I WENT to court only once in my life, and it was a case over force majeure. Here is the brief summary.
About a year after Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in June 1991, in a case my lawyer filed before the Angeles City regional trial court (RTC), I sought indemnification from the insurance company that insured my poultry farm. A total of 11 poultry buildings collapsed under the sheer weight of the ash and lahar that piled up on the rooftops. The eruption, called the “volcanic eruption of the century,” happened after more than 600 years of Pinatubo’s slumber, and there was no way I could have prepared for that force majeure, the pleading filed by my lawyer stated. The insurance company was mandated to compensate me for the damages from the force majeure.
The Angeles City RTC asked the insurance company to pay up after it agreed with my interpretation of force majeure. The Court of Appeals, historically on the side of powerful corporate groups like insurance companies, offered a different interpretation. It was a force majeure, the insurance company had no obligation to pay, then summarily dismissed my petition for indemnification. Was there lobbying from the insurance cartels that swayed the CA decision? That I don’t know.
From that case, I learned a valuable lesson. Force majeure is open to interpretation. It can be correctly interpreted by good judges and great legal minds. It can be invoked by the ill-informed with barely functioning brains. Brains that can’t distinguish between “acts of God” and catastrophic events that scheming men had planned and set into motion. Addled brains who are desperately trying to win an unwinnable argument. Or brains addled by hubris and self-importance, an affliction of men and women in power.
Take the specific circumstances and events that, according to pardoned felon and now senator of the realm Robinhood Padilla, constitute force majeure: Middle East war, possible conflict between China and Taiwan, and El Niño.
A little reading on the part of the pardoned felon cum senator Padilla would have made him realize that the fresh Middle East conflict, which was triggered by the joint decision of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump to bomb Iran on Feb. 28, involved a lot of manmade planning and premeditation, the opposite of force majeure. According to multiple press reports, Netanyahu had been asking previous US presidents to help him bomb Iran, to no avail. Then came Trump whose megalomania and hubris made him an easy prey to Netanyahu’s scheming for Iran’s supposed “obliteration.”
Trump who, like Padilla, does not take time to read and has a subpar understanding of critical global issues and geopolitics, did not realize that cheap drones, which Iran has stockpiled, has changed the nature of 21st century conflicts. According to military experts, non-drone powers, including Russia and the US, are about to go obsolete despite their huge budgets and superior naval and air power. Drones enabled Ukraine to continue fighting Russia after more than four years of war despite Kremlin’s boast in late February 2022 that it could take Kyiv in “less than a week.” Cheap drones enabled Tehran to strike back at the US military facilities in the Persian Gulf and US allies in the region even after most of its theocratic leadership was decapitated in the Feb. 28 bombings.
Iran has been defying and mocking the US since the Feb. 28 bombing. It now controls the Strait of Hormuz, that critical passage for 20 percent of the global oil and a bigger share of the inorganic fertilizer the broader world needs. Iran’s leverage? Cheap drones and missiles that can destroy multibillion-dollar civilian and military vessels attempting to sail through the strait. The closure of Hormuz is the reason for our elevated fuel and fertilizer prices and our overall misery right now.
China has been salivating over Taiwan since 1972, the year US President Richard Nixon made that historic trip to China, and the broader world started to adopt the one-China policy, dropping the recognition of Taiwan as an independent nation in the aftermath. A cursory reading by the pardoned felon Padilla would have made him realize the fact that Nixon’s historic China trip predated by several decades the time the court declared him a felon. And the sad day in the 21st century that made him a senator
That Taiwan is the host of the global chips giant TSMC, which chip production technology is the envy of the world and cannot be replicated elsewhere, is intensifying China’s lusting over the takeover of Taiwan. Computer chips are considered the “new gold” and TSMC’s chip production is the gold standard in that manufacturing area.
There is no geopolitical fantasy in the world that would regard China’s lusting over Taiwan, which can really lead to a conflict, a force majeure. It is the cobwebs hosted in the minds of insufferable idiots that classify a possible China-Taiwan conflict as a force majeure.
El Niño and other extreme weather disturbances are abetted by climate change, that global, man-made, environmental scourge. You will learn that if you have the patience to read the many IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports on that topic. A multidisciplinary team that wrote one of those IPCC reports won a Nobel Prize and that team included now Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Please read, you pardoned felon. And spare this already suffering nation from the paroxysms of your insufferable idiocy.
