Middle Eastern Lentil Soup Recipe

 Soak 2.5 cups of red lentils for at least an hour. Do NOT substitute brown or green lentils as these require a different amount of time to soak. For the best price, do not buy the lentils from a supermarket. Buy them from a halal store where you can buy it in bulk.

Dice up one small onion and three cloves of garlic and saute in oil in a pot (preferably olive oil but regular cooking oil will do). The onions/garlic should be enough to comfortably cover the bottom of the cooking pot.

Put together in a bowl:  2 tbsp turmeric powder, 3 tbsp cumin, 3 tbsp salt, and 1/2 tbsp black pepper, Dump these spices in with the hot oil/onion for 20 seconds to bring out the flavor.

vegetables:  I usually mince up a couple of stalks of celery and one small carrot to give the soup a little more body but this is optional. If you are using these, dump these in and then add enough water to submerge contents of the pot and allow for the eventual addition of the lentils which you should strain in a collend,. .   colland/. . . . collein.. . . .  spaghetti strainer

When water is at a rolling boil add the lentils and stir

After fifteen minutes (this is also optional), dice up a small potato and add to the pot in order to give the soup more body.

Cook at least 20 more minutes.  When it's done it should be like soup. If it's not like soup you either didn't cook it long enough or you used too much water or not enough water. Oops.

When it's done, check for salinity. Add salt if needed.

Serve with lemons to squeeze juice into the soup. Actually I cook the soup with lemon salt which you can buy from the halal store under the name acid salt but fresh lemon is better.

If the balance of spices is not to your liking, adjust next time. I don't actually measure my spices in measuring spoons so I'm just approximating.

Generalizations, Prejudgment, and Bias

Back on or around October 1991, I was a student at Lansing Community College. I was friends with a black female student named Valencia. One day Valencia showed up to class looking miserable. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "Michael, I feel so bad about something I just did. I was walking across the bridge to come to class and there was only one other person walking on the bridge. It was a black male walking towards me on the same side of the street. I got nervous so I clutched my purse and crossed to the other side of the street. Mike, we get mad at white people when they prejudge and are fearful of minorities and then look I just did the same thing we get mad about."

I told her "Don't you dare feel bad about you looking out for yourself. You don't know that guy and have no idea whether he's good or bad. You have no responsibility to put yourself in a possibly dangerous situation just to prove how non judgmental you are. In fact, in this case, non judgment would be the wrong answer. We can't just presume everybody out there is good."

In this society, at least since the Civil Rights Movement, we have been raised to believe that prejudging and generalizing about people are moral wrongs but in fact these are mental shortcuts that help humans optimize their choices in situations where our knowledge is limited. Compare 100 people who arrive to a job interview dressed professionally with nice shoes, a tie, and a neat haircut versus 100 people who arrive in jeans, a hoodie, gym shoes, and unwieldy hair. While I acknowledge that there would be some in that second group who would make good employees, the first group would have a higher percentage of good candidates because the way they dress speaks the qualities of conscientiousness and professionalism that set them apart from that second group. You don't have to bother with going through 200 applications in this situation. Restricting your search to that first group will provide optimal results.

This isn't an easy concept for people to understand because their belief in the immorality of generalizing makes them try to think of objections. Think about it this way. As a group men are taller than women. But if you say that (which should be a purely obvious and banal fact), someone is going to respond "That's not true. There is a 6 foot tall women at my job and the guys there are like 5'5". Of course the proper responses to this is are:

• The exception does not disprove the rule and;
• A woman in the top 2% of women's height should be compared to a man in that same percentile, not to a man in a low percentile

I was once in a bar with three members of my pool team and we got on the subject of generalizations. I said "Not all generalizations are bad. Some things just are. For example, black smokers are more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than white smokers."

On of my teammates took immediate umbrage at this and said "That's not true! I know plenty of black people who smoke non-menthol!"

