{"id":53754,"date":"2020-06-20T05:58:08","date_gmt":"2020-06-20T10:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53754"},"modified":"2020-06-20T05:58:14","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T10:58:14","slug":"lies-damned-lies-and-covid19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53754","title":{"rendered":"Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/off-guardian.org\/2020\/06\/18\/lies-damned-lies-and-covid19\/\">Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper,&nbsp;<em>\u201cdepicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in a straight line.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The capitalists who printed that picture wanted people to think Soviet children were&nbsp;<em>\u201ctreated like prisoners,\u201d<\/em>&nbsp;the teacher declared angrily,&nbsp;<em>\u201cwhen in reality the kids were on their way to a swimming pool in their bathrobes.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which was a nice story (thought little Katya) \u2014 except that \u201cI had never even seen a pool\u2026. [T]hey existed in my mind as does an exotic animal or an unvisited city.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A time capsule from a remote dystopia? Think again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Staring at me right now from the latest quarterly newsletter of my&nbsp;<em>alma mater<\/em>, the University of Virginia, is an identical piece of bad-is-good fakery: a photograph of an involuntarily isolated graduate student named Kalea Obermeyer, accompanied by a caption blandly informing the reader that the woman seated alone on a trunk in the confines of a cramped dormitory room, clumsily swathed in a surgical mask, \u201cshelters in place\u201d in \u201cher most secure housing during the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome to Pravda, COVID19 style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Being an honest sort, I have considered whether I ought to write to the editors of my old university\u2019s magazine, accusing them of playing toady to democracy-destroying propagandists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Should I remind these so-called educators of the young that the term \u201cshelter in place\u201d is properly applied to air raids, not to \u201cpandemics,\u201d and is a cruel hoax when pressed into service to describe what is actually an illegal quarantine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19 Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper,&nbsp;\u201cdepicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28817,29011,2864,29902,1426,24368,655,855],"class_list":["post-53754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-lies","tag-michael-lesher","tag-misinformation","tag-off-guardian-2","tag-propaganda","tag-viral-pandemic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53755,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53754\/revisions\/53755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}