Barrel Strength

The times, the morals! When I contemplate the frivolous idiocy of the following items, and when I contemplate them together, I realize there is more folly in the world than I will ever have time to correct, and Steven Harper cannot correct either. Vast forces of idiocy and malice keep the conservative blogosphere at work incessantly.

• Young boys in England admonished not to make pistols with their fingers
• Supreme Court of Canada fails to correct definition of sexual consent; keeps radical feminist (dyke) interpretation of sexual consent
• Subsidized daycare in Quebec forbids telling of religious stories
• Dandelions triumph over 2-4-D on false evidence
• Conrad Black still not free; US prosecutorial intransigence continues

On the other hand, truth may be winning against that outrageous mountebank, David Suzuki. Lord knows what happens when evidence based science confronts the Suzuki foundation. Vivian Krause, who is doing great work investigating the links between leftist US foundations and west-coast politics, scores against the Suzuki Foundation’s claims that farmed salmon spread sea lice to wild ones.

Mrs. Seeker After Truth indeed!

This is 103-page decision  is simply a travesty of justice. Ezra Levant, where are you? Blogging Tories, wake up!

In the judgment of the BC Human Rights Commission, in the case of Guy Earle, the comic who told some heckling lesbians they were obnoxious dykes,  the principal legal finding is that the Commission cannot consider the argument for a right to free speech under the Constitution of Canada, because the argument is outside the legal purview of the Commission because of the BC Administrative Tribunals Act.

Accordingly, the fundamental issue at stake, the freedom of speech of the comic in the circumstances, is held not to be arguable.

[285] The respondents cannot challenge the constitutionality of s. 8 of the Code on Charter grounds before the Tribunal, as the Tribunal does not have jurisdiction to decide the respondents Charter -based free speech arguments. I reiterate my conclusion in Pardy (No. 3) that the Tribunal has no power to state a case on those issues for the B.C. Supreme Court.

 and at paragraph 459

“I conclude that any defence by the respondents that Mr. Earle’s freedom of expression was a bona fide and reasonable justification for discrimination fails on both the facts and the law. Mr. Earle’s conduct was not reasonably related to any effort to deal with a disruption to the show. Mr. Earle was not engaged in exposing the stereotypes of others. Nothing about Mr. Earle’s asserted purposes in verbally and physically attacking Ms. Pardy on the basis of her sex and sexual orientation justified elevating his right to free expression over her right under the  Code to be protected against his discriminatory conduct.”

What idiocy of a government to remove from the Human Rights Tribunal the ability to consider the very issues which are at the core of free speech? This means that the Tribunal cannot consider the effect of its decisions, precedents or rulings on free speech. When they talk of ”railroading” a defendant, this is a case in point.

James Delingpole, an obnoxious right wing punk who happens to be right about everything, beat the rap for saying that the global warming catastrophists were full of shit.

Maybe the sound of Britain these days is the sound of a toilet flushing, but there are still somesigns of hope…..and change.

“The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that “In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric. This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.”

Would that our own domestic speech controllers were as clear about the consequences of free speech.

Go ahead and watch her: glorious wrath in the service of truth. Ann Barnhardt rips into Senator Lindsey Graham (Rep-SC) for proposing that Pastor Terry Jones should be held to account for “causing” the Muslim mobs to invade the UN compund in Kabul and slaughtering the innocent.

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/04/manifesto-of-evil-totalitarian.html

Part 2: (Note the bacon bookmarks as she reads from the Koran)

And if you learn something about what the Koran actually says, you will be better off, even as you will amazed that a supposedly serious world religion could be based on such appalling views.

Ah! The power of the market! How we love to wander the shops picking out the amazing products from all over the world, laid out in attractive abundance! How efficient are thy ways, O market! As we have learned at the feet of the great Friedrich Hayek, the market conveys information by means of prices, and prices summon forth this abundance from the tea plantations of Assam and the chip fabs of Malaysia to our malls.

And we all know of places where they are still running the socialist experiment:Cuba, Syria, North Korea, and we do not want to copy their example.

