Game Theory in The Age of Chaos: 2017-2020 Omnibus Edition

More books from Mike Selinker and friends
The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design

The Maze of Games
The Theseus Guide to the Final Maze
The Keymaster’s Tome
The Ghastlytrump Tinies
Puzzlecraft: How to Make Every Kind of Puzzle
The Puzzlecraft Workbook
Dealer’s Choice: The Complete Handbook of Saturday Night Poker
Coordination and production

M. Sean Molley, Shane Steed, and Skylar Woodies
The authors would like to thank

Christopher Adams, Sverre Bodung, Chad Brown, Tabitha Grace Challis,
David Chen, Jeff Cisneros, Alexander Cobian, Anya Combs, Ryan Costello,
Luke Crane, Jenni DelVecchio, Krupal Desai, Matt Fantastic, Kiva Fecteau,
Katie Fountaine, Evon Fuerst, Aaron Fuegi, Anthony Gallela, Susan Glass,
Nathaniel Granor, August Hahn, Gabrielle Harbowy, Jaclyn Hebron,
Hadden Hoppert, Thomas Idzikowski, L. Scott Johnson, Darla Kennerud,
Trevor Kidd, Dan Kramarsky, Eric Levasseur, Ken Levin, Tristan Levine,
Regan MacStravic, Eric Maddy, Laser Malena-Webber, Ryan McRae, Adam Mersky,
Cat Miller, Alison Muratore, Greg Nagler, Tanis O’Connor, Linda Peltier-Moore,
Damian Puggelli, Keith Richmond, Adrienne Robasse, Richard Thames Rowan,
Douglas Seacat, Larry Selinker, Phyllis Selinker, Tiffany Chatham Smith,
Peter Spawn, Keith Stattenfield, Jeremy Sydik, Jason Tinling, Shane Tilton,
Jessica Smith Wallace, Kevin West, Benjamin Wintersteen, and all our backers
Lone Shark Games, Inc.

P.O. Box 356
Renton, WA 98057 USA
Book and shark fin logo © 2020 Lone Shark Games, Inc.
Text © 2020 Mike Selinker & Richard Malena-Webber.
ISBN 978-0-9913159-6-3
Printed in China
medium.com/@mikeselinker • atomicgametheory.com
lonesharkgames.com
2 Game Theory in the Age of Chaos

Contents
5 Foreword by Senator Steve Hobbs
8 Introduction: What happened?
12 Game theory and the two magic words that will impeach
Trump
18 The gambler: Why Trump keeps doubling down on an idiotic
Russia strategy
24 Co-op mode: Why Trump sees “many sides” to Nazi murder
30 Abortion rights and the game theory of armor
36 Good Guys, Bad Guys, and the end of an armed society
42 Two madmen play poker: The North Korea bluff-off
48 Sweet relief: How we can pay our national debt upstream
56 The Kap trap: Why no team will call in Kaepernick
62 Beating the veto player: How to end sexual harassment in the
workplace
68 Playing chicken with Robert Mueller is a bad idea
74 The GOP is living in a fantasy world on taxes—specifically,
Star Wars
82 Trump is tanking the presidency
90 Targeting the Clinton Foundation is Trump’s dumbest
move yet
98 For Trump, everything ends when the Wall comes down
106 How to make a weak man feel strong: Throw him a military
parade
112 The Democrats pick the right strategy (even though it hurts)
118 The grim trigger: Trump declares a trade war on himself
126 #MPRraccoon and the puzzle of hope
132 Seizing children is good policy (if you’re a complete monster)
138 Trump gambles for resurrection
144 Mike Pence is the Werewolf
152 Game-changer: How the Democrats won the Kavanaugh war
by losing the battle
158 Playing Diplomacy with Nancy Pelosi is a dangerous game
166 Ready Individual One: The quizzical power of a lame duck
172 The GOP Legacy: Elections don’t have consequences
178 Trump tanked the presidency. Can he tank the economy too?
186 A candidate’s guide to winning the rock-paper-scissors primary
192 Trump will always blink
198 Howard Schultz: The man who would be kingmaker
206 In politics, the cost of apologizing is astronomical
216 Pawn sacrifice: Justin Fairfax and the case for in-party
impeachment
222 Mr. Trump’s crime code
Game Theory in the Age of Chaos 3
230 The FBI showed college is a broken game, and Elizabeth
Warren can fix it
238 Barr Sinister: How to beat a corrupt referee
248 I don’t think she knows about Second Brexit, Pip: How
Theresa May’s war of attrition killed everyone
256 No one wants to go to war with Iran. We’re going anyway.
264 If Trump’s not indicted because he can’t be, he should be
272 If you liked Jeb!, you’ll love Joe!
282 When your senator threatens to kill state troopers, your system
is broken
288 You don’t have to want to save the planet. You just have to.
300 The Epstein–Barr virus: Why conspiracies beget more
conspiracies
310 You can’t spell “believer” without “lie”: A look at why Trump
lies so much
318 The Thunder in the Rotunda: How Nancy Pelosi rope-a-doped
Trump
326 Game theory and the four magic words that will convict Trump
334 Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump, and the bet
against America
346 The Butt Fumble: Rudy Giuliani and the incompetence gambit
354 How much of history is random?
362 Did Boris Johnson just show Nancy Pelosi how to destroy Trump?
368 The politics of believing in God
378 America is in a game of Cyberball, and it hurts. Just like love.
388 Bernie’s campaign is the best ever. It may not matter.
398 The Progressive Voltron: How to buy an election
408 Respecting the game: My endorsement in the 2020 primary
416 “I don’t take responsibility at all”: Trump fails the Trolley
Problem
426 Humanity at the Crossing: Defining the value of work in an
unsafe world
436 When the social contract dies, it’s time to riot
448 The Klan is a terrorist organization; Antifa is neither.
456 Southern discomfort: Lose the Confederacy or lose billions
466 The irrelevant elephant: On script, Trump’s GOP turns heel
476 All a prevent defense does is prevent your presidency
484 Kamala Harris finally finds her brand
496 2020 vision: What to do when everything is life-or-death
508 A wargame designer defines our four possible civil wars
526 Conclusion: What happens now?
529 From the archives: An open letter to Speaker Boehner from a
game designer

Foreword
I’ve spent 14 years in the State Senate as a moderate
Democrat in a blue state representing a swing district.
My first election was a battle royal, as I tried to win my
primary against the wishes of my own party. The Senate
Democratic Caucus supported my opponent with
money, a campaign HQ, and a full-time staffer.
However, I beat the party’s anointed candidate and
went on to beat a 12-year GOP incumbent through
hard work, knocking on a ton of doors, and the high
Charisma modifier on my character sheet.
Four years later, my first re-election featured the same

opponents. I barely eked out a win when almost every
freshman Democrat was crushed by the red wave of
2010. Everyone hated Obamacare and Obama (which
seems quaint alongside the madness of our current
administration, and now everyone loves Obamacare and
wants Obama back). My next two elections were easier
but there were some knife-fight moments.
You’d think after that first victory I would’ve played the

political game, embraced my caucuses’ policy stances,
locked arms on procedural votes, and cast quiet “no”
votes when asked. I went the other way. I killed bills
that my district didn’t like, formed my own moderate
alliance called The Roadkill Caucus, and broke the most
sacred rule when I broke with my caucus on a
procedural motion. This made me a better legislator and
a better representative of the people who elected me,
but it has been an anchor on my political career. I still
pay for actions from ten years ago—just ask some of
the longtime insiders working in Olympia.
If you know anything about politics, you know not
playing the game is a surefire way to find yourself
relegated to an ineffective back-bencher. Despite this, I
have become Senate Transportation Chair and have
passed or assisted in passing great progressive policy:
all-day kindergarten, expansion of career and technical
education, reproductive fairness, marriage equality,
statewide healthcare for educators, bipartisan budgets,
expanded voting rights, and education funding. While
some of my actions have been unorthodox, they’ve
been motivated by my search for a middle ground. I’ve
passed contentious bills by bringing opposing interest
groups together and shattering political brick walls.
Game theory has been at the center of it all.
Now you’re thinking, “Right, Steve, you’re just saying

that so Mike gives you a big cut of the sales from his
book. Plus, you’re full of crap because you got elected in
2006 and Mike wrote this book more than a decade
later.” Good points but here’s the deal, Mike ain’t
paying me a red cent (Mike, we need to talk about this).
He’s using the proceeds to help Democrats. Also, I never
knew I was following game theory as a legislator till I
read his book. Turns out I was fighting hard against the
Stag Hunt Dilemma when working to pass the $16
billion 2015 Transportation Package. What’s the Stag
Hunt Dilemma? Read the book!
To think, when I played all those decades of Axis &

Allies, RPGs, and just about every tabletop game, I was
honing my political skills. Going to those political
conventions was like going to tabletop gaming con
minus the fun, and my weekly D&D night with my
friends is preparing me for budget negotiations and
political deal-making. In both, you fight trolls.
Before you pooh-pooh the idea of using game theory to
understand the real-life game of politics, maybe you
should ask yourself what is the difference? In a tabletop
game you are using rules, and possibly dice, cards,
pieces, and other resources. A flip of a card or a roll of
the dice determines success or failure driven by your
strategy to meet a desired end. It’s no different than
using laws, institutional rules, political maneuvering,
PACs, allied organizations, social media, and money
driven by your strategy to meet a desired end or policy
goal.
My political science professor once defined politics as

relationships of control, I believe it’s more about
relationships of influence. Control implies absolute
ability to manipulate a relationship and that just doesn’t
happen in a political environment unless you have the
tyrannical power to do that. Also, it’s not very
democratic. You want to influence a relationship to
achieve a desired end state without burning a bridge or
turning existing relationships against you. It’s more
about having your opposition buy into your idea rather
then you trying to force them to back down.
This book uses game theory to explain individual and

group decision making as it applies to policy decisions.
Human psychology and math are at play in game theory
just as they are in politics. However, the truth is politics
is everywhere and this book can be used in business,
education, and other organizations that you might want
to influence. So stop reading this foreword and read the
rest of the book.
Steve Hobbs
Senator, 44th District, Washington
Introduction
What happened?
September 16, 2018 and September 16, 2020
If you only have a vague idea of who I am, you might

be wondering why a game and puzzle designer is writing
about politics. Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I mean,
people a lot worse than you have wondered that aloud,
usually using the words “Why don’t you just stick to
making games!” or other condescending comments.
Not you, though. You’re okay in my book.
As for what else is okay in my book, these essays use

game theory—a thing I’ve studied a little bit and put in
practice a lot—to explain the troubling situation we find
ourselves in. It’s a situation crying out for explanation.
On November 9, 2016, I woke up to fascists crowing at

their chance to take over the White House. Some were
surprised that they came out of the shadows in such
abundance. Not me. Anyone in the game industry knew
they were there. They’d swamped our forums with their
love of authoritarians, hatred of diversity, and penchant
for violence, especially aimed at women. Steve Bannon
started a company to gold-farm World of Warcraft and
rallied a generation of man-children to destroy America.
The thing is, deep in our hearts, we knew we were
better than them. That gave us a different feeling, which
was that because we were better people, that made us
absolutely sure we could stop them.
Which would have obvious to us as a clear error if we’d

looked even a little bit at game theory at the time.
Specifically, the error of zero-sum thinking.
Game theorists like to look at a principle we call the

zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, any gains by one
competitor are suffered as losses by the other
competitors. An election result looks like this. If I get
more votes than you, I win.
But an election is not just about a comparison of

percentage results. The process of holding an election is
a non-zero-sum game. That’s because turnout matters.
If I can get more of my people to show up, I don’t have
to convince your people to be my people. We can both
increase our results without reducing the other’s results.
We fell into the trap of thinking the game was zero-
sum, won the popular vote, and lost a nation.
So, all it took for the worst American imaginable to

become the worst president imaginable was for the
Republicans to find some people who had not been
activated before. People who didn’t feel a connection to
the electoral process. People who felt outside the
mainstream.
You know, Nazis.
To be clear, most people who voted for Trump weren’t

