Friday Post

To end the work-week...

The CRTC ruled that Sun News Network would receive mandatory carriage on basic cable packages (NOT public funding):

The CRTC has denied all but three requests for new "mandatory carriage" orders that would add the applicants to cable and satellite companies' basic service packages.

But the decision also lays out a proposal for a new category of licences for Canadian all-news channels, including the Sun News Network.

Kory Teneycke, vice-president of Sun News, says that means the fight for the plucky, upstart news channel continues.

"We are disappointed that the CRTC did not rule in favour of our application for a mandatory distribution order," Teneycke said. "However, we are encouraged they have found merit in the main arguments laid out by Sun News on price, channel placement and distribution, and have provided a mechanism to address these issues."

 However:

"The commission considers that there is merit to the arguments raised by Sun News regarding the barriers to entry when launching a national news service and that these barriers constitute a significant obstacle to the exchange of ideas," the CRTC said in its decision.

The broadcast regulator is asking for public comment over the next month on a proposed framework that includes forcing distributors to offer all Canadian national news services and put them in close proximity in their channel lineup, as well as offering national news services in a package and on a standalone basis. ..."

I won't hold my breath.

Dismantle the CRTC.


I wish these people would just be honest and say that they would never investigate the Liberals for murdering kittens in front of fifty witnesses:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is off the hook with the federal ethics commissioner.

"Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson confirmed today that she has completed a preliminary review and will not proceed to an inquiry under the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons ... in relation to Mr. Trudeau's speaking fees," Dawson's spokeswoman Jocelyne Brisebois said in an e-mail.

And that's why you are pus.


Because this needs desperate clarification:

- Russia has always been ruled by autocrats
- Vladimir Putin is a former KGB agent and has had journalists and bloggers either arrested or killed
-Russia has aided some of the worst regimes in the world
-Russia invaded Georgia in 2008
-Russia put a stop to American adoptions

None of these things warranted sanctions on Russia, boycotts of Russian goods or any lasting or meaningful penalties against it.

Further:

-athletes train for years
-Olympics are logistical nightmares
-there were no widespread or effective sanctions or boycotts when China hosted the Olympics, nor did anyone do anything about dictatorships like North Korea taking part

There's more:

-this is what the new controversial Russian law actually says:

The law forbids ‘public actions promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgender among minors’ and ‘the dissemination of information that can harm health, moral or spiritual development of minors’ and ‘shape distorted understanding of the social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional marriages’.

The law sets forth the penalties for violation: 5,000 roubles ($170) for individuals and up to 500,000 roubles ($17,000) for organisations.

Again:

Beneath all the hype, the truth is that Russia has not banned homosexuality and the fine for propagandizing the gay lifestyle to minors amounts to $156.00.

This is much less than the fines and penalties imposed on people in the certain states for offering reparative therapy to minors, discussing ex-gay conversions, or speaking publicly about homosexual acts being sins of the flesh.

So on this issue, sorry to say, Americans have no legs to stand on

(Spasiba, B Marco)


My point is: shut up, Sulu.


Moving on...

Cambodia deploys troops on the streets of its capital after a contentious election:

Cambodia has deployed armoured personnel carriers and soldiers in Phnom Penh to prevent any violence if mass demonstrations following hotly disputed polls go ahead.
The rare sight Friday of armoured vehicles in the capital's streets comes after rights groups said hundreds of security forces had been mobilised in the city.
Local press on Friday published pictures of several vehicles topped with heavy weapons apparently rolling into the capital's suburbs.
"The deployment is not meant to intimidate the people... it is a proactive measure to prevent any bad situation from happening," military police spokesman Kheng Tito told AFP, declining to confirm the numbers of troops mobilised.
He said the move was to "maintain security and public order" and the armed forces would remain in the city until a new government is formed, ending a political deadlock which has gripped the nation following last month's controversial election.
Strongman premier Hun Sen's long-ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) claimed it had won that poll -- one of the most fiercely contested votes seen in the country.
But the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) said it was the real winner, rejecting the CPP's results on the grounds of widespread voting irregularities.

