Back of the Book links for the October 7, 2023, program

It's Sunday morning, October 8, 2023, 11:23, and this Web page is finished. I've added some bits about the WBAI elections we've been talking about for months now. They're completed at last, and we now have to wait and see if they are making a big or small change in Pacifica, and whether that change is for better or worse. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ More unusually heavy rain! This may well be climate change on display. On this program we talked about the COVID-19 pandemic ramping up again, and Pickles of the North talked about the Nobel Prize being awarded to the two scientists who came up with the mRNA basis for the vaccine against the virus. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has secured his place in history. He's the first Speaker ever to be ousted! He lasted nine months as Speaker, it's surprising he lasted that long with the right-wing crazies he had to make deals with. Donnie Bonespur Trump continues to stain humanity with his existence. His trials are piling up, and we are now learning of another treasonous thing he did with regard to those classified defence documents that he stole from the White House. He really need to go to prison, and soon.

The next WBAI LSB meeting will be on Wednesday October 11, 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 49 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.

We had a LSB meeting on September 13. I gave a Treasurer's Report and the written version is here. There was scheduled a Q&A session with WBAI Management and any listeners who called in to talk to them. This Q&A session started at 6:30, a half hour before the LSB meeting was scheduled to begin. The General Manager took up most of the time and one listener asked a question. Some people go on and on about having the listeners being in on everything. Some people on the LSB make noises about having the listeners in general figure out how to fix WBAI's finances. It's obviously just grandstanding by those LSB members, but they behave as if no one sees through them. And I do not think that having a lot of people who are not aware of the realities of WBAI's finances hear some speeches will result in realistic actions.

The Pacifica and WBAI elections are over. A lot of people voted at the very last minute and everybody in all of Pacifica, both listeners and Staff, made the required quorum. The results of this election should be posted this coming Tuesday, October 10. We'll see if the results indicate that Pacifica is doomed or not. Two candidates from WBAI got disqualified. One was a listener candidate and one was a Staff candidate. I guess they really thought that they'd get away with it. A certain faction that was preaching against mailers in these election sent out at least two of them. They also split themselves up into various new names. I'm hoping that we don't have problems with newly elected LSB members who get announced next Tuesday as having been elected thinking that they are members for the October and November LSB meetings. They're supposed to take seats in December.

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. 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.

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?

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 1,145,958 which means that 1,419 people have died of COVID-19 since our last program a week ago. That's a bit more than the previous week's total, which shows that COVID-19 is coming back. I may get my Autumn booster this week.

The pandemic is clearly not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We're getting or have gotten our new shots, we don't want to get this disease.

Radio's Pickles of the North says, R.Paul and I took time to congratulate the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Dr. Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman, who worked together for years to develop mRNA based vaccines. They have collaborated since 1998. Dr. Kariko joins a group of only 12 women who've received a Nobel. She had many difficulties in her career getting funding and acceptance of her research from her mostly male peers. Dr. Weissman also faced skepticism for his efforts to develop a vaccine for HIV. Luckily for us and the rest of the world they kept at their research and helped create a way of making vaccines that could be implemented in an incredibly fast time frame that helped save millions of lives worldwide during the pandemic! So much for the anti vaccine claim of the vaccines being rushed. Decades of work went into the process, you dopes!

Donnie Bonespur Trump, was found liable for wide-scale fraud by state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron for lying about his net worth for years. He lied one way and the opposite way when it suited him to do so. He and his sons have been stripped of their New York business licenses. Maybe his name is going to come off some buildings now. Judge Engoron denied a motion from Trump to throw out the whole case and found his legal positions preposterous, writing, Defendants respond that: the documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as 'objective' value; and that, essentially, the Court should not believe its own eyes. Trump inflated the worth of his properties to get better loan deals. With regard to Trump's own apartment at Trump Tower on Fifth Ave. which he claimed was 30,000 square feet but which was actually just short of 11,000 square feet, judge Engoron wrote, A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud. Lock him up!

Trump was in the city for his fraud trial for a couple of days. He kept walking out o the courtroom to make remarks while the trial was going on. Eventually judge Engoron gagged him from verbally attacking the court clerk.

Trump probably figured he could just go after her since she's not powerful enough to do him harm. What a creep he is.

And we're hearing that Trump has been calling people in the military derogatory names. And a couple of years ago we'd talked about Trump not going to visit the cemetery in France where thousands of American G.I.s are buried, including many who'd died in the D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944. The excuse given by Trump's flak then was that the weather was too bad. We'd noted then that it had just been drizzling out. Well, now we're hearing that the real reason he didn't want to go visit that cemetery was because he just didn't want to be seen in a cemetery, and that he avoided being photographed with wounded veterans because he didn't think it'd look good for him! I hope that the active duty military and veterans all vote against him in 2024.

