The American Left and Right and Russian Influence

Posted on 23 June 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Since 1945 the American left has tried to fend off attempts to tar it with being called communist. In particular, Russian communist. Liberals and Socialists have been tarred with the same brush that made Russian communism evil.

But they aren’t the same. Liberals in other countries are very pro business and hence pro capitalism. Socialists have made it clear that they too like capitalism in its good periods it’s just that they see socialism as a necessity to gloss over capitalism’s problems.

It got so bad in America for these two groups that much backtracking went on. But really what good liberal or good socialist could find fault with that communism saying “from each according to ability; to each according to need”. The problem came with defining needs or ranking abilities.

Russian communism went awry with dictatorships. Before Lenin, there was little said that communism must have a dictatorship. Still, all the real world examples of communism had dictators in charge. Today the socialists and liberals see this and wish to work within the confines of a democratic capitalism. And they are popular doing this. Look at how many people said “Feel the Bern” before Sanders the socialist was defeated by the dirty games and undemocratic machinations of the Democrat party. Every poll that pitted him against Trump, said that Bernie would win more handily than Hilary.

Still Sanders is fighting. Will he or won’t he turn the democrats to the left? I think he can and the Communist! accusation doesn’t have the power it once did. Because of this I see a democrat turn to the left and a shift to winning.

Meanwhile, the right is seeing that aligning itself with Russia helps it in the dirty tricks department. No one seems to doubt that Trump got into power with the help of Russia.

How does Trump deny the Russian influence? Why he says Russia should be in the G7. This is a group that barely tolerates Trump. With every other president, the USA was considered the first among equals. Now it’s more like last among equals. Trump can pretend that he doesn’t care but he seeks odd comrades in his bid to have some state on his side. I’m looking at you Kim Jong Un and North Korea.

The right can deny they owe something to Russia. But the facts show that they actually owe a lot to the former superpower. Unlike the American left, who grew up as defiant to Russian ideology.

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Maybe Trump Wasn’t Too Far Off When He Said Kim Jong Un Loved His People

Posted on 16 June 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Perhaps Trump is on to something. What does a dictator most fear? His people. Which is why Kim Jong Un is most ruthless with them. Who do his people most fear? Why Kim Jong Un. They are locked in this fear/fear relationship.

Is Trump mistaking fear for love? Could be. What does Donald Trump most fear? Why the people he has let get close to him. They haven’t turned their back on him quite yet. And what do these people most fear? Probably being left out of the wealth and the inheritance he might leave them.

It’s just that every time Trump asks these people what they feel for him they simply say love. And knowing the Donald he probably ruthlessly tests them from time to time.

Would you still love me if I was a racist? Yes seems to be the answer they have given him.

Would you still love me if I was a philanderer? Yes also seems to be their answer to this one.

Would you still love me if I was poor? Trump himself is too fearful to ask this question. This locks him into a fear/fear relationship with those close to him.

Donald likes to think of himself as a good judge of horse flesh. But he colours his judgment with his own experience. So I think he truly believes Kim Jong Un loves his people. Fear, along with love is a great motivator. Perhaps that makes the two hard to separate in Trump’s mind.

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What If Other Activities Were Like Hockey?

Posted on 9 June 2018 by Larry Russwurm

“What was thought to be a close match of hopscotch between Emma and Samantha, has turned into a rout by Samantha. Emma hops just as well but Samantha’s aim today is impeccable. Watch that concentration as she throws a perfect 9. While Emma is stuck on 4.

“Wait a moment, Emma is approaching Samantha before the hop and punches her in the face. Emma cannot handle the stone back penalty if Samantha doesn’t hit back. But wait one moment, Samantha snaked out a leg that trips Emma then gives three really good punches in the face. Emma is not having that so quickly gets up and they are trading blows. Finally the referee holds back Samantha while the lineswoman pulls back Emma.

“The board says they are each getting their stone pulled back a square. It was really good to see that emotion from Emma. That means she is not quitting no matter how far back she gets.”

* * *

“The Belt technician arrives at the land line box first and proceeds to do a work order. A disgruntled Rutgers technician knows he is late and knows that he will get behind today since he let lunch go long. So he has almost no choice. He parks a few car lengths away and hopes the Belt technician doesn’t see him until too late.

