The Yin Blog

Blogging and Taxpayers' Money

I received the most unusual e-mail today from someone concerned that I am wasting the hard-earned dollars of the average Georgia taxpayer on my blogging pursuits.  Here is the e-mail, reproduced in full except for the name of its sender:

While searching for weblog information recently, I came upon the site you maintain.  I found the information and postings there to be insightful and well written.  However, I also noticed that you are a professor of law at my almamater.  In this regard, something struck me as being a bit out of line. 

The vast majority of your postings are done during what one might term, "working hours."  I realize that while you are a professor which likely entitles you to liberal time requirements certainly as an employee of the State of Georgia you are held to similar rules as the most basic civil servant.  Having worked for the government myself, I am certain that I would be unable to leave my office to play a round of golf or take care of other
personal chores without taking personal leave.  In this regard, I find it striking that you are entitled to persue your daily activity of "blogging" while on the taxpayers of Georgia's nickel.  This website, replete with sarcastic and juvenile attacks on a wide range of things, is certainly not within the scope of "academic pursuits" required of those employed by the University System of Georgia during their daily work.

Be certain that I fully respect your right to produce this material on your own time.  I do not intend this letter to portray any sentiments otherwise.  I find no conflict of interest in your maintenance of a professorship and your voicing of political views, this is certainly within your rights as an American.  I do find an enormous conflict with your performance of this habit while "riding the clock" of the University System of Georgia and the salary it provides for you through taxation of the citizens of Georgia.  To that end, I am forwarding this complaint to both
the Georigia House and Senate Committee on Higher Education, the Department of Human Resources of Georgia, the Chair of the Board of Regents, Michael Adams, President of the University of Georgia and Dean Rebecca White, Dean of the Law School.  I also intend to file formal written complaints with each of these entities and will not cease doing so until this misuse of taxpayer dollars and abuse of position ceases.

Sincerely,
XXXXXX

P.S. Please note that this PERSONAL matter is being attended to outside of my PROFESSIONAL working hours.

I don't think the e-mail requires a response -- other than to say that I think the author has a very narrow understanding of what my academic duties are.  Blogging is an extension of my research and teaching, not a digression from them.

I'm curious -- has any other professor/blogger at a public institution ever received a similar e-mail? 

Vietnam and Iraq -- Another Comparison

Before Bush and the right get carried away patting themselves on the back and -- falsely -- claiming credit for bringing "democracy" to Iraq, consider the following story from the New York Times, dated September 4, 1967:

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday.  Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.

A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.  The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.

Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power.

Significance Not Diminished

The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken.

The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics.  That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development, or by the Vietcong's disruption of the balloting.

American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout.  That was the figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly.  Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in elections for local officials last spring.

Before the results of the presidential election started to come in, the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80 per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three hours less than in the election a year ago.  The turnout  of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise.  The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent.

Captured documents and interrogations indicated in the last week a serious concern among Vietcong leaders that a major effort would be required to render the election meaningless.  This effort has not succeeded, judging from the reports from Saigon.

Food for thought, courtesy of Patachon at DailyKos.

The Iraqi elections, a grounds eye view (with pictures) from an American overseas

Regardless of your views on the Iraqi elections (a validation of the President, or sham elections), do check out the coverage at my buddy's blog, Cigars in the Sand.  In case you're new to this blog, it's written by an American lawyer now working in an official capacity in Iraq.

What the Elections Really Mean

Watching Iraqis turn out in significant numbers to vote today was inspiring -- the first democratic elections, however flawed, in 50 years.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that Bush and his revisionist cadres will be out in force trying to take credit for bringing "freedom" to the Iraqis.  A little history lesson is thus in order, courtesy of Informed Comment:

[T]he Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.

With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election." Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned. The measures were successful in cutting down on car bombings that could have done massive damage. But even these Draconian steps did not prevent widespread attacks, which is not actually good news. There is every reason to think that when the vehicle traffic starts up again, so will the guerrilla insurgency.

The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a "joke," and I stand by that.)

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

Funny how none of this finds its way into the election coverage by the lefty media we keep hearing about...

Some observations about the Bay Area

Because of a family matter, we had to make a trip to Northern California this weekend.  We were staying in Milpitas, which is just next to San Jose/Silicon Valley, but the main reason for the trip took place in San Francisco on Saturday.  I hadn't been back to the Bay Area since the summer of 2002, when my wife and I went to visit a couple of my mentor law professors -- to thank them for helping guide me through the law teaching job market.

Anyway, I had these thoughts during the weekend:

- The San Jose Int'l Airport is really not well-designed.  Instead of having each rental car company operate its own shuttles, there's a "rental car center" and an airport shuttle that takes you there.  However, that means that for the one shuttle, you get jammed on with a whole bunch of other people and you stop at a bunch of destinations.

