While the remainder of this piece will kind of forced to be All About Me, allow me to raise a figurative champagne flute – figurative because it's actually a glass of chillable red I'll be raising – in acknowledgment of others.

FDA Sign

In the month of June alone, the FDA demonstrated its most extreme regulatory capture to date with its Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee's (VRBPAC) approval for (1) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to vaccinate the final age cohort of six-month-old babies to five-year-old toddlers (6/14-15/22); and (2) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to reformulate Pfizer and Moderna original vaccines to accommodate current and future variants without clinical trials (6/28/22).

Primary Election Voters

It's primary election season in Scott County (June 7) and Rock Island County (June 28), and there are nearly as many county and state races unopposed as contested within each of the fictionally competing Democratic and Republican primary contests. For this primary election, questions were developed for Iowa and Illinois Democrat and Republican Primary candidates in four separate races: Iowa's Scott County Board of Supervisors (SCBS); Illinois' Rock Island County Sheriff; and both the Illinois State Senate and State House of Representatives. For the Illinois State Senate and House races, we partnered with our prolific and plugged-in columnist Rich Miller, who queried his Capitol Fax blog subscribers for candidate questions. We requested each candidate choose their own destiny via answering five questions of their choosing from the 40 posted.

James Hickman's essay "The Media Has Been the Number-One Cause of War Since 1989" cannot be overstated enough. One is reminded of the scene in what Reader movie reviewer Mike Schulz calls “the best movie of all time”: Citizen Kane. The classic film is all about William Randolph Hearst and depicts him effectively starting the War in Cuba that Hickman refers to. In the film, Hearst's retort to the field reporter who told him there was no conflict there is legendary: "You provide the prose poems; I'll provide the war."

COVID-19 Testing Site in Downtown Davenport - February 1, 2022

History will eventually reveal all the malfeasance that allowed COVID-19 to be promulgated as a global lethal pandemic when the narratives in support of this over-exaggeration can no longer overcome the evidence against it.

Genesis Health Unity Point Health Responses to COVID-19 Questions March 2022

We greatly appreciate Genesis and Unity Point participating in this critical updating community stakeholders on COVID-19 relative to health-care in the Quad Cities. We are re-publishing our questions along with their unedited responses below.

Iowa Executive Department Emergency Declaration 2021

Canada's Prime minister Justin Trudeau, with the enthusiastic support of his assistant Deputy Minister/Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, unlawfully invoked Canada's Emergency Powers after two weeks of uncontestedly peaceful protest by mostly Canadian truckers using their rigs to occupy the streets surrounding Ottawa’s parliament buildings.  Before Prime minister Trudeau's emergency declaration, local law enforcement and the protestors enjoyed a certain obvious camaraderie because truckers are as beloved as police officers and it was a chance to demonstrate their mutual loyalty, trust, and respect.

We Need You to Care Local QC Hospital Health Official Vaccination Appeal Dec 2021

Critical thinking and journalistic curiosity were woefully missing in the most recent COVID-19 press briefing hosted by county health workers and local hospital medical directors. In the six weeks since the last presser, a lot of information has come out in the independent media on how unvaccinated are documented in health systems. The devil's in the details, and how our local hospitals and county health officials conduct themselves relative to our local media inquiries has a major impact on how the Quad Cities populace perceives our collective and individual health status.

Where There's Risk, There Must be Choice

Most of us have stopped really civically engaging, convincing ourselves that voting for representatives is doing our part in the bottom-up governance that makes America so unique. We further justify our civic sloth by picking a political side and assuring ourselves that we were choosing representation that reflects our values and ideologies for governance. What a load of hooey!

January 6, 2021 US Capitol photo by Corey Eib

First and foremost is that no one has explained the motive behind why Trump supporters would deliberately storm the castle to sabotage the Congressional Electoral College certification process when they considered it the last best hope to see their precious Trump restored to the office of the President. The third narrative hole is that there are 14,000 hours of video footage being withheld from the public.

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