The Spirit of America

I thought that there has been way too much negativity about America in recent times

That's why America represents both, the failiure and the true virtue of mankind

Due to suffering a nervous breakdown, Pirsig spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 to 1963. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression as a result of an evaluation conducted by psychoanalysts, and was treated with shock therapy on numerous occasions.

In the years following the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he has lived a solitary and reclusive lifestyle. Pirsig has travelled around the Atlantic by boat, and has resided in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, England and in various places around the United States since 1980.
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Personal life

Robert Pirsig married Nancy Ann James on May 10, 1954. They had two sons: Chris, born in 1956, and Theodore, born in 1958. After Pirsig was first hospitalized in 1961, James filed for divorce, which was finalized in 1978. Shortly after, he married Wendy Kimball on December 31, 1978.

In 1979, Pirsig's son Chris, who figured prominently in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was stabbed to death during a mugging outside the San Francisco Zen Center. Pirsig discusses this incident in an afterword to subsequent editions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writing that he and his second spouse, Kimball, decided not to abort the child she conceived in 1980, because he had come to believe that this unborn child was a continuation of the life pattern that Chris had occupied. This child's name is Nell, and she is Pirsig's daughter.
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Published material

Pirsig's work consists almost entirely of two novels. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sets out Pirsig's interpretation of "Quality" and "the Good." It is mostly a first person narrative based on a motorcycle [4] trip he and his young son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco.[5]

Pirsig's publisher's recommendation to his Board ended with "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." Pirsig noted in an early interview, that Zen was rejected 121 times before being accepted by William Morrow Publishers. In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid... the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent".[6] The Times Literary Supplement called it "Profoundly important, Disturbing, Deeply moving, Full of insights, A wonderful book".

In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he elaborates and focuses on a value-based metaphysics, called Metaphysics of Quality, to replace the subject-object view of reality.

Hell:

Zen hell is of this world, right here and now, in which life is all around you, but you cannot participate in it. You see others bathing in the life all around them, but you have to drink it through a straw never getting enough.

The Moth Syndrome:

Celebrity can become some sort of narcosis of mirrors , where you have to have more and more supportive reflections just to stay satisfied. Mirrors take over your like , and soon you don't know how you are.

Moths aren't flying toward the flame. The moth is really trying to fly straight. Moths steer by keeping a constant angle with the sun or the moon. Which works because the sun or moon are so far away that a constant angle with them is virtually a straight line . But with a close up light bulb. A constant angle makes a circle. That is what keeps the moths spinning around and around and around. What is killing the moth is not a dynamic aspiration for a higher life. It is a static biological pattern of value. They can't change.

That was the feeling he got from this city. He was like a moth in danger of drifting in circles around some kind of celebrity orbit. May be at some prehistoric time before celebrity become important people could trust their natural desires to keep them going in straight forward direction. But one the artificial sun of celebrity was invented, they started going in circles.

Brains were capable of handling physical and biological patterns in prehistoric times. But a brain is dynamic enough to handle modern social patterns?

That was the Victorian stance: affecting some romantic notion of quality without intellectual penetration of the meaning of quality.

Intellect versus Society:

The metaphysics of substance failed to illuminate the gulf between ourselves and them, because it regards both society and intellect as possessions of biology. It says society and intellect don't have substance, so they can't be real.

In a value metaphysics in the other hand, biology, society and intellect are all patterns of value. It makes it possible to see that there is a conflict between intellect and society that is just as fierce as the conflict between society and biology, or the conflict between biology and death. Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it out. And that is the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the Twentieth Century.

What distinguishes the pattern of values called Victorian from the culture of today, Is that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patters of society. What held the Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. The one dominating question of the post world war one period by contrast is: are the social patterns of our world going to run our intellectual life or is our intellectual life going to run the social patterns.

Cultures are unique historical patterns which contain their own values and should not be judged in terms of values of other cultures.

The metaphysics of quality supports the dominance of intellect over society. It says intellect is a higher level of evolution than society therefore it is at a higher moral level . It is better for an idea to destroy a society than for a society to destroy an idea. However, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society has a defect in it. The defect is that from the prospective of subject - object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy. Nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, murder, genocide...Nothing is right and nothing is wrong because there are no morals. Just functions.

The scientific test of a vice is not that society approve or disapprove. The test should is it rational or irrational. Drinking that causes car accidents, or loss of work or family is irrational, because it does not contribute the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number.

In the other hand drinking is not irrational if it produces mere social and intellectual relaxation. That type of drinking is not a vice. The same test can be applied to gambling, swearing, lying, slandering. It is the intellectual aspect not the social aspect that dictates the answer.

