Today’s new robber barons

"The robber barons of the nineteenth century are disparaged today for their greed and power. But Amazon, Facebook and Google operate virtual monopolies, the influence of which exceeds the oil, rail, steel, and banking trusts of the Gilded Age. The chief difference is that companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple are worth more in inflation-adjusted dollars than were Standard Oil or U.S. Steel, and their global reach now affects 6 billion people, not a continent of 60 million." Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.hoover.org/research/camouflaged-elites

I can do This!

Prime age men not in the labor force

“ . . . the nonparticipation rate for prime-age men with only a high-school degree rose from 8.8 percent in 1996 to 14.9 percent in 2016 (a 70.3 percent increase), while the nonparticipation rate for prime-age men with some college or an associate’s degree rose from 6.8 percent in 1996 to 11.0 percent in 2016 (a 61.7 percent increase). The nonparticipation rate for prime-age men in the highest education group, who had a bachelor’s degree or higher, increased more modestly, from 4.1 percent in 1996 to 6.0 percent in 2016 (a 45.9 percent increase). Similarly, the nonparticipation rate for those in the lowest education group, who had less than a high school degree, rose only slightly, from 18.3 percent in 1996 to 20.3 percent in 2016 (only a 10.6 percent increase). “

https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/econrev/econrevarchive/2018/1q18tuzemen.pdf

Shipping books

Don't look under the bed; it's expensive. I found a few children's books that belonged to my uncle Leslie who died in 1999. I think I inherited them from my mother, some years before, and they had been in the family home.  Since I'm trying to clean out items, I decided to mail them to his daughter, Sharon, my cousin, who lives in Canada. Do you know how much it costs to send a package at "international" rate? It cost me over $37!!!  If I’d put them in the book sale at the library, she would have never known.  Freckles and Return of Tarzan plus a book of Bible stories and a cut out from a magazine.

    

What would “basic income” look like?

The usual "welfare" consists of 6 or 7 programs, although there are actually about 120 transfer programs--TANF, Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, housing, Utilities, CSFP (packaged commodities for low income), School breakfast, lunch and snacks. That doesn't count all the non-profits and church programs. There are 8 states where this amounts to earning more than $25/hour, and no taxes. In most states it's worth more than a $15 minimum wage since it's tax free. It's a high of about $49,000 in Hawaii and low of $17,000 in Mississippi. Poor people aren't dumb--they'll probably object to their Democratic congressman if he tries to fool them with that.

TANF provides financial assistance to help pay for food, shelter, utilities, and expenses other than medical.

Medicaid coverage provides all-inclusive care for eligible children younger than the age of 19, with particular emphasis on primary and preventive care in keeping with its Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT) methodology.

Other types of Medicaid insurance, such as the Healthy Start/Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provide enrollees access to equivalent Medicaid coverage. CHIP is a bridge program that extends Medicaid enrollment to low-income or at-risk children and pregnant women who would not otherwise meet the eligibility requirements. CHIP covers nearly all costs associated with pregnancy, prenatal care and birth for income-qualified pregnant women of any age.

SNAP means supplemental nutrition, but you can eat quite well with it. You’d need a PhD in government speak to figure out the rules. https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligibility#What are the SNAP income limits?

WIC is Women Infants and Children as supplement for mothers with young children.

There are numerous housing programs.

Utilities is to help with costs of heating.

The National School Lunch Program is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or  free lunches to children each school day. The program was established under the National School Lunch Act, signed by President Harry Truman in 1946.

Don’t underestimate yourself or your audience

Wikipedia: "Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work, (Carnival of Animals which he wrote for fun in 1886)  would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image. He relented only for the famous cello solo The Swan, which forms the penultimate movement of the work, and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by the composer for cello and solo piano (the original uses two pianos)." He died in 1921, it was published in 1922, now one of his most popular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LOFhsksAYw

I no longer have a piano, so I enjoyed reading along with this.

