In news from my neck of the woods, regarding my alma mater:

"The ACLU of Rhode Island today announced a favorable settlement in its lawsuit against Rhode Island College for censoring a sign display supporting reproductive freedom that was sponsored by a student women’s rights group on campus. The signs were taken down after administrators received objections about them from a priest. The ACLU lawsuit, filed by volunteer attorney Jennifer Azevedo, had argued that the college violated the First Amendment rights of the student group, the Women’s Studies Organization (WSO) of RIC, and its three student officers. The highlight of the settlement is an award by RIC of $5,000 to the student group."

The signs read, "Keep your rosaries off our ovaries." The above mentioned priest told the college president, John Nazarian, who immediately had campus police remove the signs. Back when the lawsuit was filed, Nazarian shrugged off anti-free speech charges by claiming that despite RIC being a public college, "It it is not a government entity and that college President John Nazarian is not a government employee."

The ACLU’s response: "Rhode Island College’s position that its campus is a Constitution-free zone is shocking and preposterous, and will no doubt come as a surprise to the thousands of students and faculty members who thought they were attending or working at a public institution." 

Now that the courts have sided with the students and the ACLU, the college is claiming that this was never an issue of free speech. But if it was never a free speech matter, why claim the students had no free speech rights and that you had the authority to take down any ol’ sign?

As proud as I am of my school, and as many issues as I have with our tiniest-yet-most-corrupt state, I still love living in a "blue" state, where the rosaries are kept away from the ovaries and your hands are kept off my signs and my rights.

Jennifer Leblanc

From the always educational and entertaining blog of Maud Newton comes news of "Bipartisan legislation [to] keep library records private." It’s that pesky Patriot Act again, except when you tell librarians (becoming fiestier every year) to hand over the records and keep the mouth shut, they’ll do the exact opposite.

Finally, something Republicans and Democrats agree on.

From the PEN Center press release:

"National Security Letters are administrative subpoenas which are issued by FBI field agents with no judicial oversight and which give the government virtually unlimited access to electronic communications transactions records, including those of Internet service providers and public libraries. Recipients of NSLs are bound to perpetual silence by a gag order.

The bipartisan National Security Letter Reform Act of 2007, introduced by Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), John Sununu (R-NH), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Ken Salazar (D-CO), and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), is a response to a report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice documenting widespread misuse of NSLs and to two federal court decisions striking down the NSL provisions of the Patriot Act as unconstitutional."

Show your support for the bill by writing to your local representative or senator.

Jennifer Leblanc

As we all know, the disastrous Duke case has been closed. The prosecutor, Mike Nifong, has apologized and served a day in prison. The accused players have moved on to different schools. The accuser — well, no one knows a thing about where she is or what she’s doing now. But the bloggers and journalists who reported on the case throughout its existence continue to do injustice to everyone involved in the case (including themselves) and unbiased reporting in general.

Two full-length books have been written about the case, now available through Amazon. I haven’t read either one, so the books themselves are not my concern. My first concern arose from a review of one of them, Until Proven Guilty by Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson. Charlotte Allen of the Weekly Standard butchers the definition of a book review but intitally provides a thorough examination of what we know as fact about the case now. I was surprised by how much I didn’t know about the accuser, especially about Nifong: "The various prosecutorial outrages he committed…most egregiously, concealing from the defense lawyers (via deliberate omission from a May 12, 2006, lab report) the fact that a medical exam conducted on Mangum shortly after the supposed rape revealed the presence of DNA from at least four different men on her person and underwear, none of which, needless to say, matched that of anyone on the lacrosse team…Even while excoriating the team’s "stone wall of silence," Nifong refused to meet with lawyers for Seligmann offering the young man’s airtight alibi." 

Allen says very little about the book (the whole point of her piece). But it isn’t until the end that she shows an unpleasant side of herself that is unacceptable: "On the night of March 13-14, two players (none of them the three accused rapists) flung racial epithets at Mangum and Roberts, although in all fairness this was in response to a disparaging remark Roberts had made about the sexual inadequacies of ‘white boys.’"

So, it’s acceptable to use racial insults if others insult you first? If they insult your sexuality or abilities? Personally, I don’t believe this is ever, ever justified. And where’s the line? What comes after trading insults? Swinging fists? Race war? Allen fails to review a book or present a straight presentation of facts. She only succeeds in showing the cruel biases that everyone involved in or commenting on the case harbors.

