To start with the grotesque, as is my custom:

Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the failed war in Iraq, a man who, if such losses were tallied against America, would have been on the docket at the Hague, along with his fellow merry reinterpreters of international law, to defend his killing and dispossessing of tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of anonymous brown people who never posed a threat to America. He famously quipped, stepping away from the standing desk he worked at, and cited as an example of the harmlessness of so-called ‘stress positions’ during the enhanced interrogations that unpatriotic, hyperbolic Americans insisted on calling ‘torture’: 

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.^[1]

And gruesome (and gratuitous) as it is to start with that gleeful executioner Rummy, there are, in any endeavor, the known unknowns as well as the unknown unknowns, which I have been pondering today, as most days.  To wit:  I have either already failed and stubbornly cling to the irrational belief that I can move this moribund program along or I have achieved much, against great odds, and am only one or two contacts away from making it the success it deserves to be.    

Only time will tell, I suppose, what kind of unknowns these are as I wait to hear back from my latest round of writing to convince other unknown people to help me with marketing, fundraising, etc.