Is Trump threatening war in retaliation for not being given the Peace Prize?

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President Trump did some good things toward peace last year, for which I’ve congratulated him.

Among other things, he derailed the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons with which to make good their never-ending promise to destroy what they call the “Little Satan” of Israel and then the “Big Satan” of America.

He also supported Israel in its effort to contain Hamas and other Islamic terror groups. Israel’s efforts entailed some pain and suffering, but it was the only option to prevent another massacre like October 7, a massacre that Hamas explicitly vowed to repeat.

More recently, he decapitated a narco-klepto-regime in our own hemisphere, Venezuela, that had gotten very cozy with the outlaw states of the world and inflicted horrible misery on its own people.

But the Nobel Peace Prize Committee chose to give their prize to someone else. They have their reasons. One possible reason, which they will never admit to, is that they hate Jews, hate Israel, and hate anyone who helps the Jews of Israel secure their ongoing existence. So, Trump’s efforts to help achieve peace in the Middle East may have actually hurt his chances for the Peace Prize.

In any event, the Prize Committee has explained that the cutoff for “good deeds” considered in Committee determinations was long before Trump’s Middle East triumph. That seems fair enough. Deadlines are deadlines.

As for Venezuela, the actions by Trump to remove the dictator came not just after the cutoff, but after the Prize had already been awarded.

The person who won the Prize was the opposition leader of Venezuela who has literally risked her life for her people for years.

Before the Prize was awarded, she thanked Trump for his support. After the Prize was awarded, and after the dictator had been removed, she was effusive in her thanks to Trump.

In fact, in a visit to the White House last week, she offered the prize to Trump. He accepted it. The physical Prize in now in his possession.

However, the Nobel Committee has declared that transferring physical possession of the Prize does not accomplish a transfer of the Prize itself. The winner is and will always be the Venezuelan opposition leader to whom it was awarded.

It’s a little like an Olympic gold medal. If physical possession of a medal is transferred from the medal winner to someone else, by gift, sale, theft, accident or otherwise, the medalist is still the person who won it, not the transferee.

All this did not sit well with the President. He openly campaigned for the Prize. After it was awarded to someone else, he said again that it was he who deserved it. When he was offered a gift of it by the winner, he accepted the gift and now proudly displays it as if he actually won it.

That was all awkward enough. Over the weekend came the Peace Prize coup de grace.

Trump has been agitating to take possession of Greenland. That’s not as crazy as it sounds but, as always, Trump has pursued this latest prize ham-handedly. He’s even made noises about a military invasion.

The current owner of Greenland is Denmark. They’ve held the place for roughly a thousand years – since long before Columbus sailed. The Danes are not happy with Trump’s invasion threat. Nor is the rest of Europe.

As a general matter, I have little geopolitical sympathy for the Danes or for the rest of Europe. They’ve been freeloading off America’s defense for three generations. And all the while, they impugn us with a moral and cultural smugness that is hard to bear.

The Greenland matter will get worked out. As usual in Trump spats with foreign powers, it will involve some gain for America (probably not outright possession of Greenland, however). Whether that long-term gain will be worth the short-term (hopefully) alienation of allies is something history will judge.

Meanwhile, we have negotiations by public tweets and non-confidential texts. In a text over the weekend, Trump told the Norwegian Prime Minister:

“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

This is weird on several levels. First, there is the petulance of a sore loser. That needs no elaboration.

Second, the President seems to be suggesting a substantive change in America’s priorities and policy simply because he personally did not win the Peace Prize derby. He suggests that before losing, he had been thinking “purely of peace” but he “can now think about what is good and proper for the United States.”

Wait a minute! He’s been preaching “America First” for years. Now, we find out it’s America First only since last fall when he lost out on the Peace Prize. If he’s awarded the next Peace Prize (fat chance!), will we be back to something other than America First?

Finally, there’s the irony of it all. The President seems to be willing – nay, he seems to be begging – to be manipulated: “Give me the Peace Prize, or I’ll wage war on Greenland!” Is that an effective pitch for a Peace Prize?

Maybe I’m missing something. But if this is “the art of the deal,” then someone is not playing with a full deck.

Colorado ski conditions are worse than ever. Yay!

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Switzerland ski resort last February. Places in Colorado this year are worse.

OK, it’s not technically true that ski conditions right now are worse than ever. The snowpack at Colorado ski resorts today (Jan. 16, 2026) is not worse than the snowpack in, say, an average August.

But for this time of year, the Colorado snowpack is officially the worst on record.

That’s right, since the time they’ve been keeping records of the Colorado snowpack, this is the lowest it’s ever been for mid-January. It’s barely half the normal. The forecast for the next ten days is more of the same – warm and dry.

My eyes confirm all this. The snowpack on top of Vail Pass at 10,662 feet is barely over my shoe tops.

In the town of Vail itself, about 2,700 feet lower, there’s bare dirt where there’s supposed to be deep drifts. The kitschy Norman Rockwell style sculptures littering Vail which are supposed to be buried under the winter snow are fully visible. That’s a bad thing; that stuff shouldn’t be visible even in the summer.

