by Peter Boyles | May 22, 2023 | Blasting with Boyles
AM Radio Being Removed From Cars
Blasting With Boyles
OPINION
Tesla, Mazda, Volkswagen, and BMW are no longer going to have AM radios in their electric vehicles because electric engines interfere with the sound of AM radio. Ford Motor Company, according to The Washington Post, is taking an even bigger step and eliminating AM radio from all of its vehicles, electric or gas operated.
Are we witnessing the end of a golden era? We were raised on the radio. My love affair with radio goes far beyond the time when I first came into a radio studio and sat down and punched the start button to begin to play Engelbert Humperdinck.
We were raised on AM disc jockeys. We all had our stations that were like, I suspect, baseball teams. When you meet kids from other cities their team was the Reds, another kid’s team was the Yankees, or another kid, his team was Boston. My team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, and my radio station was WAMO. It was a principally black station that played the kind of music that made sense to a bunch of blue-collar working class white and black kids. It introduced us to women and cars, and now has the time come? We no longer sell buggy whips, rotary phones, or transistor radios. Or call your favorite disc jockey on Friday night and request a song.
It’s bittersweet to read these stories. I love the promos that the radio station I’m working for now is running, asking the government to preserve AM radio. It’s like these are people who normally don’t want the government within a thousand yards of their personal lives. Now asking the Biden administration to save five thousand directional AM radio stations because they protect us.
Radio had great renewal when music went to FM for sound and fury leaving the void of what was on AM to talk radio. And a sidebar to that, it has now become dominant in sports talk and sports betting radio. A lot of what’s diminished AM talk radio is the conservative tribal approach that seems to want to exclude rather than include so many audiences.
A golden era has come, and a golden era has gone. What do we have now? What offerings are out there for us now? We are diminished.
We on this side of the microphone have long asked, “are we giving people what they want, or are we giving them what we think they want?” There’s been a whole lot of — this is what we think you want — and the ratings and revenue reflect that might not be the right choice.
With the explosion at Fox News what is to come next for CNN? Maybe radio finds its place again as others in the business have pointed out with podcasting and on-demand radio. And maybe the little engine that could, can in fact, like the wolf, survive.
But I tell you I would miss it.
— Peter Boyles
by Peter Boyles | Apr 21, 2023 | Blasting with Boyles
OPINION
From Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, to Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND corporation CIA operative and Marine, the repetition of the establishment in a foreign war would make any intelligent person throw up.
If you recall, then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, formed the Vietnam Study Task Force that created what became known later as the Pentagon Papers. Now here we are in 2023, and they have this young man arrested in connection with the same charge, the leak of classified documents. Federal authorities were on him immediately and he was charged with possessing classified documents pertaining to national security and possessing national defense materials. Circle back.
The Pentagon Papers, the NY Times 1966, led to what was a great media battle sin. The papers demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systemically lied not only to the public but also to Congress.
The papers revealed the United States had secretly spread the scope of the war throughout all Southeast Asia.
Now we discover that there have been American special forces operatives in Ukraine which we never knew, another Biden lie. Once again draw a line back to Johnson’s lies. This is repetition of the lies of the executive branch when it comes to a war in what I believe will become Europe’s Vietnam.
The question for me remains how the military industrial complex needs to be fed. The Biden administration is willfully feeding the complex that Eisenhower so warned us about. We have spent billions and billions of dollars. Rep. Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, was in a meeting with Pentagon officials and said, we spend billions and billions of dollars collecting and preserving these secrets, and a 21-year-old is able to access them, print them out, and share them with a bunch of his teenage friends. “It’s just mystifying. This is absolutely ridiculous.” Congressman, I agree.
I don’t think this happened by accident. The Biden administration currently is trying to manage this leaked classified information, the paper and the documents catch them red-handed, about U.S. operations inside Ukraine.
We have talked before about trip wire wars. Barbara Tuchman, one of my many heroes as a historian, has her two most important books, The March of Folly and The Guns of August. It’s the identical history model that leads to European war. These scenarios of history are incredibly repetitive, from the Franco Prussian War, to the First World War, to the ultimate insanity of the Second World War. Cheering Joe Biden is ultimately going to get this country into deeper trouble in a part of the world that has never really settled World War One.
As Ellsberg and Sheehan and others proved, it was a lie. It was a bright shining lie. Remember Ellsberg was also charged under the espionage act for what, I believe, was ultimately a heroic act. Let’s see what they do with this young kid.
— Peter Boyles
by Peter Boyles | Mar 17, 2023 | Blasting with Boyles
OPINION
There always comes that moment in a person’s life when they discover there’s no such thing as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny is made up, there’s no such thing as a witch on Halloween, and there sure as hell isn’t a pony under the tree on Christmas morning.
