Jeff Bezos' Rocket
So here's our first mid-Summer radio program of 2021. We covered the topics below and more. I will update this Web page in the near future, so check back for the update.
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 21 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.
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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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The Billionaire Boy$ Rocket Club is apparently done posturing, for the moment.
As we mentioned last time, Branson didn't get to space. He never got to the Kármán Line. That line is where a vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity to get sufficient aerodynamic lift from the extremely thin remnants of atmosphere at that altitude to support itself. And this week Jeff Bezos took his penis shaped rocket up past the Kármán Line, but he's not going to get any astronaut bling.
This past Tuesday, the same day Bezos blasted off in his erectile rocket, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved a change in who can be recognized as being an astronaut. As of Tuesday anyone going high enough must demonstrate activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety,
in order to receive the recognition as an astronaut.
Well, okay. Before Tuesday anyone who got higher than 50 miles above sea level was considered to be an astronaut by the United States. It's interesting that they let Branson get in under the wire but have now stopped Bezos. And all of this is so phony anyway.
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A discrimination suit was reportedly filed last month by one Henry Harrington of Minnesota. He's alleging workplace discrimination on the basis of religion. He was fired from a debt collection agency because he refused to get finger printed, which is a part of the bonding process. Reportedly the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is taking AscensionPoint Recovery Services to court on behalf of Mr. Harrington, who cited religious reasons for not wanting to be finger printed. The suit alleges that the company should have looked for a way to accommodate Harrington's Christian beliefs in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. EEOC attorney Gregory Gochanour says An employee should not have to choose between his faith and his livelihood.
So apparently Mr. Gochanour wants to give everyone who has some wacky, superstition-based belief the right to impose their crazy fixations on everyone else.
You don't have to go very far down that road before you are required to stone non-believers to death, and everyone is ma non-believer in some damned superstition. We also pointed out years ago entire books were published that showed how slavery was countenanced in The Bible. And it is! Meanwhile these dame superstitionists demand to be able to discriminate against others in terms of hiring, public accommodation, etc. How much nonsense from delusional people are we supposed to accept as normal
in this country?
Other wacky superstitionists have done this in the past. In 2018 a Pennsylvania school bus driver settled a lawsuit with her employer after claiming that the "mark of the beast," allegedly caused by finger printing, could stop her from entering Heaven as per her understanding of the Bible's Book of Revelations. School employees working with children must pass a criminal-background check including mandatory finger printing. The Book of Revelations is insane. And one Beverly Butcher Jr. was handed $586,860 in 2015, because he refused to submit to biometric hand scanning as a security measure at his job due to this "mark of the beast" nonsense!
I think that this is discrimination against everybody else. We need freedom from religion!
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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.
