From Edge:

Enough already. I bit my tongue when I heard that Sarah Palin believed that dinosaurs and humans once lived side by side and that she and John McCain wanted creationism taught in the public schools. And I just shook my head when McCain derided proposed funding for a sophisticated planetarium projection machine as wasteful spending on an “overhead projector.” But the Republican ticket’s war on science has finally gone too far. Last week, Sarah Palin dissed research on fruit flies.

In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects — they really don’t make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)

As a geneticist, I’ve worked on fruit flies in the laboratory for three decades. I know the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a friend of mine. And believe me, Sarah Palin doesn’t know anything about fruit flies. The research Palin attacked was a perfectly valid project designed to protect American growers from the olive fruit fly, a destructive pest. But fruit-fly research is good for far more than that. The fruit fly is what we call a “model organism.” Since all animals partake of a common evolutionary history, we share basic features of physiology, development and biochemistry. And because flies are easy to study, quick to breed in the lab, and cheaper than chimps and mice, we can often use them as models for things that go wrong (or right) in our own species.

More here.

From Nature:

Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois, has defeated John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, in both the electoral and popular vote. The electoral balance currently stands at 349 for Obama and 163 for McCain, according to the Washington Post; results from a few states are still pending. 270 electoral votes are needed to win. Either Obama or McCain would have represented a very different departure for science from President George W. Bush, although not perhaps that different from each other. During the campaign, Obama promised a host of changes, such as fresh investments in science and technology, including a $150-billion push in alternative energies; in his acceptance speech last night he cited “a planet in peril” among the many leading challenges for his presidency. The question now is whether those promises will be translated into reality come inauguration day on 20 January.

Senate

Thirty-five of the Senate’s 100 seats were up for grabs in this election. The Democrats strengthened their hold on the Senate, but have fallen short of the 60-seat majority that would have eased the passage of new legislation. The Washington Post reports the current balance at 54 Democratic, 40 Republican, and 2 Independent seats. But with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and in the executive branch, Democratic priorities such as climate-change legislation may now gain traction.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

The theories known as QED and QCD are the mismatched siblings of particle physics. QED, or quantum electrodynamics, is the hard-working, conscientious older brother who put himself through night school and earned a degree in accounting. QED describes all the electromagnetic phenomena of nature, and it does so with meticulous accuracy. Calculations carried out within the framework of QED predict properties of the electron to within a few parts per trillion, and those predictions agree with experimental measurements.

QCD, or quantum chromodynamics, is the brilliant but erratic young rebel of the family, who ran off to a commune and came back with tattoos. The theory has the same basic structure as QED, but instead of electrons it applies to quarks; it describes the forces that bind those exotic entities together inside protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles. By all accounts QCD is a correct theory of quark interactions, but it has been a stubbornly unproductive one. If you tried using it to make quantitative predictions, you were lucky to get any answers at all, and accuracy was just too much to ask for.

Now the prodigal theory is finally developing some better work habits. QCD still can’t approach the remarkable precision of QED, but some QCD calculations now yield answers accurate to within a few percent. Among the new results are some thought-provoking surprises.

More here.

Editorial in the New York Times:

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look — by no means comprehensive — at some of Mr. Bush’s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don’t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans’ rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

More here.

From Science:

Barack Obama made history yesterday by becoming the first African American to be elected president of the United States. The many scientists who had campaigned for the Democratic senator from Illinois reveled in last night’s election returns. “We’re just very thrilled,” says physicist Bernice Durand, who had assembled a grassroots coalition of researchers supporting Obama (Science, 31 October, p. 658). The election brought mostly good news for research as well. Here’s a roundup of other developments that could have an impact on science:

Stem cells
Arguably the result most directly affecting researchers was in Michigan, where voters passed a measure that will free scientists from state restrictions on stem cell research. Proposal 2, a constitutional amendment that will go into effect next month, allows researchers to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines from embryos that would otherwise be discarded by fertility clinics. The measure supersedes a 1978 state law prohibiting the use of embryos in research. It was opposed on ethical grounds by right-to-life groups and the Catholic Church, which also raised the specter of science gone wild. Opponents even suggested that “we might try to clone cow-people,” says stem cell researcher Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan (UM) Medical School in Ann Arbor. In fact, all cloning, including somatic cell nuclear transfer for research, is still banned.

