So yesterday a government panel recommended that all young women and girls be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus. Here is a quote from the New York Times:

A federal vaccine advisory panel voted unanimously yesterday to recommend that all girls and women ages 11 to 26 receive a new vaccine that prevents most cases of cervical cancer.

The vote all but commits the federal government to spend as much as $2 billion alone on a program to buy the vaccine for the nation’s poorest girls from 11 to 18.

The vaccine, Gardasil, protects against cancer and genital warts by preventing infection from four strains of the human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted disease, according to federal health officials. The virus is also a cause of other cancers in women.

The development and subsequent approval of this vaccine is very good news considering that HPV (aka-genital warts) is the most common sexually transmitted disease here in the US. (I should note that HVP is a group of several different viruses. The strains of HPV that cause visible warts seem to be less carcenogic than the strains that do not show visible symptoms.)

I thought it was interesting that this is being promoted as a “cervical cancer vaccine” because it really isn’t a cervical cancer vaccine, it’s a HPV vaccine. From what I have read the vaccine only works in people who do not have the strains of HPV it inoculates against and it decreases the risk of cervical cancer by preventing HVP infection. I suspect that framing this as cancer prevention is probably more acceptable to those parents who would reject the idea of a sexually transmitted infection (STI) vaccine, but there is something that bothers me about framing it in that way.

I’m also curious as to why the vaccine is being recommended for only girls and women. It seems to me that the best way to slow down the infection is to vaccinate everybody. One study indicated that vaccinating men would reduce the prevalence of HPV, but it would not be cost effective. Upon doing some further research, I found that there is a vaccine produced by Merk that can be used in men or women, but the vaccine was not universally recommended by the panel yesterday. I think even if it is more costly we should vaccinate everybody. In particular, vaccinating only women would not help men who have sex with men. This would be a non-issue if cervical cancer was the only type of cancer caused by this virus, but the HPV (which is really a group of several different viruses) viruses also can lead to cancer in the anus, penis, vagina, and vulva. The good news is that these cancers are less common than cervical cancer, but they are still costly and deadly cancers that we should try to eradicate. It seems to me that the vaccine should not be gender specific. I understand the practical reasons for calling it a “cancer vaccine” not a HPV vaccine, and I suppose it could still be called a cancer vaccine since HPV seems to increase the risk of several kinds of cancer.

I’m not trying to dampen the good news. I think the development of this vaccine is great, but I think it should be universally recommended without regard to gender. The current vaccination strategy seems to be modeled on heterosexist assumptions about sexual behavior, and it will not eradicate the disease. Universal vaccination would do this.

Here.

(And so my newfangled vow to do a page a week is (barely) maintained.)

This week, the Chancellor of the University of Colorado officially announced his intention to fire Ward Churchill. That doesn’t mean that Churchill has been fired, yet - there’s still an appeals process to go through, plus Churchill has announced that he’ll sue the University.

Joanne Belknap, a women’s studies professor at U of Colorado, summed up the Churchill case well:

…A seemingly white male, who’s benefited immeasurably through co-opting an American Indian identity, is providing rich fodder for the right and the racists (often one in the same) to damn, discredit and/or dismantle ethnic studies programs, not just at CU, but across the country.[...]

In this case, in daring the media and university to come after him, Churchill apparently didn’t care that when they revealed his co-opted identity and sloppy (even unethical) research methods, that it was ethnic studies programs that would take the real hit. Of course, Churchill may be taking a few hits as well, but he seems to enjoy his “I’m-a-bad-boy-leader-of-the-oppressed-world” identity. The real tragedy is that Ward Churchill has done an incalculable amount of harm to ethnic studies programs in order to promote himself.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Churchill is a dishonest scholar. Among his many academic dishonesties, what I somehow find particularly galling is his habit of citing claims to essays he wrote under different names, thus giving the false impression that his claims were supported by independent authority.

It’s true, of course, that Churchill only got in trouble for his academic dishonesty because of his unpopular political opinions. That’s disturbing to me, because it could create a chilling effect on unpopular speech. And it’s also true that few or none of the right-wingers calling for Churchill to be fired for his dishonest scholarship, called on the AEI to fire John Lott (Lott did finally leave AEI two months ago, but it’s unclear if he quit or was fired).

