He Can't Buy Popularity
We got back on the air after having been preempted on December 17th. Below are some of the topics we talked about on this program. I will be trying to update this Web page as soon as I'm able to, so 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 January 11, 2023, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We'll probably elect new members to the Pacifica National Board at that meeting. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 40 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
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 WBAI LSB met in open session on Wednesday, December 14, 2022, and held elections for officers. I was reelected Treasurer because I ran unopposed, a new Secretary was elected after he ran unopposed too, I think that no one else wants these jobs. Once again the LSB was unable to get to the oral Treasurer's Report. A new Staff LSB representative was seated after a Staff person who'd been elected quit.
Before the December 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 brought everyone out usual Twitter update, with which we sometimes have a bit of fun. As of this program we've dropped down to 120 followers. I don't know if it's because people are bailing on Twitter or if people just don't want to follow my account anymore, but we have to live with it either way. Leon Skum, aka Elon Musk is still posting a lot of stuff. He held this referendum about whether or not he should quit as CEO of Twitter. I voted in that, all right. A majority of those voting, 57.5%, voted with me to tell Leon skim to get out. He's since posted that he'll step down, as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.
But he says he's still going to hold on to control of some of Twitter, saying, After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
He's also using his position as a bully pulpit to push his politics. I might look into an alternative to Twitter.
Meanwhile the Washington Post has run a story about Twitter's advertising pixel. The code for this is on at least 70,000 Web sites and it's used to track visitors. These tricky pixels are even on government Web sites including a Department of Education-operated site where college students can apply for federal financial aid. Those people applying for aid are having the information they give the government shared with Twitter's paid advertisers, including foreign governments. Meta, which used to call itself Facebook, does the same thing. What happens is that advertisers embed the code on their sites to track the people who visit those Web pages, and the code targets Twitter users with their ads. The pixel code collects information like cookie IDs, IP addresses, Web site data and, in some cases, E-mail addresses and phone numbers. The information scooped up by these pixel codes gets sold back and forth on-line. And bad actors are among those who can end up with a lot of information about you. There's nothing to stop anyone who gets that information from use it to target you only for advertising.
There are ways to protect yourself against this kind of invasion of your privacy. I regularly post a number of links to software that will help you to avoid being victimized by Twitter and just about all other Web sites that do this sort of thing. I put all of that information on the Web page that my archive blurbs are on. Just scroll down to the Info / Links:
part at the bottom of the page and you can find out how to protext yourself. I put this same information at the end of every one of my archive blurbs.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 656,573,494 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,677,210. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 100,359,314 and the death toll in America reached 1,090,133, so an average of 2,867.5 people have died of COVID-19 in America in the last two weeks which actually a little lower than the previous weekly death toll. Still, the number of people being hospitalized for COVID-19 is rising, and old people are especially in danger. The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've both gotten our bivalent vaccinations, so we should have maximum immunity against the currently dominant variants. It looks like there was a small surge after Thanksgiving, and some health professionals are bracing for another one right after the new year.
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 Respect for Marriage Act passed as amended in the House and President Biden signed it this past week. So now it is the law.
We'll soon see if bigots will file lawsuits against this law and if the biased Supreme Court will try to declare the law unconstitutional. The six right-wing Justices are out of touch with the large majority of the American people. I wonder if they think that they can ride rough shod over the rights of so many millions of Americans for much longer? If that tiny minority keeps oppressing so many millions of people something will have to change, and those out of touch right-wing justices will be removed from office in some way.
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We talked a bit about NASA officially retiring its InSight lander that's been exploring the seismology of Mars for more than four years. NASA was unable to get in contact with InSight for the last two attempts and so they have declared the mission over because they believe that the batteries have run down. This is either because the solar panel array has gotten too much Mars dust covering it and keeping the already weak sunlight from activating the solar panels and thus getting a charge into the batteries, or because the frigid temperatures on Mars have degraded the batteries themselves.
I wonder why it would be too difficult to bring along some sort of an attachment that could gently brush the Mars dust off the solar panels of these landers? I think that some of them could operate for years longer if they were just able to get the layers of dust off their energy-supplying solar panels. Is it a question of money?
One part of the mission, an instrument called the mole
failed because the soil around the InSight landing zone was different from what had been anticipated. The mole was supposed to put a probe 16 feet deep into the Martian surface, but it just couldn't get in there, so NASA had to settle for the probe being just under the surface. Still, they were able to gather some information about the heat coming from the planet.
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We did talk a little bit about Isaac Newton, whose birthday the entire world will celebrate tomorrow. He'd have been 380 years old tomorrow, if he'd lived. We're all obeying the laws he laid down, of motion, of gravity and of light and heat, every second of our existence. What follower of a character that's a product of superstition, many of whom never even existed, can say that their laws are so faithfully followed?
Radio's Pickles of the North read from some suppressed Gospels about the baby Jesus H. Christ murdering young playmates and striking blind some adults who'd pissed him off when he was five yeas old, and of course already in full possession of the powers of a Supreme Being. There's no actual evidence that Jesus H. Christ ever existed, and so these stories about his toddler-mayhem are as much a fantasy as all of the other stories that some people told about him. It's all nonsense, of course, nonsense that some guys agreed on in the early centuries of the First Millennium. It does point out the fact that the various versions of the Bible are simply the result of a bunch of guys sitting around discussing, negotiating and then agreeing on what the stories would be. Not exactly a divine
production.
We on Back of the Book wish you all a merry Isaac Newton's Birthday.
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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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