Müller was born in Weilheim, Upper Bavaria, and grew up in the nearby village of Pähl, which became the centre of media attention during his World Cup exploits in 2010.
Müller played as a youth for TSV Pähl, before joining FC Bayern München in 2000, aged 10. He progressed through the youth setup, and was part of the team that finished runner-up in the U-19 Bundesliga in 2007.
As he came through the youth system, he was seen primarily as a midfielder, but since breaking into the first-team he has been used in more forward roles.
In December 2009 he married his long-time girlfriend Lisa Trede, a semi-professional equestrian.
He made his international debut in March 2010 against Argentina, being named in the starting eleven for the match at the Allianz Arena, his home stadium.
He almost missed out on the 2010 World Cup because he fell off his bicycle at the team's training camp in South Tyrol suffering a scare.


Connect with RV Resort Decision Makers!
Welcome Home, RGV's Connection Fair will be held Tuesday, November 5, 2019 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the McAllen Convention Center. At last year's Connection Fair, we had 147 vendors, over 250 attendees with over 100 parks represented, and we feel certain this year's event will be equally successful.
We will start the afternoon with special entertainment then roll right into the show. The show is the perfect opportunity to meet as many activity directors and property managers as possible to provide them with an overview of what you have to offer. This targeted approach allows you to meet directly with the decision makers in our Valley parks and resorts.
The Connection Fair is just one of the exciting activities Welcome Home, RGV has planned for this season. We invite you to join our show this year. Call (956) 687-5115 to get registered.


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We are The Pulling Linemen: dedicated to bringing you stories and opinions from the guys at the centre of football - Linemen!
Contact us at info@pullinglinemen.com, or on twitter @PullingLinemen
Tebow, Sanchez and TNF: A lesson in Wins as a stat
Tim Tebow's magic legs came to life with just 5 minutes
left on Thursday night
Well folks, Tim Tebow "did it again". For those brave souls like myself who sat through the worst game of the season that didn't involve Cleveland we were rewarded with what NFL Network's "professional" panel orgasmicly called "Tebow Time". To hear them talk it's like no one had ever gone on a game winning drive before.
Anyway, after what felt like a century of awful offense, of averaging 2.4 yards a carry the Jets defense tired a little and Tebow found a little crease here on a triple option and a big old hole there on a basic QB scramble before getting outside of the worst blitz of the season and scoring the winning TD. Well done to him. It was a game neither side offense deserved, or looked like they wanted, to win. But Timmy boy found a way through.
It's another game, much like the Miami one, that will solidify the positions of Tebow "Haters" and the… Tebowites? Tebians? I feel like his followers need a collective noun.
His QB stat line was ugly: 9/20 for 104 yards and there were not many pretty passes in there. A few were catchable balls, sometimes a WR would get an outstretched fingertip to one, but by and large there was little to write home about for Tim's arm again. His legs however, and his vision for a hole, have every right to be raving. As most talent evaluators said before Tebow entered the NFL, he'd make a real good FB/TE. He LOVES contact, he fights for every yard and he's a strong guy. Watching Tebow run during the final drive was fun, you could see what was coming and the Jets just weren't able to stop it partly because they insisted on defending a pass everyone knew wasn't coming.
Tebow's mechanics leave a lot to be desired, particularly
in the accuracy department
But… To say he won the game is wrong. Almost as wrong as saying "Tebow wins and therefore he's a good QB", but we'll get to that in a minute. Last night Tim Tebow was, for once, not the worst Quarterback out there. Would Mark Sanchez please come up to collect the award!
My god he was bad. The former USC star has been poked, prodded and critiqued more than most QB's in their 3rd year. Partly this is because of what the Jets gave up to go and get him at 5th overall and partly because he plays for a New York team. It also doesn't help that his loud-mouth head coach keeps yapping about how they're going to win the Super Bowl and take the division from New England. The kid doesn't need that kind of pressure Rex!
Sanchez does a few things really well, he can throw a quick timing pattern off of play-action REALLY well. It's right there on the money every time. But ask him to drop back, scan a field and consistently hit the open man? Not a chance. The Jets were 3-14 on 3rd down with the Sanchize as a big reason why. After last week's game against New England I said the Jets don't trust him, but the real truth is that they shouldn't trust him. Last season Sanchez, off the back of very strong defensive support, pulled out a few last minute wins (not too dissimilar to a certain #15) and people were raving about him being "clutch" and "a winner". NFLN even put up a stat that Sanchez's record in his first 40 starts was the 2nd best in Jets history. But that's so misleading it should be criminal.
Andre Goodman returns an interception for a touchdown
to keep the Broncos in the game
So here's the crux of this piece. Wins are NOT a good, or even useful, way to judge a Quarterback.
Tom Brady and Bill Belichick recently broke the record for QB-Head Coach pair wins. Great, but the problem is it's not just them out there! There are 52 other guys on the roster, all of whom play their heart out every game to get that big W next to their team in the standings.
During the game last night NFLN put up a comparison graphic of the Broncos with and without Tebow over the last year and a half. They are 4-3 with him but just 4-14 without. WOW! Tebow is a winner! He's the magic that makes the difference. Is he bollocks. The stat that needed highlighting over any other in that graphic was points per game. With Tebow Denver are scoring an extra 1.6 points a game. And it will be less after the 17 points the Broncos put up last night. Are you seriously telling me those 1.6 points are the reason they're winning? The whole Broncos organisation deserves credit for the turn around and their current win streak, most of all the defense which has greatly improved as the season has gone on. But you wouldn't know it if you went to the sports sites today.
The most galling thing about this whole "QB wins" stat is that it flat out ignores the input of the rest of the team. Would Denver have won without Andre Goodson's pick 6? How about the excellent punting of Britton Colquitt? And let's not even start to ask where they'd be without Elvis Dumervil and Von Miller.
Von Miller is showing why he was worth a 2nd overall
pick in April
American Football is the ultimate team sport. If just 1 person does not execute properly then nothing works. Yes some players have a bigger effect on the outcome of a game, and the quarterback is right up there, but to say it's the QB who wins is to be ignorant of the input other players have. The difference between a game winning last minute TD and a garbage time stat-padder is what happened in the previous 59 minutes of the game and the input of every other player on that field. They should not be dismissed so quickly. The NFL is a results business, I get that, but let's hold off anointing Tebow until we get a good sample size, or we see him against a good team and post up a good points total.
Baseball has had it's own revolution and tossed out the win as a useful stat to evaluate pitchers. The NFL is just waiting for a Moneyball moment to get this point across to the wider public. There are sabremetric places around, Football Outsiders being our favourite, but their own brand of stats aren't nearly as famous and widely used as the baseball equivalents, but they should be. You know where Tebow ranks in their QB DVOA? 37th of 40 (after week 10). Ahead of only AJ Feeley, Curtis Painter and Blaine Gabbert. Ouch.
This piece won't make a person lose their Te-boner and renounce their faith in #15. But hopefully it will make you think again before declaring: "Tebow just wins baby!!". The biggest single disaster of the Tebow craze was in the post-match interviews last night, when rookie sensation and the game MVP Von Miller's first question was about Tebow. Not about how good he was at making experienced OT's look no better than an anorexic in a pie-eating contest.
The NFL media is wrapped up in Tim Tebow because he's controversial and different. They can't get their heads out of his arse right now and it's dreadful to watch. All we ask here at TPL is that a fair and balanced evaluation of the game take place and that people don't forget the 55 or so minutes of useless play that come before the "magic". But on this night you could be excused for thinking Tebow was a good QB when you only had Mark Sanchez for comparison. The Jets would be fools not to seriously look at bringing in competition for him next year.
To me Tim Tebow is like a crappy movie that's way too long, unnecessarily complicated and extremely poorly acted, but it's got a weird twist at the end that no one sees coming. People leave the theatre stunned, talking about nothing but the twist and how good it was, forgetting the 3 hours of unwatchable dross they just sat through. To you he's a great finish to a story where the outcome is the only thing that counts. But who would you rather have right now, the 2-7 Cam Newton or the 4-1 Tim Tebow?
- Toby Durant (@TDonSport)
- The Pulling Linemen
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Toby Durant (@TDOnSport)
Favourite Team: New England Patriots.
Played since 2007.
Played For: Nottingham Outlaws ('07-'10, TE & LT).
Oxford Saints ('11-present, OT, OG, DT)
Coached for: Oxford Brookes Panthers ('11-present
About Me: Have been watching football avidly since '06, writing since '11 just for the love of the game.
Phil Gaskin (@plrgaskin)
Favourite Team: St Louis Rams
Played since: 2008
Played For: Bath Killer Bees (08/09, OG), Nottingham Outlaws (09-12, C/OG), Nottingham Caesars (11-13, OG/C)
About me: Former Nottingham Outlaws President and Coach. I play, I watch and I blog. There is no greater sport.
Gur Samuel (@FredTheGur)
Favourite Team: Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Played For: Nottingham Outlaws, OT (2 seasons, 2009/10-2010/11).
Coached since: 2012
Coached for: London Hornets, Offensive Line (2012)
LSBU Spartans, Offensive Line, Assistant Head Coach (2012/13)
East Kent Mavericks, Offensive Line (2013 - )
Canterbury Christchurch Chargers, Offensive Co-ordinator (2013/14 - )
About Me: used to play, now I coach

