Comedian and commentator Bill Maher donated $1 million to the Obama campaign in 2012. He made that kind of money in the art of mockery.

He’s good at his job. The more sacred the subject, the more biting is his mockery. He reserves some of his best for religion. In that, his liberal fans delight (as do I, occasionally).

So you might think he’d be welcomed by the liberals at Berkeley, where he has been invited to give the commencement address next spring. You’d think wrong.

Berkeley liberals are demanding that he be uninvited because, you see, the target of Maher’s most recent religion-mocking routine was Islam.

The judgment of the Berkeley liberals (who are not Muslims but claim to speak for them) is that Muslims are offended. And so Maher’s commencement invitation must be revoked. He must be silenced. He must be “shut up.”

In the old days Continue reading →

When I was 16, I got in an ugly shouting match with my father and he punched me in the face.

He stood in front of me, fists raised, awaiting my counterpunch. But his good fathering of me over the previous 16 years overcame the bad moment between us. I didn’t punch back. I instead squared my still-narrow shoulders to him, looked him in the eye and said quietly, “Don’t ever hit me again.”

And he never did.

My father was a good man, whom I loved until and after he died 15 years ago, who’d done a bad thing that day. I called him on it, as he’d taught me to, and we both became better people for it. I too have done bad things with those I love, they too have called me on it, and we too have become better people for it.

Such is the nature of humans and power. Power does not make a person bad, but it enables them to do bad things if they aren’t called out for it. The Quakers had an expression for this: “Speak truth to power.”

America was born because wise and courageous people spoke truth to power, and America survived because they established a system to ensure that people could always speak truth to power.

People spoke truth to power in demanding Continue reading →

Nearly a third of Democrats believe in astrology. This and other evidence presented in my recent column suggest that they are anti-science.

Maybe they’ve also become anti-intelligence.

Remember when Democrats derided George W. Bush as a man too stupid to perform his job? To prove it, Dems obtained his college records and military IQ tests.

Those documents disappointed them. Bush had so-so grades but at excellent schools (Yale and an MBA from Harvard) and an IQ that was in the 92nd percentile.

In short, the Dems’ self-congratulatory hypothesis, that anyone with whom they disagree must be stupid, didn’t pan out.

Dems still had a comforting corollary hypothesis that anyone with whom they agree is real smart. The guy with whom they agreed back then was Dem presidential candidate John Kerry.

But Kerry disappointed them. His college records and military IQ tests showed that he had worse grades and a lower IQ than Bush.

Kerry got partial credit, however. He was clever enough to Continue reading →

The Matterhorn was first summitted in 1865 by a team of seven climbers tied together on a single rope. Only three came back alive.

During their descent, the story goes, one fell off the 3,500-foot north face. His weight on the rope dragged others off the face with him. Four dangled in the abyss while three clung to the rock. Then the rope snapped between the dangling four and the clinging three.

We’ll never know what really happened. In those days, their hemp ropes sometimes did snap. And sometimes they were cut.

Since then, the mountain has claimed another 500 lives. It kills a dozen a year. During the short climbing season, it kills more than one a week. On any given day, there’s a fair chance that a climber on your route will fall to his death. It’s the deadliest mountain on the planet. In Zermatt, 9,500 feet below the peak, the church cemetery is crowded with crosses reading, “Died on the Matterhorn.”

Eleven years ago, I set out to climb it. Continue reading →

Let’s approach the question scientifically. Let’s look at some evidence.

Exhibit A is astrology. The non-partisan and highly respected Pew Research Center reports that nearly a third of Dems believe in astrology. That’s more than double the number of Republicans who do.

Exhibit B is vaccines. Diseases that formerly killed or disabled millions have nearly been extinguished in America by vaccines.

Enter Robert F. Kennedy of the Democrat political clan. He’s a non-scientist lawyer campaigning to end vaccinations on the grounds that they cause autism.

That’s right. In the battle between vaccine and polio, he’s taken the side of polio.

Scientists at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and elsewhere say he wrong. And they say that the quixotic campaign to end vaccinations causes illness and death.

But because he’s a Kennedy, Continue reading →

Don’t ever watch a European eat.

I’m no Europhobe. I like Europeans and their food, wine, cities, money, women, towns, museums, money, architecture, castles and women. I especially like their money and women a la carte, as when they bring them to Aspen and leave them here.

But I discovered in Europe recently that these civilized people eat like barbarians. Let’s just call them barbarians at the ate.

It goes something like this:

“Poulet, si’l vous plait,” requests a restaurant patron. And in due course, chicken appears.

“Bon appetit,” advises the chicken-bringer to the chicken-eater.

That didn’t need to be said. The chicken-eater already has a very bon appetit, believe me. He nibbles, tastes, savors, licks, squeezes, admires and fondles the chicken. He inserts it into his mouth to scrape and scour it with his tongue, teeth, lips, sinuses, esophagus, tonsils and the upper part of his stomach. Then he pulls the remaining chicken bone from his mouth.

He does this over and over, till Continue reading →

Class warfare has broken out in my town, Aspen.

“We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.” — Pogo

On one side are the people who are in the top 1 percent of wealth in the world, who’ve been dubbed the 1 percenters. “Ah, yes,” say the Aspenites, “take their money and shoot ’em”

Wait, hold your fire!

You see, the 1 percenters worldwide are people who make more than $34,000. The average income of people in Aspen is double that. Therefore, the average Aspenite is easily a 1 percenter.

So don’t declare war on them because, well, they are us. And the first rule of war is that we’re the good guys.

The bad guys are a subset of the 1 percenters — the ones who are not just in the top 1 percent but are in the top 0.1 percent.

If this were France, circa 1789, we’d say the bad guys are the “creme de la creme” and the good guys are the “creme sans la creme.”

In the fog of war, it’s easy to misplace a decimal point or a creme. For the sake of clarity, we’ll refer to the 1 percenters as the “merely rich” and to the 0.1 percent as the “really rich.”

“Cry havoc and let slip the Labradoodles of war.” — Shakespeare

Human nature being what it is, Continue reading →

Private clubs are typically considered a bad thing in Aspen. They smack of exclusivity, to borrow a phrase from the class-warfare zone.

But some local business types want to take the exclusivity out of smack. In hipster language, they wanna make some smack by openin’ private joints for gettin’ smacked.

In English, this means they want to make money by opening private clubs where a person can get high on marijuana.

People are talkin’ smack about this, you see. They’re grievin’ that gettin’ smacked has been legalized in Colorado but there isn’t anywhere to do it. Talk it, yes. Do it, no.

Well, except the house where you live. But who wants to stink up their house like that?

Speakin’ of gettin’ smacked in the house, Continue reading →

Katmandu bustles, to put it politely.

Dilapidated cars, motor scooters, trucks, rickshaws, bicycles, dogs, cats and farm animals jostle with thousands of people to fill — and I mean fill — dusty, winding, potholed streets from building to opposite building.

Not from sidewalk to sidewalk, because there are no sidewalks. And not from gutter to gutter, because there are no gutters, either.

The direction of traffic is whichever the traffic chooses at any given time, and it changes from moment to moment. Everyone and everything go every way all at once. You have to watch all directions simultaneously, else you get run over. The cacophony assaults you.

One evening in Katmandu, Continue reading →