I Was The Worst Track Runner
It's Monday night, February 14, 2022, 23:29, and this Web page is finished. I've updated it with Pickles of the North's pieces about the Canadian truckers who are blocking things because they don't like vaccine and mask mandates, and her small bit about Valentine's Day. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We did something unusual, for us, on this program. We played a segment of a previous program. I hope it's good for all of you.
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 will be held on Wednesday March 9, 2022, at 7 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 33 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic. We had an LSB meeting this past Tuesday, February 1, it was in executive session. The report out is that The WBAI LSB discussed personnel issues of a confidential nature and forwarded a list of candidates to the General Manager.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, February 9, 2022, as both the LSB and as a Delegates Assembly. We elected WBAI's members to some of the Pacifica National Board committees at that meeting. LSB members are currently engaged in voting for the contested seats.
Before the February 9, 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, so we have the following schedule:
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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This program is being broadcast on February 12, 2022. February 12, is what I call Life Day
because on that day in 1968, I ended up being declared dead, and I was pretty close to being so. In fact the army wrote up a death certificate on me. This segment was done live in 2018. We edited it a little bit and it's aired on this program again. The story starts out being about my time as a really bad track runner, and goes into other territory after that.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 407,714,754 on Friday, and global deaths reached 5,797,777. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 77,535,578 and the death toll in America was 917,443, so 17,548 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death rate slightly lower than it was last week. It's still a huge number of deaths every week though. The pandemic is not over.
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.
So today as we record this, but yesterday as you hear this being broadcast over the air, about 4,000 city workers are facing termination of their jobs over their refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Mayor DeBlasio initiated this mandate, which took effect November 1, and he said that if they didn't get vaccinated they'd lose their jobs, and then when Mayor Adams took office he said he'd enforce that mandate. As far as we know that mass termination of anti-vaxxers is in the process of being carried out by the city. We've heard that a whole bunch of the city workers who were staring at the imminent prospect of losing their jobs have gone and gotten vaccinated. The New York City municipal workforce is about 375,000 workers strong, so the 4,000 who refuse to get vaccinated are not a large percentage. Still they had a march over the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the mandate and some firefighters have formed a group they call Bravest For Choice. Some of them are saying that getting vaccinated or not should be their choice, and it is. They can get vaccinated or not. But the city has a choice of mandating certain health requirements for the jobs. It makes sense to keep your work force as healthy as possible and lower the odds of their infecting others with the virus. It's also uniformed workers' choice to wear a uniform or not, but if they refuse to wear it they can be fired. There are a lot of things that are required for certain jobs. And unvaccinated people are 97 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than vaccinated people are. More than 540 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the U.S., and serious side effects are very rare.
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A magnetic storm caused by a solar flare has knocked out about 49 of Elon Musk's SpaceX satellites. The Starlink satellites were launched on February 3, and they were orbiting about 210 miles above the Earth's surface. The magnetic storm ruffled the Earth's atmosphere and made it expand a little bit. That little bit was enough to start increasing the drag on the Starlink satellites and they started to lose orbital energy and came lower into the atmosphere where they lost even more orbital energy. As a result 49 of them have burned up in the atmosphere. The SpaceX people say that the Starlink satellites are made to completely disintegrate upon re-entry in the atmosphere, so at least no one's going to get hit on the head with one of them.
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Revelations continue to come in from Congress' January 6, Committee. We now hear that former New York City Mayor and Donald Trump's lawyer, and later public clown Rudy Giuliani called Antrim Michigan County Prosecuting Attorney James Rossiter in the weeks after the 2020, presidential election to demand that he hand over the voting machines used in the election to Trump's team so they could search for supposed signs of fraud, Rossiter told the Washington Post. Biden won Michigan by 150,000 votes. This was around the same time that Trump was caught on tape asking a Georgia elections official to find
enough votes to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia. Trump has since said at one of his bund rallies that he wanted Pence to actually overturn the 2020, election. Pence took a year to say anything real, but he has now said that no one person should be able to do that.
The Congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has also uncovered unexplained gaps in former President Trump's official White House phone logs from January 6. Official records that were turned over to the panel only reveal a few calls that Trump made and received on the day of the insurrection even though witnesses say the then-president made many calls as the violence he'd instigated was going on. Some of Trump's calls have already been reported or discussed by recipients, like a phone call with Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and fellow far right-wing bad guy Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). These calls do not appear on the official log. And Because it lacks a complete official record of Trump's calls, the committee has subpoenaed phone records of Trump allies, aides and family members to map his contacts on Jan. 6. Trump's actions certainly appear to violate the Presidential Records Act that orders these records to be preserved. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) Said, Trump potentially violat(ed) a criminal law by intentionally removing records, including communications with a foreign leader, from the White House and reportedly attempting to destroy records by tearing them up.
Trump is denying reports that he clogged White House toilets by flushing wads of paper that could have included potentially damaging government documents. We know that Trump destroyed official Presidential documents because some of them were retrieved and the national Archives workers had to tape them back together in order to send them to the Congressional committee.
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Pickles here. Unfortunately, we are still experiencing the disruption caused by far right insurgents in Canada and elsewhere, as witness to the still blockading so called freedom convoy
at a number of Canada-US border crossings, though some of this is being finally dismantled by law enforcement. This is a real hodge podge of fringe, and yes, they are fringe groups: disbelievers in the pandemic, anti mask/vaccine people, white supremacy organizations, conspiracy groups, and opportunists who realize they can take advantage of the pandemic to act out and do whatever the hell they feel like, or feel like they can get away with, using 18 wheelers or just their own pick up trucks. And those who want to disenfranchise their fellow Canadians by having the Prime Minister step down and parliament dissolve. Bolstered by the disorganized response by the various levels of government and law enforcement agencies, they are having their day in the sun, from disrupting commerce and people's livelihoods to the harassment and threat of violence to health care workers, people wearing masks, and people of color and gay folk. All the usual collection of rotten ideas and behavior from these like minded creeps. freedom convoy
my ass!
I also spoke a bit about the origin of Valentine's day, or Saint Valentine's day, from it's beginning as a sex lottery for young men and women in ancient Rome, to the Catholic Church's attempt to make it just another bland saint's day, though not one where you were obliged to go to mass!
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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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