The Smithsonian Institution is Under Attack
Some of what we did on this program was talk about Donnie Bonespur
Trump's idiotic tariffs. That included a discussion of the lies he's been telling about it. We also noted a report from the Daily News about Trump's Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration screwing up the state of Maine's Social Security operation, and then lying about it, only to be caught in his lie. We also celebrated, a bit, Pickles of the North's recovery from COVID-19. There's a bit more to come for this Web page. So it might be worth checking back for that 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.
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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Trump has had his Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, go after the Smithsonian Institution because of what he's calling the institution's their Improper Ideology.
Wow! Did he learn that from his pal Putin?
Trump announced his tariffs on Wednesday April 2, 2025. It's obvious that he still doesn't understand what tariffs are and how they work! He keeps claiming that the foreign governments will pay the tariffs, while in reality the American importer pays the full tariff and usually passes some or all of it on to the consumer. I know that he's been corrected on this more than once. Is he too stupid to learn or is he just purposely and cynically making his absurd claims in order to sow chaos in America and get his way? He's playing to his base, who are indeed stupid, so maybe he just needs to keep them from noticing that his promise about prices coming down hasn't happened. If any of them have retirement savings they are probably watching the value of those going down. How badly will things have to go before they'll smarten up, at least a little?
These big tariffs on everything that's imported will give rise to smuggling. There are drug sniffing dogs that can detect smuggled drugs, but there are no dogs that can smell everything if the smuggling gets as broad as it might. This is yet another way in which Donnie Bonespur Trump is eroding America. I talked on the air about The New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, documenting the smuggling that was going on with alcohol during Prohibition.
Trump's tariffs are in some cases targeting isolated islands near Antarctica and in the Pacific Ocean that have no trade with the United States. Heard Island and McDonald Island are two tiny dots on the map that I know a little bit about because ham radio operators in the past, maybe to a lesser degree even now, would mount expeditions to them to contact other ham radio operators from those unusual locations and exchange QSL cards. There's no persistent human population on those islands. Various islands populated only by penguins or walruses are on his list of places that will have tariffs slapped on their imports into the United States. In some cases there aren't even penguins and walruses on some islands that are just rocks that happen to jut up out of the sea. What exactly that 10% tariff will be on is a mystery.
Jan Mayen is an island in the Arctic which only has Norwegian soldiers on it. It exports nothing to anyplace.
Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean has a population of fewer than 2,000 people. Its leader, Shire President Gordon Thomson, said that it exports nothing to the United States. He said, There's no trade between Christmas Island and America except that we do buy mining equipment through Tractors Singapore.
Tractors Singapore is the regional dealer for the Texas company Caterpillar Inc. He said, The trade, if anything, is U.S. product into Christmas Island. The only thing that we export is phosphate and that goes to Malaysia, Indonesia, maybe Thailand and a bit to the Australian mainland.
Trump says that Norfolk Island, which is located in the south Pacific Ocean about 877 miles east of Australia, has been charging 58% tariffs on American imports and so he's imposing a 29% tariff on that tiny island. The Administrator of Norfolk Island, George Plant, told the Associated Press that, To my knowledge, we do not export anything to the United States. We don't charge tariffs on anything. I can't think of any non-tariff barriers that would be in place either, so we're scratching our heads here.
And it appears that the Trump underlings used Chat-GPT to come up with a phony mathematical formula that's supposed to show something about these tariffs and make them seem to be sensible. But it's a nonsense formula. Actual economists instantly saw through it. I think the Trump underlings came up with that formula to impress the people who were stupid enough to vote for Trump and to calm his base, who are inherently stupid. So it's all smoke and mirrors and lies.
Meanwhile the markets around the world are tanking. Right after the big announcement, which was timed to happen right after the NYSE closed, stock futures took a big dive. Yeah, if you have retirement savings you may be in trouble. And then there's the question of are the Trump followers going to kill off Social Security!
The Daily News is reporting that President Trump's administration intentionally made a mess of Social Security operations in Maine as part of an unrelated feud with the state's governor, according to E-mails released Wednesday.
The MAGA-ite leading the Social Security Administration is one Leland Dudek. He canceled longstanding contracts in Maine in March. The contracts allowed parents to obtain Social Security Numbers for children at birth and verified deaths through an electronic system. The grants were restored after a while because of a public uproar and pressure from elected officials. The Daily News says that Leland Dudek claimed the cancellation was simply a mistake and that he was not interested in political retaliation.
But the Daily News says that they have access to some of his internal E-mails which were obtained by Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.). In one E-mail Dudek was told that terminating the contracts would result in improper payments and the potential for identity theft. Dudek replied telling his underlings, Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,
referencing the Governor of Maine Janet Mills. Days earlier Governor Mills had been arguing with Trump over rights for transgender women and girls. Wow!
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Pickles of the North reported on the prevalence of COVID-19, flu, etc. in the nation's waste water. She has gotten over the main infection of COVID-19 that she had during last week's program. She talked about the problems she had in dealing with it. She's testing negative for the virus now and she took her mask off on this past Tuesday. She talked about how draining the after effects of the infection are. I'm glad she's gotten over the worst of it, and we're hoping that she doesn't get long COVID.
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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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