The moral values of American Indians: Kindness to children , maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature.

Victorian language was a ornamental as their wall paper, full of involution and curlicues and floral patterns that had no practical function what so ever and distracted you from what ever content was there.

The result of the new social looseness (intellect over society) weren't turning out as predicted . Something was wrong. The world was no doubt in better shape intellectually and technologically , but despite that somehow the quality of it was not good.

The pursuit of happiness seems to have become like the pursuit of some scientifically created mechanical rabbit that moves ahead at whatever speed it is pursued. If you ever did catch it for a few moments, it had a peculiar synthetic, technological taste that made the whole pursuit seem senseless.

The social chaos of this 20th century can be relieved if we see society as the middle turn in a clash between two codes of morals: society versus biology code- and intellect versus society. In the battle of society against biology the new 20th century intellectuals have taken biology's side. Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons, and guns, and police and the military. But when intellectuals in control of society take biology's side against society, then society is caught in a cross fire from which it has no protection .

There are actually five codes of morals: inorganic chaotic, biological inorganic, social biological, intellectual social, dynamic static.

Good is a noun:

The dynamic static code says what is good in life isn't defined by society or intellect or biology. What is good is freedom from domination by any static pattern. But that freedom doesn't have to be obtained by destruction of the patterns themselves.

The reasons of Moral Bankruptcy

Today the overall picture is one of moral movements gone bankrupt. Just as the intellectual revolution undermines social patters the hippies undermine both static and intellectual patters. The result has been in a drop of both social and intellectual quality. In the US the intelligence level shown in SAT score has gone down; organized crime has grown more powerful and more sinister. What is coming out of the urban slams where Victorian moral codes are almost destroyed, isn't the paradise the revolutionaries hoped for , but a reversion to rule by terror. The old biological might-makes-right morality of prehistoric brigandage.

The end of the 20th century in America seems to be an intellectual social and economical rustbelt. A whole society that is giving up on dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch.

It is the intellectual pattern of amoral objectivity which is to blame for the social deterioration of America. Because it has undermined the static social values necessary to prevent deterioration . In its condemnation of social repression as the enemy of liberty. It has never come forth with a single moral principle that distinguishes a Galileo fighting social repression from a common criminal fighting social repression. It has as a result been the champion of both. This is the root of the problem.

Technological Dream, Moral Nightmare:

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise in a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution in its struggle to become free of social level, has ignored the social level 's role in keeping the biological level under control.

The intellectual s have failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly being suppressed by social order.

Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life, but when it threatens to dominate and destroy society it becomes evil.

The metaphysics of quality indicates that the 20th century intellectual faith in man's basic goodness, as spontaneous and natural, is disastrously naive. The ideal of an harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction.
The mythology by which the puritans explained the original sin seems no longer useful in a scientific world. But when we look at the things they identified with this original sin, we see something remarkable: Dancing, drinking, sex, playing the fiddle, gambling, idleness.. which are all biological pleasures. Early puritan morals were largely a suppression of biological quality.

The metaphysics of quality concludes that the old puritan and Victorian social codes should not be followed blindly, but should not be attacked blindly either. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad. But when it represses biological for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.

The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death doesn't work. Intellectual patterns cannot control directly biological patterns. Only social patterns can control biological patterns. And the instrument of conversation between society and biology has always a policeman and his gun.

On Insanity:

Insanity is an important philosophical subject which has been ignored mainly because of metaphysical limitations. As long as you are stuck with old conventions insanity is a misunderstand of the object by the subject . The object is real, the subject is mistaken.

The problem is to change the subject's mind back to a correct comprehension of objective reality.

With the metaphysics of quality, the empirical experience is not an experience of objects, it is an experience of value patterns produced by a number of sources not just inorganic.

When an insane person , or an hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture advances some explanation of the universe that is completely ad odds with current scientific reality. We do not have to believe he has jumped the empirical world. He is just valuing intellectual patterns which because they are outside the range of our own culture we perceive to have low quality. Some force has altered his judgment of quality. It has caused him to filter out our cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture filters out his.

Ask if there was only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane? Insanity always exists in relations to others. It s a social and intellectual deviation, not a biological deviation. The only test for insanity in a court of law, is conformity to a cultural status quo. That is why the psychiatric profession bears such a resemblance to priest saving heretics. Both use physical restraint and abuse as ways of enforcing status quo.

Like police who live in two worlds the biological and the social, psychiatrists live in two worlds, the social and intellectual . like cops they are in absolute control of the lower order and absolutely subservient to the upper order. You have as much chance convincing a psychiatrists that the intellectual order he enforces is rotten as you have of convincing a cop that the social order he supports is rotten.

