Biden's Letter
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It's been an eventful week, one that will go into the history books. We talked about President Biden dropping out of the race for reelection, and we talked about Vice President taking up the challenge and running for president herself with Biden's endorsement. We also talked about the attacks from the right-wing on her. Pickles of the North talked about the dangers to people's health from the huge clouds of smoke from all of the wild fires that are burning in North America. We talked about another January 6, insurrectionist going to prison. I hope to do a little update to this Web page soon, so check back for that.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday August 14, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
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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On Sunday afternoon July 21, 2024, President Biden posted a letter to the world officially dropping out of the race for president. He immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the position. People are generally reacting positively to the change, except for those who are in the Trump MAGA-cult.
I still think that Biden would have won, but so many Democrats were against his continuing that he was swayed by them. I think that a lot of people have more hope for this election now. Lots of new donations have been pouring into what is now the Kamala Harris campaign.
Despite the new hope that many Democrats have Trump still leads in the polls. This is to be expected as part of the post-convention bump that always happens. Trump had a week of free TV coverage. That helps. The Democratic National Convention comes up in August. Pacifica will be covering that.
Trump wanted Biden out. He got that. The old saying is, Be careful what you wish for,
because you may get it. Trump wanted Biden out, and he got that. Now a lot of right-wing energy and money that had been devoted to going after Joe Biden is largely wasted. Of course they'll try to say that Kamala Harris is now to blame for everything that Biden did, like support Unions, keeping NATO from disintegrating, helping Ukraine resist the invasion by Trump's Pal Putin and at least trying to do something about the climate crisis.
I still don't know if that September Presidential Debate is on or off.
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The CDC Web site seems to be saying that the death toll from COVID-19 in America for the past week was 229, but the numbers for past few weeks look higher than they have previously been. Maybe we'll just lay off the CDC death toll from COVID-19 numbers for a while. Pickles of the North and I are not wearing our masks as much at this point, and we are waiting for the new booster vaccinations to come out in the Fall when we each plan to get one.
We also talked about another health problem that's been cropping up over the past few years.
Pickles here! There are many confirmed wild fires raging right now in both Canada and the United States, creating a multi-leveled mass of smoke across most of North America. There are also fires being detected by satellite in Mexico. A useful way of keeping track of your local air quality, which can be affected by higher temperatures, heat waves, heat domes, or wild fire smoke, is to go to AirNow.gov - you can enter your ZIP code to see what the current air quality is in your neighborhood. Elevated ozone levels are usually attributed to elevated temperatures, while elevated particulate matter, or PM2.5, has to do with smoke. Once you are on the AirNow.gov Web site, you can scroll down to the Fire icon which will take you to the wild fire smoke map.
The fine particulate matter is especially bad because it can easily get deep into your lungs. To find out more about PM2.5, you can go to the official Environmental Protection Agency Web page about it.
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Mid-Summer is here, we entered it last Sunday. The exact minute of mid-Summer will be August 5 at 2:56 PM (ET). I have a Web page that shows a chart of the seasons and sub-seasons.
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Another January 6, insurrectionist has pled guilty to two counts of assaulting a police officer in that Donald Trump organized attack on the Capitol and on democracy in 2021. The insurrectionist has been sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for his crimes on that date.
Tyler Dykes, who was discharged from the Marine Corps in March 2023, for participating in extremist behavior,
according to NBC News, pled guilty to stealing a riot shield from a Capitol Police officer and then assaulting other officers with that shield once he got inside the building. He had previously participated in the infamous Unite the Right
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, during which one white supremacist killed a counter-protestor by driving his car into a crowd at high speed.
Mr. Dykes was one of the people seen doing a Nazi salute while carrying a lit tiki torch in that Unite the Right
rally. In March 2023, he pled guilty to the felony charge of burning an object with intent to intimidate and received a six month sentence in Virginia. That law was originally passed to combat the Ku Klux Klan which used to burn crosses on the lawns of black people and others whom they disliked.
Of course Donnie Bonespur
Trump has said in a speech that if he's reelected president he will pardon all of those who have been convicted of being a part of that violent insurrection that marred a record of 224 years of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America. So far more than 1,400 people have been charged with crimes from that attack, according to the Justice Department. More than 900 have been sentenced. I hope they all serve their full sentences. And I think that Donnie Bonespur
Trump should join them.
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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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