“Since the Rutgers technician is a class player he clears his throat getting the Belt technician to see him one moment too late. The Rutgers technician simply lifts the Belt technician’s jersey over his head. The Rutgers technician freely punches the blinded Belt technician before being ejected for a few days. The few days is managed by the land line league. The land line league polices itself so the cops are never called in.”

* * *

“The judge and bailiff have kept at the ready for this case. The public defender is clearly a goon what with his physique and a number of teeth missing from his mouth. The bailiff and judge knew that if the public defender didn’t want to start anything he would have his false teeth in and look like a million dollars in his suit.

“Here comes the objection from the prosecution. The public defender leaps across the table and tries to catch the prosecutor off guard. But the prosecutor covers up his face. The public defender gets a couple blows to the stomach of the prosecutor. The bailiff is just as big as the public defender and almost tears him away from the prosecutor. The judge’s added weight gets the prosecutor out of harm’s way.

“That’s how you do it kids. Make your opponent pay for each good play. By the way, what’s the trial for anyway?

“Ha, ha! Why it’s for aggravated assault. Now we know why the defendant chose this public defender.”

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Super Plan of the Diamond Giants

Posted on 2 June 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Since 1938 the diamond mining giants have been running scared. That date is important because it marks the 1st time that Superman appeared on the scene. Soon after, it was revealed that Superman had this trick of squeezing coal just the right way and ending up with a diamond.

Imagine it, if you will, Superman could press and press and press diamonds thus flooding the market with these artificial gems and making diamond prices fall precipitously. This was where the world stood for some time for the diamond giants.

It took some doing but the diamond giants finally got a hold of some of these artificial, Superman pressed diamonds. It took awhile but the long shot plan of examining both types of diamond under various expensive machines finally hit a payoff. With good enough machines there could be seen minute differences between Superman’s squeezed diamonds and the earth squeezed natural diamonds.

All that had to be done was to market the natural superiority of mined diamonds. De Beers did this and was so sure of their name that when it became possible for these companies to make their own artificial diamonds, they chose to ignore that market and only sold the upscale natural diamonds.

It has now been 80 years since Superman appeared on the scene. It is now obvious that Superman only makes his own artificial diamonds when there is a need. He isn’t even going to flood the artificial diamond market with his creations.

So now, with a feeling of security, even De Beers has entered the artificial diamond market. Maybe this speaks to the promise of the market. Maybe we could make an artificial window out of diamond. An almost impervious artificial window. Or maybe the market will stay the same as it is. Either way the cheaper diamond is a sound business model.

Anyhow, Superman, thanks for your help in getting us there.

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Time Traveling Like an Animal

Posted on 26 May 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Certain earth animals can time travel two different ways. They are both methods of what I call ignorant time travel. If you can somehow ignore time’s ordinary passage and “wake up” in the future – that is ignorant time travel.

The first method is obvious. Hibernation by bears and other species is prompted by a large overfeeding of the animal which is followed by a months long, winter “sleep”. Tadah! It’s like time travel for the bear. There is no problem with cause and effect because the bear can never go back.

Wood frogs can literally freeze and thaw as many times as winter demands without damage. Proteins in their blood cause it to freeze first, sucking the water out of most of the rest of the frog’s cells. In the meantime the frog’s liver makes glucose that fills the cells again. This results in little damage from freezing which affects almost all other life forms. So the frog freezes when it’s cold and hops away when it warms up.

The first method has long been wanted by science fiction authors. So much so that instead of calling it hibernation it has the term suspended animation.

Freezing then being thawed and awakened has the technical sounding term cryogenics. So far it has been impossible because the water in our cells ruptures the cells when it freezes. This hasn’t stopped such authors like my namesake (Larry Niven) from writing about “corpsicles” being thawed successfully and it has become a trope, now, by such shows as Futurama.

I think little headway has been made with either method in science because we need to experiment on human beings to allow these methods to work for us. So they must show that it is very likely to successfully work on humans before doing the experiments. First they should have to prove that it works on a non hibernating species or a non wood frog. Only then would it be likely that we could time travel into the future.

But what if it doesn’t work, that their are limits to the things that can be done to humans and still allow us to live?

I think if we are defeated in this that we somehow may be able to mix hibernater/wood frog’s DNA with humanity’s DNA in such a way that our partial descendants can successfully time travel.

Look we’ve managed to do things that only animals in the past could do – like fly. I see no reason why we can’t use ignorant time travel like the animals do. Besides, as a Canadian I’d like to skip each and ever winter. Xmas can be moved and hockey really isn’t that great. And this should allow me to outlive my tropical friends who might not skip anything.

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Why We Won’t Find Aliens by SETI

Posted on 19 May 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Those aliens, precisely because they are intelligent, are in hiding, of course. What else would you do with the human race and its addiction to violence?

Transmitting higher technology to us just sounds insane. We are violent when we are young. Bullying is just a rite of passage for most young humans. Then we grow up and risk being murdered our entire lives. Although more so in the United States.

Then there is war – or killing sanctioned by almost our entire society. It is almost always backed up by our highest technology. What did we do when we developed the atomic bomb? Why we used it of course on our war time enemy Japan. That’s what we would do with higher alien technology. We would use it for an advantage over each other. Or we could even use it against the aliens who had transmitted it to us.

Some of us will probably be proud. We’ve managed to put fear into aliens. That is, only with our lower technology.

Maybe aliens won’t contact us, but should we try to contact them? As far as intelligent aliens go we could be average. Sure aliens that are a lot more violent would have killed themselves off by now. But there might still be those aliens that have eked through their violent past and still are more violent than humans. Let’s not send them the keys to destroy their planet or let them realize that one errant asteroid can still wipe out most life on Earth.

So I expect that aliens with superior technology will never try to contact Earth. Or each other if violence is common amongst aliens.

Over the years I expect space telescopes will get better and better and as we see the telltale signature of life as we know it – oxygen in the atmosphere – on more and more planets it will slowly dawn on us that intelligent life must be common. And there is a reason they don’t contact us.

We’ve even developed the word that will make them not contact us: xenocide, or the willful extermination of an intelligent alien species. If we don’t get kinder and more gentle as we develop, perhaps xenocide might be performed on us. That is, before we spread like a plague through the stars.

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3 Things

Posted on 12 May 2018 by Larry Russwurm

First of all tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Ma, you have such a positive image that there have been attempts to corporatize your image. The first one is Mother’s Pizza. This chain of restaurants is back from the dead in Ontario and wherever else they might exist. I think the idea of naming them Mother’s is to evoke the image of well made, home made pizza.

The two other attempts at corporatization of Mom’s image are more sneaky. Wendy’s fast food restaurants have an image of (presumably) Wendy as a little girl. In it her collar on the left looks like an “M” and on the right it looks like another “M”. The centre is either a button or amulet that, as a circle, surely looks like an “O”. So there is this subliminal Mom in this corporate image of Wendy’s.

The other company that uses Ma in its corporate image, right now needs something positive. That company is cheating Volkswagen and maybe they foresaw it such a long time ago that we all know their VW emblem. This is trickier. Upside down their emblem looks like MA in a circle.

My old riding in Ontario, Kitchener-Conestoga, just had a bit of a scandal. Incumbent Michael Harris was ushered out unceremoniously by the Progressive Conservatives so new candidate Mike Harris Jr. can run there instead. This was all orchestrated behind the scenes by Mike Harris Sr. the former premier of Ontario. Look PCs, I know you’re all conservative and that, but, get a new name. I am imagining that someone will get my meaning wrong and instead change the party name to the Mike Harris Party.

I know the wounds still have not quite healed in astronomical circles after dumping Pluto as a planet. Still, I must suggest dumping Neptune as well. Hold on before you object because I have a point. Shouldn’t Uranus be the natural end of the solar system? Just think on that awhile.

Before you object too strenuously, might I say that Uranus was once the end of the solar system. William Herschel only discovered it in 1781 as a planet, even though in dark skies its light can be seen imitating a star. So until 1846(when Neptune was discovered), Uranus was indeed the end of the solar system.

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More Anecdotal Proof of Erich von Daniken

Posted on 6 May 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Does anyone remember my pseudo or alien accent post from many years ago? Here is a link. In it I showed (via Youtube) my alien accent that contains a smacked M (like a kiss), clicked N and a flatulated (my own word) P which is really the sound a horse makes that is not a whinny.

But recently I came up with a fourth consonant sound. It is a clip clopped L. Again this letter is only clip clopped at the start of a syllable never in the middle or end. This is because I cannot do it (maybe you can?).

Here is the sound on Youtube: clip clopped L accent . I am saying, “Lots and lots of little locks.”

And here are all four sounds together on Youtube: full alien accent . I am saying, “I like my nice pencil.”

And thinking about this all led me to a discovery. All 4 alien accented letters are consecutive consonants in our alphabet. Could they have been slipped into our alphabet due to contact with aliens who had this accent?

Then I thought of the coup de grace that made this all sure. They just hid these four consonants in plain view by stuffing them somewhere in the middle of our alphabet. Correction, not just in the middle of our alphabet but the exact centre. There are 26 letters in our alphabet. Those well versed in math are going to know that the 12th, 13th, 14th and 16th letters are as near to the centre that you are going to get.

Obviously there was alien collusion in this and it is likely that those aliens spoke with my full alien accent. There you go, Erich von Daniken. I just gave anecdotal proof for your Chariots of the Gods that said aliens have visited the world’s ancient peoples. That is the deep thought of today.

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The Duchess of Cambridge’s Revenge

Posted on 28 April 2018 by Larry Russwurm

In 2012 a paparazzo took a topless picture of Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge. This happened in France by a French magazine. The British royals have not seen France the same way since.

Just this week Kate gave birth to a baby boy. All week we have wondered what the name would be and we were not disappointed. The boy is to be known as li’l Prince Louis. And then I thought on it some more and realized that this was how Kate was going to get her revenge against the French.

Louis has a proud tradition in the French monarchy. From Louis the I in 814 onward there have been many kings named Louis. They range in nicknames from Louis the pious to Louis the fat. They got all the way to Louis the XVI until the French revolution and Napoleon took over the reins of French leadership.

Even still Napoleon was married to the 1st cousin once removed of Louis the XVII. Napoleon ended up in exile and Louis the XVIII was chosen to rule. They got up to Louis the XIX. Then a huge change happened in the monarchy and Louis-Phillipe became king. Then Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte became Napoleon III. The French monarchy sure did love the name Louis.

Finally in 1870, the French monarchy came to an end and France eventually became a true democracy. And true democracies often have disparaging views of royalty – leading to the 2012 pics and not respecting the privacy of the visiting British royalty.

By naming her child Louis, at last Kate managed to snub the French democracy and bring back memories of its hated monarchy. Well played, Kate, well played.

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Pop Music Naming Schemes

Posted on 21 April 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Cardi B has 13 songs in the top 100 on Billboard so let’s look at her name and where she got it from. Apparently her nickname in the hood was Bacardi but she couldn’t use this for trademark reasons. So she changed it to Cardi B. Just different enough not to infringe on anything. We at Many Rants are not so high minded and intend to steal this naming scheme for humour reasons.

The first alcohol I thought of to try changing was Jack Daniels. We could change it up to Daniels J. But that just seems like Daniels, J which could refer to many people in the Daniels family. So perhaps we could make it different with an apostrophe and one other change. How about Daniel’s Jay. So what is this bird of Daniel’s and will he be flipping it at us?

How about Nadian Club C? First of all, what is a Nadian? This of course refers to an inhabitant of Nadia. She might have all sorts of gut flora, etc., that could be inside her. Club is self explanatory (a group of anything might be called a club) and C could mean Sea where any wet innards could be called a sea.

Then there is my favourite of this naming scheme: Rince Igor P. Or Rinse Igor Pee. I’m more inclined to pressure wash Igor’s pee down the nearest drain than rinse it, but some might not be such a stickler for cleanliness.

This naming scheme reminds me of Jennifer Lopez’s: J Lo from about a decade ago. It is such an ingrained naming scheme that no one bats an eyelash at Jennifer Lawrence being called J Law. I am not, however, going to use this naming scheme on present or even stars of this millennium. I am going to use it on older stars.

Alan Ladd was a western film actor around the middle of the 20th century. Perhaps his parents wanted him to be forever youthful – because the J Lo version of his name is A Lad.

Robert Redford is a more recent actor who is still alive. I suspect his parents were big communist sympathizers. After all, if they predicted the J Lo shortening at his birth they might have noticed the Bob Redford shortening or B Red.

Sir Peter Ustinov was an English actor, writer and director. Of course his parents could hardly have foreseen his knighting, but they could have foreseen the J Lo shortening. His name becomes P U. His parents must have also realized this would be his name when using initials. How could you name someone the initials of 2/3 of pun?

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