Restaurant review

Niroj in Agoura Hills

I drove across town tonight to go to what they say is the only Kurdish restaurant west of the Mississippi. Some nights (including tonight) they had Kurdish music and dancing in the small restaurant. The dancing included some shills, but mostly patrons all in a circle. The food was really good. The owner comes out and talks to everyone.

We went with a friend of my daughter's and her mom. The dad is in Russia or Germany for business. He's Syrian (not Kurdish) and is a US citizen, but parts of his large family just got to Germany and the UK recently as refugees and some are still in Syria. One interesting thing from the refugee camps in Germany...you can get out and resettled if you get a sponsor and they were among the very few who got sponsored because they are Druze and not Muslim. A Lutheran church sponsored them.

You don't need a sponsor as there are no "refugee camps". There are some centers where refugees are supposed to stay for around three months before they are resettled to the local communities which typically put them into smaller units of private housing or temporary apartments that are often the size of shipping containers.
In 2015 this wasn't possible due to the number of refugees, so they created "emergency centers" in unused public buildings. My town of 26k people had two of those in schools that were supposed to be torn down with 1.000 people at one point. These days there are a little over 300 refugees mostly living in private housing.

Not a food critic per chance are ya?

@German,

Could be a "center", but the sponsor thing is pretty clear. I'm not positive though that the camp or center was in Germany, but they were settled in East Germany (now I guess "eastern Germany") for sure. The people I had dinner with spent the xmas break visiting them in Germany and the other relatives in London. I don't remember what city in Germany. They said it was small and quiet and not much to do. And I didn't catch when they got there, but it's long enough that the teenage boy has gotten very absorbed into the soccer team as he's pretty good.

@pe,

I meant the review as more of a cultural experience for a politics review and not the lounge. It is a set menu/prix fixe for the nights with entertainment and I can't really even tell you what I ate by name. It was similar to other ME food.

Thx

@microbet:
I'm pretty sure that having a church community offer an apartment to a Syrian family would speed up the process quiet a bit. I just wanted to clarify that most refugees don't live in facilities anymore that you would call camps or centers or whatever.
In some metropolitan areas things might be more difficult, but in smaller, especially non-growing cities housing is not much of a problem.

Any of you New Yorkers been to the music venue Brooklyn Steel? Trying to pick a city to see a show.

Yeah it's a pretty clear case of liberal hypocrisy for tenured professors passionate about minimum wage and universal health care to have their six figure salaries paid on the backs of students borrowing money they'll never be able to repay and adjuncts/grad students who get paid nothing.

Not sure what the context is for this. Should the tenured professors earn less or should the adjuncts/grads earn more and effective tuition rates be lower, in your opinion?

Isn't it pretty well accepted that the money sink is the ever-growing college administrations?

States could go back to properly funding universities again, that would help a lot.
http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency...he-bottom.aspx

Yes, although I'm not an expert on it and undoubtedly biased by personal disillusionment from going through the system. Public higher education seems to be a pretty intractable cluster **** to me, especially at the graduate/postdoc level.

Noted trump propaganda financier and oculus big wig palmer luckey fined $50 million for breaking NDA with previous company, oculus out a half billion


http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/1447...awsuit-verdict

When the article extrapolates every downward trend literally to zero and feels the need to repeat that like 37 times in the article, that's a sign that you might not be citing the best source.

It's all true. If you're going to attack their methodology you're going to have to do better than that.

http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency...he-bottom.aspx

Lol....I get so sick of all those professors driving around in their fancy Hondas!

Yeah professors aren't the ones who set those policies. Most of it has to do with states dumping their support for public universities, and then the schools have to figure out how to make up the extra costs.

Yeah, and furthermore I don't think a person at the height of their field making 120k is somehow a hypocrite for wanting a minimum wage and better social safety nets.

Of course that is not hypocritical, but conservative types literally have no idea how empathy for other people works, as we have seen time and time again. They are suspicious of anyone who isn't completely selfish because they can't imagine caring for others.

This, along with the infrastructure they administer. The fancy new buildings seem to be going up continously. I don't begrudge professors their salaries. Many I know are workaholics.

I enjoyed the adjunct professors far more than the regular professors. They generally had more recent experience in the working world with what they were teaching and hadn't been in academia for however long. They were also far less dry.

I actually second this, probably twice as likely to hold a good / enjoyable / worthwhile class.

In SMPu news here are the requirements for Lord's safe space:

sportsball spoiler