Somebody has to deal with the degenerate forms of intellect.

The think to understand is that if you are going to reform society, you don't start with cops, and if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. It you don't like our present social or intellectual order , the best you can do with cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last.

Who do you start with then?

Anthropologists?

An anthropologist could study the person's complaints, find a culture where the complaints were relieved or unnoticeable, and send them there. If a person suffers from sexual inhibition he could be sent to Margaret Mead's Samoa. If he suffered from paranoia, send him to one of the middle eastern countries where suspicious attitudes are normal.

Each culture presumes its believes correspond to external reality, but a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality can just be any damn thing. Even the facts that people observe to confirm the truth depended on the culture they live in. And all cultural intellectual patterns are build on facts that are extremely selective. When a new fact doesn't fit a pattern, we don't throw out the pattern, we throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries before may be one or two individuals will see it. Then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too. Just a biological immune system will destroy a life saving skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia, so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding with the same vigor it uses to destroy crime.

The Consequence of the "Do your Own thing Democracy" is the intoxification of the greater part of the population which is not capable of discriminating for itself, which , when not guided by a power and an ideal, all too easily loses sense of its own identity.

Beginning with the Constitution's adoption, America has been a Republic. But the dominant trend over the last two centuries has been to make it into a democracy as well, a representative democracy, also known as a democratic republic. True, the creation of the Constitution itself was partly a reaction against democracy. In states like Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, the situation was getting way too democratic for the monied aristocracy that had, since the American Revolution, refused to share power with ordinary men.

The causes of the American Revolution were many, but for the monied class there were three principal aims. They sought self-government: that is, they sought to rule the colonies themselves, to further their own interests. They sought to protect the institution of slavery, which had been endangered by Lord Mansfield's ruling against it in the Sommersett case of 1772. And land speculators like George Washington sought to seize more Native American Indian land, which the British had outlawed.

But to win the American Revolution this predatory elite needed help. Their own rhetoric about freedom and equality led to widespread demands for the right to vote: universal suffrage. In other words, the people began demanding democracy. Even the slaves (white and black alike) demanded to be freed and allowed to vote.

After the British were defeated a centralized, national government was seen by George Washington and company not as a method of extending freedom and the right to vote, but as a way of keeping control in the hands of rich. They wrote several anti-democratic provisions into the U.S. Constitution. Slavery was institutionalized. The Senate was not to be elected directly by the people; rather Senators were to be appointed by state legislatures. The President was not to be directly elected by the voters, but elected through an electoral college. The Supreme Court was to be appointed. Only the House of Representatives was elected directly.

More important to our democracy-versus-republic debate, the U.S. Constitution left the question of who could vote in elections to each individual state. In most states only white men who owned a certain amount of property could vote. So, on the whole, the first federal government that met in 1789 was a republic with only a fig-leaf of democratic representation. This is what today's commentators mean when they say America is a republic, not a democracy.

Democracy means rule of the people. The two most common forms of democracy are direct democracy and representative democracy. In direct democracy everyone takes part in making a decision, as in a town meeting or a referendum. The specific rules may vary: perhaps everyone must agree, perhaps there must be consensus, perhaps a mere majority is required to make a decision. The other, better known form of democracy is a representative democracy. People elect representative to make decisions or laws.

Multiculturalism Hits The Wall
By J.R. Dunn

As year ten of the long war looms, the "multicultural" paradigm for defense against terrorism has slammed into a brick wall.

Recent developments reveal a policy in terminal disarray. The public revolt against the TSA, the ridiculous and humiliating Ghailani verdict, the still-simmering Financial District victory mosque controversy, and even the unmasking of the false Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour in Afghanistan have highlighted the absurdity of attempting to meld the "multicultural" worldview with any serious effort against jihadi terrorism. And yet, government officials directly responsible for the defense of the country, from Obama, Holder, and Napolitano on down, insist on maintaining the "multicultural" paradigm despite undeniable evidence of its failure.

Multiculturalism has effectively controlled American security policy as regards terrorism from the very beginning. Islam, we were assured by no less a figure than George W. Bush, was "a religion of peace." Critical resources were invested in curtailing any "backlash" against American Muslims by the evil-minded white Christian majority. Organizations of dubious provenance, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), were appointed official representatives of American Muslims.

What did these attempts to bend over backward under the prompting of an abstract academic intellectual construct accomplish? Absolutely nothing. Bush was excoriated both here and overseas by the very people he was working to protect. The great anti-Muslim backlash never happened (as Jonathan Tobin reminds us). The advocacy groups have all been revealed as fronts for Hamas. Few policies, official or unofficial, have such a pristine record of failure. Few have hung on more tenaciously.

