Benjamin-Shindel

In the last election, five years ago, Nguesso won with 88% of the vote.  His opponent literally died the night of the election (from COVID, no foul play AFAICT).

The only thing that will stop Nguesso this time is a similar act of god.  But that might happen!  He's 82.  There could conceivably be a military coup.  Idk.  But odds are low and there's only two months.  I'm at 95% of a Nguesso victory, with the 5% mostly representing unknown unknowns in a country not known for rigorous press coverage.

I think community is a little low on the <2 option, which has occurred in ~half of the last couple decades.  I also think that an event which would give 8 inches of slow or higher would likely already be on our radar, if it's going to occur in the first ~60% of the month.  Since it isn't, we can probably adjust that bucket downward rapidly.

I'm slightly below the community forecast on this question.  I think that the March 8th coalition would have to pick up about a dozen seats to qualify, and these types of tense, realigning, multi-ethnic coalition elections (see the Knesset) tend to make large swings like that quite challenging.

Moreover, concerningly the question criteria appears to exclude the Free Patriotic Movement.  If so, that would make a YES resolution almost impossible, so it would be nice if moderators could clarify.

I'm slightly below community forecast (74%) at 67%.  The Houthis are once again threatening an attack, as a result of US tensions with Iran.  I think this question is fairly correlated with the odds of a US attack on Iran (~60%), and should remain above this, as it's likely that this would be a chief means of retaliation if the US strikes Iran, and also likely that the threshold for Houthi attacks in the Red Sea is probably lower than a full-on strike on Iran (and could happen from the Houthis' own volition as well).

This strikes me as quite unlikely, given the short time horizon.  As other commenters have noted, Russia and China rarely sanction oil entities in this manner.  At 3%, slightly higher than community, mostly due to near-term uncertainty in US and EU trade policy.  It's possible there are some "hockey assist" style sanctions for entities that don't comply with some international arrangement, but I think I'll time decay down to 2 and 1% fairly rapidly if no news around Middle East or oil/gas tensions rises to the forefront.

Once again, I think the crowd forecast is slightly too cautious.  China and perhaps more likely, the US, have many government officials that are capable of making random haphazard statements that can then be backed up and retconned into policy.  I'll time decay on this question linearly.

Fairly low on this question.  It can often take several months between the desire for such a deployment and its actuation, given the slow speed of UN deployments.  That being said, the community is far too low at 2%, in my opinion.  I'll be slightly more conservative for the next 2-3 months before dropping my forecast rapidly.