Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see light afternoon showers with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 44m 25s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is published in America.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Philip Bump writes This is what the pandemic is doing to the country:

On Wednesday, 31 states were at the highest seven-day averages of new coronavirus cases they had seen since the pandemic erupted this year. Twenty-two states were reporting more hospitalizations than at any previous point. Ten states saw their highest seven-day averages of deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

We are in the middle of the third coronavirus surge the country has seen over 2020. The first ended in early April after the number of new cases confirmed each day reached 31,000. The second began in early June, just as Vice President Pence was writing that the country was not undergoing a second wave of infections. By July 22, the country was seeing 67,000 new cases a day before the surge receded.

The current surge, the third, began Sept. 12. It is ongoing, with the country exceeding 127,000 new cases Wednesday — as many cases that day as were added in total from the beginning of the pandemic through March 28.

….

The White House has repeatedly touted the fact that a smaller percentage of those who contract the virus are dying than earlier in the pandemic, which is true. It is also true both that the ratio of new cases to deaths has been fairly steady since early July and that the current surge in cases threatens to fill hospitals with coronavirus patients, reducing hospital capacity for any type of patient, covid-19-related or not. The point of “flattening the curve” this year wasn’t just to limit the spread of the virus; it was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. In some states, they already are.

Dhruv Khullar writes The Pandemic’s Winter Surge Is Here:

Almost every flu pandemic since the eighteenth century has come with a second wave; the fall of 1918 was far deadlier than the spring. Today, as the Northern Hemisphere steps deeper into autumn and more activity moves indoors, the spread of the coronavirus is, predictably, accelerating. America is again following Europe’s lead. In the last week of October, the U.S. recorded more new coronavirus cases than it has at any point during the pandemic; there have been days in November on which more than a hundred and thirty thousand people have been found to be newly infected. A few states—Wisconsin, North Dakota, Iowa—have among the highest per-capita infection rates in the world. The new surge has no epicenter. Infection records are being set in more than half of U.S. counties, and large swaths of the Midwest and mountain West are struggling with skyrocketing hospitalizations. On many days, more than a thousand Americans are now dying of covid-19—a number that is certain to rise, since deaths lag behind infections by several weeks.

The mortality rate for the virus has fallen substantially since the start of the pandemic, probably because of improvements in care and a shift in viral demographics: many of the newly infected are young. But a lower death rate combined with a vast rise in infections will still create profound suffering. One model predicts that, by the end of the year, two thousand Americans could be dying from covid-19 each day. The American death toll could reach four hundred thousand by January.

 The Ganges Chasma of Mars in stunning spacecraft imagery:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 4:32 PM, for 9h 46m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 4.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing for a sign ordinance amendment review at 9 AM.

On this day in 1962, NASA launches Relay 1, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Lois Beckett and Julia Carrie Wong report The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump’s election lies (‘Rightwing news outlets have taken up the president’s message on social media, stirring supporters into a frenzy’):

But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claimscasting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.

“I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”

The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.

Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool.

David E. Sanger, Matt Stevens, and Nicole Perlroth report Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud:

Hours after President Trump repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday declaring flatly that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised.

The rebuke, in a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, never mentioned Mr. Trump by name. But it amounted to a remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Mr. Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed.

The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process. Coming directly from one of Mr. Trump’s own cabinet agencies, it further isolated the president in his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election.

Lockdown is named Collins Dictionary’s 2020 word of the year:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 48m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 10.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1927, Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Andrew Higgins writes Trump’s Post-Election Tactics Put Him in Unsavory Company (‘Denying defeat, claiming fraud and using government machinery to reverse election results are the time-honored tools of dictators’):

There is little indication that Mr. Trump can overcome the laws and institutions that ensure the verdict of American voters will carry the day. The country has a free press, a strong and independent judiciary, election officials dedicated to an honest counting of the votes and a strong political opposition, none of which exists in Belarus or Russia.

Still, the United States has never before had to force an incumbent to concede a fair defeat at the polls. And merely by raising the possibility that he would have to be forced out of office, Mr. Trump has shattered the bedrock democratic tradition of a seamless transition.

The damage already done by Mr. Trump’s obduracy could be lasting. Ivan Krastev, an expert on East and Central Europe at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, said Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede would “create a new model” for like-minded populists in Europe and elsewhere.

“When Trump won in 2016 the lesson was that they could trust democracy,” he said. “Now, they won’t trust democracy, and will do everything and anything to stay in power.” In what he called “the Lukashenko scenario,” leaders will still want to hold elections but “never lose.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been doing that for two decades.

Among the anti-democratic tactics Mr. Trump has adopted are some that were commonly employed by leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia — refusing to concede defeat and hurling unfounded accusations of electoral fraud. The tactics also include undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the courts, attacking the press and vilifying opponents.