Nazis. Most were ordinary Republicans. Some believed
the racist semi-billionaire would look out for them
instead of the people they thought got all the breaks.
People who had it better than white heterosexuals, I
guess. It’s hard to envision the argument that says that
the demographic group that has run everything in
America for centuries is the oppressed one. But you
don’t have to understand it to know it’s there.
These were real Nazis. It took a man as vile as these

modern-day Nazis to rally them. They won because of a
deadly combination of hard work, Russian interference,
and appeals to the worst beliefs. Violence against
women. Violence against the press. Violence against
Arabs and Mexicans. Violence against each other.
Alexander Hamilton had this one, by the way. Writing

in his Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration of
the Government, he said:
The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a

subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by
flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their
jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into
confusion, and bring on civil commotion.... When a man
unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune,
bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents,
having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his
ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private
at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to
mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry
of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of
embarrassing the General Government & bringing it
under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the
nonsense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be
suspected that his object is to throw things into
confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the
whirlwind.”

So, hey, we got the whirlwind. Before we could quell it,
we had to understand it. As the GOP got hijacked by
fascists, I dusted off the skills I gained in Chicago as an
investigative reporter and research director for Mayor
Daley. I wrote a popular Tumblr screed called “An
open letter to Speaker Boehner from a game designer,”
which you can see at the end of this book.
Before the election, my Basket of Adorables partner

Gaby Weidling and I published a little cartoon book
called The Ghastlytrump Tinies, a depiction of all we’d lose
after Trump was elected. It too was popular, raising
$10,000 in contributions to the Clinton campaign and
the Southern Poverty Law Center.
After the inauguration, I kicked off a series of game

theory pieces for Medium, trying to rationalize what was
happening as an alternative to screaming at the
darkness. Now I’ve put them in this book. I was greatly
assisted by Gaby and editor Wes Schneider. Atomic
Game Theory mathematician Rich Malena-Webber
penned deeper analyses of specific game theory
concepts in the sidebars. Washington State Senator
Steve Hobbs wrote a stirring foreword. Liz Spain and
Skylar Woodies crafted a brilliant and disturbing cover.
This book covers the four years of the Trump

presidency from 2017 to 2020. As we put this together
during the election of 2020, we used it to help the
Democrats take back the White House and Senate.
They’re the only hope of getting out of this with an
intact America. If you can help them, please do. If these
essays focus your efforts, so much the better.
And now, some magic words.

Game theory and the
two magic words that
will impeach Trump
July 23, 2017
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that game theory is a

beast. It’s how we got Trump. We knew Candidate
Trump was a racist, a sexist, a fraud, a fascist, a creep, a
climate change denier, an anti-vaxxer, and a colossal
fool. Some of us voted for him anyway, because he was
a disruptor. Hillary Clinton was our stable equilibrium, a
validation of everything we had done up to that point.
But Trump tried a bold new strategy—fumble through
debates, collude with Russia, brag about sexual assault,
threaten to shoot people—and new strategies are the
only things that disrupt stable equilibriums. Et voilà,
President Trump.
But even those who voted for disruption didn’t know

that he was this stupid, this destructive, this infantile.
They didn’t know that in six months, he’d reach where
Nixon and Clinton got to in six years: the edge of
impeachment. Of course, one thing stops us from
rectifying the dumbest move Americans have made
since the founding of the Confederacy: the GOP’s
hammerlock on Congress. The only body that can
remove him seems perfectly happy to be in blind
lockstep with a boy who plays with trucks while health
care reform dies.
Trump provided a disruption. Game theory says we

need one too. I think that disruption comes in the form
of some magic words. Only two of them, really.
Those words are “AND PENCE.”
I’m guessing you’re used to saying, “Impeach Trump!”

Just add the words “and Pence” to the end. It’ll take a
bit to get used to. You’ll get it. “Impeach Trump and
Pence!” Let it roll sweetly off your tongue. Say it a lot.
Here’s why. Game theory has this little gem called the
prisoner’s dilemma. You have two suspects and only
enough evidence to give each a short sentence. You
independently offer each suspect the ability to walk free
if he just rats the other out. If both of them don’t take
the bait, they both get the short sentence. Yet they
squeal every time, getting the longer sentence,
because each doesn’t know what the other will do.
Accordingly, the situation is always less bad for each
one if they betray the other.
Let’s talk about Mike Pence. He’s worse than Trump,

some say. Well, no, he’s not, in that Pence won’t nuke
Ontario if Alex Jones tells him to. But he is bad in a lot
of ways. We don’t want him as president, at least for
very long. So, we shout, “Impeach Trump and Pence!”
at the top of our lungs. He’s a smart guy. He’s gonna
hear it. If he hears it enough, that will guide his
behavior. Because Pence is about the only person who
can organize a 25th Amendment cabinet vote of
unfitness against Trump.
If Pence fears impeachment, he might take the weasel
way out and turn on his boss. But Pence isn’t a weasel.
His defining characteristic is loyalty—to his God, his
wife, his president—so we need something else at work.
We need to guide Rep. Paul Ryan’s behavior. As speaker

of the House, Ryan gets to be president if Trump and
Pence are simultaneously booted. While no one else wants
that, Congress’s resident hamster-devil1 assuredly does.
If Ryan knows Pence fears impeachment, Ryan—whose
defining characteristic is not loyalty—might be spurred
to make that happen.
And if Pence knows Ryan knows Pence fears

impeachment, the veep might cut a deal with Senate
leader Mitch McConnell. Because if McConnell knows
Pence knows Ryan knows Pence fears impeachment,
he’ll tell his pal Pence that the Senate GOP won’t
convict him.
And if Ryan knows McConnell knows Pence knows

Ryan knows Pence fears impeachment, Ryan’s only
move is to impeach fast.
And if Pence knows Ryan knows McConnell knows

Pence knows Ryan knows Pence fears impeachment,
Pence’s only move is to turn on Trump faster. If Pence
can get out in front of this train, he can be president
before Ryan files the papers against him.
The thing about getting out in front of a train, though,

is you get run over by a train.
1This position opened up when Ryan retired at the end of the 2018
session.
The train—the Republicans’ Rambo Coalition—is
composed of three groups: the Racists, the Zealots, and
the Randies. Trump and Steve Bannon lead the Racist
faction; they monsterize Muslims, Mexicans, and
African Americans, and the Racists eat it up like deep-
fried Twinkies. Pence is a standard-bearer for the
Zealots; he’s got a puncher’s chance to outlaw abortion
and gay marriage, and nothing in his blessed world
matters more than that. Ryan is the poster child for the
pragmatic-conservative Randies; if poor people die from
a lack of health insurance, he sleeps well at night.
The Racists, Zealots, and Randies basically hate each

other. But they’re united in a communal and
entirely heteronormative love of white males, so they
manage somehow. Sure, they can’t pass a health care
bill, but they at least can keep the Democrats off the
board. They’re running a dysfunctional train, but it’s
lurching in the direction they want.
So, if the Rambo Coalition keeps the president in

power, the goal must be to break the coalition.
Only one thing will do that: making them fight over

who gets to drive the train. If we create a disruption—
say, we get the Zealot leader to betray the Racist leader
and frustrate the Randie leader’s ambitions—they’ll turn
on each other. If none of them knows what the other is
doing, they will sell each other out. When they do, the
Democrats swamp the GOP in 2018 and redraw the
maps after 2020. Bingo bango, America saved.
However, one more thing is needed to make that

happen: an actually united Democratic Party. This will
be a challenge, because Democrats eat their own.
So, they need to fear too. We must threaten every
Democratic incumbent who doesn’t back impeachment
with a primary challenge in 2018. Call your
Representative today and ask, “Do you support
impeaching the president?” If they say “Yes,” you can
tell them they have your support. If not, especially if
they say “We have to gather all the evidence before we
consider...,” say “Then I will be running against you.”
Or if not you, say you’ll find someone who will. Tell
your Congressperson that you are a one-issue voter, and
that issue is chucking the madman from the White
House. Now, who knows? Maybe you won’t pull your
support. But they don’t know what you’ll do, so they
have to act. It’s just basic game theory.
The prisoner’s dilemma works on a lot of people. But

most importantly, it works on prisoners, those people
who think they’re going to jail. Or worse. We all know
what the penalty2 for treason is. If you think you might
be in power because you committed treason, your
dilemma becomes a whole lot easier to resolve. You just
need to not know what the guy in the next cell is going
to do. I’m sure as hell not going to tell you.
2Fun fact: Most states have treason statutes too! And they pretty much all
have the same penalty as the one spelled out in the federal code. But hey,
Mr. Vice President, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re probably fine.
Rich explains: the prisoner’s dilemma
Hi, I’m Rich Malena-Webber. I’m a math teacher who tries to

make game theory approachable. In these sidebars, I’ll explain
some of the concepts Mike drops into his essays.
Everyone’s first exposure to game theory is the prisoner’s

dilemma, which is itself a dilemma. The whole thing is built around
a weird story of you, a criminal, about to ruin the life of your best
friend for a reduced sentence. I’m hard pressed to find a board
game that plays out like the prisoner’s dilemma, which leads new
students to think this topic is about a strange world, disanalogous
to our own. It’s just one of many game theory dilemmas, each
dealing with a different kind of conflict. Later, we’ll look at risks,
dangers, and common sense, but for now, we’ll just deal with
making the best of a bad situation.
The prisoner’s dilemma

is best described
visually using a
mathematical chart
called a matrix, such as
the one here.
You can see that this situation describes the choices of two
prisoners. Each has the same two choices because they were each
given the same deal. Keep quiet, and go to prison for four years,
or cut a deal and get one year while the other guy gets ten. But if
both prisoners try to cut a deal, they both go down together, with
each getting eight years in prison.
Both players are looking out for themselves, so they each take the
deal. The bottom right represents the equilibrium state, or the
solution to this dilemma. If either player made a different choice,
they would end up in a personally worse scenario while their
former friend runs free. For both players to escape this pit of
despair and make it to a land of mutual cooperation, they need to
establish communications, empathy, and trust, which ends up
being the real lesson of game theory.

