Deaths in America Remain Steady
Here's some of what we did on this program. It was our 36th anniversary program and we aired a number of audio clips on this program. 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 regular LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday September 14, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 39 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, August 10, 2022. At times it was a bit comical. There was a lot of disagreement over the agenda, and then we did not get to that part of the agenda.
Before the August 10, 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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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 603,371,012 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,492,263. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 94,710,239 and the death toll in America was 1,047,380, so 3,694 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. That's somewhat higher than the death rate for the previous week. People keep saying that the rates are going down, but we're still seeing steady of rising weekly death rates from COVID-19 in America. The pandemic is not over, even though a lot of people are behaving as if it were, including the CDC. Keep your masks on.
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.
The Daily News is reporting that an unidentified, mystery respiratory ailment has killed three people at a private clinic about 800 miles from the Argentina's capital of Buenos Aires. It's doing the same thing to people's lungs that COVID does. But the total of nine patients infected have not tested positive for the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, nor for influenza, the Hantavirus nor for any of the more than two dozen other pathogens that doctors in Argentina have been testing for. People who are getting this disease are getting bilateral pneumonia, which means that both their lungs are affected. Besides the patients eight medical personnel have caught the disease. Doctors are desperately searching for the cause of this serious illness. We wish those doctors, and the patients, luck, and let's hope this deadly disease doesn't get out to the rest of the world.
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We talked about President Biden's speech that he gave on Thursday night. At last he's going on the attack against Trump and his MAGA crowd that really does want to destroy democracy in America. Biden also referenced what he's calling the MAGA Republicans, who go along with Trump's anti-American crap in order to get elected by the extremely stupid people who follow Trump's often deranged statements, and who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn the 2020, presidential election. Biden didn't name Lindsay Graham, but he did reference elected Republican officials who threaten violence in the streets if Trump finally gets indicted for his crimes. Yeah, things are heating up.
Speaking of the January 6, insurrection a retired New York City cop named Thomas Webster, who was convicted of attacking a U.S. Capitol cop as a part of the insurrection in 2021, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. This is the longest sentence for one of the insurrectionists yet. This is good. Too many of them have been getting tiny sentences when they should all be facing decades in a federal prison for what they did and what they'd intended to do. In addition, Webster, who'd been on the NYPD for 20 years before he retired, reportedly was also sentenced to three years of supervised release after his time is done. Jeez, this character must have been one awful cop. So far close to 250 of the insurrectionists have been sentenced for their parts in the riots.
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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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