Back of the Book links for the October 4, 2025, program

It's Saturday evening, October 4, 2025, 18:15, and I've updated this Web page with a link to the archive of this radio program, and I've added a piece from Radio's Pickles of the North about the Banned Books Week that she talked about on the air and which is about to start. We're almost done with this Web page. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Here we have some of what we did on this radio program. We talked about Donnie Bonespur Trump's murderous ways with people whom he treats like fish in a barrel when he wants to grandstand and show what a tough guy he is. He's blown up another boat in the Caribbean Sea because he thinks that the people on the boat are criminals. In a change of pace I'm once again recommending another free E-book from Project Gutenberg. I found the book interesting, and it might be interesting to you too. There's more to come. Over the next week I plan to update this Web page, so you might want to come back and see what the updates look like.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday October 8, 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 night 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.

As we're preparing this program on Friday afternoon we're hearing that the United States has blown up another boat in the international waters near Venezuela. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that four men had been killed this time. The Trump administration's admitted death toll from this kind of action is now up to 21 people.

After having perpetrated three such attacks on boats in international waters the Trump administration recently told Congress that the United States was engaged in a formal armed conflict with Latin American drug cartels. Secretary Hegseth has written about this latest bombing of a boatload of apparent civilians, Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route; he has offered no evidence to support any of those accusations since the first such attack was carried out on September 2^nd. Hegseth also said on Friday that he'd ordered the killing of the people on this boat on President Trump's orders, and he added, These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!! Yeah, with four exclamation points.

At no point does Hegseth mention the idea of criminal prosecution of the accused where they would get to defend themselves. If due process is no longer available to non-citizens in this country, nor allowed for people on the high seas, we have to wonder when it will be declared to be no longer a right available to the rest of us in the United States.

The legality of these wholesale killings on the high seas has been called into question. The desire to avoid such questions may be why one of the first things Mr. Hegseth did when he took office was to fire the high ranking judge advocate general officers who might have raised serious objections regarding the legality of killing civilians in boats in international waters.

Hegseth called a bizarre meeting of all general and admiral grade officers for October 1^st, and Trump seems to have crashed the meeting. Trump probably heard about the publicity which that unprecedented gathering of all of those general and admiral grade officers had generated and he wanted to get into that spotlight, as he usually does. So he probably told Hegseth that since he was Commander in Chief that he should get to bore them all as well. In the end it turned out to be the usual Trump speech, which he gives all the time, except that at one point Trump suggested that American cities would be useful training grounds for future wars. Given Trump's murderous activities in international waters one wonders if his plan is to use American citizens as target practice for the troops he is illegally sending into those American cities.

Hegseth made a stupid speech at this meeting, a meeting which probably cost we tax payers quite a bit of money. Hegseth railed against gender and racial equality. The wackiest thing he said was related to his new rule that all soldiers, sailors and Marines must be clean shaven. Hegseth made the silly comment, No More Beardos! I suspect that he thought that was a witty quip. I wonder if he's ever taken notice of the Vice President? I wonder if he's ever seen the many bearded MAGA-ites that fawn over Donnie Bonespur Trump? Well, it's not as if these grasping, right-wing incompetents can see beyond their own pathetic delusions.

I am once again recommending a book on Project Gutenberg. Round the Horn Before the Mast by Basil Lubbock, published in 1903, about a voyage on a sailing ship in 1899.

In old photographs you can see, here and there, ships with masts and sails docked in New York harbor around the turn of the 19^th Century into the 20^th Century. The book follows the voyage of the sailing ship Royalshire an iron-hulled four-masted barque out of Glasgow Scotland. The book is basically Mr. Lubbock's diary of the six month long voyage from San Francisco to Liverpool, England with a cargo of grain. It's pretty amazing today to read of a cargo of grain taking six months to get to its destination. But at the end of the 19^th Century this was a viable business proposition in the years before the Panama Canal was built.

Monday, 4^th September. — To-day, at noon, the steward appeared with a bucket of lime-juice for the first time.

Each man had to come aft and take his whack. In the half-deck we all thought it very good, and were up to all kinds of dodges for getting two goes; in the end, the steward finding we appreciated his brew, used to give us whatever was left over every day.

I never heard anybody growl at having to take lime-juice, as, besides being a very good drink, each deep-water jack knows how good it is to keep off scurvy.

We turned the after-hatch to-day into a barber's shop in the second dog watch; of the haircutters, the bosun was the best, and I was the worst.

The nipper was my victim, and I don't think his hair has ever grown since. I found myself cutting huge holes, so cut round them to level it down; the result was, that when I had finished, only a razor would have been of any use to take more hair off, and the nipper got up looking like an escaped convict gone prematurely bald.

We are still hard at work sand and canvasing the poop rails and stanchions; every bit of varnish has to be rubbed off by the primitive means of sand and canvas, pumice stone, and elbow-grease.

Later in the book Mr. Lubbock describes a terrible night in the south Atlantic Ocean when they had an electrical storm that was the worst one that the ship's captain had seen in his decades of experience at sea.

A warning: some of the language used in the book is what today we would consider racist. What's referred to as The N word these days gets used matter of factly in some cases. There are some other racial groups described by the use of pejoratives in the book as well.

If you read this book you will also run into a bunch of terms used on sailing ships. If you want to you can just skip past those terms without really missing any of the import of what the author was talking about. On the other hand, you can look those terms up on-line pretty easily if you prefer to get more of the flavor of this book about a mode of commercial transport that was a vital part of civilization for thousands of years but which has been superceded by the advances of technology.

Pickles here to tell you Sunday October 5 begins Banned Book Week, which runs through Saturday October 11. This is a very positive way of expressing disagreement with the attempts by different groups, the Government and individuals who want to prevent people, especially young people, from having free access to reading materials. It is the brain child of the American Library Association, which has been around for 148 years and according to their Web site, Banned Books Week launched in 1982, in response to a sudden surge in the number of book challenges in libraries, schools, and bookstores. and they have been tracking banned books for decades. Libraries all across the country take part by having special events at their local and main branches. Here in New York City the New York, Brooklyn and Queens Public Library Systems are having great events for kids, tweens , and young adults all week, from learning how to make buttons and postcards that support the right to read, to little ones five and under learning how to put together their own books or draw their favorite books. All of the events are free and the libraries provide the materials for making all of the postcards buttons and books! This year's theme is Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights.

One of the Brooklyn Public Library events listed on their Web site sounds great:
Join us for a special Books Unbanned Storytime! As part of Brooklyn Public Library's Books Unbanned initiative, we are celebrating every child's freedom to read by sharing picture books that have been banned or challenged around the world. We will also be engaging in songs, rhymes, and movement activities inspired by the books being shared. Recommended for children ages 3-8 years.

Also from their Web site:
According to data collected by the American Library Association (ALA), the majority of the book ban attempts in 2024 originated from pressure groups rather than from parents or individual library users, with elected officials, board members and administrators initiating 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries.

As coordinated partisan attempts at censorship continues to grow, ALA has shared concerns about an increase in censorship by exclusion, or the decision of libraries not to purchase certain books in the first place, due to a climate of fear and/or other legislative restrictions.

The most targeted books are for a teen audience and contain LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; or cover topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice.

Across the country, teens continue to face book bans, censorship, and political challenges in their local school and public libraries.

As they say, reading is fundamental, but so is the right to read! George Takai is this year's honorary chair of Banned Book Week and he will be speaking at Brooklyn's Central Library Monday evening October 6. More information is on the Web site. We read banned books!!

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.

Back of the Book — October 4, 2025