Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination.
Christian groups and human rights campaigners condemned the verdict and called for the blasphemy laws to be repealed.
Her supporters say she will now appeal against the sentence handed down in a local court in the town of Sheikhupura, near Lahore, Pakistan.
Ashiq Masih, her husband, said he had not had the heart to break the news to two of their children.
"I haven't told two of my younger daughters about the court's decision," he said. "They asked me many times about their mother but I can't get the courage to tell them that the judge has sentenced their mother to capital punishment for a crime she never committed." Mrs Bibi has been held in prison since June last year.
The court heard she had been working as a farmhand in fields with other women, when she was asked to fetch drinking water.
Some of the other women – all Muslims – refused to drink the water as it had been brought by a Christian and was therefore "unclean", according to Mrs Bibi's evidence, sparking a row.
The incident was forgotten until a few days later when Mrs Bibi said she was set upon by a mob.
The police were called and took her to a police station for her own safety.
Shahzad Kamran, of the Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan, said: "The police were under pressure from this Muslim mob, including clerics, asking for Asia to be killed because she had spoken ill of the Prophet Mohammed.
Heck, Mohammed was a pedophile who owned (black) slaves. How much worse can it get? Did the woman accuse him of poor dental hygiene?
"So after the police saved her life they then registered a blasphemy case against her." He added that she had been held in isolation for more than a year before being sentenced to death on Monday.
"The trial was clear," he said. "She was innocent and did not say those words." Earlier this year, Pakistan's internet service providers were ordered to block Facebook to prevent access to supposedly blasphemous images.
Human rights groups believe the law is often used to discriminate against religious minorities, such as the country's estimated three million Christians.
Although no one has ever been executed under Pakistan's blasphemy laws – most are freed on appeal – as many as 10 people are thought to have been murdered while on trial.
Ali Hasan Dayan, of Human Rights Watch, said the blasphemy laws were out of step with rights guaranteed under Pakistan's constitution and should be repealed.
"It's an obscene law," he said. "Essentially the blasphemy law is used as a tool of persecution and to settle other scores that are nothing to do with religion.
"It makes religious minorities particularly vulnerable because it's often used against them."
....But consider: Say I steal £1 off 100 people and give you the £100. Should I do it a second time? Apparently refusing to do it a second time is a greater crime, because I’m denying you £100 that you’re now expecting. The poor suckers who are losing the £1? It’s only £1 isn’t it? Hardly worth getting in a flap over.
If they knew how much you really really needed that money, they’d be happy to cough up, right?
See, whilst many (most of them apparently on Twitter) are psychologically able to ignore, or excuse, or basically discount altogether the taking money from people bit of public spending, there are some of us that just can’t.
One day it occurs to ask the question, “What exactly gives them the right to help themselves to whatever they want?” and the answer turns out to be because they can. Then you get a bit angry and frustrated, feel almost entirely helpless then, just to make things that little bit worse, everyone else in the world comes and slaps you in the face for even daring to consider such heretical notions.
The taking from me bit doesn’t count. I don’t matter. It’s the no longer giving bit that counts. Think about how people feel! Think about all the things they could do with that money, or that job, or learn from those people or achieve with the support of those others! Don’t you understand? Have you no feelings?
Apparently not. I just keep thinking, “But it’s not your money. How can you live with yourselves taking it?”
Welcome to the first annual "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" event. Ever since the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who dared to make a movie critical of Islam, ever since the death threats against Mohammed-drawing Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, which have led to his forced retirement, and ever since the censoring of Muhammad-drawing Matt Stone and Trey Parker (of South Park fame) by the craven execs at Comedy Central, well, something had to be done.
The idea behind it? Solidarity. Plus, if everybody draws Mohammed, they probably won't kill us all.
Well, the only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Here's my pic. It's a fairly reverent depiction of Mohammed's trip to Jerusalem, the trip he made on the back of a flying horse that had the face of an angel.
