Back of the Book — May 21, 2022


It's Saturday morning, May 21, 2022, 11:45, and this Web page is finished. I've added some more of the topics we'd talked about on this program. For the rest, you'll just have to listen to the radio program. The original top of this page follows the arrow. Here are some of the main topics we covered on this program. We hit the one million deaths in the United States of America mark, this was sadly predictable. We talked about the racist mass murder in Buffalo. We also talked about the death of lesbian activist Urvashi Vaid, and we talked about the Congressional hearing on UFOs.

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 that you can listen to and maybe even participate in will be held on Wednesday June 8, 2022, at 7 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 36 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.

The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, May 11, 2022. There was the usual posturing from the usual practitioners, multiple members who couldn't figure out what was going on, revelations of a $300,000 judgment against WBAI and tales of the IRS grabbing six figures out of some Pacifica bank accounts.

Before the May 11, 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.

Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.

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.

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!

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?

SARS-CoV-2 virus
1,001,936

According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 526,539,868 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,287,278. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 83,164,705 and the death toll in America was 1,001,936, so 2,466 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death is a little bit higher than last week's. The BA.2.12.1 subvariant of Omicron is still raging through the world. The pandemic is not 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.

New York City and a number of other places in America are on a higher alert level again. Mayor Adams suggests that people wear masks, but it's not becoming a mandate again.

American massacre rifle.
So Many Bad People Have These

We had some more mass shootings in America this past week. That 18-year-old who showed up in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo was really something awful. He shot 13 people, 10 of whom died. He actually researched the neighborhood, and reconnoitered the store and the surrounding area, before he went there. He had a map of the aisles of the supermarket and he used that to plan his most efficient route through the store so he could maximize the number of people he shot. An armed security guard put a round into him, but he was wearing body armor and the pistol round did not penetrate. And so the 18 year old shot and killed the security guard with the AR-15 type rifle he'd brought to the massacre. He'd modified the rifle so it could take illegal, large magazines, which allowed him to keep on shooting without having to pause to reload. The shooter drove from hundreds of miles away in Conklin, N.Y. to get to that particular supermarket to do his shooting. He had these long, white supremacist screeds on-line and went into detail about what he was going to do. His plans included going to another store and a barber shop if he had been able to get out of the Tops Friendly Market after the shooting and he was going to kill more black people there and also shoot people in the street as he went to those places.

The 18 year old, I'm not going to mention his name, wrote in one of his screeds, Zip code 14208 in Buffalo has the highest Black percentage that is close enough to where I live. So he wanted it to be a convenient place to commit mass murder.

This was a huge, racist attack. In the screeds the shooter cited something called the Great Replacement Theory, which says that immigrants are being brought into the United States by elites to replace white Americans. Interestingly, Fox News has been pushing this so-called Great Replacement Theory for years, but they're not mentioning it when they talked about this racist mass murder by a self-identified white supremacist. No, they're blaming it on President Biden. Blaming it on former President Trump would be much more accurate.

Flying Saucer
This Is Taken Seriously Now

The House Intelligence Committee held the first open congressional hearing on UFOs in more than half a century this past week. UFOs are now called unidentified aerial phenomena. In the hearings Scott W. Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the Pentagon had received about 400 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report last year calling for more information. They called for more information after 143 out of 144 UFO reports by military members, including pilots, could not be explained. The government is now trying to encourage people to come forward with these kinds of reports. Deputy Bray said that sightings in military airspace and other restricted areas have increased since the start of the 21st Century. Bray played a video of a UFO sighting during his testimony. It showed a spherical object fly by a Naval aircraft during a training exercise. Bray said, As they fly by it, they take a video - you see it looks reflective in this video, somewhat reflective, and it quickly passes by the cockpit of the aircraft. I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.

Ronald S. Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, told the committee that the Pentagon is establishing an office to investigate these things. He said, The office's function is clear: to facilitate the identification of previously unknown or unidentified airborne objects in a methodical, logical and standardized manner. This newly established office will coordinate with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as international allies and national laboratories.

