A Cultural Transition to American

Gus’s nephew, Burk, explained, you know how it was with those old “Krauts,” they just can’t get along.

At little Bethany Church in the early fifties the situation was different. There were really two churches, each with their own pastor. There was the English speaking church enfolding an immigrant refugee German language one. They shared a building, alternating on Sundays as to which service was held in the sanctuary and which in the lower church hall. The congregations, shared in “fellowship,” youth groups and finances, yet each had a unique identity.

The German language church split off in the early 1950s a formed Zion Baptist Church. In the early 1960s that congregation divided again leading to the formation of Center Baptist. That split might have been of an old “Kraut” parting of ways. Nevertheless, the North American Baptist tradition is largely dominated by relatively small closely knit congregations, held together under an umbrella of shared theology, Christian community and cultural heritage.

This was a tradition carried from villages in the “old country” into the new. The idea of a village church was made over for a new, industrial and urban world.

Under that umbrella, these small congregations drew and still draw together, tribal like, almost annually. Every three years there is a national convention. In 1964 it was in California, Detroit in 1967, Wichita in 1970 and Winnipeg in 1973. Gus hauled his family to all of these affairs.

Similarly every three years the denomination held youth conventions for young people aged sixteen and above and those in young adulthood. These were held in separate years from the national conventions: California in in 1966, Wisconsin in 1969 and New York in 1972. His young adult children went to these if they could and had a hoot.

From the point of view of the individual congregations, the youth conventions were more important. Within a small congregation made up of several extended families, the marital opportunities for young adults were, well, limited. Kids growing up together in a small community, for the most part, whether cousins or not by the time they reached puberty it sure seemed that way.

Lothar met Bertha at one of these youth conventions. Lothar was eighteen when they met. Bertha was older, twenty. They married after Lothar turned 21. He explained: “I wanted to get married at eighteen then. My dad wouldn’t sign for me. At that time the legal limit was twenty-one. If you wanted to get married sooner, parents had to sign.”

He fled with his family from Prussia into West Germany after the end of the war. She had fled from Ukraine into Austria as the German Eastern front collapsed. They had a lot in common. It was a natural match when they met a North American Church youth convention.

One way or another that’s kind of how it went with young German refugees who wound up in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gus’s sister Irene married John, who had found himself conscripted in the German Army as a teenager almost in closing weeks of the war. His brother Harry hooked up with Elfrieda who also washed up in Germany at the end of the war, only to immigrate the United States a few years later.

It wasn’t so much about a shared German cultural heritage, as it was about a shared experience in history and shared Christian religious tradition. It’s not the sort of thing a person can quickly shed. It more like the coat you wear or the suitcase you carried on the trip. Within this context family gatherings were interesting.

They divided into two camps – the immigrant parents, the old Krauts as Burk liked to think of them – and their children who more than anything wanted to seamlessly fold into the American mainstream and were somewhat embarrassed that their parents had in the not too distant past been foreign refugees.

Gus and Olga’s first born, Rita, entered kindergarten and spoke only German. She flunked. Had to do it over. In a way it was baggage given to her by her parents that she even as a child wanted to jettison. Into junior high and high school that desire intensified. Within the cohort of the children of these refugees there was something of a cultural echo that also tied them together.

A Common Informer in an Age of Global Warming

I was an environmental journalist once, for about ten years. Now I am what GK Chesterton described as a common informer. I like it that way, better.

If you are a journalist, sooner or later you’re going to be pitching someone else’s story line and it’s no longer about telling the truth as best you can, but rather pushing an agenda and labeling it news. Possibly this is nowhere near more sordid than in the ranks of environmental and science reporters on anthropogenic global warming.

Amid all the fog, the real news story is the one about politicizing science. It's not reported.

The Story Line and the Professional Practice of Propaganda

A recent Associated Press news article on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules to cap carbon emissions from coal fired electric power plants is a case in point.

Dina Cappiello, writing for the Associated Press noted while the EPA is proposing regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal fired power plants will reduce U.S. carbon emission, increases in the amount of U.S. coal exports threaten to negate those gains [Full Text]. Fair enough, it’s an interesting sidebar to the proposed carbon rule.

But here’s where she steps in it: “Carbon dioxide, regardless of where it enters the atmosphere, contributes to the sea level rise and in some cases severe weather in the U.S. and the world.”

That statement of “fact” on sea level rise and severe weather isn’t attributed to anyone. It reflects hypothesis more than scientific fact. Yet, nevertheless, it has become so imbedded in the global warming narrative that it has become immutable.

Thank you Dina, I always like my news generously spiced with propaganda.  

The Brief History of Anthropogenic Global Warming

In telling the truth on this story one has to acknowledge, that according to the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there was no anthropogenic carbon forced warming until 1995, and what there was of it, was iffy at best. It emerged as minor edit to the 1995 science report so that it jived with the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM).