Attacking iconoclasts (meant here in its literal meaning) has been a constant throughout human history. It's one of the great dividing lines, like laughter and face-to-face copulation, that separates man from beast. Indeed, I'm betting it was a fundamental element of even pre-human history. Can we doubt seriously that some gang of Neanderthals didn't crush the skulls of others who decorated cave walls in "offensive" ways? In the 20th and 21st centuries alone, all sorts of human expression have led to brutality and murder. The ground of Europe and Asia and all the continents with the (possible) exception of Antarctica is fertilized with the blood and bones of martyrs who have done nothing more than make tangible their thoughts in words, music, and pictures. Yet even in a country like ours that threatens consenting adults for making dirty movies with effective life sentences, or in European countries where speech codes imprison malefactors for "hate speech," there is a massive gulf between "mere" censorship and death threats, between the answering of "bad" speech not with more speech but with the blade, the bullet, or the bomb.
This amateurish image was created by Islamic imams and depicts Mohammed as a pedophile. They have defiled their own tradition. There comes a point in any society's existence where it must ultimately, to paraphrase Martin Luther (who himself was more than happy to see opponents put to death), dig in its heels and say here we stand, we will do no other. We don't need to be perfectly consistent philosophically or historically or theologically to assert what is special and unique not just about the United States, with its bizarre and wonderful articulation of the First Amendment, but the greater classical liberal project comprising not just the "West" (whatever that is) but human beings in whatever town, country, or planet they inhabit. And at the heart of the liberal project is ultimately a recognition that individuals, for no other reason than that they exist, have rights to continue to exist. Embedded in all that is the right to expression. No one has a right to an audience or even to a sympathetic hearing, much less an engaged audience. But no one should be beaten or killed or imprisoned simply for speaking their mind or praying to one god as opposed to the other or none at all or getting on with the small business of living their life in peaceful fashion. If we cannot or will not defend that principle with a full throat, then we deserve to choke on whatever jihadists of all stripes can force down our throats.
This is not about U.S. foreign policy, or trade policy, or aid to Israel or Egypt, or the creation of a Palestinian homeland. This is about the right to have the conversations that might inform all that and more. We live in a time of paradox: Never before have so many been so empowered to speak their own minds, to produce and consume whatever form of expression when they want, where they want. The impact on those seeking to regulate and control thought is as predictable as it is depressing and, ultimately, ineffective: Whether they are governments or corporations or religious or ideological groups, they want to stamp out the ability of people to say and think for themselves.
Our Draw Mohammed contest is not a frivolous exercise of hip, ironic, hoolarious sacrilege toward a minority religion in the United States (though even that deserves all the protection that the most serioso political commentary commands). It's a defense of what is at the core of a society that is painfully incompetent at delivering on its promise of freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. It's a rebuttal to the notion that we should go limp in the clinches precisely because bullies and bastards can punch or blow us up.
This is from the (London) Daily Mail, written by David Rose. Don't bother reading any of this. The article, which is extremely well-written, tells us things we already knew, and will only serve to make you angry. I repeat, don't bother reading the article, or my snarky comments accompanying each paragraph. I'm just working the rage out of my system while watching some NFL and filtering some Jim Beam. Here's Mr. Rose:
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
This....just....cannot....be....so. We're supposed to be boiling by now. We're supposed to reach the "tipping point" any day, aren't we? Hell's Bells, the north pole is supposed to melt by 2013 ! !
Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.
Please. Stop reading now. I'm going nowhere with this. David Rose, of The Times, and The Whited Sepulchre, of East Funkytown, are wasting valuable time trying to explain why THE SKY IS NOT FALLING. But you're damn right, Santa's Workshop being ice-free is one of global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs. Check out the countdown widget to your right. At the time of this typing, Al Gore has 1,051 days, 5 hours, and 31 minutes to make the ice caps melt. If that doesn't happen, can we not all agree that Al Gore is a con man? I mean, if it had worked out for him in Copenhagen, he could've become the world's first carbon billionaire by requiring you to give him and Kleiner Perkins your money for.....green things and organic crap and perpetual motion machines and stuff.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
If you're having a hard time reading the captions on some of these pictures, lemme help. Starting at the top left, going counter-clockwise, Nebraska is colder than it's been since 1973. Florida, where the orange groves are freezing, is the coldest it's been since 1980. Scotland, since 1995. Amsterdam, since 1993. Hamburg, Germany, since 1963. Siberia, since 2001. Beijing is the coldest it's been since 1970. (My brother-in-law, Sauron, is in Shanghai now, and he says everyone is freezing their rear ends off.)
The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.
Well, those things happen. That's one of the great things about science. You set up a theory, and see if it can be contradicted. In this case, the theory can be contradicted. You start over. No harm, no foul. But in this case, the voices of reason were up against Global Warming Alarmists who believed that Global Warming Deniers should be executed.
They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.
Whoops. Sorry we screwed up, guys. Good thing NASA's James Hanson didn't get his way and put the chief executives of oil companies on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature. Simple mistake. Coulda happened to anybody.
This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.
However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.
I have only one question, a question I've asked in the comment fields of this blog dozens and dozens of times: This imminent disaster we're supposedly facing.....Will it be a cold disaster, or a warm disaster? Please, please, please. For the love of God, pick one and stick with it for more than a decade. In the 1970's, we were going to freeze unless we repented. In the 1990's, Global Warming was going to kill us all. Now, at the end of the 'Noughts, we're back to a thirty year cold snap.
This image of the UK taken from NASA's multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather
Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.
Theology is "settled". The doctrine of substitutionary atonement, transubstantiation, the virgin birth, and predestination are all "settled". Science is not settled. "Settled science" is an oxymoron. That's the difference between science and religion. Go here to learn why this dispute is not about science, but about religion.
Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
I'm just wondering....why is it that Al Gore is still hired and paid huge sums of money to talk about this issue?
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
Cooling and warming cycles start 3,000 feet below the surface? All this time, I thought the cycles started in Honda Civics, coal stacks, electric companies, and bovine flatulence.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
Bullshit. Summers has it all backwards. For a while during the 1990's, global cooling paused, and we had some warming. Prove me wrong. There are so many ways to look at the data, nobody has a freakin' clue. It's called "the weather", and if anybody could accurately pick what it's gonna do, he could make a fortune.
As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.
Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.
I should've mentioned this earlier. In the Alarmist industry, ALL cooling is mere weather. ALL warming is climate, and a call for action. And money. And power.
The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.....
It goes on and on and on for a while. I'm going to delete a bunch of technical stuff, just in case anyone is still hanging on. I want to get to more of the silly quotes by the Alarmists.
This picture is supposed to represent something significant.
Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970
....For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.
It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.
'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’
As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.
Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole. In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.
‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’
He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.
For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’
....According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’ But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact. In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything. 'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’
The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.
Picture of David Viner freezing his ass off in the snow came from here.
Last Friday night, a 28-year old Somali man armed with a knife and an axe entered the home of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. Because of having drawn this particular cartoon.... .....and death threats against the artist, Westergaard's home was equipped with a safe room, or "panic room", for those who've seen the Jodie Foster movie.
From the D.C. Examiner: Westergaard was at home with his visiting 5-year-old granddaughter when he heard the suspect trying to break in. "I locked myself in our safe room and alerted the police.”
Unable to smash the front door with his ax, the suspect was shot once in the knee and once in the hand by police. The wounds are not life-threatening.
What's to be done about this situation, where Muslims those adhering to certain belief system want to destroy airliners, cartoonists, themselves, and others?
Ireland has responded by tightening up their Blasphemy laws. These regulations went into effect on January 1st. Here's The Guardian:
The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).
It defines blasphemy as "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted".
The justice minister, Dermot Ahern, said that the law was necessary because while immigration had brought a growing diversity of religious faiths, the 1936 constitution extended the protection of belief only to Christians.
In other words, the current version of the Irish Blasphemy statues are no less silly, but a lot more fair. If you want to watch the virus spread, and if you have a strong stomach, you can go here for a USA Today editorial about the U.N. and the Obama Administration supporting an International Law Against Blasphemy.
A group of Irish Freethinkers instantly responded by posting a list of quotations from Jesus, Mark Twain, Tom Lehrer (hello Shuey !), Randy Newman, Salman Rushdie, George Carlin, Richard Dawkins, Pope Benedict, and a few Irish politicians. Any of these quotations would be fair game for anyone wanting to earn some money or notoriety through a blasphemy complaint. Organized sensitivity is becoming more and more profitable.
Speaking of Blasphemy, let's change gears and continents for a moment. This is Andres Serrano's masterpiece, "Piss Christ". It's a photograph of a crucifix submerged in Serrano's urine. It was a big deal back in the late 1980's.
