Kansas Votes to Protect Reproductive Rights
Here's the Web page for this program. I will note that I updated the Web page for last week's program. I plan to update this page as well, so 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 regular LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday August 10, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 38 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met in executive session this past Tuesday night August 2, 2022. We voted on a report out but I don't see it posted and I don't want to say what I think the report out should be. We have until 10 days after the meeting to post that, so I'm sure it'll get posted before the next program. I will say that things that were not at all confidential were discussed at this meeting.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, July 13, 2022. At times it was a bit comical. There was a big dispute about a letter that some said held secret information, although the information had been on the Internet, including on the LSB's own public mailing list, for a while. Some people didn't want it read, others did. The LSB voted that it was indeed in order to have the letter read, but the time had run out and we had to go to Public Comment so the LSB members coudn't read the letter aloud at the meeting. In the end various listeners read the letter aloud as part of Public Comment.
Before the July 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 how we were glad to hear early on Wednesday morning that the state of Kansas had voted to retain that part of the state's constitution that protects a women's right to choose an abortion. After a couple of days of counting the final vote tally appears to be vote 61% voted to keep the state's constitutional right to an abortion while 39% voted against it. The turnout for this referendum was especially high, about 95% of all eligible voters in Kansas turned out for it.
It's well known that about two thirds of Americans favor keeping a women's right to an abortion legal. The Kansas vote reflects that proportion. It remains to be see if other states will have referenda on the abortion issue. The right-wing might be a bit shy about trying that now.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 582,621,631 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,414,706. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 92,077,188 and the death toll in America was 1,033,421, so 3,565 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. That's more than 400 more deaths than the previous week. The pandemic is not over, even though a lot of people are behaving as if it were. Biden recovered and then had a relapse. Apparently this Paxlovid stuff does that in some cases.
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.
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In another vote on Tuesday, voters in Jamestown Township, Michigan voted to defund the Patmos Library over its refusal to remove LGBT+∞ material from its shelves. The vote was about what's called a property tax millage and 1,905 people voted against the millage, and only 1,142 voted for it, so that property tax money will not go to the library. The library will now lose 84% of its $245,000 budget and the library's board president, said that without that tax revenue, Patmos will likely run out of money late next year. This township voted for Trump for president in 2020, by a margin of 76% to 21%.
A group calling itself the Jamestown Conservatives wanted the book Gender Queer: A Memoir taken off the shelves. The book was written by Maia Kobabe, a nonbinary and queer author and illustrator from California. The book has won awards and was described in a review in the School Library Journal as A great resource for those who identify as nonbinary or asexual as well as for those who know someone who identifies that way and wish to better understand.
So anti-gay right-wing bigots hold sway in that little place. Too bad for the kids. Maybe the kids will find out about the real world in some other way now.
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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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