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Exhibition // The Best of Times, The Worst of Times Revisited at MOMENTUM
Article by Jenny Tang; Wednesday, Sep. 18, 2013
In the preface to their 1944 volume Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote, while in exile from their native Germany: "We have no doubt … that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking … already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today." That is, in short, the theoretical problem with which The Best of Times, The Worst of Times Revisited wrestles. Originally part of the 2012 1st Kiev Biennale, the seven videos chosen to be reprised at MOMENTUM Berlin offer a distillation of the biennale's themes without the accompanying demands of seeing a sprawling and unwieldy biennale. At MOMENTUM, the works are given well-deserved time and focus.
Gülsün Karamustafa – "Insomniambule" (2011), video, 11 min 40 sec
Curator David Elliott cites the oft-quoted opening lines of Charles Dickens' 1859 A Tale of Two Cities in both the exhibition's title and its press materials. Dickens' novel, in its superlative juxtaposition of revolutionary France and contemporary England, dramatizes the problems of revolution that Elliott revisits in his program. Questions of fanaticism, sovereignty (both of the individual and the state), and temporality frame the novel, and provide a fruitful starting point in approaching these works, which in style and content are strikingly diverse.
The program begins with Lutz Becker's The Scream (2012), and in its initial silent minutes we encounter not one audible scream, but the silent screams of many: of machines of war, of marching men, of strewn bodies. Becker, who is a film historian as well as filmmaker, created The Scream with footage from the films of the late Ukrainian filmmaker and poet Alexsandr Dovzhenko, and set it to a haunting score by Thomas Köner. This is the stuff of history, to be sure, but not documentary–Becker has fashioned Dovzhenko's work into a cinematic poem. In Becker's deft hands, we experience the unknowable gulf that separates our time from Dovzhenko's as layers of aesthetic mediation. Becker, who was born in Berlin in 1941 and was welcomed into childhood by a world that lay in ruins, is perhaps the best person to guide us.
Lutz Becker – "The Scream" (2012), single-channel version of 3-channel video installation montage of films by Alexsandr Dovzhenko
In contrast to Becker's almost academic meditation on cinema, time, and poetry, John Bock's Monsieur et Monsieur (2011) presents a comical and absurdist scenario: the escalating hostilities between two old men who live and work in a shared office space. The structure and logic of Bock's film is perhaps best articulated by the architecture within it. Inexplicable holes cut between walls echo the penetrating power of the camera lens itself, floors and ceilings are lopsided, and at any second the architecture of the place can be reconfigured. In one of its most memorable moments, one of the old men lies down on the carpet for a nap. Seizing his chance, the other cuts the outline of a penis from the carpet and lays it over the sleeping man's torso. This is perhaps the only subversive use of industrial strength office carpet that I have ever witnessed.
John Bock – "Monsieur et Monsieur" (2011), video, 36 min 49 sec
Doubles and doppelgängers appear again in Gülsün Karamustafa's Insomniambule (2011), which follows two female characters, one plagued by insomnia and the other by a penchant for sleepwalking. Like in the films of David Lynch, the settings seem to be an extension of the characters' subconscious: a dark luxurious bedroom, a foreboding hallway, an empty garden. There are strong echoes of the uncanny characters and eerie sets of Lynch's Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. Of course, the power of the uncanny is that, in the final turn, what is revealed is what we already intimately know.
Tracey Moffatt's Doomed (2007) made in collaboration with Gary Hillberg is, like Becker's The Scream, a montage of other films. Rather than delving into the oeuvre of a single filmmaker, Moffatt brings to our attention scenes of destruction and apocalypse from movies that already, in some way or another, litter our cultural memory. There is Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton escaping the destructive path of a tornado in Twister (1996). There is the sinking of the Titanic, the crumbling of the Golden Gate Bridge, the countless cinematic takes on the downfall of New York City. These moments of destruction and fear are taken for granted as elements of the craft of cinema. We watch from the safety of our movie theater seats how others have imagined our end. Moffatt has plucked these moments from their narrative context and set them to a soundtrack befitting dramatic and heroic cinematic moments. Yet in combining soundtrack and montage, the effect is strangely festive: the end of the world is near (or perhaps has already arrived) and you are invited to the party.
Tracey Moffatt in collaboration with Gary Hillberg – "Doomed" (2007), video, 9 min 20 sec
Alternatively festive and elegiac, deadly earnest and eclectically wry, there is nevertheless a sense of urgency, if not in content then surely in context, that unites these works. Faced with the fragmented and haunting elements of our past, how do we construct a future? Can we yet salvage the Enlightenment ideal of the rational, sovereign individual in a postcolonial and postmodern world? Yang Fudong's lush and stunning The Nightman Cometh (2011), which loosely follows the wanderings of an injured warrior who must decide whether to persevere or cease his battles, leaves us with this final view: the warrior riding inexorably forward into the snow-covered landscape, pausing only for a single look back.
"The Best of Times, The Worst of Times Revisited: Selected Videos From The 1st Kiev Biennale" – GROUP SHOW
Curated by David Elliott
Exhibition: Sep. 06 – Oct. 27, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, Sep. 06; 7-10pm
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2 (click here for map)


