Random Musings #7

Now that Dr. Thomas Sowell is no longer writing columns, the "Random Musings" posts at this blog will carry forth the tradition he started with his "Random Thoughts" columns.  Since this type of post is thus not my creation, anyone else out there who wants to put out anything similar won't need my OK, or have any obligation to acknowledge anything I've written.  But I would suggest that any such writer or blogger would acknowledge Dr. Sowell, as I previously have.  So with that, here we go:
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According to some people, this past election has been hacked by Russia, or maybe somebody in Russia.  As a result, a new humorous meme has arisen, blaming various people's failures on Russia or the Russians.  Apparently, this includes Mariah Carey's attempted lip-syncing on a recent New Year's Eve show.

MTV recently put out a video of proposed New Year's resolutions for white men, one of which was not regarding "Black Lives Matter" as the opposite of "All Lives Matter".  If that's true, it should be a two-way street.  In other words, "All Lives Matter" should not be viewed as the opposite of "Black Lives Matter", nor as an insult toward blacks.  I would also suggest that if the "Black Lives Matter" movement wants more respect, they should refrain from things such as blocking roads and calling for the deaths of cops.

Some black Americans refer to names which have a European origin as "slave names", and some of these people have adopted names having an Arabic origin.  What they don't realize is that Arabic names are just as slave-related as European names, because Arabs, like Europeans, took Africans as slaves.  In fact, slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962, almost 100 years after it was abolished in the United States.

Speaking of black Americans who change their name, the recently deceased boxer named Muhammad Ali was born with the name Cassius Clay, as his father had been earlier.  The first man to bear that name, however, was a Kentucky politician who served in Abraham Lincoln's administration.  Although this earlier Clay's father owned slaves, he himself became an abolitionist.  By contrast, Muhammad the founder of Islam, according to Islamic writings, owned and traded slaves.  Thus, by changing his name, Muhammed Ali rejected the name of an anti-slavery American and adopted the name of a slave owner.

I don't know if FEMA is setting up any camps, where Americans will be interned in response to some manufactured crisis, but so far, I'm inclined to believe that such camps don't yet exist.  On the other hand, however, I am inclined to believe that there are people on the left, who if they had their way, would round up various factions on the right, such as the Tea Party and the climate "deniers", and put them into camps where such right wingers would be isolated from society in general.  I'm not saying that these would be equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps, but it should be noted that the first people thrown into those camps were political dissidents.

Whatever anyone thinks of the invasion of Iraq, it's pretty obvious that after the secular tyrant Saddam Hussein was removed from power, a lot of Islamic religious extremists came out of the woodwork, such as Al Qaeda In Iraq and the Mahdi Army.  I have an idea that then-Senator Barrack Obama noticed the same thing, but instead of regarding this phenomenon as a mistake to avoid repeating, he pursued the same general course after becoming president.  He wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to take over in Egypt, with the removal of secular strongman Hozni Murarak.  He helped facilitate the removal of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafy (to whose last name I had always liked to append the suffix "duck"), which resulted in Islamic fighters such as ISIS gaining power, and sided with Muslim religious fighters in Syria against Bashir Assad, whose religion isn't even an orthodox form of Islam.  In my opinion, after seeing what happened in Iraq, Obama wanted to see the same thing happen in these other countries.

With respect to its ethnic and racial composition, America has been compared to both a melting pot and a salad bowl.  I find both analogies to be inadequate.  In a melting pot, all parts of the liquid have the same composition as the whole.  When you add something, the composition of the entire pot changes.  In real life, however, adding people from a certain ethnic group will not cause all cross-sections of society, much less individuals, to change composition to correspond to the overall composition of the country.  On the other hand, in a salad bowl, everything mixes together but remains distinct.  The ingredients do not change after you mix them in.  In real life, however, people from different ethnicities marry and produce ethnically mixed children.  This would be analogous to an olive and a pepper, after being thrown into a salad, combining to produce a vegetable that's half olive and half pepper, which is impossible.  And even if it were possible, I don't think I'd want to eat such a thing.

Some congressional Democrats say that repealing Obamacare would "make America sick again", as if America were sick before Obamacare was passed.  If not being under Obamacare means that you're sick, wouldn't Congress itself be sick, since they're exempt from its requirements?