Imperial Truth Decay

Source: r/MapPorn

I’m devouring the new Orhan Pamuk book Nights of Plague, an historical novel about an imaginary island where plague management challenges the decaying Ottoman Empire. He’s one of my favorite authors on the power of ideas in contradiction to facts on the ground, and he always makes me laugh as when the nonstop spying of the island’s mythical Department of Scrutinia is headed by a Chief Scrutineer.

Just yesterday I read that a big hospital in the SF Bay Area reinstated a mask mandate due to a surge of covid cases there, and that an average of ten people are still dying of covid in California every day.

Cue the chorus of covid is a hoax, people masking are sheep easily led, more people were injured by the covid vax than saved by it, and so on. The divisiveness of the U.S. empire’s response to this pandemic is a subject I’ve written about before. Originating in a lab, it’s not the first but only the most novel of pathogens weaponized by those who would wield power over restive populations. It turns out that the purpose is murky: smear China via its Wuhan lab? Divide and conquer the U.S. masses seething for change that never comes? Or hasten the information control that kicked off with the post 9/11 Patriot Act and may be cemented into place by claiming free speech can be “weaponized” against the ruling class?

Pamuk writes:

Anyone who joined the Empire’s 65 year old quarantine establishment would quickly realize that their first and most important duty to the Sultan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not so much to stop outbreaks of cholera, as to stop the news of those outbreaks from spreading.

Which reminds me that I was busy with family and did not manage an Earth Day post bemoaning the deadly assault of the empire of capitalism on climate and life. Politically motivated information management abounds in this arena, too, where a billionaire’s rocket uses taxpayer funding to crash and burn on liftoff, allegedly because key safety equipment was deemed too costly by the billionaire himself. Even if Starship had not exploded over the Gulf of Mexico its effect on both climate and coastal environs would have been terrible. All rocket launches, now proliferating rapidly, are terrible for the environment. So space is constantly sold to kids as hooray for science, technology, engineering and math.

Pentagon Planet by Anthony Freda

Meanwhile, liberal rags like Common Dreams provide sophisticated information management around military harm to the environment, well-documented but largely unaddressed as the U.S. military budget continues to metastasize (Space Force requested a 100% increase in its annual budget to pollute and militarize outer space). I noticed and disliked the subtle bias of CD’s Earth Day article with the ironic headline: “Can you fight for climate justice without being antiwar?” No, you cannot —  as some of us have been pointing out for years

But the author used tried and true grammatical sleight of hand to shield some culprits while vilifying others. The U.S. and NATO conspired over the biggest release of methane, the worst of the greenhouse gases, into the Baltic Sea off Denmark, but that act of war on the environment just happened in the passive voice: “the sabotage of the underwater Nord Stream pipelines.” Ditto “the shelling of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, particularly the Zaporizhzhia plant” as if the shelling had mysterious origins rather than emanating from Ukraine.

The U.S. public has been told in both cases via its subservient corporate press that “Russia did it.” That is, destroy its own newly completed gas pipeline and attempt to blow up a nuclear power plant its military had captured quickly. These lies are easily refuted, but you won’t read about it in Common Dreams or the New York Times.

What you will read or hear in every imperial media “news” channel is the active voice when it comes to their current favorite villain. Common Dreams again: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has mutated the global fuel market.”

See the difference? Grammar matters.

Truth, however, is merely an inconvenience to our imperial rulers. If evidence of the president’s deep involvement in corrupt energy schemes in Ukraine might threaten his election, the press stampedes to suppress it and silence those who don’t go along.

Similarly, if the national conversation is about how best to respond to a deadly pathogen, social media platforms obediently silence dissenting voices at the behest of the federal government. The Twitter files are largely, though not exclusively, about sharing evidence of this.

When Pamuk has an Ottoman public health doctor say, “Quarantine is the art of educating the public in spite of itself, and of teaching it the skill of self-preservation,” he might also be thinking about empires and their strategies for preserving their reign.

Nowadays you can be silenced for pointing out enforcement of the preferred narrative, or just for not agreeing with the imperial version of their destructive, expensive wars.

Prior to Earth Day the FBI and DOJ collaborated on the indictment of four members of the African People’s Socialist Party for allegedly colluding with Russia to affect the outcome of an election. Hmm…


According to HandsOffUhuru.com:

On April 18, 2023, indictments were issued by the U.S. Department of Justice against African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel.

Donate to our legal fund at HandsOffUhuru.org/Donate.

“I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever,” said Omali Yeshitela. “Their problem is, I’ve never worked for them.”

Pamuk is a writer from the last bit of the once powerful Ottoman Empire who knows: not working for the imperial forces is the ultimate crime.

