We talked a lot about the illegal things that the Trump Administration is doing. We also talked about scams, especially ones that target senior citizens. We advise that people always be skeptical of strangers who want their information, or who want to help them to manage their money. I plan to add one more thing to this page in the next few days, so you might want to check back in to see if anything has been updated.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
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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Trump's company is selling Trump 2028
hats and t-shirts. It's a ruse, a distraction form his other nonsense; it would violate the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which sets the limit at two terms. In my opinion This nonsense about Trump running for a third term is just a diversion meant to distract people's attention away from the terrible mess he's making of the country, and the mess he's making in the world. It's part of that Flood the zone
tactic he's been using. If he throws a lot of crazy stuff around people may not notice some of the serious damage he's doing.
The incompetence of Trump and Musk, aka Leon Skum, extends to the fact that they don't even consider some of the consequences of their idiotic actions. And example is this from The New York Times, The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service is being replaced after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complained to President Trump that the latest leader of the agency had been installed without his knowledge and at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk, according to five people with knowledge of the change and the sensitive discussions that precipitated it.
I've seen an estimate that laying off or firing all of those government workers is going to cost the United States government about $130 Billion this Fiscal Year. And that doesn't count the years of research that are going to be just scrapped because some projects have been defunded. Some people who were in the middle of clinical trials are just being cut off, and the data will not be examined. In one case the money needed to access 10 years of data has been pulled from a health related project.
Trump is going to the Pope's funeral today. He'll do anything to be in the spotlight. I've speculated before that he may be a solopsist. That would fit in with his behavior.
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Old people are getting scammed big time. And AI is making the scams better. The AI assistants are adding touches that make fake E-mails for phishing schemes look more legitimate. They're also correcting the English of the foreign thieves who are trying to prey on Americans. I'm a Boomer but I've been on-line for decades and I'm not exactly a trusting soul. I'm always skeptical of people who suddenly show up and want me to do things like change my password or something. The scammers are calling people on the phone or E-mailing them and showing that they know quite a bit about the individual. That makes the victim think that these are legitimate people who are trying to help them. But the information they have on the victim has been stolen or scraped off the Internet by the AI assistant.
This week the FBI announced that Internet crime cost U.S. consumers $16.6 billion in 2024, an increase of more than 30% compared to the previous year and senior citizens were hit the hardest with a $4.8 billion loss. There is the grandma scam
where someone calls an older person saying that they're a close friend of the grandchild and that the grandchild is in trouble and has been arrested and put in jail and, for instance, the caller needs $5,000 to get them bailed out. In various ways they get the victim to take money out of the bank or give them a password to their bank accounts or something similar. And of course it's all a scam. With AI working on this scam these days there are even instances where the victim gets a call from someone who sounds exactly like their grandchild, and the caller knows a lot about the grandchild and maybe even about the grand parent. If you're not skeptical this one can really get you.
On this program we talked about the big scam that recently netted some young thieves $240 Million in Bitcoin. The caller told the victim that he was from a prominent cryptocurrency exchange and he had a lot of the victim's information. It was a scam. He told the victim that someone was hacking into his Bitcoin account and that he needed to put his Bitcoin holdings into a different crypto currency exchange. The scammer guided the victim through the steps, and helpfully sent him an app to help with the movement of the Bitcoin. The crypto currency exchange that the victim was sent to was a sleazy operation that caters to thieves. Pretty soon some young men were spending insane amounts of money on things like luxury cars, ostentatious jewelry and massive parties.
People who track these kind of crimes informed law enforcement and at least some of the thieves were apprehended.
One of the thieves was ostentatious with his new wealth and let slip some information about his real identity. Other teives saw it and so a group of men between the ages of 18 and 26 kidnapped the parents of one of the scammer whose real identity they had been able to discover because they knew he had been a part of the group that had stolen the $240 Million. The plan was to get the victim to pay a huge ransom to get his parents safely released by the attackers. The young men were a bunch of gamers, who apparently thought they knew a lot about how to commit real world crime and get away with it, but they were all caught very quickly.
I'll note that I have a set of links on this Web site that relate to privacy and some of those links may help folks. But people need to not be so trusting of strangers!
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It's mid-Spring. This sub-season began mere hours after our last program. The exact minute of the middle of this Spring season will occur on May 5, at ten minutes to five o'clock in the morning. Yeah, Cinco de Mayo.
And the Middle Third starts next Thursday! More on that on the next program.
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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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