Trump's Creature
I managed to not fall asleep while trying to write this Web page this week. We did talk about the mess that Trump and the far right-wing are creating in Washington these days. Is this still the prelude to the second American Civil War or are we really into it now? We also talked about the Hamas-Israel war. There are any number of people who really want what's been happening for the past three weeks to be happening. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it. We talked about the pandemic too. I may add a little more to this Web page soon, so check back for those updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next WBAI LSB meeting will be on Monday October 30, 2023, but it will be a closed meeting, To discuss and evaluate WBAI Management personnel
according to the official notice posted on KPFTX.ORG. The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday November 8, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. That will be the last meeting of the 12th WBAI LSB.
We had a LSB meeting on October 11, 2023. I did not get to give an oral Treasurer's Report but the written version of the report is here. We spent an inordinate amount of time debating and then voting on excused absences because one particular LSB member insisted that we not excuse the absences of people who won't even be on the LSB anymore in a couple of months. And then we had to talk a lot about a Pacifica non-disclosure agreement, which I think has some very bad clauses in it.
The Pacifica and WBAI elections are over and the results are in, a little late. The people who were newly elected to the LSB are supposed to take their seats in December. December will start the 13th WBAI LSB. It will be interesting. The bad guys made some gains and that could do damage to WBAI.
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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This week House Republicans showed that most of them are gutless. They plugged in this Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson creep as Speaker of the House. He got 220 of the 221 Republican House members to vote for him, I think that one of them wasn't in attendance. They had rejected far-right dope Jim Jordan, but when they put up Minnesota Republican Tom Emmer, Donnie Bonespur
Trump railed against him as a RINO, saying on his pathetic social media site, Go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & get it done, fast!
This was enough to scare the Republicans who are not the insanely right-wing ilk who get a lot of publicity in the House. And Emmer dropped out of the race within hours of Trump's hissy fit and didn't even try for a vote. And then this Johnson creep got Trump's approval and got in with a single vote, as opposed to the 15 that McCarthy had had to wrangle through in January. Even the New York area Republicans in the House voted for Johnson.
This Johnson guy is a serious anti-LGBT+∞ activist. He spoke in favor of Florida's Don't Say Gay law which restricts discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms. A few years ago he wrote an Op-Ed in a Louisiana newspaper complaining about the Supreme Court striking down Texas' law that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults. He agreed with Associate Justice Antonin Scalia who wrote a nasty opposition to the majority's decision to strike down such laws. Johnson's right-wing advocacy group filed an amicus brief in support of the Texas law. He has also spoken and written against same gender marriages.
He supports a national ban on all abortions and introduced a bill in the House that would have imposed a ban on all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, this would have been a federal ban. He celebrated the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision.
Johnson voted against accepting the certified results that showed President Biden winning in the 2020, election. Johnson signed onto a lawsuit that claimed President Biden's victories in a number of battleground states were invalid; they were those infamous lawsuits that were tossed out by a lot of judges. Given that McCarthy got removed for compromising with Democrats to get the government funded for a short while it will be interesting to see what he does next month when the government again needs authorization to keep going. And will some Republicans who are in battleground states quiver but go along with him on this? They've just shown that they have no backbones. Is this the end of the United States of America?
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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 1,150,119 which means that 2,866 people have died of COVID-19 since our last program a two weeks ago, for a weekly death rate of 1,433. This is a significantly higher rate than the weekly total on our last program. I've been trying to get my Autumn booster for the past fortnight, and this coming week I expect I'll succeed in getting both the Autumn COVID-19 booster and a flu vaccination, as I've done in the past.
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.
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We spoke about the Hamas - Israel war only a little bit. Hamas has bragged about how long they had planned their attacks which they'd carried out on October 7. I suspect that they probably had help from Iran in the planning of the attack as well as with the supplying of war materiel. With all of that planning to break through fences, descend upon kibbutzes and a music festival devoted to peace, surely they didn't end their planning with just kidnapping people and taking them into Gaza with them after the raping and murdering was finished.
I can't believe that no one who had been planning this entire attack didn't ask after they got to the part about going back into Gaza with hostages, And then what happens?
Hamas had to have been planning that Netanyahu was going to lash out as he's done. And they certainly have taken a great deal of pressure off Netanyahu that had been building inside Israel for quite a while because of the crimes he'd committed previously and because he and his right-wing coalition were trying to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court so that the Parliament that he and his political allies dominate would be able to do whatever they pleased.
After October 7, it looks like Netanyahu is pretty much cemented into position, for a while at least. Some people in Israel are talking about the intel failure that occurred on Netanyahu's watch that allowed the October 7, invasion, mass murder, rape and kidnapping to happen. So what's going on now must be going according to the Hamas plan. Perhaps they hope to use Israel's reaction to get a lot of others to attack Israel. That strategy certainly doesn't help the ordinary people in Gaza very much. I'm not seeing people who are calling for and participating in these demonstrations mentioning this planning issue.
Hamas is a death cult, and they do not worry about taking others with them to the grave. I suppose that, in a way, that's a strength. If they're dead, and hanging out with their 72 virgins for all of eternity they wouldn't have a care in this 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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