What I've been eating: pressure cooker edition

I've probably been averaging running a pressure cooker about 5 or 6 times a week when I've been at home, but don't think I've ever said much about that here. Figured that I'd share a few of the recipes and whatnot that I've been rotating through.

  • Chicken and black bean chili. For most pressure cooker recipes I'd suggest using chicken thighs rather than chicken breasts, and this one is no exception. But otherwise it's a great recipe.

  • Split pea and ham soup. Simple but easy to make with ingredients that I usually have in the house.

  • Kenyan Kunde | Black-Eyed Peas with Peanuts. Lots of similar recipes like this in various parts of Africa. Think I was in Zimbabwe the first time I ate greens with peanut butter.

  • Chickpea curry rice bowl. Chana Masala is one of the spice blends that I tend to keep around. At least here you need to hit one of a select number of spice shops to find it, but it's available nonetheless.

  • Pressure cooking the perfect bowl of oatmeal. A great way to make steel-cut oats completely hands off while really only having to wash the serving bowl. Probably the way I started cooking pot in pot. Usually wind up with apple-cinnamon or cinnamon-raisin in mine.

  • Pressure Cooker Risotto. More a template for pretty much any kind of risotto than a recipe.

  • Chipotle Cheddar Corn Chowder. Good chipotles are hard to come by where I live and this is where a lot of my imports of the stuff go.

  • Pasta with tuna and capers. Tough to find tuna packed in oil here so I just use a water-packed version and toss a bit of olive oil in. I also tend to toss in fish sauce instead of anchovies and it's easier to get ahold of and cheaper.

  • Greek lentils and rice. This is here less as a recipe and more as my road to realization that if you soak lentils it'll even out there cooking times with rice so that you can cook both in the same pot at the same time without having to keep an eye on doneness. I frequently wind up with different spices and different kinds of rice when making this this, but this is the recipe that got me started eating a lot more lentils.

  • 30 minute Indian butter chicken. Probably not the healthiest but I like to eat it every now and then.

Random links

The Disturbing Thing I Learned Studying White Privilege and Liberals
"what we found startling was that white privilege lessons didn’t increase liberals’ sympathy for poor Black people. Instead, these lessons decreased liberals’ sympathy for poor white people, which led them to blame white people more for their own poverty. They seemed to think that if a person is poor despite all the privileges of being white, there must really be something wrong with them."
Why does the CPS report on violence against women include men in the stats?
"Readers might wonder how crimes against women and girls can include men and boys. The answer lies in a curiously bureaucratic definition. Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) doesn’t necessarily mean violence against women and girls. It means a subset of criminal offences that have been categorised as VAWG crimes – rape and sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking, forced marriage, etc" ... two examples from a single story: "the murder of six year old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, who died after his father’s girlfriend bashed his head against a hard surface multiple times. Arthur had been left in their care after his mother had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of her boyfriend Gary Cunningham."
Indian scientists decry ‘infuriating’ scheme to study benefits of cow dung, urine, and milk
"... some petitioners see the research program as another effort by the Indian government, run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to validate faith-based pseudoscience. The call does not appear to be shaped by 'objective scientific inquiry,' but rather 'aimed at confirming existing beliefs,' says Aniket Sule, a reader at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education". If you're opposed to milking the data to extract a pre-determined, desired result and expect such a process to involve large amounts of bullshit both amongst the inputs and outputs of these studies you should probably adopt a similar approach to a lot of ____ Studies departments in places in the West. (None of this necessarily means everything to come out of such programs is false though). This particular funding program just makes for slightly more amusing references where sacred cows are more than just a metaphor.

Iran and the female factor

A reminder from Timur Kuran (author of Private Truths, Public Lies) of a seldom acknowledged angle that's been in play here:

You can find examples from, e.g., BLM protests in Baton Rouge (despite white men being much more likely to be shot by police than black women) or from protests in other places like Sudan.

It's generally not acknowledged and virtually never described as "privilege". It's a pattern of behaviour that's applicable to soldiers and convicted felons. Will see how it plays out here.

Will China blockade Taiwan this year?

I'm starting to see more headlines like Blinken Says China Wants to Seize Taiwan on ‘Much Faster Timeline’ and US must prepare now for China invasion of Taiwan: admiral. The timeline mentioned in that article is 2027, though I worry that some recent events might have pushed the timeline of aggression forward with the admiral mentioned in the article above suggesting that now a 2022 or 2023 timeframe might be in play.

On the Chinese side is Xi Jinpeng increasing his grasp on power, as seen in the former leader Hu Jintau's removal from the current Chinese Communist Party Congress and the country's zero-COVID policies despite vaccines which seem likely to do the country significant economic harm.

On the other side are Biden's new restrictions on the Chinese tech sector and their ability to import the latest generation of chips amidst other constraints. Here's one twitter thread I'd bumped into (for which you can find some related commentary here):

One major thing that might have previously made China hesitant to invade is the risk of blowing up TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer currently at the bleeding edge and the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer. As Gwern points out:

... to put it another way, if the CCP tries to invade Taiwan in the next 10 years, historians are likely going to point to 2-3 days ago as the pivot: it is now a razor blade cutting China's throat if AI and high tech in general is the future, with nothing more to lose and everything to gain from destroying TSMC so no one else can have it either.

Another relevant question that comes to mind is: if China were to attack Taiwan how would they do it? There are a lot of voices like this that suggests that this might mean more military buildup:

I'm not sure that they're right though. Did we see the dress rehearsal in August this year in response to Pelosi's visit? What we had was a 4-day de facto blockade which was described as follows at the time:

We now have an unprecedented series of four-day-long, round-the-island live-ammunition exercises featuring advanced warplanes, warships and missiles. The Chinese military designated six closure areas, one of which is merely 12 miles from Taiwan’s southern shipping hub of Kaohsiung. Beijing also warned commercial airliners to avoid wide swaths of airspace around Taiwan, in what amounts to a no-fly zone over major flight routes. Even though China portrays this as a step short of total encirclement, Taiwan’s defense ministry describes it as “a maritime and aerial blockade.”

What could work is something like this:

As the above notes, businesses tend to be risk-averse so a threat might be enough to bring most of that to a halt. Putin's been hinting at a risk of nuclear war as a way to hold off outside interference. Here China again has the TSMC card to play. Firing directly on a US military vessel is one thing and Taiwan is seemingly difficult to invade directly, but what if China were to threaten to attack an entity like TSMC in response to any outside attempts to interfere in a blockade?

The ability to blockade or invade are two different things, and China might be capable of the first without yet seemingly being capable of the second:

Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense concluded last year that China was not yet able to launch a full-scale invasion. The Pentagon’s most recent report on the Chinese military said such an invasion “would likely strain China’s armed forces” and create “a significant political and military risk” for Beijing.

But both reports acknowledge that China is capable of blockading Taiwan. This blockade, identified by the Pentagon as the “Joint Blockade Campaign,” would cut off Taiwan’s air and naval traffic and its information networks.

“Such a blockade could be the main effort, eschewing an attempted landing altogether, or it could be part of a larger invasion campaign,” Lonnie Henley, a retired US intelligence officer who twice served as Defense Intelligence Officer for East Asia, told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last February.

I'm really not sure how this'll play out internationally it it happens. Thus far despite what's been going on in Xinjiang, China managed to attract praise from the Organization for Islamic Cooperation. It's also much easier to get other countries to agree that something is an internal dispute to be resolved at that level when mainland China has kept most other countries from diplomatic recognition of Taiwan.

I'm still not quite sure what sort of number I'd put on the risk of blockade, but it seems to me substantially higher than than the risk of a full-blown invasion, one that I expect that recent moves have made much more probable, and one still not acknowledged to the extent it should be. Guess I can only wait and see what happens.

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