Methusala

Think that the"Brexit" might end up a nasty mess!!!

Sounds like "Australia Day" to me.

So...you can oversimplify. hmmm!! every one else is being "clever" Sounds like you lose the argument Mr Simple.

Take a trip out 300km west of the Isa? (Wait for me to join you at Canteen Ck. I won't be long..promise.)

"You ever been to New York city? Or Hong Kong?" I'd like to see you put YOUR money where YOUR mouth is and claim the 250m/sq about 300 km west of Mt Isa.

No...of all the conflicts that it has started since the end of WW2 it has only won in Grenada and I think with the Contra's in Honduras. Proud record. (Spicer.. whoever he is, is not the subject here.)

All of those people turned out for Obomber BEFORE they new what he was like...Nobel Peace prize before he was even in office!!! Methinks they where to be bitterly disappointed by this UncleTom. (Hint: He dropped OVER 26,000 bombs on mainly civilians last year. Go you little psychopath.)

I suggest that the ignorant should get out more. Life is more than flippant remarks that require 0.000001sec to churn (chunder) out

Already happened...meet Barac!

In 1956 my maternal Grandfather died of stomach cancer. There was nothing medically they could do for him. When he died he had a 1928 Ford Roadster. The house had an ice box, a primitive gas cooking range, a copper and mangle for clothes washing and an outside toilet. It was located in Northcote, Melbourne. Ice, bread and milk were delivered by horse and cart. Television may have arrived but the price of a set was prohibitive. George had been employed as a proofreader in the newspaper industry. In the 60 years since then, progress has made that world almost unrecognisable to us. Right now babies are being exposed to the world via mother's i-phone, carelessly handed over as a babysitter. Miracle cures abound for all manner of medical problems. Cars are sophisticated beyond belief. Houses include every possible comfort. Communications extend globally from everyone's pocket and the internet opens the libraries of the world instantly to all. So, of course, things have improved almost immeasurably. However, the world's population is soaring towards 10 billion. I have just returned from my first visit to China. The urban population is wealthy and expect to become more so. The city I visited had advanced mass transit in place. The roads were choked with private cars, busses and goods vehicles. Super highways and bullet trains extended between cities. The air quality was awful. A local contact told me that many people can avoid the authorities attempt to ration car numbers on bad air days by owning 2 cars. One with rego number ending in evens; the other in odds. After 2 weeks my wife and I were pleased to flee. This was a stark revelation of just where advanced technological society is headed. Australia has a current net immigration of 1/4 million people pa. Canberra is noticeably more crowded these days. I imagine that in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane the nightmare is much worse. This is but the problem of advanced societies. In the 3rd World, these problems are magnified by extreme orders of magnitude. Wars, dispossession, famines and disease are intolerable burdens. Mixed bag really, but plenty of problems on the door step. Sorry for the rant.

Dear Octave, I am genuinely humbled by your question and, seeing it is quite late, I will sleep on it before answering. Hope that you are not in a hurry,Don

I was a young adolescent during the 60's and I remember clearly that we believed that by mass protest action we could change the course of politics. I marched in George St in 1968 against the Vietnamese war. Through the election of the Whitlam Labor govt in December 1972, that aim was achieved. My generation saw many of society's distortions, hangovers from the 19th century overcome through political action. Equal pay for women as well as maternity leave and housing loans available to unmarried women. These things seem so anachronistic only the span of my adult life later. Expressing 'No Dams", on a Tasmanian ballot paper prompted Hawke to invoke federal powers to save the Franklin River. I also gathered with thousands of others on the lawns of Parliament house in 2003 to demand "No War" on Iraq. However times had changed allowing Howard to expostulate that he was not going to listen to,"The Mob!" This in a democracy! So we come to this stage where the first African/American US president has presided over savage wars against the African civilian population and is being mourned by so called 'progressives'. This while he has done nothing to help the "Black Lives Matter" movement. I DO HOPE that people will become active again, and that writers, artists and community leaders will defy the politicians purse strings and lead common people back into political radicalism. My kids and their kids need a hand.

From my initial posting to this thread I never set out to laud Donald Trump as an individual. I did see his election as the least worst choice that was to be expected. I am in favor of : 1. Any attempt to lesson tension between the US and Russia- 2 massively equipped nuclear weapons states. 2. Anyone's foreign policy agenda bar Madam Clinton's. (Because she as a Democrat Congress woman voted in favor of GBW's illegal and criminal invasion of Iraq on obviously fabricated evidence; Presided over the US State Dept {Dept responsible for Making War against defenseless countries} whilst invading and destroying the most socially advanced state in Africa; Backing the Nazi coup that swept the elected govt of the Ukraine from power; and, making use of their convenient (and secret allies Al Queada, aka Al Nusra etc...) to destroy and attempt illegal regime change against the elected and highly popular Al Assad govt in Syria. Read more widely and you can see similar stories in Africa, Sth America etc.) 3. An American leader who can see that there is so much to be done to repair the domestic US homeland socially, economically. industrially and morally. I have visited the US in the past couple of years as well as S/E Asia and China and was shocked at the poverty visible on the streets of US cities co-existing with extreme wealth. Vietnam and other veterans living out of shopping trolleys and begging on the same streets that carry millionaire Ferraris and Lear jets. Conspicuous and outstanding poverty. So it will require the efforts of some radical thinking to alter the course of US imperial maneuvering that has proceeded unchecked since the end of WW2. "Come the time, come the man", is an old proverb. Perhaps I am just a wishful thinker but something needs to change.

Lying to Congress while holding the office of President... now that would offend most peoples sense of morality. But I did not introduce moral judgement as a theme. I simply questioned whether it was all that unusual for presidents to be sexually liberal (think of JFK). I think that Trump is being undermined by the establishment even before taking office and is being held to a different standard than Clinton. Why this? I want to know. I am suspicious of the political establishment including the MSM (main stream media). I was utterly convinced that Abbott would be a catastrophic PM well before he became one. I don't understand why the political commentariot could not see this coming. That IS their job. They are constantly making public utterance on Bill Shorten's suitability for the office. Please don't think that I wish to be adversarial in this discussion. I am open to contrary argument and hope not to be trapped in reacting to side issues. I apologise if I have given offence to anybody. Regards, Don

Dear Octave, I don't do predictions and I feel something if it physically interacts with my nervous system. I simply ask you why would the Director of the FBI raise questions about Clinton's emails if he saw no legal implications? He is not some back woods county sheriff. You have baldly asserted that Clinton is in the clear when this question has not been answered. I imagine that the concept of robust evidence was in HIS mind when he raised the matter. The POTUS has a great amount of power and his party controls both houses and he will have opportunity to make nominations for retiring supreme court judges. Don't make the assumption that he is a mere poster boy. Regards, Don. BTW You had a strong reaction to alleged inappropriate sexual conduct on Trump's behalf. I am waiting to hear your judgement of the Clinton episode which is fully documented

FBI Director, James Comey made an extraordinary announcement during the final days of the long election campaign making public new emails damaging to Hillary Clinton possibly putting the last nail in her political coffin. This electrified the voters who already harboured deep (really DEEP) misgivings about her character and her judgement. Remember that after her husband was found to have willfully lied about not having sex with Monica she retorted,"He's a good dog but hard to keep on the porch!" Is that a comment that would satisfy you had it been your young daughter that the President had touched up with a Havana cigar? I don't enter these discussions with malice or anger. I wish to place information and considered opinion into public space for consideration. Whether or not Trump feels it worth the political price to try Clinton is moot. I believe that his motive was to warn people of the serious risk electing her would entail. I take umbrage at your pointed question about what I would feel. Please stick to commenting on views and not personalities. Regards, Don

No...that's not what I think she was doing. I think that she was conducting her negotiations privately and probably with criminal intent and used a private server to conceal her motives. Why else would she do it? I think that "Occum's Razor" applies well in this case. Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to have her tried in criminal court for this during the campaign. I think that it is too easy to simply assert that this was "clever politics" on his part. I have said before in this forum that I believe Trump to be a conviction politician. He does not need to be in politics, not being his career unlike the Clinton's who have left a trail of criminality and possibly murder in their wake. We will have leisure time to observe how he acts as POTUS over the next 4 years (if not impeached or assassinated in the mean time, remember JFK.) You can call me a "conspiracy theorist" whatever that really means but I have followed politics all of my life and don't get it soo wrong. Trump is being targeted because Hellery was meant to get the prize. Negotiation and cooperation with Russia doesn't fit with the imperial ambitions held by the US since at least the conclusion of Bretton-Woods where Russia and China where surrounded and hog tied. BTW obviously she was stupid. The fact that (at least some of) the emails have surfaced publicly demonstrates this. I don't even care if you choose to believe your own interpretation of this fascinating period in history but no one should become too comfortable because the dogs of war are howling and it is the neocon establishment in US that is yanking their tails.

I am intrigued by the degree of skepticism and doubt that is being directed at the prospective Trump administration and all prior to him actually taking office. Sure, he is a character of acquired notoriety. So was Clinton having been de-barred in his own state and actually carrying out the execution of a mentally disabled felon when governor, prior to election. George Bush was well known as a dodger of service in Vietnam but this did not seem to occupy much space in the political analysis of main stream media. Mrs Clinton, the Democrat's nominee, had probably egregiously broken national security laws by conducting secret matters of state over a private (and so, not secure) email system, presumably to defy public record disclosure laws. Other emails showed outrageous party donation scams along with a policy within the Democratic Party to discredit Bernie Sanders candidacy in league with major players in the news media. But it is Trump, who has stuck to his pre-election commitment, to seek "detent" (real Nixon era speak) with Russia who has ignited a bees nest of fury within the US Beltway. Today we have the eerie, chilling spectacle of the CIA Director Brennan "warning" a President elect not to tangle with them! As with the popular (except among the illegal drug using community)president of the Philippines, Trump has got to watch his back. You may find little to like about Trump but the Clintons make my skin crawl.

I read somewhere that the 1st strike was only averted by the (understandable) reluctance of a Russian submarine commander to launch. My recollections are not always reliable and I can't guarantee the source but ...food for thought.BTW I may have used the wrong acronym ACM. Meant ACC (anthropogenic climate change)

IMHO the most important are ACM followed by the threat of a confrontation between NATO and Russia getting out of hand and prompting a nuclear conflagration. Resource depletion is likely to entail drying up of water supplies but still down to climate change or more correctly Global atmospheric temperature increase (same as ACM).

Yeah, you can state any view you like as long as you don't bring in any doubt about there being an "afterlife!"

I don't think that Trump will sit back and backtrack on much of what was said during the campaign. He is an anti-politician if you like. His proposal to construct an impermeable fence along the Mexican border only reflects what Israel has managed along its border with Palestine. There is a strong move in many nations to do the same (on water matters anyone?) He is reading a frustration felt by millions of people around the world at the decline in standards of living and security in employment, healthcare and housing. Of course I don't have a strong belief that he will actually fix much but the US people have put the elites on notice that they won't be dictated to. It is surprising to me and millions of others that somebody so disdained by the establishment actually made it. Don

This result is a signpost to the future. It shows that the weight of opinion in the US does not believe that the empire can win in its risky strategy to dominate the world. What Trump is saying on a subliminal level is that "We can no longer afford to follow the delusion held by Wall St and lunatics like Clinton family of controlling the world". Concentrate on the homeland. I don't necessarily rejoice in this result. I think that a Clinton win would have been more dangerous. She is a proven warmaker and so the ordinary folk had to make this hard choice. A choice which Assange called that of "syphilis over gonorrhea".

Geoff, I chose to highlight WA only because I was challenged by Russ on my source of information. I agree with Col Jones that the Turnbull govt cynically used the truck drivers of this country to push their anti labour (small l) agenda. Meanwhile the slaughter continues. The recent accident in SA killing 4 people from the same family is a frightening example. I did not set out to misinform or argue against good reforms but the facts stand that heavy trucking personnel deserve civilised conditions of work.

Check it out for yourself, please! https://www.nhvr.gov.au/node/872 This is for WA as I stated.