Each side reportedly spent more than $5 million in the public battle over the measure, with supporters receiving a big financial boost from Michigan developer A. Alfred Taubman. Scientists were particularly active, participating in public debates and visiting newspaper editors to lobby for the measure.

More here.

My old teacher Sidney Morgenbesser once said to Avishai Margalit that the urgent task before us is the development of a decent society.  Margalit later went on to flesh out what a “decent society” means: simply, a decent society is one that does not humiliate those who live in it.  This conception resurfaced recently  in Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s speech on the occasion of Spain’s passage deep fundamental civil rights legislation for gays, queers, and lesbians.  He said:

We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

What has happened in California is this in rewind.  The very public and directly democratic  roll-back of these rights  has made California’s a more indecent society, one in which citizens of the state have gone out of their way to humiliate fellow neighbors, co-workers, friends and family.  Sullivan on this affront and disappointment:

Heart-breaking news this morning: a terribly close vote has stripped gay couples in California of their right to marry. The geographic balance shows that the inland parts of California voted for the Proposition and the coast and urban areas voted against it.

Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It’s a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California’s constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama’s luke-warm opposition didn’t help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll. Today this is one of the solaces to a hard right and a Republican party that sees gay people as the least real of Americans.

But I realize I am not shattered. My own marriage exists and is real without the approval of others. One day soon, it will be accepted by a majority. And this initiative in California can and will be reversed, as California’s initiatives are much more fluid than those in other states; and the younger generation is overwhelmingly – 2 to 1 – in our favor. The tide of history is behind us; but we will have to work harder to educate people about our lives and loves and humanity.

It cannot be denied that this feels like a punch in the gut. It is. I’m not going to pretend that the wound isn’t deep and personal, like an attack on my own family. It was meant to be.

Though the final word is not in yet, the great, great disappointment last night is the blow to equal rights in California in the form of proposition 8, and bans on same-sex marriage in other states.  In the San Francisco Chronicle:

Opponents of the measure, gathered at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, tried to put the best face on the disappointing results.

“There are a lot of votes still to count, and we expect the race to go on late tonight and possibly beyond,” said Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, the guiding force behind the “No on Prop. 8” campaign.

Election officials estimated there could be as many as 2 million ballots left to count after election day, mainly from mail ballots that arrived Tuesday.

Supporters of the ban stayed cautiously optimistic.

“We’re confident voters did go to the polls to vote ‘yes’ to protect traditional marriage,” said Chip White, a spokesman for the Prop. 8 campaign.

Same-sex marriage bans won easily Tuesday night in Florida and Arizona. It was a rematch in Arizona, which in 2006 became the only state to ever reject a ban on same-sex marriage.

The campaign in California pitted those who argued that a same-sex marriage ban was nothing more than outdated discrimination against gays and lesbians, and conservatives and Christian groups who countered that the state and the courts have no right to unilaterally change a definition of marriage that has existed for centuries.

Last night, I cried during a speech by a professional politician. I’ve never done that before, ever. Ezra Klein, I think, puts what happened last night into a larger context, in The American Prospect.

The bumper stickers say “Never Forget.” Easy enough, right? The images of September 11 are indelible. The awful film of that morning will be a mainstay in history classes. But the destruction of our most iconic cityscape was not the most lasting of the damage inflicted on America. It had been a long time since we, as a nation, had felt fear. And it did strange things to us. We simultaneously lashed out and shrunk back. We called forth spectacular shows of power from the greatest army mankind has known and we started docilely removing our shoes and bagging our liquids when we went to the airport. We yelled at our friends and ceased speaking to our enemies. We sought to prove we were very big, and instead found ourselves feeling very small.

