Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 55m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 39.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1985, Garry Kasparov, 22, becomes the youngest World Chess Champion by beating Anatoly Karpov.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Annie Linskey reports For Biden fans, one unifying standard: Old Glory:

WILMINGTON, Del. — If there was one enduring symbol of Joe Biden’s nationwide election night party Saturday night, it was the American flag.

In the Riverfront district of Wilmington, near the parking lot from which Biden delivered his speech to the nation, flags flew everywhere. There was the Big Flag, a massive Old Glory hoisted between two cranes and visible from the interstate. It flew for a week as the ballot counting agonizingly continued, ripping at least twice and becoming a temporary Wilmington landmark.

An American flag bigger than a barn door hung on the side of the Chase Center, which served as the backdrop for the victory speeches delivered by Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris. Another draped vertically off the nearby wall of Daniel S. Frawley Stadium, a minor league ballpark. One more, about a story high, was suspended from the side of the nearby Westin hotel.

Brooke Thaler, who teaches journalism in Connecticut but has roots in Wilmington, said one of her students is writing a piece exploring how the American flag became more of a symbol of the right.

“How did that happen?” Thaler asked at the Biden event. “It seems as if one party and one side of the country has taken the American flag and made it theirs. And now we took it back.”

No, she said. That last comment didn’t seem quite right.

“Not just, ‘We took it back,’ ” she said, correcting herself. “Now it can be back to a unifying symbol for our whole country.”

Vanesa Williamson writes Confronting the enduring appeal of fascism:

Though the last few days have been anxiety-provoking, some of the apparent closeness of the election is a mirage. As was widely anticipated, rural votes were tallied faster on election night than votes in the cities, and mail-in ballots took days to count, resulting in early apparent leads for Trump that dwindled and reversed as more votes were counted. The ridiculous and malignant anachronism of the Electoral College means that Biden’s millions-strong popular vote margin did not assure his victory. Republican efforts to suppress the vote, stop the vote count, and even invalidate ballots already counted, have made the results more tenuous than they would otherwise be.

Nonetheless, and despite an uncontrolled pandemic that has already killed 234,000 Americans, more than 68 million Americans (and counting) voted to keep President Trump in office. Indeed, though Trump has fulfilled nearly every nightmare scenario his opponents warned of, and though he has all but abandoned the vague gestures he once made toward economic populism, Trump gained at least six million voters over his total in 2016.

These results are a fundamentally unsurprising but nonetheless stark reminder of the enduring power of racism and misogyny in America. More broadly, Trump’s core appeal is the appeal of fascism: the pleasure of inflicting cruelty and humiliation on those one fears and disdains, the gratification of receiving the authoritarian’s flattery, and the exhilaration of a crowd freed from the normal strictures of law, reason and decency.

How McDonald’s Really Makes Money:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 57m 58s of daytime.  The moon is in its third quarter with 50.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1972, pay television network Home Box Office launches.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Yascha Mounk writes America Won (‘Voters stopped an authoritarian populist from destroying the country’s democratic  institutions’):

As president, Donald Trump has caused needless suffering on a staggering scale and subjected the country’s democratic institutions to their most serious test in more than a century. They survived that test. Joe Biden has narrowly defeated Trump, putting an end to the nightmare of the past four years.

A competent and humane administration is now preparing to enter the White House. Although the nation’s deep problems won’t vanish, the 46th president of the United States will undoubtedly work to tackle rather than downplay the danger still posed by the global pandemic, to improve rather than imperil the lives of immigrants and minorities, and to unite rather than divide Americans.

What does Biden’s victory mean?

In the early stages of the campaign, pundits wrote Biden off as an anachronism who had missed his moment. Born during World War II, he was sworn in as a United States senator in the same month that George Foreman won the world heavyweight boxing championship. Biden first tried, and failed, to become president when the Berlin Wall still stood tall and nearly half the Americans now alive were young children or not yet born. While his most recent Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were elected to the highest office in the land as young men impatient to conquer the future, Biden will assume it as a kindly grandfather who seems nostalgic for a calmer past.

….

Banished from power, Trump will do what he can to bring out the worst in America. The country remains deeply divided. The incoming administration won’t have a moment to lose in repairing the damage of the past four years and reestablishing America’s reputation in the world.

