Ms. Maxwell Got Hers
It's Monday morning, August 25, 2025, 04:02, and I have updated this Web page with Pickles' piece on the plan that the government had in case the Apollo 11 mission ended in disaster. I've also updated the page with a link to the archive of this program and some graphics. More to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Another rushed Web page because I couldn't stay awake and took a nap. There will be more to come. We talked about more than what's here and I plan to update this Web page with some of that, so you might 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 September 10, 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:
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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We said last time that Ghislane Maxwell was probably going to say whatever Trump wanted her to say about his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein in order to get herself out of the 20 year prison sentence she's currently serving. And now she's quoted as saying in her interviews with Trump's former personal lawyer, and current Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, who is the current #2 official at the Justice Department, I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting,
she said. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way.
Possibly just to emphasize the point that she was trying to make it clear that she would be a good witness for Trump she added, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me,
and then she really laid it on saying, I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I've always liked him.
Yeah, one Get Out Of Jail Free card coming up.
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Well, we've made it to late Summer which started Friday morning at 6:24. This can be a pretty nice time of year, especially for people who are not at all pleased with hot weather. It's still Summer, the days are still longer than the nights, some flowers are still in bloom, most of the time we can go outside in our shirtsleeves, but the heat isn't so pronounced, usually.
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Pickles here! We talked about the speech that William Safire wrote for then President Nixon to publicly read if something went wrong on the Apollo 11 Moon mission in July of 1969, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ended up stranded on the Moon. The speech was written for the situation where both astronauts would be still alive but unable to launch from the lunar surface to rendezvous with Michael Collins in the Command module. Fortunately nothing that dire happened and all three astronauts returned to Earth. Here is the speech that was written but which never needed to be used.
Human space travel is inherently dangerous. And even organizations like NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ) have had to learn the hard way that you need to keep all the lines of communication open when designing and testing complex equipment. This has happened three times in NASA's manned spaceflight history: three astronauts were killed during a ground test of the Apollo 1 capsule on January 27, 1967, and then there were the mishaps that destroyed the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles and their crews. All three tragedies resulted in cultural and procedural changes at the agency, which had been robust up until January 20 2025. The current administration is cutting NASA's budget and cancelling many future projects and imperilling current ones. The administration via DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) is taking the science out of NASA, while ceding manned missions to the guy who helped gut the whole agency. A pox on thee, Leon Scum, for all the misery, grief and death you and this administration have wrought!!
As for Apollo 17, by the way, Nixon wrote his own speech and made the final Apollo mission crew read it aloud as they were leaving the lunar orbit. One of the lines read This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon.
And of course that was galling because Nixon was the one responsible for cancelling the next three lunar missions and then the entire program. So he made sure that December 14, 1972, would be it for Apollo. A posthumous pox on him too!
AS THE Challenger leaves the surface of the Moon, we are conscious not of what we leave behind, but of what lies before us. The dreams that draw humanity forward seem always to be redeemed if we believe in them strongly enough and pursue them with diligence and courage. Once we stood mystified by the stars; today we reach out to them. We do this not only because it is man's destiny to dream the impossible, to dare the impossible, and to do the impossible, but also because in space, as on Earth, there are new answers and new opportunities for the improvement and the enlargement of human existence. This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon. But space exploration will continue, the benefits of space exploration will continue, the search for knowledge through the exploration of space will continue, and there will be new dreams to pursue based on what we have learned. So let us neither mistake the significance nor miss the majesty of what we have witnessed. Few events have ever marked so clearly the passage of history from one epoch to another. If we understand this about the last flight of Apollo, then truly we shall have touched a "many-splendored thing." To Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ronald Evans, we say God speed you safely back to this good Earth.
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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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