Is This Q?
We talked about these topics on this program. Putin's bombing hospitals now, along with residential neighborhoods, and he wants to be seen as the good guy? Crazy. He's announced that he's sending the Russian troops in to fight the Nazis in Ukraine. If he want to see a Nazi all he needs to do is look in a mirror. He's using the same tactics that Hitler used when he invaded Poland in 1939. In bombing a maternity hospital he made claims about the shocked pregnant women that were just like the ones made by the American right-wing about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012. Not a coincidence, I think. We also talked about the current situation with the pandemic, which isn't over. We talked about a gay kid who's standing up to the people in charge at his high school in Florida over the infamous Don't Say Gay
law. And the Republican Governor of Utah took a stand against underhanded political tricks. I plan to update this Web a little bit, 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 will be held on Wednesday March 30, 2022, but it will be in executive session. The next WBAI LSB meeting that you can listen to and maybe even participate in will be held on Wednesday April 13, 2022, at 7 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 34 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. Some people were still demanding that elections be done over because their candidates lost. I insisted that the results of the election to fill a seat on a committee that rarely if ever meets be revealed to the LSB. And with a little bit of difficulty that was done. The people complaining lost again. This time it was a clear victory, no tie-breaker was needed.
Before the March 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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After video was seen of the aftermath of a Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine Russia started claiming that the pregnant women shown evacuating the hospital were actors. They showed a video of a woman doing a video blog about cosmetics or something and claimed that it was the women in the video of the bombing. First of all, they look sort of alike, but that doesn't mean they're the same woman. And what if it were the same woman? The blogger could have gotten pregnant and been in that hospital which the Russians bombed! This is a lot like the disinformation from the right-wing about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012. And that disinformation also seems to be related to Russian sources. The Russians are clearly attacking residential neighborhoods, with no military targets in them. It's state-terrorism.
And some people, even people with some relation to WBAI, are getting all excited by an issue about biological weapons facilities in Ukraine. This is something that also came out of the official organs of the current Russian Empire. Apparently it's even got QAnon associations. One of the reasons for having biological research facilities is to make vaccines and treatments just in case biological weapons are released in your country. Certainly any neighbor of Russia, which even seems to have wiped out some of their own people with a leak from a biological weapons facility during the Cold War, would be wise to take precautions in case Russia decided to use such weapons on them.
Besides the simple desire to reconstruct the Soviet Union another motivation for this invasion may well be the mineral wealth of Ukraine. They have large Lithium deposits, they apparently have half a million tons of lithium oxide waiting to be dug up. And lithium isn't just for bipolar depression, it's the big element used in rechargeable batteries these days, and with electric cars being brought close to being practical there will be a lot of demand for lithium to power them.
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At 2:00 AM on Sunday, March 13, 2022, a mere 20 hours after this program ends, Daylight Saving Time will start. It will suddenly become 3:00 AM. This is something I look forward to for most of the Winter. On that day the Sun will set in Brooklyn at about 7:00 PM. I like it when the Sun sets at 7:00 PM or later.
And The Vernal Equinox will occur next Sunday morning, March 20, at 11:33 AM. Spring will be here! I have a chart of the seasons here on this Web site.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 454,265,693 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,034,174. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 79,484,454 and the death toll in America was 966,520, so 8,887 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death rate is once again significantly lower than it was last week, but it's still a huge number of deaths every week. And the United States is not at the top of the countries with new infections anymore. We're sixth because the Johns-Hopkins site now ranks countries by the number of new infections reported over the past 28 days. 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 now it's been more than two years since we were at WBAI's studios at 388 Atlantic Ave. And yesterday was another anniversary, it was on March 11, 2020, that the WHO declared that COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions. Yeah, lives have changed, and more than six million have been lost to this virus.
Joseph Lapado, Florida's Surgeon General, and a Governor Ron DeSantis appointee, said Monday during a panel that Florida officially was not recommending children receive any of the approved COVID-19 vaccines. He said Florida, is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children.
Well, this Dr. Lapado character is going to be responsible for the deaths of some number of children who would have lived through the pandemic if they'd been vaccinated. He's certainly going to be responsible for many of them becoming sick from COVID-19. Dr. Lapado appears to have allowed political considerations to override his science-based training as a medical doctor. He has been associated with the far-right-wing group that calls itself America's Frontline Doctors,
the group had promoted disinformation about COVID-19. One member of that group was pushing the idea that demons were mating with people in their dreams, and that caused disease. Some group to be associated with!
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Jack Petocz is 17 years old and a junior at Flagler Palm Coast High School in Florida. He led a planned and pre-approved rally
at his school to protest against House Bill 1557, the so-called Don't Say Gay
law. School officials had approved the demo, but then changed their minds when about 500 students filled the school stadium carrying LGBT+8 and transgender Pride flags chanting Say gay!
Young Mr. Petocz said in a statement that, Administrators began confiscating Pride flags and attempted to remove them from campus. As the leader of the rally and a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community,
he said he encouraged fellow students to continue demonstrating our Pride
and not to give in to the school's unconstitutional seizure
of their flags. As a result he was indefinitely suspended,
and escorted off the school campus by those school administrators. There's an on-line petition condemning those school administrators' denial of the students' right, and demanding that young Mr. Petocz' suspension be rescinded. The Don't Say Gay bill was signed into law by the odious Governor DeSantis.
Meanwhile, in Utah, House Bill 11 passed both chambers of the legislature in the last hours of the 2022, legislative session. The original bill, which proposed the creation of a special commission to evaluate the eligibility of transgender students who wanted to play sports, was changed into an all-out ban in the proposal by state Sen. Dan McCay, which was released just hours before the end of the session. According to a statement from the group Equality Utah, HB11 has been amended to become a total ban on transgender youth in school sports.
In an interesting development Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, said he will not sign the bill which bans transgender student-athletes from competing in sports aligned with their gender identity into law. He said he was shocked with the last-minute revisions to the bill, and that he was very disappointed in the process,
and I just want [trans student-athletes] to know that it's gonna be okay. We're gonna work through this.
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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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