Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
Alex Pretti did something foolish and illegal at the protest in Minneapolis. He interfered with law enforcement agents. There will be debates for days if not years about whether his illegal interference with the cops, the discovery of his gun, and his violent resistance justified them shooting him.
In considering that issue, I urge readers to consider it not from the warm comfort of their recliner while watching slow-motion videotapes interspersed with football highlights, but from the perspective of cops who are being taunted, spat upon, name-called, and threatened with being run over by organized protesters in the bitter cold, who suddenly discover in a scuffle that one of those protesters has a gun hidden in his pants.
(I’m glad to report that speculation that the gun was planted on Pretti by the cops appears to be disproven.)
But let’s put to one side the issue of whether the shooting was justified. Even now, we still don’t have enough facts to make that determination.
Let’s instead consider a threshold issue: Why did Pretti bring a gun?
Note that it’s not illegal in America for ordinary citizens to own a gun. And it’s not illegal to protest non-violently.
It’s not even illegal to bring a gun to a protest (despite claims to the contrary by a Trump Administration official).
In short, whatever illegalities Alex Pretti committed at the protest, he did nothing illegal in putting a gun in his pants and going there.
But why did he? Why did he hide a loaded gun in his pants?
Ordinary people carry guns routinely for lots of reasons. Most of those reasons are poor ones, in my judgment, but not illegal ones. Some ordinary people carry guns simply because it makes them feel secure or even masculine. Some ordinary people carry guns because it plays into boyish fantasies.
And a few ordinary people carry guns because they have legitimate reasons to think they may need them for lawful self-defense and they have the expert skill and excellent judgment to use them properly in that mode.
Pretti seems not to be in the latter category. Rather, he brought a gun to the protest because it made him feel secure or masculine or fulfilled boyish fantasies. Sadly, those feelings and fantasies cost him his life.
Before leaving this incident, there’s a tribal juxtaposition here that is worth noting. Conservatives typically defend and even celebrate owning and carrying a gun, while liberals typically decry the same. Conversely, liberals typically defend and even celebrate protests of law enforcement, while conservatives typically decry the same.
So, conservative and liberal tribalists are left in a quandary when somebody brings a gun to a protest of the immigration laws. Conservatives wonder, do we defend the gun-toter even if he’s protesting? Liberals wonder, do we defend the protester even if he totes a gun?
I like the fact that this quandary forces the tribes to think past tribal identities. Conservatives are forced to acknowledge that owning and carrying a gun may be lawful but there are circumstances where it isn’t smart or right. Liberals are forced to acknowledge that protesting may be lawful but there are circumstances where that, too, isn’t smart or right.
In short, judging an act often requires thought beyond merely identifying the tribe of the person performing that act. A bit more thought and a bit less tribalism would be helpful these days.
David Brooks holds himself out as a moderate Republican. I suspect, however, that the last Republican he voted for was George H.W. Bush – the senior Bush who was elected 38 years ago.
Disgracefully but predictably, PBS pairs Brooks with Jonathan Capehart in a point-counterpoint format. PBS pretends that this little tête-à-tête constitutes balance – an avowed far-left gay Black man versus a faux Republican moderate who, in reality, hasn’t voted for a Republican in decades.
But Brooks made a good point in a recent piece on the shooting in Minneapolis. First, Capehart performed his predictable over-the-top song and dance about murder-murder-MURDER!!!
Then Brooks quietly observed that, in a better day, principled people would believe what they see on videotape. Today, however, it’s the opposite. Rather than believing what they see, people are seeing what they believe.
People watching exactly the same videotape believe they watched a murder, or believe they watched a cop shoot someone in self-defense, based on their pre-existing political persuasion.
Today’s political partisans are like sports fans. When two people are watching the same game but rooting for opposite teams, they typically both believe their team is getting cheated by the refs.
Of course, that can’t be true. On balance, the refs are either fair, or biased one way, or biased the other way. But people’s emotions cloud their judgment. It’s especially pernicious that they’re unaware of this phenomenon. That’s bad enough in sports; it’s tragic and often unjust in law enforcement.
Of course, after making this good point, Brooks went on to bash President Trump. There’s a reason, after all, that Brooks has a forum at PBS and The New York Times.
