Back of the Book

• Covid~19 cases in the whole world - 129,998,978 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the whole world - 2,832,850 on Friday.
• Covid~19 cases in the United States of America - 30,595,111 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the United States of America - 553,946 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the United States of America since our last program - 6,134.
• Covid~19 targets - More places are opening up, many without mask mandates.
• Baseball restarts - Except the Mets can't because of positive Covid~19 tests on the other team.
• Baseball tradition - Casey Stengel and Micky Mantle testify to Congress.
• Marijuana - It's now legal to toke in public. Oh the stink!
• Planet Earth - New layer discovered.
• Voter Suppression - Is this what's going to destroy the United States of America?

We talked about states opening up more and more public businesses and event, and how this sounds like a bad idea to do at this time. We talked about opening day for baseball being affected by the pandemic, and we related Casey Stengel and Micky Mantle testifying before Congress to the approach some politicians have to dealing with the pandemic.

Pickles of the North talked about the origins of Easter and ow it came to be that bunnies were laying eggs.

We talked about researchers at the Australian National University (announcing that they have discovered a new layer of the Earth. They say it's located within Earth's inner core. So there are now five layers to the Earth. We mentioned "hollow Earth" hypotheses, which have all been thoroughly debunked.

We talked about marijuana now being legal in New York State. We discussed it being one thing for people to use it but another thing for people to force others to use it. We talked about how marijuana has a real stink to it these days, and wondered what it'll be like after the pandemic eases and more people are wandering around smoking it in public? And of course all of those people will be loaded. We compared disinhibited drunks and disinhibited marijuana smokers, neither group behaves well. And how smart is it to smoke anything? We noted that marijuana sales won't be legal in New York until at least 2022, so the state is allowing illegal sales. The state doesn't allow that for liquor.

Marijuana is still illegal under federal law, and workers whose jobs are regulated by the feds, like cops and MTA workers would still be fired if they test positive for the drug.

• Guests? Guests? We don't got no guests. We don't need no stinkin' guests! -

• Barracuda - Heart
• Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty

• I have a Web site.

• R. Paul is on Twitter.

• WBAI LSB Treasurer's Reports are here.

• If you want to do something to protect your privacy while using regular browsers, like Firefox, you can check out NOSCRIPT which gives you more control over what Web sites can learn about you.

• Search engines help us to find things on the World Wide Web. Most search engines exist not to help you find things but to allow the companies that provide the search service to data mine your searches and then sell your search history to clients so they can spam you. An alternative to getting your privacy compromised is to use the DuckDuckGo search engine.

• If you'd like to keep your browsing history private you can get yourself the Tor Browser. Using the DuckDuckGo search engine is automatic with the Tor Browser, and by accessing the DuckDuckGo search engine from the Tor Browser you are pretty much guaranteed that no one can trace searches back to you.

• Gnu Privacy Guard can help you to encrypt your data and preserve your privacy.

• For those who need some help getting started with Gnu Privacy Guard there is Gentle GPG which does a lot of the work for you.

• For the somewhat more advanced user who wants to protect his or her privacy there is the Tails OS. Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any computer from a USB flash drive or a DVD. It allows you to use any computer that will allow you to boot up off a USB flash drive or a DVD and it provides a lot of good security for your on-line activities. You can get the Tails OS here.