Yet despite all that, the kind of academic cons Churchill committed should be legitimate cause for firing, just as the AEI should have fired Lott years ago. Fighting to protect the job of a dishonest and lousy scholar is not the way to defend either leftism or free speech. Besides, Churchill does more to harm than to help progressive causes, as Professor Belknap argued. Facts and evidence, by and large, support left-wing views; dishonest scholars like Churchill don’t help the cause, they muddy the waters.

If we want to stand for the academic freedom of lefty professors, let’s start with some professors who deserve a defense, like David Graeber and Joseph Massad (see also here).

And while we’re at it, we should also object to the appalling case of adjunct professor Thomas Klocek, who was fired for his pro-Israel views.

PLEASE NOTE: Comments on “Alas” are sometimes heavily moderated; if you’d like to avoid all that, you may leave a comment on the same post at “Creative Destruction.”

Over at abyss2hope.

(Early Wednesday Morning Edition)

I’d like you to take a moment and think of your favorite websites. Are they, by any chance, mtv.com or cnn.com or maybe michellemalkin.com? No? Well you may want to consider them as your favorites, cuz soon you may not have much of a choice. Or you could take a moment, educate yourself about net neutrality, and start making some phone calls, writing some letters, and signing a petition.

If you aren’t familiar with Net Neutrality and the threat against it, check out Save the Internet. Here’s the jist of it. Net Neutrality is basically the First Amendment of the Internet. It states that every site is given equal access. Basically, you are able to search for and look at a small site just as easily as a big corporate one. That’s what the internet is all about, right? Not if the big telecommunications companies and their enormous team of lobbying attorneys has anything to do with it. AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast are spending millions of dollars to create a tiered internet where money determines how fast your site loads or if it loads at all. The bill to destroy Net Neutrality is being considered by the Senate right now.

You can think of the internet as one big public access channel, but these telecommunications companies are hoping to turn it into something more like cable tv. Instead of being able to choose from millions of websites, you’ll have to choose from your internet provider’s menu. And those that don’t pay to be on the menu, won’t be accessible.

So if you like reading this website, it is of the utmost importance that you take action to save it and the millions like it. This is not something we can forget about. The telecommunications lobby is one of the strongest in the U.S. and has a long hystory of victories against what’s best for the public. But we can stand up against them and win. So take a moment and call your senator, sign the petition, write a letter to your local paper, and do whatever else you can to ensure an open internet.

A new study indicates that the number of confidants Americans have has decreased over the past 20 years. This finding marks one of several studies that indicate that Americans’ social networks are decreasing. The primary proponent of this theory is political scientist, Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone, describes the general decline in civic engagement. In this study sociologists Lynn Smith-Lovin, Miller McPherson, and Matthew Brashears were focused specifically on friends and confidants. Here is a quote from the abstract of their study:

The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third (one confidant), from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Most people have densely interconnected confidants similar to them.

The study also found that:

• The trend toward social isolation mirrors other class divides: Non-whites and people with less education tend to have smaller networks than white Americans and the highly educated.

• Racial diversity among people’s networks has increased. The percentage of people who count at least one person of another race in their close network has gone up from about 9 percent to more than 15 percent.

• The percentage of people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from about 57 percent to about 80 percent, while the number of people who depend totally on their spouse has increased from about 5 percent to about 9 percent.

Our families and communities are undergoing some dramatic changes, as people become more and more isolated. What do you think has lead to these changes? What do you think can be done to reverse these trends (assuming you think this is negative), or is this just a product of our contemporary postmodern lives? Do you think your own experience is reflected in these trends?

Here is the link to the summary of the study. and here is a link to the authors findings. (PDF)

Occasional “Alas” comment-writer Richard Jeffrey Newman will be the featured reader tomorrow (Saturday) night at an open mic poetry reading. Richard’s a pretty impressive fellow, so if you’re in NYC you should probably check it out. Details at Richard’s blog.

Oh, and I’ll be in New York City myself next month - probably around July 28th, give or take a couple of days. While I’m in town, I’d love to have dinner with any interested NYC “Alas” readers. (Also, if anyone can put me up on their sofa for the night…!) I’ll mention this again when we’re closer to the date, but please leave a comment if you think you’d attend such a dinner.