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Panel to discuss Sherwin Early Career Professor Pamela VanHaitsma's new book "Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age" Jan 13, 2021
State College Magazine features REI faculty member's COVID-19 art initiative Jan 04, 2021
Past president of Ireland interviews Douglass on Paris Agreement Dec 10, 2020
Susser cited in comprehensive EU report on social media's influence on democracy and political behavior Dec 09, 2020
Daily Collegian: Rock Ethics Institute panel discusses new book 'Trans Care' by Penn State professor Dec 04, 2020
Rock Research Archive
Ethics Education
Science and Engineering Ethics
The Rock Ethics Institute supports interdisciplinary ethics research and leadership across Penn State. This is a list of the Institute's current co-sponsored research projects.
TOPIC: Public Life
Moral Agency and Moral Development Initiative
The Rock Ethics Institute's Moral Agency and Moral Development initiative focuses on fostering research collaborations about moral experience, deliberation, judgment, and action, and forms of education that support the development of moral agency.
Integral to the initiative is the Moral Agency Workshop, which is directed by Daryl Cameron, the convener of this initiative. The Moral Agency Workshop is an interdisciplinary working group that brings together faculty and graduate students from a diverse range of disciplines to study ethics and morality.
The Moral Agency and Moral Development initiative also hosts a number of events, including the recurring Expanding Empathy speaker series and the Moral Psychology and Research Group Conference in October 2017.
The Ethics of Representing/Re-Presenting Trauma Initiative
Co-convened by MaryEllen Higgins, Judith Newman, and Brian Onishi, this initiative focuses on the ethics of lingering trauma in films and eponyms.
Using a collective, interdisciplinary approach to ethical dilemmas and solutions, the initiative examines, for example, the representations of discrimination, criminalization, violent conflict, assault, and climate anxiety in film, and the re-presentations of trauma when buildings, awards, and diseases are named after people who have committed ethically egregious acts.
Restorative Justice Initiative
The Rock Ethics Institute's Restorative Justice Initiative brings together philosophers, social scientists, and other experts to examine the ethical challenges involved in responding to injustice. Co-convened by Joshua Inwood and Eduardo Mendieta, the Restorative Justice Initiative pursues interdisciplinary research that explores how, in the wake of injustice, individuals and communities can respond in ways that promote both accountability and healing.
The Initiative primarily focuses on two (overlapping) areas of research: criminal justice policy and racial reconciliation in societies characterized by histories of injustice. Activities of the initiative include organizing public lectures and conferences, an education program for inmates housed in facilities near Penn State, and fostering collaboration on grants and peer-reviewed publications that advance scholarship on restorative justice.
TOPIC: Sustainability
Climate and Sustainability Ethics Initiative
Who bears responsibility for protecting those whose basic rights are threatened by climate change, and what constitutes an ethically justifiable response? The Rock Ethics Institute partners with researchers, stakeholders, educators, and policy makers to insure that questions like these do not go unaddressed.
Research that focuses on ethically-informed decision-support in response to climate change is a unique signature of the initiatives undertaken by the Rock Ethics Institute and Penn State. Among the initiatives are CLIMA, the SCRiM network, and VIFF, which are supported by major National Science Foundation grants.
Penn State's Center for Climate Risk Management, CLIMA, brings together scholars to inform the design of ethically defensible climate risk management strategies that are scientifically sound, technologically possible, and economically efficient and to advance real-world climate risk management.
Centered at Penn State, the Sustainable Climate Risk Management network, SCRiM links a transdisciplinary team of scholars at 19 universities and six research institutions across six nations to answer the question, What are sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible climate risk management strategies?
Visualizing Forest Futures, VIFF is a new approach to sustainable forest management under climate change that links human values, projections, and visualization to decision-making under uncertainty.
Environmental Philosophy Journal
The Rock Ethics Institute also partners with the International Association of Environmental Philosophy to publish the journal Environmental Philosophy.
Human and Ethical Dimensions of Antimicrobial Resistance
Microorganisms (like viruses and bacteria) can mutate and make the medications used to combat them (antimicrobials) ineffective. When microorganisms become resistant to antimicrobials, they sometimes are popularly called "superbugs."
Highly industrialized nations like the U.S. and China tend to overuse antimicrobials in their agricultural systems, which contributes to increased resistance to antimicrobials. Developing nations, like those on the African continent, lack access to agricultural pharmaceuticals, which contributes to both human and animal suffering through loss of income from animal products and loss of animal life due to sickness and lack of treatment.
This distributive dilemma raises complex moral questions of justice, such as: how to identify conflicting values associated with antibiotic use in agriculture; how antimicrobials should be regulated nationally and globally; and the importance of education and behavior-changing interventions that seek to improve the level of knowledge and inaction surrounding antimicrobial resistance.
The study is conducting interdisciplinary analyses of decision-making surrounding agricultural pharmaceuticals among goat farmers in Pennsylvania and Rwanda and of the factors that may contribute to different levels of antimicrobial use among farmers (such as, gender, income, education, and attitudes toward sustainability).
The study is led by Elizabeth Ransom and co-convened with REI research associates Sarah Rajtmajer and Caitlin Grady, as well as Maurice Byukusenge (Michigan State) and Suresh Kuchipudi (Penn State).
TOPIC: Technology
Engineering, Technology, and Ethics
The Engineering, Technology, and Ethics Initiative further positions the Rock Ethics Institute as a thought leader in the ethics of technology and engineering education, as the Initiative examines the intersection of ethics, engineering, and technology by examining these topics from both research and pedagogical perspectives.
From a research perspective, researchers hope to better understand how the use of technology impacts student ethics, engineering students in particular, and to develop new methods to enhance engineering education. Co-convened by Tom Litzinger, Daniel Susser, and Eduardo Mendieta, the initiative also focuses on faculty development and teaching aimed at fortifying ethics understanding and decision-making in the classroom.
Ethics, Security, and Critical Network Project
Co-convened by Caitlin Grady and Sarah Rajtmajer, the Rock Ethics Institute's Ethics, Security, and Critical Network Project focuses on the inextricably intertwined critical infrastructure in the United States—systems and processes increasingly connected to the internet and increasingly at risk for cyberattack.
The project seeks to understand the interdependencies of critical infrastructure across time and space, while also seeking the best responses to ethical questions posed by the potential risks of disruption.
TOPIC: Health
Ethics and Health Initiative
Co-convened by Jonathan Marks and Francisco Javier Lopez Frias, the Rock Ethics Institute's Ethics and Health initiative brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who share an interest in the systemic and institutional influences on health, and in their ethical and policy implications.
Among the topics of interest to the group: the relationship between individual and public health; the influence of industry actors on health research and policy; the impact on health of food systems and the environment (whether local or global; both natural and built); the framing of exercise as medicine; and the social construction of gender.
The Rock Ethics Institute frequently partners with the Penn State Bioethics Program for this initiative. The Bioethics Program is directed by Jonathan Marks and assistant director Michele Mekel, an REI affiliate faulty member.
Health Ethics, Ecology, and Policy (HEEP)
The Health Ethics, Ecology, and Policy (HEEP) initiative is an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project that bridges the humanities, social and natural sciences, and a variety of applied fields across several Penn State colleges, consolidating a university-wide research initiative within the Rock Ethics Institute.
It is driven by the recognition that health care policies and practices are embedded within political, economic, environmental, agricultural, and industrial contexts.
Meaningful advances in health research and public health policy must address this broader ecology on which our health depends, and to do so successfully requires interdisciplinary and collaborative research that bridges the humanities, social and natural sciences, and a variety of applied fields. Unifying this research is an ethical commitment to human health as a shared and guiding value.
Ready, Set, Pause
Convened by Dr. Jeremy Engels (with Robert Roeser in Penn State's College of Health and Human Development), the Institute's Ready, Set, Pause initiative seeks to create a professional development workshop series to help build capacity and community among Penn State faculty who are interested in integrating contemplative practices including mindfulness and compassion training into their courses.
The workshops would provide the ability to create an enhanced experiential learning/contemplative practices component into coursework, renewing education in the Liberal Arts to include the experiential, practical learning of ethical skills (e.g., self-awareness, mindfulness, and compassion) alongside the declarative, verbal learning that characterizes much of a university classroom today. This approach to the development of intellectual and ethical values goes back millennia to the Greco-Roman and Sanskritic India traditions in which the acquisition of ethical know-how was seen as predicated on both habit learning and contemplation, as well as dialogue and debate.
TOPIC: Gender and Sexuality
Ethical and Psychological Dimensions of Gender and Pronouns
Co-convened by Evan Bradley and Laura Evans (2020–2021 REI Faculty Fellows) the Ethical and Psychological Dimensions of Gender and Pronouns initiative investigates ethical principles that impact gender-neutral pronoun use in interpersonal communication and pilots intervention strategies based on an ethical framework.
The findings will be used to develop materials for ethical education and inclusion initiatives at Penn State and beyond.
Gender and Sex Equity Initiative
Co-convened by Hil Malatino and Sara Clark Miller, the Rock Ethics Institute's Gender and Sex Equity Initiative engages in research and outreach projects designed to address forms of oppression, disadvantage, bias, and general inequality pertaining to gender and sexuality.
The working group brings interdisciplinary, intersectional, feminist, trans-inclusive, and critical race approaches to the examination and redress of contemporary ethical issues that impact gender and sexual minorities.
TOPIC: Global Issues
Children, Youth, and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones
Children and youth are the largest populations in conflict zones. Since they most impacted, this Initiative aims to shine the spotlight on media rights and uses that best aid and empower children and youth.
Convened by Rock Ethics Institute research associate Yael Warshel (co-convened with Idan Shalev of Penn State's Department of Biobehavioral Health and Oana Albu of the Copenhagen Business School), the Initiative established the Children, Media, and Conflict Zones Lab in the Bellisario College of Communications to achieve its aims.
Human Rights and Forced Migration Project
Co-convened by Rock Ethics Institute research associates Yael Warshel and Désirée Lim, the REI's Human Rights and Forced Migration Project seeks to positively impact refugee policy and to offer alternatives to the current model of forced migration by scrutinizing refugee issues from three main points:
Arguing for a broader human right to communicate, which entitles refugees to minimally decent communication technologies
Theorizing alternatives to the current state-centric refugee model, which presumes that refugees must either return to their states of origin or join new ones
Analyzing a variety of assumptions often made about refugees—for example, the belief that they must be settled within a fixed territory, which disregards traditionally nomadic refugee groups like the Sahrawi.
TOPIC: Race
Critical Philosophy of Race
Convened by Robert Bernasconi, the Critical Philosophy of Race Initiative (CPR) seeks to develop the philosophical tools necessary to meet the ethical and intellectual challenges posed by new forms of racism, as well as the legacy of the inherited racisms. It also turns the spotlight on philosophy itself, its history, and the shocking lack of diversity within many philosophy departments today.
The CPR Initiative seeks to:
promote the recruitment, retention, and graduation of racial minorities both at the graduate and undergraduate levels
sponsor workshops on contentious issues with a view to promoting interracial understanding
be a clearing house for resources that promote the study of the history and current state of race thinking and racism
mentor young philosophy faculty toward tenure
become a site for interdisciplinary engagement with issues of race both in the Penn State system and more broadly
set up global as well as local partnerships at every level with a view to promoting a better informed discussion of racial issues
As part of this initiative, as well, the Rock Ethics Institute sponsors Critical Philosophy of Race, which is regarded as the premier journal in this area.
TOPIC: Food and Agriculture
Ethical Decision-Making Among School Foodservice Stakeholders
School administrators and foodservice directors face many challenges when trying to make ethical decisions about what meals to provide students through the National School Lunch Program. Considering menu items, the environment where the children eat, the time allowed for lunches, and more, the decisions are frequently made with little decision-making guidance and under tight regulatory, cost, and resource constraints.
The Rock Ethics Institute's Ethical Decision-Making Among School Foodservice Stakeholders initiative seeks to understand the obstacles and challenges stakeholders face in making such decisions and to leverage this understanding to develop an ethical decision-making framework to guide such decisions for these stakeholders.
The project creates far-reaching research and pedagogical synergies by leveraging the expertise of Penn State's Food Decisions Research Laboratory (which is directed by initiative convener Amit Sharma) and the REI's Food Innovation, Ethics, Leadership, Development, and Sustainability (FIELDS) initiative, under the direction of co-convener Robert M. Chiles—providing deep, meaningful research opportunities for both Penn State undergraduate and graduate students.
Food Innovation, Ethics, Leadership, Development, and Sustainability (FIELDS) Project
Convened by Robert M. Chiles, the Food Innovation, Ethics, Leadership, Development, and Sustainability (FIELDS) Project is an interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative dedicated to agricultural and food ethics.
FIELDS is centered around the ethical and economic implications of cellular agriculture—integrating ethical concerns, processes, and objectives into interdisciplinary food and agricultural scholarship, from field to fork, across multiple stakeholder groups.
Current thematic areas include: sustainable agri-food systems and climate change; food security and international development ethics; the ethics of meat production and consumption; plant-based proteins and meal options; and social innovation and corporate social responsibility in the agri-food system.


AUSTIN, Texas, June 28 (Reuters) - Three railroad workers are missing after two freight trains they were on collided in northern Texas on Tuesday, causing a huge fire, officials said.
The accident near Panhandle, about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Amarillo, happened when the lead locomotives of two Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Co trains crashed into each other, said company spokesman Joe Faust.
There was no information available as to what caused the accident or the fire, he said.
There were four workers aboard the two trains. One was found and taken to an area hospital. That person's condition is unknown, he said.
"Rescue efforts are under way at the scene with respect to the three other railroad employees involved in the incident," Faust said. Local rescue officials said the three were missing.
The Carson County Sheriff's office issued a mandatory evacuation for an area near the accident.