The ski resorts try to hide all this bare dirt with snowmaking equipment. Not by parking the equipment on the bare slopes, but by using it to make artificial snow that they spray over the slopes at night.

But that doesn’t work very well. Even a modest-sized resort of three thousand acres can cover only a fraction of the slopes with artificial snow. Moreover, they can’t cover the slopes deep enough to safely bury rocks and tree stumps. They instead succeed in burying such obstacles just enough to conceal them with a half inch of artificial snow – until the customer hits one.

As for the challenging terrain of blacks (lower case “b”), double blacks and extreme stuff, forget about it. They won’t be open at all this season, or at least not safely. The open terrain at Copper Mountain right now is barely a third of their total terrain. In a normal mid-January, it would be more like 90%.

The daily lift ticket price at Aspen is $254. That amounts to about $1.00 per snowflake.

But cheer up. It’s only about ten cents per a-hole.

I see two things to cheer about amid this skiing catastrophe. First, driving is great. The roads are snow-free. In fact, they’re bone dry, even over the high passes.

As I mentioned in a recent piece, the Catch 22 of skiing is that when the skiing is good because slopes are snowy, you can’t get there because the roads, too, are snowy. And when the driving is good because the roads are snow-free, the skiing is bad because the slopes, too, are snow-free.

Moreover, traffic volume is down. Skiers are staying home because they know that, since the roads are great, the skiing is terrible.

The second good thing about the skiing catastrophe is that it allows Colorado to be, once again, something like Colorado – the Colorado I grew up in. The Colorado of the Ute Indians and Zebulon Pike and Molly Brown. OK, maybe John Denver. The others were all before my time (but not by much.)

Skiing, you see, ruined Colorado. And I say that as a person who used to ski upwards of fifty days a year, including significant backcountry winter ascents coupled with skiing descents.

Resort skiing has nothing to do with nature. A ski resort is like a mountain converted into an expensive amusement park full of no-nothing morons who ski the way they drive – too fast for their ability and with little regard for others.

A few more years of great winter driving conditions, and Colorado might again be Colorado. We might get rid of the skiers from out-of-state.

Now if only they would take with them the wolves from British Columbia, the potheads from California, and the Democrats from all over . . .

Two foolish women taunted an overwrought cop, and now one is dead

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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.  

On to the incident itself. At least two videotapes are available. One was taken by a bystander, and the other is the body cam that was being worn by the cop who fired the shots.

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.

We can buy Greenland by buying the Greenlanders

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We don’t need to invade Greenland. We can instead buy the Greenlanders. Here’s my scheme.

First, let’s review what’s at stake. Greenland is the size of Texas. It’s strategically positioned in the North Atlantic. It extends almost to the North Pole (a spot that is on ocean ice north of Greenland).

We already have an air base in Greenland above the Arctic Circle which serves to provide early warning of incoming Russian missiles and bombers. And we also have our own bombers and missiles stationed there.

Greenland is rich in natural resources, including petroleum, fish, fresh water, gold, lithium and rare earth metals.

The population of Greenland is only about 57,000 people, 3,000 polar bears and 50,000 seals. The largest town holds only 18,000 people – smaller than the enrollment of a typical liberal arts college.

Denmark claims to “own” Greenland because it was settled by a few hundred Vikings – you know, pirates – thousands of years after it was settled by Native Americans. Greenland is technically a Danish colony today. In today’s world, however, that doesn’t give the Danes a claim to it. If anything, it makes the Danes “colonizers” and gives Greenlanders a claim against Denmark for reparations.

At some point, Greenland will be absorbed by one of today’s superpowers. It’s just too good and too vulnerable to pass up. Denmark is not in a position geographically, militarily or economically to resist a takeover. As for Greenland’s own military, well, there isn’t one.

The official language of Greenland is Eskimo. It’s not officially called that, however. (In fact, Eskimos aren’t officially called Eskimos anymore, either. They’re now called Inuit. Don’t ask why. That would be racist. But it has to do with raw meat.) The official language is officially called Kalaallisut. But most inhabitants and nearly all educated ones also speak English.

Given that 88% of the island claims to be Inuit, their loyalty to Denmark – the colonizers – is doubtful.

Of course, the U.S. could conquer Greenland with the Nantucket Police Force in a weekend. But there’s a better way.

Offer the Greenlanders money. Say, about a million dollars per man, woman and child. Since there are only 57,000 inhabitants, the total bill would come to only $57 billion.

That’s chump change. It’s less than 1% of the U.S. annual federal budget. It’s less than 4% of the outstanding student loan debt in America. It’s about what Somali immigrants defraud us out of in a couple of years.

I can see it now. We’ll annex Greenland. The Greenlanders will be thrilled and wealthy. We’ll build Trump Towers all along the coast, legalize gambling, and recoup from the inhabitants our $57 billion in a matter of months.

Pass the raw whale, please.

Will the next Jewish diaspora to America help us win another world war?

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Guess what these men have in common: Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller.

