K's First Mushroom Hunt

K has been often taken to the dog park a few blocks from our house by his nanny.  She says, "He loves the dogs and they love him."  So I thought I would use her strategy of giving him a good workout, a good meal, and then a good nap.

He walked a good bit of the way to the park, discovering nasturtium seed pods on the way.  I could tell he really wanted to eat one, but did not put one in his mouth.  Finally, he pushed one toward my mouth.  I shook my head and that settled the question for him.

When we finally made it to the park, we found some shaggy parasols growing in a far corner.  I picked a few mature specimens, and K was clearly very excited about them.  Then we found a couple just sprouting up.  I picked one and K eagerly grabbed the other.  I fried them up with some tofu and peas for dinner.

Learning about legacy racism

Several months ago, as I was putting J to bed, out of the blue, he said, "All the people who sleep outside in sleeping bags are old and black!"  We had not talked to him about "black" people or any other race.  We mention different nationalities because we know people from and eat food from different countries, but I was pretty sure we had never mentioned anything about race.  I managed to say that, while a lot of people who sleep outside are old and black, there are many who are not so old and not so black.  Indeed, I could have pointed to a few on our walk to his preschool the next morning.  Still, that's quite an observation from a newly-turned-four-year-old.

 A day or two later, L cautiously asked him whether people were different colors and what colors those might be.  He answered, "Grey, Black. Orange...".  (I asked who besides John Boehner is orange, but that was a joke for us.)  So it seems like he was not repeating what he had heard, but was just trying to describe what he saw.

A couple days ago, we watched a couple African American city workers taking down flags from a flagpole in the park behind city hall.  J asked what they would do with the flags, saying he thought they would take the flags home with them.  I told him that I didn't think so, and we should ask them.  He wanted me to ask them for him.  I told him he should do it himself.  We wound up not asking them anything.

This morning on the walk to school, I started the conversation about talking to strangers, imagining it going something like this: "It's harder to talk with people you don't know.  You're worried about what they will think and say.  But what's the worst that can happen, and do you think people are likely to do something like that?"  However, when I asked why it's harder to talk with people you don't know, he said, "When I see people with black skin, I think it's weird."  I said that it's probably because we don't talk with black people that much, and if we talked with black people more often, he would think it was normal.  He agreed.  I assured him that there was nothing weird about it; that's just how some people are.  But for the moment, I don't know an easy way to remedy this.  He has one part-time Af-Am teacher at his school and we have a couple friends, but for the most part, we live in a pretty white and Asian world.

Local Olives

A few weeks ago at the park near our house, J picked up a purplish berry-like thing and asked, "What's this?"  I told him it looked like an olive and, looking up, pointed out that we were right near an olive tree full of ripe olives.  J was very excited to pick and eat olives, but I told him we couldn't eat them as they were, that they needed to be "cooked or something" first.  As I picked some, he was still excited about our having lots of olives to eat.  The branches were high, though, and the picking was not easy.  I warned him we wouldn't be able to get a lot; this would just be a "learning project".  From online research, the easiest way to cure the olives was to soak them in brine for three weeks or so, changing the brine every week.  (Slice the olive skins first, but don't cut the pit.) After two weeks, J insisted on tasting one.  It was still a little astringent, but not enough to keep him from eating several more.  After three weeks in room-temperature brine, the olives are delicious, although not for much longer.

J's old shoes

Yesterday, after a bit of pestering from J, we sat on the front doorstep and cut open his beaten and now-too-small flashing shoes.  We pulled out the battery pack and sensor which, if flicked with the finger, made the lights flash still.  The wires between battery and lights have been exposed, but it's still attached to the shoe, and you can see where the battery used to fit under the heel.  We plan to bring it to his preschool for share day next week.

J sees the phone box

For a while now, J has been asking me and L what the large metal boxes are that he sees around sitting on the sidewalk.  I've told him I thought they were for phone lines, but of course this doesn't make much sense to him.  Yesterday on the walk to his preschool, we walked by a box that was opened by a technician working on it.  We stopped to watch him making connections and re-organizing the bundles of wires.  I tried to tell J about how, when he talked on the phone, electricity carried his voice down the wire, through some switches and along another wire to someone else's phone.  The technician was very nice, and told J that if this box was knocked over, thousands of phones around there would go out.  J said he didn't understand that, so I restated, "If a big truck comes and knocks this box over, thousands of phones in the buildings around here would stop working."  This seems to have impressed him.  He didn't say much while we were looking at it, but as we walked away, he said, "Wow, that was amazing!"

