As many of you know, today, May 21, is supposed to be the end of the world. The video below provides some quick how-to training.
Here's a lot more important (and hilarious) information about the end of the world.
I stopped wearing cosmetics a few months ago, after about half a year of using the stuff only sparingly. I started weaning myself off makeup because I had come to hate the hassle of applying it, and because I hated fretting about my appearance. I was also beginning to think of makeup as old-fashioned, an antiquated 'modesty' that inspires shame in one's true appearance. The longer I go without a cosmetic product on my face, the more I believe that makeup needs to go the way of the girdle. The restrictive, uncomfortable, needless, obsolete girdle. How many undergarments are you wearing right now? I'm guessing two at most. Likewise, I only wear two small undergarments below my clothes, even on the most formal occasions. Interview? Presentation? Class? Wedding? A bra and underwear are always adequate. Since I've never had to wear more than two undergarments, I find it staggering that women used to wear massive bras, high-waisted underwear, girdles, pantyhose or stockings, garter belts, slips, and camisoles. I often wear less than that as a full outfit. Anyone who knows me in real life can confirm that I regularly step out in leggings and a t-shirt (plus two small undergarments beneath). I don't say this to titilate, just to illustrate, because I suspect my bare-bones attire is quickly becoming the norm. I've spent a lot of time on college campuses- big and small, public and private, Jesuit and blessedly godless. Everywhere I've seen legions of women and girls decked out in equal or greater states of undress than my own. Gone are the girdles. [More . . . ]
I'm having some rather pronounced design issues with this site, but only when viewed by Explorer 9 or Chrome. Things look right on Firefox and Safari. I'm aware of these problems and I'm working to fix them. In the meantime, all the material at this site is readable on any browser, though the design is scrambled on Explorer and Chrome. Thanks for your patience.
In case DI has been looking strange lately, I am trying to configure a new skin (called Elegance) on top of our WordPress platform. I'll be making tweaks for the next few days (and, OK, years. It never stops). Hopefully, this will lead to some cool new features. I'm also experimenting with new plugins, including the ability to subscribe to the comments of a particular post. That feature is installed already. If anyone has trouble making it work, let me know. I can already see some issues, so don't complain about the new site design until I get it relatively finished, which might be about another week. Then feel free to comment here or write to me by email to let me know what's not working and what's still ugly.
David Leigh, executive editor at The Guardian, appeared on Democracy Now to discuss the lax criteria used by the U.S. to decide who should be imprisoned at Guantanamo. Here are a few excerpts:
Mohammed Basardah . . . [is a] Yemeni who was captured on the borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was apparently trying to flee after the U.S. invasion and the fighting in the Tora Bora Mountains. Since he’s been in there, in Guantánamo, he’s won his freedom by apparently denouncing or implicating at least 123 of his co-prisoners. That’s an extraordinary number, and of course it does raise the question whether he has not been exaggerating.
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The most saddening thing was the descriptions of completely innocent old men and young boys who were shipped off to Guantánamo for no very good reason, except they were rounded up in a dragnet. There’s an 89-year-old Afghan villager, who was picked up merely because there was a list of suspicious phone numbers in a satellite phone found near his compound, shipped off to Guantánamo, where they discover he’s not only very, very old and doesn’t know anything, but he’s also suffering from dementia and probably can’t even remember what day of the week it is.
Similarly, a 14-year-old boy, turned out, when he arrived there, to in fact have been kidnapped by pro-Taliban tribesmen and left holding a rifle while they fled around him. Even the Guantánamo commander at the time, Major General Geoffrey Miller, who’s a fairly controversial and rigorous figure, shall we say, who later went to the Abu Ghraib prison, even he wrote a memo and signed it, saying, “We don’t know why this boy is here. He really has to be got out of here and sent back to a normal environment, because he just—it’s completely wrong that he should be in Guantánamo.” You see innocent people being rounded up, shipped off, stuck there, sometimes for years.
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