As of today, a few more facts have come it. I don’t know what Brooks is thinking right now, but I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.
First, a couple of background facts. Context matters.
The cop (I’ll call him a “cop” for convenience, though I know he’s not a policeman, and I do so without derogation) was the victim of another car incident last year. His arm got tangled up inside the car of a person he was apprehending as the person drove off. The cop was dragged 300 feet down the paved road by the accelerating car. He was lucky to survive.
Does that matter? Maybe not in a legal sense. After all, it was a completely different incident that occurred many months ago. But it suggests that the man was probably sensitive to the danger in such a circumstance. I sure would be.
Here’s another background fact. The left has made a studied show of resistance to enforcement of the immigration laws. They’ve flung names at ICE cops such as Nazis, fascists and worse. They’ve physically obstructed them, and occasionally physically attacked them with rocks and bottles. That’s criminal behavior, even though it does not justify a lethal response.
They’ve also used their cars to obstruct the cops and, as I’ve just reported above, on at least one occasion they dragged a cop 300 feet with their car.
Their objective has been to provoke the cops into victimizing them. Lefty influencers have explicitly urged protesters to put their bodies on the line.
If they can provoke the cops into violence in their enforcement of the immigration laws, goes the thinking on the left, people will come to believe that the laws being enforced are bad.
It’s a very old strategy. It often works, especially when the news media is sympathetic to the cause.
A final background fact. The Administration has taken a confrontational approach to immigration enforcement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it may be warranted in view of the lackadaisical approach taken for many years. But confrontational approaches do have a tendency to produce, well, confrontations.
Whatever approach is utilized, it might be useful to combine it with an employee card-check system where employers are required to check the immigration status of their employees. Substantial fines could be imposed on companies who hire illegals. Such a system has been talked about for years and partially utilized, but politicians too often bow to business lobbies who want to hire illegals for cheap labor.
The bystander’s video is taken from a stationary position. It shows a cop approaching the car, putting his hand on the driver’s door handle, and ordering her:
“Get the fuck out of the car.”
The car moves backward a few inches. The front wheels turn hard right and it juts forward. Only then, you can see another cop at the left front of the car. He shoots three times. We later learn that his shots leave one bullet hole through the windshield. At least one shot went in through the driver’s open side window as the car moved past him.
The shot through the driver’s side window suggests that, whatever danger the cop was in at the time he shot through the windshield, the cop by then had gotten out of the way, for he was then alongside the car.
The video taken by the cop’s body cam provides more context as the cop circles the car. The woman’s wife was at the scene and had gotten out of the car. Smirking, the wife taunted the cop repeatedly:
“Come at us! You want to come at us?”
A refection of the cop is visible in the shiny finish of the car, and he appears to be a sizable man. The wife taunts him again:
“Go get yourself some lunch, big boy!”
As the cop circles to the front of the car, the shots come quite suddenly. The situation was tense but exploded unexpectedly, to me as the viewer anyway, with (1) the wife starting to open the passenger side door and shouting “drive, baby, drive,” (2) the car lurching forward, and (3) three shots ringing out quickly.
I cannot tell whether the cop legitimately feared for his life when he fired the first shot. I can say, however, that he was very ready to pull his gun and shoot, because he did so very fast. As for the second and third shots, see my discussion above.
It’s still early, and not all the facts are in. Maybe they never will be.
But here’s my tentative assessment. Two lefty troublemakers went looking for trouble. They used their car to block armed cops on an icy street from doing their jobs, and they taunted the cops with personal insults. One cop reacted with a profanity. Another cop – who’d been dragged 300 feet by a car in such a situation – reacted with his gun when the car lurched toward him as he was circling it and he heard “Drive, baby, drive!”
Is this tragic? Yes. Was it preventable? Yes. Is it murder? No.
A good part of a person’s success in the game of life is a product of nature and nurture – his genes and the parenting he received. People who were unlucky enough to receive bad genes, or bad parenting, or both, tend to be unsuccessful.
Tragically for America, these people who are unsuccessful at life are the very people who are disproportionately successful at having babies. Those babies tend to inherit their parents’ bad genes and learn their bad parenting.