Intelligence committee chairman Representative Adam Schiff said in his remarks that reports of these objects, Need to be understood as a national security matter. There is something there, measurable by multiple instruments, and yet it seems to move in directions that are inconsistent with what we know of physics or science more broadly.

Urvashi Vaid in 2014
Urvashi Vaid in 2014
Photo credit: The Laura Flanders Show, license: cc3 cropped & resized

Urvashi Vaid died on May 14. She was 63. She reportedly died from a recurring cancer. She had been the Executive Director of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 1989-1992. That group is now called the National LGBTQ Task Force. In 1990, she disrupted President George H.W. Bush's address on the AIDS crisis, by standing up and holding a sign that said, Talk Is Cheap, AIDS Funding is Not. She was an author, an attorney, a reporter and she was a founder and leader of several organizations related to LGBT+∞ rights. There has been an outpouring of testimonials from various well known people in the LGBT+∞ population. In some cases she sounded like some of the old gay liberation people from long ago, and that's a good thing. She will be missed.

Ukraine kills Russian battalion2022-05-12
Russian Battalion Destroyed

The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues. The important port city of Mariupol has fallen. The Russians continue to target apartment buildings in other cities.

War criminal Vladimir Putin started the war with the intent of weakening and possibly intimidating NATO. This entire war has backfired on Putin. NATO appears to be stronger than ever, and Finland and Sweden have formally applied to join NATO. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey is Not of a favorable opinion, about this because he said Scandinavian countries have supported the Kurdish militants. He could block the two countries from joining NATO.

Rand Paul
Putin Fan

Meanwhile Ukrainian forces destroyed an entire battalion of Russian armored troops that was trying to cross the Siverskyi Donets River using pontoon bridges. Britain's Defense Ministry said, Conducting river crossings in a contested environment is a highly risky maneuver and speaks to the pressure the Russian commanders are under to make progress in their operations in eastern Ukraine. Hundreds of Russian troops may have been killed or injured in that short battle.

Meanwhile the United States is going to send $40 Billion in aid to Ukraine, but right-wing Senator Rand Paul prevented a fast track vote on it. The measure passed but Rand Paul had delayed it for days. He'd also delayed a bill that allowed President Biden to order confiscation of pro-Putin oligarchs' property. He's been pro-Putin for a while, saying at one point that Russia, Only invades countries that were once part of Russia. In that case I wonder if he'd be in favor of Great Britain and Spain invading North America on the same grounds?

tmd (63K)
Temporomandibular joint dysfunction

After talking about getting it for more than a month I finally got my second booster shot this past week. From what Pickles of the North and I have read I am probably immune-boosted by the time this program airs. Given that I'm an old guy with medical issues I need to put up what barriers I can to ward off the SARS-CoV-2 virus because if I get COVID-19 I have too good a chance of joining the million who have already died of it.

Pickles of the North and I got to the V.A. Hospital a little late and had to wait until after lunch to get me shot up. So Pickles and I had lunch at the V.A. Hospital. I found that the menu at the V.A. Hospital cafeteria has shrunk drastically since the pandemic hit. After the hospital workers and I were done with lunch I got my shot. Of course Pickles and I wore masks for the time we were out except when we were eating lunch.

Having gotten my second booster we went right over to the Emergency Room to see about the problem with my jaw that I've been talking about for weeks. Once again my medical diagnosis was wrong. I thought that I'd dislocated my jaw while eating a chicken sandwich. A doctor examined me and his diagnosis was that I have a Temporomandibular joint dysfunction. (TMD) problem. The graphic shows where that happens, and it is a soft tissue problem, so I'd gotten that part right. I was glad about finally getting an actual diagnosis, and I was also glad that I didn't have a broken piece of my jaw bone jabbing soft tissue. The doctor prescribed some ibuprofen and he said that I will probably need to go in for a follow-up. His prognosis was that the condition will probably heal itself over time. I'm not a fan of ibuprofen, but this prescription if for only a few days. I'll just have to hope I don't have a bad interaction with it. Well, at least nothing's actually broken and TMD is something that heal over time.

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.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

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