Alec Rawls wrote on the history of the scientific high jacking recently on a Watts Up with That blog. [Full Text]

“It all traces back to the first human-attribution claim in the Summary of the Second Area Report (1995), which ran strongly counter to the scientific report, which was then edited to conform with the politically negotiated Summary. This case was recently discussed here at WUWT by Tim Ball:

An early example of SPM increased alarmism occurred with the 1995 Report. The 1990 Report and the drafted 1995 Science Report said there was no evidence of a human effect. Benjamin Santer, graduate from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and shortly thereafter lead author of Chapter 8, changed the 1995 SPM for Chapter 8 drafted by his fellow authors that said,

“While some of the pattern-base discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes.”

to read,

"The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate.””

Since the 1995 assessment that “discernible influence on the global climate” has morphed into this. According to the 2013 IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers (SPM): “It is extremely likely (>95% confidence) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” (SPM AR5)

What’s happened between 1990 and now, the scientific discussion over CO₂ forced anthropogenic global warming has become a nasty political debate. [FullText with Video] Once that happens, whoever best spins the mass market news outlets wins. Looking back, Al Gore won that battle in 1992 with his book and movie “Earth in the Balance.” Now AP reporter, Dina Cappiello writes without attribution about carbon forced global sea rise and extreme weather events. It’s a common story line that no longer needs attribution. It’s the “truth” everyone knows because it’s been repeated so often.

And worse once that happens, the researchers understand the research grant dollars, from both government and nongovernment organizations, flow to those proposing to conduct studies supporting the political narrative.

Blowback

Judith Curry, a once prominent climate scientist who has fallen somewhat from grace because she takes exception to the political narrative. According to Alex Rawls, her take on the latest United Nations report goes like this:

“[s]everal key elements of [AR5] point to a weakening of the case for attributing [post-1950] warming of human influences.”

“ She lists:  Lack of warming since 1998 and growing discrepancies with climate model projections; Evidence of decreased climate sensitivity to increases in CO2; Evidence that sea level rise in 1920-1950 is of the same magnitude as in 1993-2012; Increasing Antarctic sea ice extent; and Low confidence in attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic global warming.

In a recent blog post “Politicizing the IPCC Report" she reviewed a United Kingdom’s House of Commons Energy and Climate Commission’s report on the latest IPCC assessment. [FullText] Two climate “skeptics” on that commission observed that buried in the IPCC’s scientific assessment was this:

“About one third of all the CO2 omitted by mankind since the industrial revolution has been put into the atmosphere since 1997; yet there has been no statistically significant increase in the mean global temperature since then.

“By definition, a period with record emissions but no warming cannot provide evidence that emissions are the dominant cause of warming!”

Curry closes her post concluding:

“In the global debate about climate change and energy policy, science is increasingly becoming a side show, and used when it is convenient to justify a politically desirable policy.  Well, that is politics. I have two concerns:

“1. ‘Using’ climate science in this way has a very unfortunate impact on climate science itself: ‘inconvenient’ questions don’t get asked and inconvenient science doesn’t get funded.

“2. If people are concerned about the adverse impacts of extreme weather events, reducing CO2 emissions are not going to have any impact on policy relevant time scales, even if you accept the IPCC analyses.  Resources expended on energy policy are in direct conflict with reducing vulnerability to extreme events.”

The Economy of a New Era of “Extreme Weather & Rising Seas”

Well: the oceans will rise to flood our coastal cities; the polar caps will melt; the polar bears will become extinct; storms of all sorts will rage; we will all swelter in a sauna like climate; and tropical diseases will become pandemic. With this reasoning the USEPA has proposed to put caps on carbon emissions from coal fired power plants.

EPA’s Big Lie

There is a heavy price we will all pay personally for this in our utility bills. A larger one will come from the regulatory brake imposed on the U.S. economy. In all of that here’s what we’re buying: using the EPA’s carbon calculator, the rule will reduce global warming by about .02C degrees by the turn of the century. [Full Text] (And that’s assuming U.S. hasn’t shipped its coal to Europe and the Fareast to fire new coal burning generating plants.)

But what would I know? I’m no longer a journalist after all. I’m just a “common observer.”

 

Pierogi: An Atavistic Delight Coming to a School Near You

My local newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, ran feature story on pierogi in its Wednesday food section recently, Pierogi, it said, are traditional stuffed Polish dumplings, and a staple of Milwaukee’s Polish immigrant community years ago. It also said making them was an almost day long job involving the whole family – an ethnic tradition. [Full Text] Though I suspect, the article chronicled more of an atavistic and not entirely accurate recreation of an ethnic tradition.

Dumpling stuffed with sauerkraut or mashed potatoes are not the stuff of ethnic high cuisine. Instead it’s peasant food. Originally, pierogi come for the cookbook entitled “What Can I make with what’s at Hand.” (It’s out of print.) A Polish farmer would always have flour, eggs, potatoes and sauerkraut on hand. Rita grew up with the Ukrainian version of the dish – varenyky.