Now it’s happening at Fox News. Now their big stars are being outed in a lawsuit filed by local election voting firm Dominion. At Fox News, hosts regularly featured election deniers in the weeks after Trump’s 2020 election defeat. And now under oath, the likes of a Sean Hannity said he never believed election lies despite pushing them on his show.
Fox viewers questioned the election because of what they saw on the network. Fox allowed election falsehoods on its air for what reasons? Did they fear their viewers like we at the Chronicle fear you readers? Fox denies any wrongdoing and accuses Dominion of cherry-picking quotes. Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch suggested firing the Fox News Washington Bureau chief shortly after the network projected Joe Biden the winner in Arizona, which caught everybody off guard. It’s almost some bizarre version of the French Revolution, where Robespierre, read here Rupert Murdoch, fears the mob. And so, what did they do? They lied.
I suffered two and half years of election deniers watching people now facing felony charges. Watching Jenna Ellis, after accepting a censure going outside the courtroom like a little kid in kindergarten sticking her tongue out and going, ‘Nanner nanner,’ I really didn’t mean it.”
The records we were able to read in the Fox defamation case show management put pressure on reporters. Tucker Carlson in an email, claims he hated Donald Trump; and now manufactures a total Riefenstahl version of the calm, minute and a half in the putsch, that took place on January 6th.
Now comes Smartmatic’s defamation suit filed in February of 2021, and Fox viewers were told and fake talk radio said Smartmatic was a Venezuelan company under the control of dead dictators and its election technology was used in six battle ground states. In fact, none of that was true. The only place Smartmatic was used was in LA county.
Sending votes to foreign countries for tabulation, the Supreme Court in New York said Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs unprecedented in the history of American elections so inherently problematic that it is a reckless disregard for the truth.
Now watch. Who will be next? The answer is fake talk radio is next. All the best to Dave Williams. The crown price of what’s left of the Republican Party in Colorado. Good luck, Dave. You’re going to need it.
— Peter Boyles
by Peter Boyles | Feb 22, 2023 | Blasting with Boyles
OPINION
In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt, then President William Howard Taft, and Senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette fought for ideological control of the Republican Party, each denouncing the other two as not really Republicans.
The phrase “Republican in name only” emerged as a political pejorative in the 1920s. The earliest known print appearance of the term RINO, The Manchester Union Leader, abbreviated it to RINO and pronounced the sound like “rhino.”
So, Republicans in Name Only was used to describe politicians of the Republican party deemed insufficiently loyal to the party’s ideology. Lately, commonly used by former President Donald Trump and his many supporters, it refers to his critics in the Republican party as, you got it, RINOs.
So, I find it really interesting any of us who look at the need for stronger private sector labor unions in this country, women’s right to choose, the division of church and state, the COVID vaccine itself, automatically somehow become Marxists. But the better name is really RIN
O. And my contention is the bastards should have run some RINOs and they wouldn’t have gotten the ass kicking they got.
If you were handpicked by Donald Trump to run for office you were basically doomed by the secret brotherhood of the RINOs. Having been accused of being a RINO for two and a half years now, I decided that we must have a secret sign. No functioning secret society in world history doesn’t have a private recognition sign. So, folks here it is.
As a little geek history reader there were Freemasons, and I really always wante
d to know what was going on in Skull and Bones, but there are always things like swords, and handshakes. In early Christianity, allegedly one Christian would take his or her toe and make the top half of a fish in the dirt and, if the other was a Christian, they would make the bottom half of the fish and that was the sign.
What happens when a RINO meets a RINO? Before we begin to speak about our truths you first must shift your body and do a 360 to see who’s watching in case it could be a Trump Republican or some politically correct snitch. Then, squeeze your fingers tight into a fist, place your thumb squarely under the nose, and touch fist to your forehead. The sign of the RINO.
Then if the person you’re having the conversation with does exactly the same thing you know you are talking to another pillar of truth, a fellow RINO. Be careful around any member of the inner circle of the Republican Party or some politically correct witch hunting weasel, but give the secret sign — we are fellow RINOs.
And then slip away to talk about how much we miss George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Walker Stapleton, and Dick Wadhams. And then we say, “RINOs forever, forever RINOs.”
So, until the next time we get together when we’ll all learn the rhino love call.
Go RINOs. Take State.
— Peter Boyles
by Peter Boyles | Jan 19, 2023 | Blasting with Boyles
OPINION
Bill Wilson, in the world of recovery founded Alcoholics Anonymous, now known as AA, and one of the codes to know a fellow alcoholic was to ask them; “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” Bill Wilson set the stage for so many of us afflicted by the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction, always remembering that alcohol is a drug.
