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:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 10h 12m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1960, Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 The Atlantic presents The Case Against Donald Trump:

Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever. Trump has brought our country low; he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus. Trump is not responsible for all of the 220,000 COVID-19-related deaths in America. But through his avarice and ignorance and negligence and titanic incompetence, he has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to suffer and die, many alone, all needlessly. With each passing day, his presidency reaps more death.

Meryl Kornfield reports Ahead of election, experts on authoritarianism warn in joint letter of democracy’s potential collapse:

Fearing the end of democracy as we know it, more than 80 international and American scholars in authoritarianism and fascism wrote an open letter to the public, forecasting a “frightening regression” if safeguards are not put in place.

“Whether Donald J. Trump is a fascist, a post-fascist populist, an autocrat, or just a bumbling opportunist, the danger to democracy did not arrive with his presidency and goes well beyond November 3rd, 2020,” the experts in 20th-century authoritarian populism, fascism and political extremism wrote in a post published Saturday. Scholars from universities in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Israel and Italy, criticize Trump but do not endorse Joe Biden in the letter, instead arguing that injustices surfaced by the coronavirus pandemic and heightened nationalism are concerning, no matter the election’s outcome.

The experts, who have knowledge of what led to the rise of past authoritarian and fascist regimes, say democracy is at stake.

“We have seen all of these patterns in our study of the past, and we recognize the signs of a crisis of democracy in today’s world as well,” the group writes. “The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities of class and race across the globe. As the last four years have demonstrated, the temptation to take refuge in a figure of arrogant strength is now greater than ever.”

In a list of sweeping recommendations, the group urges the public to protect science, journalism, the electoral process and pluralism, and denounce misinformation, political violence and greed.

“We need to turn away from the rule by entrenched elites and return to the rule of law,” they write. “We must replace the politics of ‘internal enemies’ with a politics of adversaries in a healthy, Democratic marketplace of ideas.

“Because if we don’t,” the letter concludes, “we will indeed face dark days ahead.”

Inside The $4 Million All-Electric Plane:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 10h 15m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1870, the United States Weather Bureau (later renamed the National Weather Service) makes its first official meteorological forecast.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Economist Jospeh Stiglitz writes Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes (‘President Trump built in tax increases beginning in 2021, for nearly everyone but those at the very top’):

The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

….

By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.

At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.

The tax loss and benefit estimates just described were calculated before the pandemic. Now, incomes for almost everyone but top earners have taken a hit, so the loser group will likely be considerably larger than anticipated; and with people like Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, doing even better than expected, Trump’s gift to him is even bigger.

Jeremy Barr reports The Atlantic gave Ruth Shalit a ‘second chance’ 25 years after a journalism scandal. It ended with an ugly correction:

Two weeks after publishing a long, juicy and instantly viral story about the world of competitive niche sports and the wealthy parents who push their children to play them, the Atlantic on late Friday appended a nearly 800-word editor’s note informing readers that it was “deceived” by the story’s author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.

In particular, the magazine said Barrett incorrectly asserted that the story’s main character, who was identified by her middle name (Sloane), had a son in addition to three daughters in an attempt to blur her identity, and gave a misleading and highly exaggerated description of a fencing injury allegedly sustained by the woman’s daughter. The author had described the incident at a 2019 competition as a “massacre,” in which the girl was stabbed in the neck; in the Atlantic’s updated version of the story, the injury is now portrayed as “not severe.”

In the most scathing and self-flagellating part of the note, the Atlantic said it was wrong to have assigned the story to Barrett, who had earned acclaim as a very young rising-star political writer at the New Republic magazine in the 1990s before her career was derailed by the discovery of major errors and instances of plagiarism in her work.

Tonight’s Sky for November:

Good morning.

Halloween in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-four.  Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 17m 46s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks claim their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Steven Greenhouse reports ‘I regret voting for him’: Ohioans hit by GM plant closure reflect on Trump:

In July 2017, Trump spoke in Youngstown and told the crowd that on his way in from the airport, he had seen the carcasses of too many factories and mills. He bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs, but then boldly assured the crowd: “They’re all coming back!” He next told his audience, many of them workers worried about plant closings: “Don’t move! Don’t sell your house!”

….

Asked whom she supported in 2016, [Trisha] Amato told me: “I backed Trump,” but she followed that with a quick, nervous laugh. “I thought he stood for more of what I stood for.”

She, too, felt that Trump was the lesser of two evils. Hillary Clinton was an excellent first lady, she said, but to her mind, Clinton, by 2016, had become yet another career politician. “She just changed,” Amato said. “It comes down to character, and I wanted to believe Trump has a better character.”

Amato admits that she woefully misjudged Trump. “After he was elected, he really opened his mouth. He started tweeting and saying things that I feel are crazy. He doesn’t know when to stop.”

Upset at herself for backing Trump, she said: “I feel like I’m living in a reality TV show.” She added: “Trump, he’s a clown.”

She had thought it would be good to have a businessman as president. “But maybe he’s not such a good businessman,” she acknowledged, pointing to his numerous bankruptcies. “He doesn’t understand where the blue-collar workers are coming from. I don’t think any of the big politicians understand that. Trump, especially, doesn’t understand what it is to struggle.”

Christopher Rowland, Debbie Cenziper, and Lisa Rein report White House sidestepped FDA to distribute hydroxychloroquine to pharmacies, documents show. Trump touted the pills to treat covid-19:

The White House decision to set aside the mandatory safety controls put in place by the Food and Drug Administration fueled one of the most disputed initiatives in the administration’s response to the pandemic: the distribution of millions of ineffective, potentially dangerous pills from a federally controlled cache of drugs called the Strategic National Stockpile.

….

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the stockpile, confirmed in an email to The Post that the pills were supposed to go to retail pharmacies but that the agency does not know where the pills ultimately ended up. Through a spokeswoman, the agency said the drugs were supposed to be used for patients with lupus, who encountered shortages early in the pandemic.

The FDA withdrew its emergency authorization in June, after it found hundreds of adverse events linked to the drug’s use in covid-19 patients, including dozens of deaths. In June, two months after the White House’s urgent orders to ship the millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine, health officials told holders of the pills in a general notice they could destroy them.

See also Hydroxychloroquine’s false hope: How an obscure drug became a coronavirus ‘cure’:

500m ‘skyscraper’ coral reef discovered off Cape York:

Australian scientists have discovered a massive detached coral reef just off Cape York on the Great Barrier Reef that’s taller than the Empire State Building. The 500m high reef was discovered while a team from James Cook University were mapping the northern Great Barrier Reef seabed.