Back of the Book — October 1, 2022


I'm about to pass out, so here's a sleep-deprivation-influenced Web page about this radio program. We covered the below topics and more on this program and I hope to update this Web page in the near future.

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 been 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.

Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.

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.

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!

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?

Russian invasion of Ukraine

Vladimir Putin is getting smacked by Ukraine.
Ukraine Smacks Putin

The Ukrainian army has been very successful lately in reclaiming Ukrainian territory that had been invaded and occupied by Russia. As a result Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has lost face. He is now blaming underlings for the rollout of the draft that's resulted in thousands of men fleeing Russia in an attempt to avoid the becoming cannon fodder.

I've seen reports that at least some Russian draftees have been sent to Ukraine without any actual training. They've been put in uniforms and shipped to the war zone. Survival time for someone in such a position can be very short.

Putin has pushed a phony referendum being forced on the inhabitants of the occupied parts of Ukraine where armed soldiers go to people's houses and apartments and demand that they vote on whether or not they want the place where they live to be a part of Russia. Of course this is not a secret ballot. Even if it were the ballots would still be counted by Putin's people.

We knew that Putin was to have made a big announcement on Friday about this. We waited for the announcement and what we got before we had to start recording is this: Putin has declared four Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia. In response the United States of America and Great Britain have ordered new sanctions on Russia. President Biden has declared that the West will not be intimidated by Putin's actions.

Meanwhile Ukraine says that 30 people have been killed in a Russian attack on a civilian convoy in Zaporizhzhia, where that large nuclear power plant is. Meanwhile, Russian forces are reported to be partly encircled in the town of Lyman, according to what The New York Times calls a pro-Kremlin proxy leader.

In his speech Putin reportedly accused the United States of Satanism. He referred to the west as the enemy, which is certainly a verbal escalation of antagonistic feelings. President Biden said that Putin's actions to annex the four territories, have no legitimacy, and that, the United States will always honor Ukraine's internationally recognized borders.

So is Putin really is trying to play the game of declaring parts of Ukraine to be Russia after his threat that an attack on Russia would be met with nuclear weapons? Everyone sees through that nonsense. But is Putin serious about a follow through? Will he use tactical nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian army if, say, those Russian occupiers of the town of Lymen, who are currently being encircled, get defeated? Would he use the tactical nuclear weapons on civilian targets, as he's been doing all along with his conventional artillery and with air strikes? Or would be used full-size nukes to destroy cities? Well, things will only get more interesting.

SARS-CoV-2 virus
Did America's Death Rate Double?

According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 617,551,975 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,545,632. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 96,378,401 and the death toll in America was 1,059,521, so 6,182 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago.

This is amazing. Did the Johns Hopkins Web site have a glitch or did the rate of deaths from COVID-19 in America more than double in this past week? We get these statistics off that Web site not long before we started to record this program, so I was surprised to see this jump in the death total for the United States. Unfortunately we had no time to check it all out, but we'll look at those figure and see if there's a problem with them before the next radio program.

The pandemic is not over, no matter what Joe Biden says, but a lot of people are behaving as if it were over. Keep your masks on. I got my flu shot more than a week ago, and I'll be getting the new BA.4 and BA.5 booster this coming Tuesday. Pickles of the North got her bivalent booster shot weeks ago.

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.

A program note: We were in the process of just getting done editing the program one week ago, yes, we actually edit this thing, and I got an E-mail asking me if we were preempted. I said no, we were on.

We got the program posted and then we found out that we had been supposed to have been preempted last week for a fund raising special! We'd looked at the official schedule posted on WBAI.ORG and we were scheduled to be on according to that schedule, but we were later sent information that said that we were to be preempted. It took our Saddle Pal Maxwell J. Schmid talking to Management about this for the September 24th, program to be put in the queue for the air. We're glad it was.

WBAI has been using what's being called the 52 week schedule for more than two years now. We hadn't gotten a new schedule for Back of the Book since 2020. In this past week we have gotten two 52 week schedules. I've posted what we know now about our future program schedule on this Web site. Right now it looks like we're preempted on October 22, November 19, and December 17. So for the rest of this year we'll be doing three programs and then there will be a preemption to raise money for the station. Now you know what we know about our future schedule.

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.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

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