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U.S.S. Arizona December 7, 1941
We talked about the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor being attacked 83 years ago today. We also talked about the increasingly crazy Klown Kar Kabinet that Donnie Bonespur
Trump is assembling. He's putting people in charge of important agencies of the United States government with the intent that those people destroy those agencies! Can the United States of America survive this? We have some more to add here, and we'll try to get to that as soon as we can, so check back for those 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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As this program airs it's 83 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan on December 7, 1941.
The United States of America had set up a coalition of nations to deny oil to the Japanese Empire as a reaction to the Empire's invasion and occupation of China and Japan's well publicized war crimes in China.
In order to gain access to the oil fields of what was then called the Dutch East Indies, and to prevent the United States Pacific fleet from interfering with their plans to invade various countries in the southwest Pacifica Ocean, the Japanese Empire decided to take out the American Pacific fleet, which was based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was a very well planned attack with special weapons like midget submarines and with some of the bombs being converted 16" artillery shells which could penetrate the deck armor of ships, but it was based on some bad assumptions. First the Japanese thought that the Americans were too divided to fight, second they thought that the Americans were too squeamish to fight, and lacked the resolve necessary to oppose the large Japanese war machine. One thing that the Imperial Japanese government apparently saw as telling was the fact that the bill to initiate a peace time draft in the United States had barely gotten approved by the House of Representatives, having been passed by only one vote.
A lot of people knew that tensions were high with Japan, but the actual attack surprised most people. The sneak attack galvanized almost all of America and began America's direct, unequivocal participation in World War II which ended with the Japanese Empire surrendering on August 14, 1945, after atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the multinational, formal surrender being accomplished on September 2, 1945.
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Of course we talked about Donnie Bonespur
Trump's continuing efforts to fill up his Klown Kar Kabinet. We all know about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s conspiracy nut tendencies. We've all heard his story about his taste for road kill, and about how he dropped off a dead bear in Central Park. He's an anti-vaccination disinformationist and now he's going to be nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He will be trying to destroy the agency he'll be the head of. This is all quite an accomplishment for a guy who's acknowledged that a worm has eaten his brain.
And this Pete Hegseth person who's being nominated for Secretary of Defense would be quite the laugh were it not for the fact that he too appears totally unqualified and is actually being put in that position in order to destroy the agency he's supposed to head. This guy has run veterans' groups he's headed into the ground financially and he is reported to have a serious drinking problem. He's anti-LGBT+∞, he thinks that women can't be effective in combat, he wants to roll back diversity programs and there's speculation that he may try to bring back naming some military bases after traitorous Confederate generals. On top of all of this he doesn't have the experience necessary for the job.
We're also seeing this Trump sycophant Kash Patel who is being put in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) making crazy statements. He's said that on his first day in office he'll get everyone out of the FBI building in Washington, D.C., close the building and then the next day re-open it as the Museum of the Deep State.
He wants to do all sorts of other things that will make a mess of the FBI. yeah, the FBI is not a great organization, it certainly has some serious flaws, but in a civilized society you need police. And maybe none of these people understand why the FBI came about. Will we see a resurgence of bank robberies where the thieves go across state lines to escape law enforcement? Will Trump's FBI be able to protect people from gangs, and foreign spies and saboteurs? Once again, Trump's installing a guy into an agency who has the intent to destroy that agency.
Who could have imagined that stuff like this could have happened in the United States of America? We may be seeing the end of this country entirely over the next four years, if it lasts that long!
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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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