Everyone knows about Einstein. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, did revolutionary work on the relativity of time and space (all in his mind without a laboratory), fled Nazi Germany in 1933, had wild hair in his later years, and, most importantly, co-authored a letter to President Roosevelt explaining the potential for a nuclear bomb.

That letter is credited with persuading Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project. The ensuing nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to WWII. By avoiding a full-scale invasion, the bombs probably saved over a million Japanese, American, British, Australian and Chinese soldiers and civilians.

Einstein became a U.S. citizen in 1944, a year before the bomb was first tested at Los Alamos.

Leo Szilard was the other co-author of that letter. It was Szilard who conceptualized the notion in 1933 that incredible amounts of energy could be released in a nuclear chain reaction by splitting the uranium atom. It might have been the greatest Eureka! moment in science since the day Isaac Newton conceived of gravity when he was hit on the head with a falling apple. Szilard fled Europe in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen five years later.

Hans Bethe was a prominent physicist of the early 20th century. He fled Germany in 1935 at age 29 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. Like Szilard, he worked on the Manhattan Project. He won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work on nuclear reactions over the course of a prolific career, and died in 2005 at age 98.

Edward Teller fled Germany in 1935 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. He, too, worked on the Manhattan Project. He was later dubbed “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” (While the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs used nuclear fission, the hydrogen bomb uses fusion, which delivers much more bang for the buck. Hydrogen bombs have been successfully tested, but never used in warfare.)

OK, one thing these men obviously have in common is that they were all great physicists.

Here’s another thing, perhaps less obvious: They were all Jewish. Indeed, that’s the reason they fled pre-WWII Europe and came to the beacon of hope that is called America. (It should be noted that not all the physicists on the Manhattan project were Jewish. Project leader Robert Oppenheimer was raised in an American Jewish family but did not regard himself as Jewish. Enrico Fermi was an Italian immigrant raised in a Catholic family.)

The Nazis were pretty stupid, considering they fancied themselves clever and strategic. They drove away the greatest physicists of the day – right into the welcoming arms of their adversary.  

The result was poetic justice.

Germany’s persecution of the Jews deprived the Nazi war machine of their scientific talents. Imagine if Germany had kept the Jewish scientists at home in Germany to help them invent the bomb before America did. Those V-2 rockets they used to bombard London could have been loaded with nukes.

Fast forward a few generations. We now have some new Nazis to contend with, called radical Islam. Like the German Nazis, these neo-Nazi Islamicists fancy themselves pretty clever and pretty strategic, though at the moment the Trump-Netanyahu alliance has them on the ropes.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. What if the radical Islamicists somehow manage to subdue what they call “the Little Satan” of Israel? Where will the Israeli physicists and other scientists go?

Not to Europe, which is a hotbed of antisemitism.

They’ll go where brilliant, hard-working people have always gone – they’ll go to America.

In America, we don’t care if they’re Jewish, Lutheran or Buddhists, and we don’t care if they’re Black, white, brown or yellow. We don’t care about who they are, we care only about what they can do.

What that next wave of Jewish immigrants can do is to help us – help humanity – win another world war, this one against radical Islam. In the meantime, they can help us cure cancer or generate limitless electricity or put a man on Mars.

Here’s the bigger point. It’s too simple to say that immigration is bad, or good. It all depends on the skill set of the immigrants. I’ll happily take another Einstein.

President Trump – a historical perspective

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Democrat historians outnumber Republican historians by somewhere between 8 to 1 and 19 to 1. The disparity is even worse than those ratios suggest, since many of the Democrat historians are not just Democrats, but hard-left ones, while virtually none of the few Republican historians are hard-right.

There’s a name for hard-left historians. They’re called “tenured professors” and we pay their salaries and give them summers off. There’s also a name for hard-right historians. They’re called “Uber drivers” and we pay their salaries, too, but they don’t get their summers off.

It’s no surprise that historians have not looked at Donald Trump in a historical context. They’re too busy simply bashing him as a “threat to democracy” along with whatever epithet du jour is dished out by the pseudo-academic establishment in concert with the Democratic National Committee.  

Admittedly, there are still one or two Republican historians in existence. Not all are Uber drivers. But they, too, have not done much to contextualize Donald Trump. They’re instead simply doing the polar opposite of what the army of leftist historians are doing. They’re cheerleading the Trump Presidency. You know who you are.

When a person is a history professor on the left, or less often on the right, maybe the lure of public grants and private clicks is just too strong to actually profess some history.

In any event, since the historians on both sides are busy practicing politics, your undersigned political junky will practice a little history. Someone has to.

Let’s start small. We could compare Trump to FDR, who bullied the Supreme Court into approving his welfare state even though it plainly ran afoul of the Constitution. He succeeded by threatening to expand the number of Supreme Court Justices to whatever number was necessary and packing it with his toadies.

Or we could compare Trump to the other Roosevelt – the one known as Teddy – because Teddy was a Rough Rider and, well, Trump is a rough rider.

Or we could compare Trump to Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus (the Constitutional right of a prisoner to contest illegal imprisonment) and left it suspended even after the Supreme Court said the suspension was unconstitutional. (The matter was mooted only when Congress later passed legislation to ratify Lincoln’s suspension retroactively.)

