Where do persecuted writers go? Vegas, baby!

I just found this out and cannot get over how weird it seems:
Las Vegas was the first official U.S. City of Asylum for persecuted writers from around the world.

(Really? Las Vegas? I was thinking more along the lines of Walden Pond...or at least any locale not so well known for celebrating mindlessness. And not the good, yogic kind of mindlessness; the boozing, "Girls Gone Wild" kind of mindlessness that doesn't really mesh with my conceptions of the writerly life.)

Anyway, I digress.

In 2001, City of Asylum Las Vegas was founded, the first such program in the United States. Groups in Ithaca, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Iowa City, Iowa, have since formed similar programs. The IIML is now in discussion with groups in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. about developing programs in those cities.
Each City of Asylum in the network provides a safe haven for a writer whose voice is muffled by censorship, or who is living with the threat of imprisonment or assassination. The writer receives a $30,000 annual stipend, a home or apartment, health insurance, and help securing an appointment, if the writer wishes, at a leading academic institution.

In summary: really cool program; really (fill in the adjective: awful; depressing; just-plain-odd; soaked-in-intellectual-depravity) location.

(Thanks to Chekhov's Mistress for the link to the story.)