Nathan G wrote:
> Approximately how many entries do you think would be on such a
> list? Just as an order of magnitude.
> I understand that you are working on your own, but by the daily
> activity on this forum/weblog comments there are clearly a lot of
> people who are enthusiast about GD.
I'm not sure what kind of information you're looking for. Chaos
Theory proves that it's predictions with any kind of specificity --
such as the day of a stock market crash or the winner of an election
-- cannot be predicted. And by that I don't mean that neither I nor
anyone else has been clever enough to figure out a prediction. What I
mean is that it's mathematically provable that such things cannot be
predicted.
So, for example, I can tell you that it will be cold next winter --
that's a long-term trend prediction which is backed up by history.
But I can't tell you what the coldest temperature will be next winter,
and I certainly can't tell you what the temperature will be in Boston
on December 28.
So applying this to the Mideast, I've been predicting since 2003 that
there will be a war between Jews and Arabs re-fighting the genocidal
1948 that followed the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of
the state of Israel.
Since then, I've been able to add nuances to that prediction, but I
can't get any more specific about the scenario.
Let's take ISIS for example. I could not have predicted that ISIS
would have emerged. (The closest I could come was my early
predictions that that the flood of jihadists pouring into Syria from
around the world would go back to their home countries and commit
terrorist acts there.)
Today I can't tell you what will happen to ISIS. If I were to guess,
my guess would be that it will be subsumed into the Salafists and
jihadists in Saudi Arabia and the region, and become part of the
fighting force in their war against Iran. However, I can't be more
specific than that.
For example, suppose lighting strikes and kills Abu Omar al-Baghdadi
tomorrow. That would change the entire structure of ISIS which can't
be predicted (and which Chaos Theory says is mathematically impossible
to predict).
On the other hand, suppose lightning strikes and kills Bashar al-Assad
tomorrow. That would change the entire nature of the Syria war in a
way that can't be predicted.
That's why Chaos Theory says what it says. There are a million
individual events that could affect the scenario (like a butterfly
flapping its wings in China could affect whether we have a hurricane
next month). But those events cannot be enumerated, and even if they
could be, no computer could tell you what effects they will have. The
only thing that can't change is the overall trend prediction based on
generational flows (System Dynamics applied to generational flows).
So my updated prediction is this, as I've repeated many times:
Generational Dynamics predicts that the Mideast is headed for a major
regional war between Arabs and Jews, between Sunnis and Shias, and
between various ethnic groups. If I did a lot of work, I could
probably make it a tiny bit more specific than that (e.g., by naming
some of the ethnic groups), but basically that's all you're going to
get.
Incidentally, even these "vague" predictions are not accepted by
almost anyone. Certainly neither the Democrats nor Republicans
accept them. Nor do the journalists. Nor do the analysts. And most
people who even become aware of them hate me as the messenger as
much as the mythical Cassandra was hated or the biblical Jeremiah was
hated.
There's a consistency to this. If it were possible to make the
predictions less vague, then other people would be aware of this, and
the predictions would be considered "obvious." But the predictions I
make are only "obvious" after I make them since they always come true,
but before then they're the objects of contempt.
Finally, to answer your question more directly: If you're willing to
accept the prediction above as the best that can be done for the
Mideast, then with a lot of work I could come up with a similar
prediction for every country I've written about, and I usually include
such predictions when I write about each individual country. That
would end up being around 100-150 predictions, if that's the "order of
magnitude" you're looking for.