Or we could compare Trump and his Greenlandic hegemony with Jefferson who doubled the size of the young nation by purchasing the Louisiana Territory without Congressional authorization.

Let’s go back a bit further.

Alexander the Great was the son of a Macedonian king who was publicly assassinated when Alexander was only 20. There’s disagreement about whether Alexander was behind the plot but, in view of his subsequent brutality and ambition, there’s no disagreement that such a plot was certainly within his character.

Alexander took the throne and immediately conquered much of the known world at a tender age when much of today’s youth is still on their parents’ health care insurance. He subjugated Athens. He put Persia out of business for about 2,400 years (until Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump had to perform another smack-down last summer).

He founded a city on the coast of Egypt that became one of the great cities of the age. He had the unmitigated self-centeredness to name it after himself, Alexandria. The towering lighthouse he commissioned for the Alexandria coast was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and stood for a thousand years.

Alexander himself stood for fewer than 33 years and was in power for only 12. But which do people remember, Alexander or the lighthouse?  

(Since we’re on the topic of namesake cities, I can imagine TrumpopolisTM as a city. Send royalty checks for that name, Mr. President, to TheAspenBeat.)

Historians who are still practicing history say Alexander was a thug. He burned down Persepolis, the great Persian city in present-day Iran. He enslaved hundreds of thousands. He was gay (as were many ancient Greeks on occasion) but evidently not happy.

Alexander’s empire didn’t last, but the Greek civilization did. He was a despot, not a democrat, but his worldwide influence permanently chiseled Greek culture into the Roman and Judaic worlds, and ultimately into our own. Alexander wasn’t good, but he was certainly great.

On to another despot, Julius Caesar. Forget about Greenland, this guy invaded France. Then he went home and declared himself dictator. Desperate times call for desperate measures which call for desperate men.

It didn’t end well for Caesar, but it did end well for Rome. The ensuing empire ruled the known world for the next 500 years, establishing the “Pax Romana” that was the most peaceful time in ancient history.

We’ve named things after Julius Caesar – a casino, a surgical procedure, a month in the calendar, and a salad. No battleships, yet.

Then there was Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsican seized power in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution where a succession of bloodthirsty mobs had made ritual machine-beheading into a spectator sport. It was something like being canceled, but more so.

Napoleon’s reach exceeded his grasp, especially in the Russian winter where half his army was frozen, starved or shot.  

For that, Letitia James or some such person got Napoleon exiled. He came back for one last, brief round of glory, but met his Waterloo in 1815. He was then exiled again, and died on a remote island in the South Atlantic.

Like Alexander and Caesar before him, Napoleon wasn’t good but he was great.

America shows some parallels to the waning days of ancient Greece, the deteriorating Republic of Rome preceding the grandeur of the Empire, and post-Revolution France.

By some objective measures, our best days are behind us. National debt is far higher than ever before. Student achievement has plummeted.

A large portion of the population embraces socialism. Experiments over the years have proven socialism to be destructive and divisive, but the adherents are blissfully ignorant of those experiments, as are their teachers.

The basic competence of America’s governing elite is abysmal. Immigrants are allowed to defraud the people out of billions on the grounds that it would be racist to stop them. Trillions were spent on virtue-signaling in the guise of climate-change abatement.

For decades, the border was wide open – the government was even sending airplanes to pick up migrants for the express purpose of illegally plopping them into the country. They get commercial drivers’ licenses, welfare, college scholarships and voting rights, no questions asked.

Public discourse has deteriorated to yard signs, cable TV shouting matches, and internet drive-by commentary.

The democratic republic established by our Founders is nor equipped for this mob rule any better than post-monarchy France was.

Enter Donald Trump. He is not a good man and never will be, but he may prove to be a great man. As in the case of other historical figures, consider his timing, circumstances and luck – and sheer audacity.

What that greatness might mean for America will be revealed by history. But probably not by historians.

The death of skiing may be the rebirth of Colorado

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Colorado is a much different place from when I grew up in Colorado Springs in the 60s. That was before the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 was drilled under 11,990’ Loveland Pass. It was before the gondola at Aspen and it was before Snowmass was founded. Vail Pass was a treacherous gravel road, and the town of Vail did not exist.

It was wonderful.

Our family had one of those pop-up tent trailers and we went camping several times a year. Getting there was half the fun.

Our family of six would pile into the station wagon with the trailer in tow. My father would floor it, seeking momentum and speed – maybe 60-65 mph – to get a run at Ute Pass which was the two-lane road serving as the gateway from Colorado Springs into the Rocky Mountains. He’d invariably get slowed by a truck in front, curse, and we’d struggle up the pass at about 35 mph.

But we got there. “There” would be one of hundreds of campgrounds with spots for tents, trailers and tent-trailers like us. There were only a few RVs back in those days. They literally looked down on us from their perches high above the ground, but we figuratively looked down on them for not being real campers.  

Only rich people stayed in motels. We weren’t rich.

I learned many years later that, unsurprisingly, my mother hated camping – for all the reasons that an 11-year-old boy loved it.