The gambler: Why
Trump keeps doubling
down on an idiotic
Russia strategy
August 9, 2017
In the most recent play in which they will eventually be

dead, Hamlet’s pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern flip a
coin. A lot. It comes up heads, always heads. This
surprises them. Eventually, it should come up tails. It
does not.
This requires Guildenstern—or maybe it’s

Rosencrantz—to reexamine his faith in the law of
probability. Surely, they must be outside the bounds of
nature if so many heads come up in a row. Only the
arrival of a flip of tails could restore his faith. Yet it
never comes. They are vexed.
Then again, these guys are idiots.
Which brings us to the president of the United States.

The Trump “administration” has been aswirl in a vortex
of allegations and investigations about his campaign’s
collusion with Russia. The administration’s strategy in
dealing with these impeachment-worthy issues can
charitably be described as “highly unlikely to produce
positive gains.”
Consider the following:
• When faced with an FBI investigation, Trump fired
the FBI director, then said he did so to bring an end
to the investigation.
• When faced with an investigation into, among other
things, the firing of the FBI director, Trump
threatened the investigator.
• When his attorney general recused himself from
matters involving the allegations, Trump said he
wished he had not hired him.
• When his son and son-in-law met with Russians to
get dirt on his opponent, Trump dictated a lie about
why they went to the meeting.
These are likely the actions of a man who believes he is

guilty of a crime. But they are also incredibly stupid. If you
believe you are guilty of a crime, the one thing you don’t
want to do is bolster the belief that you are guilty. Yet
over and over, this is what Trump does. There can be
only one explanation for this: The president believes
that this is a winning strategy, despite all evidence that each
step so far has been a loss.
And if this is true, he is like millions who believe in the

gambler’s fallacy.
The gambler’s fallacy, reduced to its essence, is that if

something happens a lot more or less than it should, the opposite
will happen soon. This is a hopeful belief, a suggestion that
the universe will balance itself out over time. But if the
events are random, as in the aforementioned coin flips
in Tom Stoppard’s play, they won’t necessarily balance
out now. If you get 78 heads in a row, it is no more likely
that you will get tails next than you will get heads.
Now, the events of the Trump team’s collusion with
Russia are not random. Proof erupts on a daily basis
that something did go down. But I’m not talking about
the collusive events themselves here. I’m talking about
the administration’s expectations of responses to its
actions. Those are binary. Either they do something that
makes prosecution less likely or makes prosecution
more likely. The Trump people keep choosing “more
likely.”
This is because Trump believes he is due for a win. A

gambler who believes in the fallacy is very likely to
follow a betting strategy called the martingale. It was
invented in the 1800s, and like other such 19th century
glitter-traps as recapitulation theory and canals on Mars,
it’s complete nonsense.
But it sounds good, and that’s all some people need to

make very bad life choices.
When you pursue a martingale, after every loss you

double your bet. That way, the theory goes, when you
win you will wipe out all previous losses. Thus if you
lose $100, then $200, then $400, your next bet of $800
will get you slightly ahead of the game if you win, and
back to zero when you bet $100 again. At minimum,
you think, you at least will never lose money.
The poorhouses are filled with people who pursue this

strategy, because of two interfering problems. One is
obvious: There is a house, and the house takes a cut. So,
your expected value (your average outcome) is to
come in at what you bet minus the house’s cut.
That is called losing.

The other is less obvious: If you keep doubling your bet
when you lose, you will eventually run out of money before
you win. This is called “stopping time,” and it will kill
you. Because you can’t win what you can’t bet. You must
have unbounded wealth to win in a martingale.
Herein lies the trap for the president: He believes he has

unbounded wealth. He’s sure he has the uncontested
ability to pardon himself and everyone he knows, so each
loss is meaningless. Only the eventual win matters. So, he
doubles down on a losing strategy over and over, and
each step seems twice as disastrous to his case as the
one before. He will keep doing things that play into the
investigators’ hands—ash-canning his attorney general,
pardoning his relatives, lying even when the truth is
unthinkably apparent—because changing strategies is
fatal to the martingale gambler.
It’s kind of odd that a casino owner like Trump acts like
a gambler on tilt. But it’s going to fail him. Because the
House—and the Senate—takes a cut, floating legislation
that restricts his ability to veto sanctions and stops him
from firing the special prosecutor and eventually doing
his job at all. Each loss makes more likely the outcome
that the gambler fears most: He won’t be able to return
to the table. That’s Trump’s daily dread. If he’s a loser
when he runs out of chips to cash, then he’s a loser
forever. This president doesn’t like being called a loser.
Not one bit.
There’s another road available to the president. A

paradox related to the martingale deals with a game of
infinite expected value. Even when you have losses,
your resources mean you will eventually have a
moderate positive outcome, and all will be well.
Now, you and I don’t get to deal with infinite expected
value much; our lives are filled with situations where
even the most positive outcomes are capped. But
imagine you were president and had the near-limitless
resources of the executive branch at your disposal. You
could keep playing for years if you liked the game.
But if you were bored and tired—if, for example, you

were like a certain “Lazy Boy” on the cover of
Newsweek—you’d walk away from the game, since the
expected value of all this work isn’t interesting enough
to you. Even with an infinite expected value, you’d give
it up after a series of predictable and survivable
downturns. Paradoxically, you’d just resign.
President Trump might like this theory. It’s called the

St. Petersburg Paradox, and it was invented in Russia.
Just like his presidency.

Rich explains: the gambler’s fallacy
Human beings are pretty clever overall, but we are notorious for
making terrible decisions when randomness is in play.
Say you are asked to generate a completely random string of eight

values consisting only of 0’s and 1’s. Given the setup, you might
start with a pair of zeroes. But the more you tack on zeroes at the
start, the more you start to feel like you should throw in a one,
just to balance things out. In a sense, your intuition about
randomness is exactly right.
But in another, it’s completely wrong.
In the long term, we expect that if two outcomes of a random

event are equally likely, and the event occurs often enough, then
each will happen fifty percent of the time. We call that the Law of
Large Numbers. A six-sided die can never land on 3.5, yet that is
the statistical average for a single die roll. So, if we roll that die
100,000 times, we will expect to see a total of 350,000 pips. This
truth gives us confidence when it comes to defying randomness.
Unfortunately, this generalization doesn’t quite hold up if I only
roll the die ten times.
In the short term, if we expect that two outcomes of a random

event are equally likely, then we cannot conclude which of those
outcomes will happen during the next event, no matter what
outcomes have occurred before. This is because random events
are independent and cannot influence future outcomes. There’s
no way to gain momentum, which is really the heart of the
gambler’s fallacy.
A gambler is constantly trapped between these two statistical

truths—that we cannot comprehend a single random event
though we can predict the overall outcome of a hundred
thousand of them. So, what happens if we play ten hands? Or a
hundred? Where’s the line between order and chaos?
I’d say ask a gambler, but that’s kind of the issue...

Co-op mode: Why
Trump sees “many
sides” to Nazi murder
August 13, 2017
Quite the week for Donnie Darkest-Timeline: He got to

invoke nuclear war on North Korea and for bonus fun
he completely blindsided Venezuela with a threat of
invasion or something.
The Republicans who’d abandoned him in droves slunk

back into the fold at the possibility of carpet-bombing
brown people. The president loves competitive games:
golf, football, board games with his face on them. Now
he could tee up for the best competitive game of all:
war. It could have been quite the boost.
Then everything went sideways.
When James Alex Fields drove his Challenger into a

crowd of anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville, it
ended all that rah-rah. Politicians across the spectrum
chose to condemn the neo-Nazi violence by its name:
white supremacist terrorism. Orrin Hatch did. Chuck
Schumer as well. John McCain. Bill Clinton. Marco
Rubio. Nancy Pelosi. Terry McAuliffe. Ted Cruz. Bernie
Sanders. Ivanka Trump. Just about everyone.
The president? Eh, not so much. He was sad about the
loss of life—activist Heather Heyer assassinated by
Fields, and police officers H. Jay Cullen and Berke M.M.
Bates killed in a copter crash—but said there were
“many sides” to the violence. Hard to find the diversity
of sides in the head-on collision. There was one side in
the car, and one side with its shoes flying everywhere.
This equivocation when faced with actual Nazis killing

Americans met with a fiery reaction from every quarter.
Republicans and Democrats bade Trump to denounce
white supremacy for once in his overly charmed life.
Well, wait, not every

3:46 PM:
quarter. At left—
Trump comments were good. He
didn’t attack us. He just said the though I presume
nation should come together. they’d prefer at alt-
Nothing specific against us. right—is a post from
He said that we need to study why the Daily Stormer,
people are so angry, and implied that
there was hate... on both sides!
the neo-Nazi website
So he implied the Antifa are haters.
that organized this
There was virtually no counter- year’s “Summer of
signaling of us at all. Hate.” You don’t
He said he loves us all. want to look at that
Also refused to answer a question site. It claims that
about white nationalists supporting promoting violence
him.
is not allowed, but
No condemnation at all.
every comment
When asked to condemn, he just
walked out of the room. promotes violence.
Really, really good. It’s about as bad a
God bless him. group of people as
you can imagine.3
3The Daily Stormer is down now, but one presumes it just creeped up
somewhere else.
One of these White Power boys just killed an innocent
woman, and predictably, the Stormers are victim-
shaming her. President Fire-and-Fury would be justified
in turning on the neo-Nazi movement and making it his
enemy. As I mentioned, Trump loves competitive
games, and this is a game he can win. Like with North
Korea and Venezuela, there’s no danger to him for
standing up to this enemy. He’d be like Nixon to
China—call it “Trump to Charlottesville.”
But he had two opportunities to do so, and he didn’t

take the shot. So, I will presume he’s not going to.
Here’s why: For him—and for almost no other
politician—the game he’s playing with white
supremacists isn’t competitive. It is cooperative, and
co-op games are very different from competitive ones.
Since I’ve designed a lot of co-op games, I’ll spell out

how they work. In co-ops, everybody works towards a
common goal. We win or lose together. Hacky sack is a
co-op game. So is Diablo. So is running a company. We
all use our skills to help each other succeed.
As they supported him in great numbers, Trump’s

cooperating with white supremacists. That cooperation
helped get him elected, so he’d be loath to cut the
racists out of his already minuscule base. He’s got no
real upside for turning away the white supremacist vote,
because those who dislike him really hate him, so he’s
unlikely to gain ground. He’ll drop in popularity even if
he does the right thing. Poor guy.
What Trump doesn’t understand about cooperation

would fill a library, so I’ll just focus on two big
problems of co-op games to explain why he’s flailing.
The first is the so-called Pandemic problem, named
for the classic board game by Matt Leacock, which
didn’t actually invent the problem. In a co-op game,
since everyone is on one side, one alpha player can
direct the whole game, taking everyone’s turns for them.
The other players disengage from boredom or
frustration. It’s kind of awful. Modern co-op games
solve this by undermining the alpha player, either by
introducing traitors or encouraging self-interest or
destabilizing the value of experience.4 This is usually
perceived as a good thing.
But—and hey, stop me if you saw this coming—Trump

is the ultimate alpha player. Trump wants to take
everyone’s turns: Congress, the courts, the press, the
FBI. Everybody should do what he wants. They don’t,
because the system is designed like a modern co-op
game. It undermines the alpha player in favor of... well,
many sides.
The second problem of co-op games is subtler, but it’s

what could collapse the Trump/neo-Nazi coalition.
When everyone playing is on the same team, the thing
you depend on to hold the game together—a mutual
desire to enforce rules—disappears. In a competitive
game, one side can call the other out for cheating. The
referees or other players will step in to set things right.
In a co-op game, there’s no other side, so there’s no

reason to enforce the rules other than social stigma and
desire for fairness. “We start with just five cards each?
Naw, let’s make it ten. Wait, we lose if we run out of
4 Disclaimer: Those are the alpha-killing design strategies in Betrayal at

