By Now the Toll is 700,000+ Dead in America
So we're back from what amounted to a sort of one week vacation. We were preempted for a fund raising special last week. This week we talked a lot about the COVID-19 pandemic again. We touched on anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, the death toll that will probably have hit 700,000 in America by the time this program airs, the stupidity, waste and hypocrisy of opting for monoclonal antibodies instead of a vaccination, the Vatican not showing patience for the anti-vaxxers and more. We also talked about astrophysicists confirming that there are Type 3 supernovas. And the Crab nebula is one of them. We plan to update this Web page soon, so check back for updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do, and I've recently updated some of that.
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee on this Web site. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, October 18, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 27 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, September 8, 2021.
The LSB meeting was sort of the usual, WBAI Management couldn't do their reports in the allotted format and they were allowed to go back and forth. This may have lowered the number of questions they were asked.
Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
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, which gives us the following schedule:
All of 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. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.
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 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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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site Covid-19 cases in the whole world reached 234,023,858 on Friday, and global deaths reached 4,788,096. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 43,519,298 and the death toll in America was 698,992, so 27,157 people have died of Covid-19 in America since our last program two week ago. That's an average of 13,578 per week. That's slightly down from the rates we've been seeing. The infection and death rates are reported to be generally lower, but we're still in the territory that we were in some months ago when it was really terrible and we didn't have a vaccine yet. Those parts of the country with a lot of unvaccinated people are supplying the victims of most of the deaths. ICU beds in those areas are still somewhere between hard and impossible to find, even after in some places they've greatly expanded their intensive care unit capacity. By the time this program airs on Saturday morning all of those figures we quoted will be higher of course, and we're pretty much certain to have hit the 700,000 dead in America mark. This was all mostly preventable.
We talked about people like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida continue to be responsible for more sickness and death.
In the past fortnight there have been more instances of people denouncing the vaccines and mask wearing and then dying of Covid-19 this past week. We've also had anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers disrupting all sorts of meetings. Some school boards have asked the federal government to send people in to protect them. One guy quit his position because of threats from some of these people.
The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America is sounding the alarm on a concerning and dangerous
trend that is currently showing up on social media. Apparently idiots on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have been breathing in hydrogen peroxide through nebulizers to try to prevent or treat COVID-19.
Last week the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America said, This is dangerous,
and that hydrogen peroxide can cause tissue damage if you swallow it or breathe it in.
Household H2O2 is about a 3% solution and can cause respiratory irritation, while inhalation of vapors from concentrated hydrogen peroxide, higher than 10% solutions, may result in severe pulmonary irritation.
Well, yeah. Hydrogen peroxide is used for bleaching things. Thus the peroxide blonde.
This harkens back to the very early days of the pandemic in 2020, when that uneducated moron Trump was asking at a press conference about injecting people with bleach to cute COVID-19.
We've read that YouTube is banning a lot of anti-vaxxer accounts and removing lots of the crazy anti-vaccine videos.
Meanwhile a nurse named Bethann Kierczak has been arrested for allegedly stealing authentic COVID-19 vaccination cards from a Veteran's Administration hospital in Michigan and selling them online for between $150 and $200 each, according to the Justice Department. Ms. Kierczak also used vaccine lot numbers from legitimate cards to make fraudulent ones appear legitimate; she's formally charged with theft of government property and theft or embezzlement related to a health care benefit program. Another person in the Detroit area, 32-year-old Rapheal Smiley, is accused of ordering fake COVID-19 vaccine cards from the so-called People's Republic of China and selling them on Facebook and Instagram. This kind of stuff is not good. People will try to scam others for a quick buck no matter what's going on.
Anti-vaxxers have all sorts of excuses for not getting the vaccines, what they're going for instead is getting sick and in the hospital demanding treatment with monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies are also new, and treatment with them costs about $2,100, while a shot of the vaccine costs about $20. Also, the shot takes minutes for everything. The monoclonal antibody shots take hours and involve as lot of hospital personnel. It is so irrational to go for the more expensive treatment that's as new as the vaccines and takes long and has no guarantee that it will work. Maybe a lot of them go for this because their great leader Trump had this done when he got COVID-19. And there's no guarantee that the monoclonal antibody treatment will work on someone who's gotten sick enough to be hospitalized.
Speaking of treatments, drug company Merck said Friday that its experimental COVID-19 pill reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half in people recently infected with the coronavirus and that it would soon ask health officials in the U.S. and around the world to authorize its use. Merck and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said early results showed patients who received the drug, called molnupiravir, within five days of COVID-19 symptoms had about half the rate of hospitalization and death as patients who received a placebo. The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who were considered higher risk for severe disease due to health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. This new pill works by interfering with an enzyme the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses to copy its genetic code and reproduce itself. It has shown similar activity against other viruses. The U.S. government has committed to purchase 1.7 million doses of the drug if it is authorized by the FDA. Among patients taking this drug, named molnupiravir, 7.3% were either hospitalized or died at the end of 30 days, compared with 14.1% of those getting the placebo. There were no deaths in the drug group after that time period compared with eight deaths in the placebo group, according to Merck.
We talked about religious exemptions. Pickles of the North and I noted that Catholics sure can't claim them. The Vatican City State said Tuesday that it would soon begin requiring all employees, including the highest members of the Catholic Church to show proof of vaccination or of a recent negative coronavirus test. Those without the proper certificates, the Vatican said, will be considered unjustly absent
— and will be paid no salary. In some good news the virus-tracking Web site outbreak.info said that the mu variant did not account for any new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and so it's looking like that variant has been wiped out here. Scientists had been very concerned about the mu variant being vaccine-resistant and even more transmissible than the delta variant. But a Japanese study shows that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine gives substantial protection against the mu variant. And now it's down to causing under 1% of the infections globally, according to the World Health Organization.
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In the so called People's Republic of China they will reportedly ban video games that don't promote correct values
and accurate understanding
of the country's history and culture, a leaked internal memo shows. This includes a ban on any portrayal of effeminate males,
the promotion of same-sex relationships, and the showing of characters who have no clear gender.
According to the memo developers are instructed to treat video gaming as a new form of art, one that's no longer apolitical pure entertainment.
The dictate in the leaked memo says, If regulators can't tell the character's gender immediately, the setting of the characters could be considered problematic and red flags will be raised.
Male game characters who wear female clothing could also be pose a problem for regulators. Well, the Maoist residue, like the Stalinist residue, has always been homophobic and uptight about sexual and gender identity matters. So screw the Chinese Communist Party!
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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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