Think of your favourite political movement, right now think of your favourite television executive producer.

See given the subject of this blog means that I’m guessing a fair number of people came up with feminism and Joss Whedon. Well guess what? You can combine the two in special fundraising screenings of Serenity for Equality Now. Go see if there’s one near you. You can also combine the two by watching Joss’s speech to Equality Now, where he answers the question he gets asked most often half a dozen different ways. Go watch it now (or if you’re on dial-up like me - start down-loading it) - I’ll wait.

I thought I’d honour these events by writing about the politics (OK I’m a geek and I have many different theories about the politics of Joss Whedon shows and I’ll go into them at a moments notice).

I think the politics of the television show are quite distinct from the politics of the movie. The movie says something - and we can argue about what that is, but it’s message is in the plot of the movie. The politics of the television show are less direct, they’re more about the world that was created, and less about the narrative of the individual episodes.

Live Free or Die

I first got involved with activism in university when I was 19. It was 1997 and the National government was looking to corporatise university education. A whole bunch of other people got involved with me - it was new and exciting. I was young, innocent and inexperienced. I remember having a conversation about politics with a Marxist, who seemed very grown-up to me, but now I think about it he was probably only 22. Anyway we were talking about our local social democractic party of the time the Alliance* social democracy and he said something like this:

In a way we agree with the National party - the country couldn’t afford free education and free health care, and all the rest of the Alliance’s policies [the Alliance was NZ's social democratic party for a while there]. If the government introduced policies that radical then the capitalists would disinvest. Government’s have to run the country in the interests of capital.

Only he said it a little bit more annoyingly because he was a member of the International Bolshevik Tendency. Now I’m a little bit older now, and basically agree with what he said.

What does this have to do with Firefly? Well I think the politics of Firefly are a little bit like that - I think the Firefly can sustain either a libertarian or an anti-capitalist reading relatively easy - but I’m not sure the world they portray is particularly consistent with social democracy (or liberalism - if the term means much to you).

Now obviously I prefer the anti-capitalist reading, but I’ll go briefly into the libertarian reading, which I think is pretty self-explanatory. On Firefly the government is generally portrayed as the bad guy. The basic aim of the captain of the ship is to stay away from the government and stop them meddling in his life. I’m not at all surprised that libertarians can find the show appealling. I strongly suspect that Tim Minear leans towards libertarian politics, and that doesn’t surprise me (Tim Minear is the show-runner of Firefly who is not my secret tv boyfriend).

There are some serious problems with the libertarian reading - most importantly because no-one in the ‘verse takes private property particularly seriously.

The Materialist ‘verse

I think (and I don’t think this is particularly controversial) that the ‘verse is a capitalist one. I also think that capitalism doesn’t work for poor people in the ‘verse (just like it doesn’t work for poor people in the real world). We see people dying from work in the mines, because they’re not safe, we see the desperation of unemployment and we see capitalists using indentured labour owning a company town. These are real world problems, caused by real world capitalism. Joss set it up this way describing it as a world where there were laser guns, but not everyone could afford them.

This is more important than it should be. Most television denies any material reality for its characters. Grace Paley said that when you’re writing you should remember that all your characters have blood and money. For most TV characters money isn’t a reality, they have a bigger apartment and wardrobe than someone on their salary could ever afford, and whenever the writers get bored and decide to introduce a money based plot it is ridiculously unrealistic. On Firefly money, and class were real - they affected people’s lives and were the driving force in much of the plot.

This isn’t particularly radical (in the real world, it’s possibly quite radical on television). But I do think it makes an anti-capitalist reading consistent with the text. It’d be radical if it offered a solution, and it does - for a second - from Jaynestown (my favourite episode):

If the mudders are together on a thing, there’s too many of us to be put down…

It’s not quite a call to the barricades, but it’s a sign that at least some of the writers of Firefly live in the same world I do.