On the other side of the coin, we have Samhita of Feministing. From day one, this blogger made it clear that she believed the lacrosse players were guilty. A year and a half later, the dust has settled, the facts laid bare, and Samhita doesn’t have the ovaries to stand up and say, "I was wrong."

(Side note: the threats Samhita has received are also unacceptable, but harrassment of female bloggers is a whole other long, many-layered post).

In response to the threats, she wrote, "You will not shame me…I still stand by what I say and have said." Unfortunately, what she said was that the lack of DNA evidence indicated a cover-up (ironically, the prosecution covered up evidence of innocence, not guilt) and that female lacrosse players were "stupid" to believe in their counterparts’ innocence. Now she says: "None of us actually know what happened that night. Sorry, unless you were there, you don’t know what happened." After repeatedly stating her belief that a crime did occur that night, she wants to use the Schrödinger’s card in response to overwhelming evidence that it did not.

In what was supposed to be her defense, she wrote at length about the state of race/class/the justice system/etc., to deflect from her own mis-bloggings. She writes that, sadly, many ignorant people now believe that "black strippers are lying whores," but her whole defense of herself is based on generalizations that rich boys are guilty and blacks are unfairly discriminated against in law. You cannot refer to a history of discrimination for one side when you yourself are guilty of it for the other. The true history of injustice committed by and endured by the races has nothing to do with the fact that her statements were wrong.

You will not shame Samhita — she already shamed herself, as did Duke, Nifong, the accuser, the media, and everyone who now wants to say they were right or refuse to admit they were wrong.

Jennifer Leblanc

On a Saturday for myself, I take some time to walk through Mussoorie, eat every two hours, and enjoy my independence in a new place. Dehydrated and too close to the end of my book to keep walking by this coffee shop, I duck in. Tucked into the corner, I start to read, but my attention is stolen. Bad Indian pop music is blaring, scattering my thoughts initially before they fall into a state of intent focus on a group of women and their teen girls against the window. Lip-synching with the performative flair and accuracy required to fill the biggest venues in Mumbai, the words to this song are sung as second nature. Articulate, well-coached English broadcasts the very vague, unmeaning lyrics. Plush, brown leather couches and the complementary earth-tone cushions comfortably support the onlooking women, creating a court scene; performers performing and their adoring patrons draped elegantly on an exotic fur as they drink exotic concoctions from far-off lands. Wearing saris themselves, their daughters don the most notorious name brands, the same ones bootlegged all over the world, available on Canal Street and Fifth Avenue. Daughter and mother alike are painted a certain complexion, their eyebrows maintained.

My mind is captivated, enraptured by their speech, enchanted by the scene playing out in front of me, a scene I just read about, was told about by the leading commentators on India. As the bill arrives, one of the mothers dismissively places a large bill on the check presenter and shoos the boy away. She doesn’t say thank you; she’s busy gossiping about the latest on Salman Kahn, what earrings she had on at dinner, or what clothes he was wearing on his day off from boarding school. Louder than the music, the composition of this scene far more telling of something bigger, more "Indian," these women represent the future of India and it is a frightening future that no amount of decadent leather couches can warm me to.

Converted from the theoretical to the real, Octavio Paz’s "In Light of India," Amaryta Sen’s "The Argumentative Indian," and Henry Luce’s "In Spite of the Gods," words enter my mind, their warnings of a rapidly growing population — growing in population and power — of wealthy, educated, privileged, consumer-crazed, well-connected, disconnected Indians. This burgeoning subsection of the population, vastly atypical of the average Indian, is a critical mass that is responsible in large part for furthering an obsession with money, products, packaging, labels, and the conveyance of status at the expense of the starving people who live in the shadows of their mansions.

Surely this is an overly simplistic diagnosis, reducing the economic problems of the 12th largest economy of the world to a sentence, to the people who go to Bollywood movies on a Friday night. But, it is undeniable that a pernicious classism is emerging and the rich are setting the agenda, controlling the flow of money, entertaining foreign investors. This isn’t different from the other countries I have been to and the larger trend of the world today. But, I think about why I am here. I arrived in this country on the wings of funding meant to prompt sustainable development, to cultivate a class of leaders who will try to reverse these harmful patterns, poverty. So, often, in the front of my mind are questions about how to do that, how to effectuate positive change in a meaningful, lasting, fair way and in this coffee shop right now the real question is: whose responsibility is this? This fellowship has one thought, suggesting me as a possible answer, and hearing that from them sounds nice, flattering to think that I might be able to do something so big. But, it seems, these women sitting there have also suggested me as an answer, seemingly unfazed by such questions, choosing instead to purport the exact system I am thinking about. In Delhi, on the train, in Mussoorie, on the billboards, in malls, in advertisements, it feels that the percentage of Indians who have "made it" do not care about where they have made it from, this history that has put them there, and the opportunity they represent going forward, instead choosing to blame the poor, caste differences, or varying state cultures as the reasons for the inability of other people to pull themselves up.

They are now taking pictures of the three girls, divas, sprawled on the couch, their shiny digital camera clicking away.

The Earth can’t support this growth; I know this. So, too, am I aware that it is hypocritical of me to sit here at the same cafe, paying the same inflated prices for a coffee, very much the product of a consumer-crazed country controlled in large part by class structures, to be passing judgment. Admitted. But it feels — thinking about ideas of development and the future and India somehow falling into this term, set to surpass China in 2030 as the most populated country — that there is an opportunity to reconsider these assumed thoughts of progress, material gain, etc. and change a course because the goal ought not and can not be an American lifestyle of consumption. There are things we can do better, cleaner, more inclusively, to not make the same mistakes that the "developed world" made and continues to make.

Cue the violins. Sure this is idealistic, but there is no reason this music should be so bad — it is a product catered to a consumer class more concerned with communicating their status than listening to good music. A bottle of Jack Daniels costs $90, a sign that stinks of a desire to be American, not to drink good bourbon.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Sitting in class, I decided I was going to get my haircut after lunch. My self-cut and styled faux-hawk/mohawk was at a Eurotrashy point that needed to go. On top it was hanging on to cool, standing up, sorta stylin’, but the back had grown to look like a wet rodent, and, because the top didn’t exist without the back and the back didn’t exist at all, it was time.

Walking down the mountain, zig-zagging on the roads to the town of Landour, tunnel vision engulfed my eyes: people’s hair was all I noticed and this new country provided a lot of variate fodder for consideration. My last teacher of the day wears a bob, a Golden-Girls-middle-aged ‘do with little style, lots of natural curl, and the humid air. Voluminous always.

Approaching me was a nice-looking older man in a button-up shirt, grey slacks that looked to be about the same age as me, sandals, and a sharp part swooping his hair from left to right. It smelled nothing of a balding accountant or first communion participant in a white suit and doting mother. Clean shaven. Smart.

Zooming by on his motorbike, a young stud strut his stuff, his brown locks on full display, perhaps the only reason he bought the bike in the first place. Flowing behind, tended to with much time, loving comb strokes, overpriced product, and a constant dose of vanity, his hair matched his tight shirt, tighter pants, and designer sneakers. He too was clean shaven. Around the curve was an older man, seemingly wise because of his hair, venerable in grey. Long and kempt, his beard was wise in its own right. Nothing special in his style, organic, growing from the tested proteins of his oft-tested brain.

That beard opened a can of worms, blaring new tunes of facial hair styles at me in keys I’ve never heard. Paramount among them: the moustache — a style often made fun of in the U.S., at parties organized around the theme, pedophile jokes, and white trash punch lines. In India, the ‘stache is in. It is everywhere, cooler than bellbottoms, sliced bread, or what that guy on the motorbike thought of himself. Fruitseller, bus driver, tailor — a man assumed to have a sense of style, sporting the ‘stache without shame — another guy on a motorbike, one of my teachers at the school, businessmen in the newspaper. The list could go on. Pubescent boys do their best but need to wait their turn. The moustache, replete with wax, attention, trims, and a garish air, is hip.

