Category Archives: People

Gun grabbin’ Mel Crippen

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My gawd you can’t even turn on the radio anymore without hearing some idiot spouting off. While the rest of America’s amplitude modulated radio went conservative, Ames, Iowa’s KASI 1430 stayed commie. Morning host and gun grabber Mel Crippen had Ames Mayor John Haila on telling us what a fine job city plow crews are doing on the streets. An honest person would have broke out laughing. There’s not a bigger bunch of overpaid / underworked employees in the country. If you don’t live on Lincoln Way, Duff, Grand or a bus route, your streets are shit.

But putting a clown like Crippen on the air is KASI’s choice, isn’t it? As far as I know they are a private concern . Also in Ames (or used to be) is the NPR affiliate WOI 640 am. They’re even more commie. The problem is they’re tax funded (yes I know they also receive donations). I saw a meme online the other day from Mark Levine asking, “Why does NPR still exist?” Republicans let stand a taxpayer funded entity that wants to destroy them. If there’s any logic in that I don’t see it. So what we’re left with is radio that is funded by everyone’s tax dollars, but only provides programming for half the country.

So that’s the deal, I don’t have to pay for KASI, I do for WOI.

That’s the difference between liberals and conservatives, we don’t try to ‘cancel’ people. If your employer wants to hire a commie som bitch that’s their business. We sure as hell ain’t going to listen to your ugly ass.

[KASI has been gobbled up by Clear Channel or iHeart or whatever it is that company that owns all of radio is calling itself now. Its not good when 95% of all media is owned by 6 corporations. Oh! Oh! Oh! I almost forgot. If there wasn’t enough commie radio in Ames, a few years ago a group formed an actual independent radio station called KHOI 89.1. I’m surprised they allow Trumpers to live in the same town!] 

(The other thing about radio all owned by the same people is the corporate nature of it all. I’ve long felt that there will come a day when radio stations will say, “Practically everyone listens to our station using our app on their device, its just not worth our while to have the cost of the broadcast tower anymore.” Then after a short transition, that “free app” will incur a small ‘service fee’. Then it will become a larger monthly subscription. Which is why it seems their sole goal in life is to see how many times in one day they can say, “iHeart radio app! iHeart radio app!“)

You really think I’d vote for you?

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Sanders, Warren, Steyer, have each had volunteers show up at my door canvassing for the February 3 Iowa Caucus (I’m on their list because I caucused for Sanders in 2016). It just staggers the mind. I counted up my vote for President the last 40 years. 4 Democrats, 2 Republicans and 5 ‘other‘. I’ve spread my vote around about as much as anybody. But for god’s sake these last 4 years changed everything. Have you listened at all to the media? To Hollywood? To officials of the Democrat Party? Have you listened to the things they call someone night after night after night? What they call independents? According to them the straight/white/Christian/male has been responsible for all the world’s maladies! And now you think I’d vote for you?? My God the things you have called us! Just vile! Now its, “Oh, could you forget everything we said about you the past 4 years and give us your vote?” Not a chance in hell. There are consequences to your actions.

Never has a town done so little with so much

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Its criminal! Ames is out of control. January in Iowa is making up for the earlier lack of snowfall with a vengeance. And the brain trust at City Hall has instituted the “2 inch” rule, the plows don’t come out with less snow than that. Its a mess, its a hazard, its a ripoff. We pay the damn taxes! Plenty of them. We pay higher than the state average in property taxes. We have a city sales tax. We have a school district surcharge tax. We pay taxes. What we don’t get are services. I blame City Manager Steve Schainker. Well, him and that idiot City Council for not firing him. Plows don’t plow, cops don’t patrol, its insane. There are few city services that affect public safety so directly as clean safe streets. Do they cut the budget for conferences? For symposiums? For training sessions that just happen to be held in Honolulu, Vegas and Miami? Only in a college town could such a high level of stupidity be reached that people find this acceptable.

10 Most Beautiful Women of the 2010’s

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Okay there’s just one, Lacey Nicole Chabert (September 30, 1982, Purvis, Mississippi), nuff said. She shouldn’t be that attractive, she just is. She’s equal to 10 mortal women. I watch her in all those Hallmark movies. Sure she’s not nineteen anymore, but just as smoking in a different way.