House on the Hill, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and Apocrypha,
all games I helped create.
cards? Screw it. How about we just win then.” Sure, you
could do that. But the game might not function if you
do.
I’m not privy to the rules that Trump and his racist
fanboys are playing by. I’ll guess one rule was “We
should not mow people down in muscle cars.” Now
that rule has been broken. We’ll find out if Trump
thinks that’s out of bounds.
He could flip the table, threatening every one of these

Nazi punks with bunker-busters and the electric chair.
He could fire their dog-whistling leaders—Steve
Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, et al.5
He could join the game the rest of us are playing.
My guess is he’ll keep playing the game he’s playing

now, because he thinks his team is winning. If he does,
we’ll all lose together.
5 Within a few weeks after I wrote this, Bannon and Gorka were excised
from the White House. Miller remains in his job, in control of
immigration policy.
Rich explains: the Pandemic problem
Problem players exist in all kinds of games, but few are as

frustrating as the quarterback player. This alpha believes that they
are best able to see the board and come up with the plays that
will lead the team to victory. This kind of condescension is
especially frustrating in something like a board game where all
players exist as equals, because it creates a new power dynamic
where only cooperation existed before. Suddenly, players must
choose between following orders or being seen as working against
the group. In both cases, player agency is lost.
Alpha players fall into two major camps. The first are the
strategists. These players truly are completing a comprehensive
scan of the game in order to find success. In football, the
quarterback is trained to read certain signs and has the authority
to call audibles if they believe a play should be altered in the final
moments before the snap. Confidence and expertise wrapped into
one package is hard to ignore, which is why it feels so difficult to
argue with an alpha.
Fortunately, the second kind of alpha is truly worth that

argument. The second kind are the reachers. These alphas see
cooperation as a power vacuum and attempt to work their way to
the top. If everyone can work towards a single design, then
everyone succeeds together. Or, if things go wrong, then the
reacher can push blame on those who didn’t work hard enough to
meet these lofty goals.
For a strategist, dissent is an opportunity to discuss and build a

new strategy after weighing all the options. For a reacher, dissent
is the same as treason—to question the plan is to doubt the
leadership abilities of the alpha. Neither alpha is needed to win at
a board game like Pandemic, because board games don’t require
leaders.
However, if you’re reading this book and you don’t see our last
two presidents in these differing leadership styles, then you might
want to give it another read.

Abortion rights and
the game theory
of armor
August 25, 2017
While Charlottesville set itself ablaze with white

supremacist fury last week, there was another equally
horrifying assault in the South. The Governor of Texas
signed yet another horrendous abortion bill, this one
mandating something called “rape insurance”6 to get
coverage for a medical procedure.
It’s the fifth abortion bill the Texas House and/or

Senate passed this year. Texas is the largest Republican-
held state, and it tries like the dickens to outlaw
abortion on an annual basis.7 It’s not very good at it.
This is because of Texas’s other famed propensity:

faring disastrously before the U.S. Supreme Court.
6 Thisis perhaps a non-neutral characterization of the law. What it does is

require a separate private insurance plan for any woman who wants
coverage for abortions. It doesn’t mention rape specifically, but that’s the
problem: It requires a victim of rape to have thought to have bought this
insurance before her assault, which is just nuts.
7 One proposed bill just banned abortions outright. That one failed.
Something about having a Supreme Court.

Here are some of Texas’s legendary losses before the
most august body in the land:
• In 1869, it lost Texas v. White, negating the South’s
Civil War secession.
• In 1954, it lost Hernandez v. Texas, giving Mexicans
equal rights.
• In 1989, it lost Texas v. Johnson, allowing us to burn
the flag at will.
• In 2003, it lost Lawrence v. Texas, shredding sodomy
laws across the U.S.
• In 2017, it lost Moore v. Texas, ending execution of
the mentally disabled.
Texas is the biggest loser at the Supreme Court, apropos

since everything’s bigger there.
But even a year after the fact, none of Texas’s losses

seem as jimmy-kicking as Whole Woman’s Health vs.
Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court decision that struck down
H.B. 2, Texas’s last abortion law. It’s worth looking at
that decision, lest we panic too much over the latest
predictable Texas-sized overreach.
Much discussion centered on Justice Ginsburg’s

concurrence, which characterized Texas’s law as
“beyond rational belief.” But the interesting bit (to me,
anyway) was the justices’ chatter about severability,
both in Justice Breyer’s majority decision and in Justice
Alito’s dissent.
Severability is the rule that if one provision of a law is

struck out, the rest of the law remains in force. This
might be a dry subject, but here it was shockingly
entertaining.
H.B. 2 had the most insane severability clause I’ve ever
seen. It said:
it is the intent of the legislature that every provision, section,

subsection, sentence, clause, phrase, or word in this Act, and
every application of the provisions in this Act, are severable
from each other. If any application of any provision in this
Act to any person, group of persons, or circumstances is
found by a court to be invalid, the remaining applications of
that provision to all other persons and circumstances shall be
severed and may not be affected.
Folks, this law was severable by individual word. This was

madness. Even Alito, defending the clause in dissent, was
gobsmacked at the overreach.
H. B. 2 contains what must surely be the most emphatic

severability clause ever written. This clause says that every
single word of the statute and every possible application of its
provisions is severable.
Then, in case anyone was not clear that H.B. 2 was

about restricting the ability of women to access
abortions, it doubled down and became severable by
individual human female.
The legislature intends that every application of this statute

to every individual woman shall be severable from each
other. In the unexpected event that the application of this
statute is found to impose an impermissible undue burden on
any pregnant woman or group of pregnant women, the
application of the statute to those women shall be severed
from the remaining applications of the statute that do not
impose an undue burden, and those remaining applications
shall remain in force and unaffected, consistent with Section
10 of this Act.
Wowsers. So, okay, let’s see what happened in that

“unexpected event” (a staggering term in an abortion
bill). In this law, Texas set up a truckload of restrictions
on abortion providers, two of which—the admitting
privileges and surgical center requirements—the
majority found unconstitutional under Planned Parenthood
v. Casey’s “undue burden” clause. Beyond those two,
there were dozens of other requirements in there, from
teaching guidelines to sound barriers to fire alarms. The
Court could have kept all of those intact and just cut out
the two most offensive impediments.
They could have, if Texas had understood basic game
theory involving armor.
Armor is a series of choices. You probably want some.

I wouldn’t advise wading into a Game of Thrones-style
battle wearing a loincloth. But I also wouldn’t advise
wearing armor so cumbersome that you can’t move,
because a giant will catch you and stomp you into
sandpaper.
Layering on armor has its costs. In game design, I often

say: “The more armor you put on, the more you’ll get
hurt when you suffer an injury.” That’s just sensible; if
you cover everything but your eyes, anything that gets
by that cover is going through your eyes. This is why
basketball players get elbow sprains and football players
get broken knees. Football’s armor brushes away the
minor injuries that two colliding basketballers would
suffer if they hit each other. But when something gets
through and actually hurts a football player, he is out for
a long time. Possibly for good.
In Hellerstedt, we got a real example of the serious

consequences of trying to clamp on the most
bulletproof, Hulkbuster-ish legal armor possible.
Writing for the majority, Breyer seemed ready to
embrace Texas’s wishes for severability:

Severability clauses, it is true, do express the enacting
legislature’s preference for a narrow judicial remedy. As a
general matter, we attempt to honor that preference.
Gee, that must have felt reassuring. And then...
But our cases have never required us to proceed application

by conceivable application when confronted with a facially
unconstitutional statutory provision. “We have held that a
severability clause is an aid merely; not an inexorable
command.”
OH, HI THERE. Breyer showed nary a whit of

enthusiasm for parsing the infinite number of conceivable
rules required to save this patient.
Such an approach would inflict enormous costs on both courts

and litigants, who would be required to proceed in this
manner whenever a single application of a law might be valid.
We reject Texas’ invitation to pave the way for legislatures to
immunize their statutes from facial review.
With a sweeping “facial review,” Breyer said, “Man, it’s

too much brain-pain to fight through all this. What if
your armor just didn’t exist? Yeah, fuck that noise, your
whole bill is toast.”
So, H.B. 2 became nothing but powder, an unmoving

husk stomped flat by a giant. Severability is no longer a
trustworthy suit of armor. Thanks to Texas, no one will
ever win with that dodge again at the USSC. Texas
continues its legendary history as the Supreme Court’s
whipping boy. So, if you tremble at this year’s awful
rape insurance law—and I can see why you might—
there’s a solid chance the black robes will ride to your
rescue.
Oh, also, yay for women’s rights.

Rich explains: armor theory
One of the most important contributions to the game theory of

armor came from a Hungarian statistician named Abraham Wald.
During World War II, he was consulted on a project about

protecting U.S. aircraft from enemy fire. As one of the brilliant
minds in the Statistical Research Group, Wald had access to reams
of data from aircraft covered with bullet holes. The assignment
was simple: Given that gunfire usually hit these aircraft in similar
places, but armor plating is heavy, what areas of the plane should
receive a layer of reinforcement? Since the majority ran along the
fuselage, this seems like an obvious spot to place some armor.
Wald, a statistical juggernaut, disagreed. His recommendation was

to reinforce the engines, the area of the planes with the fewest
bullet holes. He was right.
What Wald realized is that the obvious answer was based on

survivor bias, a fallacy where data is drawn only from those who
survive to be sampled. A plane shot in the fuselage could still
come home! Engine shots weren’t rarer than fuselage shots in
general, just in the surviving planes. Any aircraft shot in the engine
was significantly less likely to ever make it home to be part of this
study. With Wald’s advice, Allied aircraft became that much
stronger throughout the rest of the war.
Not only does armor provide protection, it also makes it possible

to determine where successful attacks will fall. If a castle is heavily
defended, except for the front gate, then it only stands to reason
that most attacks will come through that front gate. Studying
these weaknesses grants attackers an edge and also gives
defenders a very specific strategy during combat.
If you’re interested in a quick research project, look at the

differences in glove types and hand injuries between boxers and
MMA fighters.

