The Kazan-based television station Efir24 recently aired a news broadcast about a man arrested for driving while heavily intoxicated. The man was so drunk that he nearly passed out while being interrogated by police officers. This is the dialogue between the officer and the driver captured on film:
Vital knowledge (on an instinctual level). / serg k
Whose car is this?
Don't know.
Did you steal it or something?
Yeah, probably.
Who'd you steal it from?
Don't know.
And how much have you had to drink today?
Don't know.
You don't know anything, eh?
Nope.
Well who's the president of the Russian Federation? Do you know?
Yes. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
According to Efir24, this knowledge of Putin didn't help. The full 20-minute TV show episode (about car accidents) can be viewed here (in Russian).
A Princeton PhD, was a U.S. diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Central/Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. After leaving the State Department in 2003 to express strong reservations about the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, he shared ideas with Georgetown University students on the tension between propaganda and public diplomacy. He has given talks on "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" to participants in the "Open World" program. Among Brown’s many articles is his latest piece, “Janus-Faced Public Diplomacy: Creel and Lippmann During the Great War,” now online. He is the compiler (with S. Grant) of The Russian Empire and the USSR: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States (also online). In the past century, he served as an editor/translator of a joint U.S.-Soviet publication of archival materials, The United States and Russia: The Beginning of Relations,1765-1815. His approach to "scholarly" aspirations is poetically summarized by Goethe: "Gray, my friend, is every theory, but green is the tree of life."
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