River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy talks with Aaron Dail and Enrique Sandoval re the highlights of Issue N° 1006, including Art at the Airport: Fun Reasons to Visit the Quad Cities Aiport While Not Enduring Security Theatre, featuring the works of James Eli Bowden, Matt Moyer, and Corrine Smith, on display now through 02/28.

Link: The Sixth Annual Fake News Awards by James Corbett of The Corbett Report: JC offers his nominations for the Dino Awards — “Dino” as in “dinosaur media” — and the stories from the past year that have since been revealed to be examples of deceptive reporting. Included is a 45-minute video JC provides on it that’s entertaining, elevating, and excruciating in its implications (The “E” Trifecta!).

Link: Who Knew about These Firsts? by Todd McGreevy, featuring a new cartoon of “Uncle Scam” by Ed Newmann, which is so good that it adorns the cover of the Reader‘s print edition. McGreevy has thrown down the gauntlet to readers for them to point out something — anything — by the US federal government that isn’t a scam. He also points out a number of “firsts” of history to which the Quad Cities provided a setting. One such would be. . .

Link: John Atanasoff, the father of the modern computer: Augustana College’s Wallenberg Hall will hold a screening of Birth of the Computer: The John Atanasoff Story on 02/23, 6PM. In the tech world, Atanasoff, who went to Iowa State College in Ames (now Iowa State University), is a hero because of the testimony he gave during a lawsuit about how he came up with the concepts behind the first computer, which resulted in the computer becoming public domain, and IBM was thus prevented from owning the patent. In his testimony, Atanasoff talked about driving two hours from Ames to Rock Island in 1936 to get a drink — Iowa was then a dry state; Illinois wasn’t; and he had his a-HA! moment in a local tavern, where he wrote out on the back of a bar napkin the concept of the computer.

Link: The World Comes to DC to Demand Biden Drop the Case Against Julian Assange by Kevin Gosztola, concerning the organized international opposition to the United States government’s extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, thirteen years after his data-dump (which, incidentally, he carefully vetted before dropping it). Pressure is being brought to bear on the Biden administration to drop its efforts against Assange; will it be enough to free JA from his Ecuadorean-embassy “fortress”?