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Gordon Ramsay's Scrambled Eggs
Gordon Ramsay, one of the world's most celebrated chefs, invites you to learn his tricks with Cook with Me, the wild-mannered chef's new app, presented exclusively twice a week in The Daily.
The Scottish-born and English-raised chef Ramsay opened his first restaurant at age 31 in London's Chelsea neighborhood. The eponymous restaurant was awarded three Michelin stars within its first three years. Ramsay went on to open some of London's most famous restaurants, including the Savoy Grill and Petrus. In 2003 he went international, expanding in urban destinations from Tokyo to New York to Los Angeles.
Now Ramsay's bringing the heat directly to your iPad. Try Cook with Me via The Daily.
<iframe src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/PUP7U5vTMM0?v=PUP7U5vTMM0&feature=youtu.be&theme=light" allowFullScreen="true" frameborder="0"></iframe>


Once we have received your registration form we will send you the first volunteer newsletter by email, that will provide you with detailed information about volunteer roles, how the race works and what to bring. As we get closer to the event we will provide you with additional details to prepare you for the adventure ahead and to ensure that all the necessary logistics are taken care of for your time with us.
Although we are hoping that all volunteers will be self-sufficient during the race, we will do our best to make sure you have everything required. Expect to bring most of your own food and gear -- we are working hard to get as many food and equipment/product donations from companies for you as we can manage. Many roles require you be comfortable in the wilderness, as each race will be in a fairly remote areas, so please come prepared. We will let you know in advance whether you will be camping in a remote access area, near your vehicle or at one of our camps so that you can plan your requirements appropriately.
For most volunteer roles we will need you to arrive the day before the start of the race. Although we will give you most information prior to race(s) dates, there will be detailed information necessary to go over with you in person which will be done in a pre-scheduled, one-on-one meeting with one of our staff. This will give us the opportunity to better get to know you and answer further questions. It will also provide a chance for you to meet and get to know the competitors and fellow volunteers before the race starts.
After registration, everyone will camp out at base camp before heading to your role the following morning (Note: In most cases you will have the option of booking hotel accommodations at a special rate at the host site). All volunteer roles will have a minimum of two people per station. Most tasks will last the duration of the race, and we hope that everyone will be able to stay for the party directly after the race, as it will give the staff at Frontier Adventure Sports and the competitors a chance to say thank-you for your involvement and support.
Volunteering at an adventure race is hard work. It can also be a very rewarding and a memorable experience. We will do everything we can to get you ready for your role and help you maximize your experience, but we will still be expecting a lot of you. As important as it is that we all have a good time, it is most important that the competitors are safe and well looked after.
The following is a list of the major roles available at each race. Please read through all of them to see which roles most interest you.
Checkpoint Staff: This is where we need the most people. Checkpoints are specific locations on the course that all teams must pass through. For many checkpoints, it will involve being stationed in fairly accessible areas. The role consists of setting up the checkpoint, recording each team arrival and departure times as well as their general condition and then radioing the information to headquarters. You will also be responsible for ensuring the site is left clean. Note: All checkpoints are staffed with a minimum of two people, so it's a great job to do with a friend!
Remote Checkpoint Staff: This job is similar to the regular checkpoint but is usually deep in the wilderness. People wanting this role must be self-sufficient! Having your own camping equipment and the ability to carry it in for a stay overnight is a must. We will lead you in but you and your partner must be able to navigate your way out.
Transition Area Staff: TA's are major checkpoints, and the only areas on the course where teams can meet up with their support crew to re-supply. This area will be stationed with a minimum of four people. In addition to tracking competitors, you will also be responsible for tracking support crews, building a communal fire, and initiating games for the support crews, awarding prizes to the support crew antics. It is a fun role but definitely requires organizational and leadership skills.
Base Camp Staff: Base camp is at the finish line and serves as the command centre for the whole race. All team progress reports are relayed back to base camp to get entered into the master time spreadsheet and added to the spectator leader board. Teams must be tended to as they cross the finish line and equipment needs to be managed. Base camp is certainly more comfortable than a checkpoint and it has plenty of action. It is a good choice for those that are not as keen on being out in the wilderness.
Dispatch Driver: If you know the land and the roads in the race area, this is the job for you! The dispatch driver will be responsible for picking up teams that have dropped out for various reasons, volunteers that need to get to the next checkpoint. A person with a four-wheel drive truck is preferred but not necessary and of course Frontier Adventure Sports will pick up the tab for any gas you use.
Medical Team: Frontier has a great professional medical team. The AR Medics have years of experience and know what adventure racing is all about. If you can help them out let us know. Some medical staff assist in search and rescue situations while the majority monitor and assist teams as they pass through transition areas. Medical teams are positioned according to qualifications. If you have the minimal requirements of 1st Aid, CPR, or Wilderness 1st aid you can assist any of the qualified medics. If you are a qualified medic or above you will be in charge of caring for the competitors and assessing their condition as they come into transition areas.
Massage Therapist/Physiotherapist: Once teams reach the finish line we want them to relax and get comfortable. Volunteers for this position need to participate only on the last day of the race. We will establish a massage/physio tent near the finish line of every race so you have a dedicated facility to work from.
Each role listed offers some unique challenges and rewards and are suited to different types of individuals. List your top 3 choices on your registration form and we will do our best to put you in your role of choice. If you have any questions about any role listed please do not hesitate to contact us.


Warning: Do not read the Indie Game Making Contest 2017 Submission unless you already finished the game since it contains spoilers.
Investigate the crime scene where the murder took place.
Interrogate and contradict the suspects of the case.
Pursuit the true killer behind all the case!
Once you downloaded "Event Horizon Murder Case.zip" decompress it with your favorite software (Winzip in my case) and then just open "game.exe"
Very fun game, I really enjoyed it.
The game's very clearly inspired by the Ace Attorney games (as others have said) also as others have said there are some (glaring) errors in the English in the game, (as the creator is a non-English speaker this makes sense) so while it's a fun game with a nice mystery it's kinda hard to understand (at least for me) in some parts.
Overall I rather enjoyed the game and would recommend it to anyone who rather enjoys a good murder mystery.
building will be more fun as it is, fixing grammar horrors very soon!
Very fun game indeed, it is obvious that the author got inspired from Phoenix Wright series doing this game (it even has the Cross-Examination mechanics!), which is one of my favorite games from my childhood, that fact made me like this game fast; the suspense and history also builds up in a very nice pace. I think that the major issue with the game are the misspells and syntax errors, which kind of disconnected me from the game, because the history is the main aspect of it. However, if you are a fan of investigation games like Phoenix Wright and Heavy Rain, this will be a fun experience!
I feel you bro, my main language is portuguese and misspells are also an issue with my game, i am even considering hiring someone to correct it, lol.
Thank you too c: !


