Riemann's Cut

The Stability Treaty

2012-05-29T21:53:00.001+01:00

Are you all ready for the big Fiscal Referendum thing on Thursday? Have you made up your mind? Your vote counts, you know. Your vote will change the future of Europe forever... ha ha you're some fucking cretin if you believe all that shite. Everyone is getting all hot and bothered about this referendum, and they are putting forward such convincing arguments too: "VOTE YES!!" "VOTE NO!!!" "STABILITY!" "JOBS!" "MURDER!" "RAPE!".... Well, I'm convinced.

And what is it all for. What was Nice for? What was Lisbon for? These things don't mean anything. We were told by the "No" brigade, that our souls would be doomed for eternity if we voted yes, and the "Yes" side just kept running referendums until we "got it right". These referendums are just there to make you feel like you have some control over the political Leviathan that the EU has become. "I'm voting; I'm in control!" Absolute peasantry.

I keep banging on about it but, all treaties since Maastricht have been irrelevant. I hear nothing but"VOTE NO FOR SOVEREIGNTY" with this Stability referendum. Total bollocks. We voted away our core sovereignty for 30 pieces of silver back in the '90s. All we could see were the £8billion a "yes" vote would bring. Crying over some fiscal treaty shite now is irrelevant. To put it in the crudest form possible: it's like getting ridden up the arse for a fiver, and then making a stand about not kissing. And anyway, we all know it will be "sloppy seconds" if we don't vote "right" the first time around, because that's how democracy works.

Hitler said, to his credit, that a union of European states would never work; the "Folk and traditions" are too diverse. A union could only form "slowly" and "after many centuries" as the citizens became homogenised over time. Merely sticking them together in some arbitrary form would prove disastrous, as the union would slowly crumble from internal bickering (He also said a lot of things about the Jews being sub-human cockroaches, so you know, everything with a pinch of salt). We are seeing the union crumble now though. Driven by the tightening economic disaster, the stereotypes form the battle cries: The Greeks are lazy, the Irish are ugly, the Germans are brilliant...

Here is my advice for you: Vote YES to save Ireland some money by stopping them re-running this charade - or vote NO, because we don't want anymore fucking loans anyway. So go ahead, make your choice, it's so simple...

We're In Safe Hands, With Enda Kenny

2012-05-29T02:54:00.000+01:00

Admittedly, this is fairly low brow stuff, but it needed doing if only for that face that Lucinda is pulling. You know exactly what's on her mind, don't you... that's right, it's Stalin.

Russian Men And White Pets

2012-05-27T23:59:00.000+01:00

Gurdgiev cat glows in dark; import cat from south Belarus.
Putin dog with dirty ears; FSB dog listens to walls.

The Eurovision'

2012-05-26T14:56:00.000+01:00

http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/events_57552.htm

Every year, people get confused over how Israel are "allowed" to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. Israel has appeared in the Eurovision' since 1973 but it is neither a member of the European Union nor the European continent; this is common misinterpretation of what the "Eurovision" is. The European Broadcasting Union (parent of Eurovision) has little to do with Europe, except from a historic point of view regarding the countries it was originally formed in. It is in fact a worldwide broadcasting union, encompassing associations with radio/television companies from North & South America, Africa, Asia, Australia... That's why (as you can see in the screen capture above) the Eurovision was involved in coverage of the NATO summit in Chicago recently.

You won't see a song from the USA in the Eurovision Song Contest anytime soon though, because "associated members" of the EBU aren't allowed get involved with Eurovision activities. Only direct members of the EBU can appear in the Eurovision Song Contest. The Israel Broadcasting Authority is a member of the EBU, and that's why they can appear in the song contest. If they so wanted, North African members of the EBU, such as Morroco, Algeria, Egypt... could enter a song, also.