America’s sudden sense of vulnerability was ruthlessly exploited by those who sought to dominate our politics. Max Cleland, an American hero who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War, found himself compared to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The cable news networks — led by Fox — affixed the daily terrorism alert to the corner of the screen. Love of country somehow became an arms race of accessories; flag pins and bumper stickers and car magnets became the loyalty oath of a consumerist society. Dissent was equated, both implicitly and explicitly, with treason.

In 2004, John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, actually devoted a portion of his acceptance speech to “those who question the patriotism of Americans who offer a better direction for our country.” The fact that he felt it necessary to defend the patriotism of hundreds of millions of Americans did not, by that point, seem very strange. This was the 9-11 era. And last night, it ended.

Barack Hussein Obama was, arguably, the country’s most unlikely candidate for highest office. He embodied, or at least invoked, much of what America feared. His color recalled our racist past. His name was a reminder of our anxious present. His spiritual mentor displayed a streak of radical Afro-nationalism. He knew domestic terrorists and had lived in predominantly Muslim countries. There was hardly a specter lurking in the American subconscious that he did not call forth.

And that was his great strength. He robbed fear of its ability to work through quiet insinuation. He forced America to confront its own subconscious. Obama actually is black. His middle name actually is “Hussein.” He actually does know William Ayers. He actually was married by Jeremiah Wright. He actually had lived in Indonesia. These were not smears, though they were often used as such. They were facts. And this election was fundamentally about what happened when fear collided with fact.

///
Let America be America Again
Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

///

From The New York Times:

This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:

An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States. Showing extraordinary focus and quiet certainty, Mr. Obama swept away one political presumption after another to defeat first Hillary Clinton, who wanted to be president so badly that she lost her bearings, and then John McCain, who forsook his principles for a campaign built on anger and fear.

His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world.

More here.

People,

I want to state publically that this is one of the happiest days of my life.

Yes, I know all the reasons not to be too happy, thank you.

I am happy.

It is something to have one’s faith restored, to feel connected to something bigger than oneself, to feel inspired, to feel ready to give rather than take.

As a non-white person who grew up in Pakistan, I took it for granted that white men ran the world. My father served in the British Government of India. Now, there is a person even darker than me who will be the leader of the free world. It is a wonderful and remarkable thing, and a testament to the true beauty of America. I am finally undeniably proud to be a citizen of this crazy melting pot, this so pleasing instantiation of brotherhood and tolerance, this America!

Last year, I became a US citizen at a time when I almost felt ashamed pulling out my blue passport when traveling; henceforth, I shall display it with pride.

I have not slept all night and must get some rest. To my fellow Americans, and also to everyone else, my heartfelt congratulations. Believe it or not, the world has changed today. For the better.

Yours,

Abbas

Over at the Bruno Schulz’s Stories website:

IN JULY, my father went to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and older brother, prey to the glowing white and stunning days of summer. We browsed — stupefied by the light — through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour, and had, deep inside, a sweetly dripping pulp of golden pears.
    Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona^* out of the fire of the enkindled day, tipping the sun’s colourful beauty from her basket — glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skin, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed what would be realised in their taste, and apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons. And alongside that pure poetry of fruits she unloaded slices of meat and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with energy and goodness, and algae of vegetables calling to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner, its flavour still unformed and sterile — dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients with their wild and field aroma.

For the month of November, the current and 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal is free.  Michelle  Sieff on Africa, its diversity and its prospects:

Africa in 2033 will look somewhat like Africa in 2008: it will still face challenges, but different challenges than today. Internal wars, such as in Sudan, will no longer be the primary threats to the security of Africa’s populations. Instead, transnational organized crime syndicates and radical Islamist groups will become the greatest threats to civilian life in Africa. But there are positives too: economic growth will continue, democracy will spread, though its progress may be halting and unpredictable.

Today, some 50 years after the beginning of the independence era, Africa is far more complicated than the image of Africa in the popular imagination. All too often, Africa is still seen as the basket-case continent of Darfur and Zimbabwe, of “blood diamonds,” “resource curses,” and “poverty traps.” In reality, however, Africa is a humdrum continent, and is part of the general trend towards economic and political progress shared by other parts of the world.

