thaibeachlovers

On 4/14/2025 at 12:23 PM, PomPolo said:

Lets keep an eye on all your statements over the next couple of months - I will be bookmarking it, and we can discuss further in the not too distant future, that's if he is still President!

If the GOP ever begins to think Trump is going to lose the next election, IMO they'll stab him in the back in the middle of the night and have some muppet ( Vance ) installed by day break.

14 minutes ago, frank83628 said:

I used to think that, however he endorsed Hillary after her & the dnc cheated him and has towed the line since with the anti Trump and now with anti RFK. So kinda sold out imo.

IMO all politicians sell out. He's just behaving like a normal politician.

I don't think he's worse than any other politician, and he doesn't like Wall Street, which is why I liked him in the first place.

19 hours ago, beautifulthailand99 said:

The irony for the MAGA blowhards long on dollars via the exchange rate and 401 funds is they along with many others are going to be rinsed as Trump wrecks the finacial plumbing of the world. The global financial community has increasingly perceived Trump as unreliable, leading to a growing trend of nations diversifying away from dollar reserves and U.S. Treasuries. This shift is a primary driver behind the surge in gold prices, effectively reversing the Bretton Woods agreement. This divergence is occurring while Trump receives praise domestically.

The impending financial crisis, though yet to fully materialize, poses a substantial threat. The U.S. government's massive debt, which is largely financed by foreign entities that once viewed the U.S. as a safe haven, is now at risk. With diminished trust, higher interest rates will be required to compensate for increased risk. Furthermore, Trump's proposed tax cuts will exacerbate the situation, creating a downward spiral of federal financial instability. This could jeopardize essential programs like Medicaid and Social Security. That's what winning looks like but on the plus side we only have 2 genders.

 

 

 When the gold price is soaring, we should all be afraid

Donald Trump is at war with himself – and putting the might of the US economy at risk

 

https://archive.ph/ymwcQ

 

That huge debt

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. IMO the present world order is built by and for the benefit of the rich. IMO it's unsustainable, because it depends entirely on exporting jobs to the most exploitable nations, and it needs ever increasing growth, like one of those pyramid scams, to keep the money coming in. Neither is indefinitely sustainable, and it was going to fall down eventually.

Whether it was going to happen now or later is irrelevant.

I doubt Trump is the cause of the collapse, though he may have hastened it by a few years

My generation had the best of it, but once the world population exceeded 5 billion, IMO it was heading inexorably to doom.

You just can't have half the planet's population attempting to move to the rich countries and that system survive.

and that's not even mentioning the destruction of the environment, which may result in water wars and widespread famine. What happens when the water from the Himalayas dries up, leaving over 1 billion people without water?

19 hours ago, hotsun said:

Ask yourself why you care so much about china. Are you white? Good lord

I care about China because they buy a large part of our exports and my entire way of life depends on them doing so.

19 hours ago, Gweiloman said:

What’s even dumber is thinking that China can be contained. Dumb and dumber comes to mind.

On that I agree. Hurrah for the US nuclear arsenal.

18 hours ago, GammaGlobulin said:

Appeasement never ends well.

It does for the guys that didn't have to die.

21 hours ago, jas007 said:

Trump wants the war to end and I think Putin does as well.  

I'd say Putin is desperate to end the war before he has to call up the Moscow Russians, hence the terror attacks. I'm sure he figures that Zelensky can hang on to the last Ukrainian given the endless supplies from Euroland, so trying a bit of the Hamburg/ Dresden/ Tokyo solution. Unfortunately for Putin ( or more appropriately all those about to die ), they didn't end the war.

21 hours ago, frank83628 said:

If that is a Tesla car sales yard, I'd vote for that penguin as it obviously is on the side of righteousness.

Hopefully it's first executive order would be to send Musk on his own rocket to Mars.

I say "it" because I'd need to see if it's back has claw marks to know it's gender.

On 4/13/2025 at 8:11 AM, PomPolo said:

In the event that there was a snap US election tomorrow in the possible event he was no longer the Ooompa Loompa in chief who would you vote for?

Bernie Sanders. He deserves it, having had his chances destroyed by the Dems twice.

11 hours ago, Felton Jarvis said:

If he has diabetes, it is certainly an encouraging sign. The closer to death Trump is, the sooner

we will be free of him. He has done incalculable damage to the US and his supporters will insure

that the damage will continue. Prison for ALL of them.

Well, if it upsets you, diabetes is not a sign of impending death. It's one of the most easily controlled diseases humans can have. Given proper treatment people can live a perfectly normal life span.

Enjoy the next 3 1/2 years.

21 hours ago, daveAustin said:

I’m a little bit right of centre but completely agree with Jing’s assessment. Anyone who thinks the guy is fit for office or can’t at least have a quiet snigger at the OP needs their head read. 

Anyone who thinks the guy is fit for office or can’t at least have a quiet snigger at the OP needs their head read. 

How about when Biden was in charge? Do all the posters that thought he was A OK need their heads read?