Multiculturalism is the most recent, and perhaps the final, expression of the late 20th-century left-wing ascendancy. It is a completely synthetic doctrine, formulated without reference to any perceptible element of the quotidian world. Although derived in format and rhetoric from the civil rights movement, it has no relationship with the ideas or hopes expressed by King, Abernathy, Rustin, or any other legitimate civil rights leader. While the civil rights movement was founded in opposition to the odious practice of legal racial segregation, multiculturalism had no such concrete agenda. It was based almost completely on abstract academic theories derived in equal part from black racial extremism and Marxism, purporting to define the relationship between the dominant "white" race and all other races.

According to multicultural theory, the "white" race (never further defined) forms a privileged oppressor class, forever and completely at odds with members of other races. The relationship between races is presented only in terms of power, in which the oppressed races became in effect a proletariat awaiting liberation through revolutionary activity. Under these terms, every action taken by the white oppressors is illegitimate, while those taken by the "subaltern" races are justified, no matter what their evident nature and intent. As a global theory, multiculturalism possesses universal applicability under all circumstances. Every aspect of racial and ethnic relations must be seen through the multicultural lens.

It would be difficult to find a theory to beat multiculturalism for sheer vacuity. It ignores the fact that numerous groups among the "oppressor" race, such as the Irish and Jews, have been historical victims, while the "oppressed" races have often victimized in their turn when they have occupied the top slot. (Arab treatment of sub-Saharan Africans marks only one instance.) For these reasons among others, multiculturalism gained no greater a foothold with the American public than its political models, socialism and Marxism. Although the left attempted throughout the late '80s and '90s to force multiculturalism on the country through its activist PC component, the effort went nowhere. Americans as a whole rejected the doctrine as yet another bizarre fixation of the intellectual class.

There were two exceptions -- the academy, whence multiculturalism arose, and the government bureaucracy. On campus, multiculturalism remained one of the weird things that academics believe. In the bureaucracy, it became another expression of bureaucratic stupidity and intransigence, which did not prevent it from having an impact, limited but malignant, on the country as a whole.

That was the status quo in September 2001. After 9/11, the response of the country's intellectual leadership was straightforward: to react exactly as set forth by multicultural doctrine. The U.S., as a white European oppressor state, was obviously at fault. The Islamist jihadis, all members of an oppressed subaltern race, were victims, no matter what appearances might otherwise suggest. The belief system was up and running; all it needed was factoids to be plugged in.

All the same, the response of the left was muted in the immediate wake of the attacks. Only a handful of left-wingers spoke up in their accustomed manner, to scuttle back into the shade and damp when public agreement was not forthcoming. The most notorious of these comments was Michael Moore's posting characterizing the jihadis as "minutemen ... and they will win." A near match came from a nameless, forgotten California pol who asked, "America -- what have you done?"

An angry and disdainful public response momentarily shut down such sentiments. But these comments did speak for tens of thousands of silent true believers. The atrocity was explicable in familiar multicultural terms -- it was "whitey" (America) that was actually to blame for the attack, while the jihadis, far from being murderous thugs, were in truth romantic rebels, so many adorable Ches gazing off into the radiant multicultural future. The left kept its counsel and waited.

They did not have to wait long. Public contempt did not last, due in large part to failure on the part of the administration to confront the left. The Bush White House found it extremely difficult to actually put a name to the enemy, going through epic contortions rather than admitting any connection to Islam. At the same time, leftist figures engaging in what amounted to sedition were not arrested, prosecuted, or even rebuked, but instead allowed to continue undermining American unity undisturbed. No government figure, from Bush on down, ever publicly attacked such people. It should have been done. But such confrontation was not the style of George W. Bush, and asking for it would have been asking him to be a totally different president.

Leftist boldness increased as the environment of public opinion deteriorated. Both trends were fed by irresponsible news stories attacking such initiatives as the Patriot Act, exposing anti-terror programs such as international wiretapping, and retailing lurid fantasies such as the "Koran-in-the-toilet" story reported by Michael Isikoff. All of these embodied the multicultural narrative to one extent or another.

The watershed came with the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which an out-of-control National Guard unit amused itself by hazing jihadi prisoners while stupidly preserving the violations on camera. Amid the massive publicity surrounding Abu Ghraib, the entire system of dealing with jihadi captives became fair game. Guantánamo Bay, possibly the least rigorous prison camp ever erected (at least until the Dutch or Swedes have need of one), was transformed into a place of Gothic horror, with Lovecraftian tortures an everyday occurrence. The practice of waterboarding had its hour onstage as a form of "torture." Since torture requires at least the threat of disfigurement or death, waterboarding was clearly no such thing.

The multicultural paradigm was put into full play, the imagery of imperialists tormenting poor third-world victims calling up memories of every historical violation from antebellum plantation whippings to the torture sequences of the classic leftist agitprop film, The Battle of Algiers. Such tableaux were virtually part of the public subconscious, their meaning inherent. They spoke for themselves, requiring nothing the way of explication or commentary. (Such imagery can be found in the Abu Ghraib photos as well, where the mindless guards had the brilliant inspiration of dressing one prisoner in what looked to be a clown's version of a KKK outfit.)

Against this visual evidence, rational arguments -- that only three jihadis were ever waterboarded, that each was a leading figure, that evidence existed in each case that innocents might be in danger (a circumstance believed by attorney Alan Dershowitz among others to fully justify torture) -- had no chance. The campaign against terrorism, begun as the noblest of efforts (and remaining so in most minds), was degraded to the popular image of the Vietnam War -- a brutal imperialist rampage against innocuous brown people carried out for much the same reason as the Athenians' excuse for destroying the city of Melos: "The strong do what they will; the weak endure what they must."

The 2008 presidential election offered the country a way out: Barack Obama, that magical, superhuman melding of black and white America, would square the multicultural circle. The plantation at Guantánamo would be closed immediately. Torture would be forever banned. With his vague (and ever vaguer) connection to Islam, Obama would launch a new era of comity with the worldwide Umma. Jihadi victims would be endowed with full American civil rights, Mirandized, allowed as many lawyers as they could possibly use, and given civilian trials, the same as any citizen. America's image would be restored, its reputation cleansed, its soul returned to it.

And so it came to pass with the defeat of the old white guy and the crazy frontier woman with all them guns. American policy became consciously multiculturalized. This has remained the case for the past two years. The result has been unmitigated disaster.

Multiculturalism's first failure involved the Gitmo facility, which Obama promised to close as a symbolic gesture within weeks of taking office. Symbolic it was to remain. For obscure reasons, officials across the country were unwilling to allow murderous, malevolent religious fanatics to be transferred to prisons in their localities. The schedule slipped and then evaporated without comment from the administration. Two years into Obama's term, Gitmo remains the prime resort destination for jihadis worldwide. Multiculturalism had encountered practical politics. Multiculturalism lost.

A similar uproar greeted the matter of civilian trials. Eric Holder, the most incapable attorney general in living memory, attempted to schedule a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the linchpin figure of the World Trade Center conspiracy. He insisted on not only a civilian trial, but a trial held in lower Manhattan, within earshot of the WTC site itself, an act of pure ritualism on the same logical level as holding a drunk driver's hearing next to the stop sign he ran. But Holder's dreams were laid low by the response from Mayor Bloomberg and the New York congressional delegation, aghast at the thought of spending perhaps hundreds of millions to turn lower Manhattan into an armed camp and a target for jihadi terrorists from across the world. Over a year later, prize captive KSM remains untried.

But it was the Transportation Security Agency's response that most insulted the intelligence and endangered the public. TSA procedure was tailored to meet multicultural norms from the beginning. No effort was spared to avoid any sign of profiling. This law-enforcement technique had come into disrepute during the '90s, when it was revealed that a standard practice of the New Jersey State Police was to stop expensive cars on state highways containing young black men. Profiling became another one of the infinite sins of white America, even though it was a demonstrable fact that many of those Beamers and Porsches contained large amounts of illegal drugs being transported to New York City and points north. To avoid the taint of profiling, the TSA adapted what amounted to a policy of absolute mathematical randomness, in which airline passengers were halted and searched according to no rational pattern. This led to searches of small children, elderly women, the visibly ill and crippled, nuns, and numerous other menaces to national security. The result was open public contempt and the reduction of the TSA to sheer ineffectuality -- of recent major airline attacks, not a single one was countered by the TSA. All were curtailed by airline passengers.

But certainly the nadir of the multicultural security paradigm came with the case of Major Nidal Hasan. A severely disturbed religious fanatic whose every recorded utterance and action revealed white-hot hatred for his own country and adoration for the Islamist cause, Hasan went unconfronted by Army authorities throughout his military career. Quite the contrary -- the story provides clear evidence of an institutional culture in which no criticism or questioning of any Muslim under any circumstances could be risked. The cost of this self-imposed blindness was thirteen dead and nearly three times that many wounded after Hasan went berserk at Fort Hood.

