Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

For now, Murphy is heading a 10-day effort to see if he can find bipartisan compromise on the issue. He says he’s open to anything that could get sufficient support, though any agreement is likely to center on “red flag laws” or universal background checks — two policies Republicans have expressed a willingness to consider.

If this effort falls short, the Senate plans to vote on two House-passed bills focused on strengthening background checks in order to get lawmakers on the record on the issue ahead of the midterms.

Despite an increase in mass shootings in recent years, gun control legislation has long been stalled in Congress due to Republicans’ unwillingness to support policies at the federal level. Whether that changes will become more apparent in the next two weeks.

Here’s what could happen.

Path one: Congress finds a bipartisan deal — and 10 Republican senators willing to support it

The biggest obstacle in Congress is a lack of Republican support in the Senate. Because of the filibuster, most bills need 60 votes to pass, which would require 10 Republicans to join the 50-person Democratic caucus to approve any gun control legislation.

Thus far, Democrats have been united on the subject. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), both centrist lawmakers who’ve defected from the caucus on other issues, have expressed support for gun control discussions. However, neither has indicated a willingness to eliminate the filibuster, which would enable Democrats to pass legislation with the members they have.

As of Thursday, bipartisan talks were ongoing, with Republican lawmakers floating two potential options:

That year, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) negotiated a bill that would offer grant money to states to incentivize them to establish red flag laws, but it wasn’t able to get enough Republican support. On Thursday, Blumenthal said they’re revisiting a version of this bill.

These laws — which have already been established in 19 states — enable family members or law enforcement to file petitions about the threat an individual poses. According to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, more than 8,000 petitions were filed across the country in 2020 and 2021.

The effectiveness of the law, however, depends heavily on implementation. As Vox’s Nicole Narea explained, a New York red flag law failed to stop the shooter in the recent Buffalo mass shooting that killed 10 Black Americans, because police chose not to pursue a petition even though he had been flagged for a psychiatric evaluation after threatening murder-suicide.

In poll after poll, universal background checks have been extremely popular. And while they wouldn’t address all the causes of gun violence, they would add a safeguard when it comes to gun access. Experts note that background checks are also central to other gun control proposals, like requiring each firearm owner to have a gun license.

In addition to Collins and Toomey, several Republicans including Sens. Rob Portman (OH), Thom Tillis (NC), and John Cornyn (TX) have said they’d be willing to consider legislation while many have reiterated that any new policies should be left up to the states.

“What I’ve asked Senator Cornyn to do is to meet with the Democrats who are interested in getting a bipartisan solution and come up with a proposal, if possible, that’s crafted to meet this particular problem,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN on Thursday.

Path Two: Democrats take a symbolic vote

History tells us it’s more likely that Congress isn’t going to be able to reach a deal, given how entrenched opposition to gun control has been.

Republicans just this week blocked the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act — a bill Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had framed as a vehicle for gun control efforts — from advancing. The bill, which was raised in response to the mass shooting in Buffalo, would have established new units at the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI that focused on domestic terrorism.

Schumer had said that lawmakers could debate policy additions to the bill if the procedural vote this week were to pass. In the end, however, 47 senators voted in favor of the bill, while 47 voted against it. Republicans opposed the bill because they didn’t see the need for new federal bodies focused on domestic terrorism, and expressed concerns that it could lead to disproportionate scrutiny of organizations on the right.

If bipartisan talks collapse, Senate Democrats intend to hold votes on two other bills they know won’t pass, to show where lawmakers in both parties stand. As with recent votes on abortion rights, Democrats hope these votes could be used against Republicans in the midterm elections.

Those bills would be:

Both measures advanced with a handful of Republican votes in the House and are widely expected to fail in the Senate. But Democrats think they’d provide fresh fodder to capitalize on public anger, something they hope they could channel into midterm campaigns that thus far don’t look promising. “One way or the other, we’re going to have a debate here. We’re going to force [legislators] to tell America which side they’re on,” Murphy said this week.

The US military withdrew support of Independence Day when the producers refused to remove references to Area 51.

