You've got to play both videos at the same time, and then watch the top one, to get the full effect. Think of it as a 2008 version of Simon and Garfunkel's "Silent Night" with Cronkite reading the evening news in the background.

Roughly one hour ago, there was a 7.5 earthquake in eastern Sichuan, 55 miles or so from the provincial capital of Chengdu. Brief reports out of china daily, reuters and CNN, saying that it was felt as far south as Thailand, and as far northeast as Beijing, but still no word on the extent of the damage.

Well, I finally made the leap.

I have been wavering for months between Edwards and Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, and like many Californians, saw no reason to jump the gun on making that decision before I got a better look at how they campaigned in the early states.  I liked Edwards' positions on the economy, poverty, labor and resisting the corporatization of America, and was very impressed with his policy positions on Iraq and global warming. But his campaign just never took off, and truth be told I never really trusted his conversion from moderate Southern senator to populist champion of the little guy. I wanted to, but couldn't bring myself to trust it.

On the other hand, There was and is a lot to like about Obama.

Finally, the primary comes to Davis. Former President Bill Clinton will be speaking tonight at the ARC Pavilion (that's the Rec Hall to you old timers) at 9pm, in his second trip to UCD campus. The speech will be free and open to the public, doors will open at 8:15pm, with an opening performance from the Cal Aggie Marching Band-Uh (have they endorsed Hillary?).

In the long run, in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, what we do to limit (and if possible, end) the crisis of anthropogenic global warming will prove to be more meaningful than nearly any of the other political issues that we are consumed with today. As such, this speech by Al Gore - who ought to be running for president - will end up being more meaningful than the latest news out of Iowa, the latest wonky breakdown of 2008 polling numbers, or the hottest meta flamewar.

While prophets are scorned in their own country and their own time, it is wise to heed their prophecies, so as to face the unknown future with open eyes and a hint at what challenges are yet to come.

With that, I leave you Al Gore, 2007 Nobel Peace Price Laureate, speaking on the great crisis of our times:

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a brilliant metaphor for how the debate over problems often totally misses the root of a given problem itself, in a diary at European Tribune entitled "How Best to Fill a Sieve With Water":

There are many arguments over which is the correct course of action which I liken to debating how best to fill a sieve with water. By this I mean that they ignore the fact that their premise is wrong.

Obviously the first thing an impartial observer would say when the two camps are debating whether to use a spoon or a cup would be to point out that one can't fill a sieve without first plugging the holes. This seems to be my current role, pointing out assumptions which are either wrong or taken as being obvious without any examination.

I'm not always as convinced by game theory as most economists I've run across, but this guy lays out a cogent case for why acting on the very possibility of human-caused global warming is the only rational choice. In a nutshell, his argument is that - laying aside the question of global warming's verity - merely weighing the worst case scenarios of both action and inaction leaves concerted action as the safest of both "bets."

Right off the bat, I find the idea that money = political speech to be utterly absurd - in a democracy, shouldn't all citizens get an equal voice? - but the Supreme Court has affirmed that absurdity repeatedly, so it's the law of the land. The campaign finance reform laws that have passed, while sold to well-meaning voters on the grounds of cleaning up the political system, don't really seem to have delivered on that promise. So what is to be done?

Here's an idea: limit all political donations to registered voters living in the district of the politician or political initiative in question. You can set whatever upward limit on the maximum donation, but spatially limiting it to that single district would, I suspect, frustrate the mechanism which monied interests use to buy enough politicians to be able to effectively write their own laws, ie. passing enough money around to a majority of politicians to guarantee a successful vote.

Someone has scratched on a wall inside the National Library [Baghdad], ”Hu-LA-gu Khan has returned and knocked on our door once again”.

So, I get this flyer (well, two actually) from some group that calls itself "Californians for Fire Safety." Hmm, I say to myself, I wonder who they are, and why they mailed me this glossy flyer? The flyer opposes those nefarious boogymen, "Sacramento politicians" trying to pass AB 706, which:

will ban material used to make flame retardant products that help to prevent fires - and keep our homes and families safe

Immediately I get curious. What materials are these? Why would they be proposed for banning? What chemicals in particular are in question? Who makes them? Who is for this bill, and who is against? Who is funding this flyer?

I look again at the flyer, and get nothing.

For the first time since 1955 (and really, for the first time ever, since the pre-'55 House of Councillors was dominated by the royalist right), the Democratic Party, a left-leaning party, won control of Japan's House of Councillors, displacing the Liberal Democratic Party (which, ironically, is neither liberal nor democratic in ideology) that had ruled the chamber uninterrupted in the postwar period since the 1955 elections. Also of note is that the vote totals for the parties on the left - Democratic Party, Japanese Communist Party, Social Democratic Party - added up to a majority, which has never happened in any election in Japanese history that I know of. While the lower house of the Diet was once controlled by a coalition government with a Socialist Prime Minister from 1993-94, it was a coalition of parties from all over the political spectrum.

