Unforeseen Contingencies

Unforeseen contingency: Trump re-elected! 

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 01:02 0 comments

Unforeseen Contingencies continue.

First, "we" at Unforeseen Contingencies are excited to hear that tonight Israel is bombing Iran.  May this be extremely destructive and effective, and the the IDF pilots all return safely.  I am really pleased at the destruction Israel is raining down on Hamas and Hezbollah, and hope and pray the same for the mullahs' regime.  The deaths of all of the top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah is so deserved and welcome.  My the Iranian regime experience the same.

Second, the American election is nearly upon us.  Trump and Vance are decent men who do believe in individual liberty and will obey the Constitution.  Harris and Walz are corrupt Marxists at heart.  The election will not resolve America's internal struggles, but it will indicate who has the upper hand.  There is turmoil ahead, but if Trump and Vance can get into office, things are remarkably hopeful.

Third, I completed my 23rd Le Grizz 50 Mile ultramarathon on 12 October.  It was a great event.  I ran with a Michigan friend, Liz J. and many of my regular Le Grizz friends.  Two of my former students, Katie W. and Kyle F., ran the race for the first time and loved it.  My friend Kathy L. completed her 25th Le Grizz!  We did not see any bears, but a runner who was a bit behind us had a grizzly emerge from the woods about 10 yards from him, run across the road, and disappear into the woods on the other side.  I have already signed up for the 2025 race on October 11.  All readers should join us!

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 20:09 1 comments

American politics...  Unforeseen Contingencies is named for the event that is not only not expected in a probabilistic sense, but not even imagined.  In that sense, what we at Unforeseen Contingencies are observing does not really qualify as an unforeseen contingency for us, but for many it is.

First, there was the collapse of corrupt pedophile Joe Brandon during the debate, where his senility was revealed publicly for all to see.  Next, there was the attempted murder of Donald Trump by the Feds.  (I explain below.)  And now there's the Republican Convention, a political nominating convention unlike anything we have seen in a while: a event that overflows with principle and hope.

The debate: Biden is senile. It was obvious during the 2020 campaign that Joe Brandon was failing.  He has continually degenerated since then, and it is available for anyone to see.  Just see his 2016 convention address, or this  2014 clip of his unbelievable fitness (he nearly beats Barack Obama in a footrace around the White House!) (Um, er...  /s)  Biden's senility is now a matter of public record.  Bigwig Democrats are now admitting it.

Attempted murder of President Trump: Had it been successful, the attempt on the life of Mr. Trump would have plunged the Republican Convention into chaos and strengthened Joe Brandon's position.  But not only did the attempt fail, Mr. Trump rallied the crowd with a triumphant "Fight" and "USA!" chant.  Americans are hungry for a vision of courage, strength, and defiance against evil.  This was heroic moment of Trump's part, and iconic.    It resonates around the world.

The convention: There is much that could be said.  Suffice it to say that when the head of the Teamsters, and a black Democrat address a Republican convention because this is where normal Americans are welcome, there is a seed change occurring in American politics.  When renowned GOPe leader Mitch McConnell is booed at the Republican national convention, there is a seed change occurring in American politics.  (Don't miss the short speech by black Democrat Madeline Brame.  It will be six minutes well spent.)  The convention seems to be a celebration of hope and renewal of important values (entirely unlike the phony "hope and change" marxism of Barack Obama).

UC's bottom line is that we are potentially on the verge of a reversal of the destruction of Western civilization and the imposition of the twin scourges of statism and cultural marxism.  Certainly the battle is being fought.  And people appear to be rallying to the example set by Trump.  For many, this is an unforeseen contingency.  But whether it is anticipated or not, it is a very hopeful thing.

**  **  **  

Now, what's this about the Feds trying to assassinate Trump?  Well, if the things reported in the MSM are true:

1. The Secret Service (SS) decided not to control the most obvious position overlooking the venue.  Cheatle's excuse that the roof had a slope and thus was too dangerous to post anyone is idiotic and obviously false.  The murderer's body did not roll off the roof once he was eliminated.  The snipers who ultimately killed the assassin were posted on a much steeper roof.  And roofers regularly put shingles on roofs that are far  steeper, without plummeting to the ground.