Note first, he ignored the fact that I did not say no black smokers smoke non menthols. Also, my point is not that he was unaware of the fact that what I said was correct (and to clarify, it has been well documented that cigarette companies historically marketed menthol cigarettes much more actively in the black community and that menthol cigarettes are actually more deadly than non menthol but I digress). My point is that denying obvious truths in situations like these are examples of virtue signaling. Look at me, since I am the one arguing against generalizing and you are the one generalizing, I am the good guy and you are the bad guy. Never mind that acknowledging the discrepancy in these rates would actually be the first step in addressing health disparities between the two groups but that is entirely beside the point. For the person doing the virtue signaling, their point never was actually helping the people they are ostensibly advocating for. Their main and possibly only point was ever to paint themselves as good and their opponents as bad.

My final point is that generalizing is only appropriate when you lack specific knowledge of the situation you need to judge. If you have candidates of different races before you and you say to yourself oh Asians are more academically successful that other races, then you look at their transcripts and you find that the Asian is only in the median range and you hire that person anyway because "Asians are smarter", that is not appropriate and is evidence that one, you are a racist and two, you should not be doing the hiring.

If you have read this far, that is hilarious to me.

My LSJ Editorial

 

Martial arts and film star Bruce Lee once said, “Knowledge is fixed in time, whereas knowing is continual.”  To on knowledge is to retrieve a memory from yesterday which may or may not still be relevant today.      It is our reliance on accumulated knowledge that hinders our present knowing, our struggle to arrive at the truth.

With ancient generations, it was their “knowledge” that the universe was geocentric that prevented them from knowing that the Earth revolved around the sun.  New and better systems cannot come into being if incorrect systems that prevent them that prevent them are not first identified and removed.  The best way to accomplish this is to question everything, especially the conventional wisdom.

 Bruce Lee also said that every system is a cage and that to embrace a particular style is to exclude all others.  This can be true in fighting, such as when a person holds that a particular style of karate is the best, and refuses to learn useful techniques of kung fu, wrestling, and boxing.  The style that does not adapt becomes ossified and is limited, not by the opponent, but by the self.  The worst enemy is that which comes from within.

 Something similar happens in politics when people say that a person of color who identifies as a Republican must be a sellout, and another person chooses to believe it.      This tactic was used against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.  But when you really stop and think about it, what could be more limiting and racist that you must vote such and such a way because of the color of your skin? Who in their right mind would trade shackles for a straight jacket? This is not critical thinking.  It is not thinking at all.  It is following with the blind devotion of a pig being led to the slaughter.

We must stop being led by the politics of the past and begin to question the conventional wisdom.  Instead of asking why other countries hate us so much, we should ask why we are choosing sides in bitter disputes overseas, spending billions of dollars to arm Israel, inviting the wrath of other nations in the region.

 To those who might think this position is unpatriotic, I ask you what is so patriotic about propping up a modern day apartheid on the other side of the world, instead of applying that money right here at home? What is so patriotic about helping to deprive the Palestinians of their homeland by supplying the very weapons that are used to gun them down? What is so patriotic about involving ourselves in faraway disputes when every time you turn around another nation in those areas either has or is suspected of having nuclear weapons?

And to those who say we should nuke those nations and be done with it all, that kind of logic is like throwing a grenade at a mouse in your living room.  Sure, it’ll do the job, but consider what you’ve done to your own home.

 Every problem in the world today can be traced to an action that preceded it.  Rather than follow the conventional wisdom of meeting violence with more violence, perhaps it would be wise to acknowledge that the United States has about as much business making policy in the Middle East as Iran has making policy right here in the United States.

 The United States has a Monroe Doctrine so that other nations do not interfere in this part of the world.  Is it that hard to understand that the Islamic nations of the world might want the same?

 This is not a question of military might.  One can accumulate all the fighting skill in the world, but sometimes the smartest fight is the one not fought.

The Evolution and De-evolution of American Politics

 When I was in grade school in the 1970s, we learned about the Civil Rights Movement, not as something in the distant past, but as something that had really taken hold with Brown v. Board of Education and had culminated in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King around 10 years earlier. Despite the fact that at that time we were only one generation removed from de jure segregation in the Jim Crow South, things were looking up as racial bigotry, while still alive and well, had begun to fall into disrepute and the idea of America as truly being one nation was beginning to take hold. Race relations weren't great but there was a general optimism that they were beginning to move in the right direction. Yes, we had Archie Bunker on television, but we also had The Jeffersons. Women were also making progress both socially and professionally in a movement that had largely begun to free them via the pill and reproductive autonomy. Also, America was beginning to experience a nascent gay rights movement.

In the 80s, Americans of all stripes participated in politics via the vote and Democrats and Republicans, while not agreeing with each other, tended to believe that their political opponents genuinely had America's best interests at heart. Disagreement stemmed mainly from debating which party had the better ideas to accomplish their shared ends. For example, liberals wanted to address poverty through the creation of social programs which would be paid for by taxing the rich whereas conservatives argued that lower taxes would encourage job creation which was desperately needed in order to combat the chronically high unemployment numbers and argued that jobs were more effective at combating poverty than handouts.  My point in bringing this up is not to debate which party was right, it is simply to point out that both sides were able to disagree without demonizing the other side as incorrigibly evil or presuming that their differences were based on malicious intent.

Further proof that Americans were able to tolerate and even engage with their political opponents back then comes from the fact that in 1983 Ronald Reagan won his second term by a landslide helped by the existence of many people who self-identified as Reagan Democrats. These were people who, while retaining their Democratic allegience, were able to say I like how the economy is doing under this President and I feel confident with him as commander in chief. I am therefore willing to vote for the other side. Similarly, while Bill Clinton won his first term largely due to the fact that third party candidate Ross Perot siphoned off support from George H. Walker Bush, he won his 2nd term by taking 49.2% of the popular vote versus 40.7% for Bob Dole. These results are a far cry from the razor-thin margins that exemplified the results of both the Bush/Gore and later the Clinton/Trump and later Trump/Biden results which basically were decided along party lines.

Political discourse generally continued in this vane all the way into the late 90s when the internet really began to take hold and I (now in my late 20s) joined an online personality group list where, among other things we debated ideas in religion, politics, social issues, and the like. The group's rules were generally permissive except in regard to civility. We were not allowed to verbally attack our opponents with ad hominem attacks. Attacking our opponents' ideas was of course expected. List members would point out when someone made an argument using logical fallacies such as appeal to authority, red herring arguments, non sequiturs, and poisoning the well. We vigorously debated while never hating. The list was regarded as a dojo of political ideas. Around that time, I started a political blog and strove to maintain those ideals of open political discussion while avoiding personal attacks.

Somewhere along the line America became more divided and people began to truly believe that their political opponents were either incredibly stupid or guided by venal motivations. Post 9/11, when the left began to criticize the war in Iraq the right said it was because they hated America. When America found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the left skipped straight to "Bush lied people died", ignoring the more likely possibilities which were 1) rather than lying, Bush genuinely believed the information he received from the intelligence community which turned out to be wrong, or; 2) the illegal weapons programs did in fact exist but that all evidence thereof was successfully removed/destroyed by Sadaam's operatives. Neither party could consider that their opponents might be inept or mistaken, the presumption went directly to evil.

If an outsider were to listen to the criticisms both parties regarding their opponents, they would have concluded that American politics was choosing between the America haters on the one side and the soulless supporters of war for the sake of oil and the enrichment of the military industrial complex on the other. The left was never able to consider that their opponents might genuinely be motivated by their belief that toppling Sadaam and creating a more stable Iraq would be in the best interests of the US and of the world, and the right was never able to consider that the left might oppose the war because it was ill-conceived, horribly expensive both in money and lives, and was unwinnable. 

Predictably, as America has regressed into two separate camps which are equally hateful and intolerant of each other, there no longer seems to be any role for political discourse between the parties. One cannot be seen to compromise and politically horse trade with evil incarnate and as such the days of rapprochement between the two sides and working together across party lines appear to be over. Whereas President Lincoln once warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand, America is now a virtual duplex where both parties don't interact with each other, much less get along. Americans don't even watch the same news and the result is we seem to be living in two competing realities. It is for that reason that I don't enjoy writing political essays anymore because what is the point of writing a persuasive argument when neither side is willing to be persuaded?

