The Vax Of Life, Kentucky Edition, Con't

Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear is calling a special session of the General Assembly in order for Republicans who control the state House and Senate completely to deal with the state's runaway COVID-19 delta variant pandemic, as the same KY GOP legislature stripped Gov. Beshear of almost all emergency powers relating to health and safety executive orders earlier this spring.

 

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is calling for a special session of the General Assembly to address the commonwealth's alarming rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

The session will begin Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the state Capitol in Frankfort.

Beshear's call comes two weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled a lower court was wrong to block new laws limiting the scope of the governor's emergency powers, giving the Republicans' legislative supermajority a substantial say over any new policy measures to address the pandemic.

The governor's call for a special session follows more than a week of negotiations with Republican leaders over the scope of a potential session and what pandemic-related legislation both could support.

Beshear began Saturday's announcement with a warning about the severity of the current surge in cases and hospitalizations due to the delta variant.

"In previous surges, the governor — me — was empowered to act. To do what is necessary to stop the spike, to flatten the curve, to save lives. But a recent state Supreme Court decision has changed that," he said. "Now that burden will fall in large part on the General Assembly.

"They'll have to carry much of that weight. To confront unpopular choices and to make decisions that balance many things, including the lives and the possible deaths of our citizens."

Under the Kentucky constitution, the governor has the exclusive power to both call a special session and set the agenda of any legislation it considers.

 

So, the good news is that the KY GOP can't add a Texas-style abortion ban to the special session, or any other nonsense that Beshear hasn't specifically asked the General Assembly to take up, as that's a state constitutional provision of the governor's power.

 

The bad news is the KY GOP will almost certainly do nothing substantive to stop the pandemic, other than to force the state to offer livestock dewormer and other non-COVID medicines to those who want to use it as a "treatment".

That is unfortunate, as especially in rural counties, schools are now unraveling under entire districts flooded with thousands of kids and educators sick with COVID delta.

About a fifth of Kentucky’s school districts have had to temporarily close since classes began last month because of coronavirus infections, an indication of the dire impact the most recent wave of the virus has had on the state.

Kentucky has recently reached its highest levels of cases and hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic, largely because of the highly infectious Delta variant. Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, and Governor Andy Beshear said on Thursday he was deploying the National Guard to help medical professionals.

The rise in cases has also affected Kentucky’s schoolchildren, hundreds of thousands of whom are under 12 and so not eligible for vaccination. “More kids are getting Covid right now than we ever thought imaginable,” Mr. Beshear said at a news conference on Monday.

As of Friday, 34 of the state’s 171 school districts had closed at some point during the new school year because of infections and quarantines, said Josh Shoulta, a spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association.

 

The emergency COVID orders that Beshear put into place all expire on Friday, but that means everything from that point on is on KY Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne.  

Don't expect much from these two clowns.

Sunday Long Read: Lyrical Miracles

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from over at Longreads.com, where Adrian Daub gives us more on the most underrated part of a great film: the lyrics of the movie's soundtrack and who actually writes those swelling choral strains that transfix us in the theaters.

When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started. They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before. This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.

As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.

Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled. “When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in 2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.

But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release, because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece. “The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”

What on earth indeed? It’s a moment where blockbuster filmmaking — always so anxiously in control of its meanings — seems to be at a bit of a loss. And it’s a moment where we as an audience suddenly get a sense for how films make meaning, and how it isn’t always the meaning they intend to make.

So who decided what the lyrics to the theme from The Avengers were? The short answer is that I still don’t know. But the long answer to my pedestrian question leads into the high-pressure, highly collaborative world of film scoring. A world in which composers often have just a few weeks to write music that pleases the studio and the director, and potentially even test audiences. And in which they toil with assistants, orchestrators, sound editors, and many, many session musicians to find a sound for a film that is still in the process of evolving. I wanted to find out who among this massive group would be the one to say “hey, let’s add a chorus and have it sung in Sanskrit” or something along those lines.

The answer turns out to be: Pretty much any of them can and sometimes do. What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place. It’s as likely that a director had the screenwriter invent specific lyrics early in post-production as that a subcontractor, assistant composer, or orchestrator jotted down some words or went on a Wikipedia deep-dive eight weeks out from release in a desperate late-night quest for a non-copyrighted text to use with a cue that might please a bunch of suits half a world away.

Yes, sometimes choral lyrics really are nonsense that happens to sound pretty damn cool in a theater with booming explosions and frenetic action.

Who knew?