No To Theocracy!
We covered the topic of the new law in Louisiana requiring that all public school classrooms prominently display the so-called Ten Commandments on their walls. It's another maneuver by the Christian Nationalists to basically force their superstition on everyone in America. We talked about the Summer Solstice happening this past week, and the worldwide heat records being set as a result of climate change, and the fact that people are dying in droves from the heat. We also noted that the weekly death toll from COVID-19 in America is still a much lower number than it had been. I really do need to update this Web page, and I will try to do it soon. So 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 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. It was not an ordinary one. 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. There is an illegally called meeting of the WBAI LSB posted on-line. The PNB Chair has posted it. This is in violation of the Pacifica bylaws. This illegal meeting is supposed to be in executive session. No one has even told us what this meeting is supposed to be about, we only found out about it because we got a strange notice from the meeting-tracking system that Pacifica uses. I guess we'll know more before the next program.
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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Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law this past week that mandated that all public school classrooms must prominently display the so-called Ten Commandments
on their walls. He gave a little speech about it saying that all laws came from this Ten Commandments hoax. I guess he never heard of Hammurabi, who was famous for a long time before the Ten Commandments hoax was perpetrated. So much for the state of education in Louisiana; their Governor is ignorant of history. I think that he won't allow himself to believe that someone who was not a part of the Abrahamic superstitions could come up with serious, written laws that could govern early civilizations.
The Supreme Court struck down something similar with regard to a monument of those Ten Commandments, written in English no less, years ago when it was erected on public land in front of a courthouse. I'm sure that Governor Landry and the other Christian Nationalist are banking on this Supreme Court going along with the Christian Nationalist agenda and erasing another previous Supreme Court ruling that asserted the Constitutional principle of the separation of Church and State.
Looking further ahead I wonder what he'd do if his church turned out not to be the dominant one in the Christian theocracy he wants to turn the United States of America into?
Yeah, the second civil war is happening right now. Will the shooting part of this civil war start soon?
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Radio's Pickles of the North and I celebrated the Summer Solstice this past Thursday morning. Summer is my favorite season of the year. Pickles does not like the heat so much though. Greater New York is having a heat wave at this time.
We took the opportunity to talk about global warming and about the phenomenon of people in some states largely denying that it's happening, even as their states are getting flooded, hit with droughts, scoured by tornadoes and blanched by three digit temperatures for longer periods than ever before in human history.
We talked about the tremendous heat showing up in various places around the world, not just in the United States of America. We noted that Muslim pilgrims attending the Hajj at Mecca were experiencing a lot of grief, with 450 of them reported to have died from the heat. I'm sure that Saudi Arabia around the time of the Summer Solstice can be pretty difficult to deal with in these times of climate change and global warming.
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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 148, which is a slight uptick from the previous week but it's still much lower than it had been. This hot weather should keep the virus down for a while. Pickles of the North and I are not wearing our masks as much at this point, and, while we are thinking about getting our booster shots soon, You can't get the new, updated vaccination that they'll have in the Fall if you've had one of these current booster shots less than a few months earlier. Yeah, we've to to think about it. This hot weather should really cut down on the transmissibility of the virus.
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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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