Category Archives: Middle East

The World Will Not End & Other Predictions for 2012

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Here are my top 10 predictions for 2012. These are less readings of the tea leaves or the entrails of goats and chickens and more simple extrapolations of patterns in progress. Altho that may be the way effective oracles. They just masked their observations with hocus pocus, mumbo-jumbo, and guts.

This list runs a gamut from business and technology to energy, instability in the Middle East, micro-economics in the United States, politics, and not-yet-pop culture.

  1.  Apple and IBM will continue to thrive. Microsoft will grow, slightly. Dell and HP will thrash. A share of Apple, which sold for $11 in December, 2001, and $380 in Dec. 2011, will sell for $480 in Dec. 2012.
  2. The Price of oil will be at $150 to $170 per barrel in Dec., 2012. The price of gasoline will hit $6.00 per gallon in NYC and California.
  3. There will be another two or three tragic accidents in China. 20,000 people will die.
  4. There will be a disaster at a nuclear power plant in India, Pakistan, Russia, China, or North Korea.
  5. Wal-Mart will stop growing. Credit Unions, insurance co-ops and Food co-ops, however, will grow 10% to 25%.
  6. The amount of wind and solar energy deployed in the United States will continue to dramatically increase.
  7. The government of Bashar Al Assad will fall.
  8. Foreclosures will continue in the United States.
  9. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio will resign. Calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from matters involving his wife’s clients will become louder, but Justice Thomas will ignore them. A prominent politician who says “Marriage is between a man and a woman,” or her husband, will be “outed” as gay. President Obama will be re-elected.
  10. The authors of Vapor Trails will not win a Nobel Prize for literature. They will not win a “MacArthur Genius Award.” Nor will I despite my work on this blog or “Sunbathing in Siberia” and the XBColdFingers project.

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Guardian.co.uk coverage of the Middle East

The Guardian News Blog has committed substantial resources to covering developments not only in Egypt, but in every country where popular sentiment for change has made itself known. Here’s one  excerpt from the last hour or so (times are, we think, GMT):

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers remarks on the current situation in Egypt“We’ve been very clear from the beginning that we do not want to see any violence. We deplore it. We think it is absolutely unacceptable,” Clinton told the ABC News program This Week, according to a transcript released by the network. She stopped short of calling for regime change.
“We very much want to see the human rights of the people protected, including right to assemble, right to express themselves, and we want to see reform,” Clinton said. “And so Bahrain had started on some reform, and we want to see them get back to that as quickly as possible.”