Richard Connor

My man, my man, takin’ you outta sight with a tale that’s radical.

The lady I dig is stellar and slammin’ and you know I treat her right, not just last night but every night. Last night, though, was the bomb.

Sure, I dropped about $30 for two at the Inn of the Mountain Gods on steak, veal, crab legs and off-the-hook shrimp cocktail, adding a couple of Pepsis. There were some good vibes, and it was just fab. And sure, I knocked the tip to 15% and gave the waitress five cool ones.

We tripped over to see the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and then went back to my crib to listen to some Captain & Tennille. The lady agrees “love will keep us together.” We spun some Freddy Fender to give a country groove.

All dolled up. Left the leisure suit in the closet. Me in my new bell bottoms and her in that maxi dress and high heels. We were sharp. New F-150 Ford was the right chariot.

And you know we like President Gerald Ford. Good riddance to Tricky Dick Nixon.

Okay, okay. That was 1975 and that was then but actually it is now – 2025 – and we’re basking in 50 years of nostalgia at the Inn of the Mountain Gods. On Tuesday night, Dec. 9, the Inn ended its yearlong celebration of a half century in business with a final round of Wendell’s restaurant dinner servings at 1975 prices: shrimp cocktail $3.75, prime rib $9.50 (full bone cut $11.50).

After the first one last January, each dinner has been sold out. Tuesday’s final round of servings drew more than 400 diners.

“This whole year what we’ve done on the second Tuesday of every month, we serve the original 1975 menu at the 1975 prices as an appreciation to our guests for coming 50 years and supporting Inn of the Mountain Gods,” said Chief Operating Officer Frizzell J. Frizzell Jr. “So, people are literally getting $400 meals for $75.”

Nostalgia never tasted so, well, so far out. Affordable, too.

If you need a refresher – or introductory – course on 1975, let’s start with the Billboard Magazine music charts. Captain & Tennille had the number one song with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” followed by Glen Campbell with “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Other ‘70s hitmakers in the top 10 were Elton John; Grand Funk Railroad; Earth, Wind & Fire; and the Eagles.

Jack Nicholson was wowing audiences in the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the shark shocker “Jaws” was a Hollywood hit. Art Carney earned the Academy Award for Best Actor in “Harry and Tonto,” and Ellen Burstyn was named Best Actress for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

On the political scene, the nation was still recovering from the Watergate scandal with President Gerald Ford working to restore order following the previous year’s resignation of Richard Nixon.

In 1975’s economic climate, automobiles sold for $4,200 to $4,900. The Ford F-Series pickup truck topped the vehicle charts with 366,000 sold.

Buying a home cost on average $39,300. Today, the price is $522,200. The average household income was $113,900; today’s estimates range from $59,456 to $63,214.

Let’s fill up that Ford F-150.

In 1975, the price for a gallon of gasoline was 37 cents. A gallon of gas today costs $2.98 on average. Adjusted for inflation, the 1975 price per gallon would be $3.24 – yes, believe it or not, the price for a gallon of fuel is less expensive now than it was 50 years ago.

A barrel of crude oil was $13.95 back then and today it fluctuates between $58.44 and $62.32. Adjusted for inflation, the 1975 price would be $54.61.

Two reporters and an editor who worked on our news story about the Inn of the Mountain Gods’ 50-year anniversary had not been born in 1975, nor had most members of the waitstaff at the Inn. There are folks in upper management at the restaurant who worked at the hotel in 1975. Bingo was a popular gambling pastime.

Trying to use something called ChatGPT in 1975 would have landed you in the cuckoo’s nest. Today, it’s the source for much of this information about 1975.

So, as we ponder the looks, sounds and costs of the year the Inn of the Mountain Gods first smiled on Ruidoso, the question presents itself: Would anyone want to go back to 1975?

Richard L. Connor is corporate editor and publisher of all five El Rito Media newspapers. He lives in Ruidoso.