World War I, an American soldier’s diary

At the end of this Library of Congress blog  https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/03/world-war-i-an-american-soldiers-journey-home/?loclr=ealocb  is a link to the amazing performance by Douglas Taurel based on the diary of a WWI soldier, Irving Greenwald.  It’s very moving and quite vivid.  You almost feel like you’re on the battle field with him.  We’re in the midst of remembering the centennial of WWI—and this is a worthy project.  At Lakeside last summer we had a week devoted to WWI.

This website explains how the author/actor Taurel prepared his script from the diary, which he says was extremely well-written. http://www.theamericansoldiersoloshow.com/a-soldier-life-in-word-war-i-irving-greenwald/

“Reading a soldier’s diary requires a tremendous amount of patience. For the soldiers of the First World War, the actual fighting took up a very small amount of their time. In reality, the life of a soldier in war is filled with a tremendous amount of minutia.  Reading a soldier’s diary requires time to digest all of that soldier’s life while in service, from his day-to-day life in training, through what it means to endure life in the trenches, to mustering heroic courage in combat.

For the Library of Congress’s commemoration of the centennial of the First World War, I was invited to write a new play based on the life of Irving Greenwald, a soldier from WWI. Greenwald was part of the Lost Battalion, and his diary is preserved by the Library’s Veterans History Project. I will perform a one-man play on Veteran’s Day.

Irving Greenwald left 465 days of his diary’s entries, and I set out in May to read all of them, with a goal to read ten days’ worth of his diary entries each day. I aimed to complete the entire diary in a little over a month. Some days I read more, and some days I read less. “

Because of my age, I did know veterans of WWI, although my earliest memories are of WWII. When I came across this blog, I thought about some of them that I knew, then pulled “War Record of Mount Morris” (1947) from my shelf, and although it covers about 500 soldiers that had a WWII connection to Mt. Morris, it includes a list from WWI, The Civil War, and Spanish American War.  Frank Aufderbeck lived next door to us on Hitt St. Don Clark was the grandfather of my nieces and nephews. Harold Knodle was the husband of one of my teachers. Many names on the list are familiar, although I didn’t know them personally.

Coffee and donuts helped us along

"Many hands make light work" has so many people credited with the saying, I don't know who originated it. But it's true. This morning I was part of a well organized Conestoga membership to hand address envelopes which were then inserted with invitations and information about our annual fund raiser for the Ohio History Connection added by others, then stamped by yet others, then boxed and taken to the post office. We were finished in two hours. Big job,and I have writer's cramp. Don't do much with penmanship anymore. A happy group.

Have low to middle income families recovered?

In a brief Google search to see if the low-income quintiles had yet recovered from the 2008 recession, I found a plethora of late 2017 articles in left leaning journals/websites, allowing the authors to cast blame on Trump. Then I lucked out and found a Kansas City Federal Reserve (10th district) study done during the Obama terms, but other Feds were doing similar studies. By the end of 2012, NO quintile had recovered, with the richest taking the biggest hit early in the recession, but low and middle income recovery just slid lower and lower. Low skills, prison records, drugs, the loose mortgage standards of the Bush years and the lack of resources to relocate all made a perfect storm for many low income workers. People who were previously middle-high income, were pushed into the low. A good review of recent history to keep your thinking clear. As near as I can tell from the secret code, this is 1st quarter 2013. Author is Kelly Edmiston.

https://www.kansascityfed.org/QcNUW/publicat/econrev/pdf/13q1Edmiston.pdf

Can you fathom this level of evil?

 

I wonder if we could get teens to march in front of her office to protest the killing; 30 N 1900 E # 2B200, Salt Lake City, UT 84132. Think of the classmates missing from their schools because of doctors who perform abortions and call it "medicine," or "women's health."

"Confronted with the idea that children subjected to partial-birth abortion — a procedure that allows doctors to kill a baby mere moments before birth — feel pain, and even cry during the process, Dr. Torres shared her secret for scream-free murders: you cut the child's vocal cords before you complete the rest of the "procedure."" Daily Wire.

How biased is your news source?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-source-you-probably-wont-agree-with-this-chart-2018-02-28?

