Monday, July 7, 2014

A Few Random Musings #2

A few ideas that have crossed my mind recently:

On one hand it's considered wrong to judge Muslims in general for the violent attacks carried out by Muslim terrorists.  On the other hand, it seems perfectly acceptable to judge every white person, especially white males, as having received an undeserved privilege.  Why is such generalizing OK for some groups but not others?  And why isn't judging all whites as being "privileged" considered to be a form of racial profiling?

I have come to believe that one of the biggest lies in human history is the saying that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.  When you kidnap girls, use children as suicide bombers, use civilians as human shields, or deliberately target non-combatants, you are as far away from a freedom fighter as the KKK is from Dr. King.

Colleges and universities that have small "free speech zones", while restricting speech on most of the campus, have it backwards.  If they are government schools, their entire campuses should be free speech zones.  For any students who cannot bear hearing opinions that differ from their own, the school could establish "sensitivity zones".  For example, for those who can't stand hearing the term "illegal alien", an "undocumented" sensitivity zone could be provided.

I get a chuckle out those "Miss Me Yet?" pictures showing former President George W. Bush on a billboard.  No matter what anyone thinks of him or his presidency, his eight years are over and done with, so it makes no sense to miss him.  I did wonder if these pictures were real or just photo-shopped, but according to Snopes, at least one billboard is real.

On the other hand, there is one thing that I miss about President Bush's time in office.  Back then, it was OK to dissent from the president's policies.   Some even demanded that when they dissent, they should not have their patriotism questioned.  What I never could figure out is who it was who asserted that dissent from President's Bush's policies was unpatriotic.  Can anyone out there identify a single instance when a member of the Bush administration, a Republican in Congress, a conservative pundit, or any publicly recognized person made such an assertion?

Every once in a while, some "animal rights" advocates, expressing their opposition to the use of animals in scientific research, tell us that "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy".  Try telling the same people that a fetus is a boy (except when it's a girl) and see how far you get.

There are some people who think that President Obama is muslim, and it's pretty obvious that he has a lot of respect for Islam and the muslim world.  However, I would point out that he drinks alcohol, as shown by the "beer summit", has eaten pork, and has two pet dogs.  If he is a muslim, Obama has somehow been permitted to hide his faith behind these three practices that are supposed to be foreign to Islam.  It would make him the best practitioner of taqiyya in all of Islamic history.

It appears that to our current federal government, global warming/climate change is a "security threat", but our horribly unsecured border is not.

Our immigration system is said to be broken.  If that's true, it's not broken because we've been too strict, have not admitted enough immigrants, or have not offered amnesty to enough illegal aliens.  It's broken because we have not secured our border and have allowed too many people to come in illegally or to overstay their visas.

In a recent interview, former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that at the time her family left the White House, they were broke.  Among other things, she said something about "mortgages".  I find this puzzling, because the Clintons, to my knowledge, did not own any real estate until after her husband left the presidency.  For many years, they had lived in either the Arkansas governor's mansion or the White House, during which time I never heard of the Clintons buying or owning any private home.  Did I miss something?

Every once in a while I hear someone on the left use terms such as "far right", "extreme right" and even "ultra right" to describe people on the right who disagree with him.  I would like someone using any of these terms to define what they mean, and then, depending on the issue being discussed, explain what would be the position of someone on the right who they would consider not to be "far", "extreme" or "ultra".

To the people who encourage vegetarianism, I have a simple response.  "When lions and tigers and bears, oh my, stop eating meat, so will I."  (Apologies to the creators of The Wizard Of Oz.)

For this last musing, I'm going to unleash my inner sci-fi geek.  One prominent feature of the Space Odyssey novels by Arthur C. Clarke are the mysterious monoliths, left in various places within our solar system by some advanced race of beings.  The word "monolith" is derived from the Greek words mono, meaning "one" and lithos, meaning "stone".  I've also noticed that if you translate these words into German, you get eins ("one") and Stein ("stone").  The German eins Stein is very similar to the name "Einstein".  Is this a coincidence, or were the fictional monoliths supposed to remind us of the physical laws about which Einstein was theorizing?  If the latter was true, Clarke took the idea to the grave.

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