...it’s dismaying to realize that the grandeur of Berkeley (and the remarkable success of the University of California system, of which Berkeley is the flagship) is being jeopardized by shortsighted politicians and California’s colossally dysfunctional budget processes.

Berkeley is caught in a full-blown budget crisis with nothing much in the way of upside in sight. The school is trying to cope with what the chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, described as a “severe and rapid loss in funding” from the state, which has shortchanged Berkeley’s budget nearly $150 million this year, and cut more than $800 million from the higher education system as a whole.

Bob Herbert writes up the Berkeley budget crisis in the context of America's larger infrastructural collapse on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Odd to see no reference to the recent walk-outs; that seems like it would be a part of the story worth mentioning.

Great achievements in American socialism. Via MeFi and Edge of the American West.

Another proposal involved upgrading the nation’s electrical grid, to allow power generated, for example, by wind turbines in the Midwest to be transmitted to population centers in the Northeast.

“You say, We can’t do it,” he observed. “And I’m going to say, Au contraire, mon frère, and I’ll prove my case. We used to have a country, allegedly, but you couldn’t drive across it, because all we had was a bunch of old dirt roads. Somebody, in the name of national security, said, ‘Hold on a sec. What if we get invaded on the West Coast, how can we get troops from the East Coast?’ So we created an interstate-highway system that connected the country to itself.”

He lowered his voice to a grumble: “ ‘Oh, we can’t afford to do it! This is insane!’ We couldn’t afford not to do it. Because the minute you did that the economy went through the roof. It was such a good idea that we did it again. In the name of national security, people in the Pentagon said, ‘If we have one big communications tower, and somebody knocks it out, then we’re blind, deaf, and dumb. We’ve got to figure out a way to distribute our information system.’ So they came up with the idea of the information superhighway—for you young people, that’s what we call the Internet. ‘We can’t afford to do this!’ We couldn’t afford not to do it. The minute we connected the country to itself, the economy went through the roof. All we’re saying is, let’s do it again. But this time, instead of connecting the country to itself to move bodies and vehicles or data around, let’s connect the country to itself so we can move clean-energy electrons around. Then you’ve got the strongest economy in the world.”

Speaking of the work beginning: a good article from the New Yorker tackles the Green Recovery.

The morning news.

* The bailout has cost more than "Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget -- *combined*!" But think of all we have to show for it!

* Related: Alternet's ten worst corporations of 2008. How did they limit themselves to just ten? Via MeFi.

* Marginal Revolution casts some cold water on wind farms, points (where else?) to nuclear energy instead. Isn't the problem here our poor energy infrastructure? The sort of redesigned, rebuilt grid Obama talks about would make these wind farms much more efficient than just about any other source of power, including, I'm given to understand, solar.

* Because of the downturn, colleges aren't hiring. Ugh.

* Cory Doctorow is looking to change the world.



* Confidential to Mac users: an update for Handbrake has been released.

* And Wendy Whitaker is today's poster child for obscenely stringent sex offender laws: because she had oral sex with a 15.9-year-old boy when she was 17, she's a sex offender for life and is currently being forced to vacate her home because it is too close to a church that runs a daycare service. A judge, unbelievably, just upheld this order. Via MeFi.

Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, an industry report says.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. Via Dot Earth.

The person I'd most like to see with a cabinet-level position in the new Obama administration is Al Gore, who should be made all-purpose Eco-Czar. Here he is in the New York Times laying out an energy agenda for the next ten years.

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

With carbon in the "danger zone" and humanity increasingly running out of biocapacity to exploit, Obama comes into power at just about the last possible second to save us all from the eco-apocalypse—I hope.

More politics updates.

* That "overheard projector" John McCain was talking about last night? A projector for Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Sounds like a reasonable expenditure to me.

* How will Obama save the economy and the planet at the same? As Matt Yglesias mentions, it's a two-fer: a green recovery plan that creates jobs modernizing the nation's antiquated energy infrastructure. We're getting closer and closer to the point where a truly solar economy is possible—there were two major solar innovations just this week, cheap, more absorptive panels and light, more flexible panels—and frankly it's all happening just in the nick of time.

The miracle of an Obama presidency reminds me a bit of the old Bismarck line: "God protects fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

* The language of "Green Recovery" also provides the necessary "crisis" rhetoric required for an massive expenditure of this nature, as if the ecological and energy crises weren't already reason enough. Because apparently they aren't.

* And the polls all show the same thing: Obama is winning big.

In the Guardian: 'The party's over for Iceland, the island that tried to buy the world.'

The nation's celebrated rags-to-riches story began in the Nineties when free market reforms, fish quota cash and a stock market based on stable pension funds allowed Icelandic entrepreneurs to go out and sweep up international credit. Britain and Denmark were favourite shopping haunts, and in 2004 alone Icelanders spent £894m on shares in British companies. In just five years, the average Icelandic family saw its wealth increase by 45 per cent.

But, as a result of the international banking crisis, the billionaires who own everything from West Ham United football club to the Somerfield supermarket chain, Hamleys toy shops and the House of Fraser, are in trouble and the country is drowning in debt.

Iceland's cheap labour force, the Poles and Lithuanians, have left already - there's little point in sending home such a worthless currency, and the tourist season is over. Iceland is on its own.

Whatever else you may say about Iceland's economic crash, at least they put their prosperity while they had it into something more useful than still-empty McMansions: Iceland is one of the cleanest, most energy-independent industrialized nations in the world. More at MeFi.

The National Mall serves as a tragic metaphor for our nation, whose own infrastructure has been left to crumble. The irony is that the way that the National Mall has been allowed to crumble literally in front of the government is like how our nation has slowly crumbled while the government grows in size and power.