being done.
The final tally of this bylaws referendum is what some are calling a split decision. A majority of listener members voted in favor of it by 56% to 44% against, but a majority of Staff members voted against it by a vote of 58.6% against and 41.4% for.
The National Elections Supervisor wrote, The referendum did not pass as it failed to garner majority vote
yes
for staff and listener voters. As a result, the current bylaws stay in place.
We have heard that the hijackers have said that they were going to go to court to get the Staff votes annulled. Well, we'll see how that goes. Thanks for voting NO
to all those who did so.
I'll be updating this page, and this item, more pretty soon.
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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.
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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2021, R. Paul Martin.