This chart for instance, is.  There’s no way that Washington Post can be considered an objective source.  .  . especially where Trump is concerned.

A good example of news selectivity based on politics is two current stories: 1) the prostitute and Trump and 2) NYC pulling armed security from the public schools.

The MSM cable and alphabet news will feature the prostitute story with interviews, discussions, panels, and Fox will report it as news with little additional stuff.  The issue of armed guards in schools and removing them will be a featured story on Fox with interviews with New York City parents and students whereas if it is mentioned on other cable channels, it might be a tag end after reporting the student walk out which is being funded by celebrities and various leftist organizations (that part won’t be mentioned, however).  So both stories are reported, selectively, and with different amounts of time and different “experts” and concerned.

The perfect storm damaging boys who become stunted men

From the book by Leonard Sax, MD, PhD, “Boys Adrift: the Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men”

“Here’s a quick run-down on the five factors which are disengaging so many boys:

1) Changes in education. Over the past 30 years, American education has undergone three major changes which have had the unintended consequence of turning boys off school. Here we have space just to talk about one of those changes, namely: the acceleration of the early elementary curriculum. Thirty years ago, kindergarten typically was about activities such as fingerpainting, or playing duck-duck-goose, or singing in rounds, or going on a field trip to splash in a pond or chase after tadpoles. No longer. Today, kindergarten is first and foremost about learning to read and write. In other words, the kindergarten curriculum in 2007 looks suspiciously like the first-grade curriculum in 1977. Likewise, we’re now asking 1^st-graders to do what we asked 2^nd or 3^rd-graders to do thirty years ago. And so on.

That acceleration of the early elementary curriculum took place without any awareness of recent neuroanatomical research showing that the different regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in girls compared with boys. The language area in the brain of a typical 5-year-old boy, according to a large NIH study published in 2006, looks very much like the language area in the brain of a 3½-year-old girl. Many 5-year-olds are simply not ready to sit for hours, learning to read and write – not because they’re dumb, but because they are BOYS. The result is that for many young boys, the first experience of school is a turnoff. I’ve watched this happen countless times. “Jason honey, why are you squidgeting and widgeting in your chair like that? Please stop, it’s very distracting. Damien, are you making that buzzing noise again? Please. Jason, what did I just tell you! Now look at Emily, she’s being so good, she’s sitting still and being quiet. Is that so hard for you boys? Can’t you please just SIT STILL AND BE QUIET!” The boys get the message that doing well in school means being more like a girl and less like a boy. But boys don’t want to be girls (just as girls don’t want to be boys). As a result, many boys develop hostile attitudes toward school – by the age of 6! – which are hard to change, particularly if parents and teachers don’t understand where those attitudes came from.

2) Video games. The average American boy spends 13 hours a week playing video games, compared to less than 5 hours per week for girls. That figure does NOT include time spent watching television. And that’s just the AVERAGE: many boys spend 15 to 20 hours a week, which means on a typical day they’re spending two hours or more in front of the PlayStation or the Xbox or the GameCube. We now have some extraordinary brain research demonstrating that boys who spend more than eight hours a week playing video games – which means, the majority of American boys – actually atrophy the area of the brain involved in motivation and concentration. They are more likely to prefer video games to reading a book, and more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, which leads to the next factor:

3) Medications for ADHD. In affluent suburbs, as many as one in three White boys today is taking a medication such as Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, or Metadate. Recent research from Harvard University and other prestigious research institutions suggests that when these “academic steroids” are administered at an early age, the end result may be damage to the nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens plays no role in cognition. The function of the nucleus accumbens is to translate motivation into action. If a boy has a damaged nucleus accumbens, he’ll look fine and he’ll feel fine. But he’ll be lazy – particularly if he stops taking those medications.

