Back of the Book

• Covid~19 cases in the whole world - 201,271,096 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the whole world - 4,272,990 on Friday.
• Covid~19 cases in the United States of America - 35,467,746 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the United States of America - 615,438 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the United States of America since our last program - 3,050.
• Covid~19 - The vaccination rate has jumped in the last week or so.
• Pandemic changes - Wildlife that came around during the lockdown is still around.
• Climate change - The west coast fires have wiped out entire towns in California. Greece, Italy Turkey, Spain and Lebanon are also experiencing record breaking wildfires.
• People Stink - Bots force shutdown of emergency passport application system.

This program marked 17 months since we were last physically at WBAI.

Republican Asa Hutchinson, the Governor of Arkansas, said that he regrets his April ban on mask mandates and is hoping to reverse course. He changed his mind, he said, because "the delta variant hit us hard." Only 42% of Arkansas residents ages 12 and up are at least partially vaccinated. Cases among kids in Arkansas have risen by 517% between April and July, according to the Associated Press. Governor Hutchinson said, "There's been a lot of distrust and we hope to overcome that because medical sciences, vaccines work, I believe, and we need to get those out — because that's the way out of this," D'uh!

The Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Kristi Noem of South Dakota all still oppose mask mandates.

Former public moron and Trump's ex-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders running for governor of Arkansas said, "If I am elected governor here in Arkansas we will not have mask mandates, we will not have mandates on the vaccine, we will not shut down churches and schools and other large gatherings, because we believe in personal freedom and responsibility." Still stupid.

We talked about more instances of people denouncing the vaccines and mask wearing and then dying of Covid-19.

We talked about the red tailed hawks that currently rule the fire escapes in our neighborhood.

R. Paul talked about rescuing his old-fashioned passbook savings account the other day.

We debuted a new program segment we call "People Stink."

There is a Web page for this program.

• 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.