Sikh men grow their hair long but rock their turbans with the same concern for appearance as the trendiest secular Bollywood star. Purple shoes, a violet shirt, and darker hue in the turban, one Sikh man struts his stuff like the coolest rooster in the pen, feathers puffed, chest out. There are an array of colors, but the most common are black and white — white is the new black once again, just after black was the new white, equally timeless despite the best efforts of marketers and fashion magazines to suggest something outlandish like earth tones. Simple, becoming.

Some men use henna in their hair, an orange like a tiger, fuming almost in the intensity. That color, if put on a dude in leather with piercings, is available on St. Marks Place, but here it is just right, fitting, and fantastic.

Women are far more understated, a part in the middle, their natural beauty does the talking, not highlights or bloated chests. Most schoolgirls put their hair in two braids, looping the bottoms with ribbon, but even still there are no bells or whistles, texture and natural beauty the expression here.

I’m ready to part with my current style. One week into Hindi language school, we’ve not yet learned, "Please shave my head." Turning into one shop, a storefront no more than four feet by six feet, I am met by a blank face. May I please have a haircut? Still blank. More blank. Then some hand waving, a two-handed, fast-forwarded hello. He is not the barber. Walking on, another sweet beard on another owl-like older man, the moustache featured but aware of its strong supporting cast. About the same size, two chairs, two mirrors, a small bench, some pictures of Ricky Martin, I feel good about this barber. May I have a haircut, please? Yes, please sit. Doing better already, I like where this is going, ready for this teen of about 14 to go get someone. Instead, this young man, unable to even enter as a contestant in the ratty 14-year-old moustache-growing contest, is, it seems, the barber.

His hair is awesome, well oiled, trimmed, a meticulous part in the middle, not as slick as Alfalfa and without the cowlick, a little more air underneath it, wing-like. A sweet guy, yes, but I don’t want his haircut. Grinning in amusement, laughing at the absurdity of the situation and absence of my Hindi skills, I begin: Can you please cut it all one length? Reminded by his face and the mirror, I have a mohawk on my head. Touching the sides, he asks me something. Language barrier. I pick up the clipper and ask him for the #2 attachment. Nice, now we’re going. He shuffles through a drawer that doesn’t glide open, but in its worn wood that just fits, it sits in place, hanging down, its contents rushing forward. There are matches, papers from the Dark Ages, rusty scissors, magazine shards, and lucky number #2. Right where I put it, perfectly organized, a little smile peeps through from the barber, amused at what is going on. I’m right there with him, still smiling. One length please, all, cut it off… I try numerous approaches to the same end, taking the clippers and motioning them through my hair. Enter hands: not just saying "one length, #2" but pushing my hands through my hair as if I just surfaced from underwater, then scissorhands, back to the water motion again. Slowly, the boulder creaks forward; we are on to something, about to start rolling down the hill. The sweet buzz of a hair clipper, a soft hum like a blue mosquito light, my hair running to the blades and their dramatic end. Smoothly, the sides are crisply clipped. Now I really look ridiculous.

Getting the clippers through the thicket on top proves challenging, far more testing of the clippers, mosquitoes upgraded to Madagascar hissing cockroaches, a wild animal far more difficult to tame but not unconquerable. With great care, this young man, a young man with great experience but no frame of reference for this foreign species, crouches slightly, pauses, unplugs the weapon and calls for backup, reaching into a bag on the wall to produce another clipper. "New." My smile grows, as does his, and my mohawk quivers in fear, eyes darting like a cornered mouse, aware that it doesn’t stand a chance. This new clipper has been raring to go, a young colt pleading for the track, a Porsche feigning for the Audubon, no seatbelts, bets placed, harnessed with current, plowing ahead. There is a lot of hair, but his savvy enters here, the home stretch in sight. He saves enough for the straightaway and comes up strong to challenge and overtake A Few Stray Hairs, Precarious Ear Area, as well as the favored Encroaching Back Moss.

A deep breath on both our parts; little did I know we were just getting started. Those awesome rusty scissors jumped out of the drawer. I’m stoked to think that they are going to touch me with the intent of cutting things off my body. Sweet. But, young Luke Skywalker uses the force, shaping the hairs around my ear keenly. Nice. I think we’re done. Then, like a samurai wielding numbchucks, he does this crazy thing with a straight razor, like a ninja with a butterfly knife, too fast for a mere mortal to really understand, aided by instant replay and dramatic camera work. A new razor inserted, my neck is cleaner than a newly Zambonied ice skating rink.

Unknowingly, we had now arrived at the final frontier. With his palms down, arms bent at the elbow, and my body the location of a fire, he started fanning me and saying some words. Clueless, my face’s blank stare said that I didn’t know what was going on. More flapping and I finally got it. I crouched in my chair, deciphering the "can you please schooch down" motion that he was trying to tell me — there wasn’t actually a fire. Then, Spider Fingers went to work with a divine touch to rival that of Brancusi, massaging my head in ways I didn’t know were possible. Jammed into the chair in a proper crouch, I was delighted.

Baby powder, payment, and the awesome burst of air on my newly shorn head. One last look back, our smiles were mutual, entirely amused with what just transpired.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

I received a much-forwarded email last week that set off my BS radar:

In case you know someone young enough that uses birth control and for the younger ones.

PASS THIS ON EVEN IF YOU DO NOT USE IT.

Recently this past week, my cousin Nicole Dishuk (age 31…newly grad student with a doctoral degree about to start her new career as a doctor…) was flown into a nearby hospital because she passed out.

They found a blood clot in her neck and immediately took her by helicopter to the ER to operate. By the time they removed the right half of her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain, the clot had spread to her brain causing severe damage.

Since last Wednesday night, she was battling…they induced her into a coma to stop the blood flow. They operated 3 times.

Finally, they said there was nothing left that they could do. They found multiple clots in the left side of her brain…the swelling wouldn’t stop, and she was on life support.

She died at 4:30 yesterday. She leaves behind a husband and 2-year-old Brandon and 4-year-old Justin..The CAUSE of DEATH — they found it was a birth control she was taking that allows you to only have your period 3 times a year…They said it interrupts life’s menstrual cycle, and although it is FDA-approved, shouldn’t be. So to the women in my address book — I ask you to boycott this product and deal with your period once a month — so you can live the rest of the months that your life has in store for you.

*Please send this to every woman you know — you may save someone’s life…Remember, you have a CYCLE for a reason!

FYI…The name of this new birth control pill is Lybrel.

If you go to Lybrel.com, you will find at least 26 pages of information regarding this drug.  
The second birth control pill is, Seasonique. If you go to the website of Seasonique.com, you will find 43 pages of information regarding this drug.  

The warnings and side effects regarding both pills are horrible.

Please, please forward this information to as many daughters AND sons, co-workers, friends, and relatives. Several lives have already been changed.

Being cynical and smelling a rat, I immediatly started searching. The very first result on Google about Nicole Dishuk leads to a site about urban legends. Turns out, Nicole Dishuk did die a year ago — of a stroke. Any other details about the cause of her death have been sealed as confidential. But note how the email states, in bold letters, "CAUSE OF DEATH." She was on this type of birth control pill, but no one has said, let alone confirmed, that the pill caused or was related to her sad, untimely death.

Another misleading bit from the email is that it lists how many pages of info about each drug you’ll find on the site. Of course you will find info — you will find that from any pharmaceutical site — they are required to disclose all drug facts. It doesn’t say, however, that you’ll find 43 pages of info about how deadly it is. It just says 43 pages.

There are side effects (and even related deaths) for every single prescription drug on the market. So the next time you get one of these ominous, meant-to-scare email stories, think twice before you forward it.

In related news: Birth control pill may cut cancer risk (study)
LONDON (Reuters) — Taking the contraceptive pill does not increase a woman’s chance of developing cancer and could even reduce the risk of getting the killer disease, a major British medical study showed on Wednesday.

Thank you medical science.

And now I’d like to thank common sense in the legal system:

A doctor has no duty to tell a woman considering an abortion that her embryo is an "existing human being," a unanimous New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, averting a trial over when human life begins. The decision, citing past rulings, said the court "will not place a duty on doctors when there is no consensus in the medical community or among the public" on when life begins. The 5-0 Supreme Court ruling reversed a unanimous ruling by a three-judge appeals panel.

"No concensus in the medical community…unanimous ruling…" If only facts and science were enough, as in other countries, for our politicians to leave our bodies and our rights alone. It would help if, also like other countries, we could keep religious extemists out of our courtrooms and hospitals.

Jennifer Leblanc