The results of human action are, as we all know too well, often confusing and generally unpredictable. The Law of Unintended Consequences, as it’s known.

Which is good news for writers, because — let’s face it — if people lived in perfectly rational societies and always made perfectly rational decisions, there’d be no literature.

And people like me would have to find honest work.

(Perish the thought.)

Which is why we need no-longer-obscure Joe “YOU LIE” Wilson, the congressman from South Carolina, and pigs.

Especially pigs in Egypt.

Pigs in Egypt? you ask. Yes, pigs in Egypt. Although I warn you, you should not try to make a joke about pigs in Egypt, at least not in print, because if you do, some irate reader will not get the joke and will e-mail you and compare your intelligence to that of a lump of granite. (Who knew granite came in lumps?)

You might remember last spring, before we fixated on town-hall meetings, swine-flu hysteria swept the globe, and as part of that hysteria, the Egyptian government ordered that all pigs in the country be slaughtered. Now, we all know (well, most of us) you cannot get swine flu from swine, but if people always made perfectly rational, etc., etc.

As the New York Times reports, Egypt killing all the pigs has had a severe consequence: garbage is piling up by the ton. And that’s because the Egyptian Christian community for 50 years, the Times says, collected the garbage, sold off what could be recycled, and fed the organic garbage to their pigs.

But now, no pigs. And the garbage is piling up, heap by heap. “The whole area is trash,” the Times quotes Cairo resident Ramadan Hediya as saying. “All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground.”

So, you kill all the pigs, and you turn your country into a garbage dump. Swell.

Well, we shouldn’t be too harsh with the Egyptians, because making truly bad decisions knows no nationality, no color of skin. Talk about your equal opportunity.

Take fighting the ozone hole. You remember that. (Well, some of you do.) In the ’80s, the growing ozone hole was the sexiest thing on the environmental front. A culprit was fingered as the cause — the CFCs used in air conditioning and refrigeration units.

As NPR reports, the Montréal Protocol banned CFCs. And the air-conditioning/refrigeration industry scrambled around and came up with HFCs to replace the CFCs.

Which apparently worked. I mean, how often do you hear about the ozone hole anymore?

There’s just one catch (there’s always a catch; have you noticed?): It turns out HFCs are a greenhouse gas, and we all know what that means for global climate change. (Well, most of us do; there are still some flat-earthers out there.)

In fact, as NPR reports, HFCs are hundreds of times worse than carbon dioxide. Hmmm.

So you try to fight the ozone hole, and global climate change pops up. You try to fight swine flu, and garbage piles up. You shout out, YOU LIE, and while you delight conservatives, and they pour donations into your re-election campaign, you enrage liberals, and from all across the country, they pour donations into your Democratic opponent’s campaign.

Human beings are great, aren’t they?

Thank god.