CDC Says
Emergency Over
It's Tuesday afternoon, May 16, 2023, 13:33, and this Web page is finished. I've updated it with Pickles of the North's review of the book of The January 6 Report by the House January 6th Committee. We also have a link to the official archive of this radio program on WBAI.ORG. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ R. Paul actually went outside this past week. It was part of a big day he had at he V.A. Hospital where he got blood tests done and he also got his second bivalent booster vaccination for COVID-19. We talked about the CDC saying that he big national emergency around COVID-19 is over. We made note of the legal difficulties of both Donnie Bonespur
Trump and that liar George Santos. Maybe they will eventually share a cell together. We noted that the Pope is imploring people to make more babies, at least in Italy. Maybe the Italians could adopt lots of babies from other countries. Or maybe Pope Francis is just looking to finally get laid.
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 June 14, 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 45 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, May 10, 2023. We found out who had gotten elected to the Management Evaluation Committee. One person who is a recent member of the LSB wants to change things and doesn't seem to care that she's causing chaos. Mostly we got reports at this meeting. Some good news is that Pacifica had applied for membership in the CPB. 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.
•
Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
•
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.
•
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?
•
Emergency Over
The CDC Web site doesn't seem to be giving the total number of reported cases of COVID-19 in America. And their weekly death toll is significantly lower than last week. Did four thousand people come back to life? They're saying that deaths from COVID-19 are trending down. That last part is probably true.
Maybe the CDC just figures that something that's killing more than a thousand people in America every week is just not worth quantifying anymore.
Pickles of the North talked about the Centers for Disease Control declaring that the national emergency of COVID-19 was ended as of midnight Thursday night into Friday morning.
The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've both gotten our bivalent vaccinations, Pickles got her second bivalent booster shot a couple of weeks ago, I got mine this past Thursday afternoon. 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.
So we went to the V.A. Hospital to get blood tests done for my doctor's visit next week. We were walking down the block when Pickles said that this was the first time we were out together in this Middle Third. And then we realized that this past Thursday was the first time I'd been out of the apartment this year! I do need to get out more. Meanwhile I got m y second bivalent booster shot while we were there.
•
A Manhattan jury deliberated for less than three hours the other day and found Donnie Bonespur
Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll. He is now ordered to pay her $5,000,000. Trump is not pleased.
We're hoping that this will be only the first of many convictions for him. He then went on CNN and talked about aspects of his various other crimes. His lawyers may not be pleased about that.
This week also saw lying Congress-critter George Santos formally charged with 13 crimes. The charges carefully avoid anything about campaign finance law, and instead focus on wire fraud, COVID unemployment fraud and false financial disclosures to Congress. Campaign finance lawyer Brett Kappel said the charges were the bread-and-butter route
to a conviction.
We're wondering if Donnie Bonespur
Trump and George Liar Santos will end up becoming cell mates in the not too distant future. They could amuse each other with all sorts of lies.
•
Pickles here! I reviewed The January 6 Report by the House January 6th Committee, with a forward on the Coup Conspiracy by Ari Melber, Published by HarperCollins 2022. The report is clear and concise and easy to comprehend. Each short chapter has end notes full of evidence gathered by the Committee. It is meticulously documented, and is captivating and horrifying at the same time.
The summary in the forward by journalist Ari Melber includes a chart that illustrates all the plots the 45th president and his co-conspirators set in motion to keep him in office after he lost the 2020, presidential election. It's a clear visual of overlapping plots over a three month period from November 2020, to January 2021. As Mr Melber states in his forward After Lawsuits, all the remaining plots were unconstitutional or illegal by January.
For example, the plot to select false electors was aided and abetted by 300 Republican legislators at the State and local levels, presidential advisors, lawyers and members of the White House staff, some of whom suggested other plots like having the military seize voting machines. Then of course there are the six Senators and 121 members of the House of Representatives who after the insurrectionists had been removed from the Capitol still voted against certifying the electoral college votes. White supremacist groups even planned out their violence online with encouragement from at least one presidential advisor. And of course, the man in front of the curtain for all of this was number 45.
Except for instances of National Security, main participants of the various plots are named. There are a lot of people who need to be indicted, especially the former president, who began defaming the future results of the November 2020, election back in July of 2020, (rigged unless he won), and does so to this day. On this program we read a short passage by reporter William Shirer from his book The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich about how constantly being bombarded by hate speech and disinformation (today on the radio, podcasts, YouTube and cable, broadcast and internet TV; in the '30s under the Third Reich by State controlled radio and papers) can wear away at even a sane person, as he personally experienced in Germany 1. The bad thing about today is that the people in thrall to the former president have access to a free press in all its forms, but end up getting sucked into all the violent hate speech and alternate facts
they can access 24/7.
1 William L. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The (New York, 1959 1960), pp. 247-48.
•
Pope Francis on Friday criticized couples who have pets instead of babies, joining the Italian conservative prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, in denouncing the country's plummeting birth rate as a national emergency.
Well, he could let priests get married and they might help. Or he could get out there and meet some women and get the papal baby boom going himself.
•
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.
There used to be an open WBAI-specific list on the Web called the 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, some anonymously and some using our real names, 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 because the previous moderator had passed away. 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.
•
Back to the Back of the Book page
Back to my home page.
The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2023, R. Paul Martin.
