Reduced Death Rate
It's Saturday morning, May 4, 2024, 06:22, and I've updated this Web page a little bit to reflect more of what we did on this program. I'm hoping that I update it a bit more, too. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Here's what I've got so far. We covered more than what's on this page during this program. I really am going to try to update this page over this weekend. 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 May 8, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. At the April 10, LSB meeting we had a lot of obstruction. There are people on the LSB who are intent on making everything take much longer than it needs to. There was a humorous note at the end of that most recent LSB meeting: late in the meeting, toward the end of a roll call vote, the Secretary paused for a bit, and then said that her cat had peed on her laptop keyboard.
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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The CDC Web site says that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,190,122 which is only 519 deaths from COVID-19 over this past week, that weekly number has again dropped. Maybe we're coming out of the pandemic, but it's not over. Pickles of the North and I are not wearing our masks as much at this point, but we are going to get our Spring booster shots soon.
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Donnie Bonespur
Trump is on trial for 34 felonies. He complains about not being on the campaign trail because he has to sit in court. He takes naps a lot in court. It is reported that his lawyers sometimes nudge him awake or put papers in front of him in an effort to have him not sitting there asleep.
Trump made a public statement about the trail saying, Well, I'm not allowed to testify. I'm under a gag order, I guess. I can't testify,
and the judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchant, began Friday's court session by saying that he wanted to, clear up any misunderstandings
Trump may have about the trial and the gag order he's under. The judge said, I want to stress, Mr. Trump, that you have an absolute right to testify at trial, if that's what you decide to do,
the judge said that his gag order applies to, statements that are made outside of court, it does not apply to statements made from the witness stand.
So maybe that will shut Trump up about that item.
On Thursday they started to play audio of a phone call that Trump took part in about the actual payment of the hush money. I guess you can use audio in courts now. I know that it used to be that you couldn't use tape recordings in courts.
And the prosecutors have brought up four more instances where they say that Trump has violated the gag order. Oh, I hope the judge has him locked up. I'm reading that Trump really is horrified at the idea that he might be put into one of those orange jail jumpsuits. That'll be a nice photograph to see. I only hope an orange jumpsuit becomes his permanent mode of attire for several years in the near future.
And Trump is now trying to throw the so-called pro-life groups under his campaign bus. He's taken to dodging questions about abortion and just saying it's all up to the states. He had been running on how he'd appointed Supreme Court justices who had overturned Roe v. Wade, but then he was informed about how badly Republican candidates had been doing when the abortion issue had come up. But he can't get away from it. And he said this week that he would be fine with states monitoring women's pregnancies and prosecuting them if they had abortions.
Wow! So now women would have to do what, register their uteruses? Would women and girls in younger age ranges have to supply some state agency with monthly proof of their non-pregnancy and then get monitored if they miss a month? Yeah, talk about getting rid of big government some more.
From the Washington Post, The auditor for Trump's media company was charged with
massive fraud
on Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused the firm of being a sham audit mill
whose failures put investors at risk. The auditor, BF Borgers, and its owner, Benjamin Borgers, agreed to a permanent suspension from accounting work and to pay $14 million in civil penalties, federal regulators said.
Things really are falling apart for Trump these days. I hope that continues.
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The Middle Third is here! The Middle Third is the four months in the middle of the year: May, June, July and August. It's my favorite time of year. It's sunnier, the Sun sets later in the evening, and it's usually warm. All things I like.
And we are in mid-Spring. The exact minute of mid-Spring will occur tomorrow Sunday May 5, at 03:52 AM (ET). I have a chart of the seasons and sub-seasons here.
And as you can tell from the cold opening of this program today, May the fourth, is also Star Wars day.
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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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