What’s not to love? Fishing with worms, walking and wandering, climbing trees, making forts, getting dirty, shooting imaginary Indians and, most importantly, camp fires!

It was wonderful.

This fun was limited to summertime, of course. Winter was too cold for even intrepid would-be mountaineers such as that 11-year-old boy.

Winter brought skiing, but it was an oddity. Skis were long and straight with “bear trap” cable contraptions for bindings. Boots were leather. Clothing, at least in my case, was an army surplus jacket, cotton jeans, a stocking cap and work gloves.

I once rode a two-person chairlift with a stranger. It moved excruciatingly slowly, as they all did in those days. As I shivered, the stranger scolded me, “Kid, you’re gonna shake us off the lift!”

Given the slowness of the lifts, you were lucky to get six or seven runs into a day. But the price of a daily lift ticket was commensurate – about six or seven dollars.

You had to be a good skier to get down the mountain in one piece. I wasn’t. I could guarantee a “yard sale” most days, where a wipeout would scatter over the slope my assorted apparel, skis, poles and boots (well, not the boots).

It was wonderful.

Things are different now. Skiing is big business, and lift tickets are upward of $250. Vail Resorts is a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Slopes are finely groomed with both natural and man-made snow, and equipment is vastly improved, such that an ordinary Joe on his third day can ski easy slopes without falling down.

It’s terrible.

Traffic is horrendous. I-70 is jammed with stop-and-go traffic heading into the mountains on Friday afternoon and headed back to Denver on Sunday evening. A two-hour drive between Denver and Vail often takes four, and more if there’s an accident or snowstorm.

Which highlights the irony of skiing. For a real skier interested in challenging terrain, the snow is good only for a day or two after a storm. But that’s when the mountain roads are clogged with rental SUVs from Texas and California (don’t even get me started on the Australians) driven by so-called drivers who attempt to drive on snow only once a year when they come to ski Colorado.

When the snow is good, the driving is horrendous. And when the driving is good, the snow is horrendous.

Driving has been exceptionally good this winter. It’s no exaggeration to say that Colorado has had record-good driving this winter.

The only solution to this cruel paradox is to live at the ski resort. In Aspen, that’s perfectly doable for about $9 million for a three-bedroom condo. (It’s only about $6 million in Vail, but then you have to live in – ugh! – Vail.)

With that condo, you do get to live in Aspen (or – ugh! – Vail). That’s great if you like crowds (and, in the case of Vail, you like the interstate highway passing right through the center of town).

And it’s great if you like locals who despise you for having earned money as an investment banker in New York working 70-hour weeks while they were ski-bumming their youth away in Aspen (or dodging the interstate in – ugh! – Vail) while bitchin’ about the rich tourists who hire them for ski lessons at $1,500/day, plus tip.

This devolution of the State of Colorado has coincided with the state’s legalization of pot and the color shift from a red state to a blue state, but that’s a story for another day.

OK, enough snark. My point is, skiing brought boatloads, planeloads and shitloads (well, OK, maybe a little more snark) of people to the Colorado mountains. I miss the Colorado of my boyhood.

But there’s hope. Skiing may be dying. As I hinted, snow conditions this year are really terrible. The snowpack on top of Vail (ugh!) Pass when I drove over it last week was about 4 inches. As my hero Dave Barry might say, I’m not making that up. There’s less snow than I’ve ever seen for this time of year, and very little in the upcoming forecast.

And this isn’t just a one-year drought. I’m pleased to report that the stock price of Vail (ugh!) Resorts, Inc. is down 64% from its peak some four years ago as the recreational tastes of the baby boomer generation ages from downhill skiing at high altitude into flat ocean cruises at, as you might expect, sea level.

I’m praying that this season of good driving continues next winter, and the winter after that. With three consecutive good-driving winters and the continued aging of the Boomers, we just might reclaim Colorado for 11-year-old boys, of all ages.

Christmas survived us, and we survived it

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I went walking on Christmas Day and crossed paths with others doing the same. Unprompted, most wished me a “Merry Christmas.” Some simply said “hi” or gave me a nod. Only a few said nothing at all.

None wished me “Happy Holidays.” And there were no Kwanzaa carols in the air.

Yes indeed, “Merry Christmas” survived the invention of both “Happy Holidays” (a misguided attempt to avoid offending Jews by greeting them with a wish for merriment when they were not merrily profiting from the writing of most of our modern Christmas carols) and Kwanzaa, a late-20th century invention that was something like DEI for religious holidays to pander to people who think Christ is a dead white European who preached that camels could pass through the eye of a needle easier than poor Black people could get to heaven.  

Christmas also survived the climate-change lobby. It survived the Gaia worshippers.

It survived the nihilistic, faithless Millennials (and has been embraced by their successors, the faith-seeking Gen Z), it survived the Godless Democrats, it survived the proselytizing atheists.

It survived 9/11, it survived October 7.

It survived the faith-mockers, it survived “Pope” Francis, it survived the Episcopalians, it survived yard signs of the self-devout self-proclaiming their virtue.

And not only did Christmas survive us, we survived it.