The Alliance

That’s the radical left reading and the radical right reading - it’s the social democrat reading that is most problematic. The Alliance, the government in the ‘verse, is not neutral - it maintains the power structures, and fights imperialist wars. Now this makes perfect sense to libertarians, because they believe that governments suck (although I’ve no idea what they think about imperialism, because litertarianism never made any sense to me - the only libertarian I’ve ever liked was Laura Ingalls Wilder). It makes sense to most left-wing radicals because we believe that the state tends to work in the interests of people with power, particularly the ruling class. It’s problematics for liberals and social democrats, because at best they have to believe that the state can be neutral.

Big Damn Movie

Serenity is slightly different. Not because the state is presented any more positively - poisoning people and creating unimaginable horrors is hardly neutral. In our comments someone described it as an ‘anarcho-libertarian’ - and I might agree, but I don’t consider that a compliment. The show has become about the small guys beating the big guys, not by building their strength through numbers, but by being smart and lucky. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t ring particularly true to me.

I prefer the indirect, realistic, politics of the show, to the straight-up, fantastic, politics of the movie. Give me Jaynestown over Serenity - I think I would have preferred Serenity if it had been told over a season - I think it would probably have been less fantastic that way (or maybe I just prefer TV to movies).

Also published on my blog.

Bitch Lab: The 17th Carnival of Feminists!

Jay Sennet Jaywalks: The Second Erase Racism Carnival!

YouTube: Joss Whedon’s Speech For Equality Now!
Damn! Awesome speech regarding being asked “why do you write strong female characters” by reporters a thousand times over. “How is it possible this is even a question? Why aren’t you asking other guys why they don’t write strong female characters?” Curtsy: Heron61.

Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty: Women Are Really Neat People

There has been a bit of a bit of a debate among feminists blog-writers, about blow-jobs. I don’t want to write about that, but I do want to write about the way in which feminist analysis looks at women’s lives, both individually and collectively, and what relationship that has to the sort of action we take.

Taking Place: “Freedomland” sucks and is racist; here’s why.

Super Babymoma: What Happens to Bloggers Who Disappear?
Probably everyone who uses netnames - either for themselves or their netfriends - has had this thought.

Super Babymoma: Venezuela Begins Program of Wages for Housewives

Taking Place: Couple arrested for saving illegal immigrants’ lives

Interesting discussion of Gentrification and Neighborhoods
My Amusement Park: Why Should I Have More Right To Live Here Than Someone Moving In?

Arbusto de Mendacity: Gotta Move

Angry Brown Butch: Innate Charm, My Ass

Here. Right now, I really like how it looks, although I might hate it a month from now.

My intention is to post a new page of Hereville every Thursday. Considering my past record, however, my advice to you is to wait and see how it goes. :-P

Folks may have noticed that I haven’t been posting as much on “Alas” recently. To some extent that’s because I’ve had to go to the “day job” a lot more than usual lately, a situation I expect to be temporary.

However, my lack of posting is also because I’ve changed my free time priorities, and “Alas” has been moved down a couple of notches, so that I can spend more time drawing Hereville (and doing some other stuff as well, but Hereville is the biggie).

So substantive blogging from me will be less frequent for the forseeable future. And I’m afraid the huge link farms - which I really liked doing - are of the past, because they took a lot of time to put together. Future link farms will either be a lot smaller, or a lot less frequent, or (most likely) both.

Just thought I should let y’all know.

(Normally I try to avoid blatantly partisan blogging, but I was in a mood when I wrote this, I guess.)

So What Does Ann Coulter Stand For? Does it stand for:

Another Noisy Neo-Con Offers Underhanded Lies & Tedious, Erroneous Rants.

Or perhaps:

Ann’s Neverending Nastiness, Cruelty, Offensive Utterances, & Lying Titillates Every Rightwinger.

Post your suggestions in this thread, but remember, no references to Ann’s body, supposed lack of femininity, etc. - let’s keep this a sexist-joke-free zone. (It’s her ideology we want to be making fun of!) Winner gets a color print of my sketch of Ann (that’s it to the right), with their own Anncronym used as the drawing’s caption. (Of course, if there aren’t any submissions I like better than my two suggestions, then I’m the winner.)

Oh, and a curtsy to Piny for the word Anncronym.

(Cross posted on Creative Destruction).

As some of the language in this post suggests, I wrote it while my daughter was still in utero. It turned up during a spate of hard-drive housekeeping, and I think it’s relevant enough to be worth posting, even so long after it was written.