text:
ChefsClub wants to bring great food to Brazil at a discounted price
Matthew Hussey
Commissioning Editor
Matt Hussey was the former Editor-in-Chief for The Next Web. Previously he worked on the launch of Wired UK, ShortList and Mr Porter. He's b (show all) Matt Hussey was the former Editor-in-Chief for The Next Web. Previously he worked on the launch of Wired UK, ShortList and Mr Porter. He's been an active contributor to GQ, FHM, Men's Health, Yahoo, The Daily Telegraph and maintains a blog on Huffington Post
Each week we're profiling one company that has been selected for Boost – our early-stage startup growth program. Catch up with these companies in person at The Next Web Conference in New York on November 18.
While the US and Western Europe have had the luxury of discount dining clubs for years now (Tastecard, Gourmet Society, Hi-Life Diners Club), South America's burgeoning middle class has not.
Enter ChefsClub. Based and founded in Brazil in 2012, the team has added 1,600 restaurants across the country and is already the biggest dining club in South America.
Where did the idea for ChefsClub come from?
Fabrizio, an old friend since high-school, was doing his Masters in Copenhagen and saw a business model that he thought he could replicated in Brazil. Also he had a GroupOn company before and thought the model needed to evolve to survive. So he presented his thoughts to me and other to Danes and we decided to launch ChefsClub in Brazil.
What's your background?
I have a bachelor in Marketing and an MBA in Business Management. Before ChefsClub I worked for consultant companies, focusing on retail and customer service advisory. I also worked for B2W, the biggest e-commerce group in Latin America, as a buyer, as well as Reckitt Benckiser as a sales executive.
These two experiences gave me a good understanding of how to create relationships on both sides of the table. On top of that I was a university lecturer for a while, teaching marketing and trade marketing.
What are your goals for the company this year?
Launch a complete new website and app, to have 2,000 restaurants as partners and three million Reals in revenue.
What's the best thing about working at ChefsClub?
The culture we have enables us to provide one amazing service to both our restaurants and customers. So I would say the best thing is the people we have and the culture they are developing together.
And if you didn't launch ChefsClub, what would you be doing?
Probably I would open a restaurant or bar. I did some business plans. It turned out I'm helping 1,600 instead of one :)
➤ ChefsClub
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text:
The Small Voice
RJD Candidate Tanveer Hasan (L) and CPI candidate Kanhaiya Kumar (R). Source: Affidavits.
Tanveer Hasan — Kanhaiya's "unbranded" opponent
Mohammad Tanveer Hasan is not a name likely to ring a bell. Hasan who? That is the likely question. But pop the name Kanhaiya Kumar, and you are likely to hear about the young man from Jawaharlal Nehru University, who, depending on the political persuasion of your interlocutor, is either out to dismember the country or save it. It is also likely that you will recognize Giriraj Singh, a BJP Union Minister who is fighting the elections from Begusarai, and again depending on your persuasion, he is either a saviour or a bigot. It may well be that you believe that in Begusarai it is Mr Kumar (he has chosen to eschew his caste name Singh) out to defeat Mr Singh.
But there is a third man in the fray, and it is worth asking what makes him an inferior candidate than Mr Kumar. Mr Hasan is the candidate of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) for the Begusarai seat. He is a candidate of the Mahagathbandhan, which has the tacit support in many seats from the Communist Party of India despite being rebuffed by the alliance when it came to seat sharing. Now he is most things that his contenders are not. He comes across as a polite well-spoken man. His few television interviews do not betray a rabble-rouser or heckler or a person with histrionic abilities. His political credentials are as solid as it comes in these elections. He has been associated with the socialist movement from his youth. He has been elected as a Member of the Legislative Council on more than one occassion. He is academically qualified. He has been associated with educational institutions, and comes across as just the kind of mild-mannered person who would add to the debate in the Lok Sabha. And mark this during the BJP wave of 2014 he polled 369892 – merely 58,335 less than the winner and over 177,250 votes more than the CPI candidate.
Yet Mr Kumar is being hailed as some kind of messiah who has descended on Begusarai. Mr Kumar is a lot like Mr Singh in more ways than just his caste. The importance of his caste cannot be lost on anyone mildly familiar with the Bhumihar-dominated CPI of Bihar, and the fact that Bhumihars are an important caste in this constituency. There is a rebarbative quality to his speech, much like Mr Singh, which works for their base. Other than being the head of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union, there is not much of a political record that he possesses, and as history tells us those who have been elected to that august office are, with some exceptions, more suited to the hairsplitting of internal party politics than the electoral politics of the popular variety. And yet Mr Kumar has received the support of the chattering classes of the Indian left bank. What that has meant for the personality-driven media is an infatuation with Mr Kumar.
Mr Hasan in an interview used a term that has considerable explicatory power. He called his opponents in this election "branded netas." Mr Kumar is a good exhibit of this type though far from being the exemplar. That laurel rests elsewhere. Except that in his case, the news media have played a key role.
Who the people of Begusarai choose on voting day, we will know later. But to assume that Mr Hasan is not a contender or not worthy of more press or even worse not even worth a vote as suggested by Javed Akhtar who said people should either vote for Mr Kumar or just go with Mr Singh and not waste their vote is something that should make people wonder. If you believe that the BJP government has not performed well, or that they have made Muslims insecure, or that more Muslims should be in the Lok Sabha, how Mr Hasan is a worse candidate than Mr Kumar beggars belief. If anything Mr Hasan seems a more qualified one. Not that it matters, but he has a doctorate.
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The promise of prohibition in Chhattisgarh


This unique account of the history of Canada during the events of the War of 1812 and the stories of the people and places he was exposed to during this time is being made available in book form for the first time. This is the only account of the War of 1812 as seen through the eyes of a young seaman. Included is a Wingfield genealogical description that spans the modern world.
Whether you are a student of the War of 1812, naval history, or Ontario history, Four Years on the Great Lakes belongs on your reading shelf. Reading it will present you with a history you will never forget, and you will come away learning a lot more on the subject.
Wingfields life overlaps Austen and Dickens and though he is certainly not in their league, he is eloquent and shares the same dry English sense of humour. He starts out a bit self conscious but quickly finds a personable tone as much MASH as Melville.
Now retired, and after 55 years of sailing, Don Bamford lives in London, Ontario.
Paul Carroll, a "wharf rat" in his youth, brought forward the first Waterfront Development Plan for the long-term evolution of the Goderich shoreline and was involved with the sidescan sonar search for the Wexford. Paul's most recent book is Four Years on The Great Lakes. He lived near Goderich, Ontario.


Three years ago, in our very first months of living abroad in Austria, we came across Jackie and her incredible and inspiring Budget-Minded Traveler podcast. After discovering us on Instagram, as we were preparing for our move abroad, or 'Surviving the Countdown' as we put it, Jackie contacted us.
She was interested in doing a podcast to discuss our preparations for this major life change, along with a recap of our very first months living abroad. Was it everything we'd hoped for? Were all the preparations worth the effort? Did we miss home? Did we feel inspired or regretful?
If you're curious to know, listen to her podcast and find out here!
Instantly, we clicked. It was like we'd known each other for years. She even came to visit us in Salzburg for 3 magical days. We built snowmen, visited beer gardens, binge-watched Game of Thrones and showed her around our new hometown.
We were instant friends and it was a friendship that we knew would always transcend borders.
Since then, Jackie's gone on to conquer not only the travel podcast world but also now leads group trips around the world as Traveling Jackie. She is an inspiration to us and a constant reminder of the reasons we LOVED living abroad and the true beauty of discovering new places and interacting with new people.
Fast forward to now, and we've recently relocated back to the USA after almost 3 years of living in Salzburg. It's been a rollercoaster, to say the least. But we were so excited when Jackie reached out again for a follow-up podcast. It was like our re-entry into the travel world, that we chose to temporarily set aside while we resettled.
So how've we been doing? Are we feeling sad and regretful for leaving Austria or content in our new surroundings?
How did we deal with all the major life changes that took place after moving back to the USA? After we did a complete 360 on our day-to-day lives? Were we able to maintain our positive outlook or did we give in to the very real post-expat depression that many ex-expats face?
BMT 99: "It Seems Impossible Until You Do It." Moving Forward with Erin & Erin Zipperle.
The Budget-Minded Traveler Podcast: Subscribe NOW!
Travel with Jackie: Check out her planned trips, here.


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Q: Multithreaded socket testing C I have a file transfer program using TCP sockets (server.c and client.c). Server.c can accept multiple client connections using threads. Client.c connects to the server and waits for user input 'get' to receive a list of downloadable files in the server directory. The client then waits for user input to select one or more files that they want to download (Ex1. $ test.txt) (Ex2. $ test.txt sample.txt). The server then sends that file(s) to the client if it exists. The time to transfer is logged.
Now, I want to test the time to transfer by:

*

*Connecting n amount of clients to the server at once, and each client downloads x amount of files simultaneously from a folder.

I assume that I have to create a script (shell script?) to do this. However, how would I create this script if my client.c takes user input ('get' files request and input files)? Does this even matter or do I need to modify my program? I haven't written scripts yet so this is all new to me.

A: A bit of bash glue:
date
for x in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
do
echo "get file" | ./client &
done
wait
date

Key points: & to run the download in the background, and wait to collect all the background jobs.
Once having the idea you should be able to come up with a better one.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The Victorian government allocated $61.7 million over four years to implement Koolin Balit: Strategic Directions for Aboriginal health ('the Koolin Balit investment'). A key element of the investment was an evaluation plan that highlighted accountability to government, the Aboriginal community and the wider public and effectiveness of existing programs and future funding decisions.
A program of focussed evaluation activities was pursued and it included the work of the Grampians Region Aboriginal Eye Health Advisory Group (GRAEHAG) that drives planning, implementation, data sharing and evaluation to improve eye health outcomes. This collective work resulted in a number of outstanding successes including a five-fold increase in eye examinations and optometry visits, additional eye care equipment and associated training and locally tailored health promotion resources, developed with strong local community engagement. These changes supported an increase of over 55 per cent of patients receiving annual diabetic eye checks from 2013 to 2016.
This initiative is an example of how a collaborative approach to addressing local community needs can be achieved without the need to conduct a formal evaluation. Instead, the strategic use of data, program monitoring and community feedback provides a systematic approach to identifying local community needs and providing culturally appropriate responses.
Digital stories have been developed to support these shared learnings from local level evaluations, reflective practices and continuous quality improvement processes employed in Aboriginal health and Koolin Balit initiatives across Victoria.


text:
Vol. IX Number 4, Fall 2009 Failed State
Vol. IX Number 4, Fall 2009
How the California dream became a nightmare.
by William Voegeli
California's Progressives achieved breakthrough victories in the 1910 elections. With some running as Democrats, others as Republicans, and still others disdaining party labels altogether, Progressives won governing majorities in the state legislature. Hiram Johnson, the candidate of the "Lincoln-Roosevelt League," was elected governor, and later became Theodore Roosevelt's vice-presidential running mate on the Progressive ticket in 1912. (One reason Roosevelt carried California that year was the Progressives were powerful enough to keep the Republican nominee off the ballot; President William Howard Taft was forced to seek California's electoral votes as a write-in candidate.)
At next year's parades marking the centenary of the Progressives' triumph, confetti suppliers and marching bands may have to be paid with IOU's instead of cash. California's bonds are rated lower than any other state's; its budget deficit, relative to the size of the state's population, is higher than any other's. The current recession is the proximate cause of California's crisis, but other states devastated by the economic downturn, such as New York and Florida—even Michigan—face choices about taxes and spending that are far less dire. A growing number of observers argue that California's real problem is that it has become ungovernable. Kevin Starr, for example, who just published the eighth volume in his comprehensive history of the Golden State, recently told an interviewer, "In our public life, we're on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country."
Rome wasn't sacked in a day, and California didn't become Argentina overnight. Its acquired incapacity to manage its own affairs has been a long, complicated story, with many contributing factors rather than a single villain or tragic flaw. No analysis of California's political demise, however, would be complete without discussing how the Progressive legacy has undermined the state's ability to govern itself.
Hyperdemocracy
According to historian Alonzo Hamby, the framework for Progressive politics was the conviction that the political conflict was between "the people" and "the interests." It followed that the highest political duty was to help the people resist and ultimately triumph over the interests. One problem with this framework is that it lends itself better to the disdain than to the practice of politics. "The Progressives did not like politics," writes political scientist Jerome Mileur, because "the politics they saw was not about the public purpose of the nation, but was instead consumed by local interests and private greed, indifferent alike to the idea of a great community and the idealism of grand purpose."
As a result, Progressivism's anti-politics was designed for the people as they ought to be, not as they really are. Positing that the fundamental choice is between the people and the interests presupposes that the people are authentic only when they are disinterested. The Progressives' goal was to equip the people with the means to advance encompassing, lofty ambitions by thwarting the interests' narrow, selfish ones. The means to this end was to collapse the constitutional space between the people and the government, dismantling the political mechanisms that conferred unfair advantages on connected insiders. As the New Republic editorialized in 1914:
The American democracy will not continue to need the two-party system to intermediate between the popular will and the governmental machinery. By means of executive leadership, expert administrative independence and direct legislation, it will gradually create a new governmental machinery which will…itself be thoroughly and flexibly representative of the underlying purposes and needs of a more social democracy.
The California Progressives' reforms included the direct primary, the nonpartisan election of judges, the referendum and initiative, and recall elections. The results, a century later, cannot be what anyone who wishes democracy well had in mind. As journalist Peter Schrag argues in California: America's High-Stakes Experiment (2006), the state's people are groaning under the weight of all the weapons they have been given to fight the interests. California, he writes, has
seven thousand overlapping and sometimes conflicting jurisdictions: cities, counties, school districts, community college districts, water districts, fire districts, park districts, irrigation districts, mosquito abatement districts, public utility districts, each with its elected directors, supervisors, and other officials, a hyperdemocracy that, even without local and state ballot measures, confounds the most diligent citizen.
Hyperdemocracy needs disinterested citizens, but produces uninterested ones. "California has a dozen major media markets," writes Schrag, "where few newspapers and even fewer TV stations recognize the rest of the state, much less pay much attention to it." For all the scrutiny these media devote to state government, the capital city of Sacramento "might as well be on the moon."
Admittedly, Progressivism has a better record of promoting conscientious, congenial, efficacious governance in states with long, dark winters, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota. It's a lot easier to get a respectable turnout for a city council or school board meeting in those states than in one with 840 miles of coastline and 1,100 golf courses open year-round. Victor Davis Hanson, a native Californian, suggests, "Perhaps because have-it-all Californians live in such a rich natural landscape and inherited so much from their ancestors, they have convinced themselves that perpetual bounty is now their birthright—not something that can be lost in a generation of complacency." The recent observation by Ron Kaye, the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, about the widespread disengagement from politics in the state's largest city applies with comparable force to Californians generally: "Mostly, people have never paid much attention. Life is too good, the sun is too sweet."
Existentialists without Portfolio
Trying to apportion the blame for California's dysfunctional politics between its good climate and bad constitution is, ultimately, more interesting than important. The reality is that the state's hyperdemocracy enables Californians to periodically rebuke the governing class in the manner of Network's Howard Beale: "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!" One of history's little jokes is that these rebukes have, more often than not, been defeats for thebien-pensant liberals who are the descendants of California's Progressives. In the last three decades the voters have rejected unlimited property tax increases; public services for illegal immigrants, no questions asked; affirmative action; bilingual education; and same-sex marriage.
What California's hyperdemocracy does not facilitate, however, is the realization of the people's quotidian interest in government that is fair and efficient, that respects their rights scrupulously and spends their tax dollars carefully. Californians who already have lives and jobs are not in a position to make citizenship a parallel career. Among the respects in which all men are created equal is that everyone's week contains exactly 168 hours, regardless of how many public hearings your air quality management district schedules, or how many reports get posted on its website.
Contrary to the New Republic's confident assertion 95 years ago, it turns out that American democracy does need political intermediaries between the people and the government. Such intermediaries are capable of bringing the people's concerns to bear on the thousands of small decisions made every week that determine the success and reliability of the government endeavors affecting them most directly. The Progressive legacy in California renders these intermediaries, especially political parties, too weak to aggregate and represent the concerns of the vast majority of citizens for whom lives of constant civic vigilance are impossible.
The New Republic welcomed the demise of political intermediaries out of the belief that the emerging governmental machinery would do a far better job of representing the people by relying on "executive leadership, expert administrative independence and direct legislation." Each of these mechanisms, however, is problematic. California has demonstrated that direct legislation is a good way for the people to yank the government's leash and thwart its excesses—but too blunt an instrument for managing the innumerable details that control the provision of education, public health, law enforcement, and other essential services.
The Progressives were enthusiastic about executive leadership. As Woodrow Wilson said during the 1912 presidential campaign, "The business of every leader of government is to hear what the nation is saying and to know what the nation is enduring. It is not his business to judge for the nation, but to judge through the nation as its spokesman and voice." The problem, in our federal system, is that the key word in this Napoleonic job description is "nation." Whatever sense Wilson's formulation makes, and whatever appeal it holds, applies to the presidency. The idea that governors, mayors, and school board presidents should be the vessels for their constituents' hopes and dreams is ludicrous. People ask their state and local officials to deliver reliable public services and impose low taxes, not to be existentialists without portfolio.
By process of elimination, then, the burden of the hopes for bringing the will of the people to bear on the workings of government comes to rest on "expert administrative independence." It's the worst bet of all. The idea of relying on independent administrators to connect the people to the government is fundamentally contradictory: it's people that administrators are supposed to be independent from. The people are not a problem, of course, because "the people" —the hypostasized, disinterested abstraction for which Progressivism was designed—selflessly arrive at all the same conclusions as the independent administrative experts. Indeed, when the leaders lead but people don't follow, when the experts pronounce but people don't assent, the problem can be reliably ascribed to people's failure to live up to their responsibilities as "the people."
In the face of this dereliction, leaders and administrators have the capacity and duty to manifest the "underlying purposes and needs of a more social democracy." What these underlying purposes and needs lie under are the purposes and needs real people express around dinner tables, on the sidelines during their kids' soccer practice, and in voting booths. The way to render democracy more social is thus to render it less political. Leaders and administrators can see through people's imperfect expression of their preferences, and govern on the basis of the Platonic ideal of "the people's" aspirations, which they apprehend more clearly and reliably than do actual citizens themselves.
Unionocracy
The brigades of government administrators who govern in the name of the people have grown more organized and powerful over the past 50 years as unions of government employees have flourished. The history of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is instructive. According to the AFSCME website, it was not established out of concern for labor unions' usual preoccupations—wages, benefits, and working conditions. Rather, in 1932 "a small group of white-collar professional state employees met in Madison, Wisconsin," another Progressive stronghold, "to promote, defend and enhance the civil service system." They were concerned about their job security, but in a way that had as much to do with professional dignity and political beliefs as it did with bread-and-butter finances. According to AFSCME, the Wisconsin civil servants "feared that politicians would implement a political patronage or 'spoils' system and thousands of workers would lose their jobs."
The spoils system would not have precluded Wisconsin's white-collar professionals from keeping or regaining their government jobs—but would have decoupled their tenure from their expertise and independence. They would have been forced to demonstrate their ongoing utility to politicians who were, in turn, forced to justify their own utility to the voters. Rather than suffer this affront, AFSCME's founders organized politically, and "saved the civil service system in Wisconsin," inspiring other public employees around the country to do the same. By 1936 these discrete groups were a national trade union, chartered by the American Federation of Labor.
Today, AFSCME claims 1.6 million members, making it one of the country's largest unions, and one of the few that has grown while those based in smokestack industries like automobiles and steel have shrunk. It does not have the field to itself, however. In California, for example, where 179,000 AFSCME members work for state and local governments, slightly more than half of the 193,000 unionized state government employees belong to the Service Employees International Union, which walked out of the AFL-CIO in 2005. The rest of the state's represented employees are divided, for collective bargaining purposes, among a long list of narrowly specialized unions, such as the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians, and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.
