Half-Baked Alaska

Last Sunday former Alaska senator and Libertarian presidential candidate Mike Gravel stopped by. He talked about that weird ad of him tossing a rock into a pond and got into a heat argument with a local liberal, calling the Democrats 'pussies' and declaring that he had lost faith in representative government.

His basic idea was a 'National Initiative for Democracy' which would make allow the citizens of each state to make laws by ballot proposition. I asked him how, under such a system, one could prevent tyranny of the majority. Unfortunately, he never really answered my question. His only response was 'You have to trust the people'. I do, but not entirely - that's why we have constitutional protections against such things. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we did allow citizens to make all the laws the first three laws passed would make it illegal to be gay, Muslim, or black.

But hey, at least Gravel has no inhibitions:

Wanda, where art thou?

After my last post ws published in a school newspaper, this reponse came in:

Dear Editor,

I was utterly shocked and appalled to read Noah Klinger’s recent article of February 29 entitled “The surge to nowhere.” As a frequent reader of The Brandeis Hoot, I am somewhat familiar with Klinger’s doctrinaire liberalism; as well, his thinly disguised Ba’athist sympathies are no secret.

Nonetheless, it is surprising that even an ideologue such as Klinger could be so totally divorced from reality. During the month when the US troop surge in Iraq hit its apex, the United States lost almost 80 soldiers and marines in combat. By December 2007, that number was less than 20 demonstrating beyond a doubt that the surge has been and remains a stunning success.

In that same time period, fatalities among the Iraqi security forces plummeted from over 200 a month when the surge began to 75 in December 2007. The decline in deaths from sectarian violence has been even more dramatic from almost 1,100 a month when the surge began to a mere 200 a month in late 2007.

But there’s no telling this to Klinger who would rather we had left a genocidal dictator like Saddam Hussein in power than admit that our democratically elected President and his allies in Congress are succeeding in Iraq.

-Wanda Tinasky

Somerville, Mass.

OK. So some lady in Somerville thinks I'm a Ba'athist. All in a day's work.

Wait. "Wanda Tinasky' is not a real person. It was a pseudonym for many years attached to a series of suspiciously erudite letters ostensibly written by a bag lady in northenr California.

So, who really wrote Wanda Tinasky? The current favorite is postmodern novelist and notorious recluse Thomas Pynchon.

Who lives in Somerville.

Weird...

The Surge to Nowhere

During a visit to Baghdad in the late 1980’s, American journalist Tony Horowitz picked up a copy of the local newspaper The Baghdad Observor. On the front page was a story proudly proclaiming that ’sixteen strategic mountain peaks’ had been captured from the Iranians. All of those mountains were Iraqi; their original capture by Iranian forces had never been reported.

The current debate over the success of the Iraqi ’surge’ has followed much the same path. In recent months supporters of the war, who never admitted that anything had gone wrong in the first place and heatedly denied that there was a civil war going on in Iraq, have been loudly proclaiming a turnaround in the Iraqi situation, with reduced violence and the defeat of al-Qaeda. General David Petraeus was hailed as a second Ulysses S. Grant and many conservative pundits suggested he should be made Time’s Man of the Year.

It’s a beautiful idea ruined by some ugly facts. Coalition casualties remain high; in fact, the months after the surge has been among the deadliest so far, Iraqi civilian deaths have lowered somewhat, but remain higher then 2005 levels according to the Iraq Body Count..

While the defeat of al-Qaeda is good news, al-Qaeda was always one of the smallest and least influential militant groups in Iraq, never numbering more than a thousand active members. The US government managed to dispose of them by arming and funding radical Sunni militias who remain the sworn enemies of the elected government in Baghdad. Also, I suppose it is bad taste to point out that al-Qaeda was not a presence in Iraq before the invasion.

Ethnic conflict remains intractable, with the Iraqi parliament unable to form a stable governing coalition due to frequent defections and intra-party revolts. The intermarriage rate between Sunnis and Shi’ites has plummeted to almost zero. Four million Iraqi citizens still reside in foreign refugee camps, mostly in Jordan and Syria.

