Well, you just take that, New Orleans!

If the greatest flood ever recorded in California happened in 1862, wouldn't it be hard to blame another of its size on the global warming now occurring? The damage such a flood would cause, quite aside from its cause, would be the result of the state's contemporary population, 39.5 million, compared with the half million in the state in 1862. And these aren't 39.5 million sitting ducks. They don't fly and don't float. But, according to our business and political leaders, they and their new neighbors, just about to arrive, are the life blood of the California economy. And it is not permitted to criticize the richest state in the union and, depending on whether you include a cost-of-living index, either the sixth or the eleventh richest economy in the world, even though the difference between the two rankings is largely the ever-rising cost of real estate in this constantly booming and busting economy. We are supposed to love our good fortune, somehow, according to our leaders, whose main purpose is to produce a constant din of communal good fortune, when anyone who has lived here for any length of time realizes things are not, actually, getting much better. Perhaps jobs are easier to find than they were in the depths of the Great Recession. We're not in a drought this year. Marijuana is legal now, which is sending waves through the state's rural real estate market.