Good Guys, Bad Guys,
and the end of an
armed society
October 3, 2017
Every time we have a gun massacre, two things will

happen: The Onion will publish a “No way to prevent
this” article and the gun control debate will flare. The
anti-gun side will try to get agreement on common
sense gun laws, whoever the pro-gun Sarah-Huckabee-
Sanders-of-the-week is will say it’s premature, and
nothing will happen except the guaranteeing of more
massacres.
I’m going to presume something about you here, and if

I’m wrong, I apologize: I’m going to assume you want
fewer gun massacres.
If you don’t—say, if you’re the NRA, who get airtime

and contributions whenever innocents get gunned
down—you’re not going to like this much. But if you
just want people to not be shot full of holes when they
go to music festivals, this might help.
Game theory is often applied to gun control, usually on

the anti-gun control side. I’ll go through this logic,
which is called “A Good Guy with a Gun.”
A Bad Guy wants to rob a Good Guy. The Bad Guy
might be armed, and the Good Guy might be armed. As
game theory is obsessed with payoffs, we need to look
at the two sides’ payoffs separately.
Let’s look at the payoffs for the Good Guy first. Bad
news: They’re never positive. The unarmed Good Guy
is in trouble against an armed Bad Guy.
But the armed Good Guy doesn’t have a positive payoff

either. Because the Bad Guy knows the attack is
coming, the Good Guy loses most of the time against
an armed Bad Guy. Even winning won’t guarantee a
positive outcome. The Good Guy has guaranteed a gun
confrontation. He might get shot in a situation where he
would otherwise lose only money.
Now let’s look at the Bad Guy’s payoffs. He always

wants to be armed, because a Bad Guy without a Gun is
almost always beaten by a Good Guy with a Gun.
Against an unarmed Good Guy, the Bad Guy with a
Gun’s payoff is presumed to be greater than 0.
(This is a weak argument, since prison exists to put

robbers in cages. Bad Guys know this, so they generally
don’t commit ten heists a day. But for now, let’s say
crime against an unarmed victim does pay, at least a little
bit.)
The argument presumes that 0 is greater than the Bad

Guy’s payoff against an armed Good Guy. In the latter
case, he guarantees a gunfight in which he can be killed
or maimed, so he has to think about it first. This last value
presumption is the linchpin of the anti-gun control
argument.
Which is great if we all have one-shot revolvers and
rational goals in life. The logic crumbles when the Bad
Guy is intent on murder, has access to good guns, and
doesn’t care about consequences. Then, to the Bad Guy,
the guns have a greater utility—that is, they are more
useful under these circumstances. So, the Bad Guy goes
five football fields away and opens fire.
A 64-year-old white male millionaire named Stephen

Paddock set up 23 firearms, among them an AR-15 and
a Kalashnikov rifle supported by bump fire stocks, on
the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay. He smashed out a
window and fired on the Route 91 Harvest Festival
crowd that was 500 yards away across a busy street. The
density of the 22,000 concertgoers meant he hit almost
600 people, killing 58, and then turned his gun around
and added one more body to his count. He was dead
when the SWAT team blew open his door.
This was a country concert in Nevada, not Lilith Fair; if

the demographic holds, many attendees owned guns.
But they didn’t have them. If they had, the body count
would’ve been higher.
No Good Guy with a Gun would’ve done anything to improve

the result.
A pistol is accurate to 25 yards; the only thing they

could hit was each other. As country musician Caleb
Keeter noted in his mind-changing manifesto, any
Good Guy who pulled out his gun would’ve been shot
by police. The value proposition for the victims if they
were armed was worse than if they weren’t. (Heaven
forfend if the victims had AR-15s, as I expect they’d have
killed dozens of innocents inside the Mandalay Bay.)
If you have two people with handguns, you have an
okay chance the Good Guy with a Gun wins. But make
any of these changes, and the situation changes entirely:
• If you add range, the Bad Guy with a Gun wins.
• If you add magazine capacity, the Bad Guy with a
Gun wins.
• If you add rate of fire, the Bad Guy with a Gun
wins.
• If you add quantity of guns, the Bad Guy with
More than One Gun wins.
The Good Guy’s payoff versus this Bad Guy is nearly

always a disaster, gun or no. There is only one thing you
can do to the Bad Guy’s guns that will make him less
likely to win, and that is remove them. If the Bad Guy
can’t obtain the high-range, high-capacity, high-rate of
fire multiplicity of guns, he can’t win.
How do we know? We learn. We learn that gun

homicide rates are 25 times higher in the U.S. than in
other such countries. We learn that the U.S. has 30% of
the world’s mass shootings and only 5% of its people.
We learn that nations and states with more guns have
more gun deaths. We learn that Australia has had 0
mass shootings since it enacted gun control in 1996,8
the U.K. has had 1 since then, and the U.S. has had
1,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook.
If we really want to learn, we learn that the only

difference between us and the other nations is that we
have half the world’s guns and they don’t. Since the day
8This was true in the first edition of this book. The Darwin massacre of
2019 saw four people shot and killed.
after a mass shooting is supposedly not an acceptable
day to discuss gun control even though there’s a mass
shooting every day in the U.S., we will never discuss it.
But we must. Because a Good Guy with a Gun doesn’t

have a blessed chance. He’s just as likely to be
massacred as the rest of us. He just doesn’t believe it.
So, he fights for the right to possess an assault weapon
that won’t stop the Bad Guy with a Really Good Gun
and never will. The Bad Guys will get more and more
really good guns, and kill more of us at a time, because
we’re fervently committed to letting them do so.
After all, as The Onion says, there’s no way to prevent

this.

Rich explains: utility
When a game theorist makes decisions, they often build a

framework based on their own personal wants and needs in an
attempt to maximize their own happiness. Since this is quite
subjective, game theorists came up with a more concrete term
they called utility. That’s right, we quantified happiness.
In simple terms, an outcome which is better for a player has a

higher utility value. Most game theory problems are easier to
understand once we stop thinking about complex motivations and
just assign them an overall utility score. A presidential candidate
doesn’t need to decide whether the Iowa Caucuses are important
because they’re early in the schedule or because they allow a
connection with the Heartland. In the end, what’s important is
that Iowa gets a utility value of 10 for any serious candidate. On
the other hand, my state of Oregon might round up to a 1.
After making these

plans, we can build a
utility matrix that
compares my possible
outcomes with those
of my opponents,
turning a long series of
thoughts into a simple
calculus. Should I campaign in Oregon while my opponent works
some voting magic in Iowa? Of course not. With a late primary and
only a small number of electoral votes, Oregon is cursed with its
traditional single visit in an election cycle.
The most important reason to develop a matrix is to consider how

to alter outcomes in your favor. How much would I have to
change the utility for Oregon to convince more candidates to
visit? I can’t add electoral votes or change what time polls close on
the West Coast, but what if Oregon developed a unique debate or
can’t-miss event that convinced politicians to stop by? By creating
a utility matrix, we can determine what kind of changes might turn
bad strategies into good ones.

Two madmen play
poker: The North
Korea bluff-off
October 15, 2017
There was this one poker tournament I said I would

attend, but I ran late, and so they just blinded me down
as play continued. But everybody else played so
aggressively that I actually came in third and cashed in
without ever showing up. What a fun story!
Say, here’s a horrifying poll:
48. Would you support or oppose a preemptive

strike on North Korea?
Total Rep Dem Ind

Support 26% 46% 16% 20%
Oppose 62% 41% 77% 67%
DK/NA 11% 12% 7% 13%
Per the reliable Quinnipiac University poll, 46 percent

of Republicans would support a military strike on North
Korea—a nuclear power with the capability to devastate
Seoul and the nearly 30,000 American troops stationed
therein—right now, with no armed provocation. Who
even puts this idea into their heads?
The Hermit Kingdom may have a scarcity of resources,
but it does have about one million active-service
soldiers and as many as five million in reserve. Here in
the US of A, we have a little over a million active-
service soldiers.
So, 46 percent of Republicans support either

thermonuclear assault or a draft. If Quinnipiac’s boffins
said, “Would you support a draft to fight North
Korea?” I expect the number of draft-age Republican
supporters would go way down.
But hey, that number has gone up from 28 percent of

Republicans in the last two weeks, per an earlier ABC
poll. President Trump’s “fire and fury” bombast
energized his base, and they’re ready to make the
Korean Peninsula a smoking crater. Even if it kills some
of them.
How did we get here? A simplified answer: Both Trump

and Kim Jong-un are kinda nuts. They know there’s a
time-tested theory behind nuclear-age confrontation
that fits their crazed personalities. It’s called the
madman theory.9
President Nixon’s foreign policy rested on a

Machiavellian dodge: He would simulate madness. To
do so, he launched Operation Giant Lance, a three-day
run of nuclear bombers near the Soviet border. By
convincing Leonid Brezhnev he would risk nuclear war,
Nixon thought Brezhnev would beg for peace.
9 Trigger warning: I’m going to say “crazy” like it’s a bad thing. Mental
illness is complicated, and this is a simplistic article about war. Apologies in
advance.
It failed. We don’t know that Brezhnev understood that
Nixon wanted him to think he was crazy, and even if he
did, Brezhnev himself wasn’t crazy, and he didn’t think
Nixon was either. The START agreement got done
because President Bush Sr. and President Gorbachev
weren’t crazy. The New START treaty got done
because President Obama and President Medvedev
weren’t crazy either. Uncrazy people can do uncrazy
things like ensure world peace.
The madman theory collapses because the world is led

by mostly sane people. However, there’s a risk of two
insane leaders leading two opposing nuclear powers.
When that happens, all bets are off. It’s worth
understanding that with nuclear weapons, we are
making big-time bets. So, let’s talk about betting.
The madman theory plays out every day for far lower
stakes in the world of competitive poker. In poker, a
“maniac” is a very aggressive player who plays lots of
hands, often out of proportion to their expected value.
Maniacs crash and burn at the table most of the time,
since playing 4–9 offsuit a lot gets you killed much more
often than not. Maniacs don’t care. But they should.
When one maniac plays at a table with five non-

maniacs, he will lose pretty much all the time, because
someone will have a better hand than him and play it.
The rest of the players will let him do it, giving the non-
maniac the win. But when two maniacs are at the same
table, it’s common for the conservative players to let
them fight each other. This can result in one maniac
quickly losing out to the other—but now there’s a
maniac with a large stack of chips. That’s where the
conservative players start to sweat.
When a maniac has a large stack of chips, suddenly his
madness is a weapon. He can afford to lose some chips,
so he wades right in. If a sane player isn’t willing to risk
all his chips, he’ll buckle, and the maniac will collect
more and more chips. The traditional way to beat a
maniac who has a big stack is to either have a bigger
stack or much better cards.
The trouble with the standoff in North Korea is that

both players are maniacs, and both think they have the big
stack. Both men have shown they are insecure about size
(for various reasons), and so they are prone to
posturing. But who really has the big stack here?
I doubt it’s us. Nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is

not something America can have. If Pyongyang destroys
Seoul or even Tokyo, millions die, the world economy
collapses, our Japanese-held debt is called in, and
everybody suffers—and that’s the best case scenario.
Worst case is war with China and Russia and hooboy I
can barely type it out. We don’t win a fight with a
nuclear power. Everybody, including Kim, knows it. At
least, everybody except Trump.
Trump only has the big stack if he is 100% die-in-a-

holocaust insane. He is at least a little bit nuts, as I said.
But the White House isn’t. General Kelly isn’t. Rex
Tillerson isn’t. Mike Pence isn’t. Nikki Haley isn’t. Even
the guy named “Mad Dog” Mattis isn’t. The truly
bonkers cats like Gorka and Bannon are long-gone.
Trump is Mad King George, alone in his straitjacket.
He’s the one who wants to de-certify Iran’s nuclear
compliance; he’s the one telling Putin that he won’t re-
up the START agreement; he’s the one who thinks
4,000 nuclear weapons aren’t enough.
So, Trump continues his Crisismonger-in-Chief
“strategy.” Maybe he thinks it’s a reasonable play.
Doesn’t matter. It only works if Kim Jong-un thinks it’s
a reasonable play. As a poker player, Kim’s savage
“mentally deranged U.S. dotard” takedown makes me
think he doesn’t. Leastways, he’s not backing down at all.
Kim’s playing the big stack. While I personally wish
he’d leave the table and make peace, aggression might
not be a bad play in his position. Now, I want it to be a
bad play. So does Trump, I expect... no, I hope.
I mentioned that the traditional way to beat a maniac

who has a big stack is to have a bigger stack or much
better cards. That’s not the only way. The other way is
cooperation. Remember the tournament where
everyone was so aggressive that I came in third despite
not playing at all? Well, there’s a reason I didn’t come in
second. Eventually, after all the carnage, the last two
players decided there was no point to fighting while I
was a factor. They sat on their cards until I mechanically
blinded out for good, then split the pot. If maniacs
abound, the best way to survive is to work with other
non-maniacs (in a non-colluding manner, of course) and
figure out a way to isolate the maniacs’ damage.
We can do that with North Korea. We could decide to

work diplomatically with China and Russia and our
allies to isolate and cut off North Korea’s nuclear
arsenal. We can try to raise the country’s standard of
living or bombard them with propaganda or impose
sanctions or—wait, this is exactly what we’ve been
doing for decades and no one has been obliterated in
atomic fire. I like it that way. So, all we need to do is not
have a madman of our own in charge of our nuclear
codes. Maybe we should work on that.
Rich explains: the madman theory
The origins of the madman theory can be traced back to the great
political mastermind Niccolò Machiavelli, who said it is sometimes
“a very wise thing to simulate madness.” Though Machiavelli
simply pointed at madness as a method to hide weakness by
appearing foolish, Nixon took this a step further.
Machiavelli doesn’t support Nixon’s “madman strategy” of

aggression. Instead, he tells a story of a Prince who wishes to be
left alone, unobserved and secure while building his strength. The
maniac prince, Junius Brutus, sucks up to those who are more
powerful through flattery and praise. When someone is powerful
enough to stand up against an enemy, Machiavelli encourages
them to focus on their strength and make war.
The madman strategy has usefulness in low-stakes scenarios

repeated over time. Sometimes, I have a strong position yet
choose to appear weak. Other times, I choose to appear strong
when I’m barely hanging on. By confusing my opponent, I hope I
can push them into a suboptimal move. After the round, the
opponent has difficulty reacting to the seemingly random move
unless they can find a pattern or gain new intelligence.
In the long run, playing as a Maniac is a losing strategy. When a

Maniac isn’t lying about their strength, their odds of winning are
equal to that of the Stable player. When a Maniac pretends to be
weak while actually being strong, they may trick a naive opponent
into a mistake. But a canny Stable opponent may play safely, not
taking big risks against a known Maniac. Similarly, when a Maniac
pretends to be strong while actually being weak, a Stable
opponent may also keep their distance.
The downside of playing a Maniac is letting your opponents know

that you are no longer to be trusted. Statements of strength and
weakness can be completely ignored by the canny opponent.
Meanwhile, just as Machiavelli wrote five centuries ago, appearing
foolish is for the player who is weak, because the strong do not
need to hide from their opponents.

Sweet relief: How we
can pay our national
debt upstream
October 20, 2017
What would you do if you had a trillion dollars?
Would you rebuild every aging public school in the

country? Finance wars of principle in three Iraq-sized
nations at once? Underwrite an array of hydrogen
stations to replace gas-burning cars? Reinvest it in high-
end stocks like airlines and biotechs? The multiplicity of
options, like the size of the number, boggles the mind.
Thankfully, you don’t have to make that tough decision.

You’ve ceded that right to the Chinese, who as of this
writing possess some $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasury
bonds, a big part of the $6 trillion we owe to foreigners.
Our orgy of spending over the last quarter century has
been underwritten by the Chinese and Japanese banking
systems. They have taken our traditional role as the
world’s lender of last resort, and we’ve resorted to them
on a daily basis for several decades.
This might be tolerable if the Chinese banks weren’t on

the verge of total collapse. Due to shadow banking and
unchecked debtmongering, China’s outstanding credit is
now three times its gross domestic product. This raises
the ugly specter of the Chinese calling in their loans.
That could lead to something not seen in this nation for
five generations: a run.
You remember the run. You saw it in It’s a Wonderful

Life, as the residents of Bedford Falls rushed to the
Building and Loan to get any payout they could on their
home accounts. Except that was a movie. This time,
there’s no kindly George Bailey telling you that your
money’s in Mrs. Macklin’s house. This time, it’s General
Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping,
who thinks he’s the most powerful man in the world.
He wants your money.
The federal government spends more than 6 percent of

its earnings—your taxes—as interest on the deficit.
That’s about $266 billion a year. Those are payments we
pay first, assuming we make them. Those last four
words are what stops the Chinese from calling in our
loans. We’ve shown a propensity not to pay before; this
is what led to Ted Turner stepping in to pay off our
United Nations dues. We could do that again, but of
course, we take our position in the world seriously.
Unless some moron defaults on our debt, China won’t
call in the principal. The system holds together for the
time being. But if China gets deeper in hot water, this
might come to an end.
What can we do? We can’t crank our economy into gear

any faster, can we? We’re not at full employment by any
standards, but the U.S. economy is still pumping along
at its innovative best.10 We could do some trimmings
10 This position fell apart as COVID-19 hit the U.S. like a bullet train.
around the edges—end self-employment taxes to
encourage small-business innovation, say—but we
won’t double our production no matter what we do.
But what if we had our debt back? We’d stop paying

interest. We could do a lot with $266 billion a year. To
get our debt back, we’d have to have something we
don’t want, but that the Chinese would want. If we gave
them something we need, we wouldn’t be helping our
situation. We don’t have a trillion bucks in spare cash,
or anything else. Except one thing.
We have other people’s debt. From the end of World

War I to the mid-1980s, the U.S. was the world’s biggest
creditor. Sure, we’re now the world’s biggest debtor, but
there are a whole lot of loans lying around that haven’t
been paid—roughly two and a half trillion dollars that
nations owe us in long-term debt.
For example, the least developed countries owe us a

couple hundred billion. In his last days in power,
President Clinton tried to forgive their debt. The plan
didn’t even make it to Congress. These countries are
being destroyed by the interest payments on their debts.
Could their interest be in our own self-interest?
Let’s say we traded these nations’ debts to us to the

Chinese. We’d be giving up our interest on their debt, in
exchange for forgiveness for some of our debt. Poker
players call this upstreaming.
In the dealer’s choice poker game known as 3–5–7, all

players pay every player that beats them. So, three players
might go into a hand knowing that if they don’t have
the best hand, they will pay an amount equal to the
chips in the pot to each player that beats them. In
practice, though, the lowest of the three hands pays the
winning hand twice the pot (paying “upstream”). That’s a
lot simpler than the lowest hand paying the middle hand
and the highest hand, the middle hand paying the
highest hand and being paid by the lowest hand, and the
high hand being paid by both.
Paying upstream in the financial world can even be

simpler than that. For example, if Country A owes
Country B $3 billion, and if Country B owes Country C
$3 billion, then Country A could just pay Country C $3
billion, zeroing out Country B’s debt to Country C.
Country B need not participate in the payment stream,
as Country A paid upstream.
The low hand (A) owes $3 to the middle hand (B) and owes
$3 to the high hand (C). The middle hand also owes $3 to the
high hand. So, instead of the low hand paying $3 to the middle
hand, and then the middle hand paying the same $3 to the
high hand, the low hand pays $6 upstream to the high hand,
thus satisfying every player’s debt to the high hand.

This runs aground, of course, on whether Country C
wants Country A’s debt. In the poker game, if the lowest
hand needed to reach into his pocket to pay for a hand,
and then said he didn’t have any money, then the highest
hand would be justified in demanding that no
upstreaming occurred. He’d want what he was owed
from the middle hand. Then both solvent players would
take the deadbeat out back for some re-education.
Country C, in this case China, might take the $17 billion

that Israel owes the U.S. at a one-for-one basis. Israel
pays its bills regularly, so that’s a safe trade. China
would be less inclined to take Brazil’s $42 billion in debt
to us. China figures that (a) it already has some of
Brazil’s debt, and (b) Brazil is in the middle of a
meltdown. Brazil’s debt is a worse risk than American
debt, so taking it is a more dangerous investment than
just holding our debt.
It’s more dangerous, that is, unless China understands

the concept of pot odds. Calculating pot odds is how
good poker players know when to make a bet. In the
course of a game, nearly every hand has a calculable
chance of improving to be good enough to win.
Here’s an example of pot odds:
In Five-Card Draw, if you have four consecutive

middling cards (say, 6–7–8–9 offsuit) before the draw,
you have eight cards (four 5s and four 10s) that you
could draw to make your straight, among the 47 cards
you haven’t seen. This 8-out-of-47 ratio is a 17 percent
chance (8 out of 47), or roughly 5:1 odds of failing to
make your straight. (At the poker table, you might call
that a 5-to-1 underdog, or “dog.”)
You figure your pot odds by comparing these odds of
failure with the amount you would make if you
succeeded. You make a new ratio based on the amount
of money in the pot with the amount you must pay to
call the bet. So, if there’s $12 in the pot and the amount
you must bet is $2, the bet odds are 6:1. If the bet odds
exceed the failure odds, you bet; otherwise, you fold. In
this case, the 6:1 bet odds are greater than the 5:1 failure
odds, so you’d bet on your outside straight draw. Over
time, you will make money making this play.
Exchanging the reliable American debt straight-up for

less reliable Brazilian debt is clearly a bad idea for China.
But there must be some rate at which Brazilians will pay
their loans, and pot odds tell us there’s an exchange rate
that makes sense. Its neighbor Argentina did this very
thing in 2005, restructuring its post-default debt to pay
at 30% of face value. It worked.
Let’s say Brazil is only one-third as likely to pay as we

are. Then if America offers China $4 U.S. in Brazilian
loans for each U.S. dollar that China forgives, China
should take that deal. China gets the $42 billion in debt
certificates that Brazil has with us, and we get $10
billion in relief of our own debts to China. Nobody
defaults, Brazil gets one less creditor, and the U.S. and
China are better off.
We get from poker a form of Nash equilibrium, a

game theory construct that says that for every situation,
there’s an optimal strategy, and deviating from it costs
you utility. When a country is drowning in debt, its
equilibrium is to either pay the debt or default on it.
Sometimes one of those is right, and sometimes the
other is. We can use pot odds to tell ourselves whether
we should pay or crash out. In our situation, defaulting
is a disaster, because we need to take on more debt to
pay our way out. We don’t want to end up like Brazil or
Greece, where defaulting looks like a better way out.
Thus, we’re stuck paying lots and lots of interest on our
debt. As annoying as this is, the alternative is far worse.
But when we trade away our debt, we can spend like a

nation that has some level of self-control. It’s not
guaranteed, of course, but it’s possible. Right now, no
one has capital to do anything, so everyone suffers
under the onus of debt. Open this up, and we can start
making sensible decisions with our money.
This assumes, of course, that we stop racking up our

debt. Which we could do as long as nobody tries to give
a $1.5 trillion tax cut to the rich and...
Oh, okay.

Rich explains: the Nash equilibrium
We owe a great mathematical debt to Greece. From Pythagoras

throwing poor Hippasus into the Aegean Sea for coming up with a
weird new number, to Plato saying only philosophers were fit to
rule, it’s tough to conceive of a world without Greek thought.
Sure, many of their ideas originated in other parts of the world,
and the rest of the world soon caught up, but every western high
school geometry class is still devoted to the Greek ideal.
So, what does Greece do when they owe a great mathematical

debt to the European Union? They pull an incredible move right
out of the Platonic playbook and bring home one of their own—a
philosopher king. Economist Yanis Varoufakis earned his stripes as
a game theorist, and returned to Greece as Finance Minister in
2015. As the debt crisis loomed, his background kept being hyped
by the media to show Greece as arcane masters of decision
making. After a month in office, Varoufakis had to let everyone
know that he was not using game theory to affect the EU’s
strategies. Of course, whenever a game theorist speaks, game
theory is happening, no matter what they might say.
The media assumed Varoufakis had a solution to the question of

whether Greece should pay back their debt and whether the EU
would accept a smaller amount than they were owed. In such a
situation, the solutions are about determining which strategies
each side would be forced to enact. Named after the game theory
titan John Nash, a Nash equilibrium denotes a naturally occurring
outcome which locks each player in, only able to switch to a
different outcome if they are willing to lose utility and hurt
themselves. John Nash proved that every game theory scenario
has an equilibrium, and the idea that this Greek god could
somehow find it meant that everyone else in Europe needed to
simply sigh and fall in line or face the consequences.
Standing firm, Varoufakis urged his nation to vote against the EU,
putting his career up as collateral. Sadly, theory and reality seldom
agree. Greece voted down his designs, and the defeated
philosopher king resigned after just six months in office.

The Kap trap: Why no
NFL team will call in
Kaepernick
October 29, 2017
Another NFL Sunday is here, another day Colin

Kaepernick watches it on TV. This week, the National
Anthem protest issue, previously a subject of league
unity after Trump’s thoughtless fearmongering, spiraled
into divisiveness after Houston Texans owner Bob
McNair’s grenade-like comment that the NFL “can’t
have the inmates running the prison.” Hooboy, Bob Ol’
Buddy, you don’t wanna say that if your player base is
more than 70% minority.
At the heart of this anthem anathema remains

Kaepernick, a former San Francisco 49ers quarterback
of mixed racial heritage. Kaepernick was the first player
who decided to protest the oppression faced by people
of color by not standing for the National Anthem in
2016. That was also the year he opted out of his
contract with the Niners, and he hasn’t touched a
football in the NFL since.
On face value, this is hard to fathom. This is a

quarterback who led his team to the Super Bowl, and at
age 29 may have much left in the tank. As QBs like
Aaron Rodgers, Carson Palmer, and Jay Cutler go
down, some fans ask, “Why not Kap?” Fan sentiment
has gotten so loud that Kaepernick filed a grievance that
owners colluded to keep him out of the league.
Some fans. Others are clear: “Not Kap. Not Kap at all.”
But how much of this is due to his Anthem protest and
how much is due to his playing ability? I’ll dissect it
from a game theory viewpoint by looking at an
analogous model: the stag hunt. Because every now
and then, game theory applies to games.
The stag hunt is a dilemma posed thusly: Two hunters

track a large stag into the woods. They lay a trap which,
if the stag springs it, will let them both eat. Days go by.
They get very hungry. Then the hunters see a hare hop
across the trap. Each thinks, “If I snare that hare, I’ll
eat, but the trap will be ruined.” The hare is of less
value; the hunter who springs the trap will be the only
one who eats. But if both stay put, then maybe—
maybe—they’ll snag the stag, which can feed both of
them. If it comes. If, if, if.
Okay, let’s put aside the question of where the hunters’

AR-15s are and accept the dilemma as is. A hare in hand
is worth more than a hypothetical deer to a hungry
hunter. But the enmity of the hunter he condemns is a
real social consequence. So, what should they do? It
turns out the answer is that they should either both stay
put or both go for the hare as fast as possible, with
neither strategy being predominant. Or predictable.
I pointed out that the hare is of less value than the stag.
That brings us back to Kaepernick, and how good a
player he is. No one thinks that he’s Aaron Rodgers.
But one would presume he’s a better bet than the
unknown Brett Hundley, who replaced Rodgers. One
would presume he’s a better bet than perennial backup
QBs Drew Stanton and Matt Moore, who replaced
Palmer and Cutler. One would presume this—and one,
it turns out, could be wrong.
Kap played in the 2012 Super Bowl and the NFC

Championship Game the year after. That’s good, and it
got him a six-year, $126 million contract. But after that?
Um, not $126 million worth of good, that’s for sure.

Two fines, two departed head coaches, three seasons of
8–8, 2–6, and 1–10 in his starts. He lost his starting job
to Blaine Gabbert—not good—and never regained it.
With an overall record of 32–32, Kaepernick wasn’t
great for a while, despite being stellar before.
The quarterback position is hard. To play it, you have to

learn a system, and every head coach has his own
system. Hundley, Stanton, and Moore know their
coaches’ systems. The coaches might be forgiven for
trusting the men in whom they’ve invested time.
Kaepernick is an outsider they’d need to teach from
scratch in the middle of a season. The hare might have
value, say the hunters, but we can get by on this stale
trail mix for at least a little while.
That doesn’t let the teams off the hook in the last
offseason. There’s plenty of time to teach a gifted
quarterback like Kaepernick a new system, and he very
well might prosper in it. It at least is a better bet than
hoping Blaine Gabbert turns out to be great.
Yet no one took the bet on Kaepernick. No one at all.

This leads us back to the stag. In this case, it seems to
be the National Anthem. McNair’s “inmates” comment
came right after fellow Trump supporter and
Washington Team-That-Cannot-Be-Named owner Dan
Snyder claimed that “96 percent of Americans are for
guys standing.” Like on everything else, Snyder’s wrong
here. 43 percent of Americans say the protesters are
doing the right thing—and importantly, some 82
percent of African Americans do. The Trump
supporters’ case for anthem supremacy is overstated.
The 49 percent of Americans who oppose the protests

are quite vocal, though. The League’s revenue is tied to
mollifying those people, and so Commissioner Roger
Goodell has said “we want our players to stand” for the
Anthem. But the league has stopped short of mandating
it, despite Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’s
incendiary statements demanding his players stand
during the Anthem or face suspension.
Other owners have been less iron-fisted. The NFL

wants to appear 100% behind the flag; while it knows
players have rights to speak out, it would prefer they not
exercise them during the Anthem. Sponsors have stood
on the sidelines, mostly supporting free speech. So far,
the players still show up to work. So far, the fans are
still there. So far, the money flows. It’s a very careful
equilibrium.
It all collapses if they let Kaepernick back in. At least we

have to presume the NFL thinks so. The fans who’ve
threatened to boycott will do so if the most vocal
anthem-protester is playing quarterback on Sundays.
Fox News would erupt. The Commenter-in-Chief
would go crazy on Twitter. So, no job for Kap.
This is a horrible place for a player to be in—and the
fact that I just spent a thousand words comparing
Kaepernick to an animal can’t have helped much. He’s
just a guy who wants to play ball while his legs and arms
allow. Playing in the NFL isn’t a right, but it’s a privilege
conferred to people who’ve done a lot more wrong than
he has. It’s impossible to take Jerry Jones seriously on
the subject of morality, since he signed defensive end
Greg Hardy after he violently threw his girlfriend onto a
futon full of guns. Yet all 32 teams have found reasons
they’re better off without Kap in uniform.
The quarterback thinks that’s collusion. So do his fans.

The problem for Kap is that it’s not necessarily collusion,
at least of the malicious kind. It could just be 32 hunters
who each believe that if one team seizes the hare, all the
hunters lose out on the stag. For now, they’re all waiting
in the bushes. For now.
They might miss the big picture, though. Kaepernick

might not be the hare in this example; he might instead
be the stag. If one team signs him, it’s like waiting for
the stag to come back through the trap. Two things can
occur. The trap works or it doesn’t.
Either way, they know. Kap could be great again, or

competent, or a bust. Either way, we’ll know. While
signing Kap doesn’t erase racial oppression, it at least
moves the debate to something else. Folks forgot what
it was like when Tim Tebow—a controversial player
who knelt for a different reason—couldn’t advance his
career based on talent. Folks’ll forget it if Kaepernick
can’t. They won’t if he never gets the chance.
Meantime, #ImWithKap.
Rich explains: the stag hunt
The Stag Hunt Dilemma is an important problem in game theory

because players are focused on minimizing their level of potential
risk rather than in gaining the greatest possible reward.
Traditionally, this story is all about a group of knights hunting a
stag for King Arthur’s feast. If the knights all work together, they
might bring home a great trophy and bring great honor to their
king.
But they might also fail, and come back empty-handed. In the face
of that, a knight might neglect their role of hunting the stag to go
after some easier game, making sure that the table at least has
some food. Then again, if one knight leaves the hunt, it makes it all
the less likely that the stag hunt will find a successful conclusion
for everyone—except, of course, for the stag.
The stag hunt is all about the nuances of cowardice and

pragmatism in a community. Because while a lot of players would
consider that a sure, small thing is better than a big, risky move,
the story itself leads everyone to also consider the aftereffects.
What happens when the knights come back?
Sir Pragmatic is so excited to drop two small quail on the table,

because it was an easy get. Every other knight stares at Sir
Pragmatic, who walked away from the line and cost the rest of
them the glory of catching a stag. Sir Pragmatic’s chest fills with
pride and his voice fills the chamber, “I have brought the most
food to this table! Clearly, I am the greatest of all knights.” In an
ideal world, King Arthur would immediately show Sir Pragmatic
the door.
And yet, in a sense, Sir Pragmatic is correct. Bringing something is

better than bringing nothing, but sabotaging a group effort to win
a personal victory is seldom considered a “win.” This becomes a
much larger problem when we start to consider senators with
multiple constituencies—calling something a “win” when it
benefits the home state yet supports the other party is probably
the pragmatic approach.