I had my first drink when I was 13 years old. I’ve written about it off and on over the last 37 years. I was playing baseball with some older guys and when the game was over, we went to this girl’s house. I had my first drink and first-time sexual experience. I personally believe I was born alcoholic, cultural alcoholic, and genetically predisposed to alcoholism.
I had my last drink following the murder of my best friend Alan Berg, who by the way, was the first real in-recovery alcoholic I’d ever known. I was in a Chinese restaurant on Hampden Avenue three weeks after that and that’s where I met the followers of Bill.
I literally turned myself in to a pair of great physicians who helped me. I went to my first AA meeting at the Air Force Academy Officer’s Club. To illustrate how bad I’d become, until recently I believed there were four people in the car, one a woman who was a very dear friend. But she took me aside later and said, “Peter, I wasn’t in the car.”
Alcoholism is a disease and that’s why cities like Denver and others around the country can’t come to terms with the alcoholics and addicts who have now become the unhoused. They treat them like they have the plague and you’ve seen some of the results.
Having set that stage, recently on talk radio and Denver television news, is what I would dub the smearing of an Aurora police officer. His name is Nate Meier. He was found drunk on duty in March 2019, armed, as officers are. I have developed great sources in the Aurora Police Department. They tell me stories about what happened with their brilliant previous chiefs, the amount of true support they feel from a ridiculous City Council, and how they’ve generally been screwed over by their own government.
Now I know this factually. The officer has been sober, went into alcohol treatment and has nearly three and a half years of sobriety. He speaks at the police academy, shares his story with employee groups, and went on to say something I find myself saying, he saved his own life. A life he could have lost.
He took the test to be promoted and he scored high on the Career Service test, and that I believe is very competitive. Now he is being attacked principally in talk radio and alternative press. And one of the charges that was made by the uneducated self-righteous is that he should be fired, he should not be promoted, and that being in recovery is untrustworthy.
That’s quite an alarming accusation for all of us in recovery, including federal judges, district attorneys, airline pilots, doctors, nurses, people in positions of responsibility, people who carry guns and badges and make decisions on other peoples lives. I’ve met people from these professions in recovery, and that is why Bill decided there would be no last names.
I chose to break my own anonymity to talk about my disease, alcoholism. But now it shows you exactly why we don’t use last names, because of people like the media and elected officials.
My hope for them is they never have a family member or anyone they love and care about go through the darkness of alcoholism into the light of recovery. This is 2023 for heavens sake, finally learn something.
— Peter Boyles
by Peter Boyles | Dec 16, 2022 | Blasting with Boyles
OPINION
This is not the end of 2022 and not the beginning of 2023. I see this as a very sad era ending with no clean solutions for the time period ahead.
Denver has fallen into such disarray under the Hancock administration; the rise of drugs, crime, homelessness, violence, the lack of people wanting to go to a downtown which was once a warm and vibrant place to visit. Denver Police have been set back on their heels. Politicians are so unworthy of anyone’s respect, but this is a product of this last time period.
People will have to judge the time period for itself. I see it pretty much as the last decade. In 2023 we will select a new mayor for the City of Denver. Have you looked at this circus of people who want this job? The state of Colorado is now pretty much a one-party state. The country appears to me to be rudderless. It appears there is no captain on the bridge. So, as Lenin asked, “What is to be done?”
Denver media, talk radio, television news, and much of newspapering (with the exception of this fine publication) is lost on me. It seems to be background noise, meaningless babble. Political correctness has permeated and put fear into the hearts of people who, in the past, would have taken many of these issues on a hell of a lot harder than is being done today. So, what is to be done? Frankly I really don’t see a Ronald Reagan character. I don’t see an FDR, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela.
Baby New Year, you’re supposed to be bringing us hope, a bright shining future and a brave new world. Ask yourself honestly, do you think COVID’s over, the insanity in Ukraine, big tech censorship far more powerful than Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst combined?
Most of the people I know are most upset about the Denver Broncos. And maybe it’s far more easy and simple to spend your time talking about Russell Wilson and the head coach, and your Colorado Rockies and their inability to hit the ball on the road, than trying to understand the depth of our malaise. Historians repeatedly say all empires fail. Are we an empire in failure? All the signs are there.
So, what will 2023 bring? Is it the start of something new, or look over your shoulder? This is a crap shoot. But can you honestly see any potential leader, Republican or Democrat, that can bring us home? My pessimistic answer is no.
But remember, all Dorothy had to do was click her heels and bring herself home. We have the power to save ourselves. Or do we? I don’t think so.
— Peter Boyles
