I think she whisked some flour into that milk. On that point my brothers and sisters are divided. It’s the same thing about whether or not mom precooked the macaroni a bit. None of us paid proper attention.
There is agreement, however, that some of the macaroni ends poked above the milk browned a bit and delivered a delightful crunch. Beneath the crunchy top the, cubes of cheese remained largely intact – melted but not diluted in a cream sauce. Magnificent simplicity. To serve four you will need:
½ pound of raw macaroni
1 ½ cups of milk (plus or minus)
1 ½ tablespoons of flour
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ pound of cheddar cheese cut into ½ inch cubes
½ cup grated parmesan cheese
Paprika
Precook the macaroni to a very toothy el dente, drain and toss with the cheese cubes in a casserole. The cheese should be very evenly distributed in the macaroni. Whisk the flour and pepper into the milk, then add it to the casserole. The milk should nearly cover the macaroni with macaroni ends poking up above the milk here and there. Top with the grated parmesan cheese and a sprinkling of paprika. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour in a 350o oven until the top becomes lightly browned and crispy.
So there it is, a simple home cooked recipe. If you like, this recipe can be improved upon. For example cubed smoked Gouda cheese and/or blue cheese crumbles can be added to the cheddar cheese and macaroni mix. So can any number of spices. A recipe that’s similar to my mom’s, appearing in a Penzeys Spice catalog, called for Turkish oregano and ground nutmeg.
The Slippery Slope into a Life of Crime
Caution is needed. The quest for macaroni and cheese perfection can surprisingly lead to jail time. I fear it’s a path I might be on. It’s my sister’s fault.
She gave me a cheese making kit for Christmas and advised the best cheese comes from very fresh raw milk. She knew I’d run with that.
The perfect macaroni and cheese requires homemade cheese from raw milk. Commerce in raw milk is illegal. A dairyman directly selling raw milk faces severe consequences. To do so in Wisconsin is to risk unleashing the bureaucratic hounds of hell. [Full Text]
Public Health and the Constitution
Now, the regulators will say their heavy handedness is a matter of public health. But really, isn’t individual consumer choice beyond the reach and scope of “public health” regulation? Isn’t it a higher order of regulation?
At this point my macaroni and cheese becomes a lesson on the Bill of Rights.
The transactions between the individual consumer and producer are regulated by personal rules of self-interest and trust. The individual consumer wants a superior wholesome product. The individual dairyman selling raw milk wants a satisfied customer, one who above everything else, he does not want to make sick. Similarly, the mom or dad who sends their kid to school with home baked chocolate chip cookies, to share with their classmates, above all other things does not want to make anyone ill either.
Those neighborly treats brought to school by the second grader are frowned upon and increasingly forbidden in our schools.
On a neighborly level, the rules of self-interest and trust seem to work pretty well. These unwritten rules of neighborly commerce should trump the rules of corporate commerce. They do not.
While the federal Food and Drug Administration cautions that the risk of becoming ill from raw milk are about 100 times greater than from big dairy pasteurized milk. Its data are faulty. The health risk of raw over pasteurized mild is about ten times greater, an order of magnitude, but nevertheless it’s miniscule. Flying on commercial airlines is riskier. The health risks of drinking raw milk are somewhat less than those from random strikes of lightning. [Full Text]
I tend to put more trust in my local farmer than the teenager in charge of the regulated ‘deli’ sandwiches lining the gas station’s cooler of ready to eat fast foods, or worse the hot sandwiches, the horrible hot dogs that rotate for an eternity in a glass encased slow cook oven. It’s not possible to slap enough mustard on those beauties.
An individual engaging in commerce is exposed to a bewildering maze of Byzantine regulation. Those rules so often do little to protect the “consumer” -- food recalls are not uncommon -- whereas the unwritten operating rules of neighborly trust sublimely and presciently do. Yet, should an individual violate the regulatory codes of commerce, even unknowingly and without doing harm, they face severe penalties and possible criminal prosecution.
Now, should it be my pleasure to pursue a simple agrarian life raising vegetables, chickens and livestock for my family and selling the surplus to my neighbors, it shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. But it would if I was selling raw milk, butter and farmers cheese made from the same, as well as home packed pickles, tomatoes and jams from a roadside stand. If such small enterprise were to be allowed, the permitting regulatory oversight would likely be so onerous as to erect a de facto prohibition.
And to be sure if federal and state regulators didn’t ensnare me, the busybodies in my town likely would.
Martha Boneta, a small farmer in Fauquier County, Virginia, discovered that in spades. Her good busybody neighbors enacted what can only be called a harass Boneta ordinance. She has been fined for hosting birthday party eight ten-year-old girls, and for selling her farm produce without a special “administrative” permit. [Full text] Her farm store is open one day a week for six hours.
