The protesters, shoulder to shoulder and chanting "Education should be free. No cuts, no fees," marched through campus, passing by UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's office, and then went off campus to Shattuck Avenue, ultimately blocking all lanes of traffic for two block.

Faculty/staff walkout at Berkeley. Eagle-eyed Durhamites may notice a former GPLer in the bottom right, walking it out. Some more background and discussion at MeFi.

Change we can believe in: Cynical-C has your protest sign of the night.

Wednesday 3.

* First Read considers the curse of the 2012 GOP candidate, noting that only Mitt Romney has avoided total credibility implosion. But stay tuned: it's a long way to Iowa, and I believe in the Mittpocalypse.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Obama's political opponents tend to be cursed in this way: consider that his main opponents for Illinois State Senate were pulled from the ballot for insufficient signatures, that his original run for Senate was facilitated by the scandal surrounding the divorce of Jack and Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan, and that his opponent for the presidency actually thought Sarah Palin was a credible vice presidential candidate.

* More on Kay Hagan and health care from Triangulator. Contact information for Hagan's Senate office is here.

* The MTA is trying to sell name rights for subway stations. Can't we get a court to bar this kind of silliness? "Atlantic Avenue" is a useful and informative name for a subway station; the name of a bank in London is not remotely. UPDATE: I'm 99% less outraged upon realizing that Barclay's is building a basketball stadium near that subway station.

* Michael Bérubé on the futility on the humanities. Said futility is not a bad thing.

* Žižek on Iran (at least allegedly).

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

* Soccer in South Africa, at the Big Picture.

A study from a British think tank purports to show definitive evidence of electoral fraud in Iran; Juan Cole backs the study up with some analysis. Violence has been amping up in Tehran over the last few days, with worse likely to come; an article in Time suggests that renewed violence may flare up on the 3rd, 7th, and 40th days following deaths like Neda Soltani's in accordance with Shi'ite mourning practice. This significantly complicates, Jason Zengerle argues, comparisons to Tiananmen.

The Big Picture continues to collected photos from Iran; here are the two most recent updates.

Monday!

* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether "Charlie Kaufman" is officially a genre yet.

* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.

* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren't a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.

* Also not useful: classifying "protests" as "low-level terrorism activity."

* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.

* What's wrong with the American essay? I'm not sure anything is, but certainly not this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.

It doesn't seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.

* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.

Sunday night links.

* I can't bring myself to watch the murder of Neda Soltani on YouTube, but a lot of other people have. It's remarkable how quickly her face has become that of the protests in Iran.

* The New York Times has an article exposing abusive practices in the freelance textbook market in New York, with my good friend and old co-blogger PClem providing some of the ugly details.

* Polls show widespread public support for a public health care option. Will this remind Democrats in Congress that they swept the last two elections?

* Buffy vs Twilight.

* Infinite Summer begins tonight. Kottke kicks things off.

The New York Times is liveblogging today's planned protest in Iran, which threatens to escalate the situation or perhaps even pose a potential tipping point after Khamenei's denunciation. Against this backdrop, the Atlantic's coverage seems a bit trivial.

Village Voice: 'Anti-Letterman Rally Draws Dozens.'

Iran politics, American politics.

* NYU's Joshua Tucker: 'Don’t Expect This Week’s Protests To Lead To Revolution In Iran.'

* Suspect positionalities watch: Marc Ambinder says we should "follow the developments in Iran like a CIA analyst." I'm not sure that's quite the posture I'd recommending adopting—especially as it takes a stunningly doe-eyed view of the CIA—but the hermeneutic of general skepticism Ambinder advocates seems wise.

* Nate Silver analyzes that pre-election poll that's getting increasing attention today.

If you take that 30 percent swing vote and add it to Ahmadinejad's 33 percent base, he could have won the election with 63 percent of the vote, as he ostensibly did on Friday. If you take it and add it to Mousavi's column, Ahmadinejad would have gone down to a solid defeat.

The point that few commentators are realizing—Al Giordano is an exception—is that this story really isn't about the way that the votes were counted. It's about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected. If Ahmadinejad hired a bunch of thugs to hold every Iranian at gunpoint while they were casting their ballots, it would not have been difficult for him to get 63 percent of the vote—indeed, he'd probably have wound up with very close to 100 percent. This would be an election—and there would be no need at all to tamper with the results. But it wouldn't be an expression of democracy. We need to separate out those two concepts. Ahmadinejad, as far as we know, did not go so far as to hold anyone at gunpoint. But the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.

* Still more from Iran: details on the protester shot in Azadi Square today and big pictures from the Big Picture.

* Obama, political capital, and climate change: Matt Yglesias makes a good point.

The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

* And your attention please: Sonia Sotomayor is no longer a racist.

Potentially very bad development: @persiankiwi, "the world's most important journalist" per Attackerman, is reporting gunfire in Azadi Sq.

Over the weekend an old friend wrote me to make sure that I don't like Andrew Sullivan now. I don't; his opinions are by and large awful, even if on many important issues he's slowly switched to "our side" since 2001. But on isolated issues his coverage can be very strong, as it is this morning on the now-illegal protest march in Tehran. Just look at the size of that crowd. (UPDATE: Video from BBC Persia. Wow.) (UPDATE 2: Mousavi is at the rally.)

Morning links.

* The protests in St. Paul turned violent yesterday, with police tear-gassing the crowd.

They had come in their thousands – grandmothers, veterans, young families and even disgruntled Republicans bearing banners and peace flags, to demand an end to the five-year conflict. And for the most part, the demonstrations passed off peacefully.

But once the main antiwar march had finished, splinter groups embarked on a violent rampage, smashing windows, slashing car tyres, throwing bottles and even attacking Republican delegates attending the nearby Xcel Centre.

Many of those involved identified themselves to reporters as anarchists. These protesters, some clad in black, wreaked havoc by damaging property and starting at least one fire.

* Washington Monthly has a nice pair of posts detailing the entire Sarah Palin fiasco so far, if you haven't been following the coverage closely here and elsewhere. And for a good articulation of the gambling frame I've been pushing as the best way to understand John McCain, see Josh Marshall.

* Barack Obama loves science and science funding.

* Google releases its long-awaited browser, Chrome, tomorrow. MetaFilter's talking about it.

* Neal Stephenson and the 10,000-Year Clock. There's more Stephenson links at MeFi.

* “The Night Gwen Stacy Died": The End of Innocence and the Birth of the Bronze Age.

Salon's indispensible Glenn Greenwald is all over the RNC "thoughtcrime" arrests.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

Firedoglake has a lot more. They're talking about this at Boing Boing and MetaFilter, too.

Midnight links.

* A mandatory evacuation has been ordered in New Orleans—and Gustav is looking very ugly.

* Somebody shut up Michael Moore. This guy, too.

* Apparently you can now arrest people for intent to protest. Good to know.

* Flowers for Algernon: The Blog. Via MeFi. See it now before the DMCA takedown.

* Steve Benen has a good roundup of shocked reactions to the Palin pick from both Alaskans and Republicans. (Apparently Romney and Pawlenty are not happy either.) Or take this from an off-the-record Bushite:

If it said something admirable about President Bush that he chose a running mate who would be more helpful in governing than in campaigning, what does it say about Senator McCain that he did the opposite? One of the most loyal Bushies calls the selection “disrespectful to the office of the presidency.”

And this, from the Politico:

Whatever you think of the pick, here are six things it tells us about McCain:

1. He’s desperate.
2. He’s willing to gamble — bigtime.
3. He’s worried about the political implications of his age.
4. He’s not worried about the actuarial implications of his age.
5. He’s worried about his conservative base.
6. At the end of the day, McCain is still McCain.

Crooks and Liars has a post on yesterday's 38th anniversary of the Kent State shootings.

Longshoremen on the West Coast went on strike today to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If 2007-2008 has taught us anything, it's that organized labor still has some fight left in it after all. Via MeFi.

I completely missed this whole controversy last week, but Grace Wang, a Duke freshwoman from China, made national news when she tried to broker mediation between the pro-Tibetan and the pro-Chinese protest factions on campus. Since then she's had death threats, her parents have gone into hiding, and her parents' home in China has been vandalized—she's no longer going back this summer.

She had an op-ed talking about the experience in the Washington Post last Sunday.

Monday!

* Which imaginary animals are kosher? Via Boing Boing.

* Plan59.com is a great site for retro and nostalgia art.

* MetaFilter has now apparently set about translating all of Pulp Fiction into Shakespearease, following the lead of this link.

* Cogitamus has a question for the class, via Cynical-C.

Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had multiple affairs, had been a member of the “Keating Five,” had had a relationship with a much younger lobbyist that his staff felt the need to try and block, had intervened on behalf of the client of said young lobbyist with a federal agency, had denounced then embraced Jerry Falwell, had denounced then embraced the Bush tax cuts, had confused Shiite with Sunni, had confused Al Qaeda in Iraq with the Mahdi Army, had actively sought the endorsement and appeared on stage with a man who denounced the Catholic Church as a whore, and stated that he knew next to nothing about economics — do you think it’s possible that Obama would have been treated differently by the media than John McCain has been? Possible?

* The New York Times says Harold and Kumar 2 creates a whole new genre: the stoner protest film. The legendary Randolph High School debate squad of the 1990s even gets a veiled shout-out...

* The Catcher in the Retirement Home.

* A people's history of the banana.

No honor, no degree: Students and faculty at U-Mass (Amherst) protest the awarding of a honorary degree to former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. Warms the heart. Via MeFi.