I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California. 8:00 AM I finally got around to retrieving the car seat that someone threw out in front of the vineyard near my mailbox. (Don’t try waiting dumpers out — as if it is not your responsibility to clean up California […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Two events now characterize the California agrarian heartland, the richest and most productive farm belt in the world. One, of course, is the third year of drought. I refer here to nature’s lack of rain and snow. But also factor in the state’s additional man-made drought, through diversions […]
by Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Content Agency No place on the planet is as beautiful and as naturally rich as California. And few places have become as absurd. Currently, three California state senators are either under felony indictment or already have been convicted. State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) made a political career out of demanding harsher state gun-control laws. […]
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Just a handful of legislative acts might still save California. Here are 12 brief examples: 1. The Hetch Hetchy Smelt and Salmon Act This so-called “Skip a Shower, Save a Smelt Act” would transfer control of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir releases from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to the California Department […]