Serial Killer at Sea
It's Monday monrning, November 17, 2025, 11:05,and I've updated this Web page with the book review that Pickles of the North did on the program. previously I'd posted the link to the archive of the program on the WBAI Web site. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ I have a lot more to do on this Web page. I'll get to it over the next few days. Right now I'm so exhausted and sleepy that I am making a tremendous number of typos here. We did a lot on this program and when I'm awake I'll be posting some of what we did. So I think it will definitely be worthwhile to check back here later this weekend.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday December 10, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday. We had some financial discussions which I as LSB Treasurer took part in. We also talked a bit about a mysterious situation where a meeting was cancelled and set to happen simultaneously. Yeah, there are some mysteries in Pacifica.
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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This week has seen more murders on the high seas by Trump and Hegseth. The toll is at least 80 dead now and they show no signs of stopping these flagrant violations of international law and human rights abuses.
A Columbian family is suing over the killing of their patriarch who was a fisherman and posed no credible threat to the security of the United States. How long before the bloodlust these two have exhibited on the high seas starts getting acted out inside the United States of America itself? Summary executions on the street is what dictatorships around the world do. Trump hungers for that kind of action, and Hegseth is just glad to have a job, the fact that he gets to commit murder is just icing on his cake.
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Pickles here with a book review. We talked about The Science of Revenge written by James Kimmel JD, published by Harmony Books in 2025. Mr. Kimmel is a lawyer and lectures in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. In his book he presents a lot of evidence generated by studies conducted by medical researchers around the world that have determined which parts of the brain are affected by feelings of revenge brought on by real or perceived grievances, and what happens in the brain if one chooses to act on or not act on these grievances. The parts of the brain that activate in response to painful grievances is where reward and pleasure response is located, the Nucleus Accumbens and the Dorsal Strata. And they get flooded with dopamine when you think about taking revenge! He says you can get the kind of high and then crash, the same cycle that many drug addicts experience. A different part of the brain, the Prefrontal Cortex, which exerts function and control, dominates if you decide not to act on the grievance.
The author has a lot of examples of revenge being the big motivator in many world events over history and up to the present day. And he offers a different way of dealing with this cycle which he has successfully used with prisoners, called the Non Justice Court. It's a very interesting book.
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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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