- Not only that, it seems like there's a single chokepoint to get in and out of the airport, and there's construction that narrows it to a single lane in each direction.

- Back when I lived in the Bay Area (1990-95), I heard Northern Californians constantly rag on Los Angeles for being too smoggy, too trafficky, and too superficial.  But the traffic in the Bay Area was nothing to write home about back then, and it still isn't.  I'm not sure that the freeway system has recovered from the 1989 earthquake. . . .

- I realize that lots of people love living in San Francisco, and there's nothing wrong with that.  But to me, it seems like an overcrowded, over-hilly place whose street system has no logic or coherence.  Fortunately, on this trip I kept in mind the lesson I'd learned back in the early 1990s about driving in San Francisco: "Van Ness Blvd is your friend for getting out of the City."

- The South Bay, on the other hand, isn't over-hilly (though it too may be overcrowded) and it also doesn't seem to have San Francisco's hipness.  It makes me wonder if, to put in the old SAT analogies format:

San Jose : San Francisco as Orange County : Los Angeles

Sorry, Pigs -- You're Not Related to Hippos, After All

Scientists have been debating the origins of the hippopotamus (Hexaprotodon sivalensis) for thousands of years.  Ancient scientists believed the hippo was related to the horse, while modern scientists believed it was related to the pig.  As it turns out, both views are wrong -- the hippo's nearest surviving relative is actually the whale:

"The problem with hippos is, if you look at the general shape of the animal it could be related to horses, as the ancient Greeks thought, or pigs, as modern scientists thought, while molecular phylogeny shows a close relationship with whales," said [Jean-Renaud] Boisserie. "But cetaceans -- whales, porpoises and dolphins -- don't look anything like hippos. There is a 40-million-year gap between fossils of early cetaceans and early hippos."

In a paper appearing this week in the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Boisserie and colleagues Michel Brunet and Fabrice Lihoreau fill in this gap by proposing that whales and hippos had a common water-loving ancestor 50 to 60 million years ago that evolved and split into two groups: the early cetaceans, which eventually spurned land altogether and became totally aquatic; and a large and diverse group of four-legged beasts called anthracotheres. The pig-like anthracotheres, which blossomed over a 40-million-year period into at least 37 distinct genera on all continents except Oceania and South America, died out less than 2 and a half million years ago, leaving only one descendent: the hippopotamus.

Good Advice on Law School Grades

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy makes a number of useful points about law school exams and 1L grades here.  And I'm not just saying that because he links to my earlier post.

Finally, the Oscars Get It Right

A priceless political cartoon about Bush and Blair, courtesy of The Times (UK):

Wal-Mart Does the Right Thing

Because I've been so critical in the past of Wal-Mart's business practices, it behooves me to give the company credit for adopting a new definition of "immediate family":

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is expanding the definition of "immediate family" in its employee-ethics policy to account for laws in states that recognize domestic partnerships and civil unions.

The change drew quick praise from a major gay-rights lobbying organization.

The revised policy, which was disclosed Wednesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission recognizes that in some states "immediate family" includes an employee's same-sex partner.

The revisions deal with sections of the company's ethics code that bar employees from using confidential information to benefit themselves or immediate family members and from approaching Wal-Mart's suppliers about jobs for immediate family members, the company said Thursday.

The company declined to say whether the new definition would affect employee benefits.  Let's hope that it does, given Wal-Mart's general anti-union, low-benefit policies.

Monkeys Like Porn, Too!

Powerful evidence that humans are indeed descended from monkeys:

In a finding that deepens our understanding of animal social cognition, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have demonstrated for the first time that monkeys, like humans, value information according to its social content. People readily pay to see powerful or sexually attractive individuals, and, according to this new study, monkeys will also "pay" to view these kinds of images.

[snip]

In the new work, researchers Robert Deaner, Amit Khera and Michael Platt, all of Duke University Medical Center, tested this hypothesis by measuring how much fruit juice monkeys would accept or forgo to see photographs of familiar monkeys, permitting the researchers to compare monkeys' valuation of different types of social information. Male monkeys "paid" in juice to view female hindquarters or high-ranking monkeys' faces, but required "overpayment" to view low-ranking monkeys' faces. Despite living in a captive colony, the value monkeys placed on information about potential sexual partners and powerful individuals matched the relative importance of these individuals for behavioral success in the wild. This study demonstrates that monkeys assess visual information by its social value and provides the first experimental evidence that they spontaneously discriminate between images of others based on the social rank or classification of individuals.