Installing His Klown Kabinet
It's Saturday morning, November 30, 2024, 06:25, and I've updated this Web page with the Project Gutenberg book I've recommended and with a link to the archive of this radio program. More to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ I'm in another rush. We talked about Trump's Klown Kar Kabinet on this program, along with some other things. I'll be updating this Web page very soon. Check back for the updates.
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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During the presidential campaign Donnie Bonespur
Trump said he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Trump described a lot of the policy goals laid out in Project 2025 as absolutely ridiculous.
During the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he even said that he was Not going to read it.
And now he's appointing various authors of Project 2025 to his Cabinet.
Trump Deportations. He'll start off with the easy targets. That's why it's good that New York City has shut down that big migrant shelter. This Tom Homan guy who's going to be Trump's Border Czar
is all ready to get at throwing people out of the country. I'm sure the easy ones will go first, the ones who are in jails for various things. When they run out of them it will be places like migrant shelters that will be hit all at once. Will we see Trump's border agents stalking the subways and buses looking for easy pickings? Show me your papers!
may become a phrase that we hear on public transportation a lot soon.
This Brendan Carr guy is going to head the Federal Communications Commission, and Project 2025 names the Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI and four other radio stations around the country, as a target. But we don't receive money from the government, not directly anyway. Trump wants to shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) but Pacifica managed to get kicked out of that more than a decade ago. The real problem could come from H.R.9495 which would allow the Department of the Treasury to lift the tax exempt status of non-profit organizations, like Pacifica.
I'm reading The New York Times that the rapid response director of the Democratic National Committee Alex Floyd, said that, After months of lies to the American people, Donald Trump is taking off the mask. He's plotting a Project 2025 Cabinet to enact his dangerous vision starting on day one.
And Trump had said that on day one he'd be a dictator. Maybe he wasn't lying about that part. We have rough times ahead.
It's also becoming clear that Trump doesn't even know how tariffs work! Probably some right-wing jerk told him that telling people that foreign countries would pay tariffs to send goods into America and thereby boost the federal budget and reduce taxes would get him the votes of other people who knew nothing about what tariffs are. Those people, and the rest of us, are the ones who'll be shelling out to pay for the tariffs.
I'm reading about what Leon Skum, aka Elon Musk, and Vive Ramaswamy are going to try to do. And I'm reading that they probably can't do it without really gutting Social Security and the Veterans Administration, along, maybe with actual defense. I'm wondering if Trump and his pals will blame it all on Biden as they go through with it over the years?
An interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. From some years ago has surfaced. In it he credits heroin for helping him do9 better in school! And this rogue Kennedy is going to be in Charge of the health of the people of the United States of America! Meanwhile the woman who's a part owner of the WWE phony wrestling organization will be in charge of the Dept, of Education. Maybe they'll get together and do PSAs to promote the use of heroin for school kids! Hey, kids, don't talk smack - DO smack! Stay in school and get high, just make sure that your teachers and all of your friends have an a couple of squirts of NARCAN on them when you decide to shoot up in the back stairway. If your marks are not good enough, shoot up! Remember, stay in school and become a junkie.
We're hearing that Trump lied about a phone call he had with the President of Mexico. Trump said that he'll impose a 25% tariff on Mexican goods sold in the U.S. until Mexico puts an end to migrants and drugs entering the United States. He misrepresented that phone call according to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. She released an open letter to Trump saying in part, Seventy percent of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from your country,
she also said, We do not produce the weapons, we do not consume synthetic drugs.
And she said, According to figures from your country's Border and Customs Patrol, encounters at the border between Mexico and the United States have been reduced by 75% from December 2023 to November 2024.
She concluded saying, President Trump, we are not going to address the migration phenomenon or drug use in the United States with threats or tariffs.
She also said that if the United States imposes tariffs on Mexican good then Mexico will impose tariffs on American goods.
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I've been recommending books lately, old books. I frequently look through the offerings on Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is a volunteer organization that specializes in preserving books, and some other media. Mostly what they do is find books and other materials that are no longer in copyright and they take these books and scan them in and then use OCR to produce a written E-Book which the Project Gutenberg distributed proof readers then go over to make sure that the text is correct. You can read these books in a browser and in various other formats. There are books falling into the public domain every year and Project Gutenberg produc es over a thousand E-Books every year that they tehn release for people to read or download for free.
The book I'm recommending this week is A voyage to South America, with an account of a shipwreck in the river La Plata, in the year 1817 by George Fracker. This is the second edition of this book. It was published in 1826, and contains the harrowing story of Fracker's adventures on board a couple of merchant ships and his shipwreck off the coast of South America. To me this account was almost cinematic, more than 60 years before the first motion picture was produced. When reading this book I wondered if maybe some movie producers had read this book before they created shipwreck scenes in their work.
I recommend this book, and I'll note that it is of its time and Mr. Fracker notes the presence of African slaves on the ships in a mater of fact way. It's a personal story of a disaster at sea 207 years ago when seagoing ships were made of wood and only used sails for propulsion.
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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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