Geoglyphs in Peril
We talked a lot about people who race all terrasin vehicles in the Atacama Desert of Chile destroying the 3,000 year old geoglyphs there. We also talked about The Onion buying the assets of InfoWars at an auction.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday December 11, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. That will be the first meeting of the 14th WBAI LSB. I won't be on it because will term out in December.
This past week's meeting was the final meeting of the 13th WBAI LSB, and it was my final LSB meeting as a voting member. There are term limits on the Pacifica LSBs and I will hit my term limit when the December meeting starts. This past week's meeting saw people trying to get more meetings crammed in. It also saw the same people complaining about wasting time on the agenda while wasting time on an alternate agenda that they never even bothered to propose to the meeting. And then they complained about how long things took even though they were the ones delaying everything and forcing roll call votes on routine matters, thereby making something that should have taken maybe two seconds take about five minutes or more. Yeah, not with a bang but with a whimper.
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. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager 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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The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest places on earth. Starting around 3,000 years ago the people native to the area that's now named Alto Barranco carved huge figures of animals, humans and objects into the sand of the desert. They carved their artworks into the desert floor by hand, using stone tools.
People today are destroying those ancient artworks. People from 3,000 years ago could never have imagined that it would be possible for anyone to easily survive in that harsh desert environment at all. And people in the future rushing through the landscape at high speeds on vehicles that could also carry their water and food was also not something they could have imagined. Having people who just don't care driving vehicles over those artistic creations, and destroying them would have would have been a nightmare for them.
Vehicles, including trucks from mining operations, are driving over the geoglyphs in Alto Barranco and other parts of the desert, scarring them with the tracks left by heavy, industrial tires, as well as racers scarring them with high speed all terrain vehicles that have treads that carve up the desert floor at a rate that the ancient artists also could never have imagined.
Luis Perez Reyes is the director of the regional museum of Iquique and he said, It's a tragedy.
He began raising formal complaints in 2017, about the damage to geoglyphs caused by the rallies. But he said that the government continued to approve major racing events.
Doctor Gonzalo Pimentel is an archeologist and president of the Fundaceon Deserto di Atacama, a Chilean non governmental organization said, This landscape has stayed the same for 25 million years.
In the space of a couple of decades that landscape and the unique artworks they contain, have been seriously defaced.
In the The New York Times story Marcela Sepulveta, president of the Chilean Society of Archeology, noted that big signs had been placed around archeological zones to prevent damage meaning that drivers should be fully aware of what they're heading into. He said, The geoglyphs are gigantic, no one can claim they didn't see them, that's impossible.
The organizers of the races said, The real issue is with drivers who ride rented motorcycles in the desert without permission, no one says anything to them.
Daniel Contras Rojas, a regional official, approved the 2022 rally on the condition that the racers stick to pre-established roads. But he said that after the race was over rally organizers did not turn over the GPS information about the tracks followed by the drivers, so officials could not determine whether the drivers could be linked to any observed damage.
After the 2022 race Mr. Perez Rojas filed a complaint with judicial authorities that claimed the rally's route had gone over archeological sites and he provided photographs of racers passing through dunes near legally protected areas. In the couple of years since Mr. Rojas' complaint was filed no one has been penalized. According to the law in Chile anyone who damages an archeological site can get sentenced to more than 5 years in prison along with fines.
Jose Barraza, director of cultural heritage for the Tarapaca region told The New York Times that often complaints were dismissed or investigation files were left open because of lack of evidence. Mr Barraza said, There are no licence plates, no faces.
At this point the Chilean government is convening experts to develop strategies for raising awareness among desert rally enthusiasts, to protect the remaining undamaged geoglyphs and to improve signage around archeological areas.
Mr. Perez Rojas said that all over the desert there are dozens of motorcycle and jeep rental businesses for people who want to spend their weekends racing around in the desert at high speeds and digging up the surface of the desert where the geoglyphs have been created and they have no supervision.
Mr. Perez Reyes also said that some of the geoglyphs that inspired his interest in archeology as a child would soon no longer exist.
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The Onion has bought all of the InfoWars assets, but the sale is being challenged by rich right-wing guys.
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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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