Back of the Book links for the March 18, 2023, program

I's Monday morning, March 20, 2023, 07:10, and this Web page is finished. I've added the piece about St. Patrick and I've given Mayor/Pope Adams a more appropriate hat. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ The Mayor of New York thinks he's on a mission from some god. Vladimir Putin is to be arrested by anyone who can do it for his role in war crimes. It's not impossible that a supernova could show up fairly soon. We're looking at the CDC's COVID-19 numbers now.

The next regular LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday April 12, 2023, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 43 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.

The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, March 8, and we once again tried to hold elections for committee members of the Pacifica national Board's committees. This time we managed to do it.

It was a messy meeting, but it was not as bad as the February meeting. We populated some committees. A brand new member, who had replaced a member who'd resigned, tried to get an item on the agenda which would have caused utter chaos by suspending Robert's Rules of Order for the chat function on Zoom. We had a big debate about it and that chaotic proposal got stopped. We then took up the routine item of excusing absences, which was scheduled to take at most five minutes. In the end it took up 24 minutes because the same new member wanted to not excuse some members. The Chair could have handled that better. We went though those committees that we had to populate, and we did Public Comment, and the meeting was about to end and it looked like I would once again not be able to do an oral Treasurer's Report, but people extended the end-time of the meeting to allow it. And I was almost done when my phone got disconnected! My written Treasurer's Report is on the Web page for this program at glib.com.

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:

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.

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?

On Friday Vladimir Putin was finally declared a war criminal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the Russian Children's Rights commissioner Alekseyevna Lvova-Belov.

The ICC said that Putin, who's been struggling to conquer Ukraine for more than a year now, is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

The other Russian charged with the same war crimes is Alekseyevna Lvova-Belov a 38-year-old mother to at least ten children, some of whom were adopted. She is alleged to have adopted some Ukrainian children who were shipped out of Ukraine by the Russian government when their towns and villages were overrun by Putin's military.

The ICC said, There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, and that in Russia, officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren't wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship. The ICC statement continued, As a judicial institution, the ICC does not have its own police force or enforcement body; thus, it relies on cooperation with countries worldwide for support, particularly for making arrests, transferring arrested persons to the ICC detention centre in The Hague, freezing suspects' assets, and enforcing sentences.

The Associated Press reports that, Officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren't wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship.

There are Russian laws that prohibit children being adopted to countries where consent wasn't granted.

This thing of kidnapping the children of conquered people is at least thousands of years old. The Roman empire, and other empires through the ages, did it. What Putin gets out of it is that if he does finally conquer Ukraine he'll have these kids, who are Ukrainian, available to be sent back to Ukraine, after some years of indoctrination, to put a local, Ukrainian face on the conquest. They'll be very high-profile people as adults, and they'll be the people Putin has wanted as puppets who would run Ukraine.

I've also read a piece in the Washington Post about low morale and ammunition shortages in the Ukrainian army. In the article it says that a lot of the Ukrainian soldiers are raw recruits who run when the real battle begin. The article says that a lot of the battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded in this war. I hope that somebody gets rid of Putin soon.

NASA's next generation space telescope, which is named after an anti-gay bigot, has found an interesting star in its Wolf-Rayet phase. Wolf-Rayet stars are named after the French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet who first discovered one in 1867. They are special because they always start out as large stars and then shed a great deal of their mass in dust before going supernova. The star Wolf-Rayet 124 in the constellation Sagitta has already blown off its outer layers. The folks at NASA say that WR 124 is 30 times the mass of the sun, and has already shed 10 suns' worth of material. They figure that the star is about to go supernova pretty soon. Of course it's 15,000 light years away so it most likely has done that already. But we may finally see a Type 2 supernova after more than 400 years.

Also in that same constellation V Sagittae is a cataclysmic variable which is a binary star system composed of a white dwarf accreting mass of a donor star that is expected to go nova and briefly become the most luminous star in the Milky Way and one of the brightest stars in our sky around the year 2083. The last supernova seen on Earth that wasn't in another galaxy was Kepler's Supernova which blew in 1604, just before astronomical telescopes got invented.

Daylight Saving Time arrived the day after our last program. The Sun is setting after 7 PM now, and I really like that. On this coming Monday March 20, at 5:24 PM (ET) Spring will arrive! Whooppee!! I have a chart of the seasons here on this Web site.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is really foisting his superstitious beliefs on the rest of New York City. This past week he said that he wants to transform the New York City into a place of God. At some other event full of sky pilots Adams said, How do we take a city that is the center of the power of America and turn it into a city, when you enter it, everyone sees faith and sees God? I'm thinking maybe by forcing hallucinogenic drugs on everyone? Apparently the Mayor does not understand what his job is. He went on to say, Our challenge is not economics. Our challenge is not finance. Our challenge is faith. People have lost their faith. So economics is something he's not going to deal with. He's going to pray the city's problems away. He had previously said that he doesn't believe in the separation of church and state. At a gun violence summit hosted by even more sky pilots, he called on them to be part of a major recruitment campaign to get young people to become police officers. Yeah, we need more superstition and superstition-based bias on the police force. Adams had put various anti-gay bigots in city positions during his term in office. He sees nothing wrong with that. And before the St. Patrick's Day Parade he said that people who object to his pushing his religion on everyone that they should just. Get over it. Wow. This week he also said, When people walk into this city, when they get off the bus, when the asylum seekers come in, when they enter the city for the first time at JFK or Amtrak - do they feel God? What a schmuck. He's even worse than I'd previously thought.

The CDC Web site says that in America the number of reported cases as of Friday was 103,801,821 and the death toll in America was 1,121,512, with a death rate of 1,750 for the past week, although the CDC gives that death rate as being 1,706. So we have different numbers, but either way they're down from last week's numbers. We'll see how this goes in the future.

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.

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.

This program was recorded on St. Patrick's Day 2023. This Saint Patrick guy wasn't even Irish! He was also never canonized, although that's mostly due to his mythos being prevalent before the actual fall of the Roman Empire, when the Catholic Church hadn't set up a whole bunch of its rules yet. He was a Roman missionary sent to make the Irish people the vassals of the then deteriorating, but Roman Catholic, western Roman Empire. Superstitious people claim that he drove the snakes out of Ireland. In fact there were never any snakes in Ireland. What is probably meant here was that he oppressed and destroyed the worshipers of another, older religion, people who were then called pagans, and so he got Christianity, as it was then, made into the only surviving superstition on the island. He was not good for Ireland.

On this program I told the story of why I did not get to march in the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade in 1965. No, it had nothing to do with sexual orientation, it had to do with drunken teenagers.

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.

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.

You can also send me E-mail.

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Back of the Book — March 18, 2023,

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!