Remember those predictions that polar bears and snow would soon be extinct?

Well, here in Aspen and throughout the Colorado mountains, snowpack this spring is nearly 500% of normal. That’s not a typo. It’s almost five times normal.

The ski mountain at Aspen has reopened for skiing every weekend in June, including this weekend. Even the locals — a pretty discerning bunch — say we had a season beyond epic.

None of the growing polar bear population has been sighted in Aspen, yet, but the black bears often seen in town must be getting nervous.

Does this mean that global warming, or whatever is the nom du jour, is a hoax? Continue reading →

We are all Keynesians now.” ­— attributed to President Richard Nixon

In the depths of the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes theorized that the government could control business cycles through monetary and fiscal policies.

Keynes was right to some extent. Lower taxes, higher government spending and lower interest rates stimulate the economy, at least for a while. Even Nixon came to believe in it.

The phrase “We are all Keynesians” caught on. Economics is the dismal science after all.

A Newsweek cover story in 2009 took the catchphrase a step further in proclaiming on its cover that “We are all socialists now” as they celebrated President Barack Obama’s promise to fundamentally transform America.

Maybe Newsweek didn’t really think socialism would save the world, but just hoped it would save Newsweek. Within a few years Continue reading →

Until Aspen’s mob shouted it down it, valet parking service was planned this winter at the base of the Aspen Mountain gondola. No longer.

Local politicos saw an opportunity to bash business, which they always find profitable, and to accumulate some political capital — which is apparently the only kind of capital that is permissible to accumulate these days.

Take our mayor, a former tennis instructor. He whined: “I question the equitability and ethic of” the valet parking service.

Others politicians jumped in. With an analysis equaling her syntax, one councilwoman complained, “It had a huge insulting factor to locals. It was like separating the rich from the poor, and here you are going skiing and those rich people have something they can afford that you can’t.”

Well, we certainly want to avoid a “huge insulting factor to locals” especially if “here you are going skiing.” And it’s the government’s job to do that, whatever “that” is.

Emotions like envy being so useful to politicians, another councilwoman who was not armed with a pitchfork but could have been, grumbled, Continue reading →

In case you haven’t kept up, I’m here to tell you that you’re a racist. We all are. Here’s the update.

Bette Midler is racist for suggesting that blacks who support President Trump have been paid to say that.

Justin Beiber.  Yes, he’s Canadian, but he’s a racist anyway.

President Trump, according to Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, according to Joe Biden

Trump supporters. Duh.

People who are tired of being called “racist” and people who don’t like being called a racist. (Query: What about the people who do like being called racist?)

Anyone who calls anyone else a “boy.” Happy parents to healthy newborns are apparently supposed to shriek, “It’s a male!” (Or does that violate a gender rule? Maybe just announce breathlessly, “It’s a human!”)

White yoga women, white evangelicals, white people who are not ashamed of bring white, white critics of the Internal Revenue Service, white gun owners, and all other white people.

An app to help people avoid dangerous neighborhoods. Continue reading →

Denver’s goose is cooked, and now the needy need more.

According to Denver officials, “Geese poop in our parks is one of the biggest complaints we have. It had gotten to the point where the parks were being almost unenjoyable for a lot of people — that is why we moved forward with this plan.”

OK so far, but I’m curious. Why just “almost”? And “a lot of people” suggests a number less than “all.” Are there some people who don’t find goose poop unenjoyable?

I have a friend who thinks goose poop is unenjoyable even on the golf course. Because when he accidentally drops his cigar and goes to pick it up, he sometimes mistakes a goose poop for it, and the goose poop — though no worse for his health and no worse smelling and tasting than a cigar — is really hard to keep lit. Sort of like smoked salmon, but more so.

On to Denver’s plan. It’s to feed the geese to needy families. This is all couched in sanitized bureaucrat-speak, of course. They say they will “cull” the geese by capturing them alive. (Why?) Then they’ll send them off to be “processed” and eventually the needy will eat them. I assume that somewhere in that process of being “processed” and before getting eaten, the geese get killed and cooked, but the bureaucrats are vague about that step.

