Cowboy Who?

OSIRIS-REx became the first mission to gather samples from an asteroid in space after it successfully collected rocky “regolith” material from the surface of Bennu. Now, NASA has released several videos showing exactly how that six-second collection process looked, and the best way to describe it is “controlled chaos.”

NASA prepared for this moment for a long time, as OSIRIS-Rex first started orbiting Bennu in early 2019. It conducted surveys early on that revealed organic carbonaceous material spread widely over Bennu’s surface, particularly at the Nightingale site chosen for the sampling process. That gave NASA confidence that it would collect a sample with organic material, which was a central goal of the mission.

The sample collection process was a carefully orchestrated dance. OSIRIS-REx extended its 2 meter (6.6 foot) TAGSAM robotic arm with the 30 cm (1 foot) wide sampling head attached, while folding in its solar panels to protect them. The probe then slowly approached the surface, eventually touching down to within a single meter (3.3 feet) of the selected target. The entire process was monitored by the SamCam imaging camera mounted above the arm.

The camera shows the TAGSAM head approaching and then impacting Bennu’s surface at just 0.2 mph, penetrating in to the regolith. At first, it appears to crush some porous rocks below, and then a second later, fires a nitrogen gas bottle. That stirred up “a substantial amount of the sample site’s material,” NASA said, to put it mildly. It spent around five to six seconds collecting material, with the majority gathered in the first three seconds.

The head is designed to catch and store that stirred-up surface material. OSIRIS-REx will first take a picture of the collector head to confirm the presence of regolith, and then on Saturday, measure the mass of rock and dust by spinning on its axis like a centrifuge.

NASA said that the sampling “went as good as we imagined it could,” since it crushed a lot of material that should have been collected in the sample chamber. Scientists have already learned a lot about Bennu just by watching the video of the impact, but we’ll have to wait three long years for the spacecraft to return to Earth, before we can verify what it’s actually made of.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If you made it the least bit social you could complete end divorce and also happiness.

Today's News:

Witches of the World Volume 1
Habitual Novelties (Jason)
https://linktr.ee/habnopubco

Witches of the World Volume 1 is an A5 full-colour zine collection of detailed descriptions of witches of the world including real-world history, folklore, and more in a Dungeons and Dragons-esque style anthology.

I may have fangirled all over this zine shortly after Jason handed it to me.

Witches of the World opens with a title page (a title page!) and table of contents (which I will be talking about soon) before launching into the introduction of this zine. Jason writes about how this zine came to be, influences in its creation, and even plans for future volumes in the series.

From there we go not right to the descriptions but into instructions! Yes, my zine friends, this is not only a zine but a game you can play as well! When Jason delivered this directly into my hands at Festival of the Photocopier, it also game with a character stats sheet but also with dice as well! The next spread also includes a guide to the information provided as well as a key to all the information provided in each witch spread.

I love, love, love the layers to this zine. Informational, artistic, adding a game element as well… So much fun in one package. Jason has really thought of everything.

We then get into the witches pages, each spread is dedicated to one witch. Magic type, age, height, elements, world map, profile, items, and so much more are included. If you want character layout, this is it. I’d love to adapt this for some of the character development for my novels.

As with all Habitual Novelties zines, I love the little details – not only in the art included but in the zine overall. In this zine, the table of contents is actually a set of mini images of the spreads underneath the header for that spread. The header font style is fun and different without being ridiculously hard to read. Even each witch comes with its own small colour palette for what was used in the art.

I have never in my life played a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and I still think this zine is amazing and so well done. If that doesn’t say something, I don’t know what will.

Witches of the World Volume 1 is an awesome, fun zine that just goes to show that you can keep stretching the bounds of what a zine is and the things a zine can encompass. Definitely check it out.

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s Election Update for Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020! As President Trump and Joe Biden prepare to take the stage tonight for the final presidential debate, Trump has just a 12 in 100 chance of winning the presidency, while Biden has an 88 in 100 chance, according to our presidential forecast.¹⁴ And according to national polls, Biden leads Trump by an average of 9.9 percentage points.

This is lower than Biden’s peak 10.7-point lead as of Monday, but still higher than his 7.1-point lead over Trump before their first debate on Sept. 29. In the last few days, national polls have tightened a bit, something our forecast was anticipating in the home stretch. But, to be clear, Biden is still well ahead overall in our forecast.

But of course, the national popular vote doesn’t pick the president — states do, via the Electoral College. And we got a flurry of state polls Wednesday that were still good for Biden. Take Pennsylvania, the state with the highest chance of deciding the election, according to our forecast’s tipping-point odds. Wednesday, no fewer than four high-quality polls of Pennsylvania were released. Biden garnered 50 percent support and Trump garnered 45 percent in a Fox News poll; Biden led by 6 points in a Suffolk University poll; Biden led by 8 points in a Quinnipiac University poll; and CNN/SSRS even put Biden ahead by 10 points among likely voters. Though these ran the gamut from being OK to great polls for Biden, together they were pretty well in line with other polls we’ve seen this month — in other words, Biden has a solid, though not insurmountable, lead in Pennsylvania.

This is, however, still an improvement from where he stood before the first debate, when the winner of Pennsylvania was more uncertain. Since Sept. 29, Biden’s odds of winning Pennsylvania have increased from 79 in 100 to 87 in 100.

It’s a similar story in Florida, another important potential tipping point state; Trump has a less than 1 percent chance of winning the White House without it. Biden’s average lead in Florida polls is currently 3.8 points — not much lower than Biden’s October high of 4.5 points, achieved for a few days last week. And Wednesday, Reuters/Ipsos, CNN/SSRS and Civiqs/Daily Kos all released surveys of Florida that gave Biden either a 4- or 5-point lead among likely voters. These numbers are a bit better for Biden than they were before the last debate, when he led by an average of 2 points or less in the Sunshine State. That early-October increase brought his chances of winning Florida from about 3 in 5 to around 7 in 10, but that number has barely changed in the last couple weeks.

