Back of the Book links for the March 15, 2025, program

It's Wednesday afternoon, March 19, 2025 17:01, and I've updated this Web page with a couple of more things that we did on the air. I've also thanked the folks who got the program on the air after a technical problem. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We talked about the arrest of this Mahmoud Khalil guy and the First Amendment crisis it seems to be starting. For whom will they come next? We talked about various other topics on this program and I plan to update this Web page with some of those topics. So it might be worth your while to take another look at this Web page some time in the future.

We heard the person on the air a minute and a half after 5 AM announce that the computer had re-booted! This has happened so many times!

The program did get on the air, but the last few minutes of this program got cut off so that the 6 AM show could start on time. This surprise certainly did not help my blood pressure.

Thanks to Habte Selassie and Ian Forrest of Labbrish, which airs before our program, and WBAI Ops Staffer Reggie Jackson for working together to find a way around the disabled computer and thereby getting the program on the air.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday April 9, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had one this past Wednesday night and a motion came up regarding doing those periodic radio reports to the listeners from the LSB that you hear from time to time, and a person sabotaged it all. She threw in an amendment that she hadn't sent to the LSB until the last minute and then she wanted others to read it. That amendment undid months of work, but it got passed. Well, we'll see what happens with that whole issue next.

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:

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.

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.

Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested this week by DHS or ICE or some other acronym of the government. The government is saying that he represents a national security risk he had spread Hamas propaganda, and put out leaflets with the Hamas logo on them during demonstrations at Columbia University. But none of that is a crime. The First Amendment hasn't been removed by one of Donnie Bonespur Trump's executive orders yet. And ultimately this arrest is coming on orders from a president who had a mob try to stop the formal polling for the 2020, election so as to try and secure his attempt at not being replaced as president by the actual winner of the 2020, election. And Trump has praised his mob! Trump is also not at all worked up about the neo-Nazis that Trump who have voiced support for him and who have put out Nazi propaganda, hate literature, and anti-Semitic literature, and the Nazis display the Nazi logo, the swastika and other far right-wing symbols and logos of sometimes violent organizations.

This Tom Homan character who's formally listed as being the Executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations Trump and the rest of his crowd call Homan the border czar. Regarding the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, and subsequent whisking away to Louisiana without access to a lawyer, Homan has said that free speech has its limits, well on this program we have said that law enforcement has limits too! And the people arresting Mahmoud Khalil couldn't even get their facts right. He's not here on a student visa, he has a green card, and that means that he is afforded all the rights under the Constitution of the United States of America, including the First Amendment. I'm hoping that the courts don't knuckle under to this right-wing bullying. This arrest is the thin end of the wedge, albeit a rather blunt thin end, which, if it allows the Trump Administration to succeed in deporting Mahmoud Khalil and depriving him of his rights, will result in ever worse crackdowns on legal speech and actions that the right-wing doesn't like. Hell, we could even see American citizens being arrested for saying things in opposition to Trump and his thuggish administration. We could even see people arrested for calling Donnie Bonespur Trump names on the radio!

The Vernal Equinox will occur this coming Thursday morning March 20, 2025, at 5:01 AM (ET). At that moment Spring will arrive in the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth. Huzzah!

With Daylight Saving Time having been implemented on March 9, and with daylight predominating with the advent of Spring, this is a great time for people like me who prefer more daylight.

But will this be the last time we have Daylight Saving Time? Donnie Bonespur Trump had said in the weeks leading up to the change in clock time that he was against Daylight Saving Time (DST) and that he would abolish it. Of course Trump is an ignoramus and probably doesn't know that he can't abolish DST with the wave of a Sharpie_®. DST is the result of an act of Congress and would require Congressional action to eliminate it.

This idea of abolishing DST after it's been in use in the United States for 107 years is probably something some right-wing attention seeker brought up to him. It's possible that he could get some compliant Republican to put a bill on the floor of the House or Senate to eliminate DST but that would result in a fight. And we can all revel in the fact that neither that fool Trump nor any of his underlings can do anything to stop Spring from happening on a schedule that crooked politicians can't affect.

Pickles of the North and I watched the total lunar eclipse in the wee hours of Friday morning. It was an eclipse of the Blood Worm Moon. We watched it on TV because it was 100% overcast in Brooklyn. We watched from part way through the preliminary penumbra, through all of totality and for a quite a while after totality was over. During totality you could really see the Moon was red on TV. And soon after the period of totality, when the Moon entered the penumbra, it looked like a black and white cookie. I'll note that the crazies who deny that we ever landed on the Moon in 1969, because you don't see stars in the film and TV shots of that event that you didn't see stars during the live telecast of the lunar eclipse either, for the same reason.

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.

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.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

You can also send me E-mail.

And now you can even reach me on Twitter

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WBAI related links

A WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site

Back of the Book — March 15, 2025