Future CDC Head?
We talked about that crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has been nominated for the position of Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. He is already trying to stop some vaccines from being given to people. We also talked about the guy who was the subject of a nationwide manhunt after he killed a rich CEO in Manhattan one morning earlier this month. We voiced relief that the sunsets are starting to get later now. We have bribed highly placed officials to arrange for the Winter Solstice to occur just before our next program. I hope to add more to this Web page. It might be worth it to 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 January 8, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
We had the first meeting of the 14th WBAI LSB this past week. I've termed out, so I couldn't fully participate in the meeting. In fact I was supposed to have given an oral Treasurer's Report but we never got to it.
This is not all that much of a new WBAI LSB. In fact of the 24 members of the 14th WBAI LSB only one is actually new.
So the usual suspects did their usual stuff again. The former Chair of the LSB had termed out, as I have. The Vice Chair was chairing for the first time. The disruptors are well practiced at what they do. We spent time arguing about adding a minute of silence, and also on someone who wanted to add that minute to the end of the meeting. And later on that person claimed that her motion was to add all of the time spent talking about her motion to the end of the meeting, which she said was 14 minutes. This is the underhanded way some people do things.
Anyway, the people who wanted to make a mess of the meeting largely succeeded. I didn't get to give an oral Treasurer's Report, the interim General Manager and interim Program Director did not get to give a report, the WBAI Directors on the PNB did not get to give a report. We sure did hear a lot about the nonsense one faction pushes, however. I suspect that the one new person on the LSB was left puzzled about it all. We'll have two years of this LSB, if we're lucky and Trump doesn't destroy the entire thing.
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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Trump's Klown Kar Kabinet keeps making headlines. Crackpot conspiracy nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now had his personal lawyer petition the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the hepatitis B and polio vaccines, and to also block the distribution of 13 others including vaccines designed to protect against tetanus, diphtheria and hepatitis A.
These and many other vaccines that he's trying to prevent from being given to people have been around for decades. No test that any right-wing conspiracy nut can do will have a more valid outcome than the real-life experience of millions of people taking these vaccines over the course of more than half a century in some cases. That dead worm in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s brain is not a valid substitute for a trained professional Medical Doctor with experience in experimenting with viruses and vaccines.
It's being reported that Kennedy Jr. and Donnie Bonespur
Trump have been talking about doing investigations into the vaccines that are used against mumps, measles and rubella regarding autism. This hoax is inspired by a totally discredited 1988, paper by a British doctor. They're just grabbing at things they hear in gossip. This will be the administration of the supermarket checkout-line tabloid mode of thought.
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We're in late Autumn right now. The Sun set at 4:29 this afternoon, on Friday the 13th when we recorded this program. We are finally getting later sunsets. Having the Sun set at about 4:28 PM (ET) for several days was depressing to me. It is also depressing for me to see the sky be as dark as midnight in the late afternoon. The Winter Solstice will occur next Saturday morning at 4:21 AM (ET), a mere 39 minutes before the start time of our next radio program. Yes, we did arrange it that way. But the sunsets are going to be marching out of the gloom of Winter entirely pretty soon.
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The search for the half-assed assassin came to an end this week. When we first saw the images of the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, I noted that the guy with the gun was barehanded. That was an obvious amateur move. Everything he touched he left fingerprints on. And then we heard that he'd left his cell phone, a water bottle and a candy wrapper he'd handled behind at the scene of the murder! All of that stuff would have retained his fingerprints and some of it would obviously have had his DNA on it as well. This confirmed to me that the killer was definitely not a professional assassin.
I knew they'd get this guy. Apparently he'd figured out how to sneak up on his target and use his silenced ghost pistol, but everything else was just totally amateurish. He did manage to mostly keep his mask on, but he pulled it down in front of a sign-in desk at the hostel he'd stayed at for days, and that's a place where you'd expect there to be a camera. He pulled his mask down enough for that camera to get a good shot of his face. He pulled his mask down for a little while in order to flirt. That's a case of thinking with the small head and screwing up what you're trying to do. Eventually that photograph is what got someone to recognize him hundreds of miles away from Manhattan and call the cops. Walking around with the same ID he'd used at the hostel, with which he tried to fool the cops, and still having the same illegal gun, the murder weapon, with him was just piling blunder on blunder. I don't think that he's going to regain his freedom for a long time, if ever.
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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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