In collaboration with our academic partners Prof. Cingranelli at the Political Science Department, SUNY Binghamton University and Profs. Sam Bell and Amanda Murdie at the Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, we developed a Domestic Political Violence Model that forecasts political violence levels five years into the future. The model enables policymakers, particularly in the COCOMs, to proactively plan for instances of increased domestic political violence, with implications for resource allocation and intelligence asset assignment. Our model uses the IDEA dataset for political event coding, plus numerous indicators from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Polity IV Dataset, World Bank, OECD, Correlates of War project, and Fearon and Laitin datasets.
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Here is our model’s forecast for 2010 – 2014 as a ranked list:
1. Iran . 2. Sri Lanka . 3. Russia . 4. Georgia . 5. Israel . 6. Turkey . 7. Burundi . 8. Chad . 9. Honduras . 10. Czech Republic . 11. China . 12. Italy . 13. Colombia . 14. Ukraine . 15. Indonesia . 16. Malaysia . 17. Jordan . 18. Mexico . 19. Kenya . 20. South Africa . 21. Ireland . 22. Peru . 23. Chile . 24. Armenia . 25. Tunisia . 26. Democratic Republic of the Congo . 27. Belarus . 28. Argentina . 29. Albania . 30. Ecuador . 31. Sudan . 32. Austria . 33. Nigeria . 34. Syria . 35. Kyrgyz Republic . 36. Egypt . 37. Belgium
Egypt: A spokesman for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood announced that the group is making five urgent demands which the Egyptian government should comply with in order to avert several crises, according to a 19 January posting on the Muslim Brotherhood website.
Muhammad Mursi said the group wants Cairo to revoke the state of emergency, dissolve the People's Assembly and hold free and fair elections, amend the constitutional articles that led to vote rigging in Egypt's last elections, hold presidential elections according to those amendments, and fire the current government and form a national unity government responsive to the Egyptian people's demands.
Comment: The Brothers are belatedly trying to take advantage of the Tunisian uprising. Mubarak could die at any time, but as long as he possesses his faculties he will not fall for lies by his personal security chief, as did Tunisia's Ben Ali, and will not be intimidated by the Brotherhood.
Phi Beta Iota: Dictators will fall before faux democracies because they are on the thinnest ice in the face of angry connected young people with legitimate grievances. The PowerShift that Alvin and Heidi Toffler anticipated in the 19990's has begun to occur. The other threat to civilization can be found in fundamentalists and relativists–those who treat faith as a cult or faith as a convenience. It is a mistake to regard the Muslim Brotherhood as threatening–they are more of an indications & warning. When the right precipitant comes along, Egypt will fall, and the other 43 dictators will follow in relatively quick (ten years) time. Now is when US covert action could shine, but first the White House and Congress and the military-industrial complex must be weaned of their love of dictators. This is also a time when holistic all-source analysis could shine, helping guide a 180 degree turn away from dictators and toward democracy in time for the 2012 “Awakening.”
Jesus. Now I understand a remark made twenty some years ago by an angry senior Mexican scientist who essentially accused the US of provoking a horrific hurricane that caused terrible damage in Mexico. He added: “And you [the US] know exactly what I mean.” You can tell the men from the boys by the cost of their toys, but this is like a tree full of monkeys masturbating. The quotes from Brzezinski below are confirmation enough of the US psychotic craving for high-tech global dictatorship, risking everything for total control. And we think Hitler was nuts?
The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and built a ground based “Star Wars” weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska. Scientific evidence reveals that it is now active.
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The US has developed a new type of weapon called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). HAARP zaps the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. It is an advanced model of an “ionospheric heater.” (The ionosphere is the electrically-charged sphere surrounding Earth’s upper atmosphere. It ranges between 40 to 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.) HAARP is a super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything — living and dead.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not new. Conspiracy theorists have been all over this for decades, and the lack of transparency has enabled the Soviets, among others, to leverage this against the US within normal propaganda channels. What is new is the combination Brzezinski quotes and current context in which the “elite” are now known to have exploded the global economy, contrived food, water, and energy shortages, and generally sacrificed a prosperous world at peace in favor of obscene wealth for the few. Apart from this we know two things: first, that Acts of God are actually acts of man, but more associated with the catastrophic effects of paving over wetlands, producing toxic goods, and generally ignoring the Precautionary Principle; and second, that governments and corporations cannot be trusted to be transparent, tell the truth, or be worthy of the public trust. Transparency is the new app, Truth is the new wealth, the times they are a-changing. The article is worth a full read.
People power goes techie, ousts Tunisian dictator
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 01:25:00 01/16/2011
Seeds of protest
The antigovernment protests began a month ago when a college-educated street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi in the small town of Sidi Bouzid burned himself to death in despair at the frustration and joblessness confronting many educated young people here. But the protests he inspired quickly evolved from bread-and-butter issues to demands for an assault on the perceived corruption and self-enrichment of the ruling family.
The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates like Bouazizi and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the US Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, which detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president’s family. And the protesters relied heavily on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to circulate videos of each demonstration and issue calls for the next one.
