…cometh the hour

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as they did last year, set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight — the theoretical point of annihilation. Scientists set the clock based on “existential” risks to Earth and its people: nuclear threat, climate change, and disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and new biotechnology.

“Conflict hot spots around the world carry the threat of nuclear escalation, climate change is already causing death and destruction, and disruptive technologies like AI and biological research advance faster than their safeguards,” Rachel Bronson, the bulletin’s president and CEO, told Reuters, adding that keeping unchanged from the prior year is “not an indication that the world is stable.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/atomic-scientists-keep-doomsday-clock-close-midnight-ever

…cometh the man?

Here it is, your Moment of Zen pic.twitter.com/Y6AFBkJtOx

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) January 24, 2024

Stewart will host Monday nights through the 2024 election and then will continue as executive producer for every episode until the end of this year and the next, according to a news release from Comedy Central. On days Stewart is not hosting, “The Daily Show” will continue to rely on a team of rotating correspondents.
[…]
Stewart made his most high-profile return to media in 2021 when he began hosting “The Problem with Jon Stewart” on Apple TV+, a current events series that ran for two seasons before its abrupt cancellation in October.

Jon Stewart returns to ‘The Daily Show’ [NBC]

…I know the man isn’t some sort of magic bullet…but…bursting some bubbles seems…overdue?

The mainstream media is flabbergasted at Trump’s success in sweeping the Iowa caucuses, dominating the polls and destroying all his rivals but Nikki Haley before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
[…]
Headline after headline offers the same breathless, spellbound story: “Trump is dominating.” “Disciplined”. “Ruthless”. “Hugely effective”. “Remarkable”.

Earth to the mainstream media: this is dangerous nonsense.
[…]
Trump’s success in last week’s Iowa caucuses wasn’t a “stunning show of strength”. It was a display of remarkable weakness. He got just 56,260 votes. There are 2,083,979 registered voters in Iowa. Fewer than 3% of Iowans voted for him.
[…]
Former presidents have a huge advantage in their party’s primaries because they control their party apparatus. Presidents who have served just one term and seek the nomination for another are always re-nominated by their party, as was Trump in 2020 – and presumably will be again in 2024.

Of course Trump will be the Republican nominee. Trump was the party’s presumptive nominee before he even announced he was running again.
[…]
The danger in the mainstream media’s awestruck coverage of Trump right now – making a big deal out of his winning the Iowa caucuses, dominating the polls, pushing out all rivals except Haley, and almost surely winning today’s New Hampshire primary – is that it creates a false impression that Trump is unstoppable, all the way through the general election.

But no one should confuse Trump’s performance in the Republican primaries for success in the presidential election.
[…]
Even if Trump is not yet criminally convicted, I doubt that a majority of Americans will want for their president a man who has 91 criminal charges against him, who has been impeached twice, who has orchestrated an attempted coup, who has profited financially while president, who has stolen top-secret documents and who has been judged to be a rapist.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/trump-primaries-election-biden-robert-reich

…all due respect to bob’s-your-uncle, there…but he does say at one point that the campaign commenced immediately after the mid-terms…&…maybe I’m splitting hairs…but…he hasn’t been not-campaigning at any point since jon stewart left the daily show…not if you measure it by whether or not he’s been washing funds through those oh-so-forgiving campaign finance mechanisms…you know…like the ones that have been covering his legal costs…well…the ones he couldn’t con the state into picking up the tab for the way he tried to argue it ought to defend him (on its own dime) against those charges of assault that so pre-dated his entrance into the political sphere…so…maybe next time bob could talk a little bit about how the suicide pact is working out between him & the…what to call the GOP in its current MAGA incarnation…I mean…if you did some sort of find & replace on a description to attribute the characteristics to a political party somewhere on the african continent…well…they’d be a terrorist organisation, wouldn’t they…at the very least an insurgency of some unhealthy-looking complexion?

Access to maternity care is decreasing in the parts of the U.S. that need it the most, affecting nearly 7 million women of childbearing age and some 500,000 babies.

That’s according to a report released Tuesday by March of Dimes, a nonprofit focused on maternal and infant health. It finds that 36% of counties nationwide — largely in the Midwest and South — constitute “maternity care deserts,” meaning they have no obstetric hospitals or birth centers and no obstetric providers.
[…]
And it warns the result is disproportionately harming rural communities and people of color: One in 4 Native American babies, and 1 in 6 Black babies, were born in areas with limited or no access to maternity care services.

Mothers and babies in maternal care deserts face a higher risk of poor health outcomes, including death. Roughly 900 women died of pregnancy-related causes in the U.S. in 2020, the report says, adding that nearly two-thirds of such deaths are preventable.
[…]
The data for the study — and the concerns it raises — predate the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade*, says Dr. Zsakeba Henderson, March of Dimes’ senior vice president and interim chief medical and health officer. She says there isn’t enough data yet to show the impact of Dobbs, but acknowledges there is a known relationship between abortion restrictions and access to maternity care.
[…]
The number of obstetric providers (meaning obstetricians and certified midwives) in the U.S. actually increased — by 1.7% — between the 2020 and 2022 reports, Henderson says. But only about 7% of providers serve rural areas.

Two in 3 maternity care deserts are in rural counties, the report says.
[…]
No single solution will fix maternity care deserts, the report says. Instead, it offers nearly a dozen suggested policy changes that would tackle the issue from different angles.

“While this is an ongoing problem. there are potential solutions that we know exist to help address these issues,” Henderson says.
[…]
The organization says it will continue to push for policies at the state and federal level that will “increase access to make this nation a better place to experience pregnancy and give birth,” and it hopes this report will serve as a catalyst to bring about those changes.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128335563/maternity-care-deserts-march-of-dimes-report

[* …emphasis mine…kinda?]

…the fuck is that if it ain’t a “hostile environment”…eat your heart out theresa may…while you hold their beer

More than 64,000 women and girls became pregnant because of rape in states that implemented abortion bans after Roe v. Wade was overruled, according to a new research estimate published online Wednesday.

The research letter, published by JAMA Internal Medicine and headed up by the medical director at Planned Parenthood of Montana, estimated that nearly 520,000 rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies across 14 states, most of which had no exceptions that allowed for terminations of pregnancies that occurred as a result of rape.

Texas topped the list, with 45% of the rape-related pregnancies occurring within the state, researchers estimated. Ninety-one percent of the estimated rape-related pregnancies took place in states without exceptions for rape, according to the researchers.

“Few (if any)” of the women and girls who became pregnant because of rape “obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors,” the research letter said.

Abortion rape exceptions can be rendered “virtually meaningless” because of rape reporting requirements, said Dr. David Himmelstein, who co-authored the research and teaches at the School of Urban Public Health at Hunter College.

“I think, frankly, those are window dressing exceptions,” Himmelstein said. “They’re not actually exceptions … [that are] effective in making abortion available in cases of rape.”
[…]
Twelve states are enforcing almost-complete bans on abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights organization. While it is not banned in Wisconsin or North Dakota, abortion access has been complicated in the two states by legal uncertainty in Wisconsin and the decision by North Dakota’s only abortion clinic to move, the institute said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/64k-women-girls-became-pregnant-due-rape-states-abortion-bans-study-estimates

…it’s…look, I know it’s not a thing to joke about, really…& that left to their own devices the havoc they could wreak with a deathgrip on a locked in minority rule is…well…literally the stuff of terror…but…by way of a logical extension of the lysistrata

…I think every single woman in every one of those states should…get spirited away in the night…like “the rape of the sabine women” combined with a hostage rescue deal…& let these assholes find out if they finally catch the part james brown got to right after “this is a man’s world”…oh…& they should get postal votes for life for whichever state they left…&…since this is already well divorced from reality…if they do leave…their vote should count double until shit gets fixed enough for them to consider going back…call it…affirmative action…after all…the confirmative action of the men in that equation is the sort of abrogation of human rights that “the international community” officially takes a very dim view of…so…swings & roundabouts?

The first reports of the Hamas attack were already fusing with rumors, sweeping into social media feeds and private chat groups in an emotionally charged and largely unverified mass. Mr. Schatz, one of the best-known disinformation researchers and fact checkers in Israel, rushed back home to his computer, knowing he had little time to stop the false claims from metastasizing.

In a way, he was already too late.

Since the initial attack, disinformation watchdogs in the region have been overwhelmed by unfounded narratives, manipulated media and conspiracy theories. The content has spread in enormous volumes at great speed: video game clips and old news reports masquerading as current footage, attempts to disavow authentic photos as artificially generated, inaccurate translations and false accusations distributed in multiple languages.
[…]
The work, however, is hard even for seasoned professionals, who faced pushback while fighting false and misleading narratives across multiple elections and a pandemic. In the Mideast, where fact-checking websites and disinformation research are relatively nascent and often poorly funded, the challenges have been compounded.

“You don’t have a lot of established fact-checking organizations with long track records in the region, and that makes it harder,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which supports fact checkers worldwide. “On the ground, it’s a new area that needs development.”

Many Israeli and Palestinian fact checkers entered the field within the past few years. They have done valuable work, sometimes without pay, in recent months trying to ferret out the facts from a combat zone, Ms. Holan said. Their proximity to the conflict makes them deeply invested in the truth, and better equipped to understand the cultural nuances that shape it.

It also exposes them to accusations of bias. Neutrality can be difficult in a region where political and religious differences have been hotly contested for generations, and even more so during an intensely polarizing war.
[…]
The network, a three-year-old project run by the media organization Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, includes more than 250 fact checkers from Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. Saja Mortada, the Lebanese journalist in charge of the organization, said the war between Israel and Hamas has been the most complicated crisis to monitor in a year that also included claims related to the war in Sudan, earthquakes in Syria and Morocco, and storms in Libya.

“Fear and uncertainty can make false information spread rapidly, as people might easily believe and share things that match what they’re afraid of, or already think,” she said.

The warning signs of such a misinformation surge were immediately evident to Mr. Schatz, the Israeli researcher, on Oct. 7.

“I was in shock, like everyone else, but I realized that it is exactly in that state of shock that the worst type of things materialize and go viral on the internet,” he said.

His group, FakeReporter, relies on a team of 14 people to research and vet conspiracies and rumors circulating on social media. It is known for discovering an Iranian disinformation campaign in 2021 that used WhatsApp groups to sow confusion among Israelis. That fall, the organization also uncovered WhatsApp groups formed by Israeli extremists to attempt attacks against Palestinian nationals. FakeReporter’s findings have been cited in both left-wing and right-wing Israeli publications.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/business/media/misinformation-fact-checking-israel-hamas.html

…in the end

What to know about Israel’s controversial ‘buffer zone’ in Gaza [WaPo]

…we can argue over the words we use to name a thing

More than one-third of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide, poll shows [Guardian]

…but

Libs of TikTok creator accused of inspiring school bomb threats named to state library board [NBC]

[…look…I know what I said about getting a double vote & everything…but…uhhhh…#notallwomen?]

…however you muddy the waters

Probably no friend has benefited more from that generosity than President Biden’s son Hunter, according to Morris. The attorney paid for Hunter’s California house, bought the younger Biden’s art and helped pay off outstanding tax obligations. For doing so, he was summoned to Washington to participate in a closed-door deposition led by House Republicans eager to find evidence implicating Hunter Biden — or, more important, his father — in wrongdoing.