In summation: The Eurovision has nothing to do with Europe. More info [wiki] [ebu.ch]

Hail Victory: Angela Merkel

2012-05-25T20:40:00.001+01:00

I guess this explains why Hitler invaded the Ukraine instead of pushing on towards Moscow: he hadn't a clue where he was.

I've done a lot of arguing with people when they joke about "Germany still wanting to rule the world". That shit pisses me off, especially because it's a historically inaccurate thing to say about even Nazi Germany. Then Merkel pulls this shit out of the bag. I'm not even going to go down the road of commenting on the "Russia, so close?" thing. This is just a case of someone behaving patently dumb.

Let's all vote Yes on the 31st, anyway. These people obviously know what they're doing.

[ via RT ]

Google Translate Rotary Phone Sounds

2012-05-23T23:28:00.000+01:00

I was messing around with the little beatbox Easter Egg included with Google Translate, that I only discovered recently, and I appear to have created the sound of an old rotary phone being dialed. Give it a go yourself.

Dr. Klaus Löhlein's Dental Clinic

2012-05-22T00:07:00.001+01:00

Spot the difference - Click to enlarge...

There's an image of a German dentistry's website doing the rounds on the Internet. It shows all the staff in Dr. Klaus Löhlein's dental practise, and is noteworthy mainly because Dr Löhlein's team are all women, and all are blond. [The practise must seem very clean at times, with the smell of peroxide.]

It seems though, that one staff member has gone missing since the original screen capture, and had to be 'shopped out of the website's main image. Ordinarily, this would be no big deal, but given the peculiar nature to the choice of staff, one can only imagine all kinds of horror story scenarios... "No, Miss Gehring is not with us any more. She had... an accident."

I have a great difficulty with the image. All the similar features causes my brain to hurt, much like those images of faces with a second set of eyes. It reminds me of that story about the Pricewaterhousecoopers story from a few years ago, involving female interns being rated by male staff. Some said they all looked like clones.

Nigel Farage: Myths & Legends

2012-05-21T16:52:00.000+01:00

Nigel suffered minor injuries when his Bell UH-1 huey helicopter was gunned down over Ho Chi Minh trail, North Vietnam. He later went on to say that the pilot was a communist belligerent, who was ordered by Moscow to fly into the path of the bullets.

Nigel is a Eurosceptic. That means he finds it hard to believe that the continent of Europe exists. He insists that there are only two continents: the United Kingdom, and the "Land of Savages". He said he saw it on a map once.

Nigel has personally hand-delivered informational leaflets to every home home in Ireland. The leaflet supports the "No Campaign" regarding the May 31st Fiscal referendum thing. In it, he tells Irish citizens not to be influenced by non-Irish persons...

Nigel insists that he is not a racist, or a xenophobe. He said he enjoys a nice curry, and karaoke session, occasionally. He also took a two week holiday in Spain in the early 1990's.

Nigel enjoys the sights and sounds of a diverse London.

A Little Old Notebook #3

2012-05-21T03:36:00.000+01:00

OSL120509 - Hedvig Bang

2012-05-20T15:50:00.000+01:00

[UPDATE 26/05/2012: Link to 300 Acting Spaces page on the event]

I came across a series of images on flickr (yeah I know, it's an addiction at this stage) of some serious music gear pr0n, and a woman that appeared to be a dancer of some sort. It piqued my interest as it seemed as if she had sensors to interact with whatever music was being performed. After a little bit of research, I found the following video:

The video editing, is at best, "unfortunate". I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve but I don't think they got there. I'm also not sure if the video is out of sync, or if there was a natural delay with all the effects being used. As I had first thought, her movement is linked to the sounds being created, in the beginning of the piece at least.

The two musicians performing with Hedvig Bang, are Jonas Johnsen, and Alex Gunia. This performance is full-hipster, with pretension turned up to 11, but it has it's moments. It really gets going at 23 minutes in.

