Things That Will Not Die!

As mentioned before, I am a die-hard Sci-fi fan. I particularly love those old movies about giant reptilian monsters on the rampage able to withstand all that the insanely brave US army throw at them. In one of my favorites, the 1953 classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the beast, Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion "Rhedosaurus," which dared attack Coney Island, in the end (spoiler alert!) gets repelled only by an all-purpose "radioactive isotope" projectile fired from the top of the Cyclone roller coaster by a brave soldier-scientist-all-around-good-looking-stud. While watching the 1961 "masterpiece" Gorgo, in which pre-Beatle infestation London gets razed by a rubbery mother-son giant lizard tag team able to withstand all that the insanely brave British army throw at them, I got to thinking about "Things That Will Not Die!"

Many things, of course, do die, e.g., PanAm, TWA, the euro, the dollar, the pound, the economy, common sense, literacy, free speech, Cyndi Lauper's career, the city of Detroit, the border with Mexico. Despite repeated debunking, however, many horrid beliefs live on in popular culture, politics, academia, media commentary, and every day speech. Many have a totemic quality for the uneducated leftist college graduates who dominate the remaining shards of Western civilization. As with Godzilla, these beasts keep returning. As a public service, therefore, I have decided to begin a list, in no particular order, of seemingly immortal monsters. Please add at will. I make no claim to having a complete list. Consider this a work in progress; the first step in the hunt for an all-pupose "radioactive isotope."

1) The McCarthy "Witch Hunt": How often must we hear about Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy's "witch hunt"? I am amazed at how often foreigners babble on about McCarthy with absolutely no knowledge about the man or the era except what they pick up from the New York Times and some Hollywood movies, the main source of knowledge about America for Europeans. Just the other day I heard some British journalist going on about McCarthy and his Hollywood "witch hunt." Senator McCarthy, of course, had nothing to do with Hollywood; the House, not the Senate, investigated Communism in the film industry. McCarthy sought to expose Communist penetration of the State Department and the military. The term "witch hunt," of course, aims to show that concerns about Communism had no validity. As we have known for years (Whittaker Chambers, anybody?) and especially since the declassification of the Venona Project, the Soviets ran large spy rings at the highest levels of the US, Canadian, and British governments and societies, including security and military agencies, academia, media, and research organizations. Amazon carries several good books that cover the once very secret US/UK decoding of Soviet intelligence communications. Lloyd Billingsley's Hollywood Party, for example, provides a well-researched and detailed account of Soviet and Communist efforts in Hollywood.

McCarthy might have had little refinement, a bad hair cut, and a face made for radio, but history has proven him right. The "witches" were real and dangerous (e.g., Walter Duranty, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss, Morton Sobel, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, anybody? Anybody?)

 2) Man-Caused Global Cooling Global Warming Climate Change: Does there exist a more vague, empty phrase than "climate change"? "Environmentalists," code word for New Age Luddites, have sought for decades to hamper economic development in pursuit of a vision of man living within Gaia's embrace. They exploited legitimate concerns over pollution, and came up with manmade global cooling, then--Oops!--warming. Big Fail. Their models could account for and predict nothing. While no great fan of Wikipedia, I found it has a nice explanation of scientific theory: "The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena. Theories are improved as more evidence is gathered, so that accuracy in prediction improves over time." Since neither Cooling "Theory" nor Warming "Theory" explain or predict anything, the proponents of a prehistoric lifestyle settled on Climate Change "Theory" which "predicts" and "explains"--hurrah!-- everything!  If we have more hurricanes or fewer hurricanes in a given year, that's "evidence" of manmade climate change; more or less rain, warmer or cooler, windy or becalmed all because of manmade climate change. If, of course, your "theory" explains "everything" but predicts "nothing" ahead of time (the very definition of prediction, no?), you have nothing except the jejune observation that "stuff happens." The proponents of this rubbish cannot answer even basic questions: Should the earth's temperature be what it is now, or what it was ten, twenty, thirty, 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years ago? When has there not been climate change? What causes climate change on Mars?

3) Palestinians: When the Arab countries attacked the new state of Israel, they did not do so in the name of establishing a separate Palestinian entity. They claimed the territory for themselves.

A few questions: How are "Palestinians" different than Egyptians or Jordanians (note: Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo)? Why isn't Jordan the Palestinian homeland? When Jordan controlled it, why wasn't the West Bank referred to as Palestine or Occupied Palestine? Why does the definition of Occupied Palestine only correspond to wherever Jews live? Where are the refugee camps and lavish UN programs for the one million Jews who had to flee their homes in the Arab world since 1948? You get the drift . . .

4) Bush Lied about Iraqi WMD: Let's remember one thing above all else: Iraq under Saddam had and used WMDs, in the guise of chemical weapons, against the Kurds and the Iranians. His agents spent years and millions of dollars trying to acquire the technology for nuclear weapons and a delivery system (Canadian readers please recite Gerald Bull Project Babylon.) It was the official position of the US Congress in the 1990s, and the Clinton administration, along with its reprehensible Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and CIA Director George Tenet, that Saddam sought to develop nuclear weapons. All the world's intel services reported the same thing. President Bush, who kept Tenet at CIA, accepted the wisdom of the world's intel wise men, and acted upon it. What else should a President do? Take a chance that everybody is wrong, and that Saddam had no nukes or nuke program? I am convinced that Saddam thought he had a nuclear weapon, certainly many of his senior military thought Iraq had it; the Iranians certainly thought he had or was about to get one. Enough.

 5) Right Wing Nazis and Fascists: Very tiresome. One of the great propaganda victories of the Communists was to label Nazis and Fascists as right-wingers. This is in keeping with a Leninist strain of thought that labelled the true Bolsheviks as Mensheviks, and the true Mensheviks as Bolsheviks. Communism, Fascism, Nazism, all spring from the same leftist belief in mass movements and subordination of the individual to the power of the state.

6) John Kerry is Smart:  Ok, you get the idea. Do I really need to "Swiftboat" this mountebank again?

Well, the floorers are drawing nigh, and soon I must disconnect my wifi again. I will stop here. Feel free to add others to this list.

Where is that isotope?