Today is May 1st, otherwise known as May Day, known both for the Pagan spring festival involving flowery doorbell ditching and dancing merrily around ribboned maypoles, and the International Labor Day that was spawned by America's own Haymarket Riot which began as a strike in support of the right to an 8 hour workday (and which was subsequently crushed by Chicago police) on May 1, 1886.

Last year, the widespread Immigrant Rights marches and boycotts on May 1st added another layer to this holiday palimpsest, and they're going for a repeat this year.

In their ever-continuing quest to turn California's public higher education into a de facto private institution, the University of California, not content with jacking up graduate student tuition yet another 10% (and nearly doubling fees since 2002), is now trying to stiff TAs, readers, and research assistants in the latest series of contract negotiations by freezing fee remissions and health insurance premiums:

We've had so much meta focused on our own little constellation of online communities out here in left blogtopia (and yes! skippy coined that term!), I figure we might all profit from a new vantage point to the issue.

From the guys over at Danwei TV, an online independent TV station based in Beijing and an interesting place to find video clips about contemporary Chinese culture, comes this interview with Chinese blogger, Sanlian Life Week journalist and general troublemaker Wang Xiaofeng. The interview ranges all over the place, and through his rants about the Chinese blogging scene, Wang provides a fascinating - and characteristically profane - Beijinger's perspective on the sorts of heated discussions that boil up on blogs everywhere. As you can see, there are aspects to these sorts of flamewars, pretensions, power dynamics and standards of respectabilty that we've been consumed with of late that are inherent to the very medium:

While the pundits and DLC hacks spin the new Democratic majority as moderate if not outright conservative, the facts simply don't back that up much. The vast majority of the dem class of 2006 are pro-choice and pro-getting out of iraq, and nearly all of them are in favor of fair trade, higher minimum wages, some form of universal health insurance, right to organize, access to a decent education, energy independence and ethics reform in DC.

While a couple are actual conservatives (the entire Indiana contingent are on the right edge of the party, and the right-wing organization Democrats for Life, who refused to endorse Kerry in the 2004 election, have claimed  6), even then they are often quite liberal when it comes to trade and wages.

analysis and more below the fold

I figure everyone else in the universe has done one of these (many of them piled upon my kitchen table at this very moment), so why not me?

Generally, I see this election as a great chance to set California and the nation in a new direction, and get some traction here and there to pursue real change in the future. The stakes, as I wrote below, are quite high, both in terms of really bad things to avoid, and really exciting possibilities for positive change.

my picks over the flip:

Crossposted at Surf Putah

From the China media watchers at Danwei comes this article by Sanlian Life Week editor Wang Xiaofeng (the Chinese original is here for those who are interested) on the Chinese government's plan for force Chinese bloggers to register and post under their own names, ostensibly to crack down on insults, curses, libel and fraud.

Wang's caustic retort is a wonderful example of typical Beijinger gruffness, and ought to remind American bloggers that the conversations and debates that we deal with here are going on globally, concurrent with the spread of the decentralized infrastructure of the internet. China has a thriving, bareknuckled sort of online community, with something along the lines of 17.5 million blogs and countless BBS communities, and for all the talk about Chinese government censorship and firewalls preventing Western media sites from being accessed in China, Chinese bloggers are a pretty stubborn, resiliant and creative bunch.

The whole article is worth a side-splitting read, but I'll excerpt some of the opening rant:

(cross-posted at surf putah) While most of Yolo County uses optical scanned ballots, the cynically-named Help America Vote Act a couple years back required that Yolo County drop its old reliable punch card system and use electronic voting machines (not Diebold, to be clear), ostensibly to provide better access for blind voters, but more likely to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars to voting machine manufacturers (who are then, unsurprisingly, big Republican donors) and, some argue, to leave backdoor flaws that enable election fraud.

Luckily for Yolo County (and notably unlike incumbant Schwarzeneggar appointee, Republican Secretary of State and Diebold pusher Bruce MacPherson), our county clerk Freddie Oakley is on top of things, an e-voting skeptic, a proponent of paper trails, and generally on top of things. No absentee ballot monkey business on this side of the causeway , thank you very much. So when Oakley was testing out the e-voting machines ahead of time, she discovered this weird glitch where the instructions to blind Yolo voters were inexplicably in Vietnamese: