A Holiday Surge?
It's Monday afternoon, December 12, 2022, 13:23, and I've updated this Web page again, this time with a short piece about the Winter Solstice, and with a little text from Pickles of the North about the end of the Artemis 1 mission. That's on top of the previous update about what we discussed on this radio program. There's still a little more to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Well, everything is late here. I'm trying to get this Web page posted before air time. I'll definitely be updating this page later today, and I'll do a more comprehensive update later on. Be sure to 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 WBAI LSB met in executive session on December 7, 2022. The report out from that meeting was, The WBAI LSB met in executive session to discuss personnel, financial and legal matters of a confidential nature. It also discussed a disciplinary matter.
The next regular LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday December 14, 2022, 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, November 9, 2022. The LSB passed a motion that listeners can contact the LSB; I'm not sure how that's going to work out. And Management was told to set up a phone number to call the LSB; I don't think that's going to happen. The LSB was also presented with an impossibly complicated motion, which may be out of order. I got it postponed till we can find out if it's even in order. People just throw in every bit of language they can think of sometimes and call it a motion. And once again certain LSB members showed that they are hardly familiar with WBAI at all. They should know more about this radio station than just what's on the air.
Before the November 9, 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 648,475,559 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,651,594. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 99,397,378 and the death toll in America was 1,084,398, so 3,113 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program which is more than a thousand deaths higher than the previous weekly death toll. The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've both gotten out bivalent vaccinations, so we should have maximum immunity against the currently dominant variants. There are health professional who are bracing for a surge since we're in the Winter holiday season.
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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The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues. The Ukrainians are finally hitting Russian targets outside of Ukraine. It is being reported that Ukrainian drones attacked some of the strategic bombers that Russia has been using to bomb Ukrainian cities. The Russian defense ministry has confirmed the attacks on the bases that are located hundreds of miles from the front lines, they said that two of their aircraft were damaged and three military personnel were killed. Ukrainian reports say that the bombers were destroyed at Russia's Ryazan Dyagilevo airbase and at another airbase. This long range attack is perfectly acceptable behavior by Ukraine, in my opinion. They're hitting military targets and there is no law that says that you have to fight only a defensive war in your own country when you've been invaded. The Russians bomb Ukraine, so the Ukrainians can bomb Russia.
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The Respect for Marriage Act passed as amended in the House. President Biden said he'd sign it right away. So real soon now it should become law. Maybe it will become law over this weekend. I'm sure that bigots will file lawsuits against it and try to get the biased Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. A Congress Critter named Vicky Hartzler made the news while crying as she spoke against it. Turns out her nephew Andrew Hartzler is gay and he had a comment on what his aunt had said.
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Pickles here at the tail end of the Artemis 1 mission! This weekend on December 11, Day 26 of its mission, Artemis 1 concludes its voyage as the Orion spacecraft returns to earth with live coverage of this tremendous event on NASA TV.
December 11, is also the fiftieth anniversary of the last time humans landed on the lunar surface during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
As the Orion spacecraft enters the earth's atmosphere it will be traveling at 25,000 mph. Its heat shield will reach up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as the atmosphere begins to slow down the spacecraft. When the craft slows to 325 mph three parachutes will deploy, and then two drogue parachutes as it drops into the Pacific Ocean traveling at 20 mph. Whew!
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The 2022, mid-term elections finally ended on Tuesday with the reelection of Senator Raphael Warnock. It was an amazingly tight election, especially considering that the other candidate, former football player and Republican puppet Herschel Walker was so obviously a stupid person and a flagrant liar who didn't even understand that everyone could easily see through his lies. That so many people would vote for Walker says something bad about Republican voters.
Meanwhile, the Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, Abe Hamadeh, has filed a lawsuit contesting the election after a close race against Democratic opponent Kris Mayes, who is an open lesbian, shows her in the lead.
Hamadeh has been joined in his lawsuit by the Republican National Committee. They're suing county boards of supervisors and recorders, as well as Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who was just elected governor of Arizona.
The New York Times is reporting that the lawsuit not only requests that Hobbs be stopped from certifying Mayes as the winner but also demands that Hamadeh be declared the winner instead,. Hamadeh claims there was not any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing,
but that errors in the election process have led to him being behind Mayes in the vote count.
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Twitter: we're currently holding at the gigantic figure of 121 followers on Twitter. I'm seeing claims that large numbers of people are leaving Twitter. There was quite a lot of reporting about Elon Musk, aka Leon Skum, complaining that Apple was going to pull all of its advertising on Twitter because Twitter was going to become a haven for hate speech and similar problems. Well, on my Twitter account I'm seeing ads from Apple just about every day now on Twitter. I'm also seeing more promoted
Tweets, and others are noticing this too. I'm also getting a bunch of Tweets from Musk himself, but they seem to disappear very soon after I see them! One of those Tweets from him says that he's going to delete about 1½ Billion dormant accounts. Is he really? There have been some people complaining that such an action would end up erasing some history, especially of some accounts that had been held by people who are now deceased and whose Twitter accounts are considered a memorial to them.
A couple of months ago, shortly after he'd finally bought and paid for Twitter after a great deal of drama, Musk had said that he was buying Twitter in order, to help humanity.
So far he's fired a lot of Twitter's Staff and he's set up what sound like pretty sketchy working conditions for others. I'm sure that there's more drama to come from this quarter.
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I think that time can seem strange in December. We're having the earliest sunsets of the year now. The Sun set on Friday at 4:28 in the afternoon. By about half past five it's as dark as midnight. We'll be having these earliest sunsets until December 13, almost two weeks of this! I find these very earliest sunsets so depressing. The Winter Solstice will occur on Wednesday, December 21, 2022, at 4:48 PM (ET). And then the days will overall start to get longer.
I have a chart on this Web site which shows the dates and times of the seasons and sub-seasons.
Meanwhile enjoy the December twilights, which can show the most interesting natural lighting effects of the year.
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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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