I can take it or leave it. If Andres Serrano wants photograph The Last Supper in purple pelican poop, it doesn't harm me in the least. It wouldn't harm you, either, unless you were forced to pay for it. (In the case of Piss Christ, you may have paid for it, but that's another story. Go here for more than you'll ever want to know about the incident.)
Speaking of Transgressive Art.... Here's a work that I might commission, if I ever get the proper Photoshop skills.
I want to do a multimedia installation showing Barack Obama dressed as a lawn jockey, parking cars at a Goldman Sachs Christmas party. It would be controversial, but it would illustrate the power relationship between Goldman Sachs and our government, and depict the level at which Obama truly is their little bitch.
I want to photograph a sterotypical Welfare Queen in her Cadillac, the stereotype so often derided during the Reagan era. I want to paste (juxtapose, in artspeak) the face of the Archer Daniels Midland CEO onto the body of the Welfare Queen, and call the piece "Welfare Brood Sow", and challenge preconceptions of government dependency.
The final work will be something called "U O Me", and I intend to hire a troupe of performance artists to infest the maternity ward of Arlington Memorial Hospital. The artists will give each infant a bill for $375,000.00, representing each child's share of the unfunded government liabilities voted into place by their grandparents. The artists will threaten to withold milk until all debts are paid.
If you're wanting to help fund any of these projects, don't bother. I'm going to apply for an NEA grant.
Let's review the topics covered so far:
1) Danish cartoons portraying Muhammed. 2) Quotes from Jesus, Twain, and Pope Benedict. 3) Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ". 4) Some proposed artwork of my own, designed to illustrate the corrupt nature of our government.
A few questions on each:
1) Have any of these caused you, or anyone else, physical harm? 2) Would you censor, or prosecute the producers of any of these forms of speech? 3) All of them, or just some of them? Why? 4) Do you think any of these are actually beneficial to society and represent a valid point of view? 5) And finally, do you think it's possible for a government to prohibit one category without endangering all the others?
Just wondering.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. (Especially if you're a god.)
Please tell me that Global Warming, Cooling, Dimming, and Climate Change aren't just a fad that briefly caught the eye of the media, politicians, celebrities, money-hungry entrepreneurs, and the Nobel Prize Committee. Please.
Forget about the Godless Evolutionists. They're mostly a bunch of harmless drudges in white lab coats. Don't worry about the Secular Humanists, those pointy-headed academic villains of a few years back. The real threat to humanity? The Copernicans. Yes, the Copernicans. Those misguided souls who believe that the earth moves around the sun.
The people at The Fair Education Foundation bring up some good points. If all biblical texts are valid, inspired, and infallible, then somebody has some explaining to do. Look at this listing of 67 biblical references to the movement of the sun. Here are a few:
Genesis 15:12...... "...and when the sun was going down..."
Joshua 10:12.. "...Sun, stand thou still upon Gideon...."
Psalms 19:6.... "...the sun goes forth in a circle from one end of heaven to the other...."
Matthew 5:45.... "...for He maketh His sun to rise...."
Both Heliocentrists (those who believe the sun is the center of our solar system) and Geocentrists (those who accept the biblical truth of an earth-centered universe) agree that the moon is moving around the earth. No argument on that. Then we see that the Scripture says that Joshua commanded not only the sun but ALSO THE MOON to stop, and that both obeyed the command. He commanded both of them at the same time in the same breath in the same sentence to stop their motion. He obviously accepted as fact that the moon he was speaking to was a moon that was moving. Since, therefore, he addressed both sun and moon together in his command, it is a grammatical imperative that when he commanded a moving moon to stand still, he was ALSO commanding a moving sun to stand still.
How can you argue with that? I love this guy. Let's close with this link, which includes an account of all the popes who have both condemned and embraced Copernicanism. It explains why all strategic attacks on Creationism and Geocentrism must be met with a rapid, harsh, and yet scholarly response:
This (Satanic) strategy and this strategy alone is the one capable of wrecking belief in the Bible. After all, the Origin of the universe, the earth, and all life forms constitutes the most rudimentary basis of all knowledge that there is. If people can be convinced that the Bible is wrong on its account of the Origins of everything, and that they have been superstitious dupes for believing otherwise, a moron can see that the virgin birth, resurrection, heaven...would soon be viewed the same way. No two ways about it, the Creation Account was the place for the Devil to strike. If trust in the Bible could be derailed on its Creation Account, trust in all the rest of the Bible would follow as night follows day. And as temporary "god of this world" (II Cor. 4:4) that is precisely where Satan struck.