2. The police who were stationed in the building observed and photographed the sniper 30 minutes before the  shooting.  He was using a range finder, a device that measures the distance to a target.  They noticed he had a backpack.  Yet he was not stopped and searched.  

3. Numerous people in the crowd noticed the assassin crawling on the roof and saw that he had a gun.  They videoed him and shouted and pointed him out to the SS.  This was more than a minute before the shooting.

4. A law enforcement officer (LEO) climbed the ladder the murderer had set, to see what he was doing.  The murderer pointed his rifle at the LEO, who retreated.

5. All of this was observed by LEO snipers on another, steeper rooftop, through their riflescopes and spotting scopes.  With these scopes you can read the brand name on someone's jeans at 400 yards.  So the LEO snipers knew that they had a man armed with a rifle trying to sneak up on the President.  They allegedly asked for permission to shoot, which was denied.  Unh... I lived in Pennsylvania for a year, and before I went I studied PA's self defense law.  I could have legally shot the murderer when he was crawling  with a weapon.  When he pointed it at the LEO, the case for shooting him was airtight.  And then he pointed it at the President.  Yet they didn't shoot him.

6. The murderer fired eight rounds at Trump, murdering Corey Comperatore and wounding three others, including the President.  The shots took 4-5 seconds.  The LEO snipers (SS?) waited that long to respond and kill the assassin, even though they had rifles mounted on tripods aimed at him.  The only reasonable conclusion is that they allowed him to touch off eight rounds.  This morning I ran an experiment with a shot timer.  In less than four seconds I can pick up a firearm and put two rounds into the A zone of two targets.  And I'm not a trained professional, just a an amateur enthusiast.  

7. Trump's security detail included women who are clearly out-of-shape and untrained.  His regular bodyguards had been diverted to cover a speech by Jill Biden.  He was given incompetent idiots who didn't know what to do; the fat one couldn't even figure out how to holster her pistol.

8. Local police were locked out of the venue and had to ram a gate with a police cruiser to get in, once trouble developed.  The SS is blaming local authorities for security lapses, an obviously ridiculous position.

This is not an exhaustive list (yes, there's more), but the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that the Feds allowed the murderer to shoot at Trump.  They had many opportunities to stop him prior to him opening fire, and no legal restrictions that might have stopped them.  They observed him preparing to shoot, what with his range finding and his crawling around with a rifle and pointing at the LEO.  Once he started firing they allowed him to get off eight rounds, and only then did they kill him.  One would have to be stupid, addled by ideology, to think this is just a bunch of mistakes.  The same people who lied to FISA courts, bugged Trump Tower, promoted the Russian disinformation dossier, lied and claimed Hunter's laptop was simply Russian disinformation, have now tried to kill Donald Trump.  That's the obvious conclusion from the points above.

**  **  **

And these are in rough times, and they will get rougher.  God willing, reason and freedom will triumph.  And there's hope.  Unforeseen contingencies will prevail!

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 00:09 3 comments

Happy American Independence Day!  As is my usual practice, I have spent the morning rereading the Declaration of Independence and various meditations on it.  Today Law and Liberty had two that are particularly good.  250 Years of Jeffersonian Constitutionalism, by my friend Hans Eicholz, is a deep and careful analysis of Jefferson's "Summary View of the Rights of British America" and its implications for the Constitution as well as the Declaration.  It is worthwhile.

The second is Professor Paul Seaton's The Declaration's Timely Teaching on Immigration.  Seaton notes how the Declaration carefully distinguishes between the natural rights of each individual, a universal principle, and the political rights of a particular people to protect and defend their political order.  The Declaration applies this to immigration by noting George III had blocked laws facilitating immigration and naturalization.  Today our Federal government instead blocks these laws to facilitate mass invasion by unvetted, unaccountable, often hostile foreigners who are not to be naturalized.  Seaton points out how the Founders' understanding offers a rational alternative to bad ideas from leftists and national conservatives.  

Related to this theme, Scott Johnson has posted on the Powerline blog an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's speech of 10 July 1858, in his annual "The Eternal Meaning of Independence Day" post, in which Lincoln makes clear that it is the moral principle of equal individual rights in the Declaration that makes America what it is and the binds Americans together, and also that this is a universal principle that can and ought to connect all men.  In The Eternal Meaning of Independence Day (2) Johnson quotes Calvin Coolidge on the Declaration.  An excerpt: 

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. 

Finally, in the last letter he ever wrote in his life, the great Thomas Jefferson reflected on the Declaration and its importance: May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.

Hillsdale College has made a very nice short film dramatizing this, Last Days of a Revolutionary.

American Independence Day -- all people, everywhere, who love liberty, should study it, celebrate it, and live it.

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 14:45 0 comments

 Of late I've been in touch with people in several lines of work who have expressed horror at what is happening in their fields.  Among these are instructors at medical schools and military officers.  In each case the story they tell is chilling: the imposition of insane woke ideology, demands of conformity to obviously harmful things, quotas for various identities resulting in incompetent people being promoted, and competent people leaving.

The immediate effects are obvious -- medicine and military are life-and-death professions.  An incompetent person can get a lot of people hurt or killed.  But there's another matter perhaps less obvious.  Driving competent people out of a profession results in a loss of knowledge that can't be replaced.  Even if DEI programs are suddenly ended after a few years and people entering these professions selected only for merit and competence, there will be a loss of people and knowledge, and training the next generation to previous high pre-DEI standards won't be possible.  Knowledge is lost and skills decay.  The longer DEI nonsense is pursued, the greater the loss and the worse the problem.  It will become increasingly difficult to recover. We will retrogress.

This is akin to a problem economist John Cochrane has identified with so-called degrowth and the environmental anti-technological movement.  If such a movement gets its way, it might well lock us into a downward spiral of poverty we cannot escape.  Resources have become increasingly abundant because our advances in knowledge and thus technology have allowed us to turn what were once worthless submarginal deposits and stocks into valuable sources.  Real prices of resources systematically fall.  But these deposits are often not physically accessible with older technology, and should we stop or reverse technological advance, we no longer have the more easily accessed resources of the past, trapping humanity in resource-scarce poverty.

This is remarkably dangerous.  Advocates of DEI, degrowth, the war on reliable energy (i.e. nuclear, fossil fuels, and hydro power) are effectively working for the suicide of the West.  In every way the "woke" agenda is destructive.  It must be reversed at all cost.

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 19:56 0 comments

In the modern era, it is most likely that the two most warlike peoples in the world were the Germans and the Japanese.  Germany was hell-bent on war; for example, Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Merings (first name?) edited a volume published in 1900 that advocated Germany build a massive navy and rule South America.  Germany was the instigator of WWI, and Germany and Japan together started WWII.  Both countries built militaristic totalitarian regimes that plunged the world into war.  But militaristic no longer describes them; now they are arguably the most pacifistic nations in the world.  What happened?

In the Second World War both nations were utterly crushed.  They were defeated in battle, heavily bombed, and completely occupied.  They surrendered unconditionally to avoid total annihilation.  The result?  Peace!  And two previously warlike nations that subsequently became anti-war.  Harry S. Truman, Curtis LeMay, Dwight David Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, and the Allied forces should have received the Nobel Peace Prize for what they accomplished, but unfortunately did not.

Those who fight to crush aggressors and predators make peace, freedom, and civilization possible, and they should be recognized for their contributions.  Violence demonstrably begets peace, as the utter crushing of Germany and Japan show.  In this spirit, we at Unforeseen Contingencies propose that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 be awarded to Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF.  It is to be hoped, for the sake of the Palestinian people, that their spirit be so utterly crushed that, like the Germans and Japanese post-World War Two, they completely foreswear war and terror against Israel, and commit to living in peace and being as productive as the Germans and Japanese.  If this happens, the credit will go to Netanyahu and the IDF, for bringing peace.

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 22:38 0 comments

 This is the single best statement I've read on the conflict that has been forced on Israel.  An Israeli author, Dina Rubina, was invited to participate in an online discussion of her books.  But having accepted the invitation, she then found herself being asked to explain her position on the conflict.

She did, and it is magnificent.

The critics of Israel are vile.  The critics of Israel's just war to destroy Hamas are vile.  And Ms. Rubina has given them the perfect response.

// posted by Charles N. Steele @ 21:44 0 comments