Martha Boneta, a small farmer in Fauquier County, Virginia, discovered that in spades. Her good busybody neighbors enacted what can only be called a harass Boneta ordinance. She has been fined for hosting birthday party eight ten-year-old girls, and for selling her farm produce without a special “administrative” permit. [Full text] Her farm store is open one day a week for six hours.
Writing in the American Thinker, on this sad state of affairs Mark J. Fitzgibbons observed: “Thousands of times per day, government violates the law, bullies its citizens, and compounds its grab of our property rights and individual liberties. We don’t hear about most of these incidents because most people fear government retribution and decide to cave in.”
Making Criminals of Us All
The plain meaning of our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights has been slowly chiseled away. It’s eroded. Good law has become an indiscriminant bludgeon of tyranny.
That would be what is called a “conservative” take on things. But there is a radically “liberal” take on these things as well. Shall we trust in the plain meaning of words?
It begs the meaning of a simple statement. Our Bill of Rights explicitly affirms the founding principles proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence which were grounded in liberal thought of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
A Wikipedia writer says our individual rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness incorporate John Locke’s idea that the purpose of civil society is the protection of private property – in Latin, “proprius,” or that which is one’s own, meaning “life, liberty and estate.”
The author continues in speculating that “Locke’s argument for protecting economic rights against government may have been most salient to the framers of the Amendments; quartering and cruel punishments were not the current abuses of 1791.“ [Full Text]
The author continues in speculating that “Locke’s argument for protecting economic rights against government may have been most salient to the framers of the Amendments; quartering and cruel punishments were not the current abuses of 1791.“ [Full Text]
Locke’s notion of “estate” is written clearly, in the plain meaning of words, in the Bill of Rights.
The Fifth Amendment explicitly states that no person shall be denied the right to life, liberty and private property without due process of law, nor shall property be taken for public use without just compensation. In a similar vein, the Eight Amendment prohibits excessive bail, fines and unusual punishment.
Going back to trusting in the plain meaning of words, it seems the Bill of Rights has become severely encrusted in the multiple layers of both criminal code and administrative law.
With a macaroni and cheese casserole, a bit of a crust is a good thing, with the Bill of Rights not much.
Writing in the Huffington Post, Radly Balko points out that we are subject to now no fewer than 4000 separate criminal laws at the federal level and to as many another 10,000 to 300,000 regulations can be criminally enforced. [Full Text]
He notes this regulatory labyrinth constructs a formable wall blocking individual participation in the economy. From my perspective, it’s not easy to buy raw milk in order to make homemade raw milk cheese upon which the perfect macaroni and cheese depends. But that’s trivial.
He writes: “But you, citizen, are expected to know and comply with all of these laws. That isn’t possible, of course. It would probably take you most of the year to understand them all, at which point you’d have the next year’s batch of new laws to learn.”
Let Aaron Swartz be a Lesson to Them All
Balko’s column followed the suicide death of Aaron Swartz, a computer programming genius, who had been charged with criminal violations of The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
His crime was downloading too many “free” files (spectacularly, some five million) from JSTOR, a subscription based digital search engine and library of academic journals and mostly subscribed to by and accessed through educational institutions. Rather than pursuing a civil lawsuit against Swartz, JSTOR reached a settlement with Swartz, whereby he surrendered the downloaded data.
In a sober society of neighborly commerce, one would think Swartz’s settlement would have ended matter. But that’s not how it works in a regulatory, authoritarian state. A month following the settlement, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with a number of data theft crimes relating to the incident. In total these crimes exposed him to a million dollars in fines and up to thirty-five years in prison, but they were willing to deal.
Swartz was a high profile internet innovator who actively opposed government regulation of the internet. His crime was to hack a MIT’s firewall preventing general access to papers that are the product of publicly funded academic research. And worse from his point of view, JSTOR’s revenue mostly benefitted the academic publishers, rather than the authors. The law, if you will, protected an unnecessary cozy monopoly benefitting from what is either public or individual intellectual property.
Many, including Swartz’s father, believe the heavy handed federal prosecution of the case was “politically” motivated to put Swartz in his place and was a contributing factor motivating his suicide. More than 45,000 have signed a petition calling for the lead prosecutor’s, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, dismissal.
In his Huffington Post column Balko observes: “Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position – in general, put particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.”
Balko failed to explicitly acknowledge that the Justice Department is an executive branch of the government under presidential oversight. He nevertheless concludes the abuses of prosecutorial discretion have “increasingly made us a nation ruled not by laws, but by politics (and by aspiring politicians). And once criminality is influenced primarily by politics, we’re all just potential criminals.”
The fact is prosecutors, whether federal, state or local, are unbridled from any standard of Fifth Amendment “due process” in choosing which laws to enforce and how aggressively to enforce them; nor are they restrained by the Eight Amendment’s prohibition of excessive bail, fines and unusual punishment.