After the deposition, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) released a statement suggesting that Morris had offered information that was deeply problematic for the Bidens. It read, in part:

“Kevin Morris’s massive financial support to Hunter Biden raises ethical and campaign finance concerns for President Joe Biden. Shortly after meeting Hunter Biden at a Joe Biden campaign event in 2019, Kevin Morris began paying Hunter Biden’s tax liability to insulate then-presidential candidate Joe Biden from political liability. Kevin Morris admitted he has ‘loaned’ the president’s son at least $5 million. These ‘loans’ don’t have to be repaid until after the next presidential election and the ‘loans’ may ultimately be forgiven. Since Kevin Morris has kept President Biden’s son financially afloat, he’s had access to the Biden White House and has spoken to President Biden. This follows a familiar pattern where Hunter Biden’s associates have access to Joe Biden himself.”

Morris’s lawyer, Bryan Sullivan, quickly sent Comer a letter condemning the legislator for misrepresenting the testimony — a letter that certainly comported with Comer’s past practice but that was hard to evaluate on the merits given that no transcript was available.

On Tuesday, the transcript was made public. And Sullivan’s criticism of Comer was very much proved to be warranted.
[…]
“I had a very tribal feeling about Hunter,” Morris told the committee. “He’s a guy. I have brothers. He’s from close. He was in a lot of trouble. … I basically found him like a guy getting the crap beat out of him … by a gang of people. And, you know, where we come from, you don’t let that happen. You get in and you start swinging.”
[…]
A bit later, Morris began loaning Hunter Biden money. In his testimony, he makes clear that this wasn’t simply passing cash to Hunter Biden. He met the president’s son only months into Hunter’s sobriety, and soon after the younger Biden had been pulled by Donald Trump’s Republican allies into Trump’s first impeachment inquiry. This was the period when Trump would demand “Where’s Hunter?” during campaign rallies, with the result that Hunter Biden became the focus of an enormous amount of unwanted attention. Hunter’s wife was pregnant, Morris testified, and his safety was at risk. So Morris did what he testified he often does, pulling together a team to help Hunter Biden move forward. He found a house in a private neighborhood and paid the rent directly. He hired security. He paid off overdue payments on a car so that Hunter could return it.

The payments, Morris testified, were to third parties (including, eventually, the IRS) and were memorialized by separate attorneys in promissory notes. Those notes included interest requirements and payment deadlines beginning in 2025. More than once, Morris and Sullivan rejected the idea that he “gave” Hunter Biden money, and Morris more than once said he expected the president’s son to pay the money back.

Morris did testify that he met President Biden, several times. Those meetings were at White House events at which Morris and Biden spoke only briefly, just as other guests did. Morris was asked explicitly — again, under penalty of perjury — if he made the payments to aid Joe Biden politically (“In helping Hunter Biden, was your intent to help President Biden?” he was asked; “No,” he responded) or whether he’d asked the president (once elected) to take any official action on his behalf. Over and over, he flatly denied having done so.
[…]
Now again, consider how Comer framed all of this. That the two met at a fundraiser and then Morris began paying Hunter Biden’s tax bills to insulate Joe Biden. That these were “loans” — implying they weren’t. That this generosity granted Morris dubious access to Joe Biden. None of this is justified by Morris’s testimony; Comer is instead simply trying to frame Morris’s testimony in negative terms.

He does so, presumably, because he knows that his close allies in right-wing media will not read the primary document and because he is signaling how the testimony should be contextualized.

On Wednesday morning, Comer’s closest media ally, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, welcomed Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) to her show.

“It’s incredible to me,” Bartiromo said, “that a guy, Kevin Morris, could meet Hunter Biden and then two weeks later, give him $5 million.” This isn’t at all what happened, but reality has of late not served as much of an encumbrance to Bartiromo.

Donalds took the opportunity to insinuate that everything about Hunter Biden, his businesses and Kevin Morris was suspicious, as you’d expect. Bartiromo asked about Morris buying an LLC formed by Hunter Biden that had a minority stake in a hedge fund run by Chinese investors. Donalds declared that “this stake in the Chinese company stinks to high heaven because Mr. Morris would have never got it if it wasn’t for Hunter Biden,” which, considered by itself, is not a robust argument.

Then Bartiromo followed up.

“Do you think Kevin Morris is working for the Chinese Communist Party?” she asked, with complete earnestness. “Is that why he’s paying all this money and helping Hunter so much?”
[…]
“You are not an agent or a lawyer for the Communist Chinese government?” asked Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), Oversight’s top Democrat.

“No,” Morris replied — again under penalty of perjury.

“What is your understanding of why you’re here?” Raskin asked a bit later.

“You know, that’s a good question, Congressman,” Morris replied. “I guess because of my relationship with Hunter and because there’s a financial aspect to it, I guess.”

And that’s exactly right. Sure, the relationship is unusual, but Morris’s full, non-cherry-picked testimony at least offers a rationale for it. But he was deposed and his testimony was reshaped and molded by Comer to seem damaging because Comer and House Republicans are in the habit of doing that with everyone to whom they speak. Morris checked the “Hunter” and “money” boxes, and so, despite what he said, he became a vehicle for talking about “Hunter” and “money” in nefarious terms. And, despite the utter lack of any obvious connection to the president, he somehow became evidence of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing, too.

This is how these investigations have worked from the very beginning.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/24/hunter-biden-kevin-morris-impeachment-inquiry/

…if only there were an mRNA-based solution

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee shared first with NBC News that it is launching a series of websites on Thursday, translated across English, Hindi, Korean, simplified Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The information hubs, referred to as the “In It Together” campaign, will provide details on Democratic platforms.

The websites are aimed at countering disinformation that has been prevalent across closed messaging apps, like WeChat and WhatsApp, that are popular among communities of color, said Sarah Lin, the committee’s national Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) engagement deputy director. 

“Knowing how prevalent these closed platform groups are and how much our communities rely on them … we want to empower organizers, our volunteers with culturally competent, in-language content so that they can counter disinformation,” she said. 
[…]
With social media companies scaling back efforts to curb misinformation on their platforms, and former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election among several other factors, experts say disinformation could prove an unprecedented threat in the November election.

The mainstream media’s lack of coverage of immigrant communities like Asian Americans, in addition to scarce translations of existing coverage, make many communities of color more vulnerable to misinformation, experts said. The majority of Asian American eligible voters, for example, are foreign-born naturalized citizens. Roughly 57% of foreign-born Asians were proficient in English as of 2019.

And disinformation on closed-messaging platforms like WeChat, for example, proved to be threats before the 2022 midterms. Over five months that year, researchers found more than 300 articles shared on the app that they categorized as “major” disinformation, defined as having more than 5,000 views on WeChat or having spread to other platforms. One major disinformation narrative was the notion that election fraud was prevalent and threatening the foundation of democracy, the study said. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/democrats-in-it-together-campaign-disinformation-voters

…one man’s disinformation is…I mean…holy fuck, people…it’s literally on the level of trying to just get things he’s guilty of down as sound-bites on the basis his support is so high on his supply that just the words in his nails-on-a-chalkboard fucking voice seems to sever their ability to hear the words themselves…let alone comprehend the meaning…”day one I’d be a dictator” says the man…but…subjecting him to the legitimate penalties for his amoral but certainly illegal behaviors…like any other serially felonious asshole would be when the cat is this far out of the goddamn bag…*that* is the “real threat to democracy”?

…I thought…never mind what I thought…I guess deliverance lied to me

…still…let’s just say there’s some folks I wouldn’t object to seeing sold down that river…hell, if I won the lottery I’d even offer to cover the tab

…yes…I said win the lottery…I dunno where you’ve been…but there are a lot of them

…welp…there you have it…though…I may have lost it?

…either way…I’ll see about finding some tunes in due course…assuming I can maintain one of those today…which may be a bold assumption in light of my progress thus far…wish me luck?