For two decades after it was chartered in 1936, AFSCME's priority remained enacting and strengthening civil service laws. By 1955, though, AFSCME's membership had come to include blue-collar as well as white-collar workers, and its priorities shifted to establishing its right to bargain collectively with states and municipalities over wages and terms of employment. A number of strikes by public employees were needed to win this contested claim. A turning point came in 1958 when the mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., granted collective bargaining rights to unions representing city workers. (Wagner's father, as a U.S. senator from New York, had authored the fundamental law legitimizing labor unions, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, usually known as the Wagner Act.)
Other states codified the right of public employees to bargain collectively in the following years. California did so in a series of laws passed between 1968 and 1979. It's important to note that strikes by public employee unions played a much bigger role in establishing collective bargaining rights than in the exercise of those rights after the unions had been recognized. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), for example, went on strike for five weeks in 1970, only to have the agreement that ended the strike nullified by the courts due to the absence of a statewide collective bargaining law covering public school employees. The state legislature enacted such a law in 1975, and the only subsequent strike mentioned in UTLA's official history is one in 1989 that lasted 9 days and resulted in a three-year contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Strikes have become rarities in the private sector because strike threats are not believable in industries that are downsizing and face low-cost competition from around the world, and the people on both sides of the bargaining table know it. Strikes have become rarities in the public sector, too, but at a time when those unions have been gaining members and strength. Whereas private-sector unions don't strike because it would be injurious, public-sector unions don't strike because it would be superfluous. Having bargaining leverage against the management negotiators across the table is all well and good, but it's radically inferior to negotiating when labor dominates both sides of the table. As the Los Angeles teachers union summarizes its prevailing strategy, "UTLA has successfully backed candidates for the school board who have vowed to place top priority on students and the classroom." In low-turnout, below-the-radar school board elections, the union's involvement is rarely less than decisive. Earlier this year it spent more than $287,000 on behalf of a candidate who easily won an election for one of the seven seats on the L.A. school board.
The state's major public employee unions have all followed this approach, and it has been a tremendous success. Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee says California's "public employee unions wield immense—even hegemonic—influence" over the Democratic majorities in the state legislature. Even more than in most states, gerrymandering in California means that, in the overwhelming majority of districts, competition between politicians who belong to the same party is common and intense, while truly contested general elections between those who belong to different parties are exceedingly rare. Primary elections are the only ones that aren't exhibition games, and nothing matters more in a Democratic primary than getting endorsed by public employee unions. Those endorsements guarantee two crucial political resources—money and manpower. No other political entity comes close to the unions' ability to produce effective, sophisticated get-out-the-vote campaigns with hundreds of experienced workers. According to the Los Angeles Times, the California Teachers Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association, "has deep pockets, a militia of more than 300,000 members to call on and a track record of making or breaking political careers."
Paying the Piper
California's public employee unions not only sit on both sides of the bargaining table, but also have it both ways rhetorically. They are happy to act as ventriloquists when the people don't know what to say or think about an endless list of complicated, arcane, and tedious policy questions. It turns out that the people are deeply, deeply concerned that the state's public employees have excellent wages, benefits, pensions, and job security. California Democrats, like Democrats everywhere, never pass up an opportunity to express their solicitude for children. When, however, that solicitude recently led to the consideration of ways to enroll more children in state healthcare programs, the Democrats' most powerful constituency prevailed against their most vulnerable one. According to Chris Reed, an editorial writer for theSan Diego Union-Tribune, the unions scuttled an initiative that would have let parents enroll their children in the health programs online "because it might have led to layoffs of clerks at county social-services offices."
It's neither a coincidence nor a surprise, then, that California's government employees receive higher compensation than those in any other state. The Census Bureau's latest figures cover the year 2006, and show that California's local government employees were paid at an average annual rate of $60,780, 33% above the national average. State employees had average annual compensation of $65,964, 34.2% above the national average. Many states and regions have lower costs of living than California, reducing the national compensation averages. But California's public workers receive more, often significantly more, than government employees in other states with high living costs. Californians who work for local governments were paid 7.7%, 9.1%, 11.5%, and 21.4% more than their counterparts in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts respectively. California's state employees received 8.6% more than Connecticut's, 13.1% more than New York's, 19.9% more than those in Massachusetts, and 28% more than Maryland's.
Nationally, 5.4% of the population works for a state or local government, but only 5% of the California population does so. Only nine states have a smaller proportion of their population employed in the public sector. The services rendered by state and local governments are very labor-intensive, so that even if California saves some money by employing fewer workers than other states, it pays out a larger amount by compensating them at higher rates. One analysis, for example, shows that it costs California $45,000 to keep one inmate in prison for one year, compared to an average cost of $27,237 for the nation's ten most populous states. As a consequence, Dan Walters argued in the Sacramento Bee, the state would save $4 billion a year by reducing its incarceration costs to the average in the other big states.
Walters's colleague Jon Ortiz recently reported that in 2008 "California state correctional officers made an average $63,230, more than any other federal, state or local counterpart in the country." Even before factoring in overtime, which increased the pay of the average California prison guard a further 14.9%, the compensation level in California was 53% above the national average. These compensation levels are not happenstance. Ortiz says the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has "built a reputation for its textbook application of raw political force, fueled with enough money to sway elections and build or destroy political careers." A CCPOA spokesman told Ortiz that the union's 2002 contract, providing a 37% pay increase over five years, better retirement benefits, and fewer restrictions on sick leave, was the best labor contract "in the history of California." What goals the union can't achieve through collective bargaining and politics it pursues through litigation. It's currently suing to secure "'donning and doffing' pay," according to Ortiz, "which compensates officers for the time required to put on and take off a uniform, vest and other equipment at the beginning and end of a shift."
Corrections outlays account for 10% of California's state general fund. Apply the same political dynamic to the rest of the state's expenditures, as well as those made by all the cities, counties, and "special purpose districts," and you end up with a public sector that is one of the country's most expensive. The Census Bureau provides detailed information on state and local government finances in each state for a 14-year period, from the 1991-92 fiscal year to 2005-06. By combining that data with the Census Bureau's annual population estimates, and the Commerce Department's implicit price deflator for state and local governments, we can compare government expenditures across the 14 years and 50 states. In 1991-92, California's combined outlays by all state and local governments were, on a per-capita basis, the eighth highest in the nation, after six states and the District of Columbia. By 2005-06 they were the fifth highest, behind only Washington, D.C., Alaska, New York, and Wyoming.
Adjusted for inflation, California's per-capita outlays increased by 21.7% between 1992 and 2006; the increase for the other 49 states and the District of Columbia was 18.2%. What's striking is that California is an exception to the pattern we were told to expect in Statistics 101, the regression to the mean. The states where inflation-adjusted, per-capita government outlays grew the fastest between 1992 and 2006 were, generally speaking, ones where those outlays were among the lowest to begin with. Conversely, of the ten states that had the highest per-capita public expenditures in 1991-92, California and Wyoming are the only two that saw those expenditures, adjusted for inflation, grow faster than the national average over the next 14 years.
A few counterfactuals show that these different growth rates matter—a lot. If constant-dollar, per-capita expenditures by California's state and local governments had grown by 18.2% between 1992 and 2006, the rate for the rest of the country, rather than 21.7%, California's public sector would have spent $10.6 billion less than it actually did in 2006. While California government expenditures grew faster than the national average, even states not famous for the parsimony or integrity of their public sectors, such as New York (16.4%) and New Jersey (12.8%), grew more slowly. If California's outlays had grown only fast enough to keep pace with population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, public spending would have been 17.8% less in 2006, $300 billion rather than $365 billion. The resulting level of per-capita government outlays in 2006 would have equaled neither Somalia's nor Mississippi's, but…Oregon's, which is rarely considered a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.
Expensive and Ineffective
Clearly, paying your employees more than any other state is an excellent way to bend the governmental cost curve upward. The danger, however, is that stray efficiencies might pollute the system and undermine these efforts. Higher payments to retired government workers eliminate this risk. In 1999, just as the dot-com boom was ending, California's state government concluded the good times would go on forever, and passed a law that made the pension formulas for state employees dramatically more generous, and encouraged municipalities to adopt the same approach. State employees could retire at age 55 with a pension exceeding half of the highest salary they ever received. Public safety workers could retire at age 50 with 90% of their salary. Lifetime cost-of-living adjustments protected the pensions, which were paired with generous health insurance benefits.
Two problems. First, the assurances by officials from the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) that a permanent stock market boom would cover the enhanced pension obligations proved immediately, and ruinously, off base. The state's required contribution to the more generous retirement system in 2008-09 was supposed to be $379 million, according to the original CalPERS projection. The actual figure needed to cover the amount not generated by the CalPERS investment portfolio was $4.6 billion.
Second, the same political forces that made the public pension system extravagant keep operating to make it ever more unaffordable. One result is that the portion of the state workforce eligible for the more generous pension benefits available to public safety workers has increased steadily. A law passed in 2002, for example, guaranteed that the chance to retire at age 50 with 90% of salary would be available not just to firefighters and police officers, but also to the dedicated public safety officials who put their lives on the line every day to protect their fellow citizens from wobbly billboards and tainted milk.
Asked to assess his team before the beginning of the season, a basketball coach once said, "We're short, but we're slow." Californians can draw similar encouragement from the accumulating evidence that while their government is increasingly expensive, it is also increasingly ineffective. The public interest, as interpreted by the government workers' unions, demands no public employee be fired before incontrovertible justification for his termination had been established through an elaborate, prolonged series of fact-finding procedures and hearings. As a result, Californians will apparently have to regard with equanimity the prospect that some, or even many, public employees whose professional conduct ranges from borderline incompetent to borderline illegal will enjoy lifetime job security while crossing off the pay periods before that first pension check arrives.
A recent Los Angeles Times series, "Failure Gets a Pass," demonstrated that it is "remarkably difficult to fire a tenured public school teacher in California." Knowing the gauntlet of proceedings and investigations they'll have to run, administrators overwhelmingly opt to live with problem employees, saving their attempts at termination for "the most egregious cases," those involving "blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time." Being a mediocre or even a terrible teacher is rarely a sufficient reason to get the termination process started. Even so, special review panels decide in favor of the teachers in more than one third of all cases.
It's impossible, with so many ways for the process to end or be prolonged, to compute the average duration of a dismissal procedure. One middle school principal estimated the typical time period needed to fire a tenured employee at five years—seven months longer than it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
The teachers unions found nothing in the Times series to apologize for. "The union is bound by law to defend our members, and we do," A.J. Duffy, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, told the paper. He allowed that the school district's job is to weed out "failing teachers," but quickly made clear that the union would use its political power to prevent the school districts from acquiring the means necessary to discharge that responsibility. In the wake of the newspaper revelations the Los Angeles school board passed, on a 4-3 vote against union opposition, a resolution asking the state legislature to look into changing state laws to make it easier for school districts to fire teachers accused of serious crimes. UTLA immediately made clear that this defeat was a momentary, meaningless setback, insisting confidently that the state legislature would respond to the resolution only in ways the teachers unions endorsed.
The school district also created a task force to explore the question of assessing teachers' effectiveness. UTLA's abiding commitment to the schoolchildren of Los Angeles led its president to declare, "If I'm comfortable with the composition of the task force, then I'll agree to be a part of it. Otherwise, that issue is going nowhere."
That imperious threat will almost certainly prove to be an accurate prediction. The fundamental dynamic of modern California politics is that the permanent government, operated by or at the behest of the public employee unions, can routinely produce outrageous results through outrageous processes—as long as it stops just short of the tripwires that cause the voters to become genuinely outraged. If the permanent government stays inside that perimeter, it can run California pretty much the way it wants to. When it crosses the line, and provokes the state's distracted hyperdemocracy to become focused and angry, the permanent government runs the risk that the voters will reassert their prerogatives and reduce the government's latitude for action.
Earlier this year, for example, the state government's tentative solution to its budget crisis required the voters to enact a typically complex, indecipherable cluster of ballot propositions on taxes and spending. Because the propositions' tax increases were immediate and certain, while their spending restraints were long-term and nebulous, voters were skeptical from the outset. They shifted into outrage mode when reports surfaced a month before the election that leaders of the state legislature, who insisted night and day that the state was broke, had found $551,000 to give pay raises to legislative staffers. The raises were quickly rescinded, but the political damage was done. None of the ballot measures that mattered secured even 40% of the vote.
It took a while for some parts of the permanent government to realize it had suffered a setback. After the defeat of the ballot propositions the public employee unions took the position that when the voters reject tax increases, the correct response is to press for bigger ones. AFSCME proposed a budget alternative that relied on new taxes designed to augment state revenue by $44 billion per year, but which did not cut one dollar from a single spending program. It presented its list of tax increases to the Democrats in the legislature with precise instructions: "If you opposed any of the options above, please indicate your reasoning, and your SPECIFIC proposal(s) for achieving similar revenue or savings."
Not even one Democratic politician turned in that homework assignment. Union leaders told the Los Angeles Times that they were "appalled" that Democratic leaders were considering serious budget cuts "without first making a stand for bigger, broader tax hikes." The president of the California Federation of Teachers said, "For some reason, they are unwilling to stand up and say 'This is not what I was elected for.'" Nonetheless, according to the story, "even some of the most liberal Democrats" in the legislature said the idea of closing the state's deficit largely or entirely through tax increases ignored the fiscal and political realities, among which was "the reality of an angry public."
Strategies, Left and Right
In California, the political strategies of both conservatives and liberals concentrate on how to deal with that angry public. The conservative strategy is to get the public angry, and see that it stays angry. Conservative talk-radio hosts compete to identify the latest and most astounding outrage, and to see who can denounce it most stridently. The liberal strategy is, as noted, to avoid rousing that public to anger, but also, when the voters do put on their war paint, to wait for their ire to ebb due to the passage of time and the inevitable reappearance of life's many nonpolitical preoccupations. When the anger has passed, government-as-usual can resume without meddling by citizen-amateurs.
Three of California's last four governors, and six of its last nine, have been Republicans. The politicians who secured those victories immediately found it necessary to cooperate with a dominant opposition party; California is, in every other respect, a state that has been becoming more Democratic for as long as its oldest residents have been eligible to vote. California has not given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, or been represented in the U.S. Senate by a Republican since 1992. Of the 53 Californians in the U.S. House of Representatives, 34 are Democrats. In the past half-century, each of the two chambers of the state legislature has seen a Republican majority—once. The GOP's state senate majority endured for two years, the one in the lower house for less than a single year.
The evidence is incontestable: the liberal strategy of waiting for the public's anger to subside is far sounder than the conservative strategy of hoping it will gather strength. The liberal calculation rests on a shrewd assessment, not only of human psychology but also of modern mobility. California is not yet East Germany, which means that one of the ways Californians who are mad as hell can decide not to take it any more is by moving away. The Census Bureau shows that California, the state that used to be a magnet, has experienced negative "net domestic migration" since 1990. Between 1990 and 2007 some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved toCalifornia from another state.
States don't conduct exit interviews, so there's no way to tell how many ex-Californians left paradise because the taxes were too high, the public services too shoddy, and the unions too overbearing. Whatever the tally, one problem for conservatism in California is that the conservative critique of the state's governance argues as strongly for flight as it does for fight. It is possible to advocate a national policy agenda by invoking patriotism, but "state-riotism" is a far weaker sentiment. Indeed, one could argue that the best way not to let California's crisis go to waste is to let it run its course. As public employee unions assert ever more power over the affairs of a state that has steadily worsening economic and political prospects, opponents of unlimited government across the country and around the world can boil their arguments against taxes, regulation, and bureaucracy down to one rhetorical question: "Do we really want to run things here the way they do in California?"
If we could count on vice to be its own punishment, however, the world would have much less of it. When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of "ungovernable" New York City in 1994, he demonstrated that a successful commitment to limited but effective government is far more resonant than affirming that unlimited and ineffective government invariably fails. Some people once hoped Arnold Schwarzenegger would become California's Giuliani. Regrettably, Schwarzenegger's improbable ascent to the governor's mansion in 2003, on the same day the incumbent Democratic governor lost a recall election, proved to be the only spectacular ending Schwarzenegger could deliver without a script and special effects. Other silver bullets, such as the nation's strictest term limits for state legislators, have proven equally disappointing.
Reclaiming California
If California is to have a more conservative future, it's going to result from patient, painstaking attention to political and policy details, not from finally discovering the dramatic transformation that catalyzes a blue state into a red one. Conservatives have gotten most of the mileage they ever will out of efforts to translate Californians' anger into a polling place backlash against the permanent government. For conservatism to revive its fortunes, and California's, far-sighted resolve will have to do the work that populist outrage cannot. Two connections must be forged for that project to succeed. First, the state's Republican Party will have to break free from the gravitational pull of the Progressive legacy to establish itself as the vital political intermediary between the public's desire for fair and frugal public services, and a newly chastened government that delivers them conscientiously. The historical record clearly establishes that direct legislation and galvanizing leaders are not adequate to this task, and independent administrative experts can be trusted only to sabotage it.
Second, the institutional capacity of the Republican Party will be inadequate to its mission unless it persuades Californians that they have an urgent, abiding, and legitimate interest in reclaiming their government from the public employee unions who have asserted squatters' rights over it. The logic of Progressivism called for independent administrators to discern and implement the people's disinterested, inchoate aspirations for government. Instead, the permanent government has become increasingly adept and brazen at advancing its own private interest by invoking platitudes about the public's. The vindication of the public's real, as opposed to its faux, interest will require walking back, over several years, the depredations the permanent government has perfected over decades. The public employee unions do not need elaborate PowerPoint presentations to convince their members they'll secure tangible rewards by electing pliable Democrats. Private citizens, however, will have to be shown that the permanent government has forfeited the right to be entrusted with pursuing the people's prosaic but compelling interest in securing effective public services by paying fair, sustainable taxes. The voters will have to be persuaded that these legitimate demands can only be addressed by electing principled conservatives to public offices both prominent and obscure.
A telling, because surprising, place to begin that argument is by contending that the permanent government has disqualified itself from superintending California's welfare state, ostensibly its reason for existence. When parents can't enroll their children in healthcare programs online because it is more important to protect clerical jobs, the humane purposes of the welfare state are mocked. When teachers unions proudly commend themselves for making it effectively impossible for schools to discipline or fire faculty members who are burnouts and creeps, the endless, cynical talk about putting children first becomes an indictment. If the rhetoric determined the reality of the welfare state, the needs of its clients would always take precedence over the demands of its personnel. It is a scandal that the politicians who ought to be most deeply concerned about using California's tax dollars as efficiently as possible to assist the state's neediest residents are, instead, complacent and often insistent about diverting billions of those dollars to the government workforce. The misgovernment of California has such deep, tangled roots that the anger this scandal engenders will not suffice to rectify it. If that anger is wedded to a determined commitment to reclaim California's government for its people, that mission may yet succeed.
This essay is part of the Taube American Values Series, made possible by the Taube Family Foundation.
For Correspondence on this essay, click here.
William Voegeli is a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author of: Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State (Encounter Books); and The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion (Broadside Books).... read more
Next in the fall 2009 Issue
Is Deregulation to Blame?
by James Keller
A review of A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, by Richard A. Posner and Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis , by John B. Taylor
by Paul Hollander
A review of Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, by Mark Rudd
Can Democracy Survive Capitalism?
by Carl J. Schramm
The challenge of creative destruction.