Vote. For Harriet.

I’m writing to tell you that I’m very worried. Something strange has happened, in addition to the election so egregiously being stolen from you, our rightful president. I’m told that in Arizona, paper ballots have turned into panda feed?? Argh! Who’s responsible?? Some say it’s the Chinese. I’m sorry, but I disagree. It wasn’t the Chinese; they don’t need more bamboo. It was probably our very own worst domestic enemy, the Left Coast, the Californians. You know, they’re the ones who need to feed those creatures in the San Diego Zoo. Yeah, yeah, I know the critters are from China, originally. But they’re the ones who would benefit the fastest from this. That’s what they chomp all day, Trump ballots! Tons of them! No wonder we can’t get our ballot numbers straight. May I suggest collecting panda poop?

And what if it’s not the Californians? It must be someone else. Who could it be? Who else has hungry pandas? Wisconsin? Michigan? Maybe, just maybe, it’s only one guy, acting solo. It could be the same thief who flew in the ballots -henceforth known as the ‘fake jewelry’- to Michigan to substitute for the real ones. Double argh!! Those of us who know Mighty Mickey (Lindell) is right, must heed your call and unify to have the real jewels (or ballots) returned to their rightful owner: The Real President of Us.

Interview with Seva Gunitsky is author of Aftershocks: Great Powers And Domestic Reforms In The 20th Century.

GUNITSKY: It seems to be the case that protests are just easier to organize today, and there's now more non-violent protest movements in the last 20 years than ever before, averaging more than 50 movements each year. During most of the Cold War, during the '90s, you had about half that. So this is a golden age for social movements in some way, at least for their numbers, at least for their visibility.

But success rates, not so much. Actually, we've seen a decline in the success rates of social movements by about 20% compared to just 10 years ago.

SHAPIRO: Wow.

GUNITSKY: And I think there are really two main factors at work here that could explain that. One is the nature of the protests themselves. They're easier to organize than ever, partly because of social media. It enables collective action. It allows protests to be mobilized on a larger scale than ever before. But social media still cannot replace the really hard work of building durable movements, which means physically organizing people, which means having a leadership structure.

My latest off-duty thoughts are up at substack.

Blogging with Tumblr has been a good experience, but substack offers an additional feature: you can choose to have my articles delivered directly to your inbox.

How the Trump Impeachment Ends

Read the thread. Spoiler:

I’m disappointed by this op-ed written by noted economist Tyler Cowen. He’s basically telling Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z that they will pay more during their peak earning years to make up for the contribution shortfall of today’s senior citizens. 

This is fundamentally unfair, not to mention the old you’ll-live-longer argument no longer holds. Life expectancy is not rising; in fact there is plenty of anecdotal evidence the younger generations are in worse shape than believed.

Don’t just take my word for it. Consider the work of my colleague Charles Blahous at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who is a relative pessimist (some would say an alarmist) on this issue. His reputation commends his work as a good benchmark for where Social Security really stands.

According to his estimates, if no further steps are taken to shore up the finances of Social Security, the system will stop being able to meet its scheduled payment obligations sometime in the 2030s. (Note that benefit hikes are part of the schedule.) That would be bad, but even under this scenario the system is still paying out a roughly constant level of inflation-adjusted benefits over time, at least as those benefits are defined as a percentage of workers’ taxable earnings (about 13%). Of course, to the extent those taxable earnings rise, the benefits will be rising too, even if not at a spectacular pace.

Keep in mind that this is the worst-case scenario offered by a relative pessimist.

Another way to describe the problem is that, over the next 75 years, about 17% of scheduled benefits are currently unfinanced. Blahous estimates that the U.S. could cover that gap if the Social Security payroll tax were raised from 12.4% to 15.1%.

Now, you might have strong views about the wisdom of that kind of tax increase, but you should acknowledge that this is a very different reality than a bankrupt system. With Social Security on full cruise control, and with no forward-looking reforms, today’s younger earners still are slated to receive more than their parents did — just not very much more.

Hedge fund honcho Ray Dalio was all over the Internet the other day, giving interviews on The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken. The way I’m hearing it is this: partisan populism is here, and things are going to get ugly. 

The problems he speaks of will affect American lives the most, but as we all know, there’s no escape from the blast radius. We are stuck with this problem for the rest of our lives.

Some quotes:

Investors have an abundance of money and then we also don't have much in the way of the trickling down . . . we do know that we have populism of the left and populism of the right and we're going to come into a period of time where that's going to be more challenging and it will have big effects on the markets.

As we move ahead there will be more printing of money that's necessary to fund those deficits. That will lead to "bad returns."

Those things will have to be normalised . . . will have to be rectified. Time will produce a paradigm shift.

We're going to need to raise taxes, but the question is how it's engineered and whether we're doing that in a partisan and in a nonpartisan basis.

There is no “again” in MAGA

In plain English, Yale prof Timothy D. Snyder says nationalists that want to Make Country X Great Again are selling tyranny to the people. Examples are Putin of Russia, Orban of Hungary, Brexiteers of England, Erdogan of Turkey, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, and of late, Trump of the United States. Ditto to resurgent nationalist parties all over Europe, and one Steve Bannon.

They have created a narrative, a national myth that their country will be restored to greatness once it is purged of other races, other religions and other languages. Except back then, none of these countries were great unto themselves. They were all empires: 

the USSR,

the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

the British Empire,

the Ottoman Empire,

the Persian Empire,

the French Empire,

the Portuguese Empire,

the Dutch Empire,

the German Empire,

the Spanish Empire,

the Italian Empire,

and now, the late, great American Empire.

