River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy talks with WQUD GM Aaron Dail and his amigo Gary re recent highlights, both online and within Issue N° 1013. Christopher Gadsden’s iconic “Don’t tread on me” snake from the Gadsen flag adorns the cover, a serendipitous decision, according to McGreevy, given the contents of this issue:

To Comply or Not to Comply, That Is the Question

Dail observes that the recent new COVID-19 variant has been received with more skepticism by the public this time around, and the World Health Organization’s acumen isn’t taken on such blind faith anymore. As with the first go-around, Kathleen McCarthy asks the questions about which the local media, whatever their respective reasons, chose (and choose) to duck. McCarthy writes, “Never forget by the end of 2022, the CDC had to dial back its claim of one million US deaths with COVID, to approximately 40,000 deaths from COVID, after it had been discovered that the CDC ordered hospitals, coroners, and medical examiners nationwide, to record deceased patients with positive PCR test results, as primary COVID deaths on their death certificates.” “It’s all I can do,” McGreevy says, “[to prevent myself from] putting a hundred-sized font on the front saying, ‘WE TOLD YOU SO’.” When public health officials can’t get their numbers straight on such a scale, citizens do themselves a disservice when they don’t question the narratives that proliferate, either with or without the WHO’s assent.

The more things change. . . Dr Ron Paul’s recent column (A New Covid ‘Variant’… Just in Time for Election Season!) found comedy in the return of the recently-retired Anthony Fauci to national prominence, “like a moth drawn to the light of publicity.” Back in March 2020, Dr Paul contributed The Coronavirus Hypocrisies to the Reader; and the only change of note to the handling of the variants is that Donald Trump was still president then. Now it’s Joseph Biden at the wheel, but, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Buried Stories: William Louis Sandoval (1923-1944)

The most recent installment in Bruce Walters’s series of the famous among the locally-interred concerns William Louis Sandoval, one of the East Moline, Illinois natives who was heralded as what has since been branded “Hero Street” in Silvis. Twenty-two families from that street sent 57 of their children to fight in WWII. Sandoval was among the eight who didn’t return. In fact, Sandoval’s body was never recovered. A monument conceived by a childhood friend of Sandoval’s, Sonny Soliz, was commemorated in 2007, and it honors those eight, and serves as a reminder that, for a far-too-brief moment in time, soldiers like Sandoval did more than simply walk the earth; they fought for every centimeter of ground they could hold, and they paid for it in blood.

Nate Lawrence, 1942-2023

McGreevy and David Baker observe the passing of another unsung hero, Nate Lawrence, who died 15 August 2023, age eighty. Lawrence helped co-found, with Shellie Moore Guy, Polyrhythms, the grassroots non-profit responsible for the Third Sunday Jazz concerts and free student workshops with internationally-renowned jazz artists, the Donald Meade Jazz Griot Award, and the Bill Bell Jazz and Heritage Festival. He helped keep the Watertown musicians alive in the historical discussions of jazz greats from the Quad Cities when it seemed it might only have room to accommodate Bix Beiderbecke and Louie Bellson. Lawrence was also heavily into promoting transparency in media, so his passing has added relevance.

The Harsh Lessons of “Rich Men North of Richmond”

Dail was very taken with Loren Thatcher’s assessment of  Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond”: “Unlike the maximalist production so essential in sending Aldean’s floater to the top of the pop country Port-A-John, Anthony’s video is as spare as the song itself: just a man and his guitar and a couple of dogs, presumably on his Farmville, Virginia homestead.” Dail also thought it pertinent to mention that Thatcher also hosts The Black Light Blues Show, a psychedelic-rock show on WQUD, which Dail thinks gives him “a peculiar pedestal to stand on and judge other music when you’re a psychedelic rock-show host” — said with much love, naturally.

G Edward Griffin Stays True to Himself at Red Pill Expo in Des Moines

Jason Bermas, a New York transplant who moved his family to the area three years ago, writes about Adam Callaghan’s interview with G Edward Griffin at the 13 August Red Pill Expo in Des Moines. Gary, who mentioned a YouTube clip wherein the discussion focused on the ominous omnipresence of nanoparticles in our world,* moved McGreevy to bring Griffin up, as Griffin, at 91, is a nanoparticle ninja.

* Might Gary be on about Chad Mirkin PhD’s discussion of nanoparticles, posted a couple months ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YdQE5yVSNs)?

Reader Events Calendar: Your Key to Quad Cities’ Culture

Links to events happening this month in the QCA, like River Action’s Taming of the Slough Mississippi River Adventure Triathlon, September 16 and 2023 Mississippi Valley Blues Fest, September 15 and 16.