Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at April 18th, 2007

So here’s a strange juxtaposition: A few weeks ago, I attended the ninth annual Summit on Racism. The next day I attended a cooking seminar entitled, “The Spirit of Soul Food.”

Summit on Racism is a little bit of a downer. It’s not supposed to be. It tries to be positive and goal oriented as opposed to concentrating exclusively on what’s wrong with the world. Still, the only reason anybody is there is that our society treats some people badly for no good reason. You can’t expect to come out of something like that cheering.

“The Spirit of Soul Food” by contrast is more of a celebration of the style of cooking that came out of the combination of North American environment, slavery, and African culinary sensibilities.

What sort of food do you learn how to make? Many different sorts of food. A key point is that the food you learn how to make is the sort of food that people make at home everyday. Thus you get things like meatloaf, pork chops in gravy, and macaroni and cheese. There were also a lot of interesting vegetable side dishes (greens) and desserts (sweet potato pie, for example).

Oddly enough, it served to reconnect me with the cooking I grew up with as much as it did Soul Food. Since teaching myself to cook, I’ve spent most of my time cooking Indian, Mediterranean (Italian, Greek, Provencal French, Lebanese), and Southeast Asian (Thai, Malay) food. Occasionally, I also cook a few favorites from my childhood, but not all that many. My kids have seen a lot more basmati rice than grilled cheese sandwiches.

Soul Food doesn’t use curries as often as it does garlic or onion powder. It uses Campbell’s Soup (cream of mushroom) in more than a few recipes. The recipe for macaroni and cheese actually required me to buy Velveeta for the first time in my life.

It’s worth noting that “Soul Food” isn’t a homogeneous entity. It varies by region. In Louisiana, it includes red beans and rice. In places near the ocean, it includes crab cakes. Bearing in mind that Jaye and her father Jim originally come from Kentucky, this particular seminar included a recipe for Kentucky Bourbon Pie (bourbon comes from Kentucky). I tried the pie. It’s good.

Those of us who wanted to could also try a sip of the bourbon. It’s powerful stuff.

The instructors: Jim Beeler is a (semi-retired) self taught cook who worked in restaurants for his professional life. Jaye Beeler is the food editor for the Grand Rapids Press (my local paper). Even beyond learning about Soul Food, the family dynamics were entertaining.

During the seminar, each person was responsible to cook one dish. Despite not liking macaroni and cheese, I chose that one. Why? Mostly because my kids do like it. I thought it might be interesting to know how to make Mac and Cheese from scratch and flavor it with actual cheese as opposed to from a box flavored with Mystery Cheese Powder.

It turned out pretty well. I’ve made it at home since then and my family seems to like it (with the exception of one of my daughters who simply doesn’t like cheese). The same is generally true of the other dishes from the seminar. I’ve been trying to make one or two a week.

Next year they were talking about doing a slightly different seminar–a Soul Food brunch. I’d go.

Posted by Jim at February 25th, 2007

The 2008 presidential campaign seems to have started much too early. If you’re already sick of Hillary, Obama, McCain, Giuliani and such, I’d like to point out another possible candidate:

General Zod of Krypton

I’m not saying he’d be a good ruler (unless you like brutal oppression), but at least you’d know what you were getting.

Posted by Jim at January 13th, 2007

I didn’t watch the presidential speech about Iraq on Wednesday, but I had a good idea what was coming and figured that I could watch it online or read it if there were anything important that I missed.

So far I haven’t felt the need.

The gist of the plan is that we’re going to put in 20,000 more troops and stabilize Baghdad in an attempt to stop the violence there.

It’s funny. From before we went in I’ve believed that we were going in with too few troops. I should be happy, but…

I’ve got a bit of a problem with this one. I’m thinking that the best case scenario is that they succeed and stabilize Baghdad. Even in that scenario, there’s the whole rest of the country that would not have been stabilized. In the worst case scenario, of course, we’re just going to send more people over there without any change at all.

Er… No wait. That’s not the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that we send in more people and it actually makes the situation worse. Don’t ask me how that’d happen, but I’m sure it’s possible (just not probable–I hope).

But back to the main point of this post… Basically the whole point of having 400,000 or 500,000 troops in there is that there’s no place for insurgents to go that they can escape our troops. As it is, they can leave Baghdad and start operations somewhere else–which is the major problem we’ve been facing all along.

Also, of course, if troops follow the insurgency to the new problem spot, the insurgents can always move back to Baghdad.

We’ve got enough troops to stop an insurgency in the country. We just don’t have enough to stop insurgencies all over the country and keep them stopped.

Of course, I’ve got to admit that success isn’t inevitable even with with 400,000 troops. There’s just a far better chance then than with 130,000 to 150,000 (plus some 10,000-15,000 coalition troops).

With any luck, the current Congress will find some way to push the Bush administration along. I’ve got to admit though, that I think that unlikely. From what I understand, the power of the purse is a fairly blunt instrument and Bush has the ability to move money around from one place to another.

I deeply suspect that we won’t see an effective Iraq policy until we have an administration that wasn’t involved in getting us into this mess.

UPDATE: Just for what it’s worth, I’d like to clarify that “effective Iraq policy” doesn’t necessarily mean putting in 400,000 troops at this point. It could just as easily mean pulling out, involving other countries in the process as per the Iraq Study Group, or some other new and creative idea that seems unlikely to come out of the current administration.

Posted by Jim at January 10th, 2007

I don’t know if it happens to you, but sometimes I wonder what happened to people I know from high school. Specifically, I’ve occasionally wondered about Erik Prince, a person with whom I was on the track team. We weren’t close or anything, but I talked to him every once in a while. Also, his parents were wealthy and financed my class’s high school graduation party.

A few days ago, someone told me that he owned a com pany that supplied mercenaries to protect people in Iraq. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “that’s interesting. So that’s what he’s doing now.”

And then today, this:

Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future.

(From David Brin’s blog, scroll down a bit in the post and you’ll find it in context)

In a science fiction novel or comic book, this would undoubtedly be preparatory to me getting superhuman abilities and lead to a dramatic confrontation in the halls of Blackwater’s HQ. *

In reality of course, superpowers are not forthcoming and it remains very, very strange to find someone you knew mentioned on your favorite author’s blog as a possible source of theocratic dictatorship.

I’ve got to admit though, that I don’t think that either Erik or Blackwater is particularly likely to try to end democracy. The article that Brin pulls the quote from has a certain conspiracy theory quality to it that I can’t quite pin down. It might be that as someone who is a Christian and comes out of an evangelical background, I don’ t know anybody who’d be for a theocracy. In fact, on the rare occasions that I’ve been in Christian bookstores, I’ve been amused to notice multiple Christian, political thrillers in which the presumably atheistic left puts a dictatorship in place.

If nothing else, US citizens of all stripes share a common anxiety.

* Clarification: For those of you who don’t ever read comics or science fiction, it’s worth mentioning that it’s pretty common to have someone that the main character likes turn up later doing something that they disagree with. It’s a good way to ratchet up the tension. It’s kind of overused though.

Posted by Jim at November 7th, 2006

Those of you who were reading here two years ago, know that robocalls irritate me. This year I haven’t gotten as irritated as other years (I once got 14 on a single day) because the number of robocalls hasn’t been so bad.

I live in a racially mixed area and one that trends democratic.

Thus, I’ve gotten an interesting series of phone calls over the last few weeks. They’re all from someone with obviously African-American speech patterns. Within the first few sentences, she complains that Granholm (Michigan’s governor, a Democrat) has been taking “us” for granted.

In the first call, she encouraged people to split their ticket and vote for DeVos (the Republican candidate). In the next four calls she’s left a number of variations on that message, telling potential voters that:

–Granholm is damaging the public schools
–she’s actually working to send money to suburban schools
–she’s got a Ku Klux Klansman working for her

So far she’s only promoted voting for DeVos (though never by name) and concentrated on convincing people that Granholm is evil.

It’s not illegal, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Posted by Jim at November 7th, 2006

Not to nag, but, you are going to vote, aren’t you?

Posted by Jim at November 3rd, 2006

As someone who considers himself a moderate, I’m not particularly inclined to believe one party rule is a good thing. I want each party to be in charge of something. That way each of them have a stake in government and no party constantly gets their way.

Divided government also requires each party to compromise, forcing people to govern from the middle of the country rather than Dennis Hastert’s “middle of the majority.”

That’s one reason I’m hoping that the Democrats will take at least the House.

If you’re interested, here’s an article about divided government that I’m largely in agreement with.

Posted by Jim at October 28th, 2006

Here’s clip from David Letterman’s show in which David Letterman and Bill O’Reilly talk about Iraq. There’s a point in it in which O’Reilly asks the sort of question that he often asks on his own tv show–a question that makes the interviewee look like a fool when he/she answers differently than Bill O’Reilly would have.

It’s harder to put someone into a box when it’s not your show.

Posted by Jim at October 14th, 2006

Some of you may remember this post I made about Iraq a while back. I can’t say my views have changed much since then, but that won’t stop me from briefly revisiting them.

Here’s the worst case scenario I worried about pre-invasion due to the little I was hearing about post-invasion planning:

1. We invade and win.
2. Due to not having enough troops on the ground, we are not able to prevent an insurgency from developing.
3. Because we do not prevent an insurgency from developing, many people die and the U.S. public loses confidence in the war.
4. Because the war is unpopular, we pull out early. This leads to civil war or at least civil disorganization.
5. Eventually some sort of dictator comes into being, stabilizing the country, but causing the U.S. to wonder whether it should go in a second time.

Though I don’t find it particularly comforting, I’ve been a little bit relieved to find that we are only at number 3 (even though the current situation edges toward 4) in my worst case scenario.

“Well,” I’ve said to myself, “at least we haven’t had serious talk about putting in a dictator to stabilize the country.”

You can then imagine my reaction to this NPR story about coup rumors in Iraq. The good news is that a coup isn’t likely. The bad news is that some Iraqis appear to be thinking that it wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing.

In the past I’ve written that the solution to insurgency is putting more people on the ground. I still think this. The trouble is that the chances of that are roughly zero. If we wanted to raise the necessary troops from our own country, we’d need to draft people. Raising troops from other countries seems unlikely.

Bearing that in mind, it seems that the question then becomes how to leave responsibly. As in, how do we leave while giving Iraq the best chance to avoid civil war and dictatorship? Personally, I’d be in favor of a slow withdrawal while simultaneously training up Iraqi troops. The trouble is that that seems to be our current policy and my impression is that it’s not working very well.

Every so often I’ve heard people who defend the war say something along the lines of, “Leaving Iraq alone would have left Saddam Hussein in charge. Removing him is an improvement no matter what else happens.”

While I agree that removing Saddam Hussein from power is potentially a good thing, I’m inclined to think that a process of removal that turns Iraq into a chaotic mess (or creates a new dictator) is just as bad or worse.

Posted by Jim at July 23rd, 2006

Apparently some group in Germany is sticking miniature flags with George W. Bush’s picture into piles of dog poop.

The police are looking for them, but apparently there’s no law against that sort of thing so I’ve no idea what they’ll do if they find them.