Let’s go back to the beginning:

Division of the human family into two distinct groups began some 12,000 years ago. Humans existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains in the summer and would go to the beach and live on fish in winter.
The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented by Man to get to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives.

Keep Reading

NOT:

Canadian support for the military mission in Afghanistan remains surprisingly stable, including in Quebec, despite the loss of three soldiers from that province in the past week, a new CanWest News Service/Global National poll suggests.
Conducted by Ipsos Reid, the poll found 51 per cent of respondents across the country said they support the mission, while 45 per cent oppose it. The numbers remained virtually unchanged from a month ago.

I know that many of you disagree with me when I say that DND and the PMO have done a horrible job of explaining the mission to Canadians; but imagine the support, were our government to regularly inform us of the tremendous progress being made.

With the endless clamor coming from the anti-Afghanistan faction, coupled with the Harper government’s no-show in explaining “the mission”, it’s amazing that young people are still lining up to join the Canadian Forces … especially the army, which is enduring the brunt of casualties. Yet they join.
Canadians join for any number and combination of reasons as varied as adventure seeking to a genuine desire to serve and make a positive difference in the world. They come from all provinces with several contributing an unusually large share despite their small populations:
Nfld. and Labrador 1.4%
PEI 0.3%
Nova Scotia 11.8%
New Brunswick 6.4%
Quebec 20.3%
Ontario 33.6%
Manitoba 4.4%
Saskatchewan 1.3%
Alberta 10.2%
British Columbia 8.3%
Yukon Territory N/A
Northwest Territories 0.2%
Nunavut N/A
Outside Canada 1.8%
From Cjunk:

All of this raises the question; what are you willing to give for the cause? Is the cause worth it? Is any cause worth it? Hell, do you even believe in “the cause?” Are you in the 18-30 bracket and have you ever honestly considered joining the military? Would that be too much sacrifice for you? Try this then; what government handouts or percent of your paycheck are you willing to part with in order to ensure that those who fight in your name do so with the deadliest and best possible weapons and equipment in hand? These questions may seem obvious, but I can’t help but feel that few have taken the time to seriously ponder them.

Just remember, it’s all about saving the planet:

Barto is more sad than angry. He is a leader of a Dayak Kanayan community in a remote part of the rainforest in deepest Borneo.
Gazing out over a vast expanse of freshly planted palm oil plants, he says: “This is our ancestors’ land which we have had for years, and now we have lost it.”

And in Canada

The publication also said 48 to 52 per cent of Canada’s total corn-seeded area and 11 to 12 per cent of the wheat-seeded area would have to be used – all this for Canada to reach its domestic biofuel target of 5 per cent of the national fuel consumption by 2010.

Remember This

The pasta crisis is the latest in what may soon be a regular rise in global prices. In January, Mexican consumers were hit with a tortilla crisis, as grain prices doubled and tripled the cost of tortillas and caused riots in some places. Beer prices in Germany ticked upwards in May partially due to the increased production of biofuels.

cross-posted @ Cjunk

But, how can this be…

In the U.S., religious people who say they devote “a great deal of effort” to their spiritual lives are 42 percentage points more likely to contribute to charity than secularists who have little or no religious faith. Moreover, religious Americans do not just give to their churches: They are also significantly more likely than secular Americans to donate money and time to non-religious charities such as the United Way.
Brooks also found a strong and specific correlation between political ideology and charity. In both the United States and Europe, conservatives who believe in limited government are far more likely to make charitable contributions than are liberals who think government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality.

cross-posted: Cjunk

Another open thread to keep Friday nite rolling. I’ll start it off with this … haven’t offended anyone lately … so Friday evening seems as good a time as any:
Pimp My Jihad
Tagline: More Bling for your Bang!
This show features young upstart Jihadis who send in audition tapes trying to convince show host Mullah Xplozive to “pimp their Jihad”. After the audition segment, the Mullah pays a surprise visit to the participant’s home (usually under cover of darkness and in disguise) where he commences pimping the Jihad. With the help of Al Qaeda Costumes, the Jihad is “totally tricked out”. The final segment of the show is the trademark “Xploding” finale. In addition to their new pimped Jihad, all participants receive 72 virgins.
Keep your links coming!

From Cjunk:

After reading the NYT piece, one can’t help but think of how totally unprepared and Naïve “progressive” apologists for Islamic Totalitarianism are. They are truly destined to become the road-kill of life when faced with crude and harsh forces like Islamic Totalitarianism.

Here’s a great follow-up to THIS discussion on troop support.
By: Rosie DiManno

Nearly six years after 9/11 – plotted in Afghanistan – the country is far from achieving what donor nations and military custodians had hoped. Reconstruction has been laggardly, corruption flourishes.
But those who demand quantifiable benchmarks to justify continued intervention also ignore salient evidence, all that’s been achieved by empowering traditional district councils, micro-credit funding of small businesses, schools built and reopened, vital thoroughfares constructed, irrigation systems repaired, national troops trained and mentored and Afghan currency stabilized. Those stories are under-reported because combat deaths and poppy production are so much more dramatic and easier to tell.
Afghanistan is far from guaranteed a stable future. The international mission to bring that country off its knees might very well fail.
But without Canadian troops there, providing such a large and integral fighting part of the NATO commitment, it’s more likely that embryonic future will die in utero.
Who’s the baby-killer now?

Read it All.
Then from Lorrie Goldstein comes Our Troops Deserve Better:

… some people who claim they “support our troops but not the war” are lying through their teeth.
In fact, they don’t support our troops, or even think about them very much.
But they are fanatically opposed to any public displays of support or affection not just for our soldiers, but for all things military — stickers, rallies, parades, concerts, Red Fridays and similar events.

crossposted @ Cjunk

No, it’s not Kansas … it’s Manitoba:

Moving on from the discussion HERE, a tip from SDA reader Wimpy Canadian led to THIS:

If you listen to the global warming alarmists working for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, sea levels across the globe are rising at a rate that will eventually doom us all.
According to Swedish paleogeophysicist Nils-Axel Mörner, who’s been studying and writing about sea levels for four decades, the scientists working for the IPCC have falsified data and destroyed evidence to incorrectly prove their point.
Mörner was recently interviewed by Gregory Murphy of Executive Intelligence Review, and began by making it clear that the sea level claims made by the IPCC are a lot of nonsense (emphasis added throughout, h/t Eduardo Ferreyra):

crossposted @ Cjunk

From Ted Byfield:

The second goal was far more devastating. It came with a book just published by Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun Climate Research at the National Space Centre in Copenhagen. He calls it The Chilling Stars: A New Theory on Climate Change.
Like Patterson and the Russians, Svensmark contends the sun is a major factor in climate change, but he has been working for eight years to back this up with experimental proof. He has established a laboratory in which the sun’s rays and Earth’s atmosphere have been set up in model, and the cosmic effects on the Earth thereby observed.
The results, detailed in the current issue of Discovery, the highly respected magazine of science, are startling. They show solar activity affects cloud formations on Earth, which in turn determine the Earth’s climate. Paradoxically, it seems meteorological conditions do not determine the cloud formations; rather, cloud formations determine meteorological conditions.

Commentary on the Harper Connection @ Cjunk

Muslims in general are incredibly silent on matters of terrorism and Islamic totalitarianism; so much so that the main voices heard are those of the radicals. The “noise” created by Muslim violence the world over is nowhere near being countered by Muslims who oppose it.
So it comes as a surprise to find that a Tulsa Muslim is pushing back at Muslim supremacists … and he’s doing it in the most typical of American fashions; he’s suing them:

23 June 2007: Jamal MIFTAH, a Muslim who attended the Islamic Society of Tulsa, Oklahoma is now considered “public enemy number one” in the Tulsa
Muslim community. His crime? He openly condemned the terrorist actions of Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists in a letter to the editor (reprinted
below) that was published in the Tulsa World daily newspaper on 29 October 2006. In his op-ed piece, MIFTAH urged Muslims to stop killing in the name of Islam, called bin Laden and other top Islamic terrorist cowards and stated that “some mosques and Islamic institutions in the U.S. and around the world have become tools in their hands and are used for collecting funds for their criminal acts.”
What happened to Mr. MIFTAH following the publication of his letter is the focus of a lawsuit he filed against the Islamic Society of Tulsa and several other related defendants. (A transcription of the lawsuit is published in its entirety below). According to Mr. MIFTAH, on or about 18 November 2006, he attended prayers at the mosque as he had normally done in the past. Following the prayers, Mr. MIFTAH alleges that the Iman of the Mosque and a defendant named in the lawsuit, Ahmad KABBANI, confronted him in an aggressive manner – forcing him to retreat against a wall inside the mosque and told him that he “should be ashamed” of the letter he wrote, claiming that it was “anti-Islamic.”
At the same time and while being nearly pinned against the wall, mosque members and named defendants Houssam ELSOUESSSI, Abdullah ROE and Nooruddin DOE also confronted Mr. Miftah, screaming and shouting allegations that Mr. MIFTAH is “anti Muslim” and a “traitor” to Islam. ROE also removed his shoe, waived and swung it at Mr. MIFTAH’S face, shouting that he was “anti Muslim” and a “traitor.” Mr. MIFTAH was ultimately assisted by another member of the mosque who observed these activities and accompanied him outside, away from his aggressors.