What’s more, states like Iowa, Ohio and Georgia all now have almost exactly 50-50 odds in our forecast. Take the several Iowa polls we got Wednesday: Emerson College found Trump and Biden tied at 48 percent; Siena College/The New York Times Upshot put Biden at 46 percent and Trump at 43 percent; and depending on the turnout model used, Monmouth University gave Biden either a 3- or 5-point lead among likely voters. With these polls, Biden actually improved his position in our Iowa polling average. He went from a 0.4-point lead on Monday to a 1.1-point lead currently — the opposite of the tightening we’ve seen elsewhere. And although our forecast doesn’t think Biden is favored to win Iowa, he does now have a 48 in 100 shot — the highest his odds have been all year. And that’s bad news for Republicans, since in worlds where Biden carries Iowa, he wins the presidency more than 99 percent of the time.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, two pollsters — Siena College/The New York Times Upshot and Morning Consult — both found Trump and Biden in a dead heat in Georgia this week. And appropriately enough, our forecast now finds that both Trump and Biden have exactly a 50 in 100 shot of carrying the Peach State.

According to Morning Consult, Biden also garnered 48 percent support and Trump 47 percent support in Texas, another fairly red state that is a must-win for Trump. And a Quinnipiac University poll of the Lone Star State released Wednesday found a tied race, although Quinnipiac has tended to have good results for Biden this year relative to other pollsters. Accordingly, our forecast is not yet convinced that Texas is a toss-up, although it’s not safely red by any means. Trump has just a 64 in 100 chance of winning.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Biden is still ahead in all the states he needs in order to win — and is a real threat to win some that would just be icing on the cake for him. Trump still has a path to victory, but he needs to turn things around in all of these states fast — and the debate could be his last opportunity to do so.

It is difficult for me to believe, but Space City Weather turns five years old tomorrow. (Here’s our first post). I remember it well. I left the Houston Chronicle’s downtown office that afternoon, a Friday, after a nice send-off from my colleagues following 17 wonderful years at the newspaper. I had intended to at least take the weekend off before starting a weather website, as a hobby. But with impending storms and heavy rain that weekend, my wife and I put off a celebratory dinner on Friday night while I created Space City Weather and dove headlong into the effort. Matt joined from the outset and Reliant soon came on as a sponsor. Then, Hurricane Harvey hit two years later, and the rest is history.

Looking ahead, we’re going to continue to make site improvements. Most notably, many readers have asked for an app. Frankly, making a free, quality app is a really big ask for such a small site like ours, but we are planning to make this happen in the coming months, and will have more to say soon. We also are planning other small improvements, but the site is going to remain true to the core mission that I outlined in that first post five years ago—”informative, hype-free forecasting.” Thank you to everyone who was there at the beginning, or found us along the way.

Thursday

Temperatures are generally in the low 70s across the Houston area this morning, with dewpoints to match, making for fairly humid conditions. This has also led to some fog in the area that has reduced visibility. After the fog dissipates we can expect a partly sunny day, with highs in the mid 80s, along with light southeast winds. We can’t rule out a few isolated showers, but they should be fleeting. Lows tonight will be similarly warm.

Friday

This day will start out a lot like Thursday, but will change as a front pushes into the area. The front should arrive in northwest areas, such as Brenham, around sunset, push through the city during the evening or overnight hours, and reach the coast around midnight or a few hours later. Some models are now suggesting the front may have a little more oomph than we first anticipated, allowing for low temperatures to possibly drop into the 50s on Saturday morning. Emphasis on possibly.

Saturday

In the wake of this front, conditions will be pretty nice on Saturday, with partly to mostly sunny skies and highs likely only reaching the upper 70s. However, the front is going to wash out pretty quickly, so with onshore winds returning we can expect a warmer night, likely in the upper 60s for most.

Sunday and Monday

We should be back to fairly humid, warm weather on Sunday and Monday, with highs somewhere in the 80s and plenty of sunshine.

Next week

When it comes to next week’s forecast we’re still in something a of a throwing darts at a dart board mode. Some models want to bring a strong front into Houston late on Monday or Tuesday, with a reinforcing front later in the week, making for much cooler fall weather all week. Others bring a front close to Houston on Tuesday, before it stalls, and awaiting a reinforcing front later in the week to push all the way off the coast. So while we’re pretty confident significantly cooler weather is on the way, I’m not sure whether that happens on Tuesday or Thursday. The good news is that whenever a front does push all the way through, it should also bring some rain with it. Again, details on how much, etc., remain very much up in the air. Literally!

Houston’s Fifth Ward culture hub Mystic Lyon (named after the intersection at which the building stands) has announced a new mural from artist Jimmy Castillo. Embrace at the Intersection is a hand-painted halftone image of Fifth Ward residents. It’s  on view at Mystic Lyon (5017 Lyons Avenue) through November 1.

“The embrace is at intersection of Lyons Avenue and Mystic Street, a physical place, but is also at the intersection of ideas and emotions,” states Castillo, who is based in Houston. “It ’embraces’ a moment that is at the intersection of identity and community; of presence and memory; and of life and loss.”

Mystic Lyon will also host the Nap Church’s Virtual Southern Naptist Convention, beginning Friday, October 30 from 9-10 PM. The series features gong-induced vibrational healing, embodiment (somatic awareness), plus listening and napping scores by Emily Sloan, and continues Saturday, October 31 from 2-3 PM and concludes on Sunday, November 1 from 2-3 PM.

Sloan’s compositions are partially inspired by artist Salvador Dali and sound composer Pauline Oliveros. All sessions are open via registration. To register, please email mysticlyonprojects@gmail.com. All are encouraged to grab their favorite pillows, blankets and whatever else will help them nap for this free series of community naps.

Sloan is the artist, curator and the educator behind the Naptist Convention and Mobile Nap Deliveries; she is the founder of the Mystic Lyon art space.

For this year’s Virtual Southern Naptist Convention, Sloan is collaborating with Houston native Willow Naomi Curry, a journalist, essayist, and multimedia artist. Curry was an inaugural fellow for Houston’s DiverseWorks’ Project Freeway Fellowship, where she focused on cultivating writings from residents of the neighborhoods of Kashmere Gardens, Trinity Gardens and Fifth Ward .

The schedule is as follows:

Friday, October 30, 9pm—Vibrational Somatics: Healing Gong Nap with Emily Sloan.

Saturday, October 31, 2pm—Liminal Recognition Nap hosted by Emily Sloan.

Saturday, November 1, 2pm—Storytime Nap with writer and artist Willow Curry.

****

Napping Affects Performance (NAP) is a performance and participation project providing community naps (since 2009) in collaboration with various performances, including (but not limited to) collaborations with sound, word, touch, and the delivery of naps to various sites and/or contexts. 