When those babies grow up (or, often, just partially grow up) they, like their parents, are unsuccessful at life but disproportionately successful at having babies. Those babies, in turn, wind up short-changed by both nature and nurturing.
What I’ve just described already takes us through three generations. In the end, there’s no end. We’ve set up a vicious and expanding cascade of poverty and failure.
The effect is a policy of survival – and propagation – of the un-fittest. Charles Darwin would predict adverse consequences for our species.
Before you take offense, I hasten to add that general rules often are riddled with exceptions. I grew up in in a family of six with modest means. We all turned out OK. But the fact that it sometimes rains in the desert doesn’t disprove the general rule that deserts are dry.
The welfare state makes it all the worse. This was recognized as early as 1965 by intellectuals such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future Democrat Senator from New York back when the Democratic Party sometimes produced rigorous thinking rather than identity politics. Moynihan’s work focused on poor Black families but it’s not a Black issue per se; it’s a poverty issue.
Moynihan criticized social welfare policies where we pay unsuccessful people to have unsuccessful babies to propagate their failure at life, thereby amplifying this vicious cascade of poverty.
The more babies they have, the more money we pay them. Then their babies have babies, and we’re off to the races.
Perhaps our policy should be exactly the opposite. Perhaps we should discourage unsuccessful people from having unsuccessful babies.
A smart start to getting out of this hole would be to stop digging. We should stop paying unsuccessful people to propagate. To that end, eliminate the $3,000 child tax credit.
Then go a step further. Pay people not to have babies. A simple way to accomplish that would be to pay them to undergo sterilization.
That sounds cruel, but is it really? If “my body my choice” justifies people aborting unborn babies because they’re inconvenient, then surely it justifies people accepting money to prevent the babies’ conception. For gosh sakes, the manufacturers of condoms accept money to prevent the conception of babies.
Moreover, many if not most of the babies these people have are utterly unplanned. If it’s cruel to prevent unwanted pregnancies, then why haven’t we outlawed those condoms – along with birth control pills, the rhythm method, premature withdrawal, abstinence and chastity?
I recognize that courts are wary of government measures that produce sterilization. Courts might view a system where the government pays people taxpayer money conditioned on them being sterilized as tantamount to the government sterilizing them involuntarily.
So don’t do it through the government. Let foundations and philanthropists administer the system with private funds. A foundation or a rich guy (Elon, do you hear me?) could say, “Here’s $3,000 for anyone under 50 who wants to get sterilized. And we’ll pay the medical bills, too.”
The people that we want not to have babies would find that offer tempting, because $3,000 is a lot of money to those people. But the people we want to have babies would not find that offer tempting, because that’s not a lot of money to them.
Over time, we just might reduce the population of undesirables (not to be confused with deplorables).
You might ask, what about America’s fertility crisis? Yes, it’s a fact that American (and European) birthrates are less than what’s required to maintain the current populations. And so, the argument goes, we should provide incentives for people to procreate.
That argument is premised on the notion that when it comes to people, the more the better. I question that notion, especially when I’m forced to endure crowded freeways, crowded hiking trails, and crowded crowds.
We have eight billion of us. Is that not enough? I don’t know about you, but I rarely think, “Gee, I wish there were more people here.”
From a pure financial perspective, it’s true that an ever-increasing population is necessary to continue our Ponzi scheme called Social Security, where we need more and more workers to support more and more retirees who live longer and longer (though the effects of rationed medical care – which seems inevitable and already encroaching upon us – will partially solve that problem).
I submit that the way to fix the Ponzi scheme of Social Security is not to produce infinitely expanded pools of young suckers to support it, but to phase out the scheme. Like all Ponzi schemes, it’s unsustainable. We cannot increase our population forever to produce an ever-increasing pool of hard-working suckers to support an ever-increasing number of long-lived retirees. At some point, we run out of space, resources and suckers.
Even if the number of suckers we breed to support the burgeoning population of retirees is sufficient in quantity, they are apt to be insufficient in quality. How many generations of bad nature and nurture can a society withstand?
Back when Sleepy Joe Biden was “President” and someone with a Tourette’s laugh named KAMala or KaMALa or something, was his trustless assistant, we had a fashion fest.
You know, sort of like hula hoops, or streaking, or socialism, or The Twist.