But after four years of dread and shame, this is a moment for hope and pride. America stopped an authoritarian populist from destroying its democratic institutions. We came together in unprecedented numbers to show, however narrowly, that Trump is not the true face of this country. So we should once again dare to be optimistic about the possibility of building a thriving, inclusive democracy that more fully lives up to its grand ideals.

Paul Schemm reports ‘Welcome back’: America’s allies celebrate Biden win and hope for a U.S. return to global politics:

For many traditional allies of the United States — who endured sharp criticisms, unpredictable behavior and tariff wars under Trump — the election of Biden represented a return to the way things were, as summarized by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s tweet: “Welcome back America.”

Amid the typical brief messages of congratulations, some world leaders were careful to emphasize the need for a return to multilateralism and cooperation. The head of the NATO alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, was quick to note that Biden was “a strong supporter of our Alliance,” which was good for both “North America & Europe.”>

He was echoed by Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, who said the European Union — a repeated focus of Trump’s ire — was “ready to engage for a strong transatlantic partnership.”

Video from Space for the Week of Nov. 1, 2020:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 10h 00m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1907, Jesús García saves the entire town of Nacozari de García by driving a burning train full of dynamite six kilometers (3.7 miles) away before it can explode.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Simon Romero, Miriam Jordan, and Michael Wines report Why Arizona’s Storied Conservative Stronghold Could Flip for Biden:

Ten years ago, Maricopa County was the place that spawned the political careers of Republican hard-liners like Joe Arpaio, the sheriff who demonized immigrants and placed inmates in a tent camp. Politicians from Phoenix and its suburbs thrived with appeals to voters on guns, religion and taxes.

But these days, the county’s scorching growth has produced a battleground in which Republicans suddenly find themselves on the defensive. The children of the immigrants targeted by Mr. Arpaio, as well as an influx of outsiders from places like California, are reshaping the political landscape of this part of the West.

As Arizona now stands to become a coveted prize for Democrats, Maricopa County is undergoing what may amount to one of the biggest political shifts of any major county in the United States in recent years. The last time Maricopa County came this close to siding with a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1948.

“We think of John Wayne and the Sonoran Desert when we have visions of Arizona, but the truth is we’re an urban state where the Phoenix metro area is the heart and soul of Arizona at this point,” said Joseph Garcia, executive director of Chicanos Por La Causa Action Fund, a Phoenix group that helped register and turn out thousands of Latino voters for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

….

Various factors have contributed to the political reconfiguration, originating with the backlash — including from powerful Republicans in the Phoenix business establishment — against Arizona’s immigration crackdown in 2010. The changes began to take shape clearly by 2016, when Mr. Arpaio was defeated and Hillary Clinton lost the county by just three percentage points.

 Josh Dawsey and Amy B. Wang report White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tests positive for coronavirus:

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has tested positive for the coronavirus, and told others not to disclose his condition, according to an official with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Meadows was at the White House early Wednesday as President Trump spoke about the election.

The diagnosis, first reported by Bloomberg News, comes a little more than a month after Trump and other members of his family and inner circle also tested positive for coronavirus. Two weeks later, at least five aides or advisers to Vice President Pence were infected.

The repeated infections within the White House underscore the attitude with which the administration has handled the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed at least 235,000 Americans since February. Trump and his allies, including Meadows, have frequently flouted public health guidelines and continued to hold large indoor gatherings where few people wear masks or socially distance.

Meadows has fought with the doctors about the severity of the virus, argued about the effectiveness of masks and has repeatedly sought to move the president away from focusing on the virus, officials say.

This Ancient Yemeni city, which survived wars, is at risk of environmental damage:

The historic city of Chibam – thought to be home to the oldest skyscraper in the world – is now at risk of collapse due to torrential rains.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 10h 02m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 9:00 AM.

On this day in 1837, legislators choose what is now Burlington, Iowa as a temporary capital of the Wisconsin Territory.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Smith writes Trump may have broken his own record for most dangerous lies in one speech:

It seemed like a desperate last stand from a fearful strongman who can feel power slipping inexorably away.

The US president on Thursday returned to the White House briefing room, scene of past triumphs such as that time he proposed bleach as a cure for coronavirus and that other time he condemned QAnon with the words “They like me”.