****

Castillo, an artist, administrator, and educator in Houston, is a graduate of the High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston. The artist received both his BFA (2000) and MFA (2019) from the University of Houston and is the Director of Civic Art + Design at Houston Arts Alliance, as well as Adjunct Faculty at the Glassell School of Art. In addition to being nationally exhibited, Castillo’s work can be found in collections at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.  Castillo’s photographic series which focuses on his childhood (and present) neighborhood of Northside in Houston, is part of the artist’s photo-based, interdisciplinary studio practice.

Mystic Lyon is located on the corner of Lyons Avenue and Mystic Street in Houston’s historic Fifth Ward neighborhood. In addition to public art installations, Mystic Lyon offers performances, meditation, Deep Listening, sound sessions, films, Gong Therapy, Laugh Club, community coffees, reading and writing groups, and Mobile Nap Deliveries. It also plays host to the Gong Grant Micro Grant, Fifth Ward Badminton Club, Root Lock Sessions, and the Fifth Ward Chamber of Commerce.

The post Houston’s Mystic Lyon Announces Castillo Mural and Southern “Naptist” Convention appeared first on Glasstire.

It made history in the span of approximately six seconds. On Tuesday afternoon, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully completed its touch-and-go meeting with 101955 Bennu. In the process, it managed to collect a sample of regolith it will now carry back to Earth for scientists to examine. Today, we get to see how that maneuver looked from OSIRIS-REx’s perspective, with NASA sharing a series of 82 images from the craft’s SamCam imaging tool.

According to NASA, the images document approximately five minutes of OSIRIS-REx’s descent toward Bennu, including the moment it came into contact with the planetoid. Throughout the series, OSIRIS-REx’s aptly named Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) is visible in the frame. NASA says the component was the only part of the craft that touched the asteroid. The images might not seem like much, but in a media Q&A NASA held this afternoon, the agency hinted that it’s already learned a lot about Bennu’s surface just from the fact OSIRIS-REx created so much debris during the event.

"What we do these next 13 days will matter for decades to come," the former president stressed.

(Image credit: Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

by Dan Savage Borrowing Gen Z's love for labelling everything, I'm a 46-year-old homoromantic asexual Canadian faggot. For me that means I'd like to love and be loved by another man but I'd hate having sex with him. To add a vexing complication, I also need some sort of power imbalance. Ideally, I would fall somewhere between being a man's sub and being his slave. I've been searching for this since I came out in my early twenties. I've tried everything. Online, bars, hobby groups, friends, hookups. Vanilla relationships, single Masters, dominant couples, sex workers. I've spent thousands of dollars on both men and therapy, but here I am busted, miserable, and alone. The point is that no one—and I mean absolutely no one—wants what I want. My dream dude doesn't exist. It's easy to tell someone to move on, that there are other fish in the sea, etc., but sometimes your sea is a puddle and you really are the only guppy. I'm considering ending my life before the end of the year. I can't shake the deep sadness and disappointment and misery that I feel—and this isn't even touching on my current unemployment or newly-chronic health issues. What would you do if you were in my shoes? How does one switch off the built-in romantic drive?

Sought A Dom Accepting Sad Singlehood

A baby and a girl sit among Central American migrants — mostly Hondurans heading in a caravan to the US — as they rest on their way from Ciudad Hidalgo to Tapachula, Chiapas State, Mexico, on January 23, 2020. | Alfredo Estrella/AFP via Getty Images

The tragedy of family separations isn’t over.

Three years after the Trump administration started separating immigrant families arriving on the southern border, lawyers say they still haven’t been able to reach the parents of 545 affected children, according to court documents filed Tuesday night.

Some of the children involved may never see their parents again. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said that they still cannot find the parents of 283 children despite thorough on-the-ground searches, and don’t expect to be able to reach them by telephone, meaning that the families may never be reunited.

Many of the families involved were separated in 2017, before the Trump administration began separating immigrant families routinely, hoping to deter immigrants from crossing the border without authorization.

The children have been released to sponsors, who are typically family members or friends, but also include foster families. Their parents, two-thirds of whom were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be identified and reunited with their children in 2018, either have not been located or have not been successfully contacted.

The group Justice in Motion is continuing to work to locate the parents in Mexico and Central America, though that has become more difficult amid the pandemic.

“While we have already located many deported parents, there are hundreds more who we are still trying to reach,” the group said in a statement. “It’s an arduous and time-consuming process on a good day.”

The news underscores the devastating long-term effects of the Trump administration’s policy. But even in cases in which lawyers expect to be able to find the parents eventually, families may never fully recover from the long-term psychological harm.

The US government had a policy of separating families — despite officials’ denials

Beginning in mid-2017, the federal government ran a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, under which it began filing criminal charges against anyone who crossed the border without authorization, including parents with minor children — even though many of them intended to seek asylum in the US, which is legal.

Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would have simply released the families from detention.)

The Trump administration formalized the policy in May 2018, which it dubbed the “zero tolerance policy.” At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy.

The federal government, however, neglected to link the children to their parents in its databases, making the reunification process difficult, especially in the hundreds of cases of children who were under the age of 5, including one who was just 4 months old.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Obama administration did not have a policy of separating families, but it did try to detain families together on a wide scale and deport them as quickly as possible during the 2014 migrant crisis. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times in 2018 that the administration had briefly considered pursuing family separations but quickly dropped the idea.

“We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” she told the Times. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

Senior Trump administration officials, including former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of family separation. Nielsen told Congress in December 2018 that the administration “never had a policy for family separation.” It was later revealed that she had, in fact, signed a memo greenlighting the practice, which clearly stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the administration has tried to carry out what immigrant advocates call a new kind of family separation. It pressured parents already detained within the US to voluntarily separate from their children by presenting them with what the administration has called a “binary choice”: Either allow their children to be placed with relatives or a foster family in the US while the parents remain detained, or stay together as a family in indefinite detention and risk contracting the coronavirus.

Family separations carry a long-term cost

The US government has long known the psychological harms associated with separating family members. These harms would only add to the anxiety created by the pandemic as immigrants and their children fight for their release from detention.

Commander Jonathan White, who previously oversaw the government’s program providing care to unaccompanied immigrant children, told Congress that, beginning in February 2017, he had repeatedly warned the officials who concocted the policy that it would likely cause “significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”

A September 2019 government watchdog report confirmed those effects, finding that immigrant children who entered government custody in 2018 frequently experienced “intense trauma” and those who were “unexpectedly separated from a parent” even more so.