Think about it. If you lose your faith in an earth-centered universe, can a loss of faith in , say, infant damnation be very far behind?
Some people, usually community activists, loath Wal-Mart. Others, like the family of four struggling to make ends meet, are in love with the chain. I, meanwhile, am in awe of it. With more than 7,000 facilities worldwide, coordinating more than 2 million employees in its fanatical mission to maintain an inventory from more than 60,000 American suppliers, it has become a system containing more components than the Space Shuttle - yet it runs as reliably as a Timex watch.
Mr. Platt obviously didn't get the memo. Wal-Mart is supposed to be 100% evil, right?
....Considering this is a company that is helping families ride out the economic downturn, which is providing jobs and stimulus while Congress bickers, which had sales growth of 2% this last quarter while other companies struggled, you have to wonder why. At least, I wondered why. And in that spirit of curiosity, I applied for an entry-level position at my local Wal-Mart.
This will be the good part. Here come stories about employees being chained in the back rooms, forced to work off the clock while Simon Legree wannabes spit on their Bibles.
Getting hired turned out to be a challenge. The personnel manager told me she had received more than 100 applications during that month alone, chasing just a handful of jobs. Thus the mystery deepened. If Wal-Mart was such an exploiter of the working poor, why were the working poor so eager to be exploited? And after they were hired, why did they seem so happy to be there? Anytime I shopped at the store, blue-clad Walmartians encouraged me to "Have a nice day" with the sincerity of the pope issuing a benediction.
Yeah, well, in some places with new stores, there are more than 20 applicants for each job. But that's because the masses don't know better, and haven't been exposed to the blessings of giving their pay to union bosses.
.... I sat at a table that was covered in untrimmed fabric under a protective layer of sticky transparent vinyl, like a couch cover. I'd seen better-looking decor at firehouse bingo evenings. Was Wal-Mart going out of its way to emphasize its commitment to cost-cutting? I guessed that the utilitarian ethic was so deeply embedded, it was just taken for granted.
I've been to the Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville Arkansas three or four times. I've been to the Canadian headquarters in Toronto about as many. This guy, Charles Platt, has definitely been in some Wal-Mart offices. The furniture makes the North Sunflower Academy cafeteria look like Tavern On The Green. If they had nicer furniture in their offices, I bet they'd be unprofitable enough to qualify for some bailout money. The Fools ! !
....A week later, I found myself in an elite group of 10 successful applicants convening for two (paid) days of training in the same claustrophobic, windowless room. As we introduced ourselves, I discovered that more than half had already worked at other Wal-Marts. Having relocated to this area, they were eager for more of the same.
These employees simply don't know better. They've been brainwashed. They were graduates of the American school system, and of course weren't qualified for..... oh, never mind.
But I've got to include Platt's closing paragraph:
Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It's the best friend we could ask for.
Charles Platt is a former senior writer for Wired magazine.
In the Comment Field of the previous post, someone CLAIMING to be NickM has signed on and offered some faint praise, but also tried to make some corrections to the original text.
My children, we must hold everyone to a high standard of proof.
1) How do we know that this person really is NickM ? How do we know that he isn't some devious representative of The Flying Spaghetti Monster? 2) If we weren't supposed to have the original text, the text that has worked so well for us for so long, then why were we given the original text to begin with? 3) Doesn't it make sense that God would want us to have the original text? 4) What will happen to our standards, our values, our core beliefs, if any Limey With A Laptop can sign on and cause us to question our worldview?
Like Mr. Khoja's Koran, our sacred original text has given us comfort and guidance in times of trouble since.....early yesterday morning. We part from it at our own peril.
"(It) is no mere book, but is a living creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it." -Napoleon
UPDATE FROM 7:00 A.M., DECEMBER 3RD ! ! ! THE FALSE PROPHET IS DOING IT AGAIN !!! SEE THE COMMENT FIELD BELOW !!!!
"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN" -THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ
