It's Sunday afternoon, June 27, 2010, 17:42, and this Web page is finished. I've updated it with more about the huge oil spill and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which are not related stories but which we did talk about on the program, Previously I'd put in information about the partial lunar eclipse that will happen this weekend and information about the archive of this program and a new feature for the WBAI streams. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Oh, it's good to be back again! When a bi-weekly show gets preempted it means that almost a month goes by between programs. We plan to get to various topics on this program, and probably piss off a few people with what we say. Such is free form live radio.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 14, 2010, at 7:00 PM at a location to be announced.

The June 9, 2010, LSB meeting once again saw faction operatives being disruptive during the meeting. Here's a little bit about what happened at that meeting. One of the low lights of the meeting happened at the end when faction operatives slandered a woman who is active in WBAI governance. When that woman got up during the Public comment segment of the meeting to refute the lies Sara Flounders, a member of the “Secretariat” for the so-called Workers World Party, disrupted the meeting and shouted so that the woman couldn't be heard. The faction can't handle the truth.

At its January 21, 2009, meeting the LSB voted to hold its meetings on the second Wednesday of every month and/or the last Thursday of that month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:

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.

WBAI has an official Web stream of what's on the air at any time! You can go here and pick which type of stream you want! If this stream isn't working let me know. And you can see the status of the streams at any time by clicking here. The stream was working at 11:16 PM last night. They have switched the server from Virginia to Texas, so that may have something to do with various problems. They have a new Flash stream here, make sure you enable Javascript so it can work for you.

WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to this program any time for the next couple of months. You may need to scroll up one line to see the audio archive. Let me know if you find this feature useful.

If you want to listen to any part of the WBAI archive click here to go right to the archives. When you first go to the Web page you'll only see the WBAI programs for the past 7 days. If you want to see older programs you can click on one of the “See ALL Shows” buttons.

Back of the Book is now one of the programs that you can download, as well as listen to on line.

I'm glad to announce that the archives have seen some positive changes. In the table on that Web page Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are both in the Show column. The “Date and Category” column shows the date of the program. After the program I go in and write the details of the program and say which program it is. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

The Pacifica National Board (PNB) met in New York City from Friday July 23, to Sunday July 26, 2009.

The meeting was held at the Beekman Towers Hotel, 3 Mitchell Place, in Manhattan, a couple of blocks north of the United Nations.

There was an election going on in Pacifica, so there were a few candidates attending and speaking during the public comment sessions. Some disrupted the meeting.

And the PNB has also met in Houston from Friday October 9^th, through Sunday October 11^th. The official audio archive of that meeting is here. It was not disrupted as the New York meeting was, although some of the same miscreants got out there to say stupid things.

The 2010 Local Station Board Elections Have Begun!

The Local Station Board (LSB) is the primary governance body for WBAI. When meeting as delegates the LSB members elect the Directors of the Pacifica National Board, which is the governance body for the entire Pacifica Foundation. The Pacifica Foundation owns WBAI.

Here is the official time table for this crucial election.

June 1^st, to midnight June 30^th- Nomination Phase
June 30^th - All Nomination package materials should be complete and returned to the Local Election Supervisor by midnight.
July 1^st - Campaign Phase begins. Candidates are given equal airtime with respect to candidate cart rotation and on-air forums. In person forums are also an integral piece of the campaign.
August 16^th - All ballots are mailed. If you do not receive a ballot, please contact local election supervisor Nichole Justice Hylton.
September 30^th - Ballots are due by midnight. All stations will hold special hours to receive last minute ballots.
October 1^st - The local election supervisors will make the final P.O. Box pick up.
October – specific days TBA Ballots are Counted. The final ballot count will take place in a secure, public location TBA.

This election is crucial for the survival of WBAI and Pacifica. The Sixth WBAI LSB, which will be created by this election, will last for two full years. WBAI and Pacifica are in a precarious position right now as current interim Management attempts to reverse the death spiral that the station and the network have been in for years. If some bunch of chuckleheads gets a majority on the WBAI LSB they'll be able to change the composition of the Pacifica National Board and revert to corrupt, incompetent and malfeasant Management, they might even sell WBAI.

We need decent people on the WBAI LSB who will be interested in preserving the station, not in selling it or running it into the ground. I hope that the listeners will educate themselves about the candidates and vote for good ones.

The official Web page where you register to get a nomination package is here.

The Summer Solstice will occur next Monday morning June 21, 2010, at 7:28 AM. For more about the seasons and sub-seasons click this hard.

The annual Pride march is coming. The route is very short this year, due to the city's diktats about the length of such events. Maybe it's time to make it an opposed march again?

We talked about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that's been going on for 56 days now. We didn't forget Haliburton's role in setting this mess up, either - credit where credit is due.

This is now the biggest man made disaster in the history of the United States of America. And it's predicted to go on until August. Given how things have been going it may go on past August.

Some folks in England are complaining about Americans blaming BP, the current name of the old British Petroleum company, for everything. They're bothered because their pensions are largely tied up in BP and there may be a lack of dividends from the company for a while. Meanwhile BP's stock has plummeted. Apparently the English pensioners care not at all for the enormous economic damage that's been visited on Americans living along the gulf coast. People aren't just losing some business, they're losing their livelihoods, some permanently.

And while the videos of the birds and other animals getting killed in the sludge is heart rending the worst ecological damage is happening out of sight. Fish in the water column are being poisoned, other creatures that are important to the area's food chain are being poisoned. Endangered species of pelicans that get saved from an oily death may end up ingesting fish full of oil, and there won't be any way of washing that out of them. Or, those pelicans may just end up starving to death when there aren't enough fish around to feed them. Besides the immediate oil disaster there could be a Malthusian crash of some species in that ecosystem.

There are also the small creatures and the microbes to think about. The small creatures are nothing to look at. They don't have faces to spark our sympathy, but they're an important part of the food chain, and vast swatches of them are being killed off.

Most important of all are the microbes, which we can't even see without a microscope. They form the basis of the entire food chain and they do more than that, their activities form the basis of the entire web of life under the sea, many of them providing the oxygen that the higher forms of life need to breathe. There's no way to save them once they come into contact with the oil, they're either poisoned or smothered to death.

When this is all over microbes and small creatures from adjacent areas of the Gulf of Mexico will start to come into the dead zone, but that will take time. And some parts of the dead zone will remain poisonous to life for many years to come. In terms of a time scale based on the average human lifespan the damage to parts of the gulf coast is permanent.

If there are geologists around hundreds of millions or billions of years from now they'll be able to find the year 2010, in the layers of rock easily, because there will be this conspicuous layer of carbon left from this oil spill and it will form an easily discerned layer among the other, more pedestrian rocks.

Pickles of the North and I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this past week. The garden is celebrating its centennial this year.

There weren't a lot of roses left, but we found some, as you can see from the photograph on the left.

Part of the Cranford Rose Garden is sort of shut down, planted with other plants. It seems that this part of the Rose Garden got infested with a mite that killed off all of the roses there. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden staff are working on that problem.

Looking at the Lily Pools we saw that there were hundreds of tiny tadpoles among the goldfish. I suppose that at some point during the Summer there will be a whole lot of hopping going on around those Lily Pools.

They have a new section of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden called the Herb Garden. No, it doesn't have any of that herb in it - yet. But it has all sorts of ordinary, and some unusual, herbs that can be grown in Brooklyn.

The Herb Garden has only just opened up, and it's still being put together. One interesting thing about it is the smell that comes from it. They're using cocoa husks as mulch and so the entire thing smelled like chocolate while we were there. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden could probably make a pile of money from setting up a stand near the Herb Garden selling candy bars.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is free on Tuesdays throughout the year, and admission is free from November 17^th, to March 2^nd. Otherwise here's a link to their admission fee schedule. It's a restful place, most of the time, and you could even learn something there. It's certainly a tree shaded change from the usual Summer streets of the city.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even now that the gag rule has been lifted. 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.

Probably the most popular list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 subscribers coast to coast.

Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list and official announcements are frequently posted there.

You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the “NewPacifica” mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.

There is the option to receive a “digest” version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.

There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand. UPDATE: The bleepin' blue board has had to add a step for folks to get onto it because it's under attack by spambots. When you click on the above link you may be asked for a username and password. Type in Username: poster Password: enternow

When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Carrier Wave alternates with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.