They're Going to Get Him!
We were glad to talk about former President of the United States of American Donnie Bonespur
Trump being formally arrested, including being fingerprinted and having a mug shot taken, on this program. We are hoping that he'll get sent to prison for the insurrection he and his hench-creeps perpetrated in a vain effort to keep him illegally in power. We also talked about the weekly death rate for COVID-19 going up by about 35% in one week. We talked about a woman who was murdered for standing up for LGBT+∞ people. I plan to update this Web page, so check back for those 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.
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 WBAI LSB meeting will be on Wednesday September 13, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. That meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 48 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday August 9. I gave a Treasurer's Report and the written version is here. The General Manager solicited LSB members to help to do some things related to the station's financial situation. I don't know how effective that's going to be.
The WBAI/Pacifica elections are going on. If you contributed enough, $25, to become a member by June 30, you'll get to vote. There is apparently a Candidates' Debate on WBAI today from 4 PM to 6 PM.
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. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
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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Program Note: We'll be celebrating the 37th anniversary of this radio program two weeks from now on September 9th. Back of the Book first aired on September 8, 1986, and the 9th is the closest air date to that this year.
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Trump and the other 18 co-defendants who are facing a raft of RICO charges (RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) have surrendered to Georgia authorities. Trump was photographed and fingerprinted at the Atlanta jail during processing that gave us all the first mugshot of a former president. He was listed at 6 feet, 3 inches tall and 215 pounds. I think that Trump and his pals gave them those statistics. They should weigh him!
Three of the fake electors who have been indicted with Trump are trying to get out of it by saying that they were only following orders, Trump's orders. Former state Republican Party Chair David Shafer, state Sen. Steven Still and Republican Party operative Cathleen Latham all say they signed documents claiming to be legitimate 2020, electors from Georgia because they were told to do so by lawyers for Trump. I don't think that's going to be enough to get them off. There is speculation that they may flip on Trump, and maybe others will flip as well.
I'm hearing that Trump is going to use that mug shot where he tries to look like a tough mafioso to raise money. He'll have a lot of competition because I'm also hearing that people are already printing that image on T-shirts, mugs and other things in order to sell them and mock Trump. It's public domain, so he's not going to be able to stop it.
He was hardly treated like any other citizen.
Trump relented and listened to his lawyers and did issue his 100 page rebuttal to the charges, which would have actually been a request to become the first former president who was held in pre-trial detention. Aw, too bad.
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The CDC Web site isn't giving us all that much information about COVID-19 in America, although they're saying that Total Deaths in Americas are at 1,138,602 which means that 860 people have died of COVID-19 since our last program one week ago, which is 225 more than the previous fortnight's average of 635 deaths per week. That's a 35% increase from the previous number. I'm hearing that there is a general increase in hospitalizations for COVID-19 too. The CDC is talking about the Autumn booster shot, they're saying it may be available by mid-October, just in time to be given with the flu shot. And everyone will be eligible for the new COVID-19 booster. The new strain that's dominant in the United States is named EG.5 and or Eris and some people are getting concerned about it. I'm reading that some scientists in the field are saying that EG.5 does not pose a more substantial threat than the major COVID-19 variants that we're already dealing with. The World Health Organization is saying that, The public health risk posed by EG.5 is evaluated as low at the global level.
The EG.5 strain was discovered in the so-called People's Republic of China in February and was found in the United States by April. The strain comes from one of the variants in the Omicron strain. So it's really infectious, as are the strains that are still around these days. EG.5 has one new mutation that helps it get around antibodies that we have from either vaccines or from a prior infection. It can cause sever symptoms in children, older folks like us and people with compromised immune systems, and it can result in long COVID in some cases. In a The New York Times article Trevor Bedford who's a professor in the vaccines and infectious disease division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington said, I'm generally very concerned about the overall rate of evolution of SARS-CoV-2. No single variant has been that impactful but the overall accumulation of these mutations is having significant impact.
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 our bivalent booster shots. We're hearing that the new boosters are going to be ready as early as next month or surely by October. We'll probably wait until mid-October to get our new booster short against COVID-19 and the latest flu shot at the same time. It's a ritual we've gone though for the past couple of years.
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Laura Carleton died outside her clothing store called Mag.pi, located in Cedar Glen, California, this past week. She was murdered by an anti-LGBT+∞ creep named Travis Ikeguchi. Ms. Carleton had shown a LGBT+∞ pride flag outside her store and this Ikeguchi guy didn't like that so he shot her to death. Ikeguchi fled the scene of the murder and got about a mile away from the store before cops caught up with him. He had a shoot-out with the cops and he died there. It's being reported that Ikeguchi had frequently written and shared hateful posts about the LGBT+∞ community on various social media platforms.
Two of Ms. Carleton's nine children, Ari and Kelsey Carleton, wrote on-line that, She was murdered over a pride flag that she proudly hung on her storefront, make no mistake, this was a hate crime.
They added, Our family is broken.
I think that Laura Carleton was something of a martyr. She'd had pride flags torn down from the front of her store a number times and she just kept putting new ones back up. I'm sure that her tenacity and refusal to give in to intimidation got to the bigots who had been harassing her. We need more people like Laura Carleton in the world.
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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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