Each child reacts to family separation differently. But psychologists have observed three main kinds of effects: disruptions to their social attachments, increases in their emotional vulnerability, and, in some cases, post-traumatic stress disorder, Lauren Fasig Caldwell, director of the American Psychological Association’s children, youth, and families office, said.

Those symptoms could be short-term or they could persist; they could also not even manifest until a child enters their teen years or adulthood. Any of them could significantly hinder a child’s later success in academics and in the workplace.

Parents who were separated from their children have experienced their own trauma — which may manifest in symptoms similar to those that researchers observe in children — and may not have the mental and emotional capacity to be able to provide what their children need.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

François Dupoux has released SystemRescue 7.00, a new version of the project's useful system rescue toolkit for administrating or repairing a system and data after a crash. It is based on Arch Linux and features the Xfce desktop. The major version change is the result of the distribution's....

torpor loves your sad dad laser accident costume!

Donald Trump's lurid myths about bad hombres crossing the border to wreak havoc in the United States have failed to be ushered into existence by CBP and ICE. Try as they might, the two agencies have done little more than process a bunch of bog-standard illegal entries. And... um... target college students here legally. Numbers were fudged, but it has proven to be an exercise in futility. This attempt to villainize immigrants has been abandoned by both Trump and these DHS components.

Trump's new favorite enemy-of-America is "antifa." The president seems to believe antifa is a hierarchical organization capable of being crippled by intelligence gathering, strategic arrests, and the occasional extrajudicial killing. He's wrong about this as well. But that's not stopping the DHS and its protest-centered task forces from doing everything they can to prove some massive anti-facist conspiracy exists. This includes flying in FBI analysts and their tech to "exploit" data taken from arrestees' phones in hopes of finding some link between ongoing protests and Big Leftist.

All the money being spent in hopes of toppling an idea and prosecuting federal crimes isn't really accomplishing either of those tasks. As the AP reports, the feds aren't having any luck massaging Trump's antifa fever dreams into coherent shape. Nor are they really finding much federal crime to prosecute.

President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tell a different story.

Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs.

[...]

In thousands of pages of court documents, the only apparent mention of antifa is in a Boston case in which authorities said a FBI Gang Task Force member was investigating “suspected ANTIFA activity associated with the protests” when a man fired at him and other officers. Authorities have not claimed that the man accused of firing the shots is a member of antifa.

Some of those arrested by federal officers are more profa than antifa.

John Malcolm Bareswill, angry that a local Black church held a prayer vigil for George Floyd, called the church and threatened to burn it to the ground, using racial slurs in a phone call overheard by children, prosecutors said. Bareswill, 63, of Virginia Beach, faces 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to making a telephonic threat.

Two Missouri militia members who authorities say traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to see Trump’s visit in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake were arrested at a hotel in September with a cache of guns, according to court documents. An attorney for one of the men, Michael Karmo, said he is “charged criminally for conduct that many Americans would consider patriotic,” as authorities have alleged his motive was to assist overwhelmed law enforcement.

There have been more than 300 arrests since this Trump-propelled charade began, but the feds are really stretching of the term "federal crime" to keep federal prosecutors in the mix. Arson (or attempted arson) isn't normally a federal charge but that makes up about a quarter of the fed's caseload. This allows the federal government to pursue sentences far harsher than those levied by states. In one case, the government's lawyers argued the attempted torching of a cop car required federal charges because the police car was "used in interstate commerce."

There's also a lot of miscellaneous garbage being treated as federal crime. Nearly a third of the cases deal with things like disorderly conduct, impeding a federal officer, failing to obey lawful orders, and obstructing law enforcement. There are more serious tangents to these charges (assaulting an officer, rioting) but these are often handy ways to bring criminal charges against people who fail to show officers the respect they feel they're owed. And "assaulting" an officer can mean something as harmless as pulling away from one when they try to grab you.

This zealousness to find an antifa link -- and keep cases federal for maximum vindictiveness -- has resulted in tragic absurdity.

A top federal prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump held a news conference this week to announce that the “outstanding investigative work” of federal and state law enforcement officers had resulted in a federal felony charge against a 29-year-old bassist in an anarcho-punk band over a bag of weed.

An investigation was triggered after someone reported the bassist's staged photos of him carrying a mock molotov cocktail. These were supposed to be promo shots for his band, but he released them after the George Floyd killing. Law enforcement raided Justin Coffman's home in June. All they uncovered were a couple of legal guns, the fake molotov, and 24 grams of marijuana. Coffman was interrogated by the FBI after the raid. The agent questioning didn't seem too concerned officers had found a personal use amount of pot in the home. But the agent was very interested in Coffman's political beliefs. The FBI ultimately let the locals handle it. He was originally charged only with possession.

But the feds came back, apparently intent on making this anarcho-punk an example. The government brought federal gun charges against Coffman because it's illegal to own guns when you're a drug user. Those charges didn't stick but the state's creative "hoax device" charge did. That didn't stop the president from congratulating law enforcement for managing to turn nothing into some handy "we're taking apart antifa" propaganda.

This is your tax dollars working overtime to satisfy the cravings of an uninformed president content to traffic in conspiracy theories. And it's a handy way to deter future protests against police brutality. But it does nothing to make the country safer or serve the people paying for it.

A NASA spacecraft descended to an asteroid Tuesday and, dodging boulders the size of buildings, momentarily touched the surface to collect a handful of cosmic rubble for return to Earth.

As of Tuesday afternoon, 4,706,398 Texans had cast a ballot in the first seven days of early voting. They represent almost a quarter of the state’s registered voters, and more than half of the total number of voters in the 2016 election. There are a lot of things we can conclude from that turnout, and even more that we cannot, including, alas, who those voters are casting their ballots for. We can conclude that enthusiasm is high, and we can tell that some parts of the state—Harris, Denton, and Galveston counties, for example—have seen huge spikes in turnout relative to this point in the last presidential election. We can also say that just a smidge more than 35 percent of the voters who’ve participated so…View Original Post

The post Texas Has More Early Voters Than Any Other State appeared first on Texas Monthly.

NASA made history on Tuesday afternoon as its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully “tagged” the asteroid, 101955 Bennu, and in doing so collected a small sample of regolith from the passing celestial body’s surface. This marks the first time that a NASA mission has managed to intercept, interact with, and collect samples from an asteroid.

