I think it’s called urban warfare.
DB2
That’s what happens when you bring up Black Swans. Not a single black was swan was sighed among the thousands of rockets. 
The Captain
General Sherman wrote a letter to the Atlanta city council. Sherman urged the council to advise residents to leave the city. Sherman said he had no beef with the people of the city, but he needed to destroy the facilities in the city.
Snips:
We don’t want your negroes, or your horses, or your houses, or your hands, or any thing that you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it. You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better.
Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the (wea)ther until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and (pe)ace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta. Yrs., in haste,
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OK, I changed the color of the swan. Happy now?
Sheesh! Never saw so many people get hung up on something so trivial, when we are trying to discuss a significant event.
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At least, it could never happen here, right?
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Media are presenting the Hamas attack as a diversion sponsored by Iran to stop the Israel/Saudi agreement.
But it is the expected response to the “two nation solution is dead” idea.
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Do they really sigh?
Andy
iirc, a few years ago, the US mediated an “arty” deal between Israel and the Saudis, in which the Pals were not consulted, were not allowed to participate. At that time, some analysts, looking at that deal, said US support for the “two state solution” was dead.
Steve
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On top of oil futures being up $3, bubblevision’s site is showing Dow 30 futures down 200, as if the last couple months have not been rocky enough.
Steve
I’m just the messenger! There are examples of Black Swans in the books. One example is WWI. Even after the war started, leaders believed that it would be over quickly, a matter of months at the most and things would return to the status quo. Another example is the Long Term Capital Management implosion. LTCM had TWO Nobel Prize winners on the board and thought they perfectly had analyzed and managed downside risk. But it turns out there was a risk they hadn’t considered and it destroyed them.
People seem to think that Black Swans are like the Pale Rider from Revelations, the bringer of death. So any major bad event is a Black Swan. But that’s wrong. According to the guy who coined the term, Black Swans are like getting hit by the bus you didn’t see coming. If you see the bus coming, you simply step out of the way.
If you could time travel back five years and tell your previous self that Israel and Hamas would be going at it in the future, you’d nod your head and say “Yep. That sounds about right.” So, if you see the bus coming, it isn’t a black swan (sorry for the mixed metaphor).
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These Black Swans make an unearthly sound never heard on Earth before. You have to hear it to experience it. It’s even more difficult to explain than the taste of wine, flowery, nightmarish, dark, gruesome, beguiling…
The Captain
There are lots of Black Swan events in history. Syke listed LTCM as an example, a (supposedly) perfect mesh of risk vs arbitrage which got clobbered when things didn’t go as every perfectly perfect analysis said it would.
Here are some others:
The 9/11 attacks. Everybody knew there was a faction of Islamic fundamentalists who hated us, heck they had already attacked the World Trade Center with a truck bomb. But in spite of stepped up vigilance at the building and within the intelligence community, no one foresaw the hijacking of full fueled airliners and using them as bomb delivery devices.
The Fukushima disaster: again, the dangers of nuclear plants were well understood, but apparently not well enough, as an earthquake caused a tsunami which inundated and stopped emergency generators located at ground level or below from operating. That, in turn, let to a meltdown and the destruction of not just the plants but of hundreds of square miles of infrastructure, housing and industry. There was plenty of planning for an earthquake in an earthquake prone reason. There was no planning for a tsunami which might result because no one imagined it.
The failure of Lehman Brothers. One of the biggest, most reliable outfits on Wall Street was suddenly worthless overnight. Who could have foreseen that, in spite of the risk taking that is an inherent part of the business. Lehman got caught holding bad paper in the time it was taking to turn it into “good paper” and selling to hedgies, foreign investors and others, and overnight, poof!
Similarly, AIG was insuring all manner of things (and quite profitably too), and had any single or even group of bets gone bad they likely would have been able to pay off. But the whole system went bad all at the same time, and there wasn’t enough money in the piggy bank to assure that which they had insured, and poof! (The same would be true of nearly any insurance company If the Yellowstone SuperVolcano was to destroy the country, there would be no payouts because insurance can’t deal with “everything at once.”) Black swan event.
What Black Swans have in common is their devastating impact, but also that they lie far outside the traditional risk assessment of even the most competent, uh, risk assessors. They are not just unexpected, they are generally undreamed of - and when they do happen they are macro-economically gigantic.
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Yet everyone you listed is something that I could think could happen. So it seems the definition of a black swan is not something that nobody could think could think of but a disaster that caught everyone off guard. Like the attack on Israel. After all Israel is calling the attack on them a 9/11 event.
Andy
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The problem is that you could think of it in hindsight but how about in foresight. In hindsight the Great Warm makes sense but a study of the news leading up to it says that it was considered highly unlikely.
It is very difficult to get into the mindset of before the fact.
The Captain
Because the Mossad didn’t see it coming, or to try and win the sympathy and support of USians, for whatever the Israelis do next? Recall the sort of policies the US instituted, beside the made-up wars based on lies: imprisonment without legal due process, surveillance without warrant, torture. Any time anyone questioned the policies, Bush would start bawling “we were victims on 9/11”, as if that justified the police state he was building.
Today, Israel has announced a siege of Gaza, cutting off food, fuel, water, and electricity supplies.
Netanyahu says he is going to leverage this event to “change the Middle East”. What would that “change” be? I’m thinking a strong dose of “ethnic cleansing”, maybe to the ragged edge of genocide: drive out, or kill, every Pal in Gaza and the West Bank. The extremist nutters in his coalition would like that, and that leveraging of a disaster is very reminiscent of the PNAC plan for the US to leverage a disaster to use military force to take over the world.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/middleeast/israel-gaza-hamas-fighting-monday-intl-hnk/index.html
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Like exterminating the buffalo?
The Captain
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Sort of, only with people.
Pete
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Hamas started a war to kill and kidnap people like Russia did in Ukraine. Maybe that’s where they got their inspiration. If Russia can do it why not Hamas? Maybe the Ukrainians should stand down and take it…
The Captain
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On the evening of 9/11, the local Detroit news interviewed local personality Debbie Schlussel on what the US’ response should be. She said words to the effect “turn Israel loose to attack, then the US attack with them”. The news anchor said “attack who?”, because, right then, the perps were not precisely known. She said words to the effect “attack Arabs, doesn’t matter, they are all Arabs”, as if she was channeling the quote attributed to General Phil Sheridan “the only good Indian is a dead one”.
Debbie who?
Professor of Media and Public Affairs William Youmans described Schussel as a “leading right-wing observer of AD [Arab Detroit, whose] blogging, articles, and op-eds inform other right-wing activists, who mobilize against government-community relations when they seem too cozy. This group has called for greater scrutiny of Arab and Muslim Americans by government officials, and officials they consider pro-Arab are frequent targets of their protests. Consistently, Schlussel and her allies have described Detroit’s Arab Americans as potential terrorists.” Professor Julianne Hammer described Schussel as an “anti-Muslim pundit”
After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Schlussel wrote on her blog, “1 down, 1.8 billion to go”, referring to the world’s total Muslim population.
Sadly ironic to see a Jewish woman advocating for genocide.
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A nuclear accident? To many have happened. A terrorist attack? To many have happened. A financial crisis? To many have happened. The Great Warm, c’mon, just because you doubted it doesn’t mean it wasn’t fore seen. There were lots of scientist who have predicted it. I think you guys are defining a Black Swan as something that surprised you, but if other people call something a black swan, and it didn’t surprise you, Well that can’t be a black swan. Seems very arbitrary, very, very arbitrary.
Andy
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