Beating the veto
player: How to end
sexual harassment in
the workplace
December 3, 2017
The announcements of the firings of Matt Lauer and

Garrison Keillor were watershed moments in the
history of sexual harassment. They marked the first day
I can recall that we learned about powerful men
harassing women after they were punished. The recent
revelations involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K.,
Mark Halperin, Brett Ratner, Charlie Rose, Michael
Oreskes, Russell Simmons, and Kevin Spacey preceded
their punishments, and those of politicians Al Franken,
Roy Moore, John Conyers11, and Donald Trump have
preceded... well, a complete lack of consequences so far,
but we’ll see.
The Lauer and Keillor revelations suggest there’s a real

method for driving out harassment in the workplace,
admittedly one that hasn’t worked very well in the past.
But I think it’s time is now. To understand it, it helps to
know how game theorists think about veto players.
11 The day after I published this, Conyers resigned his seat. A few days
later, Franken announced his resignation. Moore still ran, Trump endorsed
him, and both were blamed for losing a safe Alabama Senate seat.
In cooperative game theory, the veto player is a player
who belongs to all winning coalitions. Whoever the veto
player allies with, that player will win, as will the veto
player. This leads to policy instability. If you want to
adopt a new policy or continue an old one, you need the
consent of the veto player, or you need the veto player
to disappear. If you can’t get either of those to happen,
you have only one possible winning strategy: you must
find or create a second veto player that doesn’t have a reason
to ally with the first one. That’s how you get policy
stability when a veto player is present.
In business, bosses are often seen as veto players. An

owner, president, or CEO who has ultimate control of
the workplace must agree to all changes to the
workplace. So, if you want to stop sexual harassment in
a boss’s workplace, the boss must agree publicly that
any employee including the boss will suffer gravely if they
harass others, and employees must mandate their
agreement. The employees then become the second
veto player, and policy stabilizes.
Disclaimer: I am a veto player. I’m an owner who has

control of the workplace. Statistically, I’m much more
likely to be a victimizer than a victim. So, the small
company I own has a crystal-clear policy on the subject:
Our employees will be safe. It’s a policy that applies not only
in our office but at conventions and game stores and
everywhere we go. It’s a policy I mandated, and it
applies to my behavior as well as everyone else’s.
The Weinstein Company didn’t have such a policy until

2015, and it very clearly did not apply to Harvey
Weinstein. That’s because Weinstein enforced his
position as a veto player. He could act with impunity
because he made people into millionaires and stars. To
take him down required deep reporting and dozens of
high-profile women willing to speak out about their
ordeals. That is an impossibly high bar to clear when the
veto player is the problem.
But Lauer—just as much a veto player as Weinstein—

crumbled after a single allegation. Here’s how Lauer
reacted, per a source that spoke to People:
“He was shocked and dumbfounded and completely bewildered by

what happened. He never thought it would get to this level. He
never expected this. He had felt like he was invulnerable—like
Superman.”
Turns out Superman is not actually invulnerable. After

the firing, other women came forward against Lauer,
but did you notice something? Unlike with the accusers
who brought down Harvey Weinstein, you never
learned their names. Because honestly, that’s how it’s
supposed to work.
When someone alleges harassment, it shouldn’t be

required that their life be turned inside-out for them to
be taken seriously. Management should investigate and,
if appropriate, act. The court of public opinion doesn’t
get a vote. It shouldn’t need one.
There were a few perfect-storm conditions in Lauer’s

case: a victim willing to come forward, women who
corroborated her story and Lauer’s patterns of behavior,
and a management willing to listen. But it is reasonable
to ask:
Why was it willing to listen?

The #metoo campaign that rose after the Weinstein
allegations is a probable reason, but what it does might
not be obvious. #metoo has created an ability for
women in an organization to collectively threaten the
health of the organization if it doesn’t enforce the
highest standards. Their external remedies are becoming
obvious even to the least empathetic of bosses:
reputation loss, monetary loss, talent loss, and (in The
Weinstein Company’s case) possible company loss.
One harassed woman on her own can’t easily become a

second veto player. It takes multiple women who
believe her and hold the organization to the fire.
Multiple men too. The network has to exist before the
problem does, or at the very least it has to build itself
fast when it discovers that the problem exists. It has to
steamroll the Nancy Pelosi-like enablers12 who can’t see
the problem. As hard as it is to do against the powerful
men who prey, it’s got to win.
It might be doing so. NBC News had routine anti-

harassment training—online, if you can believe it—but
is now instituting in-person training and other measures.
Whatever remains of The Weinstein Company will
assuredly have a solid policy, or it won’t have any
employees. The Met just figured out this is
multidimensional issue, as it needed to do some serious
work over the weekend on its James Levine problem.
Given Pelosi’s about-face, we might even see change in
Congress—heck, after Billy Bush smashed Trump in
the Times on Sunday, we might even see change at the
White House.
12Pelosi was criticized for failing to support Democratic women’s efforts

to discipline Franken and Conyers, though she later reversed that position.
Okay, probably not this White House. But despite that, I
anticipate that most organizations will re-examine their
policies as their Neanderthal overlords crash and burn
around them.
About damn time.

Rich explains: veto players
Back in 1965, a lawyer and mathematician named John F. Banzhaf

III strolled into New York’s Nassau County, determined to bring
mathematical justice to an inequitable voting system. Each region
of the county had a number of representatives based on its total
population, which seems like a valid way to reflect the will of the
people in that county. As such, there were multiple
representatives from the regions with larger towns, and few from
the more rural areas.
Banzhaf stormed in and pointed to the tendency of each region to

vote as a single bloc as the first problem. The second problem was
that a decision only required a simple majority of 16 out of 30
votes to pass. The third problem, and the biggest, was the number
of representatives from each region. As he scanned the council
chamber, he saw blocs of 9, 9, and 7 voters from the three larger
regions and blocs of 3, 1, and 1 voters from the three smaller
regions. Intuitively, this seems absolutely unfair, but Banzhaf was
not content to just point out vague inequities.
With a wave of his hands, the great professor created what we

still call the Banzhaf Power Index. This is a way of evaluating each
bloc in a vote to determine how much voting power they truly
have. Given the need for 16 ayes to succeed on a vote, Banzhaf
noted that the support of the three smaller blocs is never needed
to make a vote succeed. The three cannot win together (3 + 1 + 1
< 16) and they cannot win with the support of a single large bloc
(5 + 9 < 16). On the other hand, any two of the large blocs can win
all on their own.
Banzhaf created a system to show what was already intuitively

clear: that the three small blocs were completely powerless. The
same system, of course, can be used to show when a single bloc
has all the power, turning into a veto player, who must be part of
every winning vote. While anyone can look at a situation and find
inequity, I find it a uniquely impressive achievement to use
mathematics to point out situations in which power dynamics can
truly be described in zeroes and ones.

Playing chicken with
Robert Mueller is a
bad idea
December 15, 2017
The GOP is on a collision course with Special Counsel

Robert Mueller. In the two weeks since Mueller indicted
Michael Flynn and everyone figured out that Trump is
toast, Fox News apparatchiks and their allies in
Congress have been eager to smear him and the FBI
over the tiniest of breaches. Their efforts to delegitimize
the investigation against Trump are transparent, vapid,
and possibly effective.
Except for one thing: Mueller is the wrong person to

play chicken with.
Chicken is a classic puzzle in game theory, but unlike

such arcane constructs as the prisoner’s dilemma,
everybody understands it. Two idiots get in cars and
drive toward each other at high speed. There’s a one-
lane bridge between these idiots. If they both continue
at their current speed, they will crash and kill each other.
If one or both idiots veers away, they will bypass each
other and live to be idiots on another day.
(This really happens.)

Chicken has a bizarre payoff matrix. Obviously, the
payoff for both not veering is complete disaster. Both
idiots die, and everybody they knew shakes their heads
and says, “Of course that happened.”
But if either veers, his payoff should be zero. Nothing bad

happens. Nothing at all. All he’s done is let someone go
by. But the payoff isn’t zero. It’s negative.
The game’s name tells you why it isn’t zero. It comes

from an implied rebuke: that whichever idiot decides
not to be an idiot is less of a man. (It’s always a man.)
There is a minor loss payoff to being the only one to
veer, and a minor gain to being the only one to drive
through, because the veerer is perceived as not even a
real man. He’s a callow bird. Who wants to be callow?
Just man up and plow your hot rod into another real
man. Then, after you beneficently remove yourself from
the gene pool, we’ll tell people you weren’t a loser.
Honest, we will, Mr. Totally-Not-a-Chicken.
So, back to the GOP and Mueller. The GOP is bulleting

its car toward Mueller. Should they think he’ll veer?
Well, let’s review what Mueller has done.

• First, he indicted Paul Manafort and his flunky Rick
Gates with the clear intention of putting them
behind bars for years. Prior to that, he night-raided
Manafort’s house. This is not kidding around. It’s a
clear statement to other conspirators that this could
be you.
• Second, he flipped George Papadopolous and kept
it secret for three weeks after indicting him. During
that time, Papadopolous cooperated with Mueller’s
team, likely wearing a wire to catch the malefactors
cold.
• Third, he bonded with New York Attorney General
Eric Schneiderman13 to undercut the president’s
statement that he could pardon anyone. Not for
state crimes, he can’t. Say, what state do Trump and
Kushner and his cronies live and work in? Oh,
that’s right.
• Fourth, he indicted Flynn—whom he could nail on
anything from obstruction to kidnapping—on the
lesser crime of lying to the FBI, sending a message
that he could have thrown the book at Flynn and
his dumb kid. He didn’t, because Flynn is ratting on
Trump or someone close to him.
• Fifth, he interviewed everyone except those most
endangered by his probe: the president, the vice
president, and the attorney general.
• Sixth, he has subpoenaed Trump’s bank accounts
and likely has his tax records, in defiance of his
demand to stay away from his personal finances.
• Seventh, he left sealed indictments hiding in plain
sight, and painted his indictment of Manafort and
Gates as “indictment B,” leaving everyone to
wonder who is the target of “indictment A.” (Flynn
isn’t, as he was indicted in a different court, and
Papadopolous wasn’t indicted at all.)
• Finally, he has said almost nothing.
That is a stone-cold assassin right there. If the GOP

thinks Mueller will swerve into a ditch to avoid being
hit, it is fooling itself. Mueller will continue driving
toward the bridge, because his job is to drive toward the
13Schneiderman crashed and burned due to harassment allegations, but

the Southern District continues its cases against Trump.
bridge. The Mueller investigation is a self-driving car.
It’s got a destination, and it’s going to get there as long
as it has a mandate to do so. Mueller will take this threat
in stride and unseal indictments against higher and
higher ranking officials.
Some bright bulbs in the GOP think they’re playing

chicken with someone else: Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein. With his boss Jeff Sessions recