Here’s an embarrassing confession.  After over six years here in Aspen, and nearly a lifetime in Colorado, I’m now an Aspen local.  Not only that, but I also have friends who are locals.

I know myself and I know my friends.  I recognize that no self-respecting visitor wants to be mistaken for one of us.  So as a public service, here’s a handy guide for how to behave in a way that no one will mistake you for a local: Continue reading →

We cheated death for another year, didn’t we? So now it’s time again to ring in the new year, wring out the old one and mop up the rancid drippings with a newspaper column.

Affordable lodging was the big news here in Aspen. The members of the City Council wanted to waive the town’s zoning laws for a hotel on Main Street to provide “affordable lodging” at $400 a night.

Their idea was that Aspenites would be enriched by the presence of the impoverished skiers whom this “affordable lodge” would attract. The voters voted it down.

So why does a mere hotel proposal go to the voters? It’s because the Aspen City Council is too busy with such things as the warming of the globe to look after mundane matters like the will of the locals. So the people passed a referendum to look out for themselves.

In that globe-warming pastime that the local politicos pursue feverishly to the exclusion of local matters, the mayor Continue reading →

Have you ever noticed that people who profess such deepness and profundity that they don’t care about their own money always seem to have an inordinate interest in other people’s money? Up here in Aspen, this paradox thrives.

There are two kinds of people here: The ones who are rich and care about their own money and the ones who are not and care about the same money.

The rich ones can be annoying. For the most part, they are friendly and generous to a fault. But is it really necessary to pay other people to wash your car, clean your house, fetch your skis, wipe your butt and scratch your back?

I say it’s not. And the fact that they pay through the nose for those services doesn’t make me feel much better about it. People should be self-sufficient. They should wash their own car, clean their own houses, fetch their own skis, wipe their own butts and find a friend to scratch their backs in exchange for scratching the friend’s back.

Some of the Aspen rich are trustafarian types or successful gold diggers (and I’m not referring to the miners who died out last century). But most made it on their own. How did they navigate the business world successfully if they need help to find their skis?

The answer, of course, is that Continue reading →

“You lied to me!” So said my 6-year-old daughter to me one merry Christmas.

We always made a big deal out of Christmas. It was the one night that I did the cooking, and that alone made it interesting. We lingered over the food, drank wine and eventually moved on to the entree that’s my specialty, the single-malt scotch.

After the guests had eaten enough of my dinner that they could plausibly pretend they were full, our tradition was to open gifts. We thought that the gifts, and one another, looked better in the dim Christmas Eve lights with a few drinks than in the bright Christmas Day lights with a hangover. The kids often put on a little play.

Eventually, the party ended and the guests went home. After the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, the kids would nestle all snug in their beds in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. Hallucinogenic visions of plums and whatnot danced in their sugar-infused heads.

When not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, the curtain lifted on my own little play. Continue reading →

Let me get this straight: You’re real cool and edgy.

You think global warming is the greatest threat to America, Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare, people with more money than you have too much and big government is suited for every task except the task of defending the country. Oh, and you’re way into, like, several Eastern religions.

To which I say, “Yawn.”

Come on. You think exactly what your college professors told you to think, exactly what government bureaucrats told you to think and exactly what your friends told you to think — all because your goal in life is to be exactly like them.

And I’m supposed to give you credit for being edgy?

Let’s take a little historical journey into edginess. Continue reading →

One of the catechisms of the liberal faith is that they are altruistic while conservatives are selfish. Liberals like this part of their faith because it makes conservatives not only wrong about politics but bad people to boot. (And I do mean boot.)

This belief being a matter of faith and not fact, it is unsupported by the data, which I’ll get to in a moment. So, instead, liberals support it with parables.

One I recently saw is typical. A liberal wrote about his conservative friend who purportedly is selfish, as conservatives purportedly are.

In contrast was this liberal himself, who, he modestly reported, is altruistic. He informed us that his altruism is good for his soul.

Apart from the incongruity of performing altruism for the purpose of benefiting one’s own soul, I have two questions about this story, and then we’ll get to the data.

First, what kind of altruist goes around advertising his altruism? Continue reading →

The true believers of global warming got some bad news recently. Namely, things are not so bad. Here’s the story.

They had predicted, often and repeatedly, that global warming would melt the ice in Antarctica. Melting Antarctic ice would be a disaster because it would flow into the oceans, making them rise like water in a bathtub with the faucet left on.

The skeptics were skeptical. For expressing their scientific skepticism, the believers name-called them “deniers,” took away their professorships and denied them government grants for their work.

The local “green guy” with the ski company in Aspen, which makes money by burning fossil fuels to drag people up a hill so that they can amuse themselves by sliding back down, purchased additional fossil fuel indulgences from the high priests by announcing that people who don’t chant the global warming mantra cannot be elected to public office anymore.

It turns out, however, that Continue reading →

Last month, we saw the World Series and another set of debates in the presidential election.

In the World Series, fair-minded umpires let the players play. They called balls and strikes the way they saw them. The best team won.

In the debates, the umpires cheated. Under the guise of moderators, they didn’t just call the balls and strikes — they delivered the pitches. They delivered pitch after pitch for the Democrats and called strike after strike against the Republicans.

And those pitches were not just any kind of pitch. Not confident of their ability to get fastballs past the Republican candidates, the moderators doctored the ball by smearing their questions with bias and smirk. They threw spitballs.

Their goal was not to ask hard policy questions that might inform viewers as to which GOP candidate would be the best president. It was to name-call them, mock them and strike them out.

In contrast, the moderators in the one Dem debate served up not spitballs but softballs, and invited the Dem candidates to participate in a home-run derby.

The moderators assumed they would get away with bending the rules because they always had.

And so in a scene right out of a Saturday Night Live skit, Continue reading →

“No fair! Bobby got more!” Anyone with siblings remembers that whine.

It didn’t matter what Bobby did to get more. The point was that Bobby should not get more of anything for any reason.

Fast forward 50 years. Here in Aspen, some people are angry that “Bobby got more” because he owns a downtown penthouse with a hot tub on the roof.

But in their fog of envy and rage, they’ve forgotten about the different choices that Bobby and his siblings made over the past half-century. Continue reading →

American students are lousy compared with students in many other industrialized countries. In a 2013 survey of 64 industrialized countries, American students ranked 30th in math, 23rd in science and 20th in reading.

Comically and sadly, however, American students themselves consistently rate themselves much higher than their foreign counterparts. The one subject where they excel is in self-esteem.

Some argue that the reason for our dismal performance is that we don’t pay teachers enough. But we do in fact pay teachers fairly well in comparison to those countries that are outperforming us. Moreover, the people making that argument also tend to argue that teachers are doing a great job.

So which is it? Are teachers already doing a great job? Or are they not doing a great job, but they would if only we paid them more? Continue reading →