Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Oh no they didn’t!

Woo hoo! The more I look at Sarah Palin’s political record, the more it looks like a political fun house… or a mad house, maybe.

Now it turns out that Irish blogger Maman Poulet managed to catch Sarah Palin in a big fat lie that the mainstream media never even bothered to check out.

Sarah Palin said that she had lots of foreign policy experience because she had been to Ireland, Germany and Kuwait. Better revise that, GOP. It seems that Palin wasn’t being honest about the Ireland part.

Maman Poulet discovered that Sarah Palin’s supposed trip to Ireland consisted of a layover of an hour or two in a sequestered part of Ireland’s Shannon Airport when her plane on the way to Kuwait stopped for refueling. Does that count as visiting Ireland, and having foreign policy experience there? Sure, if you’re running for Vice President of the Wasilla High School Student Council.

It’s a shameless padding of Palin’s resume that indicates more about her lack of experience than about her qualifications to succeed John McCain and become President of the United States.

This week, CafePress sent us a cap as a free sample, to get us excited about selling clothes using a technology they call InfiniStitch. It’s a way to get an image made on a computer automatically stitched as a badge on a piece of clothing.

That sounds really great, but there’s a problem, as seen on the sample cap filmed in the movie below: The stitching doesn’t actually look very good, and the words in the stitching are almost impossible to read.

That’s small stuff compared to the problem I found on the tag: The cap is made in China by a company called Alternative Apparel. The name Alternative Apparel sounds great, but there’s more to a business than just a name.

Alternative Apparel makes a lot of promises when it comes to the ethical treatment of workers in its Chinese factories, and it says that it inspects factories a few times a year in order to see if things are on the up-and-up. However, Alternative Apparel doesn’t really know what’s going on in those factories in China except on those special inspection days.

What’s going on in Chinese factories has been exposed: Forced prisoner labor, worker abuse, and even child slave labor. The New York Times recently reported that “Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws.” They report the use of Chinese child slave labor as “quite typical”.

Alternative Apparel surely knows about these problems, and the insufficiency of inspections in revealing the problem. Yet, they choose to do business in China anyway.

Why? That’s easy. They do it for the money.

Alternative Apparel chose to have the clothes it sells made in China in order to save money, so that they could make big profits. They knew that China has low labor costs because it has low standards of worker protection.

Alternative Apparel chose to outsource its manufacturing to China in order to avoid American laws that guarantee fair treatment of workers and environmental protections.

Do you want to support that choice? It’s your freedom to do so, but if you buy from companies like Alternative Apparel, please don’t act shocked when you hear about children being forced to work as slaves in China. You helped make it happen, after all, with every cheap thing you bought that was made in China.

There is a true alternative in apparel. You can buy a shirt from Skreened, which prints here in the USA, only on shirts that are made in America, by American Apparel.

American Apparel is the real thing. They follow American labor and environmental laws. Alternative Apparel doesn’t. They went for the ethical loophole. They’re just posers.

Do you want to wear clothes made by posers?

There’s been a lot of talk over the last twenty years about how the planet Earth seems to have become a great deal smaller. Smaller it may have become, but is that because people can transcend great distances, or is it just because people have become able to ignore them?

A business brochure I happened upon today promised to tell people about “The Future Of Business”. It read, “In this issue, we explore the subject of global change on a local level, drawing our own picture of what the future of business may look like based on conversations with some of the tenants at Centennial Lakes Office Park.”

The brochure was eight pages long.

Can eight pages explore the subject of global change on a local level? What on Earth is global change on a local level?

When people use the word “global” these days, they often just mean “international”. They’ve got business contacts from some foreign countries, sure, but are those contacts truly global? Global is supposed to refer to something that pertains to the whole world, not just a connection between some parts of the globe.

Here’s a test for determining if something is truly global: If it’s not in the Falklands Islands, it’s not global. If it’s not in North Korea, it’s not global.

Fidel Castro is retiring, and I don’t care.

I won’t go so far to say that it doesn’t matter, and I’m not trying to say that Castro’s release of power, coming on February 24th when the Cuban government shall select a new President, is uninteresting, as far as it goes.

Still, in the larger scheme of things, it isn’t within the larger scheme of things. Cuba is now just an island. It never managed to overthrow the United States from our soft Gulf underbelly. There is no international Communist conspiracy any more, except for the one to have more potlucks.

Castro may be retiring, but outside of Cuba, he was already irrelevant.

Communism only matters politically to the extent that it serves as an insult that right wing zealots can hurl against progressive policies that they do not understand. To our everyday lives, Fidel Castro mattered in the end only to the extent that he interfered with our ability to get good cigars.

A follow-up to the story of the Saudi government punishing a rape victem located here.

