The Binance Crypto-Heist
It's Saturday afternoon, November 7, 2026, 15:16, and I've updated this Web page with a link to the program's archive, and with a comment from Pickles of the North on what she did on this program, along with the two poems she read on the air. I think there's more to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Here I am in another rush. We did more than the below, but I have no time now. I plan to update this Web pager soon.
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.
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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The Binance heist. Binance had an estimated $6.3 billion in Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies from its customers. Binance acted as a so-called crypto-exchange which some people envision as working as a bank for crypto-currencies. It's nothing like a bank. It's been accused of being a criminal enterprise in the past and it's founder Changpeng Zhao, whom Forbes estimates Zhao is now worth more than $100 Billion, spent four months in jail on those charges. Trump pardoned him.
The entire crypto-currency thing is pretty much a scam. It's based on solving what amount to mathematical puzzles. The puzzles do no useful work, they're just puzzles, akin to what you'd find in newspapers all over the world these days where you have to arrange numbers in a certain way. The whole thing is based on using a distributed ledger, called a blockchain, to keep track of who owns what and who's solved what puzzles. Fiat currencies, like the paper dollar, have been around for a long time. But the crypto-currencies are like claiming that some kid's math homework is permanently worth money.
So it's being said by an organization that's called TRM, a blockchain intelligence firm, that North Korean cyber-criminals calling themselves TraderTraitor
stole the crypto-currencies from Binance. Some of it has been gotten back, but so much was stolen that North Korea is probably very pleased with the take.
This is such a strange world. Science fiction stories including the world we live in now would have been rejected by pulp magazine editors decades ago because it's all too unbelievable that people would be so stupid.
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Pickles here. In honor of Veterans Day, also known in many countries as Remembrance Day, I read two poems. One was written by John McCrea, a Canadian surgeon who served as a gunner and medical officer in France during what was then called the Great War. He died overseas in 1918, after suffering complications due to being gassed with chlorine while fighting. During his service in 1915, he wrote a poem, In Flanders Fields
which was very popular both during and after the war, and the fields of poppies in the poem became the symbol of remembrance for this war, which at that time was the deadliest in world history, and which we remember as World War Ⅰ.
The second poem was written by the American poet Sara Teasdale. She wrote it in 1918, when the Great War was still raging, along with what became the 1918, Influenza Pandemic. Millions of people died in the war and of the flu. Her poem, There Will Come Soft Rains
was incorporated by Ray Bradbury in his novel The Martian Chronicles which dealt with among other things the aftermath of a nuclear war.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead, short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae
There Will Come Soft Rains
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale
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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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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2026, R. Paul Martin.
