Back of the Book links for the August 15, 2026, program

DISCLAIMER: This is not an official Pacifica Foundation, Inc. website nor an official website of any of the five Pacifica Foundation, Inc. Radio Stations (KPFA Radio, KPFK Radio, KPFT Radio, WBAI Radio, WPFW Radio). Opinions and facts alleged on this site belong to the author(s) of the website only and should NOT be assumed to be true or to reflect the editorial stance or policy of the Pacifica Foundation, Inc., or any of the five Radio Stations (KPFA Radio, KPFK Radio, KPFT Radio, WBAI Radio, WPFW Radio), or the opinions of its management, Pacifica National Board, station staff, or other listener members.

It's Monday morning, August 17, 2026, 03:49, and I've updated this Web page a bit with some graphics and Pickles of the North's piece about that 1913, book. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒To add to the insanity of the Trump administration we also have A.I. starting to show some of what it can do. We talked about an A.I. that designed viruses which scientists then made and which infected cells and made more viruses just as any virus would. That an A.I. designed the viruses is the real story here. Radio's Pickles of the North asked out loud if any of these scientist geniuses who'd created this A.I. had ever seen any of the science fiction movies or read stories about rogue robots. We also talked about Donnie Bonespur Trump's failed war against Iran. I talked a bit about a guy I used to know who ran a huge number of chess tournaments in the United States and who died this past week. I plan to update this Web page pretty soon.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday September 9, 2026, 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. It was a total mess. The people who chronically disrupt the meetings really went at it this time. They'd had the order of things done differently by having half of the Public Comment put at the start of the meeting, and then they complained about the roll call not being done first. The people running the meeting could have handled the disruption better but everything took forever. As a result the disruptors ate up enough time that I did not get to give the Treasurer's Report and the LSB did not get to discuss any of the station's financial issues at all.

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.

We had a big problem last week. Our ISP went down in various parts of Brooklyn. This happened right after that big storm. We went through all sorts of conniptions and eventually had to decide that we could not send the program in. Pickles and I talked about it and we decided that we couldn't go running into the station in the wee hours with no preparation. We had completed a large part of the program. So on this program we aired some of what we did last week on this program, along with new stuff. We're sorry that happened and we hope it doesn't happen again.

The Goich is no longer with us. Chess impresario Bill Goichberg has died at the age of 83. Bill Goichberg, whom a lot of us called The Goich, was a New York chess master and he became the major organizer of chess tournaments in the New York City area, and then throughout the United States. I began playing in what were known as the weekend Swisses in March 1970, as soon as I could get myself together enough after getting out of the army. The Swiss System is a formula for running chess tournaments that are too big to have everyone play everyone else. With the Swiss System you get a result, a winner, in five rounds, or some more, instead of having a complicated set of qualifying rounds, and, very importantly, it guarantees the chess players a number of games, usually five, over that weekend. Bill Goichberg ran what was in 1973, a huge Swiss tournament called the World Open and I played in that first one. I did terribly of course. Goichberg eventually ran tournaments all over the country and, after I dropped out of tournament chess over 48 years ago, he became the U.S. Chess Federation's executive director and a year later he became the Chess Federation's president. I must say, I was very glad that the Goich did not raise any issues about my wearing my Gay Power button to the chess tournaments. I suspect that some people objected, but I never had a problem with Bill.

I'm reading in The New York Times that an A.I. has created schematics for viable viruses. Scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute, research organizations in California, taught an A.I. to recognize patterns of DNA and then they had it write recipes for viruses that no one has ever seen before.

The scientists then used those recipes to create viruses, piece by piece. The New York Times article says that the A.I. scanned about nine trillion nucleotides. With some more input from scanning the ΦX-174 virus the A.I. made about 700,000 potential recipes and from those the scientists assembled 285 viruses. Out of those they got 16 viruses that worked. They could infect cells and use the cell to make more viruses.

I remember when the genome of ΦX-174 was the first one sequenced by scientists. In 2003, I talked on the air about scientists having actually assembled the complete, viable ΦX-174 virus from the list of nucleotides, which was a first.

Last week the National Institutes of Health came out with a new policy designed to prevent synthetic biology scientists from doing high-risk research. That policy apparently does not bar scientists from experiments that would make biological agents more harmful. The work of the California scientists isn't covered by that policy. And The New York Times interviewed Dr. Moritz Hanke, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who was not involved in the new study, and the The New York Times quoted him as saying that governments and scientific organizations have been slow to develop guardrails that could block the creation of a deadly virus - even as the science races ahead. There's just a huge disconnect, he said.

Dr. Henke noted that there's no way to tell if something he's never seen before is harmful. Oh boy.

So I think that the 16 new, viable viruses can infect ordinary E. Coli cells. Our guts have millions of those bacteria. E. Coli makes gas, among other things, in our guts. Infecting some with a virus that codes for poison gas might be a way to poison entire populations with poisonous flatulence.

Pickles here! We talked about a book published in 1913, called Goslings (its title in the US was A World of Women) written by British author of science fiction and horror J.D. Beresford. The book was written before the horrors of the Great War, now known as World War One, and the Flu Pandemic of 1918. As R.Paul has noted, that war, and the attendant pandemic, ended the world as people then knew it. The story has an unknown disease emerging from China, where it makes its way from continent to continent as people travel internationally by ship. The story focuses on a lower middle class family, the Goslings and one of their boarders, who is a reporter. Most people in the novel feel they are safe from something that is happening so far away. They aren't! And things get pretty horrible as the new plague as it is called starts killing mostly men and some women as world economies start shutting down. Beresford was pretty spot-on regarding how people and governments react to such a major imagined crisis - not well! I read two short excerpts from the book, which can be found at the Gutenberg Project website.

But let us consider for a moment, wrote Thrale, the appalling danger which threatens us when we are attacked by a pestilence which is entirely new to humanity; new, so far as we know, to the world. In the middle of the fourteenth century the Black Death is recorded in some places to have killed two-thirds of the whole population, and, notwithstanding the modern improvement in sanitation and general hygiene, there is no inherent reason why another pestilence may not appear, which may be even more deadly. And we are faced at the present moment with the awful threat that such a pestilence has appeared, the pestilence commonly known as the new plague. There is no reason why we should consider the appearance as without precedent in history; there is no reason why we should regard its coming as outside the laws of common probability; finally, and most decisively, there is no reason why England should not be smitten.

J. D. Beresford Goslings pp. 55-56

Mr Stewart died in the small hours of Friday morning, and the next day, Saturday, the 14th of April, was the first day of panic.

The day began with comparative quiet. No further case had been notified in Great Britain, but telegraphic communication was interrupted between London and Russia, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and other continental centres. In Germany matters were growing desperate. There had been riots and looting. Military law had been declared in several towns; in some cases the mob had been fired upon. Business was at a standstill, and the plague was spreading like a fire. Between two and three hundred cases were reported from Reims, and upwards of fifty from Paris....

Business houses were being closed in the City of London, and the banks noted a marked tendency among their depositors to withdraw gold; so marked, indeed, that many banks of high standing were glad to be able to close their doors at one o'clock.

It was on this Saturday morning, also, that the bottom suddenly fell out of the money market. For weeks past, prices had been falling steadily, but now they dropped to panic figures. Every one was selling, there were no buyers left. Consols were quoted at 53-1/2.

The air of London was heavy with foreboding, and throughout the morning the gloom grew deeper. The depressed and worried faces to be met at every turn contrasted strangely with the brilliance of the weather. For April had come with clear skies and soft, warm winds.

As the day advanced the atmosphere of depression became continually more marked, and how extraordinary was the effect upon all classes may be judged from the fact that less than 5,000 people paid to witness the third replay between Barnsley and Everton, in the semi-final of the English cup....

In London, men and women hung aimlessly about the streets waiting for the news they dreaded to hear. The theatres were deserted. The feeling of gloom was so real that many women afterwards believed that the sky had been overcast, whereas Nature was in one of her most brilliant moods.

It was a few minutes past three when the pressure was exploded by the report of the final catastrophe. Two more cases of plague in Dundee and one in Edinburgh, was the first announcement. That would have been enough to show that all the vaunted precautions had been useless, and within an hour came the notification of two further cases. Before six o'clock, eight more were notified in Dundee, three more in Edinburgh, and one in Newcastle.

The new plague had reached England. It was then that the panic began.

J. D. Beresford Goslings pp. 74-76

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 — August 15, 2026