Japan Gets on the Moon
Here's some of what we'd talked about on this program. I'll be seeing if we can post some more things that we did. So there may be updates to this Web page, Check back for those updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday February 14, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday night. We had a minute of silence for Ralph Poynter who died in late December. We also determined who was going to run for seats on the Pacifica National Board from WBAI. This is actually very important stuff. I ended up giving a very fast Treasurer's Report which one operative of the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign tried to talk over as I began.
The Final results of all of the LSB officer elections we held last month are in.
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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Japan has become the fifth country to send a spacecraft that made a soft landing on the moon. The spacecraft is named, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon,
or SLIM. Oh my, there will be jokes.
SLIM was intended to demonstrate precision landing. It was designed to get within 100 yards of the exact spot it was supposed to land on. That's orders of magnitude better than most Moon landings have been able to do. SLIM landed near a small crater named Shioli in the equatorial region of the moon's near side. I'm reading that SLIM landed on uneven terrain and was tilted maybe 15° from the horizontal and I'm also reading that SLIM's solar panels were not generating power. That means that the lander may only be able to operate on the charge that's in its batteries for some limited number of hours. The people at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) which is Japan's version of NASA, were working frantically to get the solar panels operational. I suppose that it's possible that the solar panels can't open up because the craft is tilted at that angle. Or maybe the solar panels are not able to be in a position where they can catch the sunlight.
SLIM was launched last September along with an X-ray space telescope called PRISM which is working in low Earth orbit.
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The CDC is putting out information on the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic again. They say that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,169,666. Which means that 2,456 people have died from COVID-19 since our last program one week ago. So the death rate is significantly higher this week. It's Winter and infectious diseases usually spread more rapidly and efficiently at this time. The fact that some people are oblivious to COVID-19 because they think that the pandemic is over is probably also contributing to that death rate.
The pandemic is clearly not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've gotten our newest vaccinations, we don't want to get this disease.
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Fox has cancelled the ads for that patented pillow which has been hawked on TV for years by that guy who tried to get then President Trump to institute martial law in 2021. The pillow patenter made an announcement on Twitter or X or whatever it's called now that, Fox news just canceled
his pillow ads. The right-wing loves to use the word cancelled
as often as possible, and here's an example of them using it against each other
The pillow jerk had hired the infamous Lou Dobbs who had been hosting his Lou Dobbs Tonight show on Fox for years. In 2021, the Fox Corporation had fired Dobbs after he'd gone fully into trashing the 2020, presidential election without any proof that anything had been wrong with it. The company had had to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million last year after Dobbs and some others on Fox had maligned that company. Dobbs is also being sued by Smartmatic which also made voting systems which Dobbs had made false claims about. So the guy who has the patented pillow thinks that's why Fox isn't running his ads anymore. And he's had Dobbs on his podcast spewing the same lies about the 2020, election that had resulted in Fox getting hit with that gigantic settlement. Fox also had to settle with a Venezuelan businessman whom Dobbs had maligned while broadcasting on Fox. The Smartmatic $2.7 billion defamation suit is still working its way through the courts. That patented pillow has also been taken off the shelves of quite a number of stores in the past two years.
The pillow pusher has been in financial trouble for some time now, He's been unable to retain counsel because he can no longer pay the lawyers he'd hired to fight the various court cases he's become embroiled in. Law firms don't work big cases for rich people for free, not even for high profile right-wing martial law enthusiasts.
Fox News has said that the ad partnership was not paused because the pillow pusher had put Dobbs on his podcast channel. They said that they'd stopped running his ads because the pillow merchant has not been able to finance the commercial spots. A Fox spokeswoman said, As soon as their account is paid, we would be happy to accept their advertising.
What are the odds that he's flogged his pillow on Fox for the last time?
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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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