Insider Trading?
We did the below topics on this program. I digressed a bit on the one about the so-called dire wolves that a company is claiming to have made. We also talked about Donnie Bonespur
Trump making a mess of the economy and that worm brained idiot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. setting up an anti-vaccination disinformationist to investigate
whether or not childhood vaccines cause autism. I plan on updating this page so it might be worth it to check back for the updates.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday May 14, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had an LSB meeting this past Wednesday night, April 9, 2025, and it was dominated by the actions of the Pacifica National Board (PNB) in having a California judge allow a a certain faction to hijack the Pacifica bylaws! ore to come.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night 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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Donnie Bonespur
Trump blinked. He was saying he would not relent on the crazy tariffs he'd imposed even as the markets crashed world wide, and then he put almost all of the suddenly imposed tariffs on a 90 day pause. Some of his underlings were caught off guard by the 180 degree reversal. One was talking to a Senate committee about how the tariffs were permanent when the announcement came in and he was corrected by a Senator. Trump does not care about burning his underlings, or anybody else for that matter.
And was all of this just him doing insider trading? He knew, and his pals knew, that he could roil the markets. So they could have shorted
stocks that they knew would have their values reduced by the tariffs by selling the stocks before he levied the tariffs, and putting the cash in a safe place. When Trump imposed his crazy tariffs and stock prices plummeted, they could buy the same stocks they'd sold at a lower price. Then when Trump reversed himself mere days later and the market rebounded significantly they could sell off what they'd bought at a higher price, and make a huge amount of money. It's a sell high, buy low operation in which it is very easy to make a lot of money if you know what's going to happen and if you know the timing of the actions that will drive the markets, that is when it's best to buy or sell. We're talking about billionaires here. They'd have people trained in this sort of thing. And I wonder if when Trump sent out the message BE COOL
that might have been a signal to the billionaires about the bottom of the market having been reached, letting everyone in the world know that he was going to reverse himself. If you have a lot of cash and know that the markets are going to behave a certain way, especially in the short term, you can make huge amounts of money with pretty much no risk at all. Is that the game that Trump was really playing? Will he play it again in three months?
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This past Monday a bioscience company called Colossal Biosciences based in Dallas, Texas announced that they had created three dire wolves. Dire Wolves were once a species of wolf that roamed parts of North America. Dire wolves have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.
The company showed three off puppies that they said were three to six months old and called them dire wolves. They said that the animals were created using a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago. Not everyone is buying this claim in its entirety. Basically what they did was they took some ancient DNA and spliced it into the DNA of modern gray wolves to approximate the size, color and coat of a dire wolf and they're calling the a dire wolf.
The Washington Post interviewed Nic Rawlence, who's an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand's University of Otago, and he said, The reality is we can't de-extinct extinct creatures because we can't use cloning - the DNA is just not well enough preserved.
There are active chemicals in DNA and if they're just left around for thousands of years they don't remain static. Even the bones of a lot of really old fossils are no longer made of bone, they're mineralized by whatever the old bones were in contact with for tens of millions of years. But in the interview Professor Rawlence noted that what the company has produced are really gray wolves that have had part of their genome changed to look like dire wolves. He continued, What Colossal is trying to do is genetically engineering animals to look like extinct creatures. They look cute and cuddly but … they're not a dire wolf.
This development relates to more than just the scientific field. Politics is at play here as well. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum appears to be saying that this so-called de-extinction could lead to animals being removed from the endangered species list. He said in a social media posting, The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder.
Of course he and the other right-wingers want to resume going full speed ahead with polluting the atmosphere and water of the world and spilling crude oil all over the place. Secretary Burgum continued, The concept of
I want to say, no, it can't! Burgum continued, de-extinction
can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.The status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation. It's time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation.
Yeah, for him it's time to completely forget about species conservation! This is from an appointee of Donnie Bonespur
Trump who's consistently called global warming and climate change a hoax!
The Washington Post quoted the leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain's Francis Crick Institute Pontus Skoglund, who said in a post on Bluesky about the dire wolf project that he was, Not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.
The Colossal Biosciences company is saying that they want to bring back from extinction the the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger, and they plan to re-engineer for the modern world.
Professor Rawlence said, There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf. Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we've got left.
There are also serious ethical questions about all of this.
And I have to say that the reason the Dodo bird went extinct was because they trusted humans!
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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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