FBI Lab rendered graphic
It's Sunday afternoon, May 31, 2026, 17:13 and I've updated this Web page. I've posted Pickles of the North's piece about the condition of Coney Island and an early fight over freedom of the press. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ This is some of what we covered on this radio program. I am hoping to post more of what we did on this Web page soon.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday May 13, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held next Wednesday May 13, 2026, 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:
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, his Department of Defense and the FBI's nonsense about UFOs or UAPs is so puerile. The release of these images is obviously meant to distract from the abysmal failure of Trump's Iran war, the Jeffrey Epstein files and the price of everything going up because of the war and other stupid moves by Trump. Besides images with a tiny dot here and there they have also released this Composite Sketch
about which they say, Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.
Yeah, that's called a fake image. UFO nuts were doing this sort of unsophisticated trickery in the 1950s! This is what the FBI does now?
We have such deeply incompetent people running the executive branch of the government now. Unfortunately they are so used to scamming people that they do it easily and pretty damned effectively. they won the 2024, election by scamming people that prices would come down, there would be no wasteful foreign wars and that the United States of America would be the first thing they thought about. And here we are with a government bent on revenge against anyone who took legal action against a criminal who had been president, or who spoke against him and the other right-wing jerks in politics, we have a Department of Defense that flexes its muscles by blowing up boats in international waters and killing people who may be fishermen, and who certainly are not posing a threat to the aircraft attacking them, they're kidnapped Venezuela's leader, who was as corrupt as Trump, and we're now involved in a war again Iran that has phony, and shifting, reasons and no plan for victory, or even an off-ramp. Yeah, in the face of this let's all look at the FBI generated pictures of flying saucers and be awed.
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Pickles here! I commented on two totally unrelated topics. First, a couple of weeks ago, I took a stroll on the boardwalk at Coney Island. It was a beautiful morning! And I'll note that boardwalk maintenance hasn't changed in years. Once you leave the pristine boardwalk in front of the amusement strip, walking towards Brighton Beach or towards Seagate, the boardwalk is full of loose boards, screws sticking up and plenty of vegetation growing up from between said boards. Keeps the locals stepping lively and the tourists tripping if they should venture that far afield!
But the real excitement happened when I left the boardwalk itself and walked down Stillwell to the Stillwell Avenue subway station and entered through the big open air entrance off of Surf Avenue. It was a landmine of pigeon poop! All over and I mean all over the floor! And the roof girders! Never have I seen so much guano inside any subway station, but especially in that station! I didn't have the presence of mind to stop and take a photo because, for one thing, I was too busy trying to tiptoe through all the splatter and, for another thing, I didn't want to linger too close to the possible bio-hazard. Right next to the first set of stairs leading up to the train turnstiles is a display of a beach lifeguard station consisting of a lifeguard chair set into some boxed- in sand from the beach. That chair was thick with crap! Wow!! I'll let you know the next time I'm out there whether this was some kind of cleaning breakdown, budget cut, mini strike or crazy oversight. Phew!
The other topic we discussed was the current attack on free speech, and how the present president was not the first one to have such thin skin when it comes to having the press express unflattering reporting, cartooning and opinions about him. That was George Washington! It made him so cranky that in 1798, he got Congress to pass the Sedition Act
which enabled the federal government to throw newspaper editors in jail or bankrupt them through fines if they thought the press was being too disrespectful of him and them. George Hay was a lawyer who wrote a response in 1799, entitled An Essay on the Liberty of the Press
; under the Jefferson administration he became a U.S. attorney. Here is an excerpt from that essay in present day English spelling:
That by the words
freedom of the press,
is meant a total exemption of the press from legislative control will further appear from the following cases, in which it is manifest, that the word freedom is used with this signification and no other.
It is obvious in itself and it is admitted by all men, that freedom of speech means the power uncontrolled by law, of speaking either truth or falsehood at the discretion of each individual, provided that no other individual be injured. This power is, as yet in its full extent in the United States. A man may say every thing which his passion can suggest; he may employ all his time, and all his talents, if he is wicked enough to do so, in speaking against the government matters that are false, scandalous, and malicious; but he is admitted by the majority of Congress to be sheltered by the article in question, which forbids a law abridging the freedom of speech. If then freedom of speech means, in the construction of the Constitution, the privilege of speaking any thing without control, the words freedom of the press, which form a part of the same sentence, mean the privilege of printing any thing without control.
And the short definition of the word privilege is that it is a right. Freedom of Speech, including freedom of the press, is a RIGHT!
If you want to read Hay's quote in its original form, it can be found here.
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A trans-Neptunian ice ball has made it to the news. This particular ice ball is called 2002 XV93, a plutino that's about 3½ billion miles from the Sun, appears to have an atmosphere. But it's only 300 miles wide so it should be too small to have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. Not only is there the issue of this plutino not having a heavy enough gravitational field to hold an atmosphere but at that distance from the Sun any atmosphere should be frozen onto the surface of the object. One suggestion that makes sense is that maybe this is the result of some other object hitting the ice ball very recently and vaporizing some of the surface ice. If that's the case then the phenomenon shouldn't last very long.
The evidence for an atmosphere is based on the observations of 2002 XV93 a couple of years ago by a number of high powered telescopes in Japan. 2002 XV93 passed in front of a star and that transit was recorded. To the surprise of the astronomers the light from the star dimmed before being occulted by the plutino, and then it showed up dimmer after coming out from behind it and then got to it's usual brightness after 2002 XV93 moved a little more, presumably letting the star clear its atmosphere. Usually the star would be expected to just disappear when being occulted by a body like that. This is something that astronomers of all sorts have observed with the Earth's airless Moon for centuries. So I'm sure that 2002 XV93 will be getting more attention in the future.
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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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