We are told the President signs off on terrorist leaders to be targeted by drone attacks. Somehow, we are to assume he pays no attention those citizens who are to be targets of Department of Justice drone attack like investigations. (Regarding those drone attacks, it’s come to light that the Justice Department’s lawyers have adopted a more expansive and nuanced meaning to the term “imminent threat.” The plain meaning of words isn’t to be trusted, nor are the constitutional provisions regarding treason.)
Should anyone of us become such a target, we are overwhelmed by the resources of government in prosecuting a case. So if ensnared we cop a deal. (The drone targeted terrorists, even if they are U.S. citizens, are not so lucky.) That’s how it is.
On this state of affairs, our president gave his blessing in his second inaugural address. He began by honoring our founding principles, proclaimed in our declaration of independence, only to bury them in a guarded denunciation of our bill of rights.
“Ultimate Freedom Requires Collective Action”
He went on to say: “But we have always understood that when times change, so must we. That fidelity to our founding principles requires responding to new challenges; that preserving our ultimate freedom ultimately requires collective action.” [Full Text]
Our “collective action” is specifically what is embodied in tens of thousands of pages of regulatory code that can be used to make criminals of us all. And so it seems from our president’s perspective our founding principle of natural law, and the safeguard of Locke’s “proprius,” is to be subjugated to the “collective.” He’s turned our founding principle on its head to embrace the very abuses from which our bill of rights was intended to guard us.
He seems to have forgotten some parts of the Declaration, or perhaps he failed to read the whole thing. Among the complaints lodged in our Declaration of Independence was: “He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
It is the same sentiment that was expressed by a group of hacker’s, in response to Swartz’s death, in posting this on a U.S. Department of Justice Web page:
“Citizens of the world, Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain."
The hacked off hackers are not alone. They are not as eloquent as Thomas Jefferson, but they sound the same note. It’s a charge anyone of us would likely make if we became entangled in an aggressive regulatory enforcement action.
Nefarious Motives of the Prosecution
“I mean, the Government’s got all the money in the world to throw at these things and they just bully people is what it is, and it’s completely wrong. It’s just not American,” said Russell Caswell in explaining is experience to Boston Public radio station, WBUR, after defeating a Department of Justice suit seeking to seize his Tewksbury motel.
Caswell owns a modest $57 a night motel. It’s the kind of place I like stay at when I travel. Caswell was never accused of any crimes. His property was. The prosecution lead by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, the lead prosecutor in the Swartz criminal complaint, alleged that motel, the property and not the owner, had “facilitated” drug crimes. Under federal drug enforcement laws private property is subjected to confiscation when used to facilitate drug crimes.Here’s the thing. Caswell’s motel wasn’t a crack house. There were no more and probably fewer drug transactions in his Tewksbury motel than in a neighboring Motel Six. To make its case DOJ copped a deal with the local police. Says WBUR:
“The idea to go after the Motel Caswell sprung from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the trial revealed. The DEA has an agent who testified his job is to seek out targets for forfeiture by watching television news and reading newspapers. When he finds a property where drug crimes occur he goes to the Registry of Deeds. Finding the Motel Caswell had no mortgage and was worth almost $1.5 million, the DEA teamed up with the Tewksbury Police, who were offered 80 percent of the taking, the agent testified.” [Full Text]
We answer to the “collective,” and live in troubling times.
Legal Macaroni and Cheese Revisited
With that I will not advocate making a perfect macaroni and cheese casserole from raw milk, homemade-cheese, instead this recipe improves upon my mom’s without breaking any laws. It’s from Penzeys, a Milwaukee spice company that’s gone national. [Link] Naturally it’s spiced up a bit with oregano and nutmeg. But there is no reason not to and it can be spiced differently. Think of chives or pepper flakes or even with a little stout beer. Making a cream sauce rather than simply adding milk makes this more adventurous take on macaroni and cheese possible.
Penzeys Macaroni and Cheeses for eight.
1 lb. uncooked macaroni
1 block of cheddar cheese (3/4 – 1 lb. one cup grated and the rest cut into ½ inch cubes)
½ Cup butter
2 cloves of garlic, minced
3 TB. Flour
2 ½ Cups half & half
1 tsp. Turkish oregano
¾ Cup grated Parmesan cheese
½ tsp. ground pepper
½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
Precook the macaroni to a very toothy el dente. While the macaroni cooks make the sauce by melting the butter over medium heat. Add the garlic and lightly sauté. Whisk in the flour and cook for another two or three minutes. Add in the half & half and spices continue stirring until the sauce thickens then add the Parmesan cheese and one cup grated cheddar cheese. Reduce to a slow simmer.
Toss the macaroni and cubed cheddar cheese together in a casserole taking care that the cheese is evenly distributed. Cover with sauce and bake for 30 to 40 minutes in a 3500 oven until gently browned.
Bravo!
ReplyDeleteThank you. I'm not alone.
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