And now, sharing can be fun. Enjoy.

August 9th

Statues outside Urakami Cathedral, burned by the atomic bomb

"When I walked out of Nagasaki's roofless railroad station, I saw a city frizzled like a baked apple, crusted black at the open core where the searing sun born at Alamogordo had split open the blue sky of midday.  ...

What irony, I thought, in a war of competing velocities, that this slowest-borne of all weapons, falling at a speed little greater than my own descent when I took training as a paratrooper, should in the end out-destroy all the fleetest of winged killers. The bomb of Nagasaki reversed the rule of war, getting there last and slowest but with the most, a terminal blow riding under a silk handkerchief."

(First Into Nagasaki, George Weller)

gRAMMUR n Speling R Harrd LOL

Learning how to spell and construct grammatical sentences has long been considered a basic pillar of good schooling.

But now one of education’s most radical and influential thinkers has claimed that the growth of technology makes spelling and grammar a “bit unnecessary”, at least in their conventional form.

The only word that fully encapsulates how I feel about this.

I should like to point out that the invention of the wheel did not inhibit the need to walk properly.

Further:

Professor Sugata Mitra - famous for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment, which allowed children to teach themselves after he installed an internet- linked computer into the wall of a slum in Delhi, India - said that resisting developments such as “text-speak” could be a mistake.

“This emphasis on grammar and spelling, I find it a bit unnecessary because they are skills that were very essential maybe a hundred years ago but they are not right now,” the academic, who is based at Newcastle University in England, told TES.

“Firstly, my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it and, secondly, because I often skip grammar and write in a cryptic way.”

Professor Mitra said this suggests that the importance of good grammar is declining. “My entire background tells me, ‘No, no, it is really bad what you are saying’, but I think there is a change and we have to learn to live with it,” he said.

The academic, who is now using the $1 million (£670,000) TED prize he won this year to set up seven internet-controlled “cloud schools”, suggested that technology may have changed what good grammar means.

“Should (students) learn how to write good sentences? Yes, of course they should,” he said. “They should learn how to convey emotion and meaning through writing.

“But we have perhaps a mistaken notion that the way in which we write is the right way and that the way in which young people write through their SMS texting language is not the right way.

“If there is a generation who believe that SMS language is a better way of expressing emotion than our way, then are we absolutely sure that they are making a mistake and we are not?”

Where does one begin?

As the keystone species of the cosmos (yes, because I don't see animals writing plays, constructing spacecraft or managing entire economies), we have both the ability and gift of language. It allows us to convey what our (for some, anyway) ostensibly complex minds are thinking. We standardise and use written and oral forms of language to not just get our point across but to live. One could go on and on with the complexity and richness of the oral and written word but let it be sufficient enough to say that we have it, we should use it. Why, then, set the benchmark of human communication to memes with as few vowels imaginable and grunts? Do we consider a car drawn with crayon perfectly drivable? Being able to properly and thoroughly communicate orally and through writing shouldn't be considered passe because someone's cell phone has a (poor) spell check feature. It's laziness and bound to keep classes of people as functionally illiterate as possible. Keep in mind that for some wags different accents and abilities are reason enough to exclude people from public office or even living. LOL and text-speak (and any other garble one wishes include in this debate) has no business been accepted as a proper mode of communication.

It's not snobbery; it's literacy and it's awesome.


(With gratitude)

Mid-Week Post

From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw

They have nothing of harm to dread,

But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank

Or before his Gorgonian head;

Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth

In white triple tiers of glittering gates,

And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,

An asylum in jaws of the Fates! 

(“The Maldive Shark”, Herman Melville)

(For more Shark Week poems, go here)

Let them eat brioche:

President Barack Obama appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to spread his spin on the economy and other matters in an entertainment-heavy venue. He also used his trip to the West Coast, where the show is taped, to dine with some of the Hollywood folk who helped him get elected twice.

**

On June 21, 2013, JW filed a FOIA lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Secret Service to obtain information pertaining to the costs to taxpayers of Barack Obama’s February 2013 “boys’ weekend” in Palm Beach, Florida, and the simultaneous vacations of Michelle Obama and Joseph Biden in Aspen, Colorado.

I'm sure Putin cares what Obama thinks:

US President Barack Obama has confronted Russia over its granting of asylum to fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden and its anti-gay measures, saying Moscow occasionally displays a "Cold War mentality."

 

No one is pouring vodka down the drain for this:

Russian authorities have detained hundreds of migrant workers in a makeshift camp in Moscow as part of a widespread crackdown on illegal immigration.

Human rights campaigners have decried conditions in the camp, which is part of a planned national network of detainment centres to hold foreign nationals facing deportation.

More than 600 people were initially held in tents in the camp in an industrial area of Moscow, although there were reports that 200 were moved to formal detention centres yesterday. Opponents say the centres are illegal, comparing them to concentration camps or gulags.

"The paradox of a concentration camp for illegals is that the concentration camp itself is illegal," writer and activist Oleg Kozyrev tweeted to more than 32,000 followers.

I thought the "undocumented" and random Russian-hatred were the trendy new causes.

(Spasiba)

 

Thumbs-up to IOW for seeing how the state-funded mouthpiece, the CBC, and its useful idiots are a great detriment to us all. I salute you.

Japan has launched a warship, its largest since the end of the Second World War:

Japan on Tuesday unveiled its largest warship since World War II, an 820-foot-long, 19,500-ton flattop capable of carrying 14 helicopters, according to media reports.

The ship, named the Izumo, is classified as a helicopter destroyer, though its flattop design makes it look like an aircraft carrier.

But the Japanese Defense Ministry says the ship is not intended to be used as an aircraft carrier and will not be used to launch fighter jets, state broadcaster NHK reported.

The launch of the $1.2 billion warship at a Yokohama dockyard comes at a time of increased military tensions between Japan and China over disputed islands in the East China Sea.

"The destroyer is aimed at better responding to various contingencies in waters near Japan," NHK reported.

Japan has no choice but to re-militarise. Even if the United States wasn’t being run into the ground by a useless empty-suit, it would eventually quit the Pacific. This means Japan must see to its own defense. It should also start forming strategic alliances, as well.

Related: the math of delivering nuclear payloads to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

South Korea doesn't need the Kaesong village and North Korea will only do something to get it shut down again, anyway:

Impoverished North Korea said on Wednesday it was reopening the troubled Kaesong industrial zone jointly run with the wealthy South just minutes after Seoul signalled its willingness to let it close for good.

The North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, which handles Pyongyang's ties with Seoul, proposed talks aimed at normalising the project and said the safety of South Koreans visiting the factory park would be guaranteed.

The committee was "prompted by its desire to bring about a new phase of reconciliation, cooperation, peace, reunification and prosperity by normalizing operation in the Kaesong zone", it said in unusually conciliatory remarks.
The comments were carried by the North's official KCNA news agency about 90 minutes after South Korea announced steps to compensate its firms that operate factories in Kaesong for losses - a step widely seen as a move towards shutting down the rivals' last symbol of cooperation.

Reclusive North Korea, for which Kaesong has been a rare source of hard currency, and the South, one of the richest countries in the world, are technically still at war as their 1950-53 civil conflict ended not in a treaty but in a mere truce.

 

In case one needed to be reminded of the sorry state of North Korea:

My military minder tells me to turn my camera off, and it soon becomes clear why.

The poverty I see through the bus window is not the view of North Korea the regime wants to be seen. We are traveling from Hyangsan, three hours north of Pyongyang, back to the capital, but the main road and the sanctioned route has been flooded. This is the only way back.

Buildings are in disrepair; some barely look inhabitable. …

Dozens of men are working on the outskirts of town, building a stone wall between their crops and the swollen river.

Boulders and stones are carried by hand and stacked without adhesive. This intensive labor force is seen repeatedly in the North Korean countryside, but I see no heavy equipment to help building or farming.

One man trims hedges with a rusty scythe; other men repair part of the pavement with small hand-held pickaxes.

Cars are rare; most people either walk or cycle.

Back in the countryside, I am surprised by how much land has been farmed. The United Nations says a quarter of the country's children are severely malnourished, and yet as far as the eye can see are fields of maize, rice, wheat and corn. In the midst of the Korean rainy season, the landscape is lush, and it raises the question of how this food, once harvested, is distributed.

Yes, about that:

Last year was one of the 10 hottest on record, with sea levels at record highs, Arctic ice at historic lows and extreme weather in various corners of the globe signaling a "new normal," scientists said Tuesday in the 2012 State of the Climate report.

Meant to be a guide for policymakers, the report did not attribute the changes in climate to any one factor, but made note of continued increases in heat-trapping greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

"Our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place," said Kathryn Sullivan, acting administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report was edited by NOAA scientists and drew contributions from 384 scientists from 52 countries.

**

Danish Meteorological Institute: Arctic Sea Ice Now 1.7 Million Square Kilometers Over Last Year!

(Thank you)

What is called the “undeserved sense of entitlement”:

If you’ve been feeling optimistic for humanity, you should stop that nonsense right now.

Sure, one anonymous man bought 500 large coffees to be distributed for free to Tim Hortons-going strangers in Edmonton two weeks ago. Yes, it cost him $895.28 and reportedly triggered a wave of copycat acts of generosity. But the do-gooders likely didn’t stay around to witness what happens next — Yahoo! Canada News decided to do just that.

Inspired by our readers’ encounters with Canadians prepaying strangers’ orders across the country just to make someone’s day, we’ve decided to test coffee shop goers almost 3,500 kilometres east of Edmonton. We’ve anonymously paid for up to 10 drinks of total strangers at four shops in Toronto.

What we’ve seen surprised us, but, apparently, not the baristas.

Tim Hortons

Scene: Regulars and tourists form buzzing lineups at this scenic location facing the lake. One after another they find out that their coffees are free, courtesy of a stranger. “Okay,” they nod and rush off with free drinks. No one smiles or lingers to ask further questions. One regular gloomily shuffles off to a table clutching his free drink. The final, tenth person, buys a doughnut and leaves whatever’s left of his $4 for the next person in line.

“I’m not surprised at all by this,” the shop’s manager says of people’s reactions. …

“In contemporary American society, we’ve come to overlook, dismiss, or even disparage the significance of gratitude,” writes Robert Emmons, a scientific expert on gratitude who teaches psychology at the University of California, Davis. Apparently, we’ve grown out of practice, assuming that we’ve earned “all the good that comes our way.”

Gratitude is not just the acknowledgement of a kindness or service; it is a form of humility and perhaps prompts a need for reciprocation. How does one be humble or feel a need to respond to a kindness if one thinks he or she just deserves it and doesn’t need to show gratitude? We’ve gone beyond perfunctory gestures or etiquette. We’re incapable of reaching out.

(Gracias, Harold)

And now, futuristic movie timelines.

On A Tuesday

Back in the saddle...

Though the Speaker claims he was not "bullied", it is beyond inappropriate, even criminal, to pursue him and to get him to change his ruling, especially when costly cancelled gas plants and deleted e-mails are the issues:

Laura Miller, who worked in former premier Dalton McGuinty's office, was asked to testify after an e-mail exchange she had with Liberal campaign director Don Guy last September surfaced in a number of documents released to the committee.

After Guy wrote that the "Speaker needs to follow up on his prima facie finding and change his mind" -- an apparent reference to a contempt case against former energy minister Chris Bentley -- Miller said, "Dave is putting the member from Brant on notice that we need better here."