A little bit more about Bang that I found. Taken from danz.no, and translated from Norwegian to English:

Hedvig is a former student at Lillehammer Ballet School, (now Lillehammer and Gjøvik Dance Center) where she also was a member of Project Dance Company. She studied dance at the Strange vgs followed by one year in a Spin Off preliminary study in dance. Recently she completed her education at the Art Academy in Oslo with a BA in Jazz Dance. She will be a substitute for May Elin on Tuesdays at Gjøvik the semester.

TV3 News Is Like A North Korean Rocket: An Embarrassing Failure

2012-05-19T22:47:00.002+01:00

Is there any chance TV3 could give us the news without the shitty script writing? Bigger than that: Is there a chance any Irish news organisation could give us news without some sort of spin to it.

And as some bonus content, here's an infuriating bullshit Daily Mail article written by "Matt Blake", about the Unha-3 launch.

Matt Blake, what the fuck are you talking about!? Props left over from the 70's? These are clearly modern 16:9 LCD flat-panel monitors, set inside custom made cabinets. There is nothing 19 fucking 70's about them! And even more incredible is your accusation that devices from the 1970's were incapable of launching a rocket into space. The Soviets launched the first manmade satellite into space in 1958 and the Americans walked on the moon in 1969. You are a complete and utter fucking moron. The development of your brain must have been severly retarded at some point in early infanthood. You are the definition of a cretin.

All we need is news; bare-bone news; the facts and figures news. We don't need you journalist fuckers trying to jazz it up for us poor peasants. All this editorialising is nothing but brainwashing; juice to improve sales, and propaganda to tell us what to think.

A Little Old Notebook #2

2012-05-19T13:39:00.000+01:00

Xvid Degradation

2012-05-18T20:58:00.000+01:00

As a small follow-up to my 2009 post ["Why You Shouldn't Rotate Your Images In Windows"] detailing image degradation from repeated jpeg compression, I have done some experiments with video and the effects repeated saves using the XVID [wiki] implementation of the MP4 standard will bring.

I won't be going into the same detail as the other post, but I may return to this again at some point in the future. I've only used one example video, which is Italian make-up artist Giuliana (Makeup Delight) [youtube]. The video choice was somewhat arbitary, but there is good contrast in image content. Lots of movement in the foreground with facial expressions, while the background remains relatively still.

As you will see, the final videos get fairly mangled by Youtube's own compression algorithm, which is why I put off trying video experiments for so long. You can increase the resolution to 480, which helps, and I have included some still frames from the videos below too.

I dialled everything back on the XVID codec settings, to really get the compression process working. When I initially started experimenting I found that the degradation process was taking too long, and while I probably could have implemented an automated process fairly easily, I just wanted to try this on-the-fly. So to increase entropy in the image, I applied two types of filters. With the video above I have added a simple (standard VirtualDub) sharpening filter, at about 50%. This effectively magnified the effects of each iterative save, by increasing the detail in the changed edges. I only went as far as 52 iterations, but you can clearly see the effects it had on the video. The image becomes infested with squares, with multitude of apparent geometric patterns. More on that later.

N.B. no audio track

For the second video, I used a error diffusion dithering filter [http://whitewing.co.uk/vdub_errdiff.html] which gave the effect of increasing the relative noise in the image. The effect here, looks more like the results garnered when experimenting with jpeg compression. It's not that clear in the Youtube version, but the background really begins to move about even after just one save. Most apparent here is the sudden flashes of noise which gradually fade back. I imagine these are based on the key-frame points in the original video.

I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what's going on here, but I would assume that the shapes represent the xvid quantize matrices, which due to the extreme measures of compression, have reduced them themselves down to binary values (either 0 or 255). I'm also going to guess that the reason they keep changing between frames, is because of a cascade effect from surrounding matrix squares. Someone reading this can probably explain it better, and it would be great if they offered an explanation in a comment :)

A 100% crop of a frame from the dithered version

That's as much as I want to discuss for now. Be sure to check out Makeup Delight's blog [ http://www.makeupdelight.com/ ] and Youtube account [ makeupdelight2009 ]. I've been following her videos for some years now and she has produced many videos detailing fine examples of her makeup artistry. Ciao.