If I had a tenth of Amp’s cartooning skills, I’d turn the Cute Li’l Parasite into a cartoon, a sort of pro-choice counterpart to the faintly disturbing Umbert the Unborn. Umbert, for those who missed him, is a cartoon fetus that floats in some kind of misshapen uterus that has been detatched completely from anything resembling a woman (the hypothetical artificial womb, perhaps?) and spouts the pro-life line as well as any adult.

Another kind of fetus, almost completely unlike Umbert, shows up in Listen: Your baby’s life before birth, a free booklet I got as part of my pregnancy loot. Aimed at women and couples who have already decided to continue with a pregnancy, it can celebrate fetal life without undercutting maternal choice, and the picture it paints of the third-trimester fetus is a good deal more believable than Umbert.

My baby, now well on the way towards birth and personhood, is already experiencing the world. Sounds, both from within my body and from the wider world, reach hir, and sie’s already learning to recognise my voice. Sie can feel hir own body and the umbilical cord, as well as being aware when something presses against my abdomen and restricts the available space.

But what fascinates me is that, apart from sound and pressure, everything my baby experiences comes through me. Take taste - sie’s sensitive to changes in the taste of the amniotic fluid, which takes on the flavours of whatever I’ve been eating. By the time sie’s ready to be born, my favourite foods will be familiar to hir, but the foods I hate and never touch - sie won’t have a clue about them.

And then there’s emotion. When I’m angry or stressed or euphoric, my baby shares as much of the emotion as is attributable to hormones. Without the intellectual development or the life experience to name the emotion, sie can’t be said to feel angry or happy, but the physical effects are clearly there. When some trollish argument infuriates me, my baby tenses up just as I do, and when I’m travelling home from a match in blissful relaxation, so is my baby.

Pro-lifers have accused me of cognitive dissonance for treating my baby as a part of me, but sie feels what I feel. How can sie not be a part of me?

The other side of the coin is that I’m shaping hir experience of the world. My baby is already very different from a hypothetical clone raised in a hypothetical artificial womb, and this is the part where I suspect pro-lifers of some dissonance of their own. A pregnant woman does a lot more for the fetus than simply refraining from abortion: every decision I make influences what my baby will become.

Editor’s Update: If anyone has any suggested topics for people to write about, please add them to the comments section.

One of the biggest biases I see reflected in the blogosphere is age bias. The blogosphere seems incredibly young at times. I notice the youngness of feminist blogs in particular—it seems like issues affecting older women are routinely ignored. In fact, I was inspired by this post over at Heart’s blog. She had several pictures of second wave feminists, and when I read it, I wondered how many of the women in these pictures are active in the blogosphere. Then, I wondered about the women one generation older than second wave feminists. I asked myself, how many of them are active in the blogosphere. I know these women are out there, but it seems to me that their views and experiences are marginalized on most feminist blogs. It seems to me that younger women like myself have a lot to learn from our older sisters; moreover, I think we can all benefit by focusing on issues that affect women through out the life course.Often feminists in my age group talk about issues like abortion, body image, marriage, child rearing, and birth control, focusing on how they affect women in their teen, 20s, and 30s. I suppose several of these issues are faced by women of all ages, but what we often fail to do is theorize about how these issues manifest themselves across the life course. Take this issue of work place discrimination; does work place discrimination affect older women in different ways than younger women?? I think so. One of the best examples is women being fired for aging. This problem is particularly acute at the television news anchor’s desk. Connecticut news anchor Janet Peckinpaugh (who was only 44) was fired as a news anchor. She subsequently won a multimillion dollar settlement in the case. However, what the CNN article on Peckinpaugh does not let you know is that CNN is also embroiled in their own age/gender discrimination suit. (You can read more here.).When men like Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and many others get anchor positions well into their older years, many in the industry think women are washed up at 40. In my view, this is just one example of an area that we need to expand on in feminist blogs.

Of course, one of the primary reasons that older women are left out of the blogosphere is related to technology access and mastery. Younger people like myself have been using computers since childhood, but the internet seems daunting to some older women who have less experience with computers. I know there are older women participating in the discussions, but it would be nice to see more older women, especially women in their 60s and older, maintaining their own blogs.

So what issues would be discussed differently (or discussed more often) if older women had more say in the blogoshpere? I think there are several important issues facing older women that feminists bloggers should take up more actively. A few that come immediately to my mind are–the social security crisis, life after widowhood, the erosion of anti-poverty programs, gender/age discrimination and bias in the health care system, and grandmothers raising their grandchildren. In order to promote some of the issues that older women are dealing with I am asking other feminist bloggers to post at least one post within the next week (not matter how brief) on some of the issues facing older women. I will be choosing one of the subjects mentioned above, and I will post on it later in the week. If you would like to participate in this project, feel free to use the comments section below to put up a link to your post. I’ll be back later in the week with my post.

A German TV news show did a segment on FATASS, the fat activist radical cheerleaders Bean is part of (FATASS stands for Fat Action Troupe All-Star Spirit Squad). Check it out.

Although it’s very cool that they were on German TV, I found the piece’s emphasis on “fat chicks are sexxee too!” analysis a bit annoying. Sexiness matters, but it isn’t the only possible locus of worth and empowerment, and it’s not all that fat activism is about, but you’d never know that from this segment. (I once had the same complaint about a Michael J. Fox sitcom, oddly enough.)

This is one of two or three updates I’m going to do of a particularly cute run to the grocery store with the kids. (Although the photos had to be cut short after a grocery minion came up to me and told me they had a store policy of no photos in the store. As the minion explained, they were afraid that we might be a fake family hired by another grocery store to do opposition research.)

Today: Maddox in the carrier.

Maddox is much more active and engaged with people nowadays - even compared to only a month ago. Hey, look, I know this person - I’ll smile at them!

Read the rest of this entry »

From a piece by Linda Hirshman in Sunday’s Washington Post:

The reaction started within a day or two of my article appearing on the American Prospect Web site. “Everyone’s Talking about Linda Hirshman’s ‘Homeward Bound,’ ” said “Alas, a blog.” “I was thinking of writing something” about it, the blogger continued, “but first I thought I’d see what other bloggers were saying . . . and that turned out to take up all my available blogging time.”

Geez, I get quoted in the WaPo, and it’s such a lame quote. Oh, well.

(Here’s the post she’s quoting, in case you’re curious.)

Curtsy: Family Scholars, where Elizabeth is annoyed that Linda H. has called their site a fundimentalist Christian site. But in the WaPo article, it’s clear that Hirshman is reacting primarily to Brad Wilcox; and if Brad isn’t an evangelical Christian, he sure as heck writes like one. And as for the difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists, I think it’s like the difference between Marvel superheroes and DC superheroes; sure, it’s an important distinction to those immersed in the subculture, but to outsiders they all look pretty much alike.

[This post of Rachel's was "lost" in the recent change of hosts, so I'm reposting it. --Amp]

Amp asked me if I would put up the Bunch-O-Links from Rachel’s Tavern over here, so I’m putting them up with a funny little story to tell you about. I’ll put up the story first, and the links second.

Men Don’t Cry??

So last year at about this time my stepson was at our house for a few weeks. At the time he was 5, and it was just before he started kindergarten. He doesn’t see us often, usually only a few weeks in the summer, so needless to say, he was a little nervous to be away from his Mommy. One day after he finished talking to his mother, I though he was unusually quiet so I walked into his room to find him teary eyed on the bed. I asked him what was wrong, and he started to sob uncontrollably. In between the heaves, I was able to get out of him that he was worried about his Mommy. My partner was really troubled by Branden’s crying, and after hugging him, the only thing he (my partner) could muster was “Branden, men don’t cry, and you and Daddy are men.”

Now, I’m pissed about this because this men don’t cry stuff is a crock of crap to me, so I look over Branden’s shoulder and give Daddy the WTF stare, followed by an audible “that’s not true.” As Branden gets calms down, I’m getting more fired up. I have a long discussion with my partner (away from Branden) about how a 5 year old is not a man, there’s nothing wrong with men crying, and what the hell is he trying to teach him. (Of course, I should note that my partner is very troubled by the fact that he doesn’t see his son often, and I think he sometimes says or does irrational things because of that, which would be great for another discussion.) After this point, on several occasions, I tell Branden and Daddy that men do cry, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So about two weeks later Branden and I are walking down the hall, and Branden says, “Rachel, do you remember what Daddy said the other day?”

I said, “What did he say?”

Branden replies, “He said men don get angry?”

I start laughing hysterically. “Yeah, Branden. He said men don’t get angry.”

I didn’t take the time to tell him that men could get angry too, mainly because I thought Branden’s interpretation was hilarious, and I admittedly like statements that defy stereotypes. I also wondered how our world would be different if we said men don’t get angry, rather than men don’t cry.

Here’s the Bunch-O-Links

1. Changeseeker has a really good post discussing transracial identities.

2. Vegan Kid has a good post on Halle Berry’s reaction and the BBC’s inaction over racist comments a DJ made during an interview.

3. Gil at Lucky White Girl asks why we can’t know the corporate sponsors of politicians, NASCAR style.

4. A new book claims that mixed race people are superior? See more over at Mixed Media Watch.

5. An advice columnist admonishes a childless couple to change their mind about having kids. Republic of T and Feministe are talking about it.

6. Thespian CPA has a good post on the impacts of Black minstrel performers.

7. Women’s Rights Protesters Attacked in Iran. Here are several posts: Kash’s Newsroom, Iranian Truth (good list of the protesters goals/demands), Kosoof (has some good pictures, with writing mostly in Farsi but also a little English).

Its hard to imagine that a company with 850 acres in Napa Valley, California is in the midst of poverty. Its hard to imagine because it isn’t true. Charles Krug-Mondavi vineyards are undergoing a $21.6 million capital improvement drive and part of that drive is to fire all the workers on July 1 and turn the land over to a land manager. Krug-Mondavi announced the decision shortly after the 20-year-old union contract expired on December 31, 2005.

Krug-Mondavi is a member of the Peter Mondavi family of wines. They are one of the most well-known California wine producers, bottling such wines as CK Mondavi, St. Helena Zinfandel, Charles Krug Napa Valley Merlot, and several others. The front page of their website encourages its reader to “peruse our pages and discover for yourself the history and tradition that our Family is proud to uphold.” But what they don’t want you to peruse are what they refuse to print on their pages - decades of worker exploitation, numerous allegations of sexual harrassment, formal charges of bad-faith bargaining and discrimination.

The farmworkers have never had an easy time representing themselves under Krug-Mondavi. It took six years for the company to agree to a union contract after the workers had voted in 1975 to be represented by the United Farm Workers in one of the first union elections under California’s pioneering farm labor law. Ten years after the original contract was signed, the workers found themselves in the midst of an eight-year battle to renew their contract, finally emerging victorious in 2000.

These contract victories have proven to be successful because of the dedicated work of the farmworkers and their ability to organize boycotts. Once again, they are asking the world to help them by boycotting Krug-Mondavi wines. As 29-year veteran Krug Mondavi worker Aurelio Solorio says, “The company simply wants to do away with our union that has represented us and fought for our benefits. The company wants to implement a younger work force that will carry lower wages, no benefits, and will hold a lesser amount of knowledge of their labor rights.” Krug-Mondavi is not threatening to fire its entire workforce because they are reaching bankruptcy. They are doing it so that they can raise their bottomline and maintain a highly exploitable workforce.

So help the Krug-Mondavi farmworkers. Boycott the company’s line of wines and visit the UFW’s website to send an email to Charles Krug. Because Krug-Mondavi has continued to ignore the workers’ pleas, despite the thousands of emails sent to Mr. Krug, UFW is also asking supporters to get on their website and send an email to Beverages and More, one of the largest distributors of Krug-Mondavi wines with 45 stores throughout California.

It’s now possible to read the archives and leave comments, so things are pretty much back to normal.

I’m still planning to restore one lost post and several lost comments (all the ones that made it into my most recent back-up), but I won’t have a chance to work on that until Sunday night.

I hope to have things fixed soon, although this comes at an awful time for me - I’m very busy this weekend, and don’t have the time I’d like to really concentrate on this.

Also, the barry@amptoons.com email address is clearly not working. If you’ve tried to send me email in the last day or so, I haven’t gotten it! For now, if you’d like to email me, please use barry.deutsch@gmail.com.

Sorry about all this… I hope to get things back to normal by Monday.