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Not Foolproof, As Proven by Fools!
It's Thursday afternoon, April 3, 2025, 13:01, and I've updated this Web page with some pieces from Radio's Pickles of the North, previously I'd updated it with the link to the archive of the program and something about Viet Nam Veterans Day, which I really had no clue about. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We covered the breach of national security protocols this past week. We also talked about several other things, including about who caught COVID-19 recently. I went on rather a long rant during the program and touched on a number of topics. There's no way to list all of that here. I'm not sure but there may be more to come for this Web page, so you might want to check in for the update.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
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:
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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It's being called SIGNALGATE.
I don't know if that will be the ultimate name for this scandal, but it's certainly a more serious breach of the rules, and of common sense, than most other scandals.
Trump's National Security Adviser Michael Waltz invited a bunch of Trump administration insiders to a group chat on Signal on March 15th. Included in the meeting were Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others, but no military people were invited to this virtual shindig. Waltz set this up and besides the usual Trump cronies he invited the Editor in Chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg to this high level group chat. Oops!
A salient point here is that if a mere reporter for The Atlantic had been accidentally invited to a high level meeting such as this and had sat through the meeting he or she would had to have gone to an editor and pitched the story, and the editor might have been incredulous at what he or she was told, and the story would probably have had to go up the chain of command to another editor, maybe more than one, before it could possibly have been published. Or one of the editors along the way might have spiked it. But in this case the passive observer at the meeting was the Editor in Chief of the magazine, and he didn't need to check out his own story. So it got published within a week or so of the event happening.
Trump and his cronies said that nothing had really happened, that it was a non-story. In reality participants had actually learned and talked about launch times before the operation was put into motion, what aircraft would be used, what the targets would be, when the aircraft would be over the targets, etc. Trump and his in-crowd denied that anything classified was discussed at the meeting on the Signal app, but it had been. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, responded to the disclosures by attacking Jeffrey Goldberg, calling him a so-called journalist,
and saying that he had never disclosed any war plans.
And then Trump said that nothing classified had happened at that meeting, which meant that it wouldn't have mattered if anyone had hacked it and sent the information to the Houthis or anywhere else. Since Trump as president has the power to declassify anything, and he had said that there had been no classified information discussed at the meeting, and they had called into question what Mr. Goldberg had said about the meeting and the information given out at it, Mr. Goldberg released a transcript of the chat to the public. He couldn't get into trouble over doing that because the President of the United States had declared that nothing from that chat was classified. So the transcript of the entire event was released. Yeah, the transcript showed that Trump and the others had lied.
What total incompetents these people are! And it's worth noting that before and during Trump's first term in office he and his pals made a very big deal about Hillary Clinton having sent E-mails out via non-secure servers. At rallies they were chanting Lock Her Up
about Hillary Clinton, even though it turned out that she had not revealed anything in her E-mails. Well, I think that Donnie Bonespur
Trump and his cronies should locked up for this serious breach of national security. What hypocrites they all are.
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Pickles here with an update on the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, and a health note.
First, the Haskell, with the United States/Canadian border between the small towns of Stanstead Quebec and Derby Line Vermont running through it, is being shown some love by folks on both sides of the border. Homeland Security had decided the library was a danger point and they were going to force visitors from the Canadian side to go through a border checkpoint before entering the building through the American front door, while still allowing visitors from the US to wander about freely onto the Canadian part of the building as has been done by both sides since 1904. Well, the door on the Canadian side is no longer solely an emergency exit, it has been opened to allow visitors from Canada equal access once again. And a crowdsourced fund has raised more than $140,000 to renovate the door and parking lot. So the tradition of the Haskell promoting comradeship between the two nations will continue! We hope!
After 5 years of being COVID-19 free, I caught it! As they say in Mad Magazine, bleh! I felt really terrible for a couple of days, and in my fog finally realized it was time to take a home test. Positive! Now I am on the other side, but still have the infamous COVID-19 fatigue and some shortness of breath which can last anywhere from two to eight weeks after you get better. I go for my regular check up in a couple of weeks, which is good. The best thing is that so far R. Paul doesn't have it — phew! Fingers crossed we don't get a visit from long COVID-19!
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This program aired on March 29, 2025. Pickles of the North reminded me that this is officially Viet Nam Veterans Day in the United States. Here is the Viet Nam Service Medal as it would have appeared if I had ever been given one. The army cheaped out and never gave us the usual ribbons that go on a soldier's uniform. I was mustered out at an army base near Oakland, California and all of us who had gotten off planes from the Republic of Viet Nam and were getting out of the army were told that new regulations required that the army not issue us those ribbons as had been done for years, but that we were required to buy them ourselves. But it was a Sunday and the PX, where we could have bought them, was closed, so we couldn't even buy the damned things. We were also told that if we didn't have the ribbons on, and this was only one of them, that we'd be out of uniform and subject to arrest. So we all just shrugged and walked away without any of us being in uniform. We all just wanted to get home.
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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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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2025, R. Paul Martin.