A Little Old Notebook

2012-05-16T22:08:00.000+01:00

This is a little notebook that I used to doodle in, some years ago at work. While a lot of the doodle-pads have vanished over the years, this one managed to survive. I plan to spawn a few posts based on pages this notebook, but not all of them.

Tom Cosm's Stalker

2012-05-14T20:59:00.001+01:00

I've made a few references to musician, Tom COSM, on this blog over the years, but this is definitely the strangest. Tom said he was emailed this video a few days ago, and insists it's the genuine article. Some suggest it's a fake, organised either by Tom himself, or someone he knows, but it's hard to say. Something about the cleanness of room doesn't sit right with me. Others have said it's just someone doing it out of spite, a mere attack at the ego. The video is very creepy either way, and is testament to why I want to live my life hiding under my bed.

Old Photographs

2012-05-14T03:55:00.000+01:00

Frau Fritz Wassermann - Demmin, Germany - 1943 [ more images ]
A blog with more than 4000 old photographs found and bought by the author. There wasn't much information on "Frau Wassermann" found in the box of images that the blog author bought on eBay in 2006.
[ http://lostgallery.blogspot.com/ ]

Restaurant - Southern Japan - 1972 [#]
A massive collection of images from the 1950's to the 1980's, taken around the world, by Nick DeWolf.
[ http://www.flickr.com/photos/dboo/ ]

Doris Winifred Poole - Sydney, Australia - July 31, 1924.
A collection of Australian female criminal mugshots. Lots of hard faces. Poole was arrested for the theft of jewelry and clothing. She was already convicted on similar charges and received six months community service.
[ http://bigpicture.ru/?p=255937 ]

Adelaide Bartlett - Circa 1885
Originally posted by Sibling of Daedalus, I did a quick little job on this photo, adding some colour and picturesque background. Adelaide is alleged to have murdered her husband because she was sick of his bad teeth and tape worm infestation.

I've always had an interest in photography, both taking and viewing, but I've recently started collecting old photographs, myself. I may publish these at some point if I acquire enough.

Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe of China - Pas de deux

2012-05-12T22:16:00.000+01:00

Crazy en-pointe. At 4 minutes in, he walks around with her perched on his arm like a bird! [ via ]

Socialising On The Web

2012-05-11T23:37:00.000+01:00

I'm just going to spit a few thoughts out of my brain that have been going around for a while. First of all, could the owner of the blog above, please remove the ban-hammer that their systems have over me. I don't comment all that often on blogs, so it would be nice if I could when I do.

Certain blogs and websites now default to Facebook as the commenting system, with a feeble attempt to support other platform accounts like Yahoo and Twitter. Often you won't even see a Google account option, which I think is a bit odd, considering the reach of Google on the Internet. I leave comments open for everyone here. Garry Glitter could comment here if he wanted, and he sometimes does!

Google+ is the best place to go if you want to interact with me [ Gamma Goblin ] . People like to bash it, belittle it, laugh at how little THEY use it, but I find myself putting a "+1" on something at least once every hundred years, adding the odd "I like the colour of your cat" comments to posts. I like it. Then again, I also just don't like Facebook, so maybe that has a lot to do with it. The horrid device that is Twitter still gets most of my attention though.

Twitter rolled out the "Promoted Tweets" thing last year, but under some sort of guise of: "you'll only see promoted tweets from companies you already follow", or some sort of shite. Now they have ramped it up and are injecting this kind of crap, from out of nowhere. God only knows what the real agenda is. As if there wasn't enough shit to scroll through.

Facebook has gobbled up most of everyone on the web. It has destroyed blogging and RSS feeds, and stands like a wall in front of interacting on the internet as a whole. Even people who know this, still insist on using it, that's the problem!

Barack Obama: Antichrist Incarnate?

