River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy talks with WQUD GM Aaron Dail and his Sancho Panza, Gary, re recent highlights, both online and within Issue N° 1014. The October Reader cover was the occasion for McGreevy to break out his best Transylvanian accent in an effort to make some legitimately scary material a little more, uh, palatable. To whit:

Scary Government Staff and Spooks “Vhant to Suck Your Speech”

Kathleen McCarthy’s cover story dives deep into an Interim Report released 20 June 2023 by The House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The report concerned complaints issued from the Office of Inspectors General about the abuses of process dealt by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA’s “quiet, under-the-radar expansion out of a foreign-surveillance mission” had, by their estimation, shifted to a mission that includes “domestic surveillance and censorship [incorporating] numerous third-party partners” — NGOs and social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Jen Easterly, the Director of CISA, said, in November 2021, that her org could argue that “we’re in the business of critical infrastructure; and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.” Like free speech, eh? When high-level government bureaucrats like Easterly begin talking on record like high-tech lowlifes out of a William Gibson novel, fears that such people have become emboldened to execute all manner of dirty tricks in order to spook a susceptible electorate away from (small “r”) republican norms (like, say, unfettered, tamper-proof domestic elections) toward more nebulous ends not only seem possible, they seem probable.

Illinois’ SAFE-T Act Promises Small County Complications

Dail asks where such orgs get their funding, which leads to a 25 September 2023 column by Rich Miller re Illinois’ SAFE-T Act, wherein counties are required to have public defenders, but out of the state’s 102 counties, 62 of them have fewer than 35,000 residents total, whereas fifty have less than 25,000 residents, 31 have 15,000, fifteen fewer than 10,000, and seven less than 10,000. “For perspective,” Miller writes, “a single Chicago ward contains about 54,000 people. Only 24 counties have at least that much population.” And now the stinger: “Public defenders outside of Cook County received $10 million in this fiscal year’s budget” — “which,” Miller concludes, overdoing understatement, “doesn’t seem like much.” Dail’s note of incredulity about “Where is the money going in Illinois? Outside of Chicago?” should be shared in the voices of the Illinois’d of every county.

Advantage Illinois

McGreevy observes that much of the COVID-19 funds allotted to Illinois have gone to this program: The Advantage Illinois — State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) 2.0 Program, designed “to leverage $220 million in funding to [equitably] support Illinois small businesses.” Gary mentioned how user-Unfriendly the site is for an applicant, which leads McGreevy to wonder whether the state wants to support small businesses, equitably or otherwise.

A Climate of Skepticism

Joel Lorentz, a Rock Island columnist who publishes “Uncommon Sense” on Substack, recounts an Uber ride from 2016. The driver, who transported JL from Denver to a community an hour away, decried the damage humans were doing to the environment. She cited shortened winters, which would normally kill an invasive species of insect, the pine beetle, was instead allowing it wreak havoc on the forests. “We’re killing everything on the planet!” she said — to which Lorentz rejoined, “Except the pine beetle, obviously.” Unfortunately, the driver didn’t receive this jibe with the humor with which it was meant, nor did she attempt to parry it with, say, a more focused ecological diatribe (an “eco-tribe”?) about how humans were disrupting the balance of Nature and creating consequences they neither intended nor understood. Such a perspective would have invited further argument — who can tell what a balanced natural environment looks like, for one. But all she had to offer was such boilerplate as “If we don’t do something in the next few years, it’ll be too late!” It must have been a very long hour for Lorentz. Unfortunately, Ms Uber Driver is not the only one parroting talking-points about climate change without the benefits of hard data to undergird her stance. “And that’s how the trap gets set,” Lorentz writes. “The non-skeptics are lulled into hapless orthodoxy, and the skeptics are quieted into non-participation.” Lorentz provides some of that missing data to show why skepticism, not a set of dogmas, is the best way to approach this issue of our present-day climate.

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