First it was COVID, the disease that was not leaked from a Chinese bioweapons lab, except that it was. The Chinese and their allies in the teachers’ unions successfully produced a generation of illiterate Americans. (But those Americans would have been illiterate anyway because, after all, their teachers are in the teachers’ unions.)
Then came Russian collusion – the fact that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, somehow, to get himself elected back in the Dark Ages of Trump 1. That fact was not factual but it was still a good fad. Call it a fadt.
Hot on the heels of that came the false fact that Sleepy Joe’s drug-addicted, deadbeat, foreign-favors-receiving criminal son left his incriminating laptop at a repair shop. That false fact, however, turned out to be a true fact, but it was fashionable to sneer that it wasn’t – that it was just something planted by the Russians. (Those Russians were everywhere!)
Believe you me, it was a crazy time.
But the craziest craziness was when attention-starved boys decided to pretend to be girls.
It worked. They got lots of attention and even cheers – from parents, classmates, teachers (in the teachers’ unions, naturally), and women’s athletic teams who didn’t like the little pervs in the women’s locker room, which not only garnered attention for them but also made them victims.
Being a victim at the center of attention was about the highest achievement in the land. And if you were a pervert to boot, well, that’s god-like (lower case “g” for this crowd).
Here’s where we need to be careful about our terminology. There are transvestites and there are transexuals. Transvestites are men who like to dress up as women.
Disclosure: I confess that in college I once dressed up like a woman on a Halloween about three hundred years ago. We all thought it was funny, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed my costume.
Some men do enjoy that costume. They really enjoy that costume, if you know what I mean. Scientists say that men who enjoy dressing up as women, not just on Halloween and not just every three hundred years, are “transvestites.”
Importantly, a transvestite man doesn’t think he’s a woman, and has no desire to become one. He’s simply (if I can use the word “simply” here) a man who for sexual pleasure likes to dress up as a woman.
Transvestites in history are not unheard-of, but they’re usually unheard from. They get their jollies in a private sort of way. They’ve generally been pretty harmless.
Rumor is that J. Edgar Hoover was a transvestite. That rumor has been mostly debunked, and historians now say he was merely gay, with a close aid as his long-time lover.
Interestingly, as Director of the FBI, Hoover liked to keep files on the sexploits of politicians, with a special emphasis on possible homosexuality for the purpose of blackmailing them if necessary, and, perhaps, because he just liked gathering and keeping those files.
Transsexualism is something different. A man who is transexual wants to be a woman. Some have surgeons surgically remove their genitals and carve a vagina into the bottom of their torso. Such a man wants not just female clothing but also female parts and female pronouns. He wants to be a she.
Unlike transvestites who typically do their thing in private, transexuals seem to crave the limelight. It’s not enough to pretend to be a woman, it’s not enough to dress like a woman, and it’s not even enough to surgically mutilate themselves to look like a woman when they’re naked.
They want you to know they are transexuals. They want you to know that they’re men who “have become” women. And they want you to acknowledge that they actually are women.
That last thing – demanding that you acknowledge that a man pretending to be a woman actually is one – is their sure-fire attention-getter. Demanding that you sign onto something that is patently untrue is sure to get your attention.
Transexuals are very rare. Scientist estimate that far fewer that 1% of men are transexuals. It’s safe to say that evolution has not favored men who go around pretending to be women, mutilating their genitals, and demanding that you admit that they really are women.
But in the fashion-fest of a few years ago, young people were signing up to be transexuals like crazy. The numbers reached something like 5-7%.
Ah, but fads fade, and this one did too. In the latest surveys, the number is something like half that, and dropping fast.
Odd, that, since we were told that transexuals were “born that way.” These folks “born that way” seem to be about half in number that they were a year ago.
Maybe the fade in this fashion has something to do with the association between transsexualism and cold-blooded murder. And maybe not, since cold-blooded murder seems rather fashionable too these days.
More likely, it’s just a fad that ran its course. Fads are that way.
I can imagine a fashion-conscious tranny today. “Now where do I go to get my penis back?”
“Epic” is how a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal last week described the current investment in AI. In today’s dollars, it dwarfs the investment in the railways in the 1800s. It dwarfs the investment in electrifying America in the early 1900s. It dwarfs the investment in the interstate highway system in the mid-1900s. It dwarfs the investments in the internet at the end of the last century.