The anti Trumpers that complain about him seem to forget that the US till January was apparently run by a guy without a functioning brain.

All that happened was that one unpleasant individual was replaced by another unpleasant individual, and the US has been run by a succession of unpleasant or incompetent presidents since Kennedy was assassinated- Nixon, Bush the younger, Obama ring any bells for you?

5 hours ago, bannork said:

Beijing has suspended the export of certain rare earth minerals and magnets that are crucial for the global automotive, semiconductor, and aerospace industries.

The New York Times stressed that stopping the export of magnets used to assemble so many products from drones to cars to missiles, was particularly troublesome as China produces 90% of the world market in magnets.

One wonders at how morons managed to be running the US for so long? If the magnets were so vital, surely even a stupid person could understand that not making them is not a good idea?

As for cars, most of the cars I drove in my lifetime had zero rare earth in them. If it means Musk can't make overpriced toy cars for rich luvvies any more, I could not care less.

If girls can't go into space with great hair and makeup, so be it- no loss.

No drones- great. I despise warmongers, and the less ability they have to wage remote war the better. Missiles, I doubt the missiles in the 1950s had rare earth in them, and they were able to destroy life on the planet.

However, if I cared, I'd go buy shares in a company that makes magnets.

On 4/9/2025 at 1:22 PM, rabas said:

 

Yes, Russia has always had ball bearing problems. The Soviets made big missiles with big nuclear warheads while America deployed smaller missiles like Minute Man with smaller warheads.  Why? Because the US invested heavily in high precision ball bearings that made their missiles far more accurate. How? High precision ball bearings are used in gyroscopes that make guided missiles far more accurate. Smaller US weapons could take out missile silos more easily than big old Russian weapons. It's always amazed me that all that high technology boiled down to ball bearings. 

 

Similar  high tech technology gaps exit today. The next revolution has begun with chip-scale atomic clocks (CSACs) so small they can be put in missiles. Such missiles can hit precise positions around the world without radio communication like GPS.  Again Putin's lack of a broad based economy leads Russia behind.  If Russia had a broad based civilian technology we wouldn't have Putin, or Putin wars. Russians and Americans alike would breath a sigh of relief. 

Hmmmmm. Seems that despite not being able to make ball bearings and having to use washing machine parts, Russia seems to have no problem sending missiles and drones to attack Ukraine.

Perhaps the inferior ball bearings in the gyroscopes can explain why the missiles seem to be hitting civilian structures instead of military targets.

16 hours ago, steven100 said:

it's such a shame Ukraine got rid of their nuclear weapons when promised security guarantees by the US and Russia which were a complete lie. 

 

They could have flattened Moscow completely by now had they kept them.  

A/ go look at a map of Russia.

B/ did you notice it is quite large, and there are not enough nukes on the planet to destroy it all?

C/ do you think that Russia keeps all it's nukes in Moscow?

If Ukraine nuked Moscow Ukraine would have all it's cities destroyed shortly thereafter.

Carry on living in your bubble though. It must be nice in there.

4 minutes ago, kwonitoy said:

There is no negotiation, no depths to which these creature will sink.

Always the victim, ashamed of nothing

Give Ukraine the weapons they need to eradicate this scab of a country

The war will end when Zelensky accepts the inevitable. All the future deaths are on him.

As Trump says, it's a war that should never have happened.

Just now, BritManToo said:

From this sentence ...........

"the US will ignore the revulsion of almost the entire world and enable the slaughter to continue."

Do you actually understand that the US is enabling the slaughter and preventing the rest of the world from doing anything about it?

What has that got to do with wanting the US to police the world? They don't have to actually DO anything- just not use the veto. Is that too hard to understand?

Just now, BritManToo said:

I'm not quite sure why you think America should police the world.

NZ has a government, why don't they stop it?

What with? NZ doesn't have much of a military. I think most got PO at the poor pay and left a while ago. Only seems able to send a few to UN "observer" posts that do nothing to stop conflicts. The navy sank off Samoa a while back when it steered into a reef. NZ doesn't have a single combat aircraft. Perhaps they could send a Hercules to drop pamphlets on the Israelis asking them to play nicely.

Bit sad really, when one considers the quite renowned reputation it had post WW2.

Where did you get the fanciful idea that I think America should police the world, given the number of posts I have made saying the opposite? Perhaps you'd had had a long shag, and couldn't read properly at the time.

True, but the UN will do nothing about it. The UN IMO is being exposed for being irrelevant in the real world. As long as the ( non ) security council has a veto, the US will ignore the revulsion of almost the entire world and enable the slaughter to continue.

A despicable event is unfolding in front of us and not a thing is being done to stop it. Western country "leaders" should be ashamed of their craven acquiescence in this tragedy that is happening in full view.

13 minutes ago, jas007 said:

Time will tell, but as I've said before, if China starts a war, all bets are off. 

I agree with that part.

If that happens, given that NZ doesn't make much any more ( all imported from China ), and we can't even refine our own oil, I guess screwed would be putting it mildly. In that event I'll join the mass exodus to Australia.