Trip Jennings

At the outset I want to say I’ve spent most of my life celebrating the new-fangled and innovative against the custodians of tradition who poked fun at anything resembling change.

For example, 18 years ago, I quit newspapers to help found New Mexico’s first online newspaper, the New Mexico Independent. A few years after that, I co-founded the state’s first digital nonprofit media outlet, New Mexico In Depth, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse.

I like new things.

So, at the risk of acting like what my children think people my age act like — I am old enough to remember calling people on rotary phones and watching original episodes of The Mod Squad and Room 222 — I am not sold that AI is the next big thing. Sure, it can help with mundane everyday tasks. But I’m not sure it’s a civilizational-defining technology, as many of its boosters repeatedly promise us.

That thought permeated my Monday morning routine as I read a New York Times story on the September vote by the Doňa Ana County Commission to grant a massive tax break to developers of Project Jupiter, a collection of data centers that would cost $165 billion in Doña Ana County. (I have kept up with local reporting on the project, but when one of the globe’s largest media players publishes a story, it is noteworthy.)

I am not a technophobe. And I am certainly not a tech genius. But what I am is a journalist who has lived through a particular set of reportorial experiences that have left an impression on me.

Over the space of a few years in the 2000s, I reported on the economic carnage Enron’s bankruptcy wrought on Connecticut municipal budgets and the economic carnage to New Mexico’s investment portfolio by the near collapse of Wall Street in 2008, fueled by the systematic fraudulent valuation of toxic tranches of mortgage bonds.

Speculative booms powered by promises of a generational opportunity to invest in the future aren’t so terrible when they do what their boosters say they will: benefit the public at large. But when speculative booms go wrong, they can rain down devastation and catastrophe on tens of millions of unsuspecting Americans in the form of lost jobs, decimated retirement accounts and destroyed lives.

In the case of Enron, once the nation’s seventh-largest company and highly valued by Wall Street analysts, fraud ultimately undid the company. Enron’s senior officers copped to or were convicted of federal crimes related to conspiring “in wide-ranging schemes to fraudulently manipulate Enron’s publicly reported financial results,” all in service of keeping the company’s troubled finances a secret. One of the victims of the fraud beyond the tens of thousands of Enron employees who lost their jobs was a quasi-public trash authority in Connecticut. It had invested more than $200 million in state taxpayers’ money in Enron. Post collapse, Connecticut communities were left to figure out how to pay for the increased cost of hauling trash the authority imposed to make up for the loss of the $200 million. I lived and breathed that story for more than a year.

A few years later, I moved across the country to New Mexico to report on Gov. Bill Richardson and the Legislature just in time for the economic collapse of 2008. During the lead up to the economic collapse, the occasional Cassandra predicting catastrophe was drowned out by a chorus of optimists who said the housing bubble driving the American economy wouldn’t burst because, well, it just wouldn’t.

After the housing bubble burst and almost took down the global economy with it, I spent many hours digging into court documents alleging pay-to-play allegations against officials in the Richardson administration. They had invested in opaque financial vehicles that lost much, if not all, of their value with Wall Street’s collapse, costing New Mexico taxpayers. I lived and breathed that story for much of 2009 into 2010.

Reporting on those stories has made me a skeptic whenever I hear someone declare an investment is a generational opportunity. That’s how the developers of Project Jupiter marketed the project to Doña Ana County officials.

I am not accusing anyone of fraud, or bad-faith dealing. I just know how bad things can go when they go sideways.

There are people much more tech savvy than I who see the possibility of AI becoming the next too-big-to-fail industry as AI weaves itself into Americans’ lives. If the AI bubble bursts, there is a chance that U.S. taxpayers might be asked to bail out the industry because it will become so important to 21st century life that a decision will be made that we cannot live without it.

Maybe it won’t turn out that way. Let’s hope.

In other words, I’m not a full-blown AI doomsday-er. But I am a skeptic.

I hope my skepticism is misplaced.

Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.

Victor Davis Hanson

As California Governor Gavin Newsom gears up to run for president, what in the world will he run on?