In Hallmark’s ‘My Secret Valentine‘ (Andrew Walker as “Handyman”) there’s a scene towards the end of the film where they eat carryout in the truck down at the beach at sunset. Unlike most American film they used mostly natural light in that scene. The golden light was so warm and caressing to her features (okay it even helped Andy). It reminded me of another film, one from 1950 called, ‘Annie Get Your Gun‘ with Betty Hutton and Howard Keel. There’s a scene where the 2 are outside on the end of the train about to kiss at sunset. I think they’re supposed to be going through Arizona or Oklahoma at twilight. Its hard to explain great light. You see it a lot more in French and Italian films. Now in Lacey’s film, it completely enhanced her appearance, if that’s possible (but then she could shave her head and get out of bed without makeup and be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood). I’ll put an example of neat light below. Its not the same light as in the film, but it gives you an idea. There are photographers who won’t shoot outdoors after 10 am, or before 5 pm. Its the angle of the light, its the temperature of the light, its the color of the light. Its affected by the type and amount of clouds its coming through. If its bouncing off water, snow or sand. The humidity, the amount of trees. ‘Sounder‘ (1972) also had some great light.

(photo by Sean Davey)

Cars

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When I was a kid something we did prior to actually being old enough to have a car, was we built model cars. My favorite was the above pictured ’72 Dodge Challenger R/T (road track). Not in that color scheme for god’s sake. I would have chosen royal blue with slot magnesium wheels. By gawd that was a car. It came in everything from a 6-cylinder I believe to a 440 CID V-8. That’s when cars were cars. You could kill yourself at a very high rate of speed, and look good while doing it.

Then real life hits you in the face and car care is up to you. Not having any formal training, my car knowledge is what I picked up from friends, family and tidbits from mechanics and the counter guy at the parts store. So some real crap amongst the gems. I was invariably paying huge sums of money to replace water pumps and heater cores. Well guess what genius? If I would have drained and refilled my coolant every 2 years, I probably would have avoided all that (now coolant lasts 5 years). I also would have avoided rotten hoses and the like. Fresh coolant lubricates your water pump and protects the innards of your heater core and radiator.

Everyone knows you have to change your crankcase oil, but you also have to change your differential oil, your transmission fluid, power steering fluid and brake fluid. If you do those roughly every 2 years, you prevent thousands upon thousands of dollars in parts replacements. Car mechanics count on you not knowing that. They’d rather charge you $2,500 for a new transmission, then change your transmission fluid and filter for $150. The best guy on YouTube that makes child’s play of all this is Chris Fix. If you’re like me, you can read the procedure on how to do something, but a picture (video) is truly worth a thousand words.

If people (me) had just followed the maintenance schedule in the Chilton’s manual to the letter, their cars would last 2 to 3 times as long. Easy. There is even a Rust-oleum product called Rust Reformer that makes rust inert! You just brush and wash off the loose stuff then spray this on! Truly a miracle product. You spray on rubberized underbody coating on top of that and your  car is set for life! Its all about changing fluids and replacing filters, replacing brake pads and lubing the hell out of metal.

Reap what you sow

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Resistance goes both ways. Back in 2016 the Left couldn’t come to grasp with the fact their Precious (Hillary) lost. They were rioting at JFK. They were rioting in Seattle. Before the election they were rioting in Santa Barbara like in the picture above where they assaulted this woman with eggs. They were stealing MAGA hats off of people. They were wearing “pussy hats”. Antifa would wear their black masks and hoodies, show up at conservative rallies with clubs, brass knuckles, cups of urine and throw feces. Full scale rioting in Washington during the inauguration. All these Lefties taking a knee during the national anthem or turning their back to the flag. Now they want my vote.

I had a piece of filth Bernie volunteer show up at my door yesterday. He couldn’t get it through his empty head that Democrats could go to hell. Yeah the past 4 years he and other Democrats thought it was great the 24/7/365 insulting of President Trump and Trump supporters. They thought it was so great the late night comics irrational hatred of Trump was, telling how anyone who voted for him was so stupid. All the SNL skits making fun of ordinary Americans. Robert De Niro, Cher, Barbara Streisand taking potshots at middle America. They thought that was great!

Well its payback time now. Yeah, now you want our vote February 3. We’re supposed to forget all that. Aw shucks you were just joshing right? No, it don’t work like that. You and Leftist society told us what you think of us. You couldn’t have insulted the black man that way the past 4 years. You can’t say boo to a Jew. But you think you can verbally and physically assault the Christian white male ad nauseum and there won’t be any consequences. Wrong-o moe foe. Payback’s a bitch ain’t it? 

[Yeah I got my Democrat bona fides. I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. Walter Mondale in ’84. Michael Dukakis in ’88. Bill Clinton in ’92. Then when the Dems sold out labor in ’93 with NAFTA I never looked back. Open borders, gun control, I was through with you. In 2016 it was so obvious Washington needed a change agent. It was Bernie or Trump. I caucused for Bernie, voted for Trump. Didn’t matter to me, all I wanted was change. Then in the ensuing 4 years I found out just what the Democrat Party thought of me. From Hillary calling me deplorable to all the other non-stop onslaught. You think the only safe person to insult in America is the white male. Well you were wrong. Its okay to be white.]

(I just noticed something about that picture for the first time. Right behind that woman getting egged looks to be a California State Highway Patrolman. See his badge? Doing nothing. If anything he looks to be securing the door. Blocking this woman’s escape from the violent left-wing mob.)

 

Down by the riverside

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Its a scary thought. People slept outdoors last night in a situation exactly like this. That isn’t that big a deal in the southern United States, but here in Iowa last night it was 5 degrees. Five. You need to be outside at about 3 am sometime to get a real feel for what that temperature feels like. That’s dying weather. Every so often the Des Moines City Council gets a  bee up their butt and has the police and fire department go down by the riverside and bust up the homeless encampments under the guise they are a “fire hazard”. They don’t provide an alternative or any help, they just say “you ain’t living here!”

What the point of that is, is beyond me. The “campers” have setup a situation over the summer accumulating enough stuff to survive the winter, and the City kicks them out at the coldest time of the year. Now they have to go somewhere else. For 20 years I’ve wondered, the State Fair campgrounds is only used 2 weeks a year, why couldn’t Des Moines’ homeless stay there the other 50 weeks? Think about it. You have fire grates, electricity, water, toilets, showers, comparable heaven to living by the river. The infrastructure there is setup for camping. Not only that, but by having the homeless in a centralized spot, access to associated help would be much easier.

The “can’t do” attitude that permeates bureaucracy is what prevents it from happening. The big obstacle I see would be where do they go for the 3 weeks around the Fair? You’d think you could get area philanthropic groups to help clear them out/move them back for the 10 days of the Fair. I don’t know. The whole thing is rather daunting. The first I noticed it was in the early 80’s during the Reagan administration. It was all the rage because the media wanted something to bash Reagan over the head with like the country’s new homeless problem was his fault.

In a  case about 1978 , most of the State run mental institutions were emptied. The ACLU and others felt it was wrong to institutionalize incompetent people against their will. It was much better to put them on the streets where they couldn’t possibly survive. So big surprise Reagan inherited Carter’s stupidity. It was further made worse by the move to outpatient the problem to “residential facilities”. What that meant was instead of State run hospitals with good wages and funding, they ‘privatized‘ (funneled money to their cronies) into group homes.

Nothing got solved of course, it just got that generation of politicians through the next election under the guise of “cost savings”. They couldn’t leave well-enough alone. Iowa for example had 5 or 6 hospitals covering each region of the state. Not perfect but we didn’t have people dying from the elements under bridges. Now in “modern” America we have the authorities busting up camps no different than during the Depression or after the Civil War. How progressive.

Central Iowa Shelter & Services      Family Promise of Greater Des Moines

Greater Des Moines Nonprofits

[I hope “Randy & Elaine” made it last night. Their camp looked exactly like the one above. The  knock on Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta was that keeping people on subsistence living did nothing to improve their situation. On the other hand, when people are barely holding on to the last rung of society’s ladder, kicking them out of their tent in winter isn’t a good thing either. “Teach them how to fish” in the spring, make sure they get through the winter first.]

JOPPA seems to be taking it to the streets. Boots, heaters, propane tanks, man stuff. The name is from Acts 9:36.

Joppa
118 SE 4th Street #120
Des Moines, IA 50309
(515) 288-5699 Local

 

 

 

Luck is for rabbits

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Going through the comments on a recent gun video I encountered a common theme: “You Americans, you so lucky to own guns.” I know what he meant. Its not about luck though. America the beautiful didn’t just “happen”. It wasn’t “the luck of the draw”. Our forefathers were willing to bleed. They were willing to die to birth this country. They were willing to lose it all. Their house, their farm, their business, their life. Furriners ain’t willing to do that. They’ll live under despotism forever rather than fight. That’s when change happens, when people are willing to bleed. These other countries, they’re not willing to bleed. They’ll stay third rate. They’ll never rule the world. They’ll never own guns.

[FYI at $33.87 for 200 rounds of Federal 115 grain brass case 9mm at Walmart, you can’t beat that. 11/26/19 update: Walmart now has 200 rounds for $33 flat.]

 

There are consequences to cronyism

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Sarah Palin might have coined the phrase ‘crony capitalism’. Describing how business and politics function in America, in a parasite / host relationship. Recently in Fort Dodge a pastor was murdered by a crazy person with a long history of violence. There’s only so many times you can talk about lazy county prosecutors who, if they did their job, we wouldn’t have these homicidal maniacs walking the streets. But, to the point, former Governor Branstad closed down the mental hospitals. He couched it as “saving money” through privatization.

When in reality what he was doing was funneling taxpayer money to his cronies under the guise of ‘residential treatment facilities’. So instead of Iowa being in the top 10 for mental health treatment, with very good inpatient facilities, we sunk overnight to the bottom 10. And pastors in Fort Dodge (Allen Henderson) get murdered (by Joshua Pendleton) because of political payoffs. Cronyism has consequences.

‘There Was a Little Girl’ – Brooke Shields

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This is the photo used on the jacket of the book I recently read by Ms. Shields. I don’t normally read celebrity books, but I have always been intrigued by her. But I wasn’t the only one. She made Pretty Baby, Wanda Nevada, Blue Lagoon, Endless Love, Brenda Starr, all movies that capitalized on her captivating looks. And its kind of funny because from reading the book, I picked up that she had that typical model way of looking at her own body.  I’m sure I can’t explain it right or understand completely, but models often look at themselves objectively.  Not the way men do. It is their asset, to be protected and presented. Nothing more, nothing less.

As the title suggests (The Real Story of My Mother and Me), her goal was to analyze her and her mother’s relationship dynamics. That she did, for 394 pages. There was the odd tidbit of celebrity gossip about this or that co-star over the years, and the goings on in Hollywood, but the vast majority of it was an endless recounting of the dark spiral her mother lived in because of alcoholism, and what it did to Brooke. To say that Brooke was screwed up is an understatement. Back then if you thought about it at all, you just assumed her life was all rainbows and unicorns.

It takes 2 people to make an alcoholic: the broken person and the enabler. Teri and Brooke. That was their world. Brooke had a decent relationship with her divorced dad, but it was pretty much her mother her world revolved around. When I finished the book the first thought was what might her life have been like had she had a warm and nurturing mother? And the second thought was why is it so often its the whack job parents that produce these prodigies? Her first husband Andre Agassi had a nut for a dad.

Brooke’s friend Michael Jackson had a set of parents that were famous for their abuse. I’m sure the list goes on and on. For some reason that need for parental approval (and that whip cracking behind them) motivates young people to incredible heights. You got the feeling a little that Brooke thought it was her amazing looks that made her career. I’m not sure she understands there is a multitude of equally beautiful young women out there, they just don’t live in New York City and have a whack job for a parent. The stars aligned for her at a time when print culture could still control who the next megastar was (Think David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Brooke, Leif Garrett…).

Another thing that stood out was a little troubling. She was jetting here, jetting there, Cannes, the Fiji Islands, making this movie, that movie, rubbing elbows with Bob Hope and other celebrities, 6 homes at one time. She led a lifestyle most of us have no comprehension of. She was able to do this because of the feelings fans had for her and the money they spent. Her fans made it possible. She seems to have zero comprehension of that. Or appreciation.

But after you read one of these you realize the volumes that you weren’t told. Things about school, relationships or jobs that you were given a glossy little picture of, but not the nitty gritty of what it was really like. I guess you get a little jaded when you realize the mission was to sell books, not give you the truth.