4) Endocrine disruptors in the environment. The average young man in the United States today has a sperm count less than half what his grandfather had at the same age. And, a typical boy in the United States today is more than twice as likely to break a bone compared with a boy thirty years ago – despite the fact that the boy today is less active. Researchers such as Dr. Shanna Swan at the University of Rochester have traced these changes to endocrine disruptors in the food our children eat and the water they drink. For example: what’s the composition of that clear plastic bottle that your bottled water is in? That bottle is made out of polyethylene terephthalate, a substance which mimics the action of female hormones. The result of drinking water out of clear plastic bottles is not only lower sperm counts and brittle bones, but diminished motivation and drive. That effect is seen only in boys, not in girls. Recent studies which I cite in the book show that endocrine disruptors lead to derangement of the motivational system in boys, but not in girls. (In girls, these same substances accelerate the onset of puberty, and may increase the risk of breast cancer later in life.)

5) The decline and disintegration of the masculine ideal. Forty years ago, popular evening TV shows included Father Knows Best and My Three Sons. Twenty years ago, The Cosby Show was a leading sitcom. Today, the most successful evening comedy show is The Simpsons. We’ve gone from Father Knows Best to Homer Simpson in a little more than one generation. I don’t believe that these shows caused the change in the way that men are viewed in our culture, but I do think that television and other aspects of popular culture reflect changing views of masculinity. Today, a boy doesn’t get much constructive guidance about what it means to be “a real man.” He can choose between boobs like Homer Simpson or slackers like the Matthew McConaughey character in Failure to Launch, or he can choose a thug or a bully as his role model – such as the personae portrayed by male pop stars Akon, 50 Cent and Eminem.”

http://www.singlesexschools.org/ultrashort.htm

The Loyal Judith has arrived. . . 1732

Just browsing around an internet site called e-books and texts (15 million books) and clicked on the University of Illinois collection and noticed an old government document for Pennsylvania about foreigners who'd taken an oath of allegiance to the province in the 1700s and to King George II. I checked my own record and found the Loyal Judith had docked in Philadelphia on Sept. 25, 1732, so I flipped the pages and there they were: https://archive.org/stream/namesofforeigner00egle#page/62/mode/2up/search/Judith. Different libraries submit their special collections, and U. of I. had 80,000+ in Illinois history, railroads, agriculture, rural studies, et. Lots of Canadian libraries, gov't libraries, special collections like comic books and children's, and special libraries For all its problems, the internet is amazing. Still, serendipity and flipping pages is not very efficient. Maybe there's a finding tool or index.

Statistical outliers—The Swamp

I guess we know now how federal bureaucrats (aka The Swamp) came up with redefining Title IX and wanting mixed locker rooms. "The percentage of individuals living in the District of Columbia who identify as transgender is 2.8 percent—more than triple the percentage of those living in the next highest states of Hawaii or California (.78 percent and .76 percent respectively). And, the percentage of transgender individuals in the District of Columbia is more than nine times greater than the .3 percent living in North Dakota or .31 percent in Iowa." (Williams Institute, UCLA data)

Churches founded by Jesus’ disciples or their disciples—the Other Catholics

The Coptic church in Egypt used to be one of the largest and best known Christian churches, second only to Rome, until the Arab invasion in 641. It was founded by the gospel writer, Mark, the disciple of Peter, and Coptic Catholics still have the succession of their Patriarch (Pope) from him to this day. The current patriarch is Anba Ibrahim Isaac. The 200,000-member Catholic Church has 14 dioceses in Egypt, including pastoral services for Latin, Melkite, Armenian, Chaldean, Maronite and Syriac Catholics. The Coptic Orthodox church is much larger--I'm assuming both claim St. Mark and all the early church fathers. Since the 1940s, many Coptic Christians have settled in the U.S., more are Orthodox than Catholic.

 https://aleteia.org/2016/12/13/5-things-to-know-about-coptic-christians/

The first European monarch to accept Christianity was King Tiridates IV (also called III) of Armenia. This church was established by Jesus' apostles, Thaddaeus and Bartholomew. Known today as The Patriarchal Armenian Catholic Church. Gregory Peter XX Ghabroyan was elected Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians July 24, 2015. He succeeds former patriarch Nerses Pierre XIX Tarmouni, who died June 25, 2015.

https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/april/documents/papa-francesco_20150409_sinodo-chiesa-armena-cattolica.html

http://www.lastampa.it/2015/09/07/vaticaninsider/eng/the-vatican/francis-condemns-complicit-silence-over-christian-persecution-36TPZflUNfin9JBkgoyXDL/pagina.html

A vacation from politics

A man from Ohio decided to give it all up because Donald Trump won--a stay at home version of moving to Canada. And he found peace, and a lake. He blocks all news from TV, radio, newspaper—won’t even allow his friends to discuss anything political.

Before our summer home in Lakeside on Lake Erie became expensive and modern, we used to have a peaceful week as renters with no TV, no radio, no newspaper, and no phone--and the car remained in the drive-way. The peace was a shock to the system. News addicts can do this any time, but once you take that first looksee, you're a goner.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-too-little.html

Not quite Mom’s salmon patties

Salmon patties were a wonderful comfort food my mom often fixed—usually with creamed peas.  This isn’t her recipe, but sounds yummy.

6 oz. can skinless/boneless pink salmon, drained
2 T. diced onion
good pinch each of salt and pepper
1 large egg
1 T. buttermilk
2 T. cornmeal
4 T. all purpose flour
Veg. oil for frying

How to make it :

In a bowl, combine the salmon, onion, salt and pepper. Stir in the egg, buttermilk, cornmeal and flour. Combine well. Heat about 1/4″ oil in the bottom of a med. size iron skillet over med. high heat. Drop spoonsful of the salmon mixture into the hot oil and flatten out just a tad. Fry, in batches, about a minute per side or until golden brown. Drain on a paper sack or paper towel lined plate. Makes 10 patties.

Found at http://recipescup.com/attie/

Today is National Meatball Day

We’re going to the Fish Fry at Our Lady of Victory tonight so I’ve decided to have meatball sandwiches for lunch.

These are my favorite meatballs, although not what we’ll have for lunch today.

Sweet Sour Meatballs
(Christmas Eve 2000)

3 lbs. ground chuck
1 pkg. dry onion soup mix
2 eggs
1 cup fine dry bread crumbs
1 can (8 oz) sauerkraut, drained
1 can (8 oz.) whole cranberry sauce
1 bottle (12 oz.) chili sauce
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

Mix meat, onion soup mix, eggs and bread crumbs and form into meatballs. Brown the meatballs. Combine the sauerkraut, cranberry sauce, chili sauce and brown sugar.  Pour over the meatballs and bring to a boil. Turn into a casserole and bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.  12 good size servings. This made a nice change from the usual roast or ham.  Was served with a potato casserole and a green beans/onion casserole.  From Columbus Dispatch.

[My notes: I couldn't find cans of the size requested, but I used the correct number of  ounces.  I would think the jellied sauce would work also--especially if you have someone in the family who doesn't like the texture of whole pieces of fruit in with the meat (I have such a person.)  I didn't use the sugar--cranberry sauce is pretty sweet, but taste it to see if yours needs it.  Mine made 24 big meatballs--if you made them smaller, would be more like appetizers.  I prepared the sauce the day before and just warmed it up and poured it over the browned meatballs after I put them in a 9 x 13 dish.  Froze the left-overs and they were fantastic in January.]

Prager University videos that went viral in 2017

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• Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism? - Dennis Prager - 7.6 MILLION VIEWS

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https://www.prageru.com/

Playing board games

Sometimes I'm really surprised at how "old" some of our problems are. Like face to face interactions. I wrote this at my coffee blog 9 years ago.
----------------------------------
I had the most delightful, surprising conversation with a clerk at Panera's this morning.

"Did you have a nice Christmas?" (me)

"Yes, we had a wonderful time? And you?" (him, 20-something, but looks younger)

"Yes, we did."

"Plans for New Year's?"

"Well, I'll just be doing things with the family. We're going to try out the board games we got Christmas."

"You mean, real board games, not computerized games?"

"Oh yes. My wife got Scattergories and my sister got the new Monopoly. Have you seen it? And I got (couldn't understand what he said)."

Imagine. An evening with family playing board games.