Timothy Fitzgerald over at The Immanent Frame:

The invention of “religions” in the modern discursive form is also the invention of the secular state and the modern idea of “science” as essentially different from “religion.” In any given context of modernity we are always dealing with “religion” in various binary oppositions, which are all dependent on the bottom-line distinction between religion and whatever is assumed to be non-religion, now referred to rhetorically as the secular. In discussions about religion, its separation from, and thus relation to, other discursive non-religious domains such as science, politics or economics is usually only acknowledged tacitly and in passing, if at all, conveying (say) an untroubled and unquestioned sense that religion and politics or religion and science or religion and economics are essentially distinct, and thus in danger of getting confused.

Max Blumenthal over at pollster.com:

Following the 2004 election, when partial and misleading results leaked out at mid day, the network consortium that conducts the exit polls decided to restrict access to a small number of analysts in a “quarantine room” for most of the day. During the primaries this year, and presumably tonight as well, they release their results and vote estimates to producers and reporters at the television networks and other subscriber organizations about about 5:00 p.m. eastern time. While some of that information will no doubt leak after 5:00 p.m, anything you see before that time claiming to be an “exit poll” is probably bogus and certainly not part of the official network exit poll apparatus (Tom Webster, an employee of Edison Research, blogged some details about life inside the quarantine room just before the Super Tuesday primaries).

And while I have your attention, let me offer some advice: Ignore leaked exit polls tonight. I know, I know. How can you ignore them? Everyone wants to know as much as possible about the outcome of this election as soon as possible. But you will do youself a favor if you ignore what leaks out before the polls close, or at least try not to jump to any conclusions about the likely outcome based on what you see. Why? First, the McCain campaign is right: Historically, the leaked exit poll results have “tended to overstate the Democratic vote,” and as I reported in March, and the early leaked results during the primaries tended to overstate the Obama vote as well.

Does that information help? Can we apply our own informal adjustment (Obama minus some percentage) and get an precise result? Maybe, but I would not advise it.

From The New York Times:

While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Feverishly streaming clips of Obama over the past weeks, I’ve been struck by the freshness of his conversational style. In one interview on The Daily Show he explained how the electorate wanted to “look under the hood and kick the tyres” before they voted for him, implying solid construction while also invoking the American automotive tradition. If we unpack it a little further, there are other metaphors nestled within: he’s “roadworthy” and already has “a few miles on the clock”. In short, he has the necessary experience.

When faced with the thorny issue of whether Hillary’s experience as first lady had any bearing on her potential as a presidential candidate, Obama conceded that she had done “some heavy lifting on issues” during Bill Clinton’s time in office. The metaphor was damning and decisive, casting Hillary as a little oafish and clumsy, fit only for drudge work.

Kennedy knew the importance of words when he chose Robert Frost to speak at his inauguration. As he said in a speech in 1963 after the poet’s death: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses … When power leads man towards his arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.” But as Michael Donaghy pointed out, Kennedy wasn’t beyond co-opting a little of this for himself: the rhetorical techniques deployed in his inauguration speech mirrored those of the Robert Frost’s poem The Gift Outright.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Democracy, as we all know, is a Greek word. Literally, it means “rule of the people.” To a proponent of democracy, then, it is not unfair to ask, “How have the people been ruling themselves?” In these days of election fever (or exhaustion), it is amusing, if not illustrative to remember that one prominent American openly proclaimed that the people stink and that democracy is a joke. I’m thinking, of course, of H.L. Mencken. Surveying the teeming hordes of American citizens, Mencken called them the “booboisie.” The booboisie is composed of idiots and mental children. “Ideas,” Mencken noted, “leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental — the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men.”

Mencken wrote these thoughts down in 1926’s Notes on Democracy (recently published in a new edition through Dissident Books with an introduction by Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers). Fear, Mencken thought, is the essential force driving human beings. The vast majority of us look simply to quell the terror in our hearts with basic comforts. Give us sweet things to eat and some light pornography and we crawl back to our domiciles awaiting further instruction. Rarely, a human being will be able to conquer that basic fear and take a stab at truth or beauty. Rarely.

More here.