Posterous you are pretty rad, but I've gone back to blogger after many a year.  Perhaps I shall return if the winds blow again.

See the blog here: http://twinvn.blogspot.com

Backstory: A flood of tweets start showing up with a #iranelection hash tag (a form that makes it easily searchable and compiled) recounting the early beginnings of protest, news of election fraud, and what some view as revolution. From an outside of the USA view it seems a worldwide community harmoniously joins behind the Iranian people. It is indeed nice to see the common American rush to support a people from a country that has been demonized so much in our media and foreign policy.

Coverage has been intense, most notably here: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ or here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/

Within a couple of days, however, I started seeing links to other sites attempting to discredit some of these Iranian twitterers.

The most infamous being here: http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/proof-israeli-effort-to-destabilize-...
which originally began at www.chartingstocks.com

While I don't buy most of the "proofs" here it does confuse me as to the level of the English in most posts. Non-native speakers are bound to be successful especially in the realm of technology, but for a country where (as best I can find, please correct if it's wrong) 2% of the population has English language ability I am quite impressed by their grasp of English and especially technical abbreviation.

Of course thinking about twitter revolutions leads us back to only a few months ago in Moldova: http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution

However, this twitter revolution also is a bit dubious: http://kylekeeton.com/2009/04/russia-twitter-revolution-made-in.html

Which leads us to here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/raimondo/raimondo55.html and here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/raimondo/raimondo58.html

I realize this stuff walks the fine line between conspiracy theory/black helicopter speculation, but Iran has certainly not forgotten 1953 like we have when U.S. dabbled in Iranian politics, and some may say with our sanctions and current foreign policy we haven't stopped (see above for where $400 million is going). And while I do think some of these links are questionable at best there may be some nugget of truth between the rampant reporting of this new twitter revolution and a covert attempt to keep Iran unstable. I'm holding my breath for the future of Iran...and praying for Iranians as well.

I just finished watching Saturday Night Live's finale which ended with
Will Ferrell singing an ode to his Viet Nam experience...a sprawling
epic which hints at lost buddies and the tragedies of war and which is
revealed to be a vacation in Southeast Asia four years ago. As his
bar buddies ask if anything bad happened, they also reveal that the
worst was that his luggage was lost.
 
Likewise, looking back to an episode of It's Always Sunny in
Philadelphia, we see the father figure of Frank fraternizing with some
Vietnamese folks (looking very dubious). When asked about meeting
them, and if it was during the war, his son reveals that by no means
was it during that period...but rather during a business trip in the
90's.
 
I really appreciate these two shows as they show both the complexity
of the Vietnamese fixation in America and the difficulty we have from
separating the country from the conflict. It's nice to see some humor
invoked to compare that of the turmoil that American and Vietnamese
people suffered in the tragic conflict and that of now, when Viet Nam
is not only a tourist destination for many a Southeast Asian
backpacker, but also an emerging and growing regional power.
 
I think comedy like this is the first step for Americans to be looking
at Viet Nam beyond the eyes of enemy or Communist or whatever term it
has yielded for over 40 years. Every year there are articles and
articles written about Americans apprehensive about going to Viet Nam
because of the history there, and every article always reveals the
young population who doesn't remember the war, the outlook of Viet Nam
to the future, and how Yanks are treated with no animosity upon
arrival. These things have been true for many a year, but it's
especially nice to see some mainstream programming recognizing that
Viet Nam is much more beyond what most Americans envision it. That is,
it's a people, a country, a culture; not a chapter in American history.