Forget about the Rooskies, plastic straws and gender-based pronouns. The latest boogieman/boogie-womyn/boogie-etc for the Democrats is the Electoral College.

That’s of course the system where each state gets electoral votes in rough proportion to its population. The electoral votes are then cast in accordance with state law for presidential candidates. A candidate needs 270 to win the presidency.

In almost all states, it’s winner-take-all. Whichever candidate wins the most votes in a state gets all that state’s electoral votes.

This winner-take-all system chosen by the states can produce a president who did not win the most votes nationwide. This happens if Continue reading →

My column two weeks ago was entitled “Democrats are no longer hypocrites.” For posting that column, Facebook suspended me from posting privileges for 24 hours.

You might ask, as I did, why?

In my column, I noted that in the old days Democrats hypocritically held themselves out as the party of love and compassion while they opposed the Civil Rights Act, while their KKK members lynched blacks and Jews, while they rioted at their own national convention in 1968, while they promoted unlimited abortion that has killed half of black fetuses in the last generation — about 20 million of them — and while they pursued a war in Vietnam that killed over a million people

All of that is factual.

But the Dems no longer hold themselves out as the party of love and compassion. They instead hold themselves out as takers. They candidly admit — nay, they boast — that they will take money from those who earn it and give it to those who vote for them. Continue reading →

For a long time, Dems held themselves out as the party of love and compassion.  That was always a stretch. 

After all, it was the Dems who defended slavery against the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln; it was the Dems who were behind racial segregation in the South; it was the Dems who opposed civil rights laws; and it was the Dems who bombed government buildings and attacked policemen during civil unrest in the 60’s.

It was the Dems of the Ku Klux Klan who lynched blacks and occasionally Jews, and persecuted Catholics; it was the Dems who rioted at their own national convention in 1968; and it was the Dems who advocated, and still advocate, unlimited abortion on demand, thereby killing half the black fetuses in the country – about 20 million of them.
It was the Dems who got us into the Vietnam War, resulting in over 58,000 American deaths and over a million other deaths.   

Yet until recently the Dems hypocritically professed to be that party of love and compassion.  Their proof was this: They wanted to give more free stuff to more people.

That has changed.  Yes, the Dems still want to give more free stuff to more people in the hope of buying their votes. But now it’s not out of a sanctimonious show of love and compassion.  It’s instead out of anger. It’s class warfare. Continue reading →

Dogs can’t understand a simple shell game. Try it.

Let the dog watch as you put two cups on the floor. Under one, put a clean toy (not a treat or a dirty toy because the dog can smell them out). As the dog watches, slowly switch the positions of the two cups.

Then ask, “Where’s your toy?”

The dog will choose the wrong cup. That’s simply because the wrong cup is now in the location where he last saw the toy. He’s unable to grasp the fact that when you switched the positions of the cups, you also switched the positions of their contents. Dog brains are limited.

Human brains also are limited. Humans are unable to grasp some concepts, no matter how hard we think, experiment and data-gather. The following examples may fall into that category. Continue reading →

I’m talking about an ice cream parlor. Yes, people who wouldn’t know John Milton from Milton Berle are in hellish agony over the decision by a landlord not to renew the lease on a local ice cream and cookie shop called Paradise Bakery.

The landlord was apparently offered a better deal by a clothing boutique.

This, say the lefties, proves again that capitalism is bad. First, capitalists come for the ice cream parlors and replace them with more profitable clothing boutiques. Next, they’ll come for the clothing boutiques and replace them with more profitable ice cream parlors.

Responding to people’s ever-changing tastes by selling them what they want to buy is just so immoral, huh?

So the social justice warriors are bombarding the newspapers with letters, vilifying the landlord and generally signalling simultaneously their love of self and food.

Enter our old tennis instructor cum new mayor who’s never met a problem too trivial for a ham-handed government solution. He demanded a meeting with the evil landlord. This is how things work in the socialist utopia of Aspen these days. Continue reading →