Are New Variants Ahead?
I'm getting this posted a little late. I'll have more to post later on. Come back for the update.
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.
The WBAI LSB elections for officers are over. DeeDee Halleck was reelected Chair, Michael D.D. White was reelected Vice-Chair, and as I said last week Kay Williams was elected Secretary and I was reelected Treasurer at the December 14th meeting, after we both ran unopposed; 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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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 660,072,705 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,689,101. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 100,738,182 and the death toll in America reached 1,092,622, so an average of 2,489 people have died of COVID-19 in America in the last week which a couple of hundred deaths lower 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 our bivalent vaccinations. We are not among those who are saying that getting a COVID-19 infection is like getting a cold. I bet that 2,489 people didn't die this past week from colds. There could be another surge after the new year starts. The so-called People's Republic of China has relented in the face of the huge public demonstrations they've had from people who were reacting against the usual heavy handed, inhumane way that the Chinese Communist Party had been keeping people bottled up as a precaution against the pandemic. Now they're throwing off precautions all together! No moderate steps there. It's either total oppression or Do as you will and we won't care,
from that government. How this will affect the country with the largest population in the world isn't known, but it will be seen, unless they crack down on reporting about it all. And what this might mean for the rest of the world is another thing we have to be concerned about.
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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Merry New Year! This is, of course, our last radio program of 2022. We're supposed to be back next week, so we should start the another calendar year of programming then.
We hope that all of you will have a good time this New Year's Eve. Be careful if you go out into the big, wide world though. It's pretty crazy out there these days.
Pickles of the North and I will be staying home, as usual, and watching the ball drop on TV. We'll have our own little celebration together. We hope you'll all tune in to our program next 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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