Animation of how a Bump Stock works
image credit:Phoenix7777 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
image credit:Phoenix7777 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
We talked about the terrible Supreme Court ruling that struck down a regulation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that banned bump stocks,
which are used to make certain kinds of semi-automatic rifles into what are in effect fully automatic rifles. I also talked about a couple of my experiences in the gay liberation movement in the early '70s. We also mentioned that the Summer Solstice will occur this coming Thursday afternoon. I plan to update this Web page, so check back for the possible updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday July 10, 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 week on Wednesday June 12. It was not an ordinary meeting. The main topic of discussion was the Pacifica Executive Director's action earlier in the week of putting WBAI Management on administrative leave,
and replacing them with a WBAI producer who is now interim General Manager and interim Program Director. The meeting went an for three hours and 45 minutes, a full hour longer than usual.
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 former 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 Supreme Court split six to three yesterday in a ruling that strikes down a regulation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that was implemented under former President Donnie Bonespur
Trump following a mass murder by a real creep who used a number of bump stocks and AR-15 style semi-automatic rifles to kill 58 people and injure hundreds more who were attending an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. In that crime the mass murderer fired from a high window in a Las Vegas hotel where he had an entire arsenal of guns with large magazines in them. When he would empty a magazine, which happened in quite a hurry because of the bump stock, he would empty one rifle's multiple magazines, pick up another and keep firing. He fired a hell of a lot of bullets at the crowd that night.
If he'd just had a rifle that only relied on his fingers to fire it, even using all of the rifles and magazines that he'd set up, he would not have been able to get that many shots off at the crowd in so short an amount of time. And the rapidity with which he was able to empty so much ammunition into that area meant that people who were trying to get to cover had significantly less time to do so.
So in yesterday's majority opinion striking down the ban Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, A bump stock does not alter the basic mechanics of bump firing, and the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot.
Is he so stupid that he thinks everyone will believe that obvious nonsense? It's not true. The entire idea of the bump stock is to make the rifle shoot faster. With the bump stock you do not need to squeeze and then release the trigger yourself, the bump stock replaces the regular stock of the rifle and basically allows the gun to bump back after each round is fired and most of the rifle moves backward into the bump stock from the recoil. That separates your finger from the trigger for a very small fraction of a second and then the bump stock moves the rest of the rifle forward because of how the recoil mechanism of the AR-15 type rifles work, and the gun moves forward and hits your finger with the trigger allowing the rifle to fire again. All the shooter has to do is hold the bump stock's grip tightly and a 20 round magazine is emptied in about a second or so.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissenting opinion, said the court had cast aside Congress's definition of a machinegun
in making its ruling. Her dissent said, A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,
and, Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.
A guy named Michael Cargill, a Texas gun store owner, sued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives over the regulation, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor Friday.
The Supreme Court is considering another gun case challenging a federal law intended to keep guns away from people who are under domestic violence restraining orders.
I wonder if one of the undisclosed entities handing out gifts to Clarence Thomas is the NRA?
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The Summer Solstice will occur this coming Thursday, June 20, at 4:51 PM. Summer is my favorite season of the year.
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If I'm reading it right the CDC Web site seems to be saying that the death toll in America for the past week was 132, which is much lower than it had been. The CDC Web site is no longer tracking the cumulative death toll in America from COVID-19.
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This past week, in 1970, we had the first Rockefeller 5
demo. This was a two pronged action with a picket line on the street outside the New York State Republican Party headquarter, and a ZAP action by several members of the Gay Activists alliance (GAA) going up to the Republican Party offices wearing suits and ties and trying to get in to see Governor Nelson Rockefeller to demand that he support gay rights, as we called it in those days. When they were not allowed to see the Governor they sat in in the office. I was one of the people picketing in the street. We didn't have a lot of people there, but we were loud. We were told that we could be clearly heard chanting in the eighth floor offices of the Republican party headquarters. That action, and the picket line, lasted for eight hours. As a result of all that yelling my voice was permanently changed.
On the program I told the story of the lambda button, which is illustrated to the left. I was one of the people who voted for the lambda to be the official symbol of GAA. In 1973, at a convention in Scotland the lambda became the official symbol of the gay liberation movement. I bought my lambda button in May 1970, on the first night it was being sold, at a GAA meeting. I'd tried to buy a Gay Power
button but they'd sold the last one. Jim Owles, president of GAA and one of the group's founders, gave me his Gay Power
button, and I wore that thing for four years, until my gay male lover gave me an even bigger, and easier to read Gay Power
button, which I wore for another decade.
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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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