Taiwan, Republic of China
It's Saturday morning, May 10, 2025, 06:30 and I've updated this Web page with some of what we talked about regarding the new Pope. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We talked about the Popes and out having once been Catholic on this program. I plan to add more about that to this Web page. I've posted a bit about a new discovery regarding the Denisovans, about whom not a lot is known. I've also mentioned the ethical violations that Donnie Bonespur
Trump has been involved in. More to come. It might be worth your while to check back on this Web page soon.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday May 14, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had an LSB meeting this past Wednesday night, April 9, 2025, and it was dominated by the actions of the Pacifica National Board (PNB) in having a California judge allow a a certain faction to hijack the Pacifica bylaws! ore to come.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night 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. 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.
•
We talked a bit about scientists finding evidence of Denisovans having lived long ago in what became the Strait of Taiwan. Denisovans are only known from a small number of fossils that have been found. They are named after Denisova Cave in Siberia where the first fossils of the archaic humans were found in 2008.
The newest find was of a fossilized jaw bone that was brought up from the Taiwan Strait. It had been under the water for tens of thousands of years, and it had no DNA left on it to identify. But apparently there were some proteins that survived in the jaw bone and that was used to identify it as a Denisovan fossil. Long ago, when sea levels were lower, a land bridge existed between Taiwan and the mainland of Asia. This fossil, and another one found in Laos, puts the Denisovans farther south than they had been known to have lived previously.
The Denisovans were very similar to the more well known Neanderthals. Denisovans interbred with Neanderthals, and later on with modern humans. In fact the fossil of a child was found elsewhere in Asia that was evidently the son of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother. The Denisovans appear to have split off from the same hominen ancestor as Neanderthals a very long time ago. The identity of that hominen ancestor is not known at this time. Humans' direct ancestors split off from that ancestor about a million years ago. Not a lot is known about the Denisovans, but as more and more fossils are found it's being discovered that they were all over east Asia.
•
Trump's sons are on a world tour making deals that benefit him financially. They're in charge of the trust that Trump has placed his business interests in. Ethics? Ethics? They ain't got no stinking ethics! Trump has been pushing his crypto-currency since he got reelected. He makes a personal profit from it. He criticized crypto-currencies as not being money some years ago. Now both he and his wife are selling their own. This all raises tremendous conflict of interest issues. Will he end up totally in violation of the U.S. Constitution's emoluments clauses?
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, of the U.S. Constitution:
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state.
•
So we talked about Pope Francis dying on the last program. This time w talked about the new Pope who was only elected this past Thursday. So Cardinal Robert Prevost became Pope Leo ⅩⅣ at that time. Pickles of the North and I talked about being brought up Catholic. Neither one of us believes in that supernatural nonsense anymore, I'm glad to say.
Pickles read about some of the superstitions associated with the glorious month of May. She noted that one of the Catholic rituals includes a figure from the pre-Abrahamic religion that was widely practiced among humans a very long time ago.
I talked about having read some statements that Prevost had made when he was just a priest in 2012. At that time he had addressed the world Synod of Bishops saying, Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel, for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia.
He made a point of, How alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children are so benignly and sympathetically portrayed in television programs and cinema today.
Yeah, not exactly a pro-LGBT+∞ statement. Some are saying that he may have changed a bit in the intervening 13 years. The president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement that she hoped that Pope Leo ⅩⅣ would, Build on the progress,
That some saw in what Pope Francis had said and done. In my opinion Pope Francis was no great friends to LGBT+∞ people either.
Well, I'm sure we'll see what this guy does on a lot of big issues. And we also wonder if Donnie Bonespur
Trump being President of the United States had any influence on the votes. In some ways Prevost became more a Peruvian than an American in his years there. He even became a citizen of Peru. Maybe some of the cardinals thought that as an American he would be able to stand up to anything that Trump might try, or at least be bold enough to speak out against some of Trump's worst actions and statements.
I'm sure we'll find out over time what this guy wants to project as the policy of the Catholic Church. As for me, I'm going to remain an atheist no matter what he or any other Pope says.
•
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.
•
Back to the Back of the Book page
Back to my home page.
The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2025, R. Paul Martin.
