River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy talks with WQUD GM Aaron Dail re recent highlights, both online and within Issue N° 1018. The first one-and-a-half minutes that you don’t get to hear concerns Dail’s admiration of Bruce Walters’s Buried Stories profile on Helen Van Dale for the latest issue:

And that’s Walters’s illustration of the notorious “Queen of the Looney Underworld“ in Rock Island circa 1920s. Good work, Bruce.

Kathleen McCarthy laments the 2013 Smith-Mundt Modernization Act’s repeal of the original 1946 Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibited government and media from using its own funds to gaslight its own citizens. Dail especially likes McCarthy’s typification of “this cabal of megalomaniacal perps and pervs” as “The Precious,” perhaps because it captures the Gollum-esque quality of said perps and pervs particularly well. McCarthy also touches upon Julian Assange’s continuing plight as a prisoner, in solitary confinement for more than a decade. in Belmarsh Prison in the UK. Assange is essentially imprisoned on an administrative violation, for having skipped bail on charges that were later dropped, and awaiting extradition to a nation of which he is not a citizen. Should the extradition prove successful, McGreevy says, there’s no reason not to think that Assange won’t die on American soil. His ongoing persecution is, more than anything, a warning to would-be whistle-blowers who might have dirt on the government and want to alert people to it.

Ezra Sidran PhD’s history of The Davenport Hotel, from its construction in 1907 to its collapse last May. Knowing what we now know about the Hotel catastrophe, it makes one very angry to know how it took so long for an accounting to be made — and at the cost of three lives, moreover.

Corey Lynn celebrates the decision by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) not to allow the creation of “Natural Asset Companies” (NAC), a completely new investment class, and explains why it is important why the combined clamor of congressional representatives, state authorities, and the public kept a nefarious monetization and management plot from unfolding.

Everything you need to know what’s going on in the QCA.