‘Black Swan Event’ – Is It Reasonable To Expect The Unexpected?

ANALYSIS – High-impact, unexpected, rare events are known as “black swans.” And we may be heading for something huge like that in 2024. It could be related to the U.S. election or a major foreign policy crisis (or several) and more likely a combination of the two.

Or worse.

The term was popularized in Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2007 book “The Black Swan.”

According to Taleb, the term ‘black swan event' has three components: “First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

So, what are some examples? As The Blaze reported:

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the rise of the internet, the personal computer, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and the Pacific tsunami of December 2004 apparently qualify as black swan events. According to Taleb, the term is not, however, a catch-all term for “any bad thing that surprises us.”

For instance, the statistician told the New Yorker that the COVID-19 pandemic was not a black swan event because it had been wholly predictable.

And this is exactly what Catherine Herridge, the former Chief Intelligence correspondent at Fox News suggested during the CBS “Face the Nation” roundtable on Christmas Eve.

She said ominously that “2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that's very hard to predict.”

Herridge is not just any reporter. The wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Herridge is now a senior investigative reporter at CBS News. She has spent a lifetime covering the Pentagon and Intelligence Community (IC).

The Blaze continued:

Herridge told the other CBS News panelists Sunday there were a number of concerns that factored into her “dark” prediction, including that “this sort of enduring heightened threat level that we're facing, the wars in Israel, also Ukraine, and we're so divided in this country in ways that we haven't seen before. And I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea and China and Iran.”

And she is absolutely correct.

The Blaze added:

China, which continues to deepen its ties with Russia and seeks to displace the U.S. on the world stage by 2049, has grown increasingly antagonistic toward the United States in recent years. The communist regime has subjected Americans to intimidation and coercion campaigns on U.S. soil; aerial threats by People's Liberation Army fighter jets; bombastic threats over political visits to Taiwan; espionage and political destabilization efforts by communist agents; a deadly influx of fentanyl via its informal Mexican cartel partners; and hacking campaigns.

North Korea's communist regime threatened to pre-emptively launch a nuclear strike on rivals after conducting an intercontinental ballistic missile test earlier this month…

Iran threatened last week to seal off the Mediterranean Sea if the U.S. and Israel continue to commit so-called “crimes” in Gaza.

Meanwhile, one user on X argued that her warning is just a prelude to election interference by Team Biden:

“Any high impact national security event is likely to be the work of the current illegitimate US government looking for an excuse to cancel the presidential election and stop Trump regaining his rightful office,” posted Pat Condell.

Others accused Herridge of being a CIA asset, without a shred of evidence.

And, yes, there already is election interference by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and leftist state and local prosecutors gunning for Trump. The Biden administration and its Democrat cabal also may be planning a justification for manipulating, or even restricting the 2024 election.

But I'm also seriously worried about real foreign crises that could take us to a major war, while the expected election chaos is unfolding. The U.S. is definitely steaming into very dangerous uncharted waters.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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