by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those […]
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The proverbial thin veneer of civilization has never been thinner in California, as if nature has conspired to create even greater chaos than what man here has already wrought. What follows below was a fairly typical seven-day period in the land of the highest sales, fuel, and income
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia California is not suffering one drought, but four. Each is a metaphor of what California has become. Nature The first California drought, of course, is natural. We are now in the midst of a fourth year of record low levels of snow and rain. Share This
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The United States can be quite an incoherent place at times. Here are a few examples. Diversity Sometime in the 1990s the growing contradictions of affirmative action in a multiracial society became problematic. Ethnic ancestry was often neither easily identifiable nor readily commensurate with class status, and
How Green extremists made a bad drought worse by Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal In mid-December, the first large storms in three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Campuses are becoming the haunts of the very wealthy and the poor, with little regard for any in-between — sort of like California. Let me explain. Lately lots of strange things have been in the news about college campuses — from the Rolling Stone’s mythography [1] of the
Versailles or San Francisco, it’s good to be the king. by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media California is run from a sort of Pacific Versailles [1], an isolated coastal compound of elite rulers physically cut off from its interior peasantry. To understand how California works — or rather does not work — drive over
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Comprehensive immigration reform — rarely has a catchphrase been so widely invoked and yet so little defined. Why? If proponents of so-called reform detailed exactly what they wanted, American voters would never support their self-interested agendas. Most Americans insist that existing federal immigration laws be enforced. They are adamant that
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The third year of California drought has exposed all sorts of water fantasies. If in wet years they were implicit, now without rain or snow for nearly three years, they are all too explicit. Add them up. Take the Bay Area, Ground Zero of water environmentalism. From Mill Valley
How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Silicon Valley is an American success story. At a time of supposed American decline, a gifted group of young entrepreneurs invented, merchandized, and institutionalized everything from smartphones and eBay to Google and Facebook. The collective genius within a