Read it all: CLICK
Related: The Moderate Muslim Minority
crossposted @ Cjunk

It’s difficult to discuss Canadian Aboriginal issues without emotions tipping the scales. It’s with caution therefore that I present the following, taken from Cjunk.

Who needs to go to Latin America to find tin-pot dictators … try visiting some of Canada’s reserves instead, or pay attention to how the aboriginal elite in Canada conduct business.
The hallmark of Latin American dictatorships has been the ruling family … entrenched in power either through military bullying or through the approval of wealthy patron families. The hallmark of Canadian Aboriginal politics is not much different. Those of us who work on the periphery of “First Nations” see it all the time … the entrenched family group lording it over the others while pealing off millions of dollars of Federal funding and kicking it over to those who are “in favor” or part of the “family”.

And, from Joseph Quesnel:

As National Aboriginal Day ends, aboriginals should take stock of what has been achieved in recent years.
It has become accepted wisdom from the aboriginal leadership elite that the current government is the worst thing to happen to First Nations in a long time. Of course, this idea filters to the masses who repeat it.
While not perfect, the government has achieved much on the aboriginal file. It is just they are the changes the aboriginal elites do not like because they empower individuals and reduce their collective power.

Discussions on this topic tend to go ballistic, so I kindly ask that you stick to the topic and keep it civil. To keep the discussion focussed I simply ask, “What should the Harper government do different from the previous Liberal Gov. in regards to Canada’s Aboriginal people … if anything?”

From Cjunk:

Simple really, no decent human can ever claim to support another if they don’t consider the dreams, aspirations, thoughts, and philosophies of that person. In other words, you can’t claim to support the soldier, when you leave the soldier out of the equation. To do so is incredibly paternalistic and insulting … yet so perfectly leftist.

More

Taliban Jack defends “peace advocate” who excused the Taliban’s wanton destruction of another religion’s symbols — when he wasn’t embracing Louis Farrakhan.
And so the Left continues its unrequited love affair with radical Islam…

“A Boston Globe article talks about crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, specifically a stalker she’s got, and the fact that earlier, she was sleeping with the wife of an FBI agent, and the FBI agent tried to kill his wife over the affair.
“I checked out the Patricia Cornwell article at Wikipedia, and found no mentioned of the FBI agent (Eugene Bennett) who tried to kill his wife / Patricia’s lover.
I found this odd, as I’d think that a crime writer having a murder plot against her lover would be noteworthy.
“So I checked the talk page, where I found that:
“This article is within the scope of WikiProject LGBT studies [ project ], which tries to ensure comprehensive and factual coverage of all LGBT related issues on Wikipedia.”
“Wow.
“So there’s self-acknowledged, organized spin, to make sure that certain bits of information go down the memory hole.
“Fascinating…”

Mark Steyn skewers the “but what about all the great restaurants” “argument” beloved of urban elites everywhere, adding:
“What worries me is when settled nations start to fetishize immigration to almost absurd degrees. In 1997, the government in Ottawa festooned the land with posters marking the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizenship and showing people of many lands holding hands around a globe – ie, Canada’s idea of itself is as a great compilation of other people’s hits rather than as a concept album in its own right.”

Kathy here, guest blogging for Kate…
Time to go shopping again, kiddies!
The Jew-haters at Rabble are publicizing the latest Boycott Chapters-Indigo Picket this Saturday, June 9, in which handfuls of (literally) smelly (I know: I shoved through them last time) unemployed misguided losers protest outside bookstores because a Jewish woman owns them.
Here’s a chant you can use:
Hippies, hippies, you’re so sad/ We charge you with smelling bad!
Warning: this Rabble thread contains the words “apartheid” and “Chomsky.” Those with pre-existing medical conditions may want to consult their doctor etc. Note one lone voice of reason is manfully trying to argue using facts — poor thing…
Israel is the only nation in the history of civilization expected to give up land it captured in a war, and Palestinians are the only “refugees” still hanging around waiting to go back “home.” Watch old footage of Nassar and co. around the 6 Day War. They don’t talk about “Israel”, they always say “the Jews.” That’s all you need to know.

“When a society imports large numbers of people from a culture that tolerates this kind of murder of the religiously deviant, or at very least from countries in which many people believe that if El-Mehdi really was a bad Muslim, then he deserved everything he got, then no one should be surprised when this kind of thing happens in the new land. No one dares address the idea that it is permissible to murder apostates in Islam. No one would dare require immigrants to renounce this idea. No one would dare require mosques to hold programs teaching against this idea, and other Sharia provisions, if they want to stay in the West. No, they’re imported wholesale, with no consideration of the ramifications…”