Back of the Book — July 17, 2021


It's Friday morning, July 23, 2021, 03:34, and this Web page is finished. I've posted the link to the archive and I've added an item or two. I've put in a couple of new images as well. The original top of this page follows the arrow. This was one hot program, and we have the sweat marks on paper to prove it. It wasn't as bad as the climate change that's forcing one heat dome after another onto the western United States and Canada. On the east coast we're just seeing the month of July turn into a tropical rainy season. And if only some of the rain that's causing deadly floods in Europe could be diverted to the drought-riven west coast of North America everyone would be much better off. But we can't accomplish that. We need to get the increasing climate change slowed down and stopped. We talked about those things and more on this program.

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, August 11, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 20 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.

The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, July 14, 2021.

The LSB meeting was sort of the usual, with some grandstanding.

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. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!

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?

Hijackers fail!
The Hijackers Failed!

The referendum on the bylaws is over. It ended this past Wednesday night. I hope you all voted NO. The hijackers were defeated for the second time in two years. Those of us on the NO side won, but just barely. And it was the Staff that saved Pacifica. The official statement from the National Election Supervisor, Renée A Peñaloza was, 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. I posted something about this after the last program.

The hijacker wanna-bes have already threatened to file a lawsuit to get the Staff vote annulled, but it doesn't look like they would win such a lawsuit. The current Pacifica bylaws are very clear about the necessity for a majority vote of the change to the bylaws, would materially and adversely affect the rights of that class as to voting or transfer in a manner different than such action affects another class, and Staff are a class in the Pacifica bylaws.

While some of the hijacker wanna-bes are whining about how the Staff have stopped them from taking over they have no problem with wanting all of Pacifica to change just because only 15% of the listeners wanted it.

The last time we had this crap with the hijackers trying to take over they lost by a two-thirds vote. This time they were just barely defeated, and that was done by a majority of the Staff voting NO.

Since the two-time hijackers did better this time than they'd done last time they are likely to try all of this again next year. They will once again use tricks, like making false claims that Jane Fonda had endorsed their attempt to hijack Pacifica, and they'll make promises they can't keep. We'll just have to remain vigilant and be ready to fight them off again.

The new Republican symbol
The New Republican Symbol?

Dr. Michelle Fiscus who was the Medical Director for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases and Immunization Programs at the Tennessee Department of Health was fired this past week. She was fired for telling people what the law was in Tennessee!

She's been trying to get teenagers in Tennessee vaccinated. She issued a statement that said, I have been terminated for doing my job because some of our politicians have bought into the anti-vaccine misinformation campaign rather than taking the time to speak with the medical experts. They believe what they choose to believe rather than what is factual and evidence-based. And it is the people of Tennessee who will suffer the consequences of the actions of the very people they put into power. The Tennessee Republicans did this. Firing someone who's fighting the Covid-19 pandemic for telling people what the law is in that state really goes beyond ordinary politics. The Republicans are flagrantly endangering kids now.

This is another example of the members of the Republican Party putting their hopes to win more seats in various legislatures, and put that moron Trump back in the White House, above their duty to the citizens. What could be more fundamental than getting people vaccinated against a potentially deadly disease? Oh, I do hope that history deals with these Republicans harshly.

Global Warming
They're Still in Denial?

One Heat Dome after another is delivering record breaking heat waves across the western end of North America. People are dying from the record high temperatures out west. Droughts are becoming the rule rather than the exception all over the west, and the wildfire season is now 12 months long. The fire fighters can't rest now. they are always having to turn out to fight yet another wildfire. Do the vocal, right-wing jerks in the west finally get it that climate change is real and is happening?

And the flagrant climate change evidence is not confined to the western part of North America. Europe is having huge floods that have not been seen for a very long time on that continent. As we went to air on this program Germany had 120 dead and hundreds missing from the floods that had swept through populated areas.

Rocket and dollars.
It Never Reached Space

We talked about the titled Richard Branson getting his silly rocket plane launched this past week.

Yeah, he's going on about how he's gone to outer space. Well, not everyone agrees with that assertion. He and the others with him got up to about 86 km, which is not outer space according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale which has established the Kármán line, at an altitude of 100 km above sea level, as the definition for the boundary between aeronautics and astronautics. This height is used because at an altitude of about 100 km a vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the extremely thin remnants of atmosphere to support itself.

However, the United States is willing to call anyone who gets to an altitude of about 80 km an astronaut. There's really nothing special about 80 km, as there is with the height of 100 km, but that's the United States' definition.

Still, we don't think much of this stunt. Branson is a member of the Billionaire Boy$ Rocket Club and what he's doing is trying to drum up even more money for himself. We are of the opinion that space begins, and the Earth's atmosphere ends, at the 100 km Kármán line. Real astronauts have had years of rigorous training. Some real astronauts have died in pursuit of the scientific exploration of space. This stunt of Branson's was done so that people with more money than they know what to do with can brag to other rich people and say that they are astronauts, after they make Branson richer. One other thing has come out about this stunt. They had live coverage of it all, and that coverage showed Branson going to the launch site riding a bicycle. He then popped up on a stage talking about having just bicycled to the site and now he's going up in his rocket plane. The reality is that the bicycle riding bit was filmed some time before Branson popped up on stage to lie about it. What 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.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2021, R. Paul Martin.