And now it's being reported that in April 2021, Trump had told Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt secrets about the American nuclear submarine fleet, including how many nuclear warheads they tended to carry and how close they were thought to be able to get to a Russian submarine without being detected. For some reason this isn't among the charges they've hit Trump with in the case against him about mishandling classified information.

This reminds me of Democratic Kentucky Congressman Andrew J. May who, as Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, went on a Congressional junket to the South Pacific theater of operations of World War II. He got back and held a press conference in June 1943, and talked about how great it was that the Imperial Japanese Navy didn't know the usual depths that American submarines operated at, and that the Japanese were setting the fuzes of their depth charges to go off long before they sank to the level where they could harm the American submarines. Well, that information got to Japan. Vice-Admiral Charles Lockwood did no like this. Predictably the Japanese changed their fuzes to off at deeper depths. He estimated that giving that information to the Japanese had cost ten submarines and 800 crewmen killed in action. Vice-Admiral Rockwood said, I hear Congressman May said the Jap depth charges are not set deep enough, he would be pleased to know that the Japs set them deeper now. So Trump isn't the first idiot who has done this. But Trump's ego trip could cost a lot more than 800 lives.

From our Be Careful What You With For, You May Get It Department: House speaker Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker of the house this past Tuesday. Of course that's going to make for more chaos, and both McCarthy and other Republicans are blaming the Democrats for this! The Congressional Theater of the Absurd was certainly playing out this week. The planned shutdown of the government was averted at the last minute last Saturday night just hours before the deadline. That was good. Those 20 right-wing creeps in the House had stopped the other 200 Republicans from voting for at least a stop-gap funding bill. McCarthy told the media, Democrats tried to do everything they can not to let [the bill] pass, is it any surprise that after statements like that, and other things McCarthy did while Speaker of the House, that the Democrats didn't support keeping him in office? And McCarthy got bounced out of his speakership on National Kevin Day!

Speaking of those 20 right-wing creeps, one of them, Jim Jordan from Ohio, who in January had traded his vote for McCarthy as Speaker for a Chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee, is running for Speaker now. And he's gotten Trump's endorsement. It would have been amusing to see them trying to get Trump in as Speaker. If they would have been able to manage it we'd be seeing Trump getting roughed up on the floor of the House. I'm certain that he has no idea of the workings of parliamentary procedure. It might have been amusing. If this Jordan bad guy gets in we might see a real breakdown of the American legislature.

The Pacifica and WBAI elections are over. A lot of people voted at the very last minute and everybody in all of Pacifica, both listeners and Staff, made the required quorum. This means that the elections did not need to be extended and so Pacifica did not need to spend thousands of dollars more on this election. Pacifica could hardly afford this election as it was and an extension would have meant that all stations would have had their elections extended. So if one station had missed making quorum the rest of Pacifica would have been angry at that station. I will note that both WPFW and WBAI had not made quorum just days before the official end of the election.

The results of this election should be posted this coming Tuesday, October 10. We'll see if the results indicate that Pacifica is doomed or not. Or maybe we'll have to wait until the 13^th LSB starts voting on things in December. The so-called Justice & Unity Campaign (JUC) has used the new tactic of splitting up the people who had run on their slate into multiple other slates, probably because the JUC has gotten such a bad reputation in the past for cheating, violence at meetings, dirty tricks and lying about what they're done that they might have a hard time getting elected. They have also roped some people who are not really a part of their group into running under the new slate names that they're using. Those other people might have given the JUC some cover, but some of those other people might get elected and, maybe after they see how the JUC really operates, they may not vote with the JUC. Could happen.

Two candidates from WBAI got disqualified. One was a listener candidate and one was a Staff candidate. They had colluded to get a person who'd run as a JUC candidate but who was running on one of the new slate names in this election to go on that producer's WBAI program and talk with him for an hour. In the 20 years of Pacifica elections that was one of the most flagrant violations of the Fair Campaign Provisions I've ever seen. I guess they really thought that they'd get away with it. Luckily, they didn't. The JUC had been preaching against anyone sending mailers to the voters in these elections, but during this election they sent out at least two of them. I suppose we'll see if the tactic of campaigning under various new slate names will get more JUC operatives onto the LSB.

I'm hoping that we don't have problems with newly elected LSB members who get announced next Tuesday as having been elected thinking that they are members for the October and November LSB meetings. They're supposed to take seats in December.

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.

And now you can even reach me on Twitter

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WBAI related links

A WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site

Back of the Book — October 7, 2023

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!