Exactly. If they don't want to fight this legally, then open the damn lab up. It is UCLA for the love of Christ. It's one of the largest universities in the nation. It can't staff the media lab on weekends?

Exterminating cool things (directly or indirectly) every year all the while piling up trash and replicating like viruses.

They are not a punishment, true. But something about your statement that they are an obligation doesn't sit right with me. Taxes are the way the government controls your activity, plain and simple. Every time they want you to do something, they lower or eliminate the tax on it. Every time they want you to stop or decrease some activity, they raise (or apply) tax on it. The complicated tax code is evidence enough that taxes are there to get you to do this and not that. Plus they want money.

Write it in LaTeX, and output it as a PDF, e.g. pdftex or ps2pdf. Employers should be ok with that.

If you are a scientist and don't want to typeset, use LaTeX.

With respect to Ron Paul, you could not possibly be more wrong even if you tried 1,000,000 times to best yourself in how wrong you are about his views on government-mandated abortion rights.