Leon Skum Knows How to Wreck Things
So we talked about the below topics and more on this program. We talked about more than these topics, however. Right now I need to get this Web page posted before the program starts to air. Check back for the updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday December 13, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This will be the first meeting of the 13th WBAI LSB. It might be a wild time, given some of the things that people are saying on the LSB mailing list.
We had a LSB meeting on Wednesday November 8, 2023. It was the last meeting of the 12th WBAI LSB. For the second LSB meeting in a row I did not get to give an oral Treasurer's Report but the written version of the report is here. We had an objection about the phrasing of an agenda item, and then we were supposed to have had a report from the station's General Manager, but his phone didn't work right and after some time was spent on trying to get it to work we went on to the next agenda item which involved going into executive session. And as we tried to do that we were told that the General Manager was trying to get on the call. And then the discussion turned to the General Manager needing 15 minutes to get on and another member got on the call. A motion to go into executive session was mentioned but not made and then we went to another agenda item, but then the General Manager got on the call and delivered his report instead. We never did get to that executive session. The LSB is supposed to do an annual Management evaluation but we seem to have lost that in the agenda mess.
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. 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.
•
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?
•
Twitter: we have surged back up to 122 followers. Twitter or X or whatever it's being called this week is getting slammed because Leon Skum has endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy hoax that's very popular among white supremecists. And some advertisers pulled their ads from the platform. Now that Leon Skum, aka Elon Musk, has made an apology for his endorsement of that piece of hate some of those advertisers are pulling their ads from Twitter or X permanently. Leon Skum's apology included a shot at the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that it promotes racism against White people. Probably a good idea that those advertisers have quit his platform permanently. I wonder how much that $44 billion property is worth now?
•
The CDC Web site isn't putting out any information on the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic anymore. They've had the same numbers up there for the past month. Yeah, millions have died around the world and I guess a weekly total of a thousand deaths or more from COVID-19 isn't considered to be of interest anymore.
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.
•
As this program airs it's radio's Pickles of the North's birthday. Given her family's tendency toward longevity we're sure that she has many more to come. We followed the usual Back of the Book traditions for someone's birthday and played the appropriate song by The Beatles.
•
HD 110067 is a star system that's about 100 light-years away. It has six planets orbiting a Sun-like star. All of the planets are between the size of the Earth and the planet Neptune. These planets in a resonant chain,
which means that they are all having an effect on each other's orbits so that they go around their star in a regular ration to each other. The innermost four planets are in a 3:2 resonance. The two outer planets are in a 4:3 resonance. So for every six orbits of the innermost planet the outermost planet makes one full revolution. Scientists are saying that this indicates that the evolution of the HD 110067 system has been quiet and gentle. A lot of star systems fling planets around violently, that may have happened with the Solar System when it was just forming. It is possible that Jupiter and Saturn had made incursions into the inner Solar System billions of years ago, as the planets were forming, and may have sling-shotted some new planets out of the Solar System entirely. Scientists have discovered that there are plenty of what are called rogue planets,
planets that are not orbiting stars, drifting through interstellar space. Yeah, people talk about a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth, well if a rogue planet were to be discovered to be on a collision course with this planet there would be nothing that could be done to prevent the collision. It would be time to invoke the famous Back of the Book Inconstant Moon Protocols
which call for eating whatever you've not been eating for health reasons and just giving way to wild abandon because it will soon be all over. This discovery looks like it's possibly validating Bode's Law, which wasn't really a law of nature. The law, named after German astronomer Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826), suggested that the orbits of the planets were determined by a simple mathematical formula and that the positions of planets that were yet to be discovered could be predicted using the law.
From this discovery it may be that there are tendencies for star systems to set up their planets in a certain mathematical range, but that having some planets that are much larger than others could screw up that mathematical order.
•
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.
•
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.