Trump offered a downright dangerous and dishonest take on this week’s election that current vote counting trends suggest he will lose. It was possibly an attempt to intimidate and deter TV networks from declaring a winner in the next few hours.

It also risked inciting protests and violence from supporters encouraged to view Joe Biden as an illegitimate president-elect.

Sombre and downbeat, Trump made false claims from a prepared statement ( is that better or worse than ad-libbing lies?)

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said with a straight face. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late – we’re looking at them very strongly, a lot of votes came in late.”

It was a bold, dramatic claim with massive implications and absolutely no foundation.

Having often dismissed the significance of Vladmir Putin’s hackers’ meddling four years ago, Trump implied that opinion polls are a more sinister threat.

Jonathan Martin and Katie Glueck report Biden Makes Gains in Key States as Anxious Nation Awaits Winner:

In a brief appearance before reporters in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden said he remained confident that he would ultimately prevail but did not lay claim to the White House.

“Democracy’s sometimes messy,” said Mr. Biden, who remained ahead in Arizona on Thursday night but lost some ground there. “It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

….

Hours later, in a stunning appearance in the White House briefing room, Mr. Trump lied about the vote-counting underway in several states, conjuring up a conspiracy of “legal” and “illegal” ballots being tabulated and claiming without evidence that states were trying to deny him re-election.

“They’re trying to steal an election, they’re trying to rig an election,” the president said from the White House briefing room. He also baselessly suggested nefarious behavior in Philadelphia and Detroit, cities that he called “two of the most corrupt political places.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks, mostly read off notes, were at times more valedictory than defiant. Far from insisting that he would stay in power, he used much of his appearance to complain about pre-election polls, demonize the news media and try to put the best face on Tuesday’s results, trumpeting his party’s congressional gains. He did not take questions from reporters.

 Falcon 9 launches GPS III SV04 and Falcon 9 first stage landing:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 4:41 PM, for 10h 05m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 2007, Google unveils the Android mobile operating system.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Kate Taylor reports Smashing a single-day record, U.S. enters new terrain as hospitalizations increase:

The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began, bursting past a grim threshold even as the wave of infections engulfing the country shows no sign of receding.

The total count of new infections was at least 107,000, according to a New York Times database. Twenty-three states have recorded more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch.

Five states — Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota and Nebraska— set single-day case records on Wednesday. Cases were also mounting in the Mountain West and even in the Northeast, which over the summer seemed to be getting the virus under control.

North and South Dakota and Wisconsin have led the country for weeks in the number of new cases relative to their population. But other states have seen steep recent increases in the last 14 days.

 University of Texas School of Law professor Steve Vladeck observes that

For anyone complaining about the “late” shift in totals toward Democrats in MI, PA, and WI, most of those votes actually came in *first.* It’s only because those states’ Republican-controlled state legislatures wouldn’t allow “pre-canvassing” that they’re now being counted last.

 Susan Glasser writes Biden May Win, but Trump Remains the President of Red America:

There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.

….

Trump was always a minority President, governing for part of the country in opposition to the rest of it. The shock of his 2016 election upset became its own political rationale and, ultimately, for Trump, the blueprint for his reëlection plan. Why do something different when he had defied everyone and won the first time? When the final votes are counted, they will almost surely show Biden surpassing Clinton’s popular-vote margin of 2.87 million, and yet Trump believed until the end that nothing mattered except keeping the support of his Republican base. He may turn out to have been wrong, but it will have been a much, much closer call for American democracy than it should have been. And, even without final results, we can already say that there are still two Americas, and that Trump, despite the catastrophes of his rule, has retained the loyalty of the vast majority of red America—his America.

 Can a Connected City Stop Car Crashes?:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 4:42 PM, for 10h 07m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1956, Soviet troops enter Hungary to end the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union that started on October 23. Thousands are killed, more are wounded, and nearly a quarter million leave the country.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Smith reports ‘Authoritarian’: Trump condemned for falsely claiming election victory:

Results so far show his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, with an edge in the race to 270 electoral college votes after flipping the state of Arizona, but it could be days before the outcome is known.

“The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect,” said the Biden campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, in a statement.

That Trump had been widely predicted to make a baseless assertion of triumph and resort to the courts to stop votes being counted did not make his 2.21am speech at the White House any less shocking. Some likened the move, unprecedented in American history, to a presidential coup.

