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California’s arid reality

We recall the catastrophic fires in Maui almost two years ago, then the horde of unusually violent hurricanes trashing Florida’s west coast. To the surprise of many, those storms unleashed cataclysmic flooding in western North Carolina, up there in the mountains. All these extreme weather events were tied in part to warming temperatures. As for wiping out large parts of an entire civilization, though, nothing can match the wildfires torching community after community in and around Los Angeles. But in the case of Los Angeles, the problem isn’t just climate change. It’s the climate ...

Farm leaders applaud action against bird flu

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) took the threat of avian flu head-on at a town hall at the 109th annual Pennsylvania Farm Show, saying that as highly pathogenic avian influenza spreads to dairy in other states, his administration would remain proactive and aggressive in establishing a nation-leading surveillance-testing system for milk at the processor level. “Because of our aggressive approach to testing and quarantine plans, we successfully reduced the threat of avian flu and haven’t had a positive test after taking over 10,000 milk samples,” he ...

Dense fog settling in

It’s important in a democracy that the losing side grapple with its defeat and learn the right lessons for next time. A certain amount of reflection and self-criticism is healthy, but we’ve blown past that point and are in danger of over-interpreting the 2024 results. Despite headlines proclaiming the GOP won in a “rout” or declaring that “This is the collapse of the Democratic Party,” November’s election was actually quite close. Trump received 49.9% to Kamala Harris’s 48.4%, a difference of a point and a half. That’s a smaller margin than any winner since Richard ...

Restart the clock

Today is the day, when Gov. Jim Justice hands over the wheel of the ship of state to the new governor, Patrick Morrisey. It is a true changing of the guard. Justice spent the prior week handing out more checks, traveling on treacherous roadways due to the snow/ice storm, receiving a polite goodbye from lawmakers who seem very ready for the new Morrisey administration to take over, and giving one final closed virtual briefing to reporters. I predict that Justice’s legacy over the last eight years will be mixed. There are many good things to point to, several bad things that took up ...

A ‘progressive hellscape’ in California

“February was the wettest month in downtown Los Angeles since 1998. With over 12 inches of rain drenching the city, it was the fourth-wettest February—and the seventh-wettest month overall—in the city’s nearly 150-year recorded history,” said Judson Jones’ report on Los Angeles’ weather on March 2, 2024, in The New York Times. Just under a year later, Los Angeles is on fire and the fire hydrants have run dry from a lack of water. “In 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the ...

Facebook and free speech

The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps eternal battle between the experts and the masses has been shifting starkly, even wildly, with the former losing and the latter gaining clout. That’s been most visible in the series of announcements and selfies emanating from the gaudy precincts of Mar-a-Lago. The experts like to scoff at what they consider a poor man’s idea of how a rich man lives. Those more attuned to the masses can respond that the compound was built with money made from sales of breakfast cereal. The most striking shift came this week on ...