This is far from the first time that humanity has brought a piece of the stars back with us when returning from space. We’ve been doing it pretty regularly since the Apollo moon missions, in fact. The Mir Space Station hung pieces of aerogel on the station exterior for 18 months to collect samples of low earth orbit space debris back in 1996. In 2004, the Genesis mission returned solar wind samples, the first ever collected from beyond lunar orbit, despite fumbling its atmospheric reentry and crash landing. 2006, saw the return of the Stardust spacecraft which had successfully collected the first samples from a passing comet. And in 2014, only two years before OSIRIS-REx launched, JAXA’s Hayabusa2 space probe set off for a similar meetup with asteroid 162173 Ryugu. It arrived at the asteroid in 2018, hung around for a year doing surveys before scooping up a container of regolith -- bits of rock and dust -- and jetting off back to Earth. It’s expected to arrive on December 6th. 

The $800 million OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission is being led by Dante Lauretta, Professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and aims to further our understanding of how the early Solar System formed.

NASA

Class-B asteroids like Bennu serve as time capsules of a sort. “Asteroids are leftovers formed from the cloud of gas and dust -- the solar nebula -- that collapsed to form our sun and the planets about 4.5 billion years ago,” NASA’s Dwayne Brown wrote in 2011. “As such, they contain the original material from the solar nebula, which can tell us about the conditions of our solar system's birth.”

Additionally, they’re rich in both carbon and volatile compounds which could help us figure out how life started -- or if an atmosphere is even required for life to get going seeing as how we’ve previously found amino acids and other organic compounds on the surfaces of asteroids. 

OSIRIS took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida in September 2016. It arrived at Bennu in 2018 and like the Hyabusa2 mission before it, has spent the last two years surveying and studying the skyscraper-sized asteroid. Those surveys have revealed that organic carbonaceous material is spread widely over Bennu’s surface, especially at the Nightingale site where OSIRIS set down. 

“The abundance of carbon-bearing material is a major scientific triumph for the mission. We are now optimistic that we will collect and return a sample with organic material – a central goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission,” Lauretta explained. 

The team also found carbonate minerals during the survey, suggesting the Bennu was once part of an even larger asteroid, one with an hydrothermal system where liquid water interacted with the rock. What’s more, the regolith found at Nightingale appears to have only ever been exposed to a space-based environment, meaning that the roughly 2 ounces of collected samples will be especially pristine and unsullied by biological contaminants.   

Collecting those samples involved a never-before-tried technique dubbed the touch-and-go (TAG). Before beginning its approach, the OSIRIS unfolded and deployed its Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) while pulling its solar panels back into a Y-shape so that if the TAGSAM arm did accidentally overshoot and crunch into Bennu, the rest of the spacecraft would still have the necessary power to function. Given that NASA was trying to set a spacecraft the size of a minivan down in an area the size of a few parking spaces -- that just so happened to be surrounded by house-sized boulders -- keeping all of OSIRIS’ bits and pieces out of the way was of paramount importance.

OSIRIS was really only in physical contact with the asteroid for a few seconds -- just long enough to emit a puff of nitrogen gas that lifted bits of regolith off of Bennu’s surface for collection. To ensure that it has a sufficiently large sample, OSIRIS will first take a picture of the collector head to confirm the presence of regolith, and then on Saturday, will extend its TAGSAM arm and spin on its axis like a centrifuge to measure the mass of rock and dust in the collection bin. From here, OSIRIS-Rex will pull away from the asteroid, redeploy its solar panels as well as a high-gain antenna to transmit initial images and data from the operation then begin a nearly three year long trek back to Earth where the collection capsule is expected to land at the Utah Test and Training Range in 2023.

“After over a decade of planning, the team is overjoyed at the success of today’s sampling attempt,” said Lauretta said during a post maneuver press conference. “Even though we have some work ahead of us to determine the outcome of the event – the successful contact, the TAGSAM gas firing, and back-away from Bennu are major accomplishments for the team. I look forward to analyzing the data to determine the mass of sample collected.”

Osiris-Rex makes brief contact with asteroid Bennu in an effort to pick up fragments of rock.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Thanks, ultra-satanist reptiloids!

Today's News:

Last month we noted how Bill Barr was rushing DOJ staffers (much to their chagrin) to launch his "antitrust inquiry" into Google. Why? Three reasons. One, it helps Trump allies and Google adversaries like "big telecom," Oracle, and Rupert Murdoch. Two, it helps put the utterly false narrative of "social media unfairly censors Conservatives" into headlines during an election. And three, it creates leverage over companies that have finally just begun to take online hate speech and disinformation (a cornerstone of Trumpism) seriously. Genuine concerns about "monopoly power" are the last thing on these folks' minds.

Right on cue, Bill Barr this morning announced that the Department of Justice is suing Google, claiming that the company's anticompetitive practices in arenas such as search "have had harmful effects on competition and consumers." The initial press release compares Google's dominance to historical natural monopolies of note, such as 80's era AT&T:

"The antitrust laws protect our free market economy and forbid monopolists from engaging in anticompetitive practices. They also empower the Department of Justice to bring cases like this one to remedy violations and restore competition, as it has done for over a century in notable cases involving monopolists over other critical industries undergirding the American economy like Standard Oil and the AT&T telephone monopoly. Decades ago the Department’s case against Microsoft recognized that the antitrust laws forbid anticompetitive agreements by high-technology monopolists to require preinstalled default status, to shut off distribution channels to rivals, and to make software undeletable. The Complaint alleges that Google is using similar agreements itself to maintain and extend its own dominance."

You're to ignore that this is the same Bill Barr DOJ and Trump administration that has rubber stamped every last fleeting whim of natural telecom monopolies (like the recent T-Mobile merger). Monopolies like Comcast that, unlike search, leave consumers trapped in punitive, expensive relationships they simply cannot opt out of. The DOJ's announcement was launched in cooperation with a handful of GOP states, apparently because many other states -- many of which are pursuing their own inquiries into legitimate problems at Google -- didn't think much of Billy Barr's rushed effort.

Many lawyers don't think much of the effort either, noting that the rushed complaint is, as you might expect, filled with odd misses and whiffs. Like here, where the DOJ attempts to claim that Google's efforts to reduce smartphone and device bloatware imposed by wireless carriers is something that should be illegal:

Others were quick to note that Google's effectively being lambasted by Barr's DOJ because its search engine -- which, unlike telecom, consumers can choose not to use -- is extremely popular:

Again, that's because this is being driven by cronyism and election season politics, not a serious concern about monopoly power. Worse, while the DOJ's announcement will be applauded by well-intentioned folks eager to see Google's power knocked down a peg, tackling Google's domination in a politicized, half-assed fashion could actually make it harder to hold Google accountable down the line. The DOJ of course wants to have its cake and eat it too, providing Trump with election season fodder while breathlessly insisting that's not what's happening:

"So, I think it's fair to say, this case has nothing to do with that subject," [Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey] Rosen said. "This is an antitrust case about competitive conditions in the marketplace, and as I said earlier, it's been a matter of nonpartisan, bipartisan, kind of across-the-board interest."

To be very clear, there's plenty of things Google does (especially on the advertising end) that can be deemed anticompetitive, inconsistent, and infuriating, many of which could use a serious good faith inquiry. But folks like Bill Barr and the GOP mainstays applauding this inquiry don't genuinely care about monopoly power, unchecked corporate power, or the downsides of consolidation. They simply don't. The DOJ (under both parties) pretty consistently doesn't either:

Mindless rubber stamping of megamergers and flimsy antitrust enforcement is what the United States does. It's our biggest pastime outside of baseball. The one Trump example usually trotted out to claim otherwise, AT&T's lawsuit to stop the AT&T Time Warner merger, was more about pissing off CNN for Trump and helping Rupert Murdoch than any serious concern about media consolidation. Rupert wanted the deal blocked after Time Warner first rebuffed his merger affections in 2014, and AT&T rejected his offer to buy CNN twice in 2017. It's extremely likely he's the motivating force in this effort as well.

So despite what folks like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz would have you believe, there's no evidence that monopoly power has ever been a genuine concern for the modern Trump GOP (simply look at its treatment of telecom, airlines, banks, and countless other heavily consolidated and monopolized sectors that routinely churn out a steady stream of consumer and competitor nightmares). And yet folks who've built entire careers on the backs of not giving a flying shit about corporate power, consolidation, and monopolization will now get to spend two weeks before an election pretending otherwise:

Why look at all the very serious, good faith, anti-monopolists just super and genuinely concerned about mindless consolidation and corporate power:

The idea that Jordan, Cruz, or Cotton genuinely care about corporate power, monopolies, or U.S. antitrust enforcement is laughable, and it's astonishing that anybody could take this performative stage play seriously. While they're doing their best to pantomime genuine concern, these gentlemen see the vilification of "big tech" as a matter of political convenience, providing leverage in their ongoing efforts to force the carriage of political disinformation, with the added perk that it's of great benefit to GOP megadonors and longstanding GOP allies like Rupert, AT&T, and Oracle.

Again, reporting indicates that while there may have been some kernels of good faith intention at the heart of the inquiry, Barr quickly got to work politicizing the effort -- and rushing it against the wishes of staff so it could be used as election season fodder. Trampling the law and government integrity for his authoritarian boss is what Bill Barr does. It's unclear how many examples are needed for the message to get through. Barr and friends should no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt.

It's a lot like the sordid TikTok affair, which had more to do with cronyism (nabbing Oracle a hosting deal) and political convenience (amplifying xenophobia) than any genuine concern about consumer privacy or internet security. Bill Barr's inquiry is politicized bad faith bullshit dressed up as serious adult policy making, and it's relatively astonishing how many folks (including both of the country's biggest cable news outlets and numerous tech reporters) literally can't tell the difference, or be bothered to include even the faintest hint of context that the investigation may not be entirely on the up and up.

This article was written in collaboration with First Draft, a nonprofit organization that provides investigative research to newsrooms tracking and reporting on mis- and disinformation.

When we picture the entity behind a network of disinformation websites, a few archetypes spring to mind: shadowy figures intent on interfering with democracy, Russian agents, Macedonian teens. Not usually included: a gamer from a suburb of New York City who sells coffee beans with his wife at the local farmers market on weekends. But that’s precisely who was behind three sites that, until last week, were pumping out misleading, hyperpartisan Spanish-language content on both the left and right. They were just a few sites in a broader ecosystem of misinformation — and disinformation — that spreads such narratives to millions of Americans. But their story has something to tell us about the misinformation industrial complex overall.

Sean Reynolds, a YouTuber, gamer and entrepreneur, was the owner and operator of three websites and affiliated Facebook pages that peddled in misinformation, predominantly in Spanish. The existence of the network was first reported by Politico last week,²¹ but an exclusive interview with Reynolds revealed why he started the sites.

Namely, he said, he saw an opportunity.

“These websites and the content on them do not reflect my personal political leanings,” Reynolds wrote in a direct message on Twitter. “I am non-discriminating towards opportunities where there is demand and no supply, which in this case, there was no political opinion pieces written in Spanish on Facebook, so I found writers (ghostwriters) interested to fill that demand.” Reynolds did not respond when FiveThirtyEight asked whether he speaks Spanish but did say he does not personally write the content on the sites. In a video he posted on his gaming channel, he identified as half Jamaican and half German.

Since 2017, Reynolds has operated the three websites and their affiliated Facebook pages: PoliticaVeraz.com, which published right-leaning content, AlertaPolitica.org, which published left-leaning content, and LeftOverRights.com, a left-leaning site which initially ran English-language stories but switched to publishing in Spanish this August. When all three sites were active, they would each regularly publish 5-10 stories per day and then spread those stories through Facebook, where they would typically attract thousands of shares. After FiveThirtyEight contacted him, Reynolds took all three sites and their Facebook pages offline.

A FiveThirtyEight investigation found multiple links that tied Reynolds to the sites, including a common server and IP address among his personal website and his other confirmed businesses, the same Google AdSense and Analytics code for his personal sites and these pages and corporate records listing Reynolds as a process agent for both Left Over Rights LLC and Alerta Politica LLC (there was no record of an LLC for Politica Veraz). Reynolds also confirmed to FiveThirtyEight that he ran the sites.

Much of the content these sites published was misleading and hyperpartisan. A recent story on Politica Veraz, for example, claimed that Joe Biden had “forgotten the words to the Pledge of Allegiance,” when in actuality he quoted part of the pledge for emphasis in a speech. Meanwhile, recent stories published on Left Over Rights deployed spin from a left-leaning perspective, such as a story about the vice presidential debate declaring Sen. Kamala Harris had “destroyed” Vice President Mike Pence by asking him not to interrupt her.