We survived electronic Christmas cards. We survived ghosts of fruitcakes from Christmases past (they never go bad, you know, or at least they never go worse). We survived aluminum Christmas trees, we survived plastic Christmas trees, and we survived dead Christmas trees.

We survived LED candles, we survived the mall.

We survived the still-unfilled promise of joy to the world and we survived Joy to the World. We survived a noisy night and we survived Silent Night. We survived Come All Ye Faithful and we survived Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

We survived We Three Kings even amid the chants of “no kings!”

We survived the cancelation of Baby it’s Cold Outside.

Speaking of which, your correspondent became a grandfather a couple of weeks ago, which is not to be confused with a grand father or even a mediocre father.

I came through it all fine, and I’m mostly happy and healthy, thank you for asking.

But it’s not all just about me, there are also other people involved. They’re happy and healthy as well.

I have a feeling that the silent nights in their home will be few and far between in the upcoming few months, but I’m starting to understand joy to the world. You see, it happens one little world at a time.

Now, if I can just get through New Years Eve unscathed . . .  Isn’t that when they do the mistletoe thing?

Final Installment – The West will be subsumed by China or conquered by Islam

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Note to Readers: This is the final installment of a three-part series. Part One is HERE and Part Two is HERE. I call this final installment “Choose Your Destructor.”

Part One of this series discussed the rise of Western Civilization from the Greeks and Romans. Part Two concluded with the sad realization that this Western Civilization is falling. The question for this final Part Three is, what will replace it?

It won’t be Russia, “a gas station masquerading as a country,” as John McCain famously put it. McCain died before he could witness Russia proving him right by flailing and failing to conquer it’s eastern neighbor for nearly four years now, a conquering that any competent conqueror could have performed in four weeks.

Of course, by “eastern neighbor,” I’m not talking about the NATO alliance, or even Finland or Sweden. I’m talking about . . . drum roll . . . Ukraine. That’s right. Russia cannot even take over a country most people had never heard of before Russia made heroes of them, and still couldn’t place on a map even if the map were limited to Eastern Europe.

That leaves two powerful forces as candidates for the Destructor of Western Civilization – the nation of China and the imperialist religion of Islam.

China is an ancient civilization going back to the time of the pharaohs. They built their civilization the old-fashioned way — by hard work, merit and an inquisitive culture, much as the Greeks and Romans later built theirs.

The ancient Chinese differed from the Greeks and Romans in an important way, due to geography. The Chinese weren’t located on the friendly pond of the Mediterranean Sea, but rather on the shores of the vast and ferocious Pacific Ocean, and so they never developed an advanced seafaring technology. That limited their ability to expand, since the land to the immediate west of them was high and dry. Eventually, they traded with the West over the Silk Road, but that came late and entailed an arduous journey.

As a result, Chinese culture has always been insular. Until the 20th century, they didn’t give a fig about the West. They were quite sure their system and their people were superior to whatever the West had to offer.

They still often think that way, though now they see that the West – or at least America – does have some things to offer. Such as advanced AI microchips.

With or without the West, Chinese culture is successful by most measures, as one would expect of a bright and numerous people utilizing merit-based approaches to management.

To be sure, communism has corrupted Chinese culture, as it corrupts all cultures it infects. But Chinese communism is a little different. It’s not just an extreme form of socialism. They don’t practice “from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” Karl Marx was not Chinese.

The communism practiced by the Chinese is more like a state-regulated capitalism. Small businesses flourish independently in a free market economy. Large ones are often controlled or even owned by the government, but with the goal of maximizing wealth, not redistributing it. Foreign investment in China is encouraged. They emphasize manufacturing and exporting manufactured goods, something no communist country ever achieved during the Cold War.

The political system, too, is pragmatic in a way seldom seen in Marxist communism. People join the Party, they advance by showing ability and alliances, and the most-accomplished become part of an oligarchy or “politburo,” which chooses leaders.

The leaders they choose these days are not dictators in the sense of having absolute power. There’s always the oligarchy/politburo to deal with.

This should sound familiar. The Founders of the United States of America were an oligarchy. They were not elected. Rather, they knew and respected one another and built alliances among themselves to arrive at most decisions by consensus.

Oligarchies are not so bad. I sometimes wish we were now being ruled by the oligarchy of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Monroe, Franklin, Adams and the other Founders, rather than by warring mobs, conspiracy theorists and a lying media.

Chinese culture is generally not imperial. That’s in part due to their geographical isolation and consequent wariness of outsiders and in part, relatedly, because they always thought their culture was too good to share. Whatever the reasons, they don’t have a tradition of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors. The Chinese could own most of Russia and all of Southeast Asia, at a minimum, but they don’t. (Yes, I know about their designs on Tibet and Taiwan.)

Nor are the Chinese a theocracy or regime of ideologues. They’re a pragmatic and patient people. The billion-plus of them will eventually dominate the world, but probably not by brute force. (Yes, I know about the brutality of Tiananmen Square.)

Their strategy in trade is an example. Their days of slave labor and child labor are largely over. With vast numbers of skilled workers, they manufacture huge quantities of goods at high efficiency and sell them at a small margin. The manufacturing skills and trading networks they’re developing will serve them over the long term.

It’s the long term they’re interested in. The Chinese were a civilization in the time of the Egyptians, and well before the Greeks and Romans.

Our assimilation by the Chinese will probably be gradual and not destructive. They’re not interested in killing their customers. They think of Americans the way we think of cattle – big and clumsy, but very useful once you domesticate them.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the Chinese are nice people. They will exploit us, and they already are. Like cattle, we will be milked.

But we won’t be slaughtered.

There are things China admires about us, such as our inventiveness, our technological sophistication, and even our entrepreneurialism (despite or perhaps because of the fact that they themselves are, putatively, anti-capitalist communists).

With any luck, the Greco-Roman-Western culture that still dominates the world but is falling fast will not be extinguished, but will instead live on and be subsumed by China. Who knows, they might even improve on it, just as the Romans improved on the Greeks in some ways and we improved on them both in some ways.

They might even boot the Muslims out of Europe – something that European leaders lack the backbone to do even as the European people demand it.

Which brings us to the other possible group that could be our Destructor. It’s that old nemesis of the Greeks – the Persians. Or, more broadly, the Muslims. Of course, the ancient Persians were not Muslims, since Muhammad was still a millennium in the future, but there’s a straight line between the culture of Persia and the culture of Islam.

I will state some hard truths about the Muslims. Rather than grappling with those hard truths, some will simply dismiss the message by labelling me as the messenger “Islamophobic.”

If “Islamophobic” means fearing people who glorify the beheading of babies, the torturing of hostages, the defenestration of gays, and the raping of women, then I plead guilty. I am indeed Islamophobic.

One of those hard truths about the Muslims is that they have a nasty habit of conquering and converting infidels at the point of the sword – the ones they don’t kill outright, that is. To that end, they’ve invaded Europe multiple times, the most recent being the “mostly peaceful” invasion of the last generation.

They’re like strangers who crashed a house party. The kind hosts reluctantly let them stay. Then they repaid the hosts’ kindness by trashing their house. Now, the hosts are afraid to ask them to leave. Next, they’ll be sleeping in the hosts’ bed, with his wife along with the young girls they brought.

It won’t continue to be mostly peaceful. The party crashers see the hosts as infidels. They contend the hosts have no rightful authority over this house. They must submit and convert and then submit some more, and some more, or be put to death.

In fairness to Muslims, two qualifications should be mentioned. First, violence can be found not only in Muslim writings but also in Judeo-Christian writings. But violence in old Judeo-Christian texts is mostly ignored or viewed as allegorical now. When’s the last time you heard a Christian talk about literal jihad? Or globalizing an intifada? No mainstream Christian theologian preaches that we should invade Saudi Arabia and kill or convert them.

Many mainstream Muslim theologians, on the other hand, do preach that they should invade Europe and America, kill or convert us, and steal our stuff. Their leaders publicly label us Satanic. The great cathedrals of Europe will be converted into Muslim mosques in the next 50 years. Bet on it.

The second qualification is, not all Muslims believe in violence. In fact, the great majority of them do not. But – and this is a big but – when someone commits an atrocity in the name of his religion, others of that religion are obligated to condemn the atrocity and disown the criminal who committed it. Muslims seldom do.

I realize I’m asking for more from good Muslims than I’ve ever asked of myself. I’m asking them to risk everything by standing against religious atrocities, while all I’ve ever risked is losing a few tribal readers by standing against stupid tweets.

But if you don’t stand up to wrongs committed in the name of your religion or tribe, then you forfeit that religion or tribe to the wrong. So far, most Muslims have elected not to bravely stand up to wrongs committed in the name of their religion. They’ve elected to risk their religion rather than risk themselves.

It’s ironic that, once you scratch the surface, this religion cloaked in machismo seems to be 10% barbarians and 90% chickens.

Back to those plodding Chinese. The difference between Chinese and Muslim culture can be seen in a microcosm in their respective immigrants to America. Which do you prefer?

I prefer the Chinese. Given the choice, I choose to be assimilated by pragmatic, exploitative, profit-seeking Chinese rather than being conquered and converted, or worse, by violent, macho, chicken-shit Muslims.

I wish I didn’t have to choose – I wish there were still reason for optimism about the West – but there’s not. Being assimilated into China is our only hope for some semblance of our culture to survive.

Part 2 – The West will be subsumed by China – or conquered by Islam

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Note to readers: This is the second of a three-part series. I call this second installment “The Fall of Western Civilization.” The first installment, called “The Rise of Western Civilization,” is HERE.

Religious animal sacrifices may soon be conducted by your neighbor in his backyard on the other side of the little fence you share, or perhaps in the condo down the hall from yours. Try not to let the animal’s screams bother you — that would be racist.

You see, there’s a small town in Michigan called Hamtramck. For generations, it has been an enclave of Polish immigrants and their descendants. They danced to polka music, ate pierogi, and so on. They were Polish-Americans. They blended right in — as well as our Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans and Chinese-Americans.

