Earth Day 2023
It's Friday afternoon, April 28, 2023, 12:45, and this Web page is finished. I've added some of the the other topics we'd talked about on the air. Not everything we'd talked about is reflected on this Web page. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We're running late and we covered more topics than what's below.
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 LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday May 10, 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 44 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, April 12. It wasn't that bad a meeting. Another brand new member, who had replaced one more member who'd resigned, showed up after having not done so for several meetings. The routine item of excusing absences was again made to take longer than necessary by another new member who is now apparently going to make a big deal about excusing absences at every meeting. The LSB voted to create a Management Evaluation Committee; nominations were held and voting for the candidates is underway. The Community Advisory Board made a report at his meeting and apparently its members said that producers should not be able to boycott
listeners when they call in. It sounds like they want to be able to call into a program nod talk to their heart's content and the producer would be obligated to let them do as they please. Crazy stuff. Another request from those Community Advisory Board members was that WBAI should tell everyone how to have a show on WBAI with a detailed point by point explanation of the process. Yeah, some of them really want to get on the air. I gave a Treasurer's Report and the written version is here.
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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It's Earth Day! We saw a PBS program about some people who were looking at the Arctic Ocean to study the movements of the ice sheets there. They found that the big ice sheets are gone! What they found there were thin ice floes that were scattered all over the place. Jumping from one small ice floe to another was enough to break some of them apart. All of the ice floes were colliding with each other and breaking each other into smaller and smaller pieces.
The explorers said that the Arctic is what's been keeping the planet cooler in the face of the changing climate. But the polar regions have been heating up faster than the lower latitudes have been and the big ice is gone now, leaving only the floes and smaller chunks of ice floating around in what is sometimes open water.
They noted that ice reflects the heat of the Sun back out into space while open water absorbs the heat of the Sun. So the cooling mechanism that's been mitigating the anthropogenic global warming that's been going on for well over 200 years now is almost gone and the climate change effects we've already seen, warmer temperatures and stronger, more frequent storms, will get worse. More than the region of the Arctic Ocean is involved, of course. Various things are going on that exacerbate the warming. Yeah, it's a climate crisis, all right, and there are still some people denying it.
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So we were all waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the fate of Mifepristone, aka RU-486. This all started because a Christian anti-abortion group went to a Trump-appointed federal judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk to get him to ban Mifepristone by saying that the FDA didn't approve it correctly more than 20 years ago, or some such nonsense.
The Supreme Court had said that it was going to release its ruling on this case by 11:59 PM (ET) Friday night. As we say at the start of the program, It's pre-recorded. This program was recorded on Friday for airing on Saturday morning. If things have happened between then and when you're hearing this program we won't be referencing them on this program. A recorded program cannot be as up-to-date as a live program, but this is what we have to do in these dangerous times.
And we have since learned that he Supreme Court kicked the entire case back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Meanwhile it sounds like this means that everything is status quo ante with regard to Mifepristone to before that idiot judge Kacsmaryk got ahold of it. Maybe even most of the right-wing zealots on the Supreme Court realize that giving any federal judge the ability to second guess a federal agency without any reasonable evidence that it didn't do its job well enough is a quagmire that they need to step back from. I remember the right-wing politicians railing against judges making rulings they didn't like, such as Brown v. Board of Education, saying that the Supreme Court should not be legislating. Well, that's exactly what's been going on in this case so far. And if they were going to do the right thing and just blow away those rulings on Mifepristone I don't think they'd be delaying their decision until midnight at the start of the weekend. They've punted. This fight is still going on.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he's running for the 2024, Democratic presidential nomination. Apparently he's campaigning mostly on his father's and uncle's terms in office. But this is not a 1960s, Kennedy. He's a big anti-vaccination disinformationist and some of his own family members have denounced his lies about the vaccines that are being used to fight COVID-19. He really sounds like one of the Republican nut cases these days.
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Speaking of Republican nut cases that guy who patented a pillow and went on to advise Trump to use his presidential powers a couple of years ago to declare martial law in order to stay in office has been ordered to pay $5 million to a man from Nevada who successfully disproved his 2020, election lies.
When the pillow jerk was showing off his made-up claims that Trump had won the 2020, election he'd issued a challenge to prove him wrong during a South Dakota gathering of Trump supporters. He reportedly said, There's a $5 million prize for anybody that can prove the election data that I have from the 2020, election was false, is not from the 2020, election.
One Robert Zeidman, a Trump supporter, took up the challenge and claimed the prize. When the pillow jerk refused to pay the prize, Zeidman took the case to arbitration, as the contest rules apparently stipulated. After a three-day hearing the arbitration board ruled in favor of Zeidman. The pillow jerk says he's challenging that ruling in court. What a welcher.
The pillow jerk will definitely be in court soon, he's facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over his bogus claims that their voting machines were rigged.
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The CDC Web site says that Maps, charts, and data provided by CDC, updates Mon-Fri by 8 pm ET.
So these figures are not as up to date as the John-Hopkins data used to be. It's what we have though.
The CDC Web site says that in America the number of reported cases as of Thursday night at 8 PM (ET) was 104,445,294 and the death toll in America was 1,129,573. The CDC is saying that the death toll was 1,160 for this past week. That rate is coming down, but there are still a lot of people dying of this virus more than three years later.
The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've both gotten our bivalent vaccinations, and we plan on getting out second bivalent booster shots very soon, now that those have been approved for old farts like us. 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.
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Another case of fishy financial declarations regarding reported income has been discovered from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week. Thomas has been claiming that he was paid between $50,000 and $100,000 annually by a Nebraska real estate company set up by his wife, Ginni Thomas, who has been active in the efforts to overturn the 2020, election. Turns out that the company he claims was paying him went out of business in 2006. Meanwhile, Thomas reportedly has told associates he will file amended disclosure forms to cover what sure looks like graft he's been collecting from Texas billionaire and Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow. Justice Thomas had said that he'd been told that the vacations were personal hospitality
that did not need to be reported to the IRS. That's a lot of hospitality!
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And of course this week Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News settled their lawsuit for a bit less than half what Dominion had sued for. The settlement gave Dominion $787,500,000. Too bad. I really wanted to see a trial with those Fox News people getting grilled about their lies. If the pillow jerk settles the same way he'd be out about $639,843,750. I wonder how much that is in patented pillows?
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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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