“Once again, the president is lying to the American people and acting like a would-be despot,” tweeted Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee. “We will count every vote. And ignore the noise.”

Trump spoke in the east room with numerous US flags behind him and flanked by two TV screens, which had been showing Fox News. Around 150 guests were standing with few face masks and little physical distancing. Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and other family members sat in the front row.

“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight, and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it,” Trump said to whoops and cheers. “We will not stand for it.”

There is no evidence for Trump’s allegation of disenfranchisement.

 Stephen Bates writes of The Timely Pessimism of Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nearly 50 years after his death, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr remains a celebrated figure. His admirers include presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama, as well as Cornel West, David Brooks, E. J. Dionne and Andrew J. Bacevich. Fans have been known to say, “Love thy Niebuhr as thyself.” He’s also the subject of the 2017 documentary “An American Conscience,” and for a time, his name served as James Comey’s nom de tweet. As a member of the Commission on Freedom of the Press in the 1940s, Niebuhr delivered a grim diagnosis of the media and the constitutional order. His newly unearthed analysis prefigures many of today’s debates about the role of media, old and new, in molding the fate of American democracy.

In his prolific writings—21 books, chapters in 126 other books, and more than 2,600 articles and reviews—Niebuhr warned against arrogance, self-deception, sentimentality and any more than a mustard seed of hope. History is not a tale of steady progress, he said, or even a tale of unsteady progress; often it’s a tale of catastrophe. In his view, many of the culture’s most harmful illusions stem from a faith that social progress is inevitable, human nature perfectible and utopia just around the bend. People cling to this faith even though, as he put it during World War II, modern history supplies “an almost perfect refutation.”

Take a tour of New York City from space:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-two.  Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 4:43 PM, for 10h 10m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1943, five hundred aircraft of the U.S. 8th Air Force devastate Wilhelmshaven harbor in Germany.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Jennifer Rubin writes Trump can declare whatever he wants, but it doesn’t make it so:

Team Trump, which can never manage to avoid tipping its hand, let on that President Trump would declare victory prematurely Tuesday night even if the race had not been called. It doesn’t matter what he says. Trump declared himself a “stable genius,” but that didn’t make it so. The same is true for elections; self-declaration of a phony victory would signal Trump believes his only avenue — if it exists at all — is to try to delegitimize votes counted after midnight. (For this reason, networks should seriously consider not covering Trump’s intentionally false declaration live.)

In this rush to claim victory, Trump has been spurred on by ahistoric and legally untenable arguments from phony originalists such as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who seemed to suggest in a recent concurrence that states have an interest in declaring a winner the day of the election. This Cinderella theory (that ballots turn into pumpkins at midnight) is simply ludicrous, as are other legal pronouncements making the rounds.
….

I asked a few legal gurus who are working on bipartisan or nonpartisan efforts to protect the integrity of the election if there is anything to the Cinderella theory. “There is absolutely no historical basis for the idea that all election officials must run a forced sprint to count ballots by any artificial deadline, whether it be midnight Eastern time, midnight local time, or any other time,” says David Becker, from the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “In fact, it’s rare that we know the president by election night.” He points out that “during the time of the founders, it was physically impossible to know the results of the election until weeks after, which is why the electoral college does not meet until six weeks after the election, and why every state does not certify election results until days or weeks after the polls close.” He adds: “In modern times, as we have members of the military voting from overseas, the importance of allowing their ballots to be received days after the election has become even more pronounced, and to require counting of valid ballots to be concluded by election night would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of members of our armed forces, and their families.”

(Emphasis added.)

Julie Carrie Wong reports ‘Putin could only dream of it’: How Trump became the biggest source of disinformation in 2020:

But while the Trump re-election campaign may have failed to recapture the magic of 2016 when it comes to hacked emails, the president has taken Russia’s 2016 social media playbook and supercharged it with the power of the White House.

“I’m sure that there is some foreign influence stuff happening and we might know more about it later,” said Phillips. “But so much of the pollution is trickling down from the White House itself, and people have been absolutely overwhelmed with falsehoods and confusion over Covid and ballots … When people get overwhelmed, they either fight or flee. [Trump] is making it almost impossible for people not to get totally burned out and disgusted.”

Inside a comet: Philae’s final secret: