Summer Is Leaving Us
We tried something new, for us, on this program. We had a Pickles' Pick.
Pickles of the North had picked out a segment of a program we'd done in the past and we aired it again. Let us know if you like this idea. We also covered the impending end of Summer, the war in Ukraine, Trump's shenanigans with a judge he'd appointed, the pandemic and more. It is my intention to update this page at some point.
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 October 12, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 40 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, September 14, 2022. The LSB voted to meet some time in October in executive session with legal counsel to address the questions/concerns about the composition of search committees and evaluation committees in Pacifica. We heard from the WBAI Directors who sit on the PNB that they and Pacifica Management are cancelling the elections that ought to have been held this year because Pacifica can't afford to pay to hold them. This has ben done before, it did nor work out well. There was also talk about the financial situation of Pacifica and a report from Pacifica's CFO that five of the Pacifica units have a total of $61,500 in cash and a cumulative Accounts Payable of about $815,000 and those bills are coming due soon. It was a gloomy meeting at times, except for those who didn't understand what was being said.
Before the September 14, 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 Summer season of 2022, ending soon. R. Paul lamented it's departure with its longer days and warmth that allows him to sleep m ore easily. Pickles of the North was glad to see it go with the heat that prevents her from sleeping and the humidity and air pollution that makes it hard for her to breathe. Well, neither one of us is a fan of the high humidity.
The Autumnal Equinox will occur next Thursday night September 22, 2022, at 9:04 PM (ET). I have a chart of the seasons on this Web site that can show you the seasons and sub-seasons past, present and near future.
Oh, that poor Sun, being attacked by the Autumn leaf.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 611,319,644 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,524,839. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 95,640,902 and the death toll in America was 1,053,339, so 3,117 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. That's about 275 more deaths than for the previous week. While the death rate had been trending lower than it had been a couple of months ago, COVID-19 is still killing hundreds of people in America every week. The pandemic is not over, even though a lot of people are behaving as if it were, including the CDC. Keep your masks on. Pickles of the North got her vaccination for the omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 more than a week ago, but I'm still having to wait for the V.A. to get ready to shoot me up. When they can I'm going to try to get both the newest COVID-19 vaccination and a flu shot as well.
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 did not have to have a pandemic killing millions around the world.
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Trump got his so-called special master. Aileen Cannon, the Federal Judge Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, after he had lost the election, is just giving him everything he wants. She has interfered with the criminal investigation of the national security harm he's done by enjoining the Department of Justice from, further review and use of any of the materials seized for criminal investigative purposes pending resolution of the special master's review.
And she has refused to reconsider that. And now she's chosen one of Trump's picks as the Special Master. When is the Department of Justice going to go around her? Surely there are other judges they can appeal to. The Special Master is Raymond J. Dearie, a judge and politician from New York. I have heard his name in the past. I'm glad to read that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal this nonsense. And while that Florida judge isn't allowing the Justice Department to bring the case to a grand jury or talk to witnesses about Trump's crimes she said that the FBI could continue to investigate, the movement and storage of seized materials, including documents marked as classified, without discussion of their contents.
Oh, I hope the Department of Justice gets all of her rulings reversed.
One issue is that Dearie is semi-retired, he sometimes hears cases. He's not supposed to have any outside jobs. Judge Cannon has said that Trump would pay the entire cost of Judge Dearie's compensation and expenses, along with the cost of support staff or advisers he needs, given that Mr. Trump had requested a special master. Wow, talk about giving trump everything! He's paying this guy!
Apparently Trump said this past week that if he's indicted there will be, problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we've never seen before.
The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence want to keep investigating at least what happened to the contents of the now empty folders marked Top Secret
and more.
Regarding the idea that no one should be above the law Judge Cannon wrote that, the principles of equity require the court to consider the specific context at issue, and that consideration is inherently impacted by the position formerly held
meaning when Trump had been president. The judge also gave Dearie until November 30, to make his decision. Some people think that Trump may have blundered in getting Dearie on this case.
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Pickles' Picks
That's the name we've given to something we're going to try. Pickles of the North noted that, since this radio program has been airing for more than 36 years now that we should bring up some of the interesting or humorous segments we've done in the past. This first one is one that she found both humorous and an example of the cross pollination that used to happen at WBAI when when we were all together and able to visit our friends on air.
This segment aired live on January 2, 2006. We were still at 120 Wall St. then. At that time we were doing a program every other week and alternated with Uncle Sidney Smith. In fact Uncle Sidney is in this segment from that program. The Catholic church had been talking about changing what Catholic doctrine was about Limbo in December 2005. As ex-Catholics we had a lot of background on this topic. The Church's political point on this is talked about at the end of the segment. The Pope at the time was Pope Benedict XVI who had been Cardinal Ratzinger.
This was also the program where Pickles of the North proposed marriage to R. Paul. I wonder if that's a part of why she remember this progeam so fondly?
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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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