Now it seems our school lunches are going retrograde traditional peasant and serving up mashed potato filled ravioli. This of course would be in Washington D.C., ground zero in the First Lady’s school lunch crusade.  [Full Text] (And I would note the First Lady's ravioli school lunch seems way tall on carbs and way short on protein. A simple PB&J sandwich might be a better bet.)

The kids have got to love that. It is possible to make good mashed potato stuffed ravioli. Just, think of pasta encasing good double baked potato mix, with bacon and cheese, sautéed in a garlic butter sauce and then topped with parmesan.

But that probably not what the kids are getting. They are more likely getting factory made ravioli stuffed with instant mashed potatoes and topped with a nasty tomato sauce. You can be sure there wasn’t an extended Polish family hidden in that school kitchen cooking up a huge batch of pierogi for those kids.

More true to peasant form Rita’s mother, Olga, typically stuffed these with either cherry pie filling or farmer’s cheese and served sour cream to top them.

Blintzes were a variation on this theme. Essentially they were crepes stuffed with the same. But give the same thin pancakes a haughty French name – Crepe Suzette – fold them four ways and top them with ice cream and a liqueur glaze and they become the shining star on the dessert menu of a upscale restaurant.

It seems with increased prosperity these simple and rather drab ethnic dishes evolve into culinary delights. They’ve become comfort foods with a hint of ethnic authenticity.

In that regard Italian cuisine shines brightly. (Ethnically I’m Norwegian. Lutefisk on the other hand can never evolve into a culinary delight. It’s an ethnic dish to be endured in small portions, at ethnic gatherings in Minnesota and the Dakotas, from time to time. And in that time to time, should years pass it would not be too long.)

But back to the subject at hand, the similarity between the Polish pierogi and my Italian ravioli.

From the photos with the Journal-Sentinel article, they looked like homemade ravioli, a dish I make regularly. It’s not a whole day job and does not involve an army of extended family. To feed a dinner party of ten doesn’t take much more than an hour and a half. To feed a table of four it can be pulled off in about an hour.

In fact the pierogi dough used to enclose the stuffing was virtually identical to my pasta dough. But the recommended fillings were not things I would think of for ravioli – sauerkraut, mashed potato, spinach, cherry or parsnip?

This of course picked my curiosity on the common culinary lineage of ravioli and pierogi. For research like this Wikipedia is good. Look up either dish and a long list of similar dishes reveals that this is an almost universal passant meal served though out much of the old world from Italy to China. [Full Text]

Across this huge swath of geography the stuffing changes as does the presentation. But the concept remains the same – stuffed dumplings. My ravioli are stuffed with either Ricotta cheese and Italian sausage stuffing or a spinach and cheese stuffing. They are served with a tomato sauce and are topped with Parmesan.

But these beauties have so much more potential both in presentation and stuffing mixes. I am thinking of a pork sausage cabbage stuffing in a dumpling which after its boiled is fried in butter, garlic and onions. I wonder how to stuff them and what size to make them if they were to be served in a bowl of rich chicken broth.

So it seems I make pierogi but call them ravioli. This is how I make them to serve two to four.

The dough

1 Egg

1 Tbs Water

1 Tbs  Olive Oil

½ tsp salt

¾ Cup Flour (1/2 general purpose, ½ semolina)

Start with the water, olive oil and salt. Thoroughly whisk together then whisk in the egg. Gradually mix in flour to make a firm dough. Let the dough rest for a half hour. While the dough rests mix the following together for the filling. 

The Filling

1 Box frozen Chopped Spinach, thawed and thoroughly drained

½ Cup Ricotta Cheese

½ Cup Grated Mozzarella 

1 Tbs Minced Garlic

To make ravioli for four, divide the dough into four portions then divide each portion into thee. Roll each of these into balls. They will be somewhat smaller than a golf ball. Roll these flat with a rolling pin.  Mound about tablespoon of filling in the center of rolled out pasta, fold over and crimp the edges with a fork.

Boil the ravioli gently for 20 minutes until cooked al dente.

For the sauce, combine:

1  14.5 oz. Can of Diced Tomatoes (no salt added)

1  8 oz. Can of Tomato Sauce (no salt added)

2 Tbs Italian seasoning

¼ Cup Dry Red Wine

Tomato Paste as need, Salt and Pepper to taste

Bring the combined ingredients to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for about one hour. To finish either add water or tomato paste to achieve a consistency where the sauce will nicely coat a spoon.

To finish the dish, transfer the ravioli to a casserole, top first the tomato sauce and then grated mozzarella cheese. Cover and bake in a 350^o oven for twenty minutes. Serve, with a side salad and garlic bread this this recipe will amply serve four.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood

Gus was discharged from the army in December 1945 and intended return to California and maybe get back into the hay bailing business. In any case, when he joined the army, he had become firmly established there. His cousins Glen and Ray were like brothers. His best prospects were In California.