So it will come as some surprise to you that we have not quite reached market nirvana in telecommunications in Canada yet, nor anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

Because the truth of the matter is this: if you had to design a communications system from the ground up, you would never build two separate wire-based systems if you had the choice. You would build one, and let everyone use it on non-discriminatory terms, set out by law and regulation. We do not have two non-interconnecting road systems, do we? You take the blue road and I’ll take the yellow road and we will see who is Toronto afore ye?

Of course not. We have two separate systems of wired communication because, before the invention of the Internet protocol, systems were adapted by analog technology to serve one purpose only: two-way telephony and one-way broadcast distribution. Our communications systems were built out under radically different assumptions of what they would or could do. Internet protocol made it possible to develop general-purpose networks that could do a variety of things. But the legal apparatus, based in ideas of railroads, switching, boxcars, and sidings, carried with the idea that the owner of the network decides what gets on his tracks. It also gave him great power over transport to integrate his business upward, to use his market power to take over grain storage and milling, for example.

These two kinds of power were thought to need regulation in the 19th century, and telecommunications regulation grew out of those legal models.

You have to be extremely conscious of what metaphor you pick when you envision a legal scheme for communications networks. If you envision “railway” – they had no other model in 1890 – you naturally assume that the right of the track owner to determine what goes in his boxcars is his business alone, and who may interconnect with his track is his business to decide. But the inefficiencies and unfairness of this arrangement led Parliament to legislate some controls over the power of owners to block traffic from other systems

And for that matter, we do not allow the people who own our roads determine what kind of cars will drive on them, beyond very general rules of construction and safety? I mean, we own the roads as taxpayers, right?

Even the corporation that owns the private toll road north of Toronto cannot deny you service because you drive a Ford, or becasue you do not drive a Ford.

Yet when we come to telecommunications (telephone and cable systems), some free-marketers lose all perspective. The foremost example of this loss of perspective is the view propagated from the Montreal Economic Institute. It never seems to lack for space in the Op ed pages of the Financial Post, since Terrence Corcoran favours their views.

The MEI sees regulation of terms of access to networks as “state economic planning.”  Martin Masse and Paul Beaudry write:

Independent ISPs survive and are able to offer unlimited plans only because they are given a privileged access to somebody else’s infrastructure

Let us consider what happens when you drive your car off your parking ramp and into the street. You as a driver  are licensed by the state. Your car is licensed by the state, part of which includes a safety check. You are legally liable for accidents. You are subject to police supervision of a rather close kind. You are subjected to heavy taxes on fuel. But you are not subjected to editorials from the Montreal Economic Institute denigrating your “right” -actually licence - to drive on a public highway as a dreadful example of state planning and incipient socialist tyranny. Why?

The answer is that we have figured out the appropriate relation of citizens to roads. By and large, they are there for us to use, however much that use is carefully licenced and taxed.

When we come to telecommunications networks, by contrast, we have not yet agreed upon the appropriate legal relationship of user to network owner. The MEI talks of networks as a kind of private property, wholly divorced from the purpose for which we have networks, which is to allow you and I to communicate. The economists hired by carriers fulminate against tinkering with networks by innovators, and allowing leased bulk access to transport facilities, as defenders of slavery fulminated against aggression towards private property by those god-damn abolitionists. We still treat seriously the notion that traffic across communications networks, things whose substrate is speech (whether spoken, visual, or any form of signification),is transported by the grace and favour of carriers, at their absolute discretion, as if we had no more rights than trespassers in a back yard.

Communications networks exist for us and our purposes. Network owners deserve profits, and we gladly supply them so that they can improve and build more capacity and functionality into their systems. But they are in business for us, and not otherwise.

The MEI people and my readership could profitably turn their attention to Tim Wu’s The Master Switch.

It is also worth noting that, in relation to the issue between the large carriers and the smaller ISPs over pricing, Bell Canada has signalled it is ready to agree with the smaller ISPs.

Nevertheless, the bad policy ideas emanating from the Montreal Economic Institute – on this issue alone – need to be skewered.

Abu-Bakr Bashir is a Muslim cleric on trial in Indonesia for doing what he says he is orderd to do by the Word of God. He apparently led a training camp for jihadists in the mountains of Aceh, and island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.

