River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy talks with WQUD GM Aaron Dail about the contents of, and items related to, the October edition of the River Cities’ Reader, Issue N° 1026. The issue’s tagline, “Ballets and Bullets,” is an apt summation, and you can get more of the former — the aht, the cultchuh, the cine, the théâtre, the musique, the danse — at the Reader Events Calendar. It truly is the best way to know what’s going on in the QCA.

Regarding the latter, McGreevy laments the “bifurcation” of the electoral mindset. The division isn’t so much about “politics” as such, which is, after all, division by definition. It isn’t even that old Roman concept of “bread and circuses” — it doesn’t quite rise to that level. More than anything, the Trump v Harris race is s a three-card Monte game over which the electorate has been driven into a blind rage over the eternal absence of the money card. Meanwhile, there are transnational machinations in motion, about which Americans would be better-served to understand more fully — if only they could be persuaded to forget about the cards and find out what the shills don’t want their marks to know.

And one who chose not to be a mark in that game is, undoubtedly, Julian Assange; and he’s paid the price for his journalistic intransigence. . .

I Am Free Because I Pled Guilty to Journalism

Kevin Gosztola caught Assange’s public remarks to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights since he emerged from Belmarsh in London. “I am not free today because the system worked,” Assange told the assembled. “I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”

Nothing About Our Political Environment is Organic

Stateside, Kathleen McCarthy writes, we are witnessing spectators who’ve chosen to call the lack of transparency in electoral politics for what it is — more three-card Monte — and are being given what might be called “the Assange-lite treatment” of knee-jerk disdain for those who won’t go in for self-censorship. McCarthy says the present-day environment can be seen as having been put into place back in 2012, with the replacement of the Smith Mundt Act of 1948 with the Smith Mundt Modernization Act; the Executive Order establishing the Global Engagement Center (GEC) to focus on “domestic messaging” (or home-based propaganda); and the authorization of DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson to add all elections to the US cybersecurity infrastructure. Election-year 2024 may be the year when all these various chickens finally come home to roost — and it has little, if anything, to do with the Trump v Harris faux-gladiatorial side-show.

2024 Election Questionnaire for Scott County Sheriff

2024 Election Questionnaire for Scott County Auditor

2024 Election Questionnaire for Scott County Supervisors

Todd McGreevy discusses the questionnaires sent out to local candidates this election year, and the quality of the responses to them. Scott County Sheriff incumbent Tim Lane made some good points; whereas Kerri Tompkins, the incumbent auditor, didn’t respond to any of the queries submitted to her. Hmmm. . .

Federal Court Rules That Water Fluoridation Poses an “Unreasonable Risk” to Children

Stuart Cooper: “After a precedent-setting, seven-year legal battle in federal court, an historic ruling by the United States District Court of the Northern District of California has ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take regulatory action to eliminate the “unreasonable risk” to the health of children posed by the practice of water fluoridation. The ruling requires the EPA to take regulatory action to eliminate the risk, in a decision that could end the use of water-fluoridation chemicals throughout the US.”

Flyin’ Gosling: “The Wild Robot,” “Lee,” “Will & Harper,” “My Old Ass,” and “Megalopolis”

Mike Schulz, the Reader’s longtime Editeur sans mandat, was especially thrilled by the film The Wild Robot (dir Chris Sanders, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, and Ving Rhames) and thinks all girls and boys should see it. Just sayin’.