Of course, the point of this whole discussion is not whether or not the US is winning in Iraq at all. The point is to create a narrative, a narrative of betrayal and squandered glory, in which defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory by liberals in Congress and the anti-war movement. The stabbed-in-the-back trope is a recurring theme in world history, and has found particular favor here in America. As in Europe after the Warsaw Pact, as in Korea after the armistice, as in Vietnam – or, indeed, as in Scooby-Doo - we would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

Cooking for Trouble

In the midst of the presidential primaries, I suppose I ought to comment on them somehow. Unfortunately, I don't have anything original to say, so I'm going to talk about something completely different: reality TV.

Specifically, Kitchen Nightmares, a show starring famously irascible British chef Gordon Ramsay, in which he finds a failing restaurant and sets it to rights. The original was on the BBC. The American version airs on FOX.

Not to sound elitist, but the British version is better, both in terms of how it's presented - no censorship, more of a focus on food and the restaurant business instead of family drama - and also in terms of the quality of the people involved.

One salient example involving two restaurants should be enough to prove my point. Ramsay managed to turn around both the Taluca Lake pizzeria Sebastian's and Nottingham Indian restaurant the Curry Lounge. Both places seemed to suffer from similar problems. Both are run by dilettantes; pharmaceutical executive Raz and married-to-money Sebastian. Both tried too hard to be hip - Sebastian's with its Hollywood location, the Curry Lounge with its Bollywood-meets-strip-club decor. Both had absurdly expansive menus. Both relied on frozen and prepackaged ingredients; a natural result of having so many dishes to prepare.

Despite being something of a preening ninny at times, Raz at least had the wherewithal to hire decent Indian chefs to make his food. Sebastian freely confesses to fiirng 50 people in the last year alone, and most of his employees are aspiring actors biding their time.

The Curry Lounge's 'speciality', as it were, is to 'Create Your Own Curry'. It doesn't take much to realize this is a terrible idea; curries are made of numerous spices combined just so to give the right flavor and consistency. Letting people mix and match - as Ramsay did, ordering a spicy chicken korma with shrimp - produces some pretty awful monstrosities. Still, Raz's mistakes seem to come from a generosity of spirit; he wants to please everyone and so focus is lost.

Sebastian, on the other hand, is in love with (what he believes is) his own cleverness. He is convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his restaurant’s ‘concept’ of is brilliant even though no one, not even his wait staff, much less the customers, can understand it. I don't really get it either; it has something to do with a long list of pre-arranged ingredients added to one of four meats and then put on a pizza, or maybe a sandwich… the phrase '20 gourmet flavor combinations' came up repeatedly.

Raz puts up some resistance to Gordon's sensible ideas, but when he actually tastes the food he changes his mind. When Gordon suggests they simplify the menu and use fresh ingredients, Sebastian literally purples with rage, then switches back to the old menu in the middle of dinner service.

Despite his smarminess, Raz is a sensible man and is humble enough to take the advice of experts over his own. Sebastian is a nutcase, and is firmly convinced that his terrible idea is franchiseable and will soon spread all over the world. When Ramsay expresses his disbelief and walks outside for some fresh air, Sebastian does a little dance and declares “I won that one”.

The Curry Lounge is still up and running. Sebastian’s closed less than a week ago.

The King and Them

With the world focused on the sudden and shocking death of Benazir Bhutto, another political dynasty far older than the Bhuttos has fallen.

I'm talking - as if you didn't know - about the Nepalese monarchy.

Via the BBC:

Parliament in Nepal has voted to abolish the monarchy, as part of a peace deal with former Maoist rebels

Nepal will be declared a republic after elections in April next year.

King Gyanendra, whose dynasty dates back to 1769, lost popular support when he sacked the government in 2005 and assumed absolute power.

...

The king's fall from grace began in February 2005, when he dismissed parliament and took executive powers for himself, saying this was the way to root out corruption and end the Maoist insurgency of the day.

But his heavy-handed action united political opposition to him, and a violent uprising in April last year forced him to restore parliament.

The new civil authorities have since stripped him of his powers, his command over the army, his immunity from prosecution - and now are set to strip him of his title.

Well, the can declare themselves a 'federal democratic republican state' all they want but it's clear as Himalayan snow that Nepal is going to be a People's Republic before the new year is out.

The Maoists simply have too many advantages. They have the organization, they have the popular support, and they humbled the King's military with all its Western aid. Comrade Prachanda should start looking for apartments in Kathmandu.