Reading in today’s South China Morning Post (page A10) we see the figure of the aged cleric, hands on the jail cell bars, smiling a benign if toothy grin. Reading from a 90-page defence document, the cleric, who appeared to be calm, said:

“I am convinced that based on Islamic sharia, the physical and weapons training in a mountainous area of Aceh was an act of worship by Muslims as ordered by God to deter Muslim enemies”.

Why is it that only us deranged right-wing Islamophobes believe that orthodox Muslims believe that jihad is a sacrament? And that they are called upon to wage it because God said so? Because that is what God told Muhammad in his inerrant dictation of every word of the Quran? And why is it “hate speech” to draw attention to it?

Why do they persecute Geert Wilders for saying so in public? This was what he said in court the other day:
 

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. The foundation of the West is under attack everywhere.

All over Europe the elites are acting as the protectors of an ideology that has been bent on destroying us for fourteen centuries. An ideology that has sprung from the desert and that can produce only deserts because it does not give people freedom. The Islamic Mozart, the Islamic Gerard Reve [a Dutch author], the Islamic Bill Gates; they do not exist because without freedom there is no creativity. The ideology of Islam is especially noted for killing and oppression and can only produce societies that are backward and impoverished. Surprisingly, the elites do not want to hear any criticism of this ideology.

My trial is not an isolated incident. Only fools believe it is. All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations. Their goal is to continue the strategy of mass immigration, which will ultimately result in an Islamic Europe — a Europe without freedom: Eurabia.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Anyone who thinks or speaks individually is at risk. Freedom-loving citizens who criticize Islam, or even merely suggest that there is a relationship between Islam and crime or honour killing, must suffer, and are threatened or criminalized. Those who speak the truth are in danger.

The lights are going out allover Europe. Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at work, on the lookout for thought crimes everywhere, casting the populace back within the confines where it is allowed to think.

This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of speech is not the property of those who happen to belong to the elites of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birthright of our people. For centuries battles have been fought for it, and now it is being sacrificed to please a totalitarian ideology.

Future generations will look back at this trial and wonder who was right. Who defended freedom and who wanted to get rid of it.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Our freedom is being restricted everywhere, so I repeat what I said here last year:

It is not only the privilege, but also the duty of free people — and hence also my duty as a member of the Dutch Parliament — to speak out against any ideology that threatens freedom. Hence it is a right and a duty to speak the truth about the evil ideology that is called Islam. I hope that freedom of speech will emerge triumphant from this trial. I hope not only that I shall be acquitted, but especially that freedom of speech will continue to exist in the Netherlands and in Europe.

————————

Note how Wilders associates the ideology of the elites with the ideology of the jihadists. Both are fighting a war against the populations of Europe. The reckoning is not long off, I believe.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZyXkiQ-vn0

For all the usual reasons: assailing the religion of peace. I have spoken to two Dutch lefties in recent travels and they fully satisfy every characteristic of self-loathing, self-destructive ideology that conservative people attribute to them. Stereotypes are true, else they would fail as stereotypes. And the Dutch left is destroying their own country.

Ocacasionally something important hapens and the blogosphere seems to be asleep. David Cameron’s recent speech to a security conference in Munich is a case in point. He denounced the policy of state multiculturalism.

It was covered by the Guardian here.
By Norman Tebbitt in the Daily Telegraph here.

The British Prime Mininster’s office has it here.

I quote from it:

… We have got to get to the root of the problem, and we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of where these terrorist attacks lie.  That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism.  We should be equally clear what we mean by this term, and we must distinguish it from Islam.  Islam is a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people.  Islamist extremism is a political ideology supported by a minority.  At the furthest end are those who back terrorism to promote their ultimate goal: an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of Sharia.  Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist worldview, including real hostility towards Western democracy and liberal values.  It is vital that we make this distinction between religion on the one hand, and political ideology on the other.  Time and again, people equate the two.  They think whether someone is an extremist is dependent on how much they observe their religion.  So, they talk about moderate Muslims as if all devout Muslims must be extremist.  This is profoundly wrong.  Someone can be a devout Muslim and not be an extremist.  We need to be clear: Islamist extremism and Islam are not the same thing.

So, a huge pace forward, and still, given the political realities, he cannot say that Islam is the problem. It is the political ideology of Islam, or Islamism. Or some such prevarication. But Cameron does manage to say the British policy has failed to create sufficient adhesion to British society and values. He also states that the Brotish government will no longer subsidize groups that preach rejection of participation in British society.

But his speech gets a lot better:

Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism.  A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone.  It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them.  Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.  It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things.  Now, each of us in our own countries, I believe, must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty.

About time, dude! Cameron continues:

There are practical things that we can do as well.  That includes making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum.  Back home, we’re introducing National Citizen Service: a two-month programme for sixteen-year-olds from different backgrounds to live and work together.  I also believe we should encourage meaningful and active participation in society, by shifting the balance of power away from the state and towards the people.

Sometimes all that is needed is to change the tone of social discussion. Prime Minister Cameron has started something important. Does it go far enough? Not theoretically, but actually he is creating the conditions whereby “muscular liberalism” can succeed. It matters little to be theoretically correct about Islam – that it is, as I have concluded, in fact a violent system of sexual repression, authorized religious war and enslavement under the banner of a demented God – when you have not even started to prepare your defences.

So Cameron is doing the right thing.

I got an email under Ignatieff’s signature, too. The claim of non-partisanship was not just a lie but a stupid, pointless and highly visible lie that again demonstrates, if proof were needed, the mendacity of the Liberal party. Incredible? No.

It is common, it is widely believed, and it is wrong: that companies that lease facilities from larger carriers a) do no pay their full costs and that b) the tide of history will wipe them out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As to contention (a), read Michael Garbe in today’s Financial Post.

Canada is enjoying an outburst of public outrage against the CRTC, which ruled that smaller carriers would have to pay usage-based billing (UBB). Natrually the carriers interpreted this to mean that the usage caps would apply to each customer of the ISP, rather than to the ISP as a whole. This had the effect of limiting the service offerings of the smaller ISPs to exactly same service offerings of the larger carriers, telco or cableco. And this in turn negates the creative potential of smaller carriers to offer different products and services.

Hence the outrage. It may qualify as a small instance of a black swan event: rare, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability. Or it may well be the demonstation to even the dullest minds that people are attached to the Internet like gun-owner to his guns. (Aside: and now the quiche-eaters know what it feels like when the state comes a-calling to restrict your freedoms).

I wrote yesterday about vertical integration between carriers and content. Bell wants CTV because if they do not pick it up, somneone else will. Telus complains about Bell locking it out of wireless distribution of CTV sports events. Such a concern for freedom of communications and the common carriage pricmiple becomes them; they should try it more often.

b) the tide of history will wipe them out

The fate of the smaller ISPs is precarious because there is a considerable prejudice against them in policy circles, and a failure to understand what role they play in the information ecology. One again I am going to base my thought on Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, because it is apt and because he is saying something I wish I had writen myself.

“It is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech”.

“What if the figurative “marketplace of ideas” is lodged in the actual and less lofty markets for products of communication and culture, and those markets are closed, or so costly to enter as to admit ony a few?”

“The problem is that a “speech industry” – as we might term the information economy – once centralized, becomes an easy target for external independent actors with strong reasons of their for limiting speech. And these reasons may have nothing to do with the industry per se.”

The failure of communications policy makers is to understand that the issue is not the prices at which people communicate – though prices are vital, too. It is the ability to communicate at all. Some industrial structures facilitate this, such as blogs on the Internet. And some do not, such as Apple, or your old-fashioned newspaper, where you communicate at the pleasure of the owners of the medium.

The second major feature is the ability to innovate without permission. You could not do this in the old AT&T monopoly, with the result that magnetic recording devices (the basis of computers), inter-city microwave, long-distance competition, cell-phones and a host of immportant technologies were buried for decades in Bell Labs. No one places an app on an Apple device without permission. And if the large carriers get their way, no smaller ISP will innovate without their permission either.