All the same, multiculturalism remained the grail of the Obama administration. The country was to continue following the Messiah President down the diversity highway no matter how many cliffs it went over. The lion was going to lie down with the lamb, no matter how many lambs served as dinner beforehand. While Gitmo and KSM might be postponed out of political necessity, multiculturalism continued ruling all other aspects of official terrorism policy. (One example can be found in the Army's official report on the Fort Hood massacre, which in its entire length failed to mention Islam and attributed Hasan's lethal outburst to personality factors.)

So we come to 2010, nearly a decade into the long war, and the year that conceivably will be looked back upon as multiculturalism's Little Big Horn (if that is not found offensive to our Native American readers). The year has seen one demented comic skit follow another, each turning on aspects of the multicultural response to jihadi terrorism, many of them skidding straight to the edge of chaos and perhaps beyond, leaving the multicultural paradigm barely hanging on.

The first of these, last spring, involved the Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris, who in a fit of whimsy attempted to defuse the uproar over cartoons depicting the Prophet with a suggestion for an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day." This was accompanied by a cartoon which in fact did not depict Mohammed. Perhaps overlooking this, the bluff, no-nonsense Anwar al-Awlaki issued a fatwa condemning Ms. Norris to Hell at the hands of any available Muslim. In response, the FBI told her that they'd like to help her out, but... Her own editor Brent Jones kissed her off with a note that should become a byword in sheer pusillanimity. No one else responded at all. Even Obama, known to give lengthy orations every time a cat scratches a flea, remained silent. Ms. Norris slipped into limbo to almost no notice from the mass of left-wingers eager to "speak truth to power" as long as the power in question does not worship Allah.

Lesson: a primary driver of multiculturalism is cowardice.

The summer was in large part given over to a public debate concerning the New York "victory mosque," a Muslim "community center" proposed as a replacement for a building so close to the WTC site that it had been heavily damaged during the attack. Spearheading the effort was an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, one of those lucky individuals chosen by the government as a representative of Islam. Rauf was employed by the State Department to plead the American case to Muslims overseas.

The mosque controversy was one of the encounters that sets the public at large in direct opposition to the elite. Americans as a whole were repelled by the proposal, while academic, media, and government figures (among them Bloomberg and Obama) feigned incomprehension. Though perhaps this was not a pose -- in the multicultural scheme of things, it was the public opposition that was incomprehensible. Rauf was a member of a subaltern group, and his opponents were the oppressor class, so...well, we know how that goes.

The effort fell apart when it was revealed that Rauf was a slumlord with numerous barely habitable properties in New Jersey, that his partners were even less savory, and that his "foundation" was effectively broke. At last report, Union City had seized one of his slum properties at the same time that Rauf was seeking a multimillion-dollar loan from the federal government.

Lesson: multiculturalism cannot distinguish between hustlers and legitimate figures.

As the year waned, the administration's civilian trial program also tottered to a shabby end. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was a precious character, a longtime jihadi who played a key role in the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Those attacks resulted in 224 deaths and over 3,000 injuries. The case was considered so open and shut that it received scarcely any attention, up to the point where Ghailani was acquitted of 224 charges of murder and 60 other serious charges. He was convicted only of the relatively trivial charge of conspiracy to destroy government property.

There were two reasons for this ludicrous verdict: Judge Lewis Kaplan's decision to bar most government evidence on the grounds that it was the fruit of "torture" (that is, waterboarding), and a single recalcitrant juror of a type not unknown in New York City. Though Kaplan promised a full sentence of twenty years, he added that Ghailani could be held as an enemy combatant in any case. The verdict gutted the government's justification for civilian trials and acted as a strong indication that no further such circuses would occur.

Lesson: multiculturalism and the law don't mix.

Multicultural terror policy spiraled into sheer dementia with the introduction of the TSA's new airport antiterror strategy. The previous Christmas holiday was marked with an attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down an airliner over Detroit by means of a bomb sewn into his underwear. Nearly a year later, the TSA, no doubt after deep consultation, millions spent on studies, and lengthy discussions among Obama, Napolitano, Holder, and a cast of thousands, came up with a countertactic: a choice among passengers of either submitting to a nude scan (with a high probability that the images would be saved) or an obscene groping by TSA agents.

This insane policy was scheduled weeks after a series of package bombs revealed that al-Qaeda had once again shifted its tactics. It was, furthermore, to be introduced in the runup to the holidays, the busiest season for commercial flying. Whether these decisions were made by TSA head John Pistole, Janet Napolitano, JoJo the Dogfaced Boy, or some combination of the three is impossible to ascertain.

The program met with total resistance from the public, marked by confrontations with officials, open arguments, and refusals to cooperate. TSA agents were particularly brutal in their "groping." As it turned out, this nastiness was official policy, intended to drive passengers to choose the scanner. A San Diego man, John Tyner, achieved the status of mythic hero by refusing both search methods and an order to remain until he was "cleared" (a previously unknown aspect of security procedure).

Public resistance became focused on "Opt-out Day," the day before Thanksgiving, traditionally the busiest flying day of the year, when thousands of fliers would refuse both alternatives, bringing airports to a standstill and forcing the TSA to back down. As it happened, Opt-out Day passed with no disturbances. While the legacy media crowed of a TSA victory (as is almost always the case these days -- media lined up with government against the people), numerous tweets from airports reported that the scanners had been shut down and roped off. The TSA had backed down, if only surreptitiously.

The most irrational aspect of the strategy lay in the fact that it was, once again, designed to avoid profiling at any cost. Both the groping and scanning were effectively occurring at random, presenting no insurmountable barrier to a potential terrorist operation. Such a system can easily be overcome by sending in a large number of terrorists at once. If one or two are caught, no matter -- the others can do the job.

Adding to the TSA's incoherence is the fact that the world's most successful airport security system is that of Israel, which is based on conscious behavioral profiling. Well-trained agents search for certain behavioral cues and then confront possible terrorists in a manner designed to force them to reveal their intentions. Critics insist that the Israeli system is not exportable, because Israel possesses only a single international airport -- about as sensible an objection as claiming that you can't use traffic lights in towns with more than one intersection. More to the point is the fact that the Israelis stop more Arabs than any other group. (It's no coincidence that the Washington Post published an article over Thanksgiving weekend condemning the Israeli procedure as racist.)

Lesson: to sow multiculturalism is to reap the whirlwind.

Thanksgiving also saw a successful antiterror operation in which the FBI intercepted an attempt by a malcontent youth, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, to set off an enormous car bomb amid Portland, Oregon's annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, attended by up to 25,000 people. The operation appears to have been textbook, executed on a far higher level than similar recent incidents (the Times Square bomb being one example). But even here, the specter of multiculturalism raises its head. Mohamud was a Somalian refugee, the product of a government refusal to curtail immigration from the most lawless and anti-American regions of the Muslim world. Almost all jihadi terror attacks have been carried out by immigrants. The solution to this problem explains itself.

But multiculturalism played an even deeper and more disturbing role in the Portland incident. Portland is one of the most radical large cities in the United States. In 2005, the city opted out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, in which the FBI works cooperatively with local police forces, as kind of a protest against the inhuman policies of the Bush-Cheney tyranny. The current mayor, Sam Adams, a peculiar figure with no connection to either the patriot or the beer, played a significant role in this decision as assistant to the previous mayor. It was for this reason that he (along with the rest of city government) was not informed of the emergency until it was over. A strange state of affairs: the population of a city saved, despite themselves, by agents of a government they despise.

We know how we got here. How do we get out? One thing is clear -- it's not a question of reform. Multiculturalism cannot be reformed because ideologies cannot be reformed. They are total dogmas in which each element plays a critical part in bolstering every other element. Eliminating one leads to the collapse of all. Government, academy, and media will not allow this -- multiculturalism as it exists is far too useful as a weapon and a mechanism for social control. So reform is out of the question. What cannot be reformed must be removed.

The problem is that there exists no particular impulse for reform or removal. Multiculturalism infests all levels of government, and no one involved sees anything wrong with the status quo. (For example, Andrew McCarthy points out that military commissions, considered by many an ideal alternative to civilian trials of terrorists, have recently fumbled two verdicts -- one being that of Omar Khadr, who murdered an American medic who was treating him after capture in Afghanistan. Khadr got only eight years. Osama bodyguard Salim Hassan, on the other hand, lucked out completely. He got five and a half years, including time served, resulting in his immediate release. The rot goes deep.) It is likely that we will simply stumble on as if lost in a haze until we suffer yet another large-scale atrocity.

The battle against terror is a race between rationality and luck. We have been very lucky so far -- lucky over Detroit, lucky in Times Square, lucky in Dallas, and lucky in Portland. But luck, as Fort Hood clearly reveals, won't last forever. When it fails, rationality -- intelligence, common sense, and trained intuition -- must be ready to take over. Multiculturalism is the enemy of all those factors. It is a set of blinders creating a state of tunnel vision. There are things that multiculturalism forbids us to look at. Soon enough, the attacks will begin coming from those directions, from out of those blind spots. The record clearly shows that we will not be ready to meet them.

The Metaphysics of Quality, or MOQ, is simply a philosophic answer to
the question of what is Quality, or worth, or merit, or value, or
betterness or any of the other synonyms for good. There are many
possible answers but the one the MOQ gives is that you can understand
Quality best if you don't subordinate it to anything else but instead
subordinate everything else to it.

It says there are two basic kinds of Quality, an undefined Quality
called Dynamic Quality, and a defined quality called static quality.
Static quality is further divided into four evolutionary divisions:
inorganic, biological, social and intellectual. Our entire
understanding of the world can be organized within this framework.
When you do so things fall into place that were poorly defined
before, and new things appear that were concealed under previous
frameworks of understanding. The MOQ is not intended to deny previous
modes of understanding as much as to expand them into a more
inclusive picture of what it's all about.

Senate votes to continue FISA domestic spying through 2017

All proposed privacy amendments rejected
By Neil McAllister in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Policy, 29th December 2012 02:35 GMT
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The US Senate has voted by overwhelming majority to extend the provisions of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 – the controversial law that grants intelligence agencies broad authority to spy on US citizens – for another five years.

The law, which was first passed in the wake of the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping scandal, grants telecoms companies blanket immunity from prosecution for participating in domestic surveillance.
In addition, it specifically authorizes intelligence agencies to monitor the phone, email, and other communications of US citizens for up to a week without obtaining a warrant, provided one of the parties to the communications is outside the US.

Critics of the act claim it violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, but the Obama administration has argued that the law "is necessary to keep the American people safe."

"Intelligence collection under [the act] has produced and continues to produce significant information that is vital to defend the Nation against international terrorism and other threats," the administration said in a policy statement in September.

As originally drafted, the law would have expired on Monday, but on Friday the Senate elected to extend it through 2017 by a vote of 73–23, with four abstentions.

Several proposed amendments to the bill would have offered increased transparency and added privacy protections, but all were rejected in the Senate vote.

Civil rights organizations were quick to blast the vote, characterizing the FISA Amendments Act as an unconstitutional law that grants the government excessive and unchecked surveillance authority.

In a statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the vote "shameful" and "disgraceful," adding, "Make no mistake: this vote was nothing less than abdication by Congress of its role as watchdog over Executive power, and a failure of its independent obligation to protect the Bill of Rights."

The American Civil Liberties Union also chimed in, saying, "It's a tragic irony that FISA, once passed to protect Americans from warrantless government surveillance, has mutated into its polar opposite due to the FISA Amendments Act. The Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretapping, once considered a radical threat to the Fourth Amendment, has become institutionalized for another five years."

Despite such objections, however, the extension is now all but a done deal. The House passed it in September by a similarly wide margin of 301–118, leaving it only for President Obama to sign it into law, which he is expected to do over the weekend.

Obama's student loan profit machine
In his current term, the government may earn more than $110 billion from this program, more than the country's most lucrative companies.
The federal government will turn a tidy profit -- to the tune of more than $110 billion -- from student loans during President Barack Obama's current term, thanks to a form of arbitrage that's helping the government reap more in earnings than some of the country's most lucrative companies.

What's driving the government's profits from lending to students? It's the fact that while the Federal Reserve is maintaining rock-bottom interest rates, students are obligated to repay their loans at a rate that's three times as high. The Treasury, as the middleman, gets to keep the difference.

That will allow the government to book profits of about $35 billion in the current fiscal year from its loans to college graduates, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

On top of that figure, the agency on Tuesday said a credit adjustment will add an extra $15 billion in profit, partly because older loans had been more profitable than earlier forecast, given the Fed's continuing low rates. On paper, that means the government will profit by about $50 billion this year.

And it means the government's student loan program is more profitable than some of the country's most lucrative businesses, from Apple (AAPL +1.34%), which posted a $41.7 billion profit last year, to Exxon (XOM -0.59%), which had $44.9 billion in profit last year, as the Huffington Post points out.

The student loan program is expected to report several extremely profitable years to come, too. Until Obama leaves office, the government is forecast to reap more than $110 billion in profits from lending money to college students, according to the CBO's estimates.

What's interesting is that the money machine isn't expected to go on at these levels forever. Because the Fed is likely to raise rates as the economy stabilizes, the CBO projects that profits will shrink each year through 2023. By that point, the government may realize only $6 billion in student loan profits per year, give or take.

The moneymaking machine may lend support to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and her argument that students should pay the same ultralow interest rate the Fed charges to banks, as reported Monday.

College grads currently pay 3.4% on federally subsidized Stafford loans, a rate that Congress set more than a decade ago, when rates were much higher than today's. The Federal Reserve discount rate is just 0.75%.

But with total student debt of more than $1 trillion, many people in their 20s and 30s are struggling to pay off their student loans while also pursuing dreams such as buying a home.