Earliest Sunsets of the Year
We talked about the below topics and more on this program. I have, I think, two more topics I want to post here and then this Web page will be finished. Check back for 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, December 8, 2021, it will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 30 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Monday, November 29, 2021. This was an executive session meeting, and so was closed to the public. This was also be the last meeting of the Eleventh WBAI LSB, although arguably the Delegates Assembly of December 8, will be the truly final meeting of the Eleventh WBAI LSB. The official report out of this meeting was, The WBAI LSB met in executive session to discuss personnel matters of a confidential nature.
In an odd move the LSB voted to hold a Delegates Assembly to vote on some bylaws amendments on December 8, 2021. That's the same date that the new WBAI LSB is to be seated. So people voted to have the Eleventh LSB meet as a Delegates Assembly and then adjourn that meeting and have the first meeting of the Twelfth WBAI LSB right after it.
I said during the meeting that this would put the legitimacy of those bylaws amendments in jeopardy because the time for the LSB meeting is the same as the time for this Delegates Assembly. The vote on handling the Delegates Assembly this way was 10 for, 3 against and 4 abstentions. I was one of those who voted No.
This past week the time for the start of the WBAI LSB meeting was changed by a couple of people to 7:30 PM and then to 8:00 PM.
Before the November 10, 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, with the vote to hold an executive session and a Delegates Assembly we have the following schedule:
The Delegates Assembly is set to begin at 7:00 PM. The new LSB has been re-scheduled for 8:00 PM. The Twelfth WBAI LSB will be seated at the LSB meeting on December 8, 2021.
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 Sun is now setting at 4:28 PM (ET). These are the earliest sunsets of the year in the Greater New York area. This deplorable condition will keep on going for about 10 days. I have always found these days when the Sun sets so early to be depressing. And the days when it sets at the earliest time of the year really point that up. The Winter Solstice will occur on December 21, at one minute to eleven o'clock in the morning. I have a Web page on this site that shows the dates and times of the seasons, and the sub-seasons.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site Covid-19 cases in the whole world reached 264,743,026 on Friday, and global deaths reached 5,240,971. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 48,918,222 and the death toll in America was 786,898, so 10,625 people have died of Covid-19 in America since our last program one week ago. That's a significant increase over the previous week's numbers. I wonder if lots of people traveling by air and going places and getting together for the Thanksgiving holiday had anything to do with that? This past Sunday a huge number of people in America traveled back from their holidays by air. Some of these family reunions may be the final ones for some participants.
By the time this program airs on Saturday morning all of those figures we quoted will be higher of course. This was all mostly preventable.
The still new Omicron variant remains a bit of a mystery. We have read, by the way, that they didn't name it after the next letter in the Greek alphabet because they didn't want to confuse it with the English word new,
which was one of my speculations on the last program. So this variant of concern,
as the World Health Organization calls it, does seem to be even more transmissible than the Delta variant, which itself was described as even more infectious than chickenpox, to name a virus that is very infectious and is familiar to the general public. It's not yet clear if the Omicron variant can get around the current vaccines. It's possible that it may not have the devastating effects that Delta and previous variants have had, but these are still early days. The Omicron variant does seem to have become the dominant variant in southern Africa. Markets around the world are still volatile over this variant's effect on the world economy. The speculated effects on the economy are probably driving the markets down even more than what's realistically predicted, so far.
Another big deal right-wing evangelical Christian who proselytized against vaccines has died after being hospitalized with COVID. Marcus Lamb, founder and CEO of Daystar Television, was 64. Daystar is the second-largest Christian TV station in the world and they've used their broadcasts to tell people to not get the COVID-19 vaccines. Apparently this Daystar network reaches 2 billion people worldwide! At the start of the pandemic Marcus Lamb and his network preached about anti-vaccine conspiracies, they hosted a lot of interviews with anti-vaxxer cuckoos, and railed against the lockdowns that were designed to deal with the spread of the disease. Earlier this month the son, Jonathan Lamb, said about his father's battle with COVID-19, There's no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy.
So he's as delusional as his father was. The son was also asking for prayers for his father's recovery. The Daystar network pushed so-called alternative treatments
for COVID-19 including unproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine rather than vaccination. Marcus Lamb's wife said that he reportedly tried some of those remedies but did not recover. What a surprise.
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In some good news, Canada's House of Commons voted unanimously on Wednesday to ban so-called LGBT+∞ conversion therapy
for minors. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to social media Wednesday afternoon to say, Good news! Today, Members of Parliament worked together to pass our government's legislation banning conversion therapy — and it is now headed to the Senate. We'll keep working to make sure this abhorrent and unacceptable practice is prohibited in Canada.
Of course in America some places still endorse it, as the former Vice President Mike Pence did when he was Governor of Michigan and pushed for cutting funding earmarked for HIV/AIDS education and for giving that money to groups that actually practiced so-called conversion therapy
instead. And it needs to be remembered that the Republican Party has adopted conversion therapy
as a plank in their platform.
In some not at all good news the Moscow-based business newspaper Vedomosti Daily has reported that the Russian Interior Ministry is looking into a complaint against Netflix filed by Olga Baranets, the public commissioner for protecting families. Baranets is taking issue with how the platform is marking some of its LGBT+∞-themed content. According to current Russian laws, so-called deviant
content should be marked with an 18+
rating, but according to the commissar, some titles from Netflix's colorful collection of films and TV series [that] tells about the lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people
are being marked with a 16+
rating. What a bunch of ex-commie creeps. Russia's gay propaganda
law even outlaws public discussions or positive messages about LGBT+∞ issues. Will Netflix cave on this issue?
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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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