Victor Davis Hanson is one of our pre-eminent gloominaries. This isn’t surprising, given that he is a scholar of history, and that his family has been farming California’s Central valley for generations. Both of these things give him an objective baseline against which to measure our civilization’s, and in particular California’s, accelerating decline and decay.
California is now suffering a severe drought. Again, to students of the area’s history this should come as no surprise: California, which is by nature a desert, has in the past undergone withering droughts that have lasted centuries. Despite this, though, the state has not only settled new inhabitants in numbers far beyond what the labile water supply can reliably support, but has also made foolish choices in the name of environmentalism — cancelling construction of reservoirs and other water-management projects, and even pumping hundreds of billions of gallons of clean fresh water into the ocean for the sake of an endangered smelt. (As with our institutional folly regarding fossil-fuel use and so-called ‘carbon pollution’, this is a consequence of choosing a standard of value that places a higher premium on non-disturbance of the natural environment than on human flourishing.)
Here is Professor Hanson’s latest essay on California’s existential predicament.
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Admitting I ain’t (yet & only maybe) read Dr. Hanson’s essay … I’d be willing to wager a dollar to a doughnut our “Resident Okie” [get it? both ways?] about a couple weeks from now’ll be wishin’ he’d taken my years old proposition to his Governor. And lobbied hard.
California ought corner the goat population. And set ’em free range. (I didn’t make it a point last time I mentioned it but – like the smelt make goats a “protected species.”)
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That last pertaining to when the mountain lions inevitably look to “greener pastures” … t’wouldn’t be so likely a Greenie unlocking the door to his Tesla rather, a goat.
(Too – that above … so any ‘people who’d suggest me a Californiaphobe’ … I spent from ages 5 to 7 at Twentynine Palms. 8 in Yucca Valley – middle sister born in Palm Springs 1960.
Intermittent periods of my 20s into my 30s again from Twentynine up to around, generally, Wasco.)
Off topic, but worthy of your reading time:
The Closing of the Liberal Mind
by Daniel Greenfield
One excerpt:
California Bear saves human from (California) Mountain Lion.
Preliminary US Forestry Service investigation finds .. *Dumbfuck [anybody from] (the dumbfuck state of) California.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF3vaNsJ-A0
Yeah yeah I know, mountain lions don’t come outta the hills and nobody any more knows Morse code
“Why Uncle JK, would they need to know ‘any’ We’ve got Facebook” and there’s no way Mark Zuckerburg is gonna let a mountain lion get into Silicon Valley … Besides, all the Governor said was, He’s not gonna allow people to …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od-jiR7NC-c
and even pumping hundreds of billions of gallons of clean fresh water into the ocean for the sake of an endangered smelt.
A species this stupid deserves to perish.
Looks like Ca. might have a rendezvous with itself and its unlimited growth as well as imaginary growth of everything imaginable without all those untidy consequences.
Between the environmentalist’s hold on political power, to the open border “Reconquista” dreamers, to the tax and tax some more pols, to the productive middle class fleeing the state…Ca. might just choke itself to death. They are usually 5 to 10 years ahead of the rest of the country in many respects.
Henry, that Greenfield quote can apply nicely to the next two offerings by our host below this current piece.
A worldview this stupid certainly does, at least.