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This leaves me shaking my head, as the daughter of California pioneers. As a new bride in 1959 I moved from CA to IL and was astonished to see the mid-west suffering from annual floods, droughts, and other weather events. I couldn’t understand it. California, my native state, had controlled the weather and the water supply. Water was collected in reservoirs during the wet season and distributed statewide, as needed.

Californians no longer suffered from the floods that had once stranded ships on dry land in the Sacramento Valley in the late 1800s (North Central Valley) or repeated floods in my home town of Fresno that dissolved adobe houses in the 1920s. Farmers had water when they turned a valve, and everybody else had a chain of lakes for unlimited recreational use.

The University system had capped its flagship Universities at 26,000 top students each, leaving much of the rest of the education burden to the State colleges (which could not offer PhDs), and the Jr. colleges which were free to all with a high school diploma.

Why couldn’t other states be so advanced in their thinking and their planning, I asked?

I’d ask where it all went wrong, but I was back in CA and witnessed that downturn in the 1960s and 1970s with the influx of draft dodgers and radical youth from the east looking for a cheap education and freedom from their parents’ rules.

What a mess it has become.

It is very sad what has happened to California. One of my neighbors is a descendent of Central Valley pioneers from Austria who ran a transportion/wagon train business during the gold mining heyday. He had to leave because he actually wanted to work and buy his own house. All that history...given up in one generation.

It used to be such a Republican state. And then that activist son took over the LA Times in the '60s... look what he has created.

Read Andrew Breitbart's "Righteous Indignation" for a good recap of the political history of southern California. He traces the destruction back to Marxist college professors who escaped persecution in Germany in the 1940s and came to teach at the colleges in southern California. They were nasty, miserable people and spread their parasitic disease throughout this once thriving state until it is a wasted corpse.