M Alger gave me grief and subsequently “Ignored” me on facebook because I called him on “unintended consequences”. He maintains, they aren’t. Well, that’s horsecrap of the deepest, just because people aren’t prescient, and nobody pays attention to what they’re doing. It might certainly well be that the criminal- er, ruling classes understand and plot against us, and we can certainly see evidence of that without looking to hard- but for people like that to be in charge in the first place, requires legitimate and demonstrable acts of unintended consequence. I’m in a different factory every day, all over the damned country (Though more local than I used to be) and I am here to tell you, and you can take this as gospel truth: People are dumbasses. Even if you tell them of the consequences of their actions, they will do so anyway, and in the main, you really don’t know. Feel free to pipe up if you’ve never done anything you later thought, well, that was particularly stupid because X happened, and I fully didn’t expect that. I’ll wait.

Yes, as I expected, nobody. The results of actions we take that don’t turn out the way we want or turn out in some bad way are the very definition of unintended consequences. And they don’t follow a pattern. My cousin had to get permission to get married at age 16, and did so. You can guess what the consequences of that would be.

And you would be wrong. She and her husband are still very much in love, more than forty years later, and they will still be young when their great-grandchildren come along. They have raised two self sufficient children and have enjoyed their lives together immensely, though they began their marriage in a trailer with a borrowed car. We do not generally know what the results of our actions will be, and Thank G-d.