Indian Curry Chicken

 1.5 lb chicken breast diced small as possible 

2 medium onions diced small

2 small/medium tomato diced

Small piece of fresh ginger about 2 tbsp diced

4 - 6 cloves of garlic diced

2 tbsp indian chili powder hot

2 tbsp regular chili powder

1 tbsp turmeric 

1 tbsp cumin 

2 tbsp salt

6 tbsp plain yogurt

2 tsp cinnamon 

small amount of fresh cilantro chopped (optional)

4 tbsp oil 

Sautee onions, ginger, and garlic in oil on low/medium heat for about 4 minutes til onions become translucent 

Add both chili powders, cumin, turmeric, and salt for about 60 seconds so the hot oil brings out the flavor of the spices

Add diced tomato and cook for about 25 minutes stirring often til the tomatoes lose their shape resulting in a pasty glob (add water if needed)

Add yogurt and cinnamon stir it well

Add chicken and raise heat to medium high and cook for 30 minutes or so until chicken is tender

When finished sprinkle in fresh cilantro and serve over rice

Oh yeah. Boil like 2 cups of rice with little salt and pepper. Basmati or jasmine are the best. If not whatever you got. 

Back Right

 I'm in my third week of having returned to my old job at Sultan's Express in downtown Lansing. This is my 20th day of not drinking alcohol, having recovered from the depths of depression, the nadir that I reached when my return to work was uncertain, when my daughter was complaining of the financial crush of having to pay the entirety of the rent since the time of my accident. The mental health rebound for me in that short period of time been amazing as has been my outward return to normalcy.

In my first full week back at work I returned to the job as if I hadn't missed a beat. I insinuated myself in with the staff flawlessly (it   a new crew none of whom I had ever worked with before). Abu Amira, the dishwasher, was particularly appreciative of me as he's only been in country for one year and speaks next to no English. He does manage to ask very basic questions in broken English and I tend to respond in Arabic. He asks me the names of things in English and I respond by enunciating clearly and slowly as I'm aware of the difficulty in hearing the sounds in a language that is not your own. The other guy, Abood, who divides his time between cook and cashier since we're short staffed, is fluent both in Arabic and English. He's a bit standoffish but we work together well.

Two weeks ago in my first full week back I was down to one egg in my refrigerator and one package of Ramen noodles. I made it through that week by loading up on my free take home meals at the end of my shift. After getting the week's tips and going grocery shopping, I bought the basics such as sugar, flour, beans, etc. and subsisted the next week mostly on tostadas and spaghetti with my homemade sauce in addition to my take-home work meals. Now into my third week I've moved up to stir fry, tacos, and hamburgers. Of course I'm stocked up on Starbucks for my coffee pot.

In my short time having returned to work I've accepted every opportunity to pick up extra hours here and there because we are short staffed. I do this, not just for the money, but also to make myself invaluable and also because the time off since my accident was excruciating. Staying home, writhing in agony from my injury, and watching Netflix all day is not something I ever care to repeat. At this point in my life work is my identity more than anything else. If someone were to offer me the same amount of money to just stay home, I would not accept it. As much as I dislike intense socializing, complete isolation is destructive to me. That is not an exaggeration. My period of non work since my accident totaled just over two months. If I didn't know that from the calendar and had been asked to estimate my time away from work I would have said it was nearly five months. It was the slowest passage of time in my experience other than jail.

In addition to work I've also been donating blood plasma for money which has given me the opportunity to catch up on some exigencies such as paying the quarterly bill for the trash service and sending some money for my child support arrears so those people don't summon me. I also have some money set aside to repair a lawn mower my friend Bernard scavenged from one of his jobs clearing out a property some people had moved out of leaving a lot of belongings behind. My daughter and I are responsible for the lawn maintenance here at the new place which is a fair trade off. The old place we didn't have to do the lawn but we didn't have a washer and dryer either. This place we do have that and it's just us here so we don't have to contend with weed smoking downstairs neighbors making our lives miserable with the stench their smoking produced.

Lastly, I will mention that when we first moved here my only association with this house was physical pain, unemployment, and depression. Now that I'm working again I'm making new memories and associations. Leaving in the morning riding the bike to work (for exercise, I have a bus pass but I need to get my resting pulse rate down, a problem that had manifested due to my inactivity). I'm making good memories now such as good meals here with my daughter and my mother who I have come over on the weekends. Life is good and I can honestly say I'm truly happy. Perhaps when they take the hardware out of my shoulder this summer and the discomfort is gone I will get a second job working weekends and nights but for right now all is well with me. Thanks again to all who have helped me during this ordeal.

Culture and the Covid

My Afghani coworker was talking to me yesterday and mentioned the extremely high rate of Covid infection in Afghanistan. I took the opportunity to mention that in Islamic communities which place a high value on communal activities, some practices that might be considered utterly unremarkable from a health standpoint in normal times could now become super facilitators for the virus. For example, many Islamic cultures have carried over the Arab practice of having several people eating from the same plate, each using bread to pick up food from the section of the plate nearest them. I am not from that culture but I've worked with enough middle eastern people to where I'm familiar with and have engaged in this practice myself.

"This is the kind of thing we need to get away from because what is the point of wearing a mask if we all eat from the same plate?" I said. "If one of us gets the virus there is no need for all of us to get it. We should stop eating like this. After the Coronavirus thing is over we can get back to normal."

While the Muslim world deals with cultural issues that influence the impact of the pandemic, we here in the west must remind ourselves not to be smug. In the US we are  also dealing with a cultural issue that goes a long way to explaining why we are dead last in regard to our response to the Coronavirus. The issue is this. A significant portion of our population is under the impression that among the various liberties enshrined in the US Constitution there exists the freedom to put the lives of other people at risk during a raging pandemic (spoiler alert, no such right exists). These people are guilty of a perverse sort of individuality and are so short-sighted in their worldview that they fail to see that their actions are self defeating regarding their own cause. They call vociferously for a reopening of the US economy but sabotage those very efforts by failing to perform the most basic act that would help reign in the virus allowing the economy to reopen, to wit, wearing a mask. In fact, when you look at nations that successfully quelled their once rampant Covid numbers, you will find that mask wearing was virtually universal and was never politicized. Here in the US, however, the motto can be said to be give me liberty and give me death.

Predictably, the reddest states which happen to be the ones most hostile to mask wearing and social distancing lead the way in returning to alarming levels of new Covid infections and deaths. Other states which have reacted more responsibly have fared better but are likely to ultimately be negatively impacted by contagion crossing over from states where the virus is flourishing. Amid all this, you still find people who continue to insist that the decision on whether or not to wear a mask is a personal decision, which makes about as much sense as saying that the decision on whether or not to stop at a red light is a personal decision. The problem is not that you put your own stupid life at risk, it is that you also risk the lives of innocent people who might actually be thoughtful, intelligent, and valuable. There are various rights and freedoms enumerated in the Constitution that make our nation great but among them there is no right to put the lives of other people at risk because of your own intransigence and stupidity.

Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to our cultural backwardness in the foreseeable future. It is my opinion that, even presuming a further skyrocketing of statistics that is sure to come roughly three weeks from today when those newly infected from the 4th of July celebrations start hitting the ICUs, I don't think another lockdown will do any good. In all likelihood , the anti-maskers will simply continue to defy recommendations and continue having social gatherings which will result in the Covid stats remaining static for the duration of the lockdown rather than decreasing. This would be a waste of time. I believe we should put off any further lockdowns until the death rate hits perhaps 750,000. Only then will enough people begin to take this virus seriously enough to get past their own political and cultural obstacles so that we can actually have a lockdown that will actually bring this virus to bay. Until then good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor.