The Twin Towers
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It's Monday morning, September 14, 2026, 03:44, and this Web page is finished. I've added Pickles of the North's commentary on her Star Trek segment of the program. We really only covered two topics on this program and here they both are. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ This program was recorded on the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers. Pickles of the North and I talked about that a lot. Yeah, I had a hard time talking about some of it. The extreme bravery of some people that day, especially the two F-16 pilots who agreed to stop United Airlines Flight 93 from hitting its targets in Washington, D.C. by ramming the plane with their unarmed fighter jets, and the passengers of that United flight who got together and attacked the hijackers and forced them to crash the plane in a field instead of hitting buildings in Washington. Everyone aboard United Airlines Flight 93 died. We then talked about the 60th anniversary of Star Trek and Pickles told about what it meant to her and the vision that Gene Roddenberry had.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday October 14, 2026, 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 week. Some of the usual Disruptors were a bit less rambunctious this time. But there was a lot of time spent on reversing a motion about a minor election to a committee that really does nothing because the people who disrupt everything didn't want that election run in the usual way. Before the meeting started some people were gushing about 9/11 conspiracy stuff.
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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On September 11, 2001, Pickles of the North and I were home. I was going to take a nap and then go vote in the primary election that day. In the kitchen Pickles had a small, analog black & white TV set on and they were showing a scene that looked like a small plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I recall years previously wondering about what menace to aircraft navigation those big buildings were. I thought it was something like a Piper Cub aircraft that had hit it. It didn't look all that bad on TV.
Pickles and I turned on our big TV set in the bedroom and looked at the coverage. And then, after several minutes, the TV just showed raster. But I said to Pickles that I thought I'd seen another plane, a big one, coming toward the other tower just before the signal was lost. Of course that was the plane hitting the south tower.
I spent the rest of that day being furious.
And the world changed that day. It may not have been as total a change as happened in 1914, when World War I had started but all of that had taken four years to change the world. This event had taken mere minutes.
And we heard all sorts of rumors and tall tales. One that some right-wing zealots keep repeating to this day is that a group of Muslims were celebrating as they watched the Twin Towers being attacked from a rooftop in New Jersey. I also heard the one about Israelis and Orthodox Jews doing the same thing. All nonsense.
And then Bush attacked Afghanistan, which was harboring Bin Laden and his group. Later on he took advantage of the mess everything was in to attack Iraq which had nothing to do with any of this and he got us into a bigger war. IMO he did that because Saddam Hussain had put a mosaic of his father on the floor of the vestibule of the biggest hotel in Iraq so people would step on his face, a big insult in Iraq. Not a good reason to go to war.
And we now have Trump claiming he was doing things to help on 9/11 and he had to be helped away by two big firemen because a building was collapsing right there. He wasn't there at all.
So this week we also had Rudy Giuliani talking about how Mayor Mamdani should not attend the event because he's a Muslim. Wow, talk about bigotry. Mamdani was in grammar school when the towers were attacked, a school on the upper west side of Manhattan.
And Mamdani has released a lot of data about how the air around all of lower Manhattan was toxic from the collapse of the Twin Towers and other buildings at the World Trade Center. We knew that from personal experience!
On the afternoon of 9/11 the wind shifted and Pickles suddenly had an asthmatic attack. That air was instantly bad for both of us. We had to close our windows. We saw the plume going above us and we saw a huge amount of 8½ by 11 blank papers flying about all over the sky. The offices had all had paper for printing in their store rooms and that had been scattered all over.
WBAI was at 120 Wall St. then and we had a number of people who were here, some off duty, who ran out with the SONY MiniDisc recorders WBAI had then and they recorded what we call actuality.
The late Eric Williams was among them, but there were others too. That smell was awful as the Pile burned for months. We knew it was all toxic right away!
That was such a terrible day and it caused so many bad things.
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Pickles here, to talk about a happier anniversary. This week we celebrate 60 years of Star Trek,
or, as it's known now The Original Series
. Both my and R.Paul's parents didn't get it at the time, but we knew a good thing when we viewed it! I was a kid in elementary school, just starting to read science fiction, but to see it on TV like this - wow!
And then as the years went by, a lot more people felt the way we did, this was a show about a hopeful future, not that we'd have actual starships, but that we could have nations working together on earth and in space to make the world a better place and that a better future world was possible. At the time, we didn't know that the Vulcan IDIC pendant was something that Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator, came up with to make some extra cash. It became more than that, people took its meaning, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,
to heart. This often shlocky, often brilliant, both of its time and ahead of its time series inspired people around the world to seek out careers in the sciences, to found organizations that helped people in need, and to have really fun gatherings all over the place with cosplay and camaraderie! And to create fan fiction in every medium!
So many talented people worked in every aspect of the TV series, and in all the series that followed, and in novels and the graphic arts, up unto today. Unfortunately, the new owners of Paramount are no fans of IDIC, but great fans of the anti- IDIC Administration. So the very latest series Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy has been cancelled after its second season. Vague assurances of a future iteration of Star Trek fall flat. Star Trek without Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
would be Star Trek in name only. But that aspiration has been out there in the world for 60 years and it ain't going away any time soon!!
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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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