Happy New Year - bye 2016 hi 2017

[psyolent]

Happy New Year folks.
Good riddance to 2016. Welcome to 2017. Is a 1 year so new beginnings, good riddance to the endings / 9 year.

[immortality]

Happy new year mate.

Hold on to your tighty whities though, gonna be a bumpy ride for the next 4 years with TRump at the helm of the USofA (assuming he last the entire term.......)!

[MAGP]

Is a 1 year so new beginnings, good riddance to the endings / 9 year.

Please explain.

Happy new year mate.

ditto to all.

Hold on to your tighty whities though, gonna be a bumpy ride for the next 4 years with TRump at the helm of the USofA (assuming he last the entire term.......)!

Putin will protect him from the facists that inhabit the free world where having a personal opinion and expressing it is not illegal ... yet.

[immortality]

Yes, that little bromance is most scary!

edit: well at least with TRump in the Whitehouse the TPPa is dead

[MAGP]

edit: well at least with TRump in the Whitehouse the TPPa is dead

I doubt it, I think he will publicly stop it but privately just rename it and say he come up with something better.

[immortality]

Yeah, but at what point do the other signatories tell him to shove it?

TPPa wasn't that great for NZ and we started the whole bloody deal. Many here in NZ weren't happy with it when we didn't even get decent concessions for our major industries.

Our PM also just resigned and he was the biggest proponent for the whole deal, with his resignation the current government is under a glass microscope and with a lot of head wind coming our way how they perform will dictate if they get back into power within 12 months. Re-signing a deal with even less concessions could very well be what tips it over the edge (so to speak).

I doubt TPPa is high on his list of things to fuck up anyway, he's got more important things to screw up for the US first.

[psyolent]

with Trump at the helm, we wont be having a nuke war any time soon. Obama was pissing him off.

9 - Chinese astrology. Typically signifies death/endings. 1 on the other hand is new birth / new beginnings.

[immortality]

I wouldn't say that. Trump may very well look the other way while Putin gets up to mischief. Hell, trump will probably suck him off whilst doing it.

You have to remember that Putin is ex KGB, he's got grand visions of re-establishing the once might USSR or something similar with a more modern twist.

[psyolent]

you've got a bigger worry in China mate. no one is going to see that coming .....

[MAGP]

China has made its plan of global domination obvious. 1st it wants the SCS (South China Sea), then once it successfully stops freedom of navigation in the international waters within the SCS it will attempt to take Taiwan (they will want to do it peacefully but will use force if required). After than China wants more control of what it deems to be its traditional sphere of influence. That will include all the SE Asian archipelago, and into the Indian Ocean. Some even say China claims eastern Africa as being part of its sphere of influence and there is archaeological and historical evidence to support this.

Russia's (more correctly Putin's) plan is to reform the USSR albeit under the CIS. He is on record as saying the greatest catastrophe and crime of the 20th C is the collapse of the USSR. He has kept an iron grip on the Central Asian Republics and paid to keep radical Islam under control in those countries under the premise that they will support Russia if the time comes. People like Karamazov (who died last year, 2016) that placed political opposition into boiling vats of oil thus cooking the person alive got away with it because Putin won't let anyone do anything about it. Let's not forget Putin also flattened Grozny (in order to stop the disintegration of Russian territory and control on Chechnya) when he was Yeltsin's PM when Yeltsin was nothing more than Putin's puppet anyway. Then we have the invasion of Georgia in 2008 apparently in order to protect Russians but he attacked Russians who stood in his way. The Annexation of Crimea, which he denied but later admitted to, the war in Eastern Ukraine, and the new fond support for Assad in Syria who has flattened, with Putin's help one of the oldest cities on the planet, bombed hospitals, schools, civilian refugee camps eve though Assad knows these things are in the locations that have been attacked (not once but many times a week). These things are no accident rather they are carefully planned. I could go into MH17 but the evidence is plastered everywhere so It would just be parroting what the world already knows.

Trump is to stupid to know that he is a pawn in Putin's plan. Trump has annoyed China by taking a phone call from the Taiwanese President. This plays into Putin's hand quite well because historically the USSR and China disliked each other intensely as they both believed they were the centre of Communism. Trump rumping up to Putin while side lining China opens up old wounds between the 2 Asian superpowers. Putin opening talks with Japan over islands that Russia occupied after WW2 finished suggesting a sharing arrangement of the islands while China tells Japan its new military policy of entering into new theatres of war if Japans interests and allies need protecting is also putting a wedge between Russia and China.

I do believe we are in for a rough time, both politically and economically, this year. Australia is heading into a technical recession but all in all I'm glad I'm in Australia, let the denizens of the northern hemisphere fight out their wars. I'm to old, and not medically fit enough anyway, to go to war and I wouldn't go into a war in another country anyway. I always thought NZ had the right idea telling the US it wasn't going to be allowed to park any of its nuclear fleet in NZs territorial waters. It's about time we had enough guts to do the same.