Vignettes

“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.” Newt Gingrich

Went well today. Yes, my reputation as a Super-Hero from A-Mer-EE-Ka carried the day. It was difficult though trying to speak Armenian all day long. The English teacher speaks English as well as I speak Armenian. It will be good for her too to be around a native speaker. The kids are so dang cute and they really put on their best for me. I will go out there once a week to work with the English teacher. She'll put together a group and we'll have some fun times.

I arrived at the school around 11am and was deposited in the teacher's lounge. Soon the English teacher came and collected me and I followed her from class to class. The heat throughout the building consists of one poor electric space heater in each room. Everyone wears their coat all day. I was fortunate to be able to sit by the heater to observe the class, but it was meager heat at that. New windows and doors have been installed in the building but other than that the surroundings are grim. Cracks in the walls that have been plastered over, paint chipping and worn away, floors either chipping concrete or unfinished wood. Chipping concrete stairwells with iron railings whose paint has long worn away. (Dang those Ruskies are good architects with an eye for aesthetics.) Very sparse decor on the walls. The teacher chalks and talks. I admire her energy. The book is poor. The 3rd graders were attempting to read a rather complex essay about Christmas. All in all they do amazingly well. One wonders how they manage to keep up their spirits in the face of the devastation around them and the lack of opportunity ahead of them. The human spirit is truly amazing.

These children clearly have different features than the average Armenian. They have come from the neighboring country for the most part. The faces are often more rounded, the hawk nose gone, freckles, blue eyes and blond hair appear more frequently in the crowd.
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Life's been being very "Business as Usual" around here lately. Hard to explain . . . counterparts who don't show up at the office for days, organizations that misappropriate donated funds, a general mindset that sees Americans as Cash Cows . . . . I lost it yesterday. I try to figure out how to just quietly go on doing life the way I do it, trying to change the ruling paradigms one person at at a time, but it's frustrating. I want to just scream sometimes: "Why can't you understand that if you conduct life this way it'll always be like this?" Then other times, like now, I become reflective and realize the forces that have molded this place and these people. So . . . . . . I tell myself, it's all about the children, it's all about the children. I must learn how to confront the culture openly and honestly without rancor.

Vardenis

Life is challenging here in oh so many ways. Before I came I thought it would be the broken infrastructure and rough living conditions that would push me to the wall . . . .

Who's on first?

January 18, 2010 10:34 AM EST by John Stossel
Stealth Propaganda

An obscure 2008 academic article gained traction with bloggers over the weekend. The article was written by the head of Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein. He’s a good friend of the president and the promoter the contradictory idea: "libertarian paternalism". In the article, he muses about what government can do to combat "conspiracy" theories:

...we suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies ... will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. They do so by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.

That's right. Obama's Regulation Czar is so concerned about citizens thinking the wrong way that he proposed sending government agents to "infiltrate" these groups and manipulate them. This reads like an Onion article: Powerful government official proposes to combat paranoid conspiracy groups that believe the government is out to get them...by proving that they really are out to get them. Did nothing of what Sunstein was writing strike him as...I don't know...crazy? "Cognitive infiltration" of extremist groups by government agents? "Stylized facts"? Was "truthiness" too pedantic?

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald explains why this you should be disturbed by this:

This was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein's close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees. Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.

... What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein's worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that "false conspiracy theories" are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.

It's certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive "false conspiracy theories" have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power: namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, "crazy conspiracy theorist" has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption.

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein's desire to use covert propaganda to "undermine" anti-government speech so repugnant. The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned -- rationally -- to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein's proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is. In other words, people don't trust the Government and "conspiracy theories" are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.

Read more: http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/01/18/stealth-propaganda/?test=latestnews#ixzz0d0lV78yf

January 2010

"There are no foreign lands. It is only the traveler who is foreign."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

Amazing! 2010! And I can still remember like it was yesterday that everyone was freaking over the new millenium. And in 2000 whoever thought I'd be living in Armenia? Certainly not me. I had no idea where on the map Armenia was or if it was. Like most US Americans I would constantly confuse Armenia with Albania. Though somewhere haunting my memory was something terrible regarding Armenia . . . .