Californians know that Newsom will not boast, “I will do for America what I have done to California!”

Why not?

Count the reasons.

California’s astronomical gas prices and taxes remain the highest in the continental U.S.

Ditto the state’s trifecta of the highest electricity rates, the costliest home prices, and the fourth-highest home insurance costs.

California has the largest unfunded liability debt in the nation, approaching $270 billion.

The budget deficit each year usually ranges from $15 to $70 billion.

Such profligate spending and deficits explain why the state also has the highest income taxes and state sales tax rates in the nation.

Just 1% of California households pay 50% of the state income tax. And the fleeced are leaving in droves.

Newsom recently boasted that he extended Medi-Cal health insurance to thousands more illegal aliens.

So, no wonder Newsom next begged for a nearly $3 billion Medi-Cal federal bailout.

Half of the state’s 41 million residents are now on Medi-Cal. Some 50 percent of all births are Medi-Cal-provided — and growing.

California has a lot of other firsts among the 50 states:

The largest population of illegal aliens.

The largest number of homeless people.

The largest number of people fleeing a state.

The largest number (11 million) and percentage (27%) of foreign-born residents.

The largest number of people living in poverty.

The highest food prices in the continental U.S.

The state’s infrastructure is usually rated near the bottom.

California ranks among the five worst states in per capita violent crime.

Here are a few other observations about the current disaster that is Newsom’s California:

One, California is a naturally wealthy state. It is the third largest by area. It ranks seventh in the nation in oil reserves. No nation has more agricultural production or forested land acreage. So it’s hard to bankrupt California, but Newsom has managed.

Two, under prior governors Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson, California used to be the best-run state in the country.

California once produced more oil than any other state except Texas.

Its now-moribund timber industry once used to be the third largest in the nation.

And its currently ossified mining and mineral industries were once among the top 10 producers in the country.

Three, no state politician over the last three decades has been more responsible for California’s decline than Newsom: six years as governor, eight years as lieutenant governor, seven years as mayor of San Francisco, and seven years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Four, California chose decline. In the last 30 years, it drove out somewhere between 18 and 20 million affluent and middle-class state residents, the largest state exodus in U.S. history.

Its open border welcomed in an influx of over 10 million illegal aliens.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s $11 trillion in market capitalization created the wealthiest and the most left-wing out-of-touch elite in the United States.

The result was a medieval state of a few million elites, a mass of poor people, and a vanishing middle class.

Five, such influxes and exoduses, along with gerrymandering, have ensured a one-party state. There are no Republican statewide officeholders.

Democrats control all branches of government. Only 17% of its congressional delegation is Republican. So the Left proudly owns what California has become.

What, then, will Newsom run on?

Certainly not high-speed rail — 17 years, $15 billion, and not a foot of track laid.

Certainly not a $500-million exploding solar battery plant.

Certainly not illegally issuing 17,000 commercial truck driver’s licenses to non-resident illegal aliens with little or no English competency.

Certainly not the horrific but preventable Pacific Palisades fire.

And certainly not a now-closed $2-billion desert solar plant boondoggle.

Instead, Newsom will continue his he-man threats to President Donald Trump, like, “We’re going to punch this bully in the mouth.”

But will such bluster lower the state’s gas and power prices or reduce its sky-high taxes?

On social media and in podcasts, Newsom will continue his adolescent threats to federal officials like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem while serving up his adolescent potty-mouth smears (e.g., “son of a b***h,” “god-d**n,” “f**k,” etc.).

But that profanity will not lower crime or house prices.

In other words, in the Democratic primaries, Newsom will try to out-crazy the violence, profanity, and extremism of the now-crazy Democratic socialists.

Newsom will rant nonstop about the evil Trump, but neither offer a word nor do a thing about his own responsibility for the collapse of a once great state.

Newsom will lecture on “affordability” without mentioning that he has created the most unaffordable state in the nation.

Will all this gobbledygook work?

It did in New York.

So, who knows?

(Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)