Joel Kotkin has got a post up, partially entitled, “Coastal Cities are Old News – It’s the Sunbelt that’s Booming.” In it, he declares, “people seem to, once again, be streaming toward the expanse of warm-weather states extending from the […]
California
After a Century, Why is the San Francisco Bay Area Kicking our Butt Now?
I was young in the early Sixties, when the cultural rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco was strong and active. Jack Smith, for Los Angeles, and Herb Caen, for San Francisco, used to feud regularly in their newspaper columns […]
The Late Chaim Potok and the 2012 Election
My apologies for my long silence. I was gone for five weeks, mainly on my wife’s business, but the last portion of the trip was a journey through the north of Greece looking mostly at painted churches. I should start […]
California Law and Sex Partner Switch
This is a strange story. A man got a woman to sleep with him by pretending [in the dark, I suppose] to be her boy friend. Now apparently if you impersonate a husband in this way, it is rape under […]
California, Sea Otters, and the Russians
Interestingly enough, the reason that sea otters remain a threatened species even today is because the Russians, when they occupied the Fort Ross enclave from 1812 to 1841, they nearly exterminated them. In response to: “End of ‘no otter’ zone […]
Changing my mind about single family homes
I used to believe that social justice required that a region be overbuilt [or at least over-entitled at law] in high-density housing and other locally undesirable land uses. Now, thanks to Joel Kotkin’s influence, I believe that social justice requires […]
Last Call in California
Huh? It would make a lot more sense, automobile-dependent as California still is, to keep the alcohol closing hour at 2 a.m. and insist that Starbucks and other coffee houses stay open till 4 a.m. If I went pub-crawling in […]
Is Hawai’i the Bellwether for California?
California used to consider itself the leading state and the bellwether for the entire country. Now that the entrepreneurial initiative has mostly switched to Texas and other such places, and Texas’s infrastructure has pulled ahead of California’s in its quality […]
Driver’s Licenses for the Undocumented
I actually favor the issuance of driver’s licenses to the undocumented. They, however, should be of a distinctive marking. But it gives us some control. If an illegal immigrant drives without insurance, or if he attempts to apply the Fifth […]
On the Inhabitants of LA and CA
From Derek Sivers, one of the best descriptions of Los Angeles life I’ve ever read, and a lot of it applies to Orange County, even though the OC is not so much a center of the entertainment industry. [Before the […]