Joel Kotkin on Newgeography.com writes about the nearly recession-proof nature of Washington, D. C. and its metro area.  It is a city of government and the mandarin classes, and they never go out of style.  But it seems to me that even during Republican administrations – the age of Reagan and Bush Senior, and that of W – the social and think-tank life of America got more and more centralized in the capital region, if anything perhaps more radically so among conservatives than among liberals.  The irony is that conservatives have been traditionally the ones arguing for ‘decentralization’ and ‘local control,’ Read the rest of this entry »

It has often been proposed to split California into two states.  In the past, these proposals generally agreed on dividing Northern California from Southern California; the cultural differential between the two was strong in the Kennedy years.  The reader may go to iTunes and check out Dick Dale’s instrumental version of  ”Misirlou,“ an iconic anthem for Southern Californians who were young in that period, as I was; and then check out Vince Guaraldi’s jazz version of the same song, released virtually simultaneously with Dale’s in 1961.  But more recently cultural differences have tended to arise more on a coastal-inland basis.  For one thing, the climatic differences between San Francisco and Sacramento, and between San Diego and Riverside, are far sharper than those between San Francisco and San Diego, critical as the north-south difference is.  For another, inland Northern California has turned increasingly conservative over time, whereas the secessio patriciorum of the late 60s and the 70s, in which much of the old Los Angeles elite fled to coastal Orange County, left Los Angeles much more under the domination of Hollywood than it had previously been.  [My old private high school, Black-Foxe, had a very pro-Goldwater student body in 1964; it folded in 1968, a victim, I think, of the secessio patriciorum.]

In 2009, Bill Maze, a rural legislator disturbed that urbanites should tell his constituents how to raise chickens, offered a proposal to slice off a new state called Coastal California.  But the boundary he proposed was Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Zubrin, in this article from National Review, takes a different approach from most conservatives on global warming, and to my view the most sensible approach.  Instead of denying that global warming is happening, or insisting that human activity has nothing to do with it if it is, he declares that global warming is in general a good thing for humankind.  Temperatures around 1000 A.D. were warmer than now, and that was not a time of great distress.  It was the cooling and Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1800 that was a challenge, at least for Europe.

I do think that he dismisses too easily the fact that there will be some real losers who will need help.  The island nations of Read the rest of this entry »

We have been accustomed recently to think of California as a place people migrate out of to the rest of the United States and that receives immigrants from abroad.  But apparently there are levels.  The Bay Area is so much more expensive than So Cal that Bay Area folks move to Los Angeles and San Diego Counties, the way people from So Cal go to Las Vegas or Phoenix.  Pretty soon I may post on my modest proposal to divide California into three states, which will never be enacted.

Related: “Bay Area Residents Leaving in Droves” by Aaron Glantz at BayCitizen.com

Recently it was revealed in a column by Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish liberal Muslim, that Newt Gingrich is a fan of none other than Mustafa Kemal Atatuerk.  Say what?  Kemal Atatuerk was one of the most radical secularists of the 20th century outside of the Communist world itself.  Ruling Turkey from 1923 to 1939, he remodeled the legal system of the nation on a French Revolutionary model, made it illegal to wear headscarves, required men to wear brimmed hats instead of fezzes [remember that till 1960, most men in Read the rest of this entry »

A recent series of political maps from PPIC, Public Policy Institute of California, provides some fascinating information.  One of the maps inflates or shrinks the various regions according to population; it makes clear why the Democratic Party dominates the state, largely because they dominate two large urban regions.  But the fourth map and the auxiliary maps make clear that party loyalty in California is primarily determined by economic issues, but that the two chief moral issues [not counting attitudes toward immigration here as a 'social issue'], left to themselves, cut somewhat differently.

I used to be a Committed Conservative; Read the rest of this entry »

To add to my collection of Swede jokes, and of Ethnic Jokes that Really Happened, I heard this story:

A gentleman of Swedish ancestry was being interviewed for the post of provost at an evangelical college.  He was asked, “So why are you excited about the prospect of becoming provost of [this particular college]?”  And he declared, “I’m not excited.”  He got the job.