Like Mr. Trump, those leaders feared that accepting defeat would expose them to prosecution once they left office. Mr. Trump does not have to worry about being charged with war crimes and genocide, as Mr. Milosevic was, but he does face a tangle of legal problems.

Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, described the president’s “refusal to accept the results of the election” as “his parting gift to autocrats around the world.

David A. Fahrenthold, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Tom Hamburger report In poll watcher affidavits, Trump campaign offers no evidence of fraud in Detroit ballot-counting:

On Wednesday, President Trump’s campaign asked a federal judge to take a drastic step: block the state of Michigan from certifying the results of its presidential election. President-elect Joe Biden now leads Trump by about 148,000 votes there.

To back up that lawsuit, Trump’s campaign had promised “shocking” evidence of misconduct.

Instead, the campaign produced 238 pages of affidavits from Republican poll watchers across Michigan containing no evidence of significant fraud but rather allegations about ballot-counting procedures that state workers have already debunked — and in some cases, complaints about rude behavior or unpleasant looks from poll workers or Democratic poll watchers.

Bigfin squid filmed in Australian waters for the first time:

Good morning.

Veteran’s Day in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 4:34 PM, for 9h 51m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 19.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1964, the Rolling Stones first performed in Wisconsin, to a crowd of 1,274 fans at the Milwaukee Auditorium.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Nick Corasaniti, Reid J. Epstein, and Jim Rutenberg report The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud (‘The president and his allies have baselessly claimed that rampant voter fraud stole victory from him. Officials contacted by The Times said that there were no irregularities that affected the outcome’):

Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.

Over the last several days, the president, members of his administration, congressional Republicans and right wing allies have put forth the false claim that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and have refused to accept results that showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner.

But top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.

“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”

….

The New York Times contacted the offices of the top election officials in every state on Monday and Tuesday to ask whether they suspected or had evidence of illegal voting. Officials in 45 states responded directly to The Times. For four of the remaining states, The Times spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state; none reported any major voting issues.

 Shawn Boburg and Jacob Bogage report Postal worker recanted allegations of ballot tampering, officials say:

A Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations, according to three officials briefed on the investigation and a statement from a House congressional committee.

Richard Hopkins’s claim that a postmaster in Erie, Pa., instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter to the Justice Department calling for a federal investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities and fraud before results are certified, a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy.

But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

….

The Erie postmaster, Rob Weisenbach, called the allegations “100% false” in a Facebook post and said they were made “by an employee that was recently disciplined multiple times.”

How To Use Apple’s AirDrop:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 53m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 29.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School District’s Policy Review Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 10 AM and the city’s Public Works Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

On this day in 1983, Bill Gates introduces Windows 1.0.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Rachel Abrams, and David Enrich report Growing Discomfort at Law Firms Representing Trump in Election Lawsuits:

Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

At another large firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, based in Columbus, Ohio, lawyers have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.

Already, the two firms have filed at least four lawsuits challenging aspects of the election in Pennsylvania. The cases are pending.

….

During the Trump presidency, Jones Day has been involved in some 20 lawsuits involving Mr. Trump, his campaign or the Republican Party, and it worked for the Trump campaign on government investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The work has been lucrative. Since 2015, Jones Day has received more than $20 million in fees from the Trump campaigns, political groups linked to Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to federal records. Jones Day lawyers said that was a small portion of the firm’s overall revenue.

(‘Discomfort’ during representation is still representation.)

Stephanie Aaronson and Wendy Edelberg write Tracking the mounting challenges among those who have lost their jobs:

The US economy is entering its ninth month of recession. The latest data on Gross Domestic Product show a substantial rebound in spending in the third quarter of the year, as self-quarantining eased, and businesses reopened following the initial pandemic-induced reductions in economic activity. However, the level of economic activity remains well-below pre-pandemic levels, and in September the aggregate unemployment rate stood at 7.9 percent, 4.4 percentage points above its February level. Moreover, recent data suggest that the pace of consumer spending and job growth have tapered off, in part due to the waning boost from fiscal policy.

As fall turns into winter, and with cases increasing across the country, the risk is that the COVID-19 pandemic and an insufficient policy response lead to a further slowing of the economy and possibly another contraction. That raises the likelihood that some of the damage to the economy, which largely started out as a temporary response to the pandemic, will become structural, making the recovery even more difficult and protracted.

In this analysis, we find evidence of structural damage in the monthly employment data. Early in the pandemic, most workers who lost jobs were laid off temporarily, as businesses expected to reopen and recall their workers. However, as time has passed, an increasing share of unemployed workers have no expectation of being recalled: the fraction of the unemployed on temporary layoff has declined from about 80 percent in April to about 40 percent in September, while the fraction of the unemployed whose previous jobs have been permanently eliminated has increased from 10 percent to about 40 percent.

Egypt’s Giza Pyramids are getting a revamp to boost tourism:

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.