The Death Toll continues to Climb
It's Saturday morning, January 29, 2022, 06:39, and this Web page is finished. I have have updated this Web page with the link to the audio archive on WBAI.ORG, and I have put in some of the other topics we'd covered on this program. I've also fixed that graphic that was causing me so much trouble. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Okay, I'm having trouble with a graphic, so I haven't done a lot with this page yet. I will do my best to fix the graphic and to update and finish this Web page very soon.
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 Tuesday February 1, 2022, in executive session. The next regular WBAI LSB meeting should be held on Wednesday, February 9, 2022, at 7 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meetings will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 32 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, January 12, 2022, as both the LSB and as a Delegates Assembly. We easily elected WBAI's Directors to the Pacifica National Board at that meeting. Only enough people wanted to become Directors as we had slots for Directors, so they were all elected by acclamation. This meeting also featured a time keeper who couldn't keep time and people disrupting the meeting because they lost an election. In Public Comment we had anti-vaxxers whining that they weren't getting enough air time on WBAI for their life threatening disinformation.
The results are in and these are the 2022, WBAI Directors elected to the Pacifica National Board:
| Staff | - | Shawn Rhodes |
| Listener | - | Jim Dingeman |
| Listener | - | James Sagurton |
| Listener | - | Sharonne Salaam |
Before the January 12, 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, 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. 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 368,605,333 on Friday, and global deaths reached 5,645,487. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 73,730,844 and the death toll in America was 880,955, so 17,184 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death rate is once again up even more than it was last week. And some people are saying that the pandemic is over.
By the time this program airs on Saturday morning all of those figures we quoted will be higher of course. This was all mostly preventable.
Scott Quiner of Minnesota was unvaccinated, and he caught COVID-19. In October he contracted COVID for a second time. By Thanksgiving he was in Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, and he was intubated. By mid-January the hospital said they couldn't do anything more for him and they were going to take him off the ventilator on January 12. His wife of 35 years Anne Quiner didn't like that, she said, I have advised the doctors that I vehemently disagree with this action and do not want my husband's ventilator turned off,
and she went to court. Judge Jennifer Stanfield issued an order forcing Mercy Hospital to keep the ventilator on, with a hearing set for Feb. 11. So we have a judge taking on the role of attending physician here.
Anne Quiner wasn't satisfied with this. She had her husband flown to Texas, where hospital officials in Houston told the family's attorney they found him severely malnourished.
The Quiner's attorney, Marjorie Holsten, announced to the press that, He lost 30 pounds while on the ventilator, that should be proof enough he was not getting adequate nutrition.
So now the lawyer they hired is giving out a medical diagnosis. Weight loss is a common side effect of long-term intubation, but I guess the lawyer didn't know that, maybe. Allina Health, which owns and operates Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, said it had great confidence in the exceptional care provided to our patients, which is administered according to evidence-based practices by our talented and compassionate medical teams.
And then they said, Due to patient privacy, we cannot comment on care provided to specific patients.
I don't know the full story of why Mrs. Quiner had to travel all the way to Texas to get her husband on a ventilator in a hospital, but I suspect politics had something to do with it. If the guy was in bad shape other hospitals might have agreed with the Minnesota hospital that they would take him off the ventilator if he was brought to their hospital in the shape he was in. Also, they may have had a hard time funding a hospital that had the room for yet another COVID-19 patient. Anyway, Mr. Quiner died of COVID-19 last Saturday. The 55-year-old who was the father of two adult children and a teenager had been kept on the ventilator in Texas. The family's lawyer said, We're absolutely devastated. On behalf of the Quiner family, I would like to thank the public for their outpouring of love and support during this difficult ordeal.
So These anti-vaxxers kept a man whom the hospital had decided could not be saved occupying a bed that someone else who needed medical attention could have occupied. They then spent money transporting him in that condition to Texas where he died soon after he'd arrived. The odds are that if he had been vaccinated we would never have heard about the sad story of Mr. Quiner. The odds of dying from COVID-19 are so much higher for unvaccinated people.
Whack-job Vice-Presidential candidate and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin has tested positive for COVID-19. This is her second infection. She recovered from her first COVID-19 infection in March 2020. Still, Palin is a big-mouth anti-vaxxer who made a speech in Arizona last month where she said, Enough is enough. Especially when it comes to government telling us what we have to inject in our own bodies. No. I will not do it. I won't do it, and they better not touch my kids, either.
She's also said that she'd get a COVID-19 vaccination Over my dead body.
Palin is in New York City for the trial of her lawsuit against The New York Times over what she claims was defamation. The judge offered her the option of taking part in July selection electronically, but Palin declined, so the trial date has been pushed back to February 3. Meanwhile, Palin is not isolating at all. She has been observed going to a Manhattan restaurant and refusing to even war a mask, which is mandated in New York City. She ought to be arrested for that.
So the singer known as Meat Loaf who died last week, died of COVID-19. In one of his last public pronouncements he said, If I die, I die,
and he did.
There's a video going around the Internet showing a confrontation between a woman wearing a double mask and a guy who was trying to bully her because she wouldn't let him use the library unless he wore a mask. She was the librarian there. The guy made a video of the confrontation, and he comes off as a real jerk. He tried t get her to say that it was her personal choice to insist that he wear a mask in order to use the library, when it's really the library's policy and the Illinois Department of Health protocols that people have to wear masks. The name of this library was not revealed, but the St. Charles Public Library, in Illinois, announced last week that has been forced to close due to the threats they have received over enforcing the mask mandate.
That library is not alone in being the target of anti-masker threats. The Denver Children's Museum announced it would close through Feb. 4. They issued a statement that said, We know the stress of the last two years has taken a toll on everyone in our community, but regrettably, some guests who object to the Museum's mask policy have been inappropriately directing their anger toward our staff, therefore, we have made the decision to close our doors to the public January 26, through February 4, so that we can support our staff and bolster our policies with the hope of preventing this type of behavior in the future.
Meanwhile the World Health Organization warned this week that a sub-variant of the omicron variant designated BA.2 was showing up. They're not calling it a variant of concern
yet, but it's shown up in 40 countries so far and has become more prevalent in the U.K. and Denmark, where it has been dubbed stealth omicron.
It doesn't appear to be more deadly than the main omicron variant, but it is more transmissible. Yeah, we're going to get things like this as long as the virus has plenty of people to infect and mutate in.
DJ Ferguson at the age of 31 needs a heart transplant but the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston took him off their list because he won't get vaccinated against COVID-19. His father David Ferguson said the COVID vaccine goes against his son's basic principles, he doesn't believe in it.
Apparently he does believe in organ transplants though. And apparently he does believe in all of the various drugs that he'll have to take for the rest of his life if he should get a transplant. Ferguson's wife said that the COVID vaccination could kill her husband. She does not seem to have elaborated on that. Surely she understands that a non-functioning heart would kill him even faster. She said, We're being pressured to choose a shot that could kill him. This is not just a political issue. People need to have a choice!
Well they do. And so does the hospital.
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That volcano that blew up near Tonga, Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai, is really something. It actually blew up twice. The satellite videos of it blowing up are quite interesting to see. Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said, This is a preliminary estimate, but we think the amount of energy released by the eruption was equivalent to somewhere between 4 to 18 megatons of TNT. That number is based on how much was removed, how resistant the rock was, and how high the eruption cloud was blown into the atmosphere at a range of velocities.
Scientists said that several small islands that had risen from the sea after a 2015, volcanic eruption were obliterated by the blast, which sent material as far as 25 miles into the atmosphere. And of course the people of Tonga got a tsunami and a lot of ash from the volcano.
Pickles of the North talked about her parents getting stranded because of an erupting volcano in Iceland some years ago. Aircraft that flew anywhere near it got enough of the ash in their engines to cause real problems. Also, the useful lives of those engines were impacted by the ash. The ash is really mostly rock. It's a lot like rubbing coarse sand paper on the rapidly moving parts of the jet engines. It was that volcanic eruption that clued the airlines in to the idea that they needed declare a much wider danger zone around erupting volcanos. Her parents were all right, they were stranded in Paris, France. There was the economic problem of being stranded in an expensive city though. It was better than riding along watching your jet engines disintegrate.
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Biden calling that guy from Fox News a Stupid son of a bitch
wasn't an accident, it was the venting of frustration with the stupid stuff they keep pulling. And what about the way Trump behaved toward the press? The right-wing thought that calling the press the Enemy of the People
and personally attacking individual reporters and publications was just fine. What hypocrites they are.
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We talked about the incident in California where a 14-year-old girl was killed by police who shot and killed a guy in a Burlington Coat Factory store on December 23. The young girl was trying on dresses in a dressing room. She was with her mother. This was an instance of the police over-gunning an incident. The rifle bullet went through the flimsy plasterboard wall and killed the kid. The police were responding to a report of a man with a gun in the store. In fact this nut was beating random women with a bicycle chain, which can kill you but which isn't nearly as deadly as a gun is. The squad of police followed the blood trail from one woman the nutcase had been beating. I don't know that they needed to shoot him right there, but a handgun probably would not have ricocheted off the floor and gone through that flimsy wall. It's hard to tell just what needs to be done in some cases, but responding to problems that need to be handled by police with weapons of war can get you in trouble. The cop who shot the kid is described as being shattered
by the experience.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom essentially vetoed the parole of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Presidential Candidate Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968, saying that releasing him on parole Would pose a threat to public safety.
Kennedy was looking like he would be the second Kennedy elected to be President of the United States in the 1968, election when he was assassinated.
The California Parole Board had granted Sirhan's parole request last year, but the Governor had to sign off on it. This had been Sirhan's 16th attempt at getting parole. The first 15 attempts had all failed.
I agree with the California Governor. Political assassins should not be set free. This is especially true when they come up with the nonsense that they don't remember killing the person whom they had assassinated. In fact I'm amazed that any Parole Board would grant someone parole from a capital crime if they didn't admit to the crime and express remorse for it. If he were to be let go I suspect that he would go back to the Middle East and he once there he might very well remember that he'd assassinated a candidate for President of the United States and might even brag about it. Hell, he might even become a celebrity for Al Quaeda, the Taliban or what's left of ISIS. Sirhan Sirhan should live out the rest of his life in prison.
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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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