News Article

Saudis defend punishment for rape victim
Wed Nov 21, 9:19 AM ET

The Saudi judiciary on Tuesday defended a court verdict that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a gang rape to six months in jail and 200 lashes because she was with an unrelated male when they were attacked.

The Shiite Muslim woman had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating Saudi Arabia’s rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes.

But in considering her appeal of the verdict, the Saudi General Court increased the punishment. It also roughly doubled prison sentences for the seven men convicted of raping the woman, Saudi news media said last week.

The reports triggered an international outcry over the Saudis punishing the victim of a terrible crime.

But the Ministry of Justice stood by the verdict Tuesday, saying that “charges were proven” against the woman for having been in a car with a man who was not her relative.

The ministry implied the victim’s sentence was increased because she spoke out to the press. “For whoever has an objection on verdicts issued, the system allows an appeal without resorting to the media,” said the statement, which was carried on the official Saudi Press Agency.

The attack occurred in 2006. The victim says she was in a car with a male student she used to know trying to retrieve a picture of her. She says two men got into the car and drove them to a secluded area where she was raped by seven men. Her friend also was assaulted.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Judges have wide discretion in punishing criminals, rules of evidence are vague and sometimes no defense lawyer is present. The result, critics say, are sentences left to the whim of judges. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light sentence to death.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack avoided directly criticizing the Saudi judiciary over the case, but said the verdict “causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment.”

“It is within the power of the Saudi government to take a look at the verdict and change it,” McCormack said.

Canada’s minister for women’s issues, Jose Verger, has called the sentence “barbaric.”

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the verdict “not only sends victims of sexual violence the message that they should not press charges, but in effect offers protection and impunity to the perpetrators.”

I’m sorry, but you can try to make any excuse you want to explain away this type of behavior but I can’t view this sort of thing as anything less than the most outrageous, disgusting, immoral perversion of justice that I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

Every so often I’ll see something that can fill me with such disgust and outrage it becomes difficult to express my feelings. This is one of those times.

And to anyone who claims that the members and writers of Irregular Times give Islam a free ride while harping on Christianity, I’m about to prove you wong.

Female rape victim gets 200 lashes and jail
From correspondents in Riyadh
November 16, 2007 07:15am

A COURT in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail.
The 19-year-old woman - whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms - was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

Saudi Arabia enforces a strict Islamic doctrine known as Wahhabism and forbids unrelated men and women from associating with each other, bans women from driving and forces them to cover head-to-toe in public.

Last year, the court sentenced six Saudi men to between one and five years in jail for the rape as well as ordering lashes for the victim, a member of the minority Shi’ite community.

But the woman’s lawyer Abdul Rahman al-Lahem appealed, arguing that the punishments were too lenient in a country where the offence can carry the death penalty.

In the new verdict issued on Wednesday, the Al-Qatif court also toughened the sentences against the six men to between two and nine years in prison.

The case has angered members of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite community. The convicted men are Sunni Muslims, the dominant community in the oil-rich Gulf state.

Mr Lahem, also a human rights activist, said yesterday the court had banned him from handling the rape case and withdrew his licence to practise law because he challenged the verdict.

He said he has also been summoned by the ministry of justice to appear before a disciplinary committee in December.

Mr Lahem said the move might be due to his criticism of some judicial institutions, and “contradicts King Abdullah’s quest to introduce reform, especially in the justice system.”

King Abdullah last month approved a new body of laws regulating the judicial system in Saudi Arabia, which rules on the basis of sharia, or Islamic law.

This is the kind of people who the USA supports. We’re allies with Saudi Arabia even though the majority of the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 were from there and we’re even sending them military equipment.

When I first read this, I admit, I found I could easily renounce an anti-violence ideal if it meant I could deal some Old Testament type punishment on the people involved with this story, but right now it’s making me feel sick to my stomach.

Religion of peace my achin’ ass.

Tonight I was researching various topics on paganism and ancient revivalism when I came across a Wikipedia article about a group of pagans in Greece who were trying to gain equal rights in the eyes of the Greek government. It seems that prior to 2006, all religions except Christianity, Judaism and Islam had been banned. An Athenian court seems to have overruled that.

The story regarding this can be found here (I may post a separate diary entry about this later).

When I read about their desire to be allowed to worship in the Parthenon, I looked it up on Wikipedia for clarification. The article listed pollution hazards and I found myself curious enough to read on. It seems that acid rain from the growth of Athens and the exhaust from cars has caused irreparable damage to the sculptures in the Parthenon.

Pollution is a bad thing, not only for the harm it does to ourselves and our environment but for the harm it does to our history. When historical landmarks and wonders of the ancient world are threatened by our pollution, isn’t it time to do something?

I see this and then I see conservatives calling for less restraints put on pollution control and I find it hard to believe that they could be so caviler and arrogant not to see the harm that is already happening. Is there nothing at all more important than grabbing for that extra dollar?

What Every American Should Know About Iraq

by David Michael Green

Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George W. Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a traitor, or a geopolitical naif.

To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or all of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments herein, nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I will even include some of the comments and arguments made by the administration and its supporters.
Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly complete account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating America’s policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim that they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart - but actually for all citizens in a democracy - it is incumbent upon us to educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.

Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about this question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices are justified.

So, in that spirit - and as the Founders themselves said - “let Facts be submitted to a candid world”.

This is the best short summary I know of of US involvement in Iraq

RED DAVE

Published by the US Government for our troops, in 1942, this is a fascinating look backwards and forwards.

A Short Guide to Iraq

RED DAVE

Liberals never can understand the value of hard day’s work. They’re just lazy effette professors who want to keep their fingernails clean.

How do I know this? I read for myself, that’s how.

Liberals hate sweatshops. Everywhere they go, they call for no sweat in factories.

Really! They expect companies to employ people, but never ask the workers to break a sweat. Wimps!

I mean, if people don’t ever sweat in factories, then how will they ever lift big boxes? Will they have to have little boxes with doilies on them?

The socialist liberals with their Marxist love of the free market of laziness keep on demanding that companies like Hanes and The Gap hire only people who never break a sweat. No sweatshops! No sweatshops!

They also demand that no children be hired to make Americans good clothing with honest family values in them. Well, how are those kids ever going to learn the value of a good hard day of work unless we help them?

Do you know, I went to Bangladesh once, almost. I saw pictures of people in Bangladesh, anyway, and let me tell you that, although they’re all very poor, they’re also very happy. They love it. They wouldn’t trade their so-called lifestyle for our decadent society of mansions and jewelry and fancy cars and Hollywood liberals. No sir!

They want our money, which is why they’re happy to work for a nickel a day.

You know what burns me? The liberals insult those people. They call those people “exploited”, and try to take away their jobs by instituting some kind of minimum wage or something.

I am so sick of liberal wimps insulting workers that I’m going to go to Wal-Mart and go buy more shirts made in Indonesia, just to make them mad.

It’s a higher moral calling.

Orange Alert! Orange Alert! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Report to Stations! Orange Alert! Whoop!

What’s that you’re saying? “I don’t have a station to report to?” Nonsense! This is a War on Terror, people, which means your battle station is right here on the Home Front! Your job, people, is to find the terrorists in our midst. None of this namby-pamby liberal hand-wringing, now. It’s inexcusable in these dangerous times. YOU, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR DOG are under direct attack by the communist terrorists, the homosexual foreigners, the marauding moonbats. So here’s what you need to do:

1. Get up on your feet, and to everyone you meet, say “Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello.”
2. Look for that squinty, shifty look in your neighbor’s eyes. Also look for brown skin and lack of crucifixion jewelry. Does your neighbor carry a liquid substance (explosive)? Do they fail to mow their lawn? Do they eat organic food?
3. If you encounter any of the above, call 1-800-FL-CHIPS and tell the good people at Frito-Lay about your neighbor’s involvement with terrorism. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your diligence and let the nice people at Homeland Security know right away.

Yes, friends, it’s up to you to stop the wave of terror that laps at our ankles, like a kiddie pool brimming with pee, like a dog that’s figured out you spilled mustard on your legs, like your boyfriend that one time, back in ‘93, when he tied you up and… at any rate, you know what I’m saying here: UNLESS YOU FREAK OUT and GET PARANOID, the terrorists win! So report on your neighbor today: call 1-800-FL-CHIPS and let the snack food industry know about the threat on your block.

Orange Alert! Now more than ever. United We Stand. Semper Fi. These Colors Don’t Run. Have You Forgotten?

You know, when I first heard that Mel Gibson had said, while being arrested recently in California, some “offensive things,” I was really really worried. I thought maybe the star of Lethal Action had said “Stem cell research is not such a bad thing” or “Gay? OK!” or “F**k, but those Buddhists really have a point there.” That would have been a level of career-destroying offensiveness, for sure.

But then I read the actual police report of Mel Gibson’s remarks while being arrested for driving after drinking the communion wine (what’s wrong with that? nothing but being RELIGIOUS!). Here’s all the nicest guy in Hollywood ever said:

“My Life Is Fucked” — Well, that’s all Jesus said, really. All our lives are “fucked,” until we accept Jesus as our personal savior!

“You Mother Fucker. I’m Going to Fuck You. You’re Going to Regret You Ever Did This to Me.” — Everybody knows these are lines from Mel Gibson’s latest film, A Trial of Faith, about a man whose wife leaves him for a chinchilla in a state with same-sex marriage, triggering a crisis of faith that involves a lot of swearing at God. But don’t worry — the movie shows in the end that God can handle being sworn at, and eventually forgives Gibson. In the meantime, come on, the Saucy Aussie was just rehearsing his lines!

“I Own Malibu” — OK, well maybe he does. That’s a good thing to know: he’s a property owner, a good upstanding citizen and all. A nice factual statement.

“I’m Going to Get Even With You” — said to the police officer, this makes sense. Mel Gibson, upright conservative Christian paragon that he is, is only telling the nice office that he’s not going to “get odd” with him tonight. No fag boy, that Mel Gibson! We all breathe a sigh of relief.

“Fucking Jews” — well, they do “that,” you know. That’s how they perpetuate their scheme to overtake all the world’s population and turn them into banking customers!

“Are You A Jew?” Good thing to know, because if so, there’s one more Jew who needs a nice New Testament sent to them as a thank you gift and chance at salvation!

“The Jews are Responsible for all the Wars in the World.” OK. So. Well. This looks really bad. At first glance. But when you consider that um, well, with the hypotenuse of the square of the Pythagorean Theorem in the second case, the smiggledy smaggle of the plumbum in green mainly takes the exclusionary clause in an unnecessarily literal manner. You know what I mean? See, no problem!

Thank you, Mel Gibson, for continuing to show the gracious goodness of Christian conservatism the whole world through. I am your number one fan, and you are my hero!

I am tired of all the obeisance (thank you, Mr. Dictionary!) given to the Statue of Liberty by Lieberal Americans. I mean, look: it’s just a statue, given to New York (hello!) by the French (hello!). The Statue of Liberty did not sign the Declaration of Independence. The Statue of Liberty was not a Founding Father. The Statue of Liberty did not die for you in Vietnam!

No. The Statue of Liberty is a Trojan Horse (thank you, Mr. History Book!) given to us to infiltrate our society and fill it with wrong thinking by those communards, the French baguette monkeys. Just look at Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed upon its base:

Lady Liberty? Hah! We have been worshipping a French Communist Whore!

The communist New York Times is at it again.

In a “news” piece this morning that they evidently think is “funny,” the “reporters” at this left-wing moonbat operation revealed state secrets yet again. This time, they disclosed that Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, Amish Country Popcorn, the Mule Day Parade, Sweetwater Flea Market, Nix’s Check Cashing, The Mall At Sears, and Bean Fest have been placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s database of locations under threat of terrorist attack.

They think this is a joke. They think it’s funny. Well, revealing state secrets like this is not funny! They’ve gone and made it easy for the terrorists again, letting them know that we know what they know, you know? Now that they we’re on to their plot to blow up Nix’s Check Cashing, they’re going to move on to even more vulnerable targets, like the Jiffy Lube next door. There are kids in that Jiffy Lube! Kids whose fathers laid down their lives in battle, so the New Commie Times could laugh over their graves and mock the threat that looms over Bean Fest!

Brian Lehman, owner of Amish Country Popcorn, knows the score. He knows the threat. He has an explanation: “Maybe because popcorn explodes?” That’s right, Brian, that’s right! Popcorn explodes! And you can fit hundreds of little popcorn bomblets into one little jar! When it explodes, the glass in the jar turns into shrapnel, shooting out at sixty miles an hour, severing heads and slicing into arteries. That’s a weapon of mass destruction right there, Sambo!

So go ahead, “journalists.” Laugh. You just go right ahead and laugh. That’s what the terrorists want. Be We The People know that in this age of terror, not even the Amish popcorn is safe.

Cnews displays the latest in the “Iraqi Disaster” photos:

This just makes me sick. Yes, this man is mourning the deaths of his relatives in another so-called “senseless bombing” that the liberal media keeps harping on like it mattered, as if these were Americans who died. Well, they weren’t Americans, so why should Americans have to look at this photo?

Besides this, I am disgusted to the core by this man’s behavior. Having your family members killed is no excuse. “Mourning” is no excuse. What a bratty sort of behavior, to try to justify one’s behavior by bringing in deaths in the family. Clearly, no one taught this man some courtesy. So let me be the one. Fella, Ahmid, whatever your name is, you SHOULD GET A CLEAN SHAVE. Your 5 o’clock shadow tells us all that you just don’t care. Slovenly appearances like this simply open the door for improper behavior on the part of the youth of today. So shape up, stop your useless gesticulating, and GET A SHAVE! Then you can “mourn” in whatever over-the-top fashion that the liberal media cameramen pay you to engage in.

Pathetic!