Opposition MPPs allege that senior Liberal aides were attempting to intimidate the Liberal Speaker into changing his ruling, which was unfavourable to their party.

Miller told the committee that she wanted to draw Levac's attention to the behaviour of the PCs who were not following the "spirit" of his ruling that the three parties work together on the disclosure of gas plant records.

"I did nothing wrong," Miller said when the NDP accused her of trying to control information around the gas plants.

(Sidebar: typical chorus)


Over at the Fur, great coverage of the al-Quds Day in which not only children but other speakers blamed Jews for everything and demanded they be killed (but only after a two minute warning). Must-reads.


In Canada, it doesn't matter what colour you are, you will still wait:

Winnipeg's health authority has admitted it failed a homeless aboriginal man in a wheelchair who died during a 34-hour wait in a hospital emergency room, but says race or his social status didn't play a role in the lack of treatment.

William Olsen, lawyer for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, told the inquest into the death of Brian Sinclair that no single person was responsible for what happened to the double-amputee.
But he said there is no doubt errors were made.

"A perfect storm occurred," Olsen told Judge Tim Preston Tuesday in his opening statement. "The WRHA failed him ... at all levels of the organization."

Sinclair went to the emergency room of Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre Sept. 19, 2008, with a bladder infection and spoke with a nurse. He stayed in the emergency room waiting room until a fellow patient notified a security guard that he was dead. Preston will hold hearings through August then again in October to determine how Sinclair was dealt with.

Inquests and commissions, by the way, waste time and money. Everyone knows what the problems are. It is only a matter of resolving them.


Chinese hackers are caught trying to take over a false water plant:

The group, known as APT1, was caught by a research project that provides the most significant proof yet that people are actively trying to exploit the vulnerabilities in industrial control systems. Many of these systems are connected to the Internet to allow remote access (see “Hacking Industrial Systems Turns Out to Be Easy”). APT1, also known as Comment Crew, was lured by a dummy control system set up by Kyle Wilhoit, a researcher with security company Trend Micro, who gave a talk on his findings at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

And yet we trade with them.

(Merci)


Why Celebrity Apartheid Week matters:

In an interview with the Guardian published Saturday, Damon revealed that he had just moved to Los Angeles from New York, but that he didn't "have a choice" when it came to putting his four daughters into private schools. The multi-millionaire did say that it was "a major moral dilemma" and then made the bizarre excuse that the public schools aren't "progressive" enough. 

Whatever is the matter with public schools, Mr. Damon?

It's not that he sends his kids to privates schools, As a parent, Matt Damon should do what he thinks is best. It's that he praised to no end public schools but refuses to avail use of them. Are they not to his liking? Not good enough? Does he not think that other parents have aspirations for their children which may include schools other than public ones?


Why, exactly, do people need to own snakes that crush their prey?

The African rock python captured after two young children were killed in the New Brunswick community of Campbellton was not registered and could not legally be kept as a pet, according to information released by provincial officials on Tuesday.

The revelation came after RCMP confirmed a criminal investigation was being held into the death of two children – Noah Barthe, 5, and Connor Barthe, 7, who died after a four-metre python got loose in a home where they were sleeping. 

It is believed they were strangled by the snake. An autopsy was being conducted on Tuesday.

The brothers were staying in a family friend’s apartment, located on the second floor above a local pet store owned by the friend. It was previously believed the python escaped from the pet store and made its way into the apartment above.

Once again, dogs prove their worth:

A 42-year-old Thunder Bay, Ont., man has his schnauzer to thank after surviving a black bear attack at a provincial park in northwestern Ontario.

The man, who has been released from hospital, was attacked Saturday afternoon by a mature black bear while he was camping at Sand Bar Provincial Park. Unfortunately the dog died following the ordeal.

Eat something while reading this:

Workers with Thames Water discovered an enormous, 15-ton blob of congealed fat mixed with baby wipes clogging up the sewers beneath London Road, in Kingston, Surrey (a suburb of London) last week, and the size of this blob has earned it the nickname 'fatberg'.

