Hopeful:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
[…]
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

I’ve said for years that support for the Canadian Forces by the Canadian population at large is a mile wide and an inch deep. With Rick Hillier in retirement, and a governing party that wants desperately to change the channel on the Afghan mission, public opinion is vulnerable. Which is one of the reasons the media and opposition parties continue to harp on the detainee documents issue. And who cares if they smear thousands of dedicated, selfless Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the process?
Enter James Travers of the Toronto Star:

Among many warnings, Colvin waved red flags about Canadian detainees who disappeared. That raised concerns that insurgent leaders captured by Canadian special forces had been either killed or sent for interrogation to secret American “black site” jails.

The insidious implication is that Canadian special operators were in some vague way doing something sinister and out of bounds in Afghanistan. It’s not a ranting, over-the-top accusation. It’s not a spittle-flecked tirade with a finger poking into the chest of the reader. It’s just a subtle smear.
But remember, this is the same columnist who earlier this year erroneously asserted that JTF 2 “is controlled in Canada outside the normal rigidly hierarchical chain of command.” (What the Toronto Star knows about the chain of command is illustrated all too well in a breathless piece this weekend in which reporter Allan Woods confuses CANSOFCOM commander BGen Mike Day with the commander of JTF 2, and moves CANSOFCOM from its headquarters on Startop Road in Ottawa to CFB Petawawa. But I digress.)
In April 2007, Travers was even more blunt:

At the centre of the first crisis to threaten Stephen Harper’s government is a failure to impose adequate civilian oversight on a military at war. Generals who considered Afghanistan prisoners merely a nuisance had unusual freedom in crafting an agreement that sacrificed safeguards for convenience.
…
These are multifaceted issues, and the failures now inflaming parliamentary debate have more than one cause. Still, there is an identifiable pattern.
One repeating part is profound military resistance to civilian control. It’s understandable – if hardly acceptable in a democracy – that soldiers don’t welcome what they dismiss as amateur oversight of technical operations involving life and death.

Travers seems to want his readers to believe the CF is like a vicious dog that’s been let off its leash and is snarling at its civilian master’s hand.
Don’t let pundits like this one systemically paint those who serve our nation in uniform – serve it to the point of laying down life and limb where required – as unethical rogues and criminals. Those of you who know CF members know nothing could be further from the truth.

During last Thursday’s session in the House of Commons, world-opinion-channeler Michael Ignatieff, who apparently believes that the opinions of those in the rest of the world should be one of Canadians’ primary concerns, opened Question Period with his usual internationalist name-dropping: “Mr. Speaker, six Nobel laureates are calling on this government to put the environment on the G20 agenda. The Mexican president and the UN Secretary-General called for the same thing here in Ottawa a few weeks ago.”
He was just getting started. In his very next question, this one about the cost of the summit, the great citizen-of-the-world jetted in even more international opinion: “Even France is saying that the costs of this summit are getting out of control, and France knows something about extravagance. Its foreign minister is making jokes about the lake…”
Stephen Harper addressed the cost issue, then added:

“As for extravagance in France, I would not know about that, but perhaps the Leader of the Opposition, at his home in Provence, could tell us all about it.”

In his essay Morals & the servile mind, published in the New Criterion, Kenneth Minogue suggests that the current state of democracy in the west is different than that of a hundred years ago in important ways. Our inherited moral values, he notes, are increasingly challenged by “politico-moral” public policies that are “both morally obligatory and politically imperative.”

…while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns….many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.

“Rulers are losing patience with us” – in Canada we see this whenever an out-of-power Liberal leader lectures Conservative politicians, and by extension conservative voters, about who we are as Canadians, and, especially, on what the Canadian view is on various “issues” dear to the brand – whether it be “our” view on global warming, or “our” view on aboriginal issues. This sort of royal ‘We’ attitude is, Minogue suggests, a misapprehension on the part of politicians:

Our rulers are theoretically ‘our’ representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves.

In any democracy these politicians who summon us to reform ourselves are, of course, elected. When Minogue describes people who “forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned” he is describing of virtually every Liberal/NDP voter in the country. Even though he’s from London England, his own view is a reasonably accurate description of the essential views of the Tea Party movement, and of most Canadian conservatives:

The point…is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit.

I used to think that the most annoying sound on earth is a mosquito hovering in the dark near my ear, but that was before I heard the “bellowing and enduring screech” of the vuvuzela, a one-note plastic trumpet that mindless African fans at the World Cup have been playing nonstop. Anyone who’s ever been kept awake by a bunch of braying, idiotic drunks knows that fully half of of the annoyance comes not from the volume but from having to hear such stupidity; similarly, the problem with the ungodly din of the vuvuzela isn’t just the decibel level – a single vuvezela is capable of 120 decibels – it’s hearing the audible evidence of the damnable stupidity of the IQ-challenged African fans who think it’s a good idea to make that sound nonstop for hours on end during a soccer match.
It’s little wonder that Cape Town shops are “running out of ‘vuvu-stopper’ earplugs. Spanish player Xabi Alonso’s description of the noise as “unbearable” is almost an understatement. To my ears it sounds like a giant swarm of metre-long robotic mosquitos with mechanical problems hovering six inches above my deathbed, but everyone’s got their own description: Martin Parry of AFP thinks it sounds like “a swarm of angry bees,” while Germany’s The Local describes it as being like a swarm of angry hornets.
Calls to have the vuvuzela banned from the World Cup – “the incessant single-note tooting drives me to distraction” – are widely shared. If you want to know why, listen to the stadium sound at around the 30 second mark in this video. Are you ready to confess yet?
Causing discomfort and annoyance might actually be the whole point: “To foreign coaches and players they could be a curse, (but) to South Africans they might yet be the secret weapon…” The South African coach says “We have to reinforce that advantage. We want it louder and louder…”

Chavez asks if no one will rid him of this turbulent priest.

As the World Cup tournament was getting underway Egyptian Cleric Mus’id Anwar explained that soccer is part of the Zionist plot for world domination:

As you know, the Jews, or the Zionists, have The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Over 100 years ago, they formulated a plan to rule the world, and they are implementing this plan. One of the protocols says: “Keep the [non-Jews] preoccupied with songs, soccer, and movies.”

Mus’id Anwar was obviously unaware that the secretive, all-powerful group had in fact disbanded in March of last year:

“We had a good run,” said one senior Elder, reminiscing over old photographs of world leaders in his musty, wood-paneled office at an undisclosed location. “Maybe we ran the world for just a little too long. Anyway, now it’s Obama’s problem.”

The announcement comes after a year in which many of the Elders’ most prized institutions suffered disheartening failures. The vaunted global banking system, which lay at the heart of Jewish world domination for almost two centuries, collapsed with astonishing rapidity, requiring trillions of dollars in bailout funds. The newspaper industry, through which the Elders have controlled world opinion, is in shambles, with prominent papers declaring bankruptcy and forcing millions of readers to form their own opinions.

Plus, as happens so often these days, the kids just weren’t interested in taking over the business:

“World domination just doesn’t resonate with the younger generation of Jews,” said Marvin Tobman, a professor of non-profit management at San Diego State University and expert on Jewish communal life. “They want the fun of fixing the world, not the responsibility of running it.”

At long last, the world gets to watch a World Cup tournament without undue Jewish influence. As liver-spotted Elder “Morris” said, “The only thing I’m looking to dominate now is a Pina Colada.”