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17-Jan-11 News -- Gun battles erupt in Tunisia amid fears of regional instability

IBM's supercomputer wins practice round against Jeopardy! champions

** 17-Jan-11 News -- Gun battles erupt in Tunisia amid fears of regional instability
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 17#e110117

Contents:
"Gun battles erupt in Tunisia amid fears of regional instability"
"IBM's supercomputer wins practice round against Jeopardy! champions"
"Additional links"
Israel is moving ahead with 1400 new settlements in East Jerusalem
China's Hu Jintao says that international currency system is in the past
Pakistan has highest polio incidence in the world
National Rural Transit Assistance Program guide to generational dynamics

The fact that the police have joined the anti-government demonstrators
in Tunis is quite significant.

When a country goes through the immense turmoil of a generational
Awakening climax, the question to be resolved is whether the "winner"
will be the older generation of war survivors versus the younger
generation who grew up after the war. If the older generation "wins,"
then it does so by morphing the "horizontal" split between old and
young generations into a "vertical" fault line split between different
ethnic groups.

Tunisia's last generational crisis war was the Algerian war of
independence that climaxed in 1962. Since that was not a civil war
for Tunisia, there is no clearly defined ethnic fault line in Tunisia.
If there were, then the police would be taking one side or the other
in the ethnic conflict, and the war survivors in the government would
clamp down on the demonstrations violently (as, for example, has
happened in Burma on 8/8/88 or in China in the Tienanmen Square
massacre).

But in Tunisia, the police are joining with the demonstrators. This
indicates that the conflict is remaining as a genuine generational
split, and will be resolved by a victory by the younger generation,
with a good chance for the survival of Tunisia's constitutional
government.

This is all very exciting from the point of view of Generational
Dynamics, because it provides for further analysis and development of
some generational theories.

Incidentally, Iran's Awakening era climax is still in its future, but
I actually expect the same kind of thing to happen, because I expect
the young people in the Revolutionary Guards to join the greens in a
"velvet coup" overthrowing the hardline government. Then it remains
to be seen what kind of government the Revolutionary Guards will
install, and what the fallout will be from the 1979 Great Islamic
Revolution. Very fascinating stuff.

John