Marina Ovsyannikova's
NO WARsign
We covered the below topics and more on this program. Spring starts tomorrow morning! Yeah, some good news. I plan to update this Web page and I hope you'll check back for those 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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NO WARsign
We talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of Russian state television Channel 1, had had enough of the station's coverage of the war. So last Monday night during the 9 PM news on Channel 1 called Russia Tonight she jumped on camera behind the anchor during a Russian TV news broadcast holding a sign that said NO WAR
in English at the top and, Stop the war. Don't believe the propaganda. They're lying to you here,
in Russian. And her sign also had drawings on the Russian and Ukrainian flags. She was arrested and, so far, is only supposed to be subject to a fine of about $280. But calling it a war is a crime in Russian now and that could get her five years in prison. At some point in the future she may well have to deal with that charge too.
Ms. Ovsyannikova also posted a video on-line in which she said Unfortunately, for the last several years I worked at Channel One, promoting Kremlin propaganda and for that I am very ashamed right now... I am ashamed that I allowed lies to be told from TV screens, that I allowed Russian people to be zombified. We stayed quiet when all of this was just getting started in 2014.
Recently the group Anonymous hacked some other Russian TV broadcasts to post anti-war messages, which the Russian people are not being allowed to see or hear about by dictator Vladimir Putin's government.
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Daylight Saving Time arrived in the wee hours of last Sunday morning. I like the improvement. The Sun is setting after 7 PM. And at 11:33 tomorrow morning Spring will arrive! I'm looking forward to that. If the latest COVID-19 variant doesn't cause a surge I might even get out of the apartment some time this Spring. 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 466,771,069 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,069,002. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 79,705,070 and the death toll in America was 970,554 , so 4,034 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death rate is less than half what it had been last week. More than 4,000 deaths a week is still quite a few though. The pandemic is not over. The BA.2 sub-variant of the omicron variant is raising the rate of infections in Europe and the United Kingdom significantly, and this variant is already here in the United States. Will we see a COVID-19 surge in the next three weeks?
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.
Study results from Canada's McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, done with nearly 1,400 test subjects at risk of severe disease if they caught COVID-19 reacted similarly to placebos and the deworming medication ivermectin.
There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful,
said Dr. Edward Mills, who was one of the study's researchers.
The FDA said last year that ivermectin showed no benefits in clinical testing and could be dangerous in large doses. Various right-wing celebrities from Joe Rogan to Fox News media hogs were pushing ivermectin, including some promoting use of the animal-grade version that the FDA found itself having to push back against through its own messaging. The FDA ran an ad that said, You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it.
In September National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease director Anthony Fauci said Don't do it. There's no evidence whatsoever that (ivermectin) works and it could potentially have toxicity.
And of course people using ivermectin with the delusion that it will prevent or treat COVID-19 are generally not using the safe and effective vaccines designed to actually address COVID-19 which has killed over 970,000 Americans.
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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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