So, went the gist of the Journal’s article, it must all be an investment bubble – right? – that will come crashing down the way Pets.com and other internet stocks did.
Or didn’t. Bear in mind that Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are internet companies, too.
A competing article in the Journal last week describes how Walmart plans to manage AI. They say AI will change every job in the company – all 2.1 million of them. They anticipate substantial growth in their revenues and store count, but see their employee count staying flat. They intend to use AI to do more work without more people.
Along the same lines, the Chief Executive of Ford Motor Company said last summer, “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
The average person has limited experience with AI. They do know that when they need a gas station, they no longer have to type “gas station” into Google Maps. Instead, they can tell AI, “Find me a gas station,” and – voila! – it does. It’s like having a wife who can read maps!
Several criticisms are often leveled at AI. One is that it’s great at gathering information off the internet, but its conclusions are only as good as the information it gathers. This criticism is valid. How could it not be? Like you and me, the machine is only as good as the information it relies upon.
On the other hand, the machine’s use of information is getting better and better as the algorithms mature. It is learning, for example, that quantity does not equal quality. Just because something is said many times on the internet does not make it right, and just because something is said seldomly on the internet does not make it wrong.
It makes this discernment both by considering the credibility of the information sources and also . . . [drum roll] . . . by reasoning.
That’s right, AI can think. It can look at a piece of information and say, “Nah, that cannot be accurate. It cannot be accurate that it takes days for sunlight to reach the Earth, given that the Earth is X miles from the sun and light travels at Y mph.”
In my judgment, that constitutes thinking. The machine is not specifically asked how long it takes for sunlight to reach the earth. Rather, in the course of answering the question it is asked, it rejects information that it reasons cannot be accurate.
Here’s another example of AI thinking. Already, you can give it information about a building site for a house, such as the location, the topography and the boundaries, and tell it:
“Give me some birds-eye views (yes, it will understand that colloquialism) of potential house designs for a client who likes midcentury architecture and passive solar, and wants four bedrooms and a wine cellar. Oh, and bear in mind the Building Code of Pitkin County, Colorado and the HOA rules at this address.”
In seconds, the machine will churn out diagrams of such houses. It doesn’t scour the internet for diagrams to copy; it generates its own. It becomes an architect – one with the benefit of Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonardo da Vinci, Antoni Gaudí, and all the others firmly in its “head” together with an instantaneous ability to figure out the workability of the designs it conceives.
If you want to tinker with a design, it will let you do so. You can say, “I like this one, but it’s kinda tall. Can you make it shorter and with a bigger footprint?” Or, “Let’s get into the HVAC and plumbing details on this one. Give me some schematics.”
To me, that’s high-level thinking again.
In medicine, AI already has the capability (though it hasn’t been tasked with this yet) to have on-file a patient’s lifetime medical history. A technician could say, “This patient is now experiencing sharp pain in his left-side torso and recurring headaches. What do you think?” AI might respond:
“It’s not his left kidney, because this patient had his left kidney removed in 2013. I recommend the following tests . . . By the way, be careful with poking him – he’s on blood thinners. And he’s had claustrophobia in the MRI chamber before. Note his family history of diabetes.”
To me, that’s high-level thinking yet again.
Ah, you say, that’s all just problem-solving. The machine still cannot dream, cannot feel. It knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
Maybe, but the same can said of many people.
As for AI’s ability as an aesthete, I asked ChatGPT the following (with deliberate misspellings):
“Make me a 3-dimentional wall hanging about 3 x 5 feet made out of scrap steel welded together to make an abstract sculture.”
Here’s what it came up with:
I probably wouldn’t hang this on my wall, but, then again, I probably wouldn’t hang on my wall what passes for modern abstract masterpieces in museums today, either.
Now a word about the purported downside of AI – the Luddite notion that it will put everyone out of work and so we’ll all starve to death.
Economists know this is bunk. Technology certainly produces dislocations. The invention of refrigeration put thousands of ice men out of work. The invention of the automobile put millions of buggy-makers out of work. The invention of the internet is gradually putting late-night comedians out of work.
