Monday, March 9, 2009

How Alaskan tourists are to be manipulated into feeling

I backed off on the whole Copper River Country Mapping Project as soon as I realized I could get sucked into that legal rat race and still never end up with a map. So I made my own (as many readers already saw) and printed a copy and put it on display at the local store for feedback. The feedback is "When can we start selling them?" heh. So I made enough off the Iditarod auctions to ORDER prints and now I'm on a roll again. But my inbox is filling up with emails from the Mapping group who sure have a lot to say about this project and a lot of time to devote to it too. Their map is planned to come out in 2010. One of the members did offer to help me get local businesses to put up the money for the printing but I haven't responded to any of them, been too busy making the money I needed to pay for the first printing run.

So tonight I opened an exchange with another member who "clarified the goals" in the most convoluted gobboldy goop synopsis I think I ever read (and I've read a lot of govt crap). I had one of my neighbors read it and it made zero sense to him either. Then the same guy just sent this out, and it sure rings a bell with all the stuff I learned in "Sinister Forces" by Peter Levenda about mind control and the whole OSS/NAZI/CIA experiments on people's memories. Does it seem odd to anyone else that this is the objective of a map designed to entice tourists out here?

Hello All,

I thought I would gather a little information to help you all understand what is intended by the objectives when it comes to words such as intellectual and emotional and meanings. Below is a few snippets of info. I use in teaching others about interpretation. I hope this helps to clarify what I intended. I'll be happy to discuss these concepts with you all.

Making connections
Both of the recent NPS and NAI definitions include the idea that interpretation facilitates connections between the interests of the visitors and the meanings of the artifacts, collections or natural resources of a site. It is these personal connections and powerful meanings that visitors will remember long after their site visit, more so than the tactics involved in a battle, or the names of wetland species. Truly meaningful interpretation relates what is being interpreted to the hearts and minds of the audience and answers the question “Why should I care?” Connections involve moments of intellectual and emotional revelation, perception, insight, or discovery. Opportunities for visitors to meaningfully connect to a site occur when an interpreter successfully links a site’s tangible resources to the intangible meanings those resources tend to represent.

Sites have been put into public trust because they are viewed as having enough meaning, enough significance, to our society to be preserved. It is the meanings and significance of the site that drive its preservation and inspire visitors to visit and to care. Interpretation highlights those
meanings so they are not lost or forgotten. Often, we take for granted the beliefs and values that drive our actions and choices. For example, while many Americans value the ability to travel or speak freely, few ponder the meaning of freedom on a daily basis. “Interpretation facilitates the
process by which meanings move from being taken for granted to being actively engaged” (Goldman, et al., 2001, p. 24). This active engagement may result in more memorable experiences as visitors find new meanings in the resources they enjoy.

To be broadly relevant, an interpretive product must provide opportunities for both emotional and intellectual connections to the meanings of the resource. Some of the links should be intentionally developed to provide opportunities for emotional connections and some for intellectual connections. An interpreter needs to plan specific opportunities that are intended to inspire or provoke feelings like awe, wonder, sympathy, curiosity, amazement, regret, grief, and anger. Other specific opportunities should provoke insight, understanding of context, discovery,
and reveal relationships.

Todd Stoeberl
Visitor Center Manager
Supervisory Interpretive Park Ranger
P.O. Box 439
106.8 Richardson Hwy
Copper Center, AK 99573
9078227251
9078225237 (Fax)
What an amazing map this will be, eh?

And don't you just wonder why we need a position called "Supervisory Interpretive Park Ranger?" It also always seemed strange to me that the new Visitor's Center to Wrangell St. Elias National Park is 59 miles away from the entrance to the park. If you're coming north from Valdez on the Richardson Hwy you have to drive PAST the park road entrance and go 24 more miles (58 RT) to get to the Park Visitor's Center. It should be on the Edgerton Hwy or in Chitina. But these same govt agencies call this a "wilderness corridor" and Chitina "a living ghost town."

Speaking of Chitina, Catherine may be interested in selling the Emporium. It's a historic building in downtown Chitina right next to Spirit Mountain Artworks and the fully refurbished Gilpatrick's Hotel Chitina. It has the original steam engine that heated the town in the 1930s. During the copper boom Chitina was the largest town in Alaska. The Emporium needs about $250,000 in structural repairs and she decided she doesn't want to take the project any further. Her and her husband John bought it decades ago, and John has since passed on. I offered to write the ad and put it online somewhere, wherever it is you put ads like that.. ebay?