Well, yeah. Why not have a supposition program instead of a dramatisation?

Shark Week fans are taking to the television event's Facebook page to voice their anger over a fake Megalodon documentary that kicked off Discovery Channel's annual seven-day series dedicated to sharks. The complaints stem from the fact that some viewers feel betrayed by the channel that normally provides facts. 

The subject matter, alone, is entertaining and interesting enough. No need to appeal to the LOL Facebook crowd.


And now, in honour of Shark Week, cats in shark paraphenalia. Enjoy.

For A Saturday

Rounding off the week that was.

Sad news:

Michael Ansara, a television and movie actor whose roles included a Klingon on "Star Trek," has died.

A longtime friend and spokesman for Ansara says the actor died Wednesday at his home in Calabasas, California after a long illness. He was 91.

Does Prince Edward Island really need the "tar sands"paranoiacs?

Islanders are wondering what a $12-billion pipeline bringing bitumen from Alberta's oilsands to the port of Saint John, N.B. will mean for people on P.E.I.

TransCanada Corporation, based out of Calgary, announced Thursday plans to move ahead with its Energy East pipeline project, which will expand an existing pipeline network to enter Quebec and end in New Brunswick.

P.E.I. Energy Minister Wes Sheridan said the pipeline will stabilize fuel prices.

"The last number of increases in gas prices have been because of the unstable condition in the Middle East where most of this oil comes from, and every time there is a blip in that we see an increase in our gas prices," he said.

Malpeque MP Wayne Easter said the region should see the benefits of the pipeline.

"We should be, as Canadians, using Canadian resources right across the country and all Canadians should benefit from the oil resources in this country," he said.

But Leo Broderick, vice chair of the Council of Canadians, has already begun a campaign against the project. He said there are huge environmental concerns.

"We will be organizing communities and Canadians to oppose this. There is a different future for energy in this country, but it certainly doesn't depend, and need to depend on dirty oil from the tar sands," said Broderick.

Well, this must be embarrassing:

Up to 35 CIA operatives were working in the city during the attack last September on the US consulate that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, according to CNN. 

The circumstances of the attack are a subject of deep division in the US with some Congressional leaders pressing for a wide-ranging investigation into suspicions that the government has withheld details of its activities in the Libyan city. 

The television network said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels. 

Sources said that more Americans were hurt in the assault spearheaded by suspected Islamic radicals than had been previously reported. CIA chiefs were actively working to ensure the real nature of its operations in the city did not get out. 

So only the losses suffered by the State Department in the city had been reported to Congress. 

"Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency's workings," CNN reported. 

Frank Wolf, a US congressman who represents the district that contains CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is one of 150 members of Congress for a new investigation into the failures in Benghazi. 

"I think it is a form of a cover-up, and I think it's an attempt to push it under the rug, and I think the American people are feeling the same way," he said. "We should have the people who were on the scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn't any national security issue involved with regards to that." 

A CIA spokesman said it had been open about its activities in Benghazi. 

(Sidebar: um, no. Why would we now find out definitively that the CIA not only had a bigger-than-previously-reported presence in Libya but was running guns? Oops.)

What difference does it make? Well, I’m glad you asked, Hillary, because now it is confirmed that this was not only a weapons-running scheme but a super-duper cover-up.

The unemployment rate in the US barely moved below eight percent:

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the economy gained just 162k jobs in July, well below expectations of 185-200k. More worrying, though, isn't just the quantity of jobs created, but the quality of the jobs. About a quarter of the jobs created, 38.5k, were in restaurants and bars. Another 46.5k jobs were in retail. This continuing trend to part-time employment is likely due to the coming implementation of ObamaCare.

This is the same administration that steadfastly refuses the jobs that Keystone pipeline will provide.