The CRTC made a policy error, and it will pull back from it. But the error is deep-rooted in the thinking of many people about the role of smaller ISPs and thier indifference to open systems of communication. Viz Terence Corcoran.

On page 5 of the Financial Post today were four articles, every one of which was concerned with the vital issues of competitiveness, freedom of speech and innovation, and economic growth :

a) Apple Shuts Book on Sony’s i-Phone App

b) Telus accuses bell of hoarding content

c) Ban on user-based Internet fees risks telecom investment,by Terence Corcoran

d) time for businesses to step up, Bank of Canada says (text of speech here)

What is the link among them?

a) Apple wants to maintain the old AT&T model of closed endpoints, (”walled gardens”) so that the owner of the network can monetize the value of all transactions within it. Vertical integration.

b) Bell the telephone/satellite carrier wants content, supplied by CTV,  to drive users to its own proprietary content, and possibly to disadvantage the content supplied by others. Vertical intergation plus possible unjust discrimination against its duties as a common carrier.

c) Corcoran is right insofar as usage-based billing (UBB) has some theoretical justification. However, the bit caps and usage fees imposed by the carriers are entirely out of line with the costs of provision, and are seen as attempts to save the closed model of cable and telephony from the open Internet-based model of content delivery. They achieve this by making Internet-based delivery of content artificially expensive vis-a-vis cable and satellite. So count this as vertical integration (content and carriage) with definite aspects of anti-competitive pricing against competitive models.

d) The Bank of Canada is telling us to find “new, more efficient ways of organizing and executing production”, now that government has done its part to make Canada tax-competitive. If this is to be done, it will necessarily involve using the Internet more effectively. Hence the net result of usage-based billing – not in theory, but as it has been imposed by the carriers with the participation of the CRTC – is to diminish the utility and affordability of  the Internet.

The CRTC has got itself on the wrong side of this UBB issue. But an impetus for this policy approach has been the unbalanced policy directive it received from government a few years ago, which had the effect of reducing the commission’s ability to concern itself with common carriage – the public responsibilities of the carriers, and of focussing on competition as the panacea for all problems in communications markets.

It is worth considering the words of Tim Wu in his brilliant and comprehensive review of the rise and fall of information empires, The Master Switch.

“Among the great questions of our time is whether our approach to the power of information should be informed by a sense of that power’s political consequences, subject to our ingrained habit of balancing and checking any great power. Or should we follow our approach to economic power in general, in which we tolerate,  and even reward, aggrandizement? 

“While perhaps not immediately obvious, such questions are in fact at the heart of the ongoing struggle between the armies of open systems and closed, represented…in the battle between Google and Apple but manifest elsewhere as well and destined to outlast that rivalry….

“…The old television-as-toaster thinking that prevailed in the the late twentieth century is no longer feasible. To leave the economy of information, and power over this commodity, subject solely to the traditional ad hoc ways of dealing with concentrations of industrial power – in other words to anti-trust law – is dangerous.

“More subtly, there is the problem of taking an after-the-fact approach to a commodity so vital to our basic liberties: a farmeowrk that has worked well enough for oil and aluminum is ultimately unsuited to an industry whose substrate is speech.”

Unclear as to whether he wants to channel Roland Barthes, Emmanuel Goldstein or John Stuart Mill, Dan Gardner ends up doing none at all convincingly in his tirade against the notion that Islamists are engaged in a war with Western democracies.  And he contends that in our efforts to respond to what he interprets as a coincidental string of criminal acts by unorganized incompetents, civil liberties are being crushed:

But as we are constantly told, war is an emergency. It’s an existential struggle. To the extent that civil liberties and standards of civilized conduct get in the way of victory, they must be suspended. And since war is endless, the suspension is permanent — which is why, as James Madison observed long ago, “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

To be blunt, any politician or journalist who demands liberty and civility be curtailed because “we are at war” is a bigger threat to liberal democracy and western civilization than any terrorist.

