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If you left out the `h' it would probably look at the context and guess you either meant `were' or `we are', shortened to `we're'.

The radical elements of either side are a threat to the "well being" of any country, which is why Trump and his MAGA cronies are such a threat to America's well-being. The direction it's heading in under Trump is a reflection of himself - division, incompetency and chaos.

What's his block worth?

Can't imagine dull as dishwater George `partying hard', but no doubt he cracked a smile at losing his place in history.

One of our daughters had an Astra. Good little car.

Not even 4,000km per year. Bargain! Must be the proverbial one lady owner model. Check for handbag strap wear on the choke knob.

It's not just Trump. He's enthusiastically signing the orders, but a lot of this is the work of the Project 2025 fanatics working in the background and pushing him to do it.

Trump will more likely side with Putin against Ukraine. He doesn’t like Zelensky. Putin has no respect for Trump and Trump is out of his depth against Putin but doesn’t know it.

Yes, it’s about 48% and likely to be going down soon when the voters rediscover what a moron he is. Not much to brag about.

I don't hate Trump personally and he won the election fair and square. I just think he is a lowlife. Even that wouldn't matter if he didn't have so much power.

My brother lives in Victoria and has plenty of tiger snakes on his property. One fell on him one when he opened the roller door to his shed. It must have been perched up there. Not sure who got the bigger fright.

‘“There’s a thin line between genius and madness”. I think that old saying might apply to Musk.

That will be another load of rubbish. That fighter plane footage supposedly showing a UFO turns out to be an artifact of the gun camera imaging system. There's a explanation on the net somewhere.

It's on the tip of my tongue

Won't be long before the Cubans announce that it's now called the Gulf of Cuba on all their maps.

Pete Hegseth has just made it over the line to become Secretary of Defense after Vance cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Should be interesting to see how that works out.

Trump doesn't care about being constitutional, and unfortunately half the population doesn't either. There are plenty of red flags to go around.

I think she simply meant differently to other US presidents, and I don't see any lack of respect for the election results. She was just acknowledging that Trump is not your typical US president, which he would agree with.

I just see that as her stating the obvious and stroking Trump's ego at the same time. Nothing to do with her politics being better or worse than his. It was a shrewd answer.

That's very good advice, Marty although like OME, I've also been thinking about this. I lost my wife a few months ago and I now have a house that's far too big for one person and a dog. We seem to have accumulated so much stuff over the years, that I really need to cull a lot of it while I'm still around, rather that leave it all to the kids to sort out one day. Not that I'm thinking of departing any time soon, but I don't want to dump it all on them. As far as tools go, my son already has more than I do, although he said he'd like to have my my shed.

He's just pardoned Ross Ulbricht who ran the Silk Road on-line illegal drug marketplace: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/ross-ulbricht-silk-road-trump-pardon Note his reason for the pardon: Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her he would pardon her son “in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”. As long as you vote for him, you're in the clear no matter what kind of a scumbag you may be. He's also let all the J6 criminals convicted of serious crimes out, no doubt because they supported him and he wants to re-write the history of what happened.

I pulled this extract from a New York Times opinion piece by jack Goldsmith. I think it sums Trump up pretty well. It takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda. The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. There is no reason to think this will change in his second term. Mr. Trump also lacks the emotional intelligence that the great presidents had in various degrees — the self-awareness, self-control, empathy and ability to manage relationships that are so vital to steering the ship of state on the desired course. Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. “Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America,” Mr. Schlesinger noted. Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. This will make it hard over time for his administration to prioritize challenges, a vital prerequisite for presidential success. It will also make his administration susceptible to drift and reactiveness, especially once unexpected events start to crowd the presidential agenda. Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. There is every reason to believe that Mr. Trump’s personally motivated first-term actions — his insistence on loyalty over other values, his preoccupation with proclaiming and securing his personal power, and his indifference to conflict-of-interest norms — will persist. These inclinations will invariably infect the credibility, and thus the success, of everything his administration does. Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will. Mr. Trump is especially focused on eroding the capacity of federal agencies. At the same time, he has plans to regulate in areas including health, crime, energy and education, and to deport millions of people, all of which require a robust and supportive federal work force. Mr. Trump’s twin aims of incapacitating the bureaucracy and wielding it to serve his ends will very often conflict. Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term. The great presidents used coercive unilateral power when they needed to, but only when they needed to — none more so than Lincoln and Roosevelt, who faced the most serious crises in American history. But these presidents also understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.

He didn’t work any wonders the first time when he said he’d fix everything and achieved practically nothing except tax cuts for the wealthy. Won’t be any better this time although it might be worse because he’s surrounded by some half-competent enablers who will do what he tells them.

Ah, my old home town. First permanent settlement in Victoria (1832). Nice place and has a few good pubs. Alcoa and woodchip exports pretty much keep it going. They were going to close the smelter a few years ago.

I think AI will be fantastic for things like medical research but its development is likely to be driven far more by military imperatives and commercial profit than any altruistic peaceful purposes. It’s still early days and there is plenty of time for it to have disastrous consequences as well as great benefits.