Health Care Workers Who Won’t Get COVID Vax To Be Out Of A Job In Maine

My status updates on spybook seldom get much attention, but lately almost anything about COVID choices gets a lot of comments and clicks (and a gratuitous offer of COVID information I can trust? I’ll pass.) 

Yesterday I had a mildly shocking experience receiving health care and I posted this:

The context here in Maine is that our governor has given health care workers notice that, unless they are vaccinated, they will have to stop working in health care. 

If you think this should be a foregone conclusion, you haven’t been paying attention.

There have already been two protests in Maine cities with hundreds of health care workers marching for their right to get up close and personal to administer health care without being vaccinated.

I have persistently shared my theory that the underlying purpose of COVID was to divide the 99% against one another so that the 1% can continue their reign of austerity for us and obscene wealth for them. That, too, has gotten a lot of clicks and shares so it will probably be taken down as misinformation soon (read it here while you can).

Many of the comments I cannot agree with, but I let the debates rage on because

I’m genuinely curious to know how other people understand this health crisis and the optimum ways to respond.

Both right wingers and liberals tend to be really nasty with the name-calling, insults, and generalized lack of respect for other people. I think that’s sad and I never “like” that kind of language. Every genocide and civil war begins with dehumanizing language aimed at “others.”

I am reminded of a theory I encountered recently: holding demonstrably false ideas in public is a way of signaling loyalty to your group, thus conferring an evolutionary advantage. If true, this explains a lot. Especially how 45 became more popular with his fan base for tweeting lies that everyone knew were lies. If you want to check out this theory, you can read about it here.

A ubiquitous comment from both sides wonders how the others could be so stupid.

This is an ableist comment unless what they really mean is ignorant. No, stupid and ignorant aren’t synonyms. One means unable to use reasoning well and the other means lacking information. People with developmental delays in cognition are not uneducated but they are differently abled. As for what happened with public education in the U.S., don’t get me started.

An anecdote from pre-COVID days:

I once learned how to use an app for making online quizzes. Another learner and I took a sample quiz where one of the math questions depended on knowing the order of operations i.e. PEMDAS. The other learner doubted the answer and it bugged them enough that they brought it up to me later. I explained why I thought it was the right answer using PEMDAS and then added, “______ was a math major and is our IT director so I’m pretty sure if he and I disagree about the answer to a math problem, he’s gonna be correct.” I could tell that this did not resolve the other learner’s skepticism. They trusted my answer — I was a literacy coach — more than his! Possibly because they had a closer relationship with me than with the IT director? Who really knows.

Distrust of experts — even in an education setting — has been with us for a while.

And it can be deadly. 

Maine legislator Rep. Chris Johansen continues to go into crowds unmasked and to fight vaccines and masking requirements for large gatherings despite the fact that both he and his wife contracted COVID. His wife died.

Then there’s the fact that the No Child Behind Act, passed with bipartisan support during George W. Bush’s adminstration, took an ax to both science and social studies education. It did this by preferencing reading and math for the test-and-punish regime that enriched for-profit testing corporations. Science clawed its way back via STEM and other intitiatives from the outside world, but much damage had  been done. And social studies has never really recovered. 

That explains a lot, too, doesn’t it? It’s clear how even many elected officials really don’t know the structures of government or understand their role in that structure. Once big money controlled all three branches of government at the federal level, and many if not all state legislatures, the old civics lesson on “how a bill becomes a law” became a lie anyway.

It would probably be elitist of me to point out that it isn’t doctors or registered nurses (RN) refusing to get vaccinated for the most part. 

Here in Maine it’s the much less educated health care providers who are the refuseniks e.g. certified nursing assistants (CNAs), lab technicians, hospital kitchen workers, group home attendants, and the like.

My sister works at the leading research hospital in northern California as an RN and has for years. I value her information and advice because so far it has been ahead of the curve i.e. the intel that she passes on from the epidemiologists at her hospital anticipates what eventually the CDC gets around to recommending. I’m guessing this is because UCSF researchers care about health rather than about commerce, while the CDC must serve two masters.

Meanwhile, every school district in Maine — and there are a lot of them — has been thrown to the wolves to hold the line for science amid shouts, threats, and jeers of uneducated and/or ignorant parents.

Then there’s the big picture context.

Source: https://twitter.com/OpinionatedLab/status/1426296638654619648

Lies are the currency of the day. Big lies, ones that can kill you.

Well, after all this gloom and doom I feel moved to end on a lighter note. No idea who created this gem:

Source: https://www.facebook.com/snarkavenue/photos/a.397515703684731/3517531905016413/