What Happened Today: June 14, 2022
Senate’s gun law experiment; Jan. 6 committee’s split purpose; Infinite Paranoia
The Big Story
With a July 4 recess looming, a group of 20 senators are attempting to pull off the first major gun reform package in roughly 30 years. It’s likely they’ll succeed. But the question remains if even a historic set of federal gun laws can significantly deter the type of mass shooting events that have served as the political impetus for this package—let alone meaningfully reduce the rampant street-level gun violence that has led to all-time high homicides in several U.S. cities.
Following up on a more sweeping set of bills that lacked enough Republican support to pass in the House, a group of 10 Democrat and 10 Republican senators have put together a more limited package that appears to have the requisite Republican backing to survive a filibuster. That the bill’s 10 Republican backers are all either set to retire at the end of their terms or not up for election again until 2024 speaks to the fact that only modest legislative measures on guns are politically tenable for most conservative politicians. “I worked closely with my colleagues to find an agreement to protect our communities from violence while also protecting law-abiding Texans’ right to bear arms,” said John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who has led his party’s coalition in the negotiation.
Solving the puzzle of how to address both mass shootings involving semi-automatic weapons and unprecedented homicides in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore that, like suicides, are driven almost entirely by handguns seems—for now, at least—beyond the scope of any single congressional effort. As it stands, the grab bag of proposed laws will take a light-touch approach to thwarting the trade of both illegal firearms and unmarked ghost guns, while the rest of the package consists of mental health provisions, more stringent red-flag laws, and tougher background checks for younger buyers.
Read More: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gun-reform-deal-senators-announcement/
In the Back Pages: Infinite Paranoia: The Army’s Newest Recruiting Strategy
The Rest
→ Following their second public hearing yesterday, the members of the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill have splintered on the purpose of the committee. “If the Department of Justice looks at it, and assumes that there’s something that needs further review, I’m sure they’ll do it,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, on the question of if the panel will suggest charges against President Trump and members of his administration to DOJ prosecutors. “That’s not our job,” Thompson added, which prompted swift pushback from his fellow panel members who argued that the criminal referrals are still on the table. “The January 6th Select Committee has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, the highest-ranking Republican on the panel, whose comments were echoed by several members, suggesting that charges are more likely to be referred only if the lawmakers suspect they’ve galvanized enough public support for the effort.
→ Extending an ongoing effort to counter China’s supply-chain dominance across several major industries, an Australian firm has been tapped by the Department of Defense to build the first U.S. facility dedicated to separating heavy rare earth elements. The $120 million deal will allow the United States to loosen China’s grip on nearly 90% of the world’s refinement of rare earth elements that are critical in fiber optic cables, cellphones, and military equipment. The rare earths will be first mined and refined in Australia before they’re brought to the new facility being built in Texas for final separation. This move marks one major step toward the development of a critical supply chain that could more easily withstand geopolitical instability and the volatility brought on by another pandemic.
→ Advertisers are spending at least a billion dollars a year to run campaigns that no one is watching. That’s according to a new study of commercials running on ad-supported streaming platforms, which found that as much as 17% of all ads play after a television set has been turned off, running up the tab for advertisers who are trying, but perhaps failing, to reach the coveted younger audiences that gravitate towards cheaper, ad-supported streaming services.
→ IMAGE OF THE DAY:
The first detainees en route to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002. From right, a subject tied down with duct tape, seated beside a detainee holding an American flag—a prop soldiers placed there for the photograph. This picture was taken by military photographers for senior officials in the Pentagon— for then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in particular—to document the detainees and the prison. Published on Monday by The New York Times as part of a trove of military photographs attained through a Freedom of Information Act request, these pictures offer the first views of Guantanamo Bay not sanctioned by the U.S. government’s public relation’s apparatus.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/12/us/guantanamo-bay-pentagon-photos.html
→ Those who come down with COVID-19 can have greater protection from reinfection than those who receive one, two, or even three doses of the vaccine, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicating that natural immunity “protection [i]s higher” than immunity in vaccinated but “uninfected persons.” The study, which was conducted by a team of researchers from Israel, raises questions yet again about the U.S. pandemic response—specifically whether people who have come down with COVID-19 should be required to get vaccinated or boosted at all.
→ The Federal Trade Commission has come to save our pets! On Monday, the FTC swooped in to break up JAB Consumer Partners, a German investment firm that recently dropped more than $20 billion in the pet care industry, buying up veterinary clinics across the United States and Europe. JAB’s investments in this sector have been among its most successful, especially during the pandemic, when pets became a popular—and in JAB’s case, profitable—trend. JAB must now get FTC approval before purchasing any more veterinary clinics, with the FTC trying to make sure that anti-competitive monopolies don’t drive up veterinary costs further. In 2021, U.S. consumers spent about $32 billion on veterinarian care and product sales.
→ A.B. Yehoshua, a writer who chronicled Israeli life with a fierce sense of empathy, died in Tel Aviv on Tuesday at the age of 85. The author of 11 novels and several short-story collections and plays—a man who “wrote in the shadow of Faulkner, with an admixture of Joyce,” as Harold Bloom put it—Yehoshua was known as an attentive narrator of his country’s lived history, offering deeply nuanced portraits of men and women navigating Israel’s birth and growth. Born in Palestine in 1936 while the country was still under British mandate, Yehoshua humanized that history, depicting Israel’s birth in 1948 as both an exultant moment for Jews as well as a nakba, or “catastrophe,” for those Palestinians living in Israel. His work as a public figure was also defined by this radical empathy, and he was deeply critical of his country’s treatment of Palestinians while simultaneously celebratory of his countrymen as the embodiment of a noble and sacred Jewish tradition, arguing that Jews living outside of Israel lacked the same spiritual connection to the religion that those living in the country possessed. “I have no doubt,” he wrote in 2006, “that in the future, when outposts are established in outer space, there will be Jews among them who will pray ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ while electronically orienting their space synagogue toward Jerusalem on the globe of the earth.” Others, Yehoshua suggested, will still be living and fighting and writing and arguing in Israel—or buried there, as he will be, in a cemetery at a kibbutz in the north of the country on Wednesday.
→ MAP OF THE DAY: Thinking about heading off on a summer road trip? You might need to keep this map handy if you hope to score gas at less than $5 a gallon. Or just stick to the South and avoid the West Coast, where gas is running as high as $6.44 at the moment.
→ As part of the White House’s broader racial equity agenda, federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced a slate of new initiatives last week that will help potential black homeowners with their down payments, mortgage insurance premiums, and credit reports. The programs, ostensibly an attempt to correct for racial disparities in homeownership—72% of white Americans own homes compared to 42% of black Americans—have been criticized for prioritizing race-based subsidies when the housing market has been brutally antagonistic to almost all renters seeking to purchase their first home.
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: 75
The Federal Reserve is getting ready to raise mortgage rates this week and might do so by 75 basis points—a fairly larger rate hike than those 25 basis point hikes the Fed first made in March, suggesting that the bank is ratcheting up its efforts to temper inflation and that its earlier rate hikes were inadequate. The University of Michigan’s gauge of consumer sentiment, meanwhile—a reliable monthly assessment of Americans’ outlook on the economy—found that consumer sentiment in June had fallen to an all-time low.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Infinite Paranoia: The Army’s Newest Recruiting Strategy
By Scroll critic John Pistelli
On May 2, 2022, the U.S. Army’s Fourth Psychological Operations Group posted an unsettling recruitment video titled “Ghosts in the Machine” to YouTube and Twitter. Departing from the optimism of traditional Army recruitment material, this three-and-a-half-minute video—essentially an experimental short film—attempts to persuade viewers that we live in a time of pervasive darkness and justified paranoia.
Rain and thunder play ominously on the ad’s soundtrack, followed by an eerie whistling motif and nightmarish lyrics about “footsteps in the night” and “wolves hiding nearby.” An old TV shows a black-and-white cartoon of a clown dancing. We hear a cacophony of news reports over a montage of empty city streets, a conductor raising his arms, a chess match in progress, the Chinese army on the march, soldiers about to storm a house, desolate underground subway tunnels, and a foggy bank of woods where a pendant decorated with a ghost hangs on a string from a scraggly bush. A legend on-screen asks, “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” Further messages warn of “a world at war” and “a threat [rising] in the east” before claiming, “You’ll find us in the dark.” Fingers scroll a screen as the ad announces, “All the world’s a stage.” A midcentury tape reel explains that psychological warfare targets “not the body, but the mind of the enemy.” As the video builds to its climax, an actor paints his face clown-white, and mysterious masked figures emerge from the misty forest where we first saw the ghost pendant. We rejoin the old cartoon: A witch turns the dancing clown into a ghost. Meanwhile, the TV playing the cartoon catches fire. “We are everywhere,” the screen threatens as martial drumming swells.
Uncle Sam, once a sturdy and optimistic figure, has adopted the aesthetic of acid-taking conspiracy theorists as the uniform of a new global information war.
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What Happened Today: June 14, 2022
Hey, your "Number of the Day" is incorrect.
The Federal Reserve does not change or even directly do anything to mortgage rates.
You are speaking of the federal funds overnight rate