The disinformation on Politica Veraz, in particular, often echoed messaging that was already circulating in far-right communities online and among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, pushing it towards a more mainstream audience. One article claimed that President Trump’s life was in mortal danger after he gave a speech at a Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio, where he said he had many enemies and that “this may be the last time you see me for a while” when discussing lower prices for pharmaceuticals. And while Reynolds said the sites’ content had minimal reach, that story was shared more than 6,000 times on Facebook, according to social media data tool BuzzSumo, and received nearly 40,000 interactions (reactions, shares, and comments combined). Similar messaging had been amplified by right-leaning users on Twitter before the Politica Veraz piece was published, including a tweet from an account that regularly shares theories associated with QAnon that was retweeted or quote tweeted more than 12,000 times.

Reynolds’s sites are far from the only source of misinformation targeting the Latino community. There are sites, Facebook pages and YouTube channels that operate on the margins, attracting little mainstream notice while garnering audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Their stories — rife with misleading spins on the news and outright falsehoods — are shared across social media and privately in messaging apps. They target communities that have fewer trusted sources that cater directly to them, according to media experts we spoke to, and amplify misinformation originating from extremist communities. And experts say this kind of misinformation can lead to voters not only being misinformed, but also feeling disillusioned by the political process.

Nevertheless, Reynolds said his goals weren’t necessarily to inform, misinform or disinform, but to make a little bit of money. So little money that he didn’t think twice about taking the sites down as soon as he was contacted by a reporter.

“I will say, though, that these websites (all three) were scheduled to be fully closed after the months of not posting and not generating any income to keep them running,” Reynolds wrote. (Two of the sites stopped uploading new posts in August and September, respectively.) “But now I’m getting contacted about them, and I just don’t have time for anything else, so I will have their closings sped up.”

Reynolds’s sites represent a brand of misinformation fueled by the ease and profitability of building an audience on social media, according to Joan Donovan, a researcher of disinformation at Harvard University.

“Social media companies have incentivized disinformation by rewarding it with financial dollars,” Donovan explained. “The fact that he was targeting Latinos with Spanish-language disinformation or misinformation from either side of the aisle shows a kind of willingness to create chaos so long as it makes money.”

It’s not as if the content was simply a translated version of English-language misinformation, either. It clearly targeted the Latino community, playing into existing fears such as worries about socialism, given its history in authoritarian Central and South American governments.

“Some of the key narratives are around the perceived threat of socialism coming into the United States, and connecting that to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” said Jacobo Licona, a disinformation researcher for Equis Labs, a Latinx voter research group. “Another one we often see is trying to discredit Black Lives Matter and paint them as violent. Since the murder of George Floyd, we’ve seen an increased effort by these bad actors in Latinx spaces to fuel racial tension in Black and brown communities.”

Politica Veraz regularly posted stories that played into these threads, like one that called the Obamas “Marxists” or another that inaccurately reported two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies shot in Compton were “ambushed by Black Lives Matter.”

This misinformation is being seeded in the midst of an election where Latino voters represent a powerful voting bloc. While Trump is trailing Biden among Latino voters in national polls, the margin is narrower in the key battleground state Florida. In a Univision poll released on Sept. 28, 52 percent of Latino voters nationally said they planned to cast a ballot for Biden, compared to 19 percent who were committed to Trump. But in Florida, 36 percent of Latino voters said they favored Trump.

Reynolds said his content was not effective and that the sites were not profitable or popular, and that he had been planning to shut them down before he was contacted by FiveThirtyEight. But data tells a different story. Combined, the three site’s Facebook pages had nearly 1 million likes and followers, and Politica Veraz alone attracted more than 500,000 interactions on its Facebook posts since July, according to data from Crowdtangle.

The allure of sensational, emotionally provocative misinformation is well documented. But this content was also able to appeal to an audience facing a dearth of targeted media, according to Randy Pestana, the assistant director of research at Florida International University’s Institute for Public Policy.

“The media outlets that appeal to Hispanics are limited. There are not a lot of them out there, and the ones that are out there more recently have been called fake news,” Pestana said. “There’s this movement where everything is ‘fake news’ if it doesn’t align with your opinion.”

He also noted that many Latino Americans consume news through social media, including Facebook and WhatsApp, making it easier for this kind of content to spread. The share of Latino Americans who get their news from the internet is higher than that of the U.S. population overall, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center. In a 2016 survey, Pew found that 74 percent of Latino respondents got their news online on a typical weekday, whereas a 2017 Pew survey found that 43 percent of the total population “often” got their news online. And while social media platforms have been cracking down on English-language misinformation to a certain degree, Spanish-language disinformation doesn’t always receive the same treatment, Pestana said.

Reynolds’s sites are now shut down, but there are plenty of other misinformation sources targeting Latino Americans. As we head into the final weeks of an election, many members of one of the most influential voting blocs continue to be bombarded with false information.

“The worst examples of the potential consequences of this is what we saw in 2016: People felt so disenfranchised by the political process that they opted not to participate in it,” said Steven Renderos, the executive director of MediaJustice, a nonprofit that focuses on racial inequality in communications. “That’s the risk we’re facing here today, that people will just opt out of engaging.”

President Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases | Saul Loeb and Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

Except Americans trust Fauci more than Trump on the Covid-19 response.

In the final weeks of his reelection campaign, President Donald Trump is facing harsh polling in key states and a major financial disadvantage, plus a pandemic that has left more than 220,000 Americans dead and millions in dire economic straights. In response, Trump has debuted a new line of attack on former Vice President Joe Biden: “He wants to listen to Dr. Fauci.”

At a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Monday, Trump told the crowd in disparaging tones that “Biden wants to lock it down,” and heed the advice of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. The day before, at a rally in Carson City, Nevada, Trump mocked Biden by saying “he’ll listen to the scientists. If I listened totally to the scientists we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression.”

Biden’s subsequent tweet indicates he’s likely not worried about this line of attack.

The Washington Post reported that this attack may have less to do with Biden and more to do with Fauci, who gave a critical 60 Minutes interview that reportedly angered the president. During the interview, Fauci said that “the president’s conduct made it unsurprising that he caught the coronavirus and that the administration had tried to muzzle him.” The next day Trump named him in his attacks on Biden in Arizona.

Trump may have a hard time rallying more supporters by vilifying the 79-year-old public health expert. A Morning Consult poll conducted October 9-11 among 1,986 registered voters shows that “nearly 2 in 3 voters rate Dr. Fauci’s coronavirus response as excellent or good.” In stark contrast, Trump has “never topped the 42 percent of voters” who gave him a “good or excellent” rating in late April. In early October, this poll indicates that 58 percent of voters believe Trump’s handling of the virus has been “poor” or “just fair.”

Another poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted August 28 to September 3 among 1,199 American adults has 68 percent of voters with “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in Dr. Fauci to “provide reliable information on coronavirus.” The same poll has only 40 percent of voters saying the same of Trump.

Whether personal vendetta or strategic move, this is unlikely to be the game changer Trump needs to shake up the race.

---

Will you help keep Vox free for all?

The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Eggs have changed! Starting today, Eggs in Pokémon GO feature a brand new set of Pokémon, across all Egg distances, including Adventure Sync rewards.

The official word came from Niantic, and we’ve prepared handy infographics and tables for every Egg group. Please note that Pokémon that appear in the wild only in specific regions will hatch only from Eggs obtained in those regions.

P.S. Huge shoutout to @OrangeHeart2018 for an insane amount of infographics recently, including the ones for the Egg shake-up. Follow our artist on Twitter if you want!

---

2 KM Eggs

Thew new 2 KM eggs feature Pokémon that are fairly common in the wild.

2 KM Eggs

Zubat	Poliwag	Cubone
Magikarp	Mareep	Wooper
Snubbull	Volbeat	Illumise
Wailmer	Swablu	Buizel
Buneary	Snivy	Tepig
Oshawott	Minccino

---

5 KM Eggs

The 5 KM egg pool is absolutely massive. There’s simply too many Pokémon to go through all of them, but there’s really a lot to look forward here.

5 KM Eggs

Machop	Farfetch’d	Seel
Voltorb	Lickitung	Kangaskhan
Tauros	Eevee	Pineco
Heracross	Corsola	Ralts
Aron	Torkoal	Feebas
Tropius	Clamperl	Relicanth
Mime Jr.	Chatot	Hippopotas
Carnivine	Pansage	Pansear
Panpour	Pachirisu	Blitzle
Roggenrola	Maractus	Gothita
Solosis	Bouffalant

---

7 KM Eggs

The 7 KM Egg pool is fully dedicated to Galarian and Alolan Pokémon.

7 KM Eggs

Geodude (Alola)	Meowth (Galarian)	Sandshrew (Alola)
Grimer (Alola)	Meowth (Alola)	Stunfisk (Galarian)
Farfetch’d (Galarian)	Vulpix (Alola)	Zigzagoon (Galarian)
Darumaka (Galarian)

---

10 KM Eggs

The new 10 KM Eggs feature a mix of familiar faces and exciting new arrivals. The pool size is a bit wide for a 10 KM egg, but since most of the top tier hatches have moved to the 12 KM Strange eggs, this makes sense.

10 KM Eggs

Shinx	Gible	Riolu
Audino	Timburr	Darumaka
Sigilyph	Emolga	Ferroseed
Klink	Elgyem	Litwick
Axew	Golett	Rufflet

---

Strange Eggs (12 KM Eggs)

Strange Eggs, aka Team GO Rocket eggs, feature the most interesting hatches among all egg groups (author’s opinion). Sure, all other Egg tiers have a few notable hatches, but the 12 KM groups is strong through and through. Well, with the exception of Trubbish.

12 KM Eggs

Larvitar	Absol	Sandile
Scraggy	Trubbish	Pawniard
Vullaby	Deino

The post Pokémon GO October 2020 Egg Shakeup appeared first on Pokemon GO Hub.

Listen, I’m proud to have inspired such an iconic song, but I’ve been waiting for thirty years to gets this off my chest: Tom completely misread me. Like, completely.

First of all, sure, I guess I love America, but it’s complicated. Many of our government’s policies have been pretty problematic over the years. Also, I only go to church on holidays, and I call my mom on the weekends — that’s pretty much all I can handle with her. Regardless, those are things that shouldn’t be highlights of my or anyone else’s biography.

And you can’t imagine how frustrating it is when people see me at the mall and an Elvis song comes on. They’ll grin at me like, Go ahead, we know you’re “CRAZY ‘bout Elvis., HA-HA.” I like Elvis. “Hound Dog” is fun. “Blue Christmas” is okay. But that doesn’t show an above-average ratio of interest.

Then there are the horses. Christ, the horses. I mean, sure, they’re fine, very pretty, I get it. But I’m not like some weird horse superfan.

I’ll tell you the truth: Tom never got to know me well enough. He liked the idea of me, of the “girl next door” who loves her boyfriend and blah blah blah. But he swung and missed on all the nuances of my personality.

Like he didn’t mention that I am severely allergic to dust. That’s not fun or a particularly cool thing to write a rock anthem about, but it’s accurate. If I forget to take a Zyrtec, I am toast.

One time I drove to Reno on a dare. I had just got laid-off and figured what the hell, dare me to go, Aunt Judy. And Aunt Judy did. Reno is nice. Had the best waffle in my life there. Write that one up!

I also have a Mason jar filled with Barbie heads in my junk drawer. It started as a prank, but then I just kind of liked the aesthetic. Nothing rhymes with that, but it’s who I am.

I’m just saying that I would like a redo. I know everyone is super attached to “Free Fallin,’” and that it’s probably impossible to pivot, but it’s never stopped me from fantasizing that I could have a say in my own narrative.

And to all those “bad boys” out there thinking that the “good girls are home with broken hearts.” We’re not. We’re totally fine. I’ve got a whole back catalog of Steinbeck novels to read. And none of them are about horses. Except for The Red Pony.

I mean, come on! The guy wrote a whole song about me, yet he claims he broke my heart? You can’t be a baller out there, having fun, standing in the shadow being all edgy, and yet also get to write my name in the sky. The only thing I want written in the sky is a retraction. So, stick that in your left ear!

Look, I’m trying not to be petty about all this. It’s probably all for naught anyway. The topline of my obituary will read “Inspiration for ‘Free Fallin,’” no matter what. Still, I just wish Tom didn’t do me like that.

The president's remarks came during a call intended to discuss strategy for the Nov. 3 election. Trump has been at loggerheads with public health experts on how best to contain the pandemic.

(Image credit: Graeme Jennings/Pool/Getty Images)

Participants in an apprenticeship program that matches employers with community colleges were able to earn substantially more after one year than their peers at community colleges, a new study found.

(Image credit: Jim Young/AFP via Getty Images)