It is clear to me that these threads are not very popular. The attitude is that prophecy is a waste of time because anyone can say anything they want to about such ambiguous predictions.
Here are a few types that may post:
1. Conspiracy theorists that have some kind of FreeMason slant to everything.
2. Those who believe in Watchtower and other fundamentalist orientation that sees Babylon as some kind of religious entity.
3. Those who believe that Israel has to have a significant role in the fullfilment.
4. Those who take the popular critical approach that this is just apocalyptic musings to speak about enemies in hidden language.
5. Those who simply ridicule.
My approach is to simply keep informed. So here is some more info that Shows the King of the North (Russia) expressing their concerns with being pushed by The King of the South (USA)
The Guardian
April 11, 2007
Moscow signals place in new world order
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The news that an arms race may be underway once
more between Washington and Moscow has brought
back some unpleasant memories, but it is also a
pointer to a more complicated future.The Kremlin's threat to counter US missile
defence installations in eastern Europe is a sign
that Russia will no longer acquiesce in a Pax Americana.
What seemed in the west like a post cold-war
honeymoon in the nineties is remembered more as a
rape by Moscow's new leaders. In their eyes
Russia was taken advantage of at a moment of
economic weakness by Washington, London and a
band of unscrupulous Russian oligarchs. A new
Russian foreign policy, published by the
government in recent days makes it clear that
Moscow believes the era of American hegemony is now over.
"The myth about the unipolar world fell apart
once and for all in Iraq," the review says. "A
strong, more self-confident Russia has become an
integral part of positive changes in the world."
The policy document is an elaboration of an
anti-American polemic delivered two months ago by
Vladimir Putin to a roomful of shocked western
diplomats in Munich. "The Munich speech may be an
event ... we look back to and say: that's when
everything changed, but we should have seen it
coming," said Cliff Kupchan, a former US state
department official now at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.
Around the world, Putin's Russia has been serving
notice for some time it is prepared to challenge
US leadership of the international community. It
is beginning to push back hard against missile
defence and Nato's eastward expansion. It has
resisted tough sanctions against Iran, and so far
refused to go along with a UN-brokered plan to
hand Kosovo autonomy. Moscow is also signalling
it wants to be treated as a serious player in the
Middle East, meeting Hamas officials at a time
they are being ostracised by the US and western Europe.
While there are cold war echoes in the Russian
rhetoric over missile defence and in the
intractability of some of the disputes in the UN
security council, there are more differences than
similarities between today's friction and the
constant rivalry of the Soviet era.
For one thing, disputes are no longer played out
against a backdrop of mutually assured
destruction. Most US and Russian intercontinental
nuclear missiles are pointing at each other, but
they are not on a hair-trigger. Nor are the two
countries engaged in a global ideological
struggle. Washington may be in the throes of
intellectual ferment over the Bush doctrine, of
defeating extremism by exporting democracy, but
the Putin doctrine is by contrast, an exercise in
pragmatism. It stresses the importance of
national sovereignty and the primacy of the UN in
resolving disputes. The common theme is Moscow's
demand for its views to be taken into account.
The roots are economic, and they reach back into
the era of Boris Yeltsin, when an impoverished
Russia offered itself as a eager junior partner
to the west. That period is seen by the Kremlin
occupants as a national humiliation. "What drives
Putin's Russia is an obsession forged in the
nineties," said one diplomat. "They detest its
instability and the weakness it brought to Russia."
Soaring oil and gas prices have transformed the
environment. Russia is no longer a debtor nation.
A new self-assuredness was on show when the
Russians hosted the G8 meeting at St Petersburg
in 2006. "Suddenly, they had all the right suits,
watches and the right cars," said a western official who was there.
Along with all the trappings of western affluence
came a new determination that Russia would not be
absorbed by the west. The Yeltsin government
toyed with the idea of joining the European
Union, but that idea is now dead. In an article
to mark the EU's 50th anniversary, Mr Putin
stated openly that Russia has "no intention of
either joining the EU or establishing any form of
institutional association with it".
Moscow's relationship with Europe is now defined
by its role as the continent's oil and gas
supplier. Its tactics have been those of a giant
corporation seeking to maximise its market power.
Rather than deal with the EU as a whole, Russia
has negotiated individual deals with different
European countries - agreeing with Germany the
construction of the Nord Stream pipeline under
the Baltic, and the extension of another gas
pipeline to Hungary. Moscow has thus undermined
the EU's communal efforts to reduce its
dependence on Russia by bringing Caspian gas through Turkey.
After Moscow turned off the gas tap to Ukraine,
Belarus and Lithuania, there are fears that it
will ultimately try to translate its market power
over Europe into a new political hegemony. But
Dmitri Trenin, a former Russian military
strategist, argues those fears misunderstand the
Putin era. Russia, he says, is simply striving to
extract maximum profits from its customers.
Read Revelation 13. The USSR died. Russia is the revived head of the beast. After it is resurrected it appears as a lamb for a period of time. But then it shows its old nature by speaking like the dragon. This is the beast that turns on Babylon the Great (USA).
