They Fight On
Here I am fighting sleep to get this posted. Well, we covered the three topics below on this program, and more. I'm really hoping to get this Web page updated soon. 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 that you can listen to and maybe even participate in will be held on Wednesday May 11, 2022, at 7 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 35 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The next WBAI LSB meeting will be held in executive session on Monday April 25, 2022. My report out is that the meeting was a total waste of time.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, April 13, 2022. We had more elections for PNB committees. We'll see how those come out. There was some posturing, and some talk about the reality of the financial situation, which not everyone wanted to be quite so frank.
Before the April 13, 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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We talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How will this end? Will the Ukrainian people be completely sugjugated? Will Putin satisfy himself with part of the country, for a while, and then build up his forces for another try at conquering Ukraine later? So United Nations head Antonio Guterres visited Kyiv, Ukraine this past week. And Russian chose to bomb the city about an hour after Secretary-General Guterres had held a press conference after touring some of the destruction in and around Kyiv and after Guterres had condemned Russia's attacks on civilians. The Russian missiles hit a residential high-rise and another building in Kyiv. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly said, This says a lot about Russia's true attitude toward global institutions, about attempts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the U.N. and everything the organization represents,
and that the missile attack was Vladimir Putin's way of giving Guterres his middle finger.
And the first American involved in trying to help Ukraine fight off the Russians has died. Willy Joseph Cancel, a 22-year-old Marine veteran who was working for a military contractor that flew him into Poland last month. We don't know the name of that contractor. Young Mr. Cancel leaves behind a 7-month-old son and a wife. His wife got a phone call Tuesday informing her of her husband's death. That's not a good way to get that news. Mr. Cancel seems to have led a bit of a troubled life. He'd served as a Marine rifleman and was stationed in Camp Lejeune, N.C. He had gotten a bad conduct discharge. Mr. Cancel had signed up for the Marines after graduating high school in 2017 and served until 2021.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 512,837,695 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,233,279. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 81,311,888 and the death toll in America was 993,554, so 2,582 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death rate is essentially the same as last week's. The BA.2 sub-variant of the omicron variant is still the dominant variant of COVID-19. 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.
We talked about the details of why the omicron variant is so much more infectious than the previous SARS-CoV-2 variants on a program a couple of months ago, there's a longer description of why it's so much more infectious in the May issue of Scientific American. Basically the spikes are stronger and this increases the odds of an individual virus being able to enter a cell more easily.
And Dr. Anthony Fauci made a bit of a blunder this past week. He said that the pandemic was over. We knew it wasn't. He then corrected himself later in the week, saying that he'd misspoken and that we're probably past the acute stage of the pandemic, but we're not at the endemic stage of COVID-19 yet.
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This past week Republicans in Kansas failed to override Governor Laura Kelly's veto on an anti-trans school sports ban. The Democratic governor had called the legislation, harmful to students and their families and it's bad for business.
The Kansas Senate had succeeded in overriding the governor's veto, but Republicans in the Kansas House failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to override her veto. The final vote was 81-42 three votes short of the two-thirds needed. The Human Rights Campaign state legislative director and senior counsel, Cathryn Oakley said, We sincerely thank Gov. Kelly for rejecting this discriminatory legislation and allowing transgender kids to be who they are — kids. We also want to thank the 81 legislators who heard the voices of transgender kids and their families, medical experts, the business community, and advocates for fairness in sports — and voted to sustain the governor's veto.
According to the Human right Campaign there are more than 320 anti-LGBT+∞ bills currently under consideration in state legislatures across the country.
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The Middle Third starts tomorrow!
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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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