Then the town was taken over by Muslim immigrants. The Muslims wanted to sacrifice animals in their backyards as part of their religious rituals. They do that by slitting their throats and watching them scream and convulse as they bleed to death while they (the Muslims, that is) shout Allah Akbar!

These Muslims not exactly trying to blend in.

These backyard spectacles were against local ordinances in Hamtramck. But the city council this week voted 3-2 (you can guess the ethnicity of the majority of 3) to change the ordinance, despite objections that such backyard animal sacrifices are inhumane, unsanitary, unsightly and noisy.

The slitting of the animals’ throats will usually be done by a butcher, they say, but the residents are also allowed to perform the task themselves because some of them complain that they are too poor to hire a butcher.

Apart from the grotesqueness of this, I have several practical questions.

What sort of butcher makes house calls? And how does that change anything — does the butcher bring along an anesthesiologist? And if the residents are too poor to afford a house-calling butcher to sacrifice the animal, how are they supposed to afford the animal itself? Is it possible that they will just “find” the animal somewhere in the neighborhood?

Ah, but I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

The point of Part 1 of this series was that, just as large parts of Roman culture derived from Greek culture, large parts of our own culture derive from Greco-Roman culture. We’re still living in the Greco-Roman age.

Unfortunately, we’ve expanded on some of those Greco-Roman values. That sounds like a good thing, but it’s not. In fact, it’s the reason for our demise. Here’s how it happened.

If a little democracy is good, as Athens taught us, then we foolishly thought a lot must be even better, right?

If picking up some menu tips from the barbarians and learning to wear funny scarves are good, then inviting them all in – to trash and replace our philosophy and religions – must be even better, right?

If showing compassion for people lacking merit is good, then we should abolish merit altogether, right?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Let’s take these in order. Democracy is like medicine. A little might be a good thing, but a lot can poison you. Right now, the biggest illness of the West is an overdose of democracy. Stated simply, too many people vote, they’re the wrong people, and they vote for the wrong people.

There’s a reason that the Left always seeks to expand the voter rolls, and it’s not to improve democracy. It’s because the Left hates the West, and they know that the fools they will newly enfranchise with voting rights are easily manipulated into sharing that hate.

Voting rights for 18-year-olds? C’mon. Today’s 12th graders have the education of 10th graders from 30 years ago, and typically have never held a job. That’s a good reason to raise the voting age by at least two years, but instead we lowered it by three, from 21 to 18.

The net result is that today’s first-time voters have five years less education than the first-time voters of their parents’ generation. (Don’t try to explain this to those youngsters. You’ll lose them on the 3 + 2 = 5 part.)

As for philosophy and religion, no religion has been as successful or made its adherents as successful as the Judeo-Christian religions. Those religions teach a combination of merit-based achievement and forgiveness for failure, which opens the door to endless opportunity. (I’m not talking about the opportunity for eternal salvation, but that too.) You can try, and try again. If you develop merit and learn from your failures, you will be forgiven and you will succeed.

You will. It’s right there in the Bible, from Job to Jesus.

The idea of earned second chances sounds obvious today, but it’s not obvious at all in most of the world outside Judeo-Christian cultures. In most places at most times, it was one-strike-and-you’re-out. And often, you weren’t even allowed that one strike – you didn’t even get to bat.

As for foreigners – the barbarians – the Greeks were not especially welcoming. The Romans were a bit more cosmopolitan. They sometimes used native administrators for controlling local matters. But when they did, the local administrators always answered to Rome on important matters.

More often, the local administrators were Romans, even in far-flung provinces. (Pontius Pilate is the most famous today. He did defer to the locals on the decision he is best known for, but that decision was a minor one, he thought.)

The notion that they should abolish their borders and invite the barbarians into Rome, or Greece, on the Panglossian notion that “diversity makes us stronger,” would be utterly foreign – barbaric in both senses of the word – to Romans and Greeks.

Abolishing merit? We did that because merit is “inequitable.” Fools and barbarians are ill-equipped for it. In today’s math:

ill-equipped = inequitable

The abolition of merit certainly did produce more equality among people. Ill-equipped people lacking merit are deemed “equal” to the ones possessing it because we stopped trying to measure it.

But in a system that does not measure or reward merit, people will not strive to be meritorious. And so, the culture as a whole will have less of it.

Principles or merit, liberty, limited democracy and common values served Greco-Roman culture for a long time – about 2,500 years, if you include the subsequent Western culture that grew out of it.  

But alas, we’ve abandoned those tested principles that got us here. Some of that abandonment was well-intentioned; we wanted to help people we deemed “less fortunate” (but who often were really less worthy).

Some of that abandonment was intentional – a deliberate attempt to undermine our culture by people who hate it (and would probably hate whatever culture they were born into).

Now, we’re past the tipping point. The West has not only welcomed fools and barbarians, but under DEI we’ve favored them. Many of them vote, and they demand a share of what our culture has earned over the course of 2,500 years while simultaneously demanding that we forsake that culture.

So, the West is lost. America is well on its way, and Europe is already there.

That leaves a question. Lost to whom or what? Who or what will take our place?

Note to readers: The third and final installment of this three-part series will come in a few days. Stay tuned!