Sarah Palin was super-right:

There’s your “Special Olympics” for you:

More than 30 million Americans place money into a pre-tax Flexible Spending Account (FSA) through their employers to help save emergency funds to pay for their families’ medical costs. Obamacare institutes a brand new $2,500 cap for FSAs, which will make more money taxable and could raise $13 billion in taxes for the federal government over the next decade.

Oh, I’m sure this will work out well:

Muslim-American groups are pushing to block the potential nomination of Raymond Kelly for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Kelly, who serves as the New York City police commissioner, is being considered as a replacement for current Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is set to resign in September. She will go on to serve as the president of the University of California school system.

The Muslim groups contend that Kelly oversaw a spying initiative that targeted Muslim people specifically for their religion, Religion News Service reports.

Why is it that anyone with a modicum of scrutiny must fall under the axe of these wags?

Yes, there is compulsion:

Tens of thousands Syriac Christians – members of the oldest Christian community in the world – have fled their ancestral provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasakah in northeastern Syria, residents have said. …

The growing presence of radical jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda, has also seen Christians targeted. 

"It began as kidnapping for money, but then they started telling me I should worship Allah," a male Christian resident of Hasakah who was kidnapped by jihadists said. 

"I was with five others. We were tied and blindfolded and pushed down on our knees. One of the kidnappers leant so close to my face I could feel his breath. He hissed: 'Why don't you become a Muslim? Then you can be free'." 

Another Christian in Hasakah said he knew of "five forced conversions" in recent weeks. 

Can we stop denying it now?

Wow. If only people could get this worked up for the gays hanged in Iran:

It turns out that the IOC doesn’t have it covered. Russia’s sports minister said this week in an interview with the state news agency that gay Olympic athletes will not be exempt from Russian law: 

“If he goes out into the streets and starts to propagandize, then of course he will be held accountable.”

In this case, "propagandize" seems akin to "exist." Which also suggests the controversy is just getting started. A bill is being introduced in the U.S. Senate calling on the IOC to press Russia on the issue. A boycott probably won’t happen, but you can bet that there will be plenty of gay pride protests in Sochi next winter. (LGTB groups are already discussing how to use the 2014 Games to publicize Russia’s regressive policies.) Russia will have to decide if it wants to deal with more than its usual share of international scorn in return for enforcing its laws. 

One: Russia has always been ruled by autocrats, whether the tsars, the communists (yes, those guys) or Putin whose grip on the country really takes one back to the USSR. I don’t hear anyone complain when Gazprom freezes old ladies to death. Two: let a country do as it pleases. Is anyone bothered by what goes in Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam… Three: the law prohibits the influencing of minors so unless you are a perverted teacher in the TDSB, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Four: you’ll punish athletes to what end? To show everyone how “open” you are? I’m sure they will thank you for it. This stand is as principled and brave as any liberal cause which is to say not at all. It’s convenient and self-serving, not to mention overblown.

Somewhat related: what you call a crusade, the rest of the human race calls nuisance:

When might a gift certificate for a free men's haircut not be honoured? 

In one case, when the customer is a woman. 

Armed with a voucher for a free haircut she won in a silent auction at the end of June, 38-year-old Lyla Miklos went into the Westdale Barber Shop Wednesday afternoon. She had just finished work at Westdale Secondary School. 

She took a seat in the King Street West shop, pulled out a book and waited for her turn. The barber, who was cutting another customer's hair, asked how he could help her. 

Miklos, who identifies as a queer, feminist and a labour activist, was shocked when he told her the shop is for men only. 

"Even if I want to get a men's cut? You're joking, right?" she asked the barber. 

"Emotionally, I was very angry and slightly hurt," she said, noting she's had short hair her entire adult life and has been to other barbershops in the area. 

"I didn't want to cut her hair," said Phil Angemi, who's owned the Westdale Barber Shop for the past 12 years. "That's my reason."

Thanks for screwing over small businesses, gender-dink.

For BM- I see your sloth and raise you a wombat:

(With thanks to one and many)