A Couple More Sweeping Statements

Joe Stiglitz, Justice for Some

Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America’s legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the “rule of law,” but it would not be a rule of law that protects the weak against the powerful. Rather, it would enable the powerful to exploit the weak.

In today’s America, the proud claim of “justice for all” is being replaced by the more modest claim of “justice for those who can afford it.” And the number of people who can afford it is rapidly diminishing.

Matt Stoller, Strategy of the Democratic Power Class

Since the 1970s, Democratic elites have focused on breaking public sector unions and financializing the economy. Carter, not Reagan, started the defense build-up. Carter, not Reagan, lifted usury caps. Carter, not Reagan, first cut capital gains taxes. Clinton, not Bush, passed NAFTA. It isn’t the base of the Democratic party that did this, but then, voters in America have never had a lot of power because they are too disorganized. And there wasn’t a substantial grassroots movement to challenge this, either.
Obama continues this trend. It isn’t that he’s not fighting, he fights like hell for what he wants. He whipped incredibly aggressively for TARP, he has passed emergency war funding (breaking a campaign promise) several times, and nearly broke the arms of feckless liberals in the process. I mean, when Bernie Sanders did the filiBernie, Obama flirted with Bernie’s potential 2012 GOP challenger. Obama just wants policies that cement the status of a aristocratic class, with crumbs for everyone else (Republican elites disagree in that they hate anyone but elites getting crumbs). And he will fight for them.
There is simply no basis for arguing that Democratic elites are pursuing poor strategy anymore. They are achieving an enormous amount of leverage within the party. Consider the following. Despite Obama violating every core tenet of what might have been considered the Democratic Party platform, from supporting foreclosures to destroying civil liberties to torturing political dissidents to wrecking unions, Obama has no viable primary challenger. Moreover, no Senate Democratic incumbent lost a primary challenge in 2010, despite a horrible governing posture. Now THAT is a successful strategy, it minimized the losses of the Democratic elite and kept them firmly in control of the party. Thus, the political debate remains confined to what neoliberals want to talk about. It’s a good strategy, it’s just you are the one the strategy is being played on.
A lot of people think that Obama is a bad poker player, but they miss the point. He’s not playing with his money, he’s playing with YOUR money. You are the weak hand at the table, he’s colluding with the other players.
There are parts of the Democratic elite that don’t believe in neoliberalism, but they are a modest portion of that structure. So often what comes out of the party is garbled. Most Democrats support our reigning institutions, they believe in paying taxes, they believe in government power. Given a choice, they’ll grumble, but they are more willing to believe that this government is good than to support structural change. By contrast, the Republicans are unified in their desire for a more brutal and more plutocratic though otherwise unchanged institutional arrangement.
This makes the GOP seem more committed, more professional and more change-oriented. This isn’t poor strategy or coordination from Democratic elites. The lack of willingness to fight on behalf of the public isn’t the same of an unwillingness to fight. It’s just their unwillingness to fight anyone but you.

Sorry. It's fairly short and dense, so I included the whole thing.

Deficits Caused by Oligopolic Control, not Entitlements

Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft points us to and elaborated on analyses about what's really causing the deficits and what's behind the Catfood Commission and other austerity measures.

http://www.openleft.com/diary/21051/the-real-budget-deficit-comes-from-outofcontrol-oligopolies-not-middleclass-entitlements

http://www.openleft.com/diary/21128/austerity-narratives-from-real-economists-debunked

Just pasting in the links now so I can read them later, and since they mesh well with how I understand what's going on now. It seems like the US economy is dominated by players profiting from economic inefficiencies who then use that money to buy political power to preserve those inefficiencies against the popular will. Not sure how to get out of this bind, and things will likely get much worse before we do. Ian Welsh even advocates getting out of the US if you can.

Berkeley coffee update

When I first moved back to Berkeley a year ago, I was worried about getting coffee from my favorite San Francisco roasters. It quickly became clear that this would not be a problem. Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph sells beans from Barefoot, Local 123 sells beans from Flying Goat, and there's a Blue Bottle stand at the downtown Farmers' Market Saturday mornings. I could go on as there seem to be more options every month or two. (There's still nothing in downtown Berkeley, though. In downtown Oakland, there's Modern: Coffee and Cafe Gabriela.)

However, I've started buying coffee roasted at the Coffee Market on Hopkins near the Monterrey Market. The roaster doesn't have a particular "style", but his lighter roasts seem similar enough to those above that it looks to become my much cheaper alternative to them. He also sells his roasted beans in pound bags at the Country Cheese store on San Pablo near University.