2012-05-10T17:23:00.000+01:00

[ A blog post from 2008, "Obama Is The Antichrist?", which I thought would repost with some minor updates, and a re-upload of the video, which had been deleted. Additions in red text. ]

There I was, browsing through Christian films (I do that every now and again). I found one gem, "Countdown to Armageddon", which was made in 1996. It's another one of those, "the world is more evil now than ever" productions. I was having a good old chuckle their take on the world as it was in 1996. They came out with things like Jamie Bulger's killing is a sign that the end is nigh. Then the topic of the Antichrist raised its horny head. The laughing stopped and I thought "holy shit", to myself. They had described the Antichrist just as you'd describe Barack Obama!

[ video ]

Lets look at the points:

"Great charisma, and speaking ability" People complained that we don't know what Obama's agenda's are. Some wondered, does he actually have any real ideas at all, but everyone has agreed that he's got a silver tongue and shit loads of charisma.

"rise to power on a wave of world euphoria" Everyone in the world is talking about Obama. Even in Ireland people were crying over his election. I'd say that's a "wave of world euphoria" if ever I heard one.

"saves the world from its economic and political problems" The world economy is currently fucked. Will he fix it? Well we don't know yet, but whats being said everywhere (even here) is that he brings hope, hope for a great change. Not sure about this economic one yet, but all will surely become clear!

"7 year plan" 8 years in office (if he gets re-elected)

"The nations of Europe will give their power and strength unto the beast" animus in consulendo liber, the global police force, NATO... Germany holds more USA military bases than any other country in the world.

"does not regard the desire of women" Two female candidates involved in the last election. A woman running for president, first time ever! He smited them both. If you read this line of scripture backwards and inside-out it kinda makes sense, kinda... ok its a weak point. Ding, ding, ding... Obama now openly supports gay marriage [huffingtonpost]. Of course, gay marriage also includes women marrying each other, but that's largely irrelevant.

"stern look" Yes!

"3 and a half years into his 7 year reign, he will break the covenant" Now this is the spookiest part of all. Obama takes over in 2009, 3 and a half years after that is the middle of 2012. Scriptures say that very soon after the covenant is broken, Jesus will return and Judgement Day will be upon us.. "Very soon after" the middle of 2012 is the much bespoke of, "End of the Mayan Calander." There are countless separate accounts and reasons for why 2012 might be the end of the world as we know it. I first heard about this back in the 90's when reading about Terence McKenna's description on his Time-Wave Zero theory. Theres also fractal-time theories, black holes and other jobbies.

"3 and a half years into his 7 year reign, he will break the covenant" The covenant spoken of is with Israel, which is interesting because of America's close alignment with the Jewish state. It's hard to see how a rift could occur. Perhaps Jerusalem is really key to this though. Perhaps, Obama will force Israel to hand Jerusalem back to the Palestinians? The Beast works in mysterious ways!

"Several major wars during his seven year reign..." Iraq is [kinda] over since the start of this year, but Afghanistan wages on. Libya was bombed to shit. Syria is looking tasty. And then there is Iran...

Ok so, you think it's all coincidence then huh? Old Gamma's gone a bit gammy... You're probably saying "but this could refer to anyone." Absolutely it could, but this was made in 1996, long before any mention of Obama. So what if its a bit woolly, and the producers of the film predicted that the Antichrist might in fact be a Russian, that doesn't prove anything! Actually, this prediction is probably based on the USA notion that the secular USSR was an "evil empire", and that all Russians are evil anyway. If you still think this is fiction, what have you got to say about the following then! Listen back to the start of the video...

"The rise of a one world government, headed by a superhuman dictator"

Watch this, from the mouth of the "beast" himself!

The rise of a one world government... a New World "International Order!"

"I was not born in a manger" ["not" = anti "born in a manger" = Christ]. "I was sent here by my father Jor-El..." A cleverly veiled statement to say that he is really the "Son of Perdition"...

Not only does he mock the birth of his enemy, but he also refers to himself as superhuman. Or how about this? Or These?? Oh you may laugh now, but in 2012 when the 4 monkey men of the apocalyptic Armageddon are chasing after you, don't come running to me. So fall on your knees now and begged to be saved by the Jeebus!

[Obama image via Wonkette]

***
Looking back at this post in 2012, I thought I would be laughing. Not a chance though. With Israel and Iran tempting each other into a nuclear war; a war in the land of Armageddon, and in the year of 2012; the world's destruction is surely imminent!

Obama has to be the Antichrist. There are no other candidates. Surely not this man, pictured to the left. A lovely man who loves animals could never be the beast. Wait a moment! Beast = animal. Hmmm... where did that video say the Antichrist came from again!?

It also couldn't be Ireland's leader, because Enda Kenny is too fucking useless to do anything as interesting as enslaving mankind.

The Strangest Thing About Anders Behring Breivik

2012-05-09T21:58:00.001+01:00

Admittedly, many would say there are lots of strange things about Anders Breivik, but the strangest at the moment is that if you do a Google Image search, using his name as a search term, you see pages and pages of images, but none of which are parodies, memes, or funnies.

They are all unaltered and journalistic. At first I thought I had "safe image search" turned on, but no, the first 16 pages [for me] contain only sanitised images. I find this highly suspicious. A character as infamous as Breivik should be amassing huge amounts of parody material at this stage.

This is an absolute travesty. The likes of Hitler and Josef Fritzl are getting all the attention. So let me continue my efforts to buck the trend, with the image below...

Brilliant

Total Solar Eclipse

2012-05-08T14:02:00.001+01:00

A stunning image by Hartwig Luethen, of the 2008 solar eclipse over Siberia, showing both the sun's corona and details of the moons surface.

[via: flickr] [more info: apod]

Laura Noonan's Blushing Arms

2012-05-07T22:35:00.000+01:00

Laura Noonan was on Tonight with Vincent Browne recently, and found herself being unable to fathom the notion of how devaluing currency equals printing money. She ended up tangling with Australian economics professor, Steve Keen, and Russian economist, Constantin Gurdgiev. Some argued (on Twitter) that she was just a government shill and was being deliberately cantankerous to spite the "radical" notions that both Keen and Gurdgiev were suggesting. That was a serious allegation, so to find an answer, I turned to the greatest minds at both NASA and the biology department at University of Cambridge, and came up with the GIF above.

On the left are two unaltered frames from the video, taken before and after the argument, respectively. On the right, a narrow band of red values in the images are highlighted and amplified. You can see there is a definite increase in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, causing a greater blood flow in the vessels near the surface of the skin of the upper arm. This is ground breaking science right here!

I'm not sure what all this means though, but what I do know is that there is nothing better than seeing a good healthy flush across the body. Mighty, so it is. I'm a blusher too, you know, so this isn't some sort of veiled attack on her person. Not at all. In fact, systemic blushing for me is tantamount to eye dilation, and we all know how I feel about that. Animals, that's all we are. Animals.

The video of the exchange is given below. It's actually a fascinating conversation, and a real highlight from the usual boredom #vinb has often suffered from in 2012.

[ I apologise for this strange sideways blog post written on the troubles of the post-growth pan-European economic depression. I felt it had to be written though, as it sheds light on the dangerous dispersions about what's really going on. A brave new conspiracy on the whole global banking sector! etc. et ad nauseum. ]

France Elects Hollande

2012-05-06T23:59:00.000+01:00

Lot's of talk, but will he walk the walk [ France24 ]

For The Day That's In It...

2012-05-05T20:20:00.001+01:00

Forgive me while I indulge myself, won't you. A selection of treasures that I feel like sharing today.

Image above by and source: http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/art/ballet-y-stuff-4-271980957 and the model, in pointe shoes weilding a Stihl chainsaw, is: http://brittaniluv.deviantart.com/

Some Youtube Videos...

And some notes about the videos:

Christian Vander is to music, what Jesus Christ was to crucifixes. His Zeuhl music is immensely uplifting for me. Vander doesn't just perform music, he sermonises it, and with such vocal and physical animation. I often think that if Hitler was a drummer in a space-jazz band, scat singing about galactic peace, love, and harmony, he would look and sound a lot like Vander.

Jet pilot - oxygen mask - hijab woman. That's what it is, and I'll have no arguments about it.

....

Bones, don't you just love them. And this video is so short, you'll love them even more!

Well that's it's for another year...

Let's Start A War

2012-05-04T22:54:00.000+01:00

Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, nuclear weapons are only useful for defensive purposes. To launch a nuclear device at another country is to commit your nation to oblivion. You might as well direct your attack at your own capital city, because before it even reaches it's destination, the retaliating missiles will have probably obliterated your entire country. Nuclear weapons are sought after, not for their offensive properties, but because they keep you from being bullied by other nuclear powers. They keep you free from the threat of invasion, because you can always threaten to launch if you see the enemy marching in over the horizon. This is why America, if they really believe Iran is developing nukes (and we know that America would never lie!), wants to stop Iran before they develop effective nuclear devices, because they know that if Iran becomes a nuclear power, the prospect of a grand invasion by US forces becomes an awful lot more tricky.

America is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons on a civilian populous, and eventually wants to be the only country that holds nuclear arms. Look at what the USA are currently up to in Europe, regarding their Anti-Ballistic missile program. They are gradually moving in to surround Russia with their ABM missile defense shield, thus greatly reducing Russia's (hypothetical) ability to effectively use their nuclear arsenal. The USA proposes that these ABM bases are to defend America from "rogue-states" who may possess nuclear weapons, but what nuclear state, rogue or otherwise sits beside Poland, except Russia. Before the Berlin wall fell in 1989, Gorbachev was promised by the Americans that NATO would not move further east than Germany. Unsurprisingly, America lied, and we find ourselves in another US / Russian conflict, over a proposed ABM base in Poland. Russia has said that unless a new agreement is signed up, where Russia is involved in the shield, and America agrees not to use it against Russia, they will launch a military offensive to destroy these sites in Poland. Potentially, this is frightening stuff.

Of course, this is if you believe the pantomime ["I transmit this information to Vladimir"]. For me, the worst case scenario is not a war between Russia and America, but rather that this is all subterfuge, to con the public into thinking there is still something to fight for other than oil deals and big-business. During the Cold War there was a real battle of ideology that kept the fires stoked between the two great nations, but what now; mere national pride? There has been a lot of "warming-up" between Russia and NATO over the last few years. Soon after becoming Russian president, Vladimir Putin once (cheekily) asked NATO, when will Russia be "invited to join" the organisation, and recently Russia has allowed a NATO "stop-over" base on it's soil, to bring "non-military" supplies to Afghanistan. One could read into all sorts of conspiracy theories into these sorts of events, but surely a reasonable view is that circumstances are never as straightforward as they appear. For instance, one must ask what concessions has America made to Russia for this base.

Money trumps all, even nuclear weapons. The Occupy movement has said that we are currently in a third world war, where the battles waged are economic and the weapon is debt. If you look at who America finds most antagonising today (Russia, China, etc.) they have nearly zero debt, and the countries they say are their closest "friends" (Europe et al.) are the ones that are drowning in it. Russia is joining the WTO in June of this year and hopes to build stronger economic ties with China, but using local currencies for trade rather than the US dollar. Thus, both countries will increasingly want less and less to do with US dollar as a reserve currency, weakening the US economy as it continues to dilute the dollar with quantitative easing.

Anyway, that's enough writing, it was only meant to be the picture of "Obama and Ahmadinejad" on it's own. Much like American hegemony, this post has sprawled into areas it has no business in.