Unless these authoritarians can restore their country’s former empire, Country X can never again attain the mythical greatness they presumably once had.

Here’s the fancy quote:

The rise of nationalism and the historic threat to liberalism sweeping the global system poses big strategic questions for European democracies. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin share an ideological belief in the language of race and nation combined with a winner-takes-all view of international diplomacy. By undermining the multilateral system the new authoritarians threaten a return to the assumptions of a previous era: a world of empires, not institutions.

This makes Europe a central crucible for what happens next. As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder argues, the EU is largely made up of states that were forced to give up their empires and so had no choice but to pursue multilateralism. Europe’s nationalists substitute the realities of this history with the national myth. They have become a major part of the EU’s own internal politics as the likes of Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński develop a fierce challenge to liberalism.

Welcome to the impeachment that dementia wrought.

What We Know

We already know that the Nash Equilibrium for the participants caught up in this impeachment dragnet is mutual defection. It was just a matter of time.

The arrests of associates of Rudy Giuliani yesterday, and the deposition of former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch today signals to all that the game has kicked into high gear.

What We Don’t Know

Where in the world is Rudy Giuliani? CNN reported Rudy “was planning to fly to Vienna, Austria, Thursday night,” that he “shared his travel plans with Elaina Plott of The Atlantic the day before an indictment unsealed on Thursday.” As far as I can tell, the last time Rudy was on air was with Hannity on Wednesday.

Is AG Bill Barr in big trouble? He was told of the arrests in advance, a masterstroke by SDNY. NBC news reported that Barr, “has been aware of the investigation into Parnas and Fruman since shortly after he came into office in February. The official said Barr has received regular briefings and was told Wednesday that the two would be arrested that evening.” 

Why did Parnas and Fruman leave town so quickly? They were due to testify before congress on Thursday and Friday. Did they have a sudden change of plan during lunch with Rudy at the Trump International Hotel? There’s no way out of this one. Either they never intended to show up in the first place or they somehow decided to flee on short notice. I didn’t read the SDNY charges, so perhaps this was question has already answered by the timestamps on the airline ticket purchase.

The Thesis

Many commentators have noted the amateurish nature of this whole affair, at committing/admitting to crimes on-air, and at the amount of cringe-worthy video left behind by Rudy Giuliani. 

From professional and personal experience, I offer this:

Professionals such as lawyers and accountants tend to make poor criminals; they overestimate their abilities.

Dementia patients tend to be paranoid and aggressive. It’s either fight or flight, with little contribution from the thinking parts of the brain.

I have long said that we could well wake up one day to see a live shot on CNN of the Trump jet sitting on the tarmac in Azerbaijan. Right now, I’m thinking the first one to go into exile will be Rudy Giuliani.

You Win or You Die is a lesson in realpolitik from Game of Thrones.

This episode is known for Tywin Lannister saying, "A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of the sheep." In the same scene, he explains to his son Jamie the difference between opinion and fact, because facts matter.

Game theory has a prediction for how the impeachment inquiry saga proceeds. As I wrote in the member discussion group, “Given the sheer number of people involved and the fact that this is a one-shot finite game, the predicted Nash equilibrium is MUTUAL DEFECTION.”

Watch the video above, the video below, and then I’ll give you my take on what we might call The Trump Doctrine. 

Let’s lay out the premises:

Pompeo states for the record that the CIA lied, cheated and stole. Officers and analysts are trained to do so.

Pompeo states for the record, ”Look, nations do this. Nations work together and they say, “Boy, goodness gracious, if you can help me with X, we’ll help you achieve Y.” This is what partnerships do. It’s win-win. It’s better for each of us. I don’t – I’m not offended when your prime minister asks me, “Can you help us with X?” Right? It doesn’t bother me a lick.”

The Trump Doctrine

Once you think on this a bit more, things start to fall into place:

Pompeo establishes that CIA personnel break their own motto, and that we can believe him because he was the director.

Pompeo establishes that NATIONS do partnerships. He does not use the word ALLIES or co-operation.

The message is simple: 

The CIA (code word for U.S. intelligence community) is dirty.

There is no difference between cooperation with established democratic allies of the United States (such as NATO member countries) and partnerships with the absolute rulers of Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, Egypt, etc.

Therefore, disregard intelligence community, and journalists should stop playing “some silly gotcha game” because the American people don’t care when government officials lie to them. These messages are repeatedly reinforced on TV:

Tucker: Trump refused to bow to intelligence agencies;

Tucker: Media try to get you to care about impeachment.

Senator Ron Johnson attacks the CIA, FBI and the press.

Pompeo says nations help each other. What he did not say, but screams out loud is that the word nations can now be interchangeably used with the person of the absolute ruler. 

We can conclude:

It is no longer what the United States can do for Saudi Arabia (or Russia, North Korea, China, Egypt, etc.), it is what Trump can do for the King, and what the King can do for Trump. The absolute rulers are partners.

By extension, there is a need to replace absolute rulers that refuse to become partners. Trump can use the collective resources of the United States to effect regime change that produces “partners” for him. 

This world view also explains why democratically elected leaders have been treated poorly by Trump. They are of no use to him since they cannot rule by decree and hide the details of their partnership.

And there you have it, an hypothesis that explains what is happening to the leader of Ukraine, why the free press is “the enemy of the people,” and how Mike Pompeo morphed from the cadet that graduated first in his class at West Point to his ascent to the position as the King’s Hand.