Yves here. I was intending to post tonight but the election has me more fried than I anticipated.

Parrot saves owner from Brisbane house fire by raising alarm before smoke detectors Abc.net.au (Kevin W)

Washington Couple Shocked When Missing Cat Turns Up 2,500 Miles Away In Alaska Animal Rescue (David L)

How the F@!# Did This Giant Whale Tail Save a Derailed Train? Popular Mechanics

How many alien civilizations are out there? A new galactic survey holds a clue. Nationnal Geographic (Chuck L)

The International Space Station’s end will mix up space geopolitics Axios (Kevin W)

NASA reestablishes contact with 43-year-old Voyager 2 which is 11.6 BILLION miles from Earth after repairs to antenna in Australia left spacecraft flying solo for seven months Daily Mail (Kevin W)

Rotten river: life on one of the world’s most polluted waterways – photo essay Guardian (resilc)

Oregon Becomes First State To Legalize Psychedelic Mushrooms OregonLive

Earwax test could reveal stress levels BBC

#COVID-19

Pope Criticizes People Who Complain About Pandemic Restrictions Bloomberg

German Study Finds Indoor Concerts Can Be Safe During COVID EDMTunes

Seniors Form COVID Pods to Ward Off Isolation This Winter KHN. Aiee. I wear a mask at home except when eating and drinking (which is a lot of the time, I nurse coffees and consume more dietary supplements than food) or alone. But I am at my computer > 8 feet away from anyone else and faced away too. And we air the house out a ton.

Science/Medicine

Rich states’ Covid deals ‘may deprive poor of vaccine for years’ Guardian

MAPPING COVID-19 VACCINES PRE-PURCHASES ACROSS THE GLOBE Launch and Scale Speedometer. Furzy: “The big boys are scarfing up all the vaccines.”

Coronavirus was circulating in New York by February, research shows Financial Times. Not surprising given timing of emergence in China + international flights. But still a change in the official timeline.

Thrombosis is a major contributor to poor outcomes in COVID. We’re randomizing 3600 hosp’d but not intubated COVID-19 pts to diff anticoagulation regimens. Investigator-sponsored study, Valentin Fuster PI. If interested email Gregg.Stone@mountsinai.org and Michael.Farkouh@uhn.ca. pic.twitter.com/AYZ1Z4HE9W

— Gregg W. Stone MD (@GreggWStone) November 2, 2020

Lung damage found in COVID dead may shed light on ‘long COVID’ – study Reuters. n=41.

Phase II Clinical trial for Evaluation of BCG as potential therapy for COVID-19 MedRxiv

Widely Used Rapid Tests Detected Only 32 Percent of Asymptomatic COVID Cases: Study Daily Beast

Researchers track the flight trajectory of airborne cough droplets News Medical Net

New Cause of COVID-19 Blood Clots Identified Michigan Health News

India

India’s low hygiene gives it more immunity against virus, helps in Covid fight — CSIR study The Print

UK/Europe

UK Contact Tracing App Failed To Flag People Exposed To COVID-19 The Verge

US

OK, You’ve Just Won the Election. Now Fix Covid Wired

With Winter Coming and Trump Still in Charge, Virus Experts Fear the Worst New York Times

More than 61,000 children got Covid-19 last week, a record NBC (resilc)

China?

China Rise to Global Superpower Is a Restoration, Not an Ascent Bloomberg

China Halts Ant Group’s IPO, Throwing Ma Empire Into Turmoil Bloomberg (furzy). So far, no evidence that this is China’s Wirecard but rather authorities cutting down a tall poppy.

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

Police Will Pilot a Program To Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras Electronic Frontier Foundation

A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can’t Crack Wired (Chuck L)

Imperial Collapse Watch

Bidding farewell to America’s failed democracy Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. Quibble with the title. What is failing in America is its adoption of neoliberal/late stage capitalism, which the overwhelming majority of voters don’t support, but it’s money that makes the decisions here, not voters.

America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall. Will It Turn Around Before It’s Too Late? Politico (resilc). How many years behind the NC comments section is this?

Trump Transition

Trump H-1B visa crackdown hit with legal double whammy: Tech giants, Chamber of Commerce challenge rules The Register

Exclusive: Tired of Trump, Deutsche Bank games ways to sever ties with the president – sources Reuters (resilc)

DeVos’ security detail cost taxpayers $24M over 4 years Politco. ssc: “The title says it all. I am so tired of my taxes paying for rich people’s sh*t. Her tax returns, including her 10 foreigned registered yachts, are probably just as stinky as Trump’s. “

2020. Even without going to the news sites proper, or Lambert’s open thread, I could see things weren’t going according to plan for Team Dem due to dearth of e-mail updates from The Hill and the Wall Street Journal over the evening. Normally, they send a barrage of calls on key states in the subject line, with those articles then having detail on smaller states and expected-to-be-close Congressional races in the article detail. Tonight, radio silence save for the McConnell, Turberville and Hickenlooper Senate wins until midnight EST.

Some initial theories of how the Dems blew their blowout:

1.Trying to beat something with nothing, and per albrt, “Joe Biden is the stumbling, bumbling epitome of nothing.” What was Biden except “not Trump”? Look at the mixed messages on Black Lives Matter, the environment (the fracking flip flop), health care (the bizarre expanded Medicaid plan presented in the debates) and even the supposed defining issue of Covid (is “doubling testing” and a hedged national masking plan persuasive?)

2. Assuming they had the Hispanic vote as a matter of right. They did close to nothing to court it.

3. Picking Kamala Harris. She appealed in the Hamptons. It turns out all that money she helped raise didn’t translate into votes. Julian Castro would have been a better pick or if they felt compelled to have a black woman, Susan Rice. Or if they really wanted those suburban Republicans, my favorite “heads would have exploded” dark horse pick, Condi Rice. Both of the Rices are terrible people but have less obvious baggage (how many Americans follow foreign policy?) and present better than Harris.

4. Assuming that they would win if they won the air war, as in TV spending. A lot was pissed away: why were they spending a dime in Alabama, where I saw lots of Biden ads? Hopefully there will be a lot of post mortems on where the funds went, but where was the GOTV effort? Or Lambert’s pet issue, why isn’t voter registration an all-seasons Dem priority?

And no, Virginia, Trump getting the Supreme Court to stop the vote count is na ga happen, not in a million years (see, for instance: Trump says he’ll go to Supreme Court to stop votes from being counted The Hill). Anyone in America can file a case, no matter how ridiculous. Voting procedures and election certification are ever and always state law matters. The Supremes either won’t deign to hear this argument at all or will hear and reject it. More likely the former. This does not mean we might not later have a Bush v. Gore, where the Supreme Court winds up calling a contested election after all the counting is done. This might include what happens to vote by mail ballots that arrive after Nov. 3, but here the Supreme Court has signaled it is deferring to existing state law.

For panicking Democrats, 2020 is déjà vu all over again The Hill. First MSM headline acknowledging trouble, at just before midnight EST. At 1:00 AM EST, the Journal called Florida, Ohio, and Iowa for Trump. At 1:15 EST, the Hill called Texas for Trump. At 3:00 AM EST, The Hill and the Journal call Arizona for Biden.

I think we should form another branch of government just so Democrats can find a way to also lose that.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 3, 2020

PA says they won’t be done counting until Friday. Fulton Co GA won’t be done counting till Friday. @USPS has lost almost 300,000 ballots that a federal judge demands they discover. No one can declare victory tonight. Or even tomorrow. Probably not until next week

— Jason Johnson (@DrJasonJohnson) November 4, 2020

According to the exit poll, Trump did better in 2020 with every race and gender except white men.

Change from 2016:

White Men -5
White Women +2
Black Men +4
Black Women +4
Latino Men +3
Latino Women +3
Other +5 pic.twitter.com/hUc17Iy1ip

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) November 4, 2020

According to the exit poll, women and people of color make up the majority (59.6%) of the Trump coalition again in 2020. pic.twitter.com/sBC5Ebl0BB

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) November 4, 2020

What your soaking wet weatherman boyfriend who didn’t bring an umbrella for your date says https://t.co/iTeJDGy6qW

— Chris Arnade 🐢 (@Chris_arnade) November 4, 2020

We now have hearings scheduled in multiple states, but Pennsylvania remains the most likely to cause a legal pile up. This has the feel of the 2000 election with ad hoc measures, pockets of disputes ballots, and jurisdictional conflicts….

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) November 4, 2020

Amazingly revealing poll on NBC shows what people around the world are thinking: they would rather neither candidate win the US election.

Because people in the Middle East, and everywhere else, recognize that, regardless of who wins, US wars and imperial repression will continue pic.twitter.com/oluRns5PIx

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 3, 2020

‘Is this a free country if you’re too scared to express your views?’ Tucker Carlson says polls have underestimated Trump AGAIN because people don’t feel free to admit they support him Daily Mail

Waymo moved its self-driving cars in San Francisco to a ‘secured location’ in case of election chaos The Verge (Kevin W)

Federal authorities expected to erect ‘non-scalable’ fence around White House CNN

‘You are no longer my mother’: A divided America will struggle to heal after Trump era Reuters

Parties trade flips in too-close-to-call battle for the Senate Politico. Dems so far underperforming spending and expectations too.

Someone is spray painting blue dots in front of houses of Biden supporters in California city Boing Boing

America’s Gettysburg Moment: Even If Defeated Trumpism Will Not Vanish CounterPunch

Europe and the US are drifting apart on tech. Joe Biden wouldn’t fix that. Politico

California Voters Exempt Uber, Lyft, DoorDash From Having to Reclassify Drivers Wall Street Journal.

Our Famously Free Press

Fox Corp. Chief Lachlan Murdoch On Donald Trump Possibly Starting Fox News Rival: “We Love Competition” Deadline (resilc). Trump becoming Berlusconi, just out of order?

Censorship’s slope is always slippery & the Internet Archive’s embrace of biased ‘fact-checking’ proves it RT (Kevin W)

The Tech Antitrust Problem No One Is Talking About: US Broadband Providers ars technica

Norwegians Got Paid To Use Electricity As Prices Fall Below Zero OilPrice

Class Warfare

Job polarisation and the Great Recession Bruege

Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes – and they bragged about it The Conversation

Antidote du jour (CV):

And a from furzy, how many of you likely feel right now, a Godzilla version of a snapping turtle that showed up in a DC suburb:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.