But there was no hurry, he thought he would take his time and visit friends along the way. The mood of the nation as GIs were discharged and returned home must have been something of an ongoing celebration. It was an atmosphere a single guy could soak in for a while before returning to an everyday life of a job and responsibility.  His itinerary included Milwaukee. As it turned out he became waylaid there. These things happen.

Pictures they say can tell a thousand words. There is one where a story is written plain. It was taken in Milwaukee at the time, and is a picture of Gus and an attractive young woman, Herta Hintz, It’s a picture that fully captures the portrait of couple in love.

His brother Harry confirmed the romance. “Ya, I know it. They were sweethearts.”

No matter what a person’s best plans might be life sometimes intervenes. Romantic love waylaid Gus in Milwaukee and familial love anchored him there. While in Milwaukee he received a letter from his mother. He hadn’t heard from her in more than a decade and his plans changed. Everything changed in unexpected ways.

He had just returned from the war torn rubble of Germany and had firsthand experience with the misery of the displaced persons camps and more so of refugees who were shoehorned into one or two rooms in the home of a reluctant host. His mother, half-brother Harry and half-sister Irene were locked in a post war purgatory. This was misery he could relieve. His priorities changed. Sponsoring them for immigration necessitated a job and a place to put them up. To that end, Milwaukee was expedient and made sense.

Milwaukee, historically, was significantly shaped by German immigrants. Within that context there remained groups close to their ethnic ties. Bethany Baptist Church, a North American Baptist Conference congregation, was one of those. The Evangelical Christian denomination was founded in the 1840s to serve German immigrants in the United States and Canada. In 1919 it wanted to shed its image as an ethnic German denomination and began encouraging the use of English as the primary language for its church services. Like so many things German, that change came stubbornly slow.

The church history claims the vision of a predominately English language church was realized in the 1940s. But that self-assessment is more hopeful than true, at least at Bethany. History intervened.

The wake of World War Two included a large wave of immigration of Europeans to North America. This wasn’t an immediate humanitarian tsunami, but rather unfolded gradually. Gus didn’t have any problems in securing immigration visas for his mother, Harry and Irene. They were blood relatives after all. They fit neatly into U.S. immigration law that was in effect at the close of the war.

The Mail Order Bride Act of 1946

The Immigration Act of 1921, variously known as the Immigration restriction act and the Johnson Quota Act, the more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 assigned more than 50,000 immigration slots to Germans. Both acts highly limited immigration slots and were hugely favorable to Northern Europeans by tying the quotas to the existing ethnic balance as reflected by the 1910 census. By contrast Italian immigrants competed for 4,000 slots. Immigrants with blood relatives in the United States were given priority for immigration visas. Gus quickly snatched his mother from the Bavarian farm where she was quartered. Harry and Irene quickly followed.

When he went to pick Irene up from the Milwaukee train station, though never having met her, he said she wasn’t too hard to recognize. “She was the only woman getting off that train who looked confused, and she was the only one who didn’t speak English.”

Gus didn’t know it then but in one way or another, the scene would play out again and again.

Meanwhile, U.S. immigration law was in a state of flux, slowly trending toward opening hundreds of thousands of immigration slots to displaced persons who remained in Germany and ethnic German refugees, who were kicked out of Eastern Europe and beyond, who fled in advance of the from the Red Army.

But with regard to adopting U.S. immigration policy to the post war reality there were certain issues that weighed more heavily on lawmakers than the plight of displaced persons and refugees – war brides and their children. President Truman signed the War Brides Act into law on December 28, 1945. It granted an unlimited number of slots to non-Asian women who married American GIs during the war.  (This restriction was temporarily lifted with amendments in 1947, and done away with entirely in 1952 while the United States was engaged in the Korean War.)

The new immigration law became significantly more robust with the passage of the Fiancés Act in June 1946.

Enter Olga.

If our lawmakers were more honest in naming bills they would have more truthfully called it the Mail Order Bride Act of 1946.

Under its provisions an American who served overseas could apply for a three month visa for their “fiancés.” They had to make the travel arrangements for their future brides and if they were not married within three months, they had to send the women back or pay for deportation. Nevertheless, it opened the door to all sorts of marriages of convenience. Between the “War Bride” and “War Fiancé” acts as many as 500,000, mostly British and European, women were granted immigration visas into the United States.

I Know Such A Fine Girl for You

Gus’s mother arrived in the United States in 1947. Her son was a bachelor. Once settled in she remarked, “I know such a fine young girl for you from the old country. We were neighbors.”

Gus’s mother somehow cajoled her son into an “arranged marriage” and correspondence courtship. Gus became a married man on January 29, 1949.  And it worked, on November 24 of that same year he was a father. Things changed.

His previous sweetheart Herta married Art Hintz. As it turned out, Gus built his first house next door to them. He might have looked back once or twice, or more likely over the fence between the two yards. At the time he might have said:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Sometimes ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

Took the least travel by,

And that has made all the difference.”

 

Robert Frost penned those lines sometime around 1920. With only a few lines, he captured the treble and the tenor of a time and it resonated for decades and still today. Those few words might have been a man’s theme song – from Ukraine to Canada, to the United States and then back to Europe and finally marriage to a refugee mail order bride. With every step along that way “two diverged in a wood.”

 

On Homicide and Public Health

Because I am a conservative and because of where I live, I am already dismissed as racist. What follows is an updated column that was originally published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 2003. It was hard writing. At the time my coffee table book had a cheery title -- Death in Wisconsin 2002. Since then not much has changed and possibly have only gotten worse. 

Some Wisconsin Liquor Stores also Sell “Assault Rifles,” None are in Milwaukee  

There is part of the story I left out. Throughout rural Wisconsin, particularly those places where hunting and fishing are good, the sporting goods store is often a liquor store. Rifles, shotguns, ammunition and full selection of wine, beer and hard liquor stock the shelves. Gun stores and liquor stores are both licensed. In rural, small town Wisconsin, issuing a license for both isn’t troublesome and it helps a small town store diversify its product lines. In Milwaukee there is not one liquor store that sells fire arms. 

Yet in Milwaukee, I’m told the trouble with violence is easy access to guns. Guns are the problem. It seems that’s not universally true. 

We are very adverse to risk. Hence we are quite willing to accept a new law greatly expanding the number of children who must be securely strapped into some sort of federally approved and hugely expensive car seat.  

The new law will save some lives, but not many. Smoking bans in taverns and restaurants will save some lives, but not many. Still, the Surgeon General tells us second-hand smoke is a serious public health risk.   

Ensuring Public Health and Safety 

Public health and safety is a primary function of government. In protecting public health both state and federal government have a long and broad reach. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency for example attempts to limit the number of deaths from exposure to toxic materials in the air and drinking water to one in one million over a 70 year exposure period.  

The standard for radium in well water is one that many communities in Wisconsin are having a tough time meeting. Those communities face the possibility of fines of $5000 per day for not meeting it.  

 

If seen in light of public health, the homicide rate for African-American males in southeastern Wisconsin should be absolutely unacceptable. But the problem isn't guns. 

Here’s How It Goes 

According to a Wisconsin Medical College report, in 2002 the Wisconsin firearm homicide rate among black males was forty times higher than that for white males. The mortality rates were 48.2 and 1.2 per 100,000 individuals respectively. 

At that rate over a ten or fifteen year period every Wisconsin black male faces somewhere between 150 and 200 to 1 odds of murdered with a firearm. Growing up black in Milwaukee is somewhat more risky than a marine’s tour of duty in Iraq in 2003 and it’s gotten worse.  

The Zumba Solution 

Over a recent weekend there were more than a dozen shooting incidents that left two dead and two kids wounded in the crossfire. [Full Text]

In 2003, while both Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Medical College were studying Milwaukee’s homicide rate as public health issue, going down that path quickly lead to a thicket of political correctness. Obviously not much has come from it. This time around that feeble history repeats. Mayor Barrett has set up an “illegal gun” hotline for Milwaukee residents to report on criminal neighbors in possession of a fire arms. Earlier this year he was lamely touting a gun buyback program. 

The health department, James E. Causey from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tells us, thinks Fitness Improvement Training Zones are the answer. [Full Text]

Zumba and yoga in the streets, it seems, will send the thugs scurrying into their dark corners like cockroaches.

 

It’s time to get serious. 

In a health care setting, serious looks something like this: if it’s cancer it is cut out, radiate it, and poison it with chemo-therapy. It is killed as completely and as quickly as can be. 

Toll of Social Pathology 

Death on the streets is a different thing. The pathology isn’t physical, it’s social. The current treatment isn’t decisive. It’s an inadequately funded, ill-conceived and unfocused patchwork of social service, educational and law enforcement programs.  

If we are to address urban homicide as a serious national public health issue we will have to take that patch work of programs and knit them into cohesive policies to address the problem.  

And identifying the nature of the problem is easy. A handful of bad actors can suck the life out of a neighborhood. They are easy to identify if you are a carpenter in the hood. 

For nearly six years I worked for one of my neighbors off and on as a contract employee. At the time Bill worked for a handful of home builders, bidding on finish work, decks and porches. He also bid on building infill housing and rehab work in the City of Milwaukee on contracts listed by various non-profit agencies administrating urban renewal and housing grants.

Among his other contract employees were Rick and Angelo. Both were minority young men from the central city. Both were good men trying to build careers and raise families. Both were smart, reliable and hard working. Both had checkered legal backgrounds. Both had knowledge of arithmetic that fell short of the fifth grade. 

Regarding the jobs he bid on in the central city, “these jobs pay pretty well,” Bill explained. “Not too many white guys want to bid on them.”

In that simple sentence Bill hit on about half of what’s wrong in the City of Milwaukee with minority unemployment. That’s big. You can’t get a license with fifth grade test taking skills. That’s big too. These and similar license restrictions are spread in a perverse way to block the formation of a variety of small businesses and very local job creation.

 

In short, too many young men in the “hood,” by the time they are in their late teens and early twenties both due to academic failure and rubs with criminal justice system, find themselves locked out of meaningful participation in the economy. 

If someone wants to look at urban gun violence as a public health issue, they’ll need to look at the pathology that leads to it: failed families, failed schools, failed policing and a failed criminal justice system. All combine to lock young men out of the mainstream economy. The only thing left is the underground and often criminal economy. 

Taking on those pathologies is a tall order and worse, the solutions are often shot down by the politically correct and a status quo bureaucracy and entrenched politicians who thrive on the continuation of that pathology.  

Instead for example if illegal weapons are an issue, let the police use any violation as an excuse for searching for weapons. But there will be loud complaints about racial profiling and harassment. Yet in the name of public safety we are all searched at courthouses and airports. Why shouldn’t that happen to all of us stopped on the streets?

How about restoring the safety net of traditional neighborhood institutions: the neighborhood schools, the neighborhood police precincts, the churches and the small town like commercial centers? It’s about the hard stuff of building environments for families.

How about outlining a path for young men with “criminal pasts” to fully reengage in the economy? Part of that is focused education but at some point the most crippling economic implications of a criminal conviction should be erased. 

Finally and this is the hardest on our liberal sensibilities, but it is life and death. We have abandoned the hard rules of marriage and family. Let’s have our non-judgmental no-fault divorces, bless the unwedded mom, then Band-Aid our fractured families and hope for the best. Let’s rewrite our social welfare codes in such a way to tilt heavily toward traditional nuclear families. 

Ultimately, the urban homicide rate reflects the breakdown of families. To repair that damage, good people from all over southeastern Wisconsin need to step in as big brothers and sisters, grandpas and grandmas and the afterschool book readers, tutors, pick up team coaches and mentors of all sort. As I recall, Rick Majerus got his coaching start on the Neeskara playground.

 

 

 

The Non-Compliant Twice Baked Potato

I made a delicious anniversary dinner for my wife. The USDA would not have approved, at least judging by the new dietary standards for school lunches. My first sin was the double baked potato. Kids diets they’ve deemed are too potato rich and are making them, and all of us by extension, morbidly obese.

Under the new lunch rules French fries, Tater Tots and chips are frowned upon. The inclusion of these items on school lunch menus is strictly limited. So too with bread and pasta. A couple of servings a week are okay, but only if they are made from whole grain wheat. Worse my double baked potatoes are loaded with fat – bacon fat, sour cream and whole milk.

The next item on my anniversary plate was the lobster tail. The regulators might be okay with lobster of and by itself (though it’s not likely to found in public school cafeteria), but the melted butter in which I generously bathed it would cause them nightmares.

Meanwhile during the day, feet upon their desks, they daydream of dietary reeducation camps.

In principle they would be okay with the salad, but, and in their eyes these things are huge, I didn’t dress it with low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. Instead I whipped together a small dressing of mayonnaise, sour cream, olive oil and blue cheese.

It seems that with all the raw vegetables and salads they want served in the schools, the only enhancement to them should be an insipid low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. It should also be noted my salad was built around nutritionally vilified Iceberg lettuce. (Iceberg lettuce holds up well in the refrigerator crisper.)

A Regulatory Crusade

The school lunch dietary standards have been a crusade for First Lady Michelle Obama. In defending them she recently told a group of school nutrition officials: “Transforming the health of an entire generation is no small task.  But we have to be willing to fight the hard fight now” [Full Text]

In Milwaukee, the schools will be serving free meals, breakfast and lunch, to all students beginning next year. You have to wonder if brown bag lunches will not be allowed. The picture with the story showed a salad with croutons and a slice or two of hard boiled eggs in in a plasticized box. In the background there was a peach and a carton of 1% milk. Hidden off camera was, I’m sure, a squeeze packet of low-cal, low-fat Ranch dressing. [Full Text] 

So the food guidelines they’ve drawn up are big on fresh fruits and vegetables, short on carbs and dietary fat, and in general force schools to serve lunches that kids would rather pass on. Increasingly elsewhere, school districts and school food service managers are passing on the federal school lunch subsidies rather than follow menu guidelines. They are losing customers and buying expensive food only to throw it away. Their food budgets have been blown to hell. [Full Text]

So maybe it’s a good idea to consider the tomato sauce on slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables again.

In all of this mischief, the underlining assumption is American parents know nothing of wholesomely feeding their children. The way to fix this of course is with federal dietary mandates regarding school lunches and increasingly breakfasts too. Scratching below that assumption is laid a deeper assumption that the institution of family is failed.

Creating the Central Bureau of Group-Think Conformity

That deeper assumption is driving Common Core, nationwide school achievement standards set by the U. S. Department of Education. The national standards are spearheaded by Bill Gates, the association of state departments of education and the Obama administration.

In explaining his support for the standards, Gates told the Washington Post: “The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get, and that is a huge challenge. ... Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.” [Full Text]

Critics of the assessment standards claim, for example, it leaves American seventh-graders two years behind the benchmarks set by other countries. Glen Beck believes the policy is nothing short of unbridled evil. [Video] But one thing is clear. While the Gates’ standard might be fine for some schools, through them the U.S. Department of Education is imposing a one size fits all curricula on our nation’s schools when in fact the majority of school districts are doing just fine. Somehow all of that is justified by the economy of scale, I suppose.

The Legacy of Devalued Marriage

But the problem isn’t with failing schools; failing schools are mostly a symptom of broken families.

There is much evidence for failed families. On the whole, culturally we’ve devalued marriage and have tried to bandage the resulting wounds with various social welfare programs. There is as much evidence these bandages haven’t worked too well. Too many federal social welfare programs, agencies and reforms have failed and instead only accelerated the declined. The 1965 Moynihan Report sort of outlined the path we were on and we’ve reached its destination. That story is told by Charles Murray in his study, published this year, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010. These are the book ends of failed social policy.

The new solution is a de facto centralized ministry of group-think conformity.

To criticize that is hopelessly politically incorrect, racist and to be silenced. Instead, we are asked to quietly accept federally mandated dietary standards and Common Core, standards that are necessarily set to a lowest common denominator. It is a low bar set for public schools that increasingly serve as proxy parents, but impose a very high price of regulatory compliance both on our school districts and the individual families they serve.

A Twice Baked Potato

Having said that, here’s how to make a USDA disapproved double baked potato. Should you serve this up with a lobster tail for your wife in celebration of a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, she will probably not kick you out of the house for a while – maybe not for another year. She said we haven’t had lobster for quite some time. Not since our last anniversary I replied.

For this non-compliant double baked potato you will need:

3 medium russet potatoes

3 slices of bacon diced

½ medium onion diced

2 Tbsp. sour cream

1 tsp dried chives

Seasoning salt to taste

1 splash of milk

2 Tbsp. grated parmesan cheese

2 sprinklings of paprika  

 

Bake the potatoes in a 350^o for an hour and 15 minutes. While these bake brown the bacon and when it begins to crisp add the unions. Continue to sauté the onions for about two minutes until they soften then remove from the burner. Prepare the lobster tails for baking by cutting the membrane and fins from the underside of the tail then wrap in foil. Toss the salad of your choice.

When the cooked and while still hot, cut off the tops of the potatoes, scoop out shells, and mash with bacon, onions, sour cream, milk and chives. Stuff the potato skin shells, mounding above the shells. Top the stuffed potatoes first with parmesan cheese and then sprinkle with paprika. Bake with the lobster in a 350^o oven for thirty minutes and then serve.  

 

Frittata with Pasta & Morel Mushrooms

 

A Nottage Full of Mice, a Bird Dog Turned Mouser and the Last of the Morels

My daughter, her husband and my grandson were the first visitors to my cabin this season. They had a good time, but the place certainly isn’t child safe, she told us, and it’s become infested with mice.

On the first score the cabin is a cabin in an old school sense of the term – primitive. It’s not a rustic second home, nor a summer cottage.

It’s a nottage, a term coined by an old friend, who had a nice piece property on Lake Michigan not far from Milwaukee. On it rather than building a second home, he built a small cabin with an enclosed sleeping room and a screened in porch. The footprint of this modest building might have been 12’ X 16’. There was an outhouse. He, his wife and two children happily camped there for years on summer weekends.

He called it a nottage as in not a cottage. I took my cabin building from his cue. When I applied for a building permit, I said it would be a shelter for weekend camping.

Not an Entirely Safe Place but One of Enchantment

Mine is a place that is hard to make perfectly safe for children. It’s heated with a woodstove. Lighting is from various kerosene and propane lamps. The sanitary facility is an outhouse. My two-year-old grandson found the little wood splitting hatchet intriguing and began, I’m sure, learning that some things are hot, some things are sharp, and the world is a dangerous place. He was thrilled.

The cabin sits on about 18 acres along the Kickapoo River, half woodland and half flood plain. The Driftless Area hills steeply rise more than 500 feet above the river valley, mountains in a two-year-old’s eyes. And better from a little boy’s eyes, these mountains rise across the road from my cabin. A steep climb from there leads to the Turkey Ridge Orchard above. That orchard is an organic, remnant old “hippy” like commune affair – interesting.

A quarter of a mile both north and south of my cabin, my neighbors keep pastures populated with either horses or cattle. These animals are not children’s book mythical creatures, but are live, huge and up close. The neighs and moos are real and our expression of them is not even a close approximation. They’re loud, much louder than the children’s books let on.

It’s a place of birds, a lot of birds and some of them are huge – turkeys, sandhill cranes and eagles.

From my grandson, Sam’s point of view the cabin is in a land of enchantment.

I told my daughter, “Well yes there are certain child hazards. You just have to keep a diligent eye on him. That’s what parents are for, after all.”

An Invasion of Mice and the Mouse Warden

As for the mice, her assessment of an infestation was something of a hysterical overstatement. Nevertheless, in a country cabin one doesn’t have a mouse. It’s mice in the plural and a tiered abatement strategy is called for.  Tier one turned out to be my bird dog.

She’s twelve, can’t hear and long romps through thick brush in search of upland birds no longer interested her much. But she has found this mousing business is an agreeable part time job for a mostly retired bird dog.

She ferreted out a mouse nest in large container of building fasteners tucked under the cabin’s kitchen counter. Tail wagging and trembling with excitement, she says they’re in here boss. I pulled the tub out, removed the lid and she went to work, nabbing and killing seven of the eight mice hunkered down in there. She is now the cabin and grounds mouse warden.

For years she has had a habit of pouncing on her dog biscuits and throwing them in the air only to pounce on them again. Now I know what that dog behavior is all about -- mousing.

The dog is only part of the solution. Part two is mouse repellent and d-Con. I hope the mice will find being outdoors more attractive than lounging in my cabin. There is nothing in there for them to eat or drink. Finally, I know where they are getting in. Next time when we’re there, and this is tier three, I’ll seal those entry points and then set conventional traps to control any residual problems.

Such are the headaches of even a simple cabin and there are others, but the pleasures far exceed them. One of those is the seasonal varieties of food available in local farmer’s markets and roadside stands, and the outstanding beef and pork for sale at the local butcher shops and meat lockers.

The Season of Mushrooms

The Muscoda (oddly pronounced Muscadee) Morel Mushroom Festival going on when we were their.. We went Sunday afternoon this year, as it was winding down. There were only a few mushroom stands when we arrived. The late and cold spring mostly ruined the three week morel season. The harvest was pitiful. When we were leaving we bought the last half pound bag from the last vendor.

Half of these I used for a morel, butter and garlic sauce for the flank steak we grilled that evening. The balance went into a morel frittata we had the next day. It was delicious.

Frittatas: A Newly Found Culinary Delight

Frittatas are as much about cooking scrambled eggs, a method, as they are about a specific dish. Marcella Hazan devotes nearly ten pages in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking on frittatas with ten recipes. I used a variation on her Frittata with Pasta recipe. Like an omelet, any number of ingredients can go into making it. Unlike an omelet, this can include pasta with a simple parmesan cheese and butter sauce. I found the idea, of fried spaghetti with eggs, intriguing – beyond the bounds of my natural culinary leanings. But, it certainly seemed like ideal platform to highlight my beautiful morel mushrooms.

Frittatas because of endless variation can fit into variety of settings, from breakfast to an appetizer to the centerpiece of a main dinnertime meal. Hazan writes:

“Frittatas taste equally good when hot, warm or at room temperature. They are at their least appealing cold out of the refrigerator. When cut into pie-like wedges, a frittata or an assortment of them will enrich an antipasto platter, make a very nice sandwich, travel beautifully to any picnic, or become a welcome addition to any buffet table.”

A Morel Mushroom Frittata

This frittata is a centerpiece for a simple but delicious main meal, to be served alone for two or with a salad and a little garlic bread for four. I used my morel mushrooms, but shitake mushrooms would work equally well.

For this you will need:

4 eggs

3 strips of bacon diced and fried

3 or 4 tablespoons of butter

½ of large bell pepper diced

¼ pound of sliced mushroom without stems, sliced into strips

¼ pound of raw spaghetti

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

Dice and brown the bacon. While the bacon is browning bring a quart pot of water to a boil, dice the pepper, and slice the mushrooms into strips. Preheat the oven to 350^o.

When the bacon is browned, sauté the mushrooms and diced pepper in one to one and one-half tablespoons of butter. When the water begins to boil add the spaghetti and boil to a firm al dente (it will cook some more with the eggs). Meanwhile beat the eggs.

When the pasta is cooked and drained, while still hot, add a tablespoon of butter and the parmesan cheese. Toss thoroughly then add bacon, mushrooms, peppers and eggs. Again mix thoroughly.

Over medium to medium high heat, melt one to one and one-half tablespoons of butter in a 10” sauté pan until it bubbles. Before it begins to brown add the egg mixture. When it sets, generously grate pepper on it and continue to cook on the stovetop until the bottom begins to brown, then transfer to the oven and bake for about 10 minutes until the top firmly sets.

This recipe might seem like a whirlwind of activity, but it can be pulled off in twenty-five or thirty minutes of only moderate concentration.

Slice into wedges, serve and enjoy.