Where are the gulags in the heartland or far north to which the dissenters of the Chimpy McHalliburton regime have been dispatched?  When did Alec Baldwin and Michael Moore become refuseniks for their supposed inability to emigrate to Canada to flee the terror of the permanent war? For people who should have apparently been snatched away by agents of the state in the dark hours of the morning, Cindy Sheehan and George Galloway are clearly seen and heard.  And the Silence of the Wikileaks? Certainly not suffering from anything like the Great Firewall of China… indeed, fighting and kicking back.

The anti-war Left and their familiars have grated on in this fashion for nearly a decade and yet they cannot offer up any reasonable proof that the struggle against Islamist aggression has transformed our society into a latter-day Airstrip One.  And Dan Gardner has done no better than them.

What’s going on? Ewald Stadtler tells the Turish Ambassador to Austria to take a hike. Are the supine Europeans beginning to wake up? Stadtler says hypocritical Muslim ambassadors that they cannot at the same time call for more tolerance towards their brethren from Europeans, and tell their co-religionists not to integrateas this would be a “crime against Turkishness”.  The thought police must be losing their grip. And watch the applause in the Austrian parliament.

I loved his phrase “tolerance romantics”,

The current concern among those of us who prefer liberal-democratic civilization  is Islam, naturally. For those who may still be under the illusion that Islam is just another religion, equally as infantile and ridiculous as Christianity, and equally deserving of our disapproval, might want to start reading about Islam and its relation to the rest of the world. You can start anywhere. Here is a list of books I have read in the past few years on the subject. Some are polemical, some scholarly.  And if you don’t like these, keep reading:  there are dozens more.

What it is:

• Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, by Tarek Fatah
• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, by Samuel P. Huntingdon
• The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, by Karen Armstrong
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), by Robert Spencer
• Why I am not a Muslim, by Ibn Warraq
• The Closing of the Muslim Mind, by Robert Reilly

What it is doing:

• America Alone:The End of the World as We Know It, by Mark Steyn
• Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, by Christopher Caldwell
• Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye’or
• The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, By Andrew C. McCarthy

History:

• Empires of the Sea: The final battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580, by Roger Crowley

If someone accuses you of being “Islamophobic”, think of it as being accused of “Naziphobic”  or “Communiphobic” in the 1930s. National Socialism, International Socialism and Islam are not the same things, but they share a common hatred of liberal democratic civilization. That includes you, my leftie-progressive friends, as well as my liberal and conservative ones.

We are deluged with insanities; indeed it can be argued we are drowning in them. They are  vast, powerful, and comprehensive. They derive from the inability to face facts, and to face facts, we would have to give up the precious ruling insanity (RI) of Western society since World War 2. First the symptoms, then the cause.

Here are three of the manifestations currently at work:

1. Airport searches, of an increasingly intrusive nature,  are predicated on a terrorist threat the source and nature of which -Islam – is not faced, discussed,or allowed to be spoken about in public discourse.

2. Canada is letting in 250,000 immigrants a year for the purpose of keeping our population from shrinking and maintaining the tax base to save our pensions, yet each succeeding generation of immigrants is less well-intergrated and less well-paid than its predecessor. Each immigrant subsequently brings in a host of relatives, whose presence largely or wholly negates the economic value of the productive immigrant Canada originally allowed in. Immigrants are increasingly deriving from societies whose goals, mores and political cultures are antithetical to our own. (see point one above)

3. We are raising electricity prices to favour renewable energy, and shutting down efficient fossil-fuel generating plants,wrecking the landscape with enormous bird-killing windmills, on the basis of a (man-caused) global warming hypothesis whose foundations have been shown to be fraudulent.

Perhaps you have your own set of insanities. Why, for instance, were the police required to suspend the rule of law in Caledon, Ontario to allow rebel Indians to run amok terrorizing the white citizens of Caledon in the enforcement of Indian land-claims?

I will tell you. They are related phenomena. The doctrine of racial, social, religious equality has been pushed to the point where different racial, social, religious or other group outcomes has been ruled presumptively illegal and immoral. This, I submit, is the ruling insanity of Western society. It seems that only the collision with something as huge, implacable, intolerant, and intrusive as Islam will force us to wake up from this delusion. If only we wake up in time.