California

The Bay Area’s 1 Percenters

If you’re hip and liberal, your kids don’t have to go to school with the gardener’s kids. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  Strip away the veneer of Silicon Valley, and it is mostly a paradox. Almost nothing is what it is professed to be. Ostensibly, communities like Menlo Park and Palo Alto are […]

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Reading Among the Ruins

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media  I have been reading both new and classic books this week among the ruins (see photos below). Martin Anderson, now almost in his 90th year, has written a fascinating memoir about fashioning a cattle and big-game preservation ranch in Africa: Galana: Elephant, Game Domestication, and Cattle on a Kenya Ranch. At one

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The Myth of a California Renaissance

Sacramento’s strategy for recovery is more taxes, more regulation, and more government. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  Are the recent raves about a new California renaissance true? Rolling Stone magazine just gushed that California governor Jerry Brown has brought the state back from the brink of “double-digit unemployment, a $26 billion deficit and an accumulated

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The Great California Land Rush

by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Boom or Bust? I have lived on the same farm for 59 years and seen at least three boom-and-bust farm cycles — one in the late 1960s, another in the early 1980s, and a third right now. Share This

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Krugman’s California Dreaming

by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is rare, even in the case of Paul Krugman, to read a column in which almost everything that is stated is either wrong or deliberately misleading. But his recent take on California’s renaissance is pure fantasy. Share This

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Five Days of Hope and Despair

by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Here is a brief travel log of five days amid 21st-century California. Share This

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The California Mordida

by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services California now works on the principle of the mordida, or “bite.” Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state. Share This

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Beautifully Medieval California

by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Gates Close at Dusk At about dusk, I close two large metal gates to my driveways. The security lights come on, and I enjoy intramural life. Share This

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It’s a Mad, Mad World

by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s The Corner Dorner Debacle It is hard to remember worse coverage of a catastrophe than what we are given about the ex-cop Christopher Dorner’s murdering rampage. Some reprehensible pundits, ever so easily, fall into blaming LAPD and its “history of racism,” in a sorta, kinda contextualizing of Dorner’s brutal killing of

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California at Twilight

by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media We keep trying to understand the enigma of California, mostly why it still breathes for a while longer, given the efforts to destroy the sources of its success. Let’s try to navigate through its sociology and politics to grasp why something that should not survive is surviving quite well

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