Todd Breasseale was one of them, a career Army officer who worked as the Army’s motion picture and television entertainment industry liaison for about six years beginning in 2002. He retired from the Army to join the Obama administration in 2014, and is now deputy assistant to the Secretary for Public Affairs at the Pentagon. In his liaison capacity, he told me by phone, his duties ranged from reading scripts for accuracy at the request of filmmakers to determining whether the Army would lend equipment, location, or personnel support to productions.

“Sometimes it was entire scene rewrites that they needed help with,” he said. Other times, he might advise Steven Spielberg on technical details for a sequence in War of the Worlds, or work with the Transformers production to access locations that the Army owns.

Often the role of the military comes in making equipment not currently in use available to production companies at cost — “every time you see a piece of military hardware that is not created through CGI, that cost is borne out by the production company,” he said. The company pays about how much it costs to keep a plane in the air hourly, far cheaper than renting commercial aircraft. “Unless a specific training mission was prescheduled and planned to be flown anyway, the production company would pay the hourly rate for that aircraft.”

Soldiers are sometimes used as extras or pilots, too — perhaps if a filmmaker wants to shoot footage of a flyby. “Soldiers are paid anyway,” Breasseale said, because active duty service members receive a 24/7 salary. So the cost to the production company isn’t the union-mandated salary of a professional actor, stunt pilot, or extra; it’s just a per diem. “For instance, we shot a picture up in Canada and we brought in actual soldiers because they needed to be able to fly the Blackhawk helicopters. So they paid for the soldiers’ transportation up there, they paid a rate field cost for the Blackhawks, they paid the hourly rate for the Blackhawks, and then they paid the per diem and hotel expenses for the service members who are on set.”

In other words, the taxpayer isn’t directly paying for the production costs, since the equipment and personnel would be getting paid for either way. The studio, however, gains a huge benefit if a deal is struck.

That said, the trade-offs can be high. Frequently, notes are returned to filmmakers, asking them to change plot points in ways that make the film more palatable to the military, and specifically to the liaison who is working with the production. And the issues with this have been well-documented, perhaps most notably in reporter David L. Robb’s 2004 book Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Robb documents cases in which prominent filmmakers agreed to substantial rewrites to paint military personnel in a more positive light, or, at times, excise material in historical films that don’t fit the military’s official narrative. As he puts it:

Millions of dollars can be shaved off a film’s budget if the military agrees to lend its equipment and assistance. And all a producer has to do to get that assistance is submit five copies of the script to the Pentagon for approval; make whatever script changes the Pentagon suggests; film the script exactly as approved by the Pentagon; and prescreen the finished product for Pentagon officials before it’s shown to the public.

Some filmmakers refuse to comply with the notes, and they usually end up going their separate ways. But in many prominent cases, they agree, incorporating the military’s suggested changes into the script.

For instance, as Robb writes in his book, the Navy agreed to let the original Top Gun production shoot on a naval base near San Diego, but that meant making some changes. Maverick’s love interest, played in the movie by Kelly McGillis, was originally written as a fellow soldier. But the navy forbids officers and enlisted personnel from fraternizing, so the script was changed in order to gain access to the naval base.

Robb also writes (from 2004) that a sequel to Top Gun was thought to be impossible to make because the Navy feared it might hurt recruiting. The massive Tailhook scandal in 1991, in which navy pilots molested women at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, cast the movie’s womanizing and drinking in a new light. The new film was, of course, eventually made, with considerable involvement from the military — and both drinking and sexual relationships (and the homophobic slurs of the original) are handled far differently. (It’s also very good, the rare and exhilarating sequel that transcends its original and doesn’t seem purely invented to build up excitement for the next installment.)

So is the Pentagon censoring cinema?

Even if you take a dim view, as many do, of the process of adopting military notes into scripts in return for support, it’s part of a long history of Hollywood self- censorship, often aimed at keeping the government from censoring them directly. In 1934, for instance, the major Hollywood studios voluntarily adopted a “Production Code” that banned, among other things, showing interracial marriage, or story lines in which clergy are disparaged or criminals are shown not being punished for their actions. Conformity to the Code lasted into the 1960s, when it was eventually replaced by an early version of the MPA ratings system we’re familiar with today.

You could see productions’ willingness to bend on these matters as a continuation of that tradition. Breasseale, for his part, sees this as a reasonable accommodation to request for productions seeking not just accuracy in storytelling, but an economic advantage. “The rules that I operated when I was out there is that it needed to be plausible,” he said. “So if you’re going to show a soldier committing a war crime, then you’re going to also need to show how the uniform code of military justice deals with that, and the punishment that they would suffer.”

You might reasonably ask why the military even bothers getting involved when they just as reasonably could refuse to ever participate in a film production. Breasseale cited several reasons. The first is recruitment. “If you see positive representations of your military — well, frankly, it doesn’t even have to be positive,” he said. Seeing the military in action, sometimes portrayed as heroes and sometimes portrayed as members of an organization with a strict code of military justice, can be immensely appealing. It sure was for those who saw Top Gun.

There’s another reason, particularly in our time, when despite having been at war for two decades, Breasseale pointed out, a sizable number of Americans haven’t had much contact with the military in real life. “There’s a lot to be said about the necessity to educate the American public about the military they’re paying for,” he said.

In Breasseale’s view, the reason to participate in a production was that it would help provide a “substantive military portrayal.” If, during negotiations with a production, he felt that the studio “just wanted cheap props, essentially, that would typically get rejected out of turn.” He might tell them to work with unions, rather than just trying to get nearly-free soldiers. He’d also reject a production that was asking for the kind of equipment that could imperil “the believability of a picture” if not shown the way the military would use it — that they wanted to “bring a knife to a gun fight.”

The whole process, he says, is reasonable and humane. He started working as the Army liaison in 2002, when “we were just starting a new era of war by politicians who had failed to find other alternatives,” as he puts it. “A lot of the scripts I was receiving at the time, even if they were set in contemporary settings in Iraq or Afghanistan or on a contemporary time period, were really movies about Vietnam. There were no substantive, decent, high-quality movies [about the military] between eras. There was an aura of the broken, crazy military vet who’s just one argument away from snapping and losing his shit.”

“So,” he says, “a lot of what I did was help humanize a military that people have no touch with.”

Robb sees this through a different lens; after all, both Hollywood and the military are selling something. He writes that “in the movies, when companies pay producers to show their products on screen, it’s called ‘product placement.’ But when the government provides incentives to producers to make the military look good in their movies, it’s known by a different name. It’s called ‘propaganda.’”

Brie Larson in uniform. Disney
Brie Larson in Captain Marvel. Her character is an Air Force fighter pilot.

Furthermore, he argues, “the military’s approval process … isn’t about making movies more authentic, it’s about creating positive images; it’s about making the military look better than it really is; it’s about making the military more attractive to potential recruits, taxpayers, and Congress.”

You can see the point. The most popular movies on the planet currently are those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, produced by Marvel Studios, which was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2009. Disney has a long, long history of working with the Pentagon, stretching back to public information and training cartoons as well as insignia produced during World War II.

From the launch of the MCU, even before its Disney days, the same has often been true. All three Iron Man movies received military support. So did Captain America: The First Avenger. When Captain Marvel arrived in theaters in 2019, featuring a main character who is an Air Force pilot, it had been preceded by a flurry of cross-promotional materials with the Air Force, including an ad in which filmmakers and stars praised their collaboration:

Though the US military plays a prominent role in many MCU films, they haven’t always worked together. Conflict arose, for instance, during production of The Avengers, in which the Pentagon found S.H.I.E.L.D., the shadowy fictional espionage organization that works closely with the Avengers, to be too “unrealistic.” The Avengers went ahead without Pentagon support.

Should we be worried about this partnership? Depends on who you ask.

Whether you agree more with Breasseale’s perspective or Robb’s depends on your answer to a fundamental question. From TV and movies to video games and more, the entertainment industry and the military have long seen one another as partners, ideologically and economically — but should they?

And if your view of the military is generally positive — as it is for most Americans — does this still count as propaganda?

In his foreword to Robb’s book, Jonathan Turley, a public interest law professor at George Washington University Law School, notes that “propaganda denotes a certain product; a packaged news account or film developed by a government or an organization to shape opinion … yet this is not traditional propaganda since the military does not generate the product itself and does not compel others to produce it. Rather, it achieves the same result through indirect influence; securing tailored historical accounts by withholding important resources.”

It’s that “tailored historical accounts” part that troubles me, at least in principle. For many people, movies are their most direct access point to the tales of war and heroism and history; think about World War II, and the images that spring to your mind are almost certainly culled from films. In the future, when those involved have passed away and our cultural relationship to truth has only gotten more corrupted, how will we access the truth about the ethically murky wars of the past several decades? Even if we know the facts and the films differ, will we care?

What does it mean if the military has the financial power to say what version of history gets made?

I ask Breasseale about this. “If I am party to a picture being made that I know presents only the wrong side, but an unfactual version of demonstrably provable events, then that’s propaganda. And so, if you can stay on the right side of those topics, to me, that is simply recruiting, or education. But it’s not propaganda.”

“There have been academics, very serious academics, who’ve written books about this sort of thing, who believe that any support whatsoever to the motion picture industry is necessarily propaganda,” he concludes. “I just can’t get there. I can’t get my head around it, because it is not a black-and-white issue.”

He’s right that it’s not a black-and-white issue — not at all. For one, Turley and Robb both note that some legal minds argue this use of military equipment, even if it’s not at taxpayer expense, is unconstitutional.

Furthermore, at times (as in the case of the 2002 film Windtalkers) the military requires a film about an otherwise marginalized group to run against the established historical record. If a few military officers (who may have variable political agendas) hold that much power with relatively low accountability, how dangerous is the whole collaboration in the long run?

Tom Cruise stands on the wings of a fighter jet, watching two jets streak by in the sky. Paramount Pictures
Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.

Ironically, we may not be asking this question all that much longer. The development of high-quality computer-generated effects and even performers could eventually eliminate or greatly reduce the need on Hollywood’s side to strike a deal with the military to get a picture made. Lower-budget films may find themselves more readily in a place to tell all kinds of stories about history.

Meanwhile, a film like Top Gun: Maverick’s charm comes, in part, from its almost nostalgic feeling, a film about heroism and military prowess that isn’t tethered to a particular war or enemy. But it also feels like the natural endpoint of that military-movie marriage, one that’s graduated from the Reagan-era, post-Vietnam rah- rah of Top Gun and into a geopolitically sticky world in which Hollywood wants to make movies for the whole globe.

The film’s nearly three-year delay between production and distribution gave journalists plenty of time to dig into the ways the military and Paramount had cooperated. We still don’t know who they’re fighting in Top Gun: Maverick, and early reporting noted that the Japanese and Taiwanese flags on Tom Cruise’s iconic leather aviator jacket had been shifted to more generic symbols.

It may just be that Hollywood has moved beyond its desire to work with the US military at all. It’s not that they’re no longer on America’s side; it’s just that they have to be on everyone’s side. And the transactional partnerships that come from that need are what will shape the future of Hollywood.

Top Gun: Maverick premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and opens in the US on May 27.

Hospital director Francesco Vaia speaks to reporters in Rome, Italy, on May 20. Vaia said three cases of monkeypox had been confirmed and isolated at his hospital in patients who traveled to the Canary Islands and Vienna.

“Will it be contained” depends a lot on the communities the virus is spreading in

Even when a germ’s intrinsic qualities favor its containment, it can cause big problems if there’s stigma associated with the activities that spread it.

With monkeypox, homophobia could jeopardize disease control, because links have emerged between cases and attendance at venues catering to men who have sex with men. If infection risk gets too closely associated with behaviors that some people stigmatize, it might prevent them from cooperating with contact tracing or vaccination for fear of being associated with those behaviors.

Health organizations run by and for gay men are an enormous asset to public health right now, and many of those organizations have longstanding relationships with public health, several experts told me. “Gay and bisexual men have been faced with HIV as a threat for three or four decades now, and we have a very activated community of people who are engaged in getting diagnosed and getting treated,” said John Brooks, chief medical officer at the CDC’s division of HIV prevention.

And it’s not just men’s health groups who’ve helped educate and inform people in the LGBTQ community about monkeypox, Baka said. At least one festival linked to cases has posted a notice of infection risk on its website, and last weekend, two dating apps commonly used in Europe by gay and bisexual men began displaying public health messages about monkeypox in several languages.

That kind of community buy-in helps key information reach people who might otherwise be skeptical of engaging with government public health agencies. “The challenge definitely is to engage with the community so that people can go get tested without prejudice,” said Baka.

When a disease’s modes of transmission are highly stigmatized, messaging related to the disease has to walk a careful line.

On one hand, frank communication in language that out gay and bisexual men commonly use is best for efficiently providing these communities with non-judgmental information. “If you treat people with respect and meet them where they are, it can go a very long way,” said Brooks.

On the flip side, trumpeting the link between infection risk and getting close and sweaty at events for LGBTQ people can instigate stigma, Schaffner said. An ideal communications strategy likely uses different language and emphasizes different elements of risk with different populations.

So far, Schaffner has been glad to see these associations often mentioned without sensationalism, even in news reports. “It’s not the lede,” he said, but “the third paragraph of the story.”

Containing monkeypox will take effort in a strained-but-prepared public health system

As the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated, a robust public health system is a necessary ingredient of outbreak containment.

Baka said that in this case, pandemic fatigue is to some degree a threat to containment. “People are tired. All the health care workers are tired, including the public health workforce,” she said.

Charles Bouessel/AFP via Getty Images
Medical staff wearing protective equipment enter a quarantine area in Zomea Kaka, Central African Republic, where clusters of monkeypox cases were reported, in 2018.

But there’s still a lot of optimism they can control the monkeypox outbreak, she said, in part because that workforce is so experienced at curtailing infection transmission, whether the infections are sexually transmitted or not. Additionally, as a result of Covid-19, new technologies exist to make contact tracing easier than it used to be.

“This does require a lot of shoe-leather epidemiology,” Schaffner said, referring to the contact tracing epidemiologists do to identify cases and contacts during an outbreak, sometimes by pounding the pavement in person.

It’s also immensely helpful to have vaccines and medications that we know can prevent and treat monkeypox at the outset of this outbreak. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved several medications to treat smallpox, which CDC representatives said Monday could also be used to treat monkeypox. The Strategic National Stockpile contains three types of smallpox vaccines, which would also prevent monkeypox.

What’s unique and particularly helpful about the existing vaccines is that they work to protect people who receive them even if they’re vaccinated after they’re exposed, said Toner. Vaccination within four days of exposure can block infection altogether, he said, and vaccines still lessen the disease’s severity even if given later in the course of infection.

That makes vaccinating cases and ring vaccination — vaccinating all the contacts of a case — a viable strategy for preventing the spread of infection, adding another point in favor of monkeypox being containable. Already, public health authorities in several European countries and the US are deploying these strategies, offering monkeypox vaccines to close social and health care contacts of cases.

Containment is possible. But the window could soon start closing.

Several experts were up front about why taking aggressive measures to contain monkeypox now are particularly urgent: Pride celebrations are coming up, and two-plus years into the Covid-19 pandemic, people are eager to party, said Brooks. “If there were to be non-compliance with containment measures, and it started transmitting more among the broader population, then it would be harder to contain,” Toner said.

There are backup plans: If the current containment strategies of contact tracing and ring vaccination don’t work, escalated vaccination strategies could involve vaccinating people in groups at high risk for infection or severe disease, regardless of whether they are cases or contacts. That would mean offering vaccines to people attending large gatherings where they’re likely to engage in the kind of contact that spreads monkeypox, such as certain Pride festivities. Meanwhile, groups offered the vaccine due to higher risk for severe disease would likely include immunocompromised people, including people with HIV, as well as pregnant people and children — but we’re not there yet.

For now, vaccine availability is not a problem, as many countries have stockpiles of smallpox vaccine as part of their bioterrorism preparedness strategies. However, companies that make these vaccines are ramping up production in case a larger supply is needed.

Fundamentally, an outbreak is likelier to be stopped in its tracks if it’s caused by a pathogen public health has successfully fought before, either with medicines or proven strategies like ring vaccination. And that’s also why experts are so optimistic. “That’s how smallpox was eradicated, and I believe that’s how monkeypox will be contained,” Toner said.

The smaller an outbreak is, the easier it is to contain. A plateau of the monkeypox case count would be a promising sign that things are headed in a positive direction. Over the next few weeks, epidemiologists — and the world — will be watching to see if their hopes of curbing this virus’ spread are fulfilled.

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit