Is It Really On The Wane?
So we talked about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s disclosure that he had a worm in his head and that it ate part of his brain. That was certainly a unique declaration for an American politician. We also talked about late Spring being about to happen, and we talked about the climate crisis a bit. We discussed Trump's legal problems little bit. Unfortunately, even if he's convicted of fraud he will not go to prison for that felony because he's a first offender in a non-violent crime. We talked about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appearing to show solidarity with the January 6, insurrectionists just days after their assault on the Capitol and Congress. I plan to update this page, so you might want to 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 June 12, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. At the May 8, 2024, LSB meeting
Try as they might the people who frequently endeavor to prevent the LSB from functioning, so that they can claim that if they're reelected to it and if their fellow faction operatives are elected to it they can fix everything, were not able to prevent the populating of one committee and the starting of an election to populate another. And then we had a motion to form a new task force based on task forces that don't exist. Basically some people on the WBAI LSB want to do what they please. Well, what they brought up was not even a legal motion. It totally lacked detail for the task force they said they wanted to create. Their attempt to create a shadow LSB got shot down.
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 has a notice that says that, Effective May 1, 2024, hospitals are no longer required to report COVID-19 hospital admissions, hospital capacity, or hospital occupancy data to HHS through CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). CDC encourages ongoing, voluntary reporting of hospitalization data.
they are no longer tracking the cumulative death toll in America from COVID-19. So the figure from two weeks ago 1,190,122 is apparently the last tone one they'll post. They do have a graphic on their Web site and it seems to say that only 287 people died from COVID-19 over this past week, which is a significantly lower number from what we'd reported on the last program two weeks ago.
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 still planning on getting our Spring booster shots soon.
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Presidential debates are coming up. Trump challenged Biden and Biden accepted. There will be two of them, one in late June and one in September. There will be no live audience, so Trump may not like it.
It came out this past fortnight that years ago Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had said that a health problem he'd experienced in 2010, Was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.
That would explain a lot. Kennedy has been an anti-vaccination disinformationist for some years now. He loves to wallow in conspiracy hoaxes. An article in The New York Times this past week said that, Doctors consulted by the The New York Times speculated that Mr. Kennedy described symptoms of an infection with larvae of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium.
After the deal about the presidential debates had been made Trump started saying that he wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a third participant in them. Biden has rejected that proposal. Will Trump use that as an excuse to bail on the two debates he's agreed to do?
I've known about tapeworms for years, they most come from inadequately cooked pork. I've known that they get into a person's intestine and eat whatever they please there. I had not know that the damned things can get into your brain and start eating it! I'm glad that I always have everything I eat cooked well done.
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Associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Samuel Alito has gotten himself into some controversy over his flag. The New York Times broke a story this past week about Justice Alito flying an American Flag upside down outside his house. They have published a photograph of it. The flag was observed being displayed upside down less than two weeks after the Trump-led insurrectionists had used an upside down American Flag to represent their Stop the Steal
position as they tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. From the Daily News, Alito, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, did not deny the upside-down flag was outside his home. Instead, he blamed his wife, Martha-Ann Alito.
Alito said in an E-mail to the Times I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,
he continued, It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor's use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.
This controversy also comes just weeks after the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether Trump should be protected by presidential immunity in his federal election subversion case.
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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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