There are NO taxes in Chitina, there's no property taxes in this entire region. Haven't verified this yet, but we may be the last place in the United States that has no municipal or county govt. We're not a Scenic Byway, the locals stopped that. We're not a Buffer Zone. There are no land use regulations, other than the state and federal gaming and mining laws. We don''t need a permit to build anything. Alaska has no state income tax either. I've been able to live better here on nothing than anywhere else I've ever lived. Now if I could just be free to get some sheep and goats I'd start a little farm... but animals are the next way to gain access to our property and regulate us. Every time I read an off the grid blog I'm sad to know they will still have regulators at their doors. Just because we don't want to be part of the plan doesn't mean we get to "opt" out of the new requirements for global citizenship. We need to stop them before they gather enough strength of law to kick our doors in... but nobody knows how to do that, especially me.

Update 2:39am: One of my readers did a little googling tonight and found more abou our local mapmaking Supervisory Interpretive Park Ranger. He wrote lessons based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights in NY and North Dakota before he came here to enlighten us.

Description of the Competency
National Park Service interpretation directly supports the preservation mission. Interpretation is driven by a philosophy that charges interpreters to help audiences care about park resources so they might support the care for park resources. http://www.nps.gov/interp/backup/idp/fulfill.htm
Todd was assigned here just this year:
Theodore Roosevelt National Park North
Unit Scenic Byway

Todd Stoeberl accepted a new position
with the National Park service in Alaska.
His new position also coincidentally resides
near a scenic byway. 2008 Annual Report
According to Linkedin, Stoeberl is a 20 year govt employee who's the Supervisory Park Ranger at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Anchorage, Alaska Area.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/todd/stoeberl . Wonder why he doesn't name the park in his email signature. So this all leads back to the Wrangell Institute for Science and Environment:

"Wrangell Institute for Science and Environment is a grassroots organization dedicated to teaching science and environmental education. It is our dream to bring a sense of wonder, excitement, and stewardship of nature so people can carry those special moments with them throughout their life. With this solid foundation, citizens will be able to make informed and enlightened decisions. Our strength lies in with collaboration many groups and organizations to provide a quality education experience in science and natural history." http://www.wise-edu.org/index.htm

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Objectives, emotional, facilitates, beliefs, values, actions, choices, value, meanings, engagement, provoke feelings, sympathy, regret, grief, anger," Repeatedly through this letter the author is revealed as a change agent. There are more change agents now than those people who are not. But that was planned. Change agents have been trained to replicate themselves. Both children and adults have been in training to think this way. Masses in the so-called churches that are also training change agents are being replicated. The "gifted" program at our local school has this same vocabulary. This is the vocabulary of Outcomes Based Education. This is the vocabulary of Benjamin Bloom and all the other Transformationists. They know that Affective Education/Emotions are what must be used to manipulate people.

Anonymous said...

Somewhat off the subject, but still dealing with EMOTIONS: beggar at my door last evening. A young man begging money for SAVE THE CHILDREN. He told me he had a college education but couldn't find a job. He told me he voted for Obama. I told him the chickens had come home to roost. I asked him if he knew the term COMMUNITARIANISM. He said he'd never heard of it. I told him he needs to since that's the form of government we live under. I dismissed him and then Googled SAVE THE CHILDREN. Nefarious. The source of the UN's Convention On The Rights Of The Child. People should go to their site and read the names of the board and their sponsors.

Anonymous said...

With so many humans in the world who need to be controlled it's so much easier if they can be controlled by indoctrinating them to think, act and believe the way THE STATE wants them to think, act and believe. Otherwise THE STATE will have to get nasty. So if Todd and his ilk can write up curricula and historical/park interpretations in such a way that the herd has "good-thought" then all goes so much more smoothly. During the summer months, when THE STATE does not have children in the government schools to indoctrinate, parents may take their children (those same students) to a government park or historical site and interpretive materials such as Todd's will be waiting for them there to reinforce the "good think" that was part of the school curricula. And when back in the government school, curricula such as the one used with Eleanor Roosevelt's home can be used to train in "good think" including the need to "volunteer". And home schoolers aren't left out because they are offered the same materials, FREE, FREE, FREE, to use on their kids. What a country, as Yacov used to say.

Anonymous said...

While visiting our daughter's house yesterday I picked up the spelling workbook her young daughter is using right now. I opened it up a few pages from the front and, lo and behold, the section/unit I read had a theme of SAVING THE PLANET/VOLUNTEERING/GETTING OTHERS TO VOLUNTEER. You just can't get away from the brainwash even when homeschooling.