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Daily Bread for 11.8.20

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.

Today is both the one thousand four hundred sixty-first day and the second day. 

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:

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