Barack Obama’s win: Liberal’s love of the USA comes out of the closet.

I admit that I’ve had a good old time dressing up as a clueless wingnut at LiberalsMustDie. But it is interesting how some of the liberal “trolls” are attacking my Limbaugh loving alter-ego: they are questioning MY (alter-ego’s) patriotism!

“no red states, no blue states, only the United States”.

Respect for other people (even those with different cultures) is being considered a patriotic value.

Now, check out this video; more importantly check out some of the comments. Here you have Obama voting African Americas reminding the video poster that lots of people helped Obama win and that we should respect one another (and even respect Republicans).

A personal story

Back in the mid to late 1980s, I was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. We had a ton of international students in our department.

Frequently, the international students would say rather unkind things about the USA. You know what? That bothered me. On occasion, I would, in the mildest terms, point out that their own countries had their own warts and I’d ask: “why do you call someone an “ugly American” if they criticize your country while visiting there, yet you just flame ours while being educated at our universities?”

But my criticism was, at best, tepid, as I did NOT want to be aligned with, well, some of the most noxious conservatives. I didn’t want to be “one of them”; I didn’t want anyone to mistake me for being a jingoist.

My guess is that, more and more, liberals will be more comfortable speaking out against those who unfairly run our country down. Yes, I know, many liberals (myself included) served in the military or served our country in other ways.

But you know what? It is our flag too.

Yes, I don’t want to see a Constitutional Amendment preventing flag burning, but folks had better leave my flag alone.

Fall is really here

It is chilly; high 30s-low 40s with a wind; still I plan on racewalking 10 miles; perhaps I’ll make myself do more. I am rather unmotivated with no firm plans for next year, at least in terms of athletics.

Afterward, I’ll do some more grading (yuck).

Update I racewalked my 10.5 mile course; the “running time” was roughly 2:18-2:19; I had the stop watch turned off.

Mathematics (education)
I’ll share a class insight that I’ve had: you remember the Chinese Remainder Theorem, right?

Ok, here it is, in simplified form: if p and q are relatively prime integers, and a and b are any two integers, then there exists an integer x such that x = a (mod p) and x = b (mod q).

Now consider the group
where p and q are relatively prime. We know that the congruences
x = 1 mod p, x = 0 mod q and y = 0 mod p, y = 1 mod q have solutions. Hence the map given by is a group isomorphism.

This proof is simple, easy and comes without much fuss.

More election reaction:

I admit that these three articles really drive home how I feel about this election:

Michael Hirsh

But there’s something else that I’m even happier about—positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama’s election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one’s enemies and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American. [...]

But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn’t seem to care much about what is “left,” “right” or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It’s no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The Sun Belt politics represented by George W. Bush—the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism—”has for the moment played itself out,” says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

From the very start of his campaign, Obama has given notice that whatever you might think about his policies, they will be well thought out and soberly considered, and that as president he will not be a slave to passion or impulse. While his GOP opponent, a 72-year-old who has battled skin cancer,, was cynically deciding for political reasons that a woman who apparently did not know that Africa is a continent rather than a country should be a heartbeat away from the presidency, Obama was setting up work groups to study every major international issue and region of the world. [...]

Emphasis mine.

Sharon Begley

It took a while to discern the guiding ideology behind the Bush administration’s poisonous science policies. The real problem wasn’t tax cuts and war spending, even though he combination did strangle domestic programs so severely that scientists at the nation’s premier physics lab were ordered to take unpaid leave, and the government is allocating 13 percent less to biomedical research in 2009 than it did in 2004. [....]

It turned out that the Bush administration had about as much respect for scientific facts as it did for facts about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As one official explained to author and journalist Ron Suskind in 2002, the administration had nothing but disdain for what it called “the reality-based community,” people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That would be science. Instead, said the official, “we create our own reality.” That translated to such things as filling federal health-advisory boards with doctors who claim, against all scientific evidence, that low levels of lead are not neurotoxic to children. The message that expertise and facts do not matter has had a poisonous effect on young people’s desire to go into science, which has played no small part in America’s losing its competitive edge in R&D.

It has also undermined public trust in the integrity of science.

It is for that reason that I hope that Obama does NOT name Robert Kennedy as head of the EPA; Mr. Kennedy can use his legal skills elsewhere.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country. [...]

So, not only do I hope that, at long last, we have informed leadership at the top (as we did under Bill Clinton, and yes, under George H. W. Bush), but that it becomes cool to be smart.

No, that isn’t going to come overnight, and it horrified me to see so many Palin backers were ok with her being so out of this world ignorant or with McCain picking such a person to be his running mate.

Even better is that there are some Republicans (e. g., David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, William Buckley Jr., George Will) who actually want to see their party break with the anti-intellectual base. That is great; it isn’t healthy that the Democrats all but have a lock on my vote.

I’d love to, some day, be able to consider voting for a Republican.

But frankly, I’d sooner vote for one of my stuffed frogs than for someone who thinks that Sarah Palin is acceptable.

Yes, we are all ignorant of some things. But at least Barack Obama seems to value folks who are experts in their respective fields and he listens to them.

And maybe, just maybe (as I’ve said before), Barack Obama can do for intellectuals what Ronald Reagan did for idiots.

Maybe we can bury “Forrest Gump” forever.

Some College Football Squeakers

I got to see some games today. (photos from yahoo)

I started with the Texas-Baylor game (while watching the Illinois-Western Michigan game on the side).

Texas simply had too much for Baylor; the Bears kept it close for about a half but the Longhorns went on to win easily 45-21.

The Illinois-Western Michigan game was close; I picked this one up at the half when Western lead 20-10. They extended the lead to 23-10 but the Illinois defense kept them in it. Eventually Illinois scored on a pass to cut it to 23-17 and the defense came up with a ball strip to thwart a Western thrust.

Eventually, Western Michigan got the ball back; moved it well, and then pinned Illinois back on its own 1 with just under 2 minutes to go.

But after a couple of passes, Illinois hit a 54 yard pass to set up shop at the Western 29 yard line. But the Western defense held Illinois on downs.

Then I watched the Penn State-Iowa game, picking it up with PSU up 13-7. The game went back and forth, with the Nittany Lions defense forcing turnovers to keep Iowa at arm’s length.

They cashed in on a fumble to take a 16-7 lead; Iowa retaliated with a long drive to cut it to 16-14. But yet another turnover lead to a PSU touchdown and a 23-14 lead in the 4′th quarter.

But then Iowa responded with a long drive to cut it to 23-21; they forced a punt but roughed the kicker. But Iowa intercepted a PSU pass and was back in business.

A drive put Iowa in position for a long field goal but a key 3rd down pass put Iowa closer.

The winning field goal came with 1 second to go.

Then I watched the last quarter of the LSU-Alabama game; LSU had just tied it 21-21.

Alabama responded with a long drive to get to a 30 some-odd field goal try, but the kick was low and it got blocked.

So, the game went to overtime with LSU getting the ball first, but Alabama intercepted an LSU pass in the end zone.

Alabama got the ball and drove it in close and won on a quarterback sneak.

Bring on Boston College-Notre Dame and Texas Tech-Oklahoma State. Ok, the latter game has much better teams, but the BC-ND game is very well matched.

Commentator comment: why does Lou Holtz always sound as if he is slobbering and spitting when he talks?