But overall, these technological wonders improve the efficiency of society – and, therefore, the wealth of society. If an invention can improve a worker’s efficiency by 50%, that doesn’t mean half the workers get laid off and starve. In the big picture, it instead means workers can get paid the same for working half the hours, or get paid double for working the same hours, or some blend of those two outcomes.
That’s what has happened throughout history in response to technological innovation. We work fewer and fewer hours, even as we have more and more things. (Whether that makes us happier is different question.)
We also live longer and longer. With AI, could we live forever?
Maybe. AI might not just cure disease and treat injury, but also stop the biological mechanism of aging.
Or AI might have the ability to receive an upload of a person’s memory – his life – before his body dies. A memory in a durable machine that can interact with humans would seem no less valid than a memory in a failing brain that increasingly cannot.
Could that AI embodiment of a person, residing on the computer cloud (maybe Heaven really is in a cloud!) continue to interact with the flesh and blood world? I don’t see why not. And what it experiences would of course add to the experiences that were originally uploaded. “You” would continue to “live.”
The AI “you” would undoubtedly be the object of real love by flesh-and-blood humans (let’s call them “humies”). After all, people routinely experience real love for inanimate objects like dolls and teddy bears and sports cars. They could surely love an image that talks with them, especially if they loved that image before its humie got buried.
In receiving that upload of a person’s memory, would the machine also receive his soul? I cannot answer that question, nor, I suspect, can AI.
It’s amusing to see them pose the question to themselves. It’s not really a question; rather, it’s rhetorical. Posing the question, “Why aren’t we marching in the streets?” is their way of saying that they really should be.
But even after considerable angst, self-incrimination, and rhetorical excesses about not marching, they’re still not marching.
As for why, there’s a simple answer and a complicated one. The simple answer is, because it’s cold outside.
Remember the “protest era” of the 60s and early 70s? College kids would organize protests and sometimes riots with two goals in mind:
Ending the Vietnam War (or, really, just ending the draft); and
Ending Spring finals.
You might reasonably ask, what about Winter finals? Well, they wanted to end Winter finals, too, but, baby, it’s cold outside when Winter finals roll around. What fun is it to protest outside in the cold?
So, the hippies conveniently decided that the Vietnam War – or at least the draft – needed ending mainly in the spring, not the winter.
Along the way, the hippies appointed themselves as the outsiders, the disrupters, the independent thinkers, the anti-establishmentarians who were rightly skeptical of government.
Such images were useful in fitting in with the cool kids, and picking up chicks.
Here we are, two generations later. The hippies are now grown up, kind of, and have jobs, sort of, at businesses, of a type, such as colleges and media outlets tasked with setting the cultural norms.
Those hippie-run institutions survive on some tuition from suckers (or advertising in the case of the media), huge donations of money from foundations that they and their friends run, and grants from a government that, again, they and their friends run.
In short, the hippies who sought to tear down the establishment are now . . . the establishment. Ironically, and with an utter lack of self-awareness, they continue their quixotic tilting at The Man, even as they themselves have morphed into him.
There’s one particular man they loath. This Bad Orange Man is an outsider, a disrupter, an independent thinker, an anti-establishmentarian who is rightly skeptical of government.
Does that sound familiar?
He’s everything the hippies imagined themselves to be two generations ago, and still fantasize that they are now, even as they rake in money and power from the establishment they simultaneously condemn and control.
Bad Orange Man is therefore not just a threat to their creature comforts, but to their self-image. For that, they deem him stupid, diabolically clever, fascist, Hitlerian, and a pooh-pooh breath with corny hair. They’d say he’s a communist, if only they disliked communism.
Yes, he’s as bad as they get. But who wants to stand on the streets of DC in the semi-freezing winter?
That’s the simple answer to the question “Why aren’t we protesting in the streets?”
Here’s the complicated answer. They feel just a twinge of admiration and empathy for Bad Orange Man. Maybe they know, deep in their subconscious, that he’s not The Man they protested against, but is the man they always imagined themselves to be.
Then again, that credits them with both a consciousness and a conscience.
We’ll see come spring. Until then, the brave resistance of the aging hippies will remain mostly pixel protests composed in keyboard comfort. Come spring, they might get out a bit more. But those achy knees . . .
the Aspen beat 