Years of Poems and Spirits

NYT news article: Justices Set Limits on Public Employees’ Speech Rights

The controlling factor in this case, Justice Kennedy wrote, was that Mr. Ceballos was acting purely in an official capacity when he complained internally about the search warrant. “Ceballos wrote his disposition memo because that is part of what he was employed to do,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “He did not act as a citizen by writing it.”

“The notion that there is a categorical difference between speaking as a citizen and speaking in the course of one’s employment is quite wrong,” Justice Stevens wrote.

–Multiple identities here: citizen and government official; Why do they have to conflict? Not in the 60s or 70s (WG, Nixon, etc.) but perhaps after War on Terror or Roberts-Alito.
–Identity and loyalty can be forcefully imposed by the state. There is no escape in this case.
–Discipline enforced: but for what? Not even in the interest of the state or the society. Just for the sake of showing off power.

Read a NYT article about the customary code of conduct in high altitude climbing: leaving the dying behind.

a British solo climber, David Sharp, 34, who was left to die on May 15 as some 40 other climbers passed him on their own attempts to reach the 29,035-foot peak.

The episode provoked a sharp dispute with Sir Edmund Hillary, the … Sir Edmund said that “people have completely lost sight of what is important.”

China’s “Soft” Centralization: Shifting Tiao/Kuai Authority Relations, by Andrew C. Mertha
counter “local protectionism” and establish standardization in policy implementation
Tiao, Kuai, Commercial and Regulatory Agencies
The makeup of administrative power: personnel, nomenklatura, BianZhi, Charts of relationship.
CCGO, jigou bianzhi weiyuanhui or bianwei
“two distinct avenues of fee collection”(shouzhi liangtiao xian)
Moreover, the principal beneficiaries of this shift to centralized management are the provinces, not Beijing.

Book Review: Beyond that, some of the authors perhaps take the claims of the Chinese state too much at face value – one example (p. 227) is the acceptance of the government’s claim to have cut coal production by 250 million tons in 1999–2000, whereas many scholars in China now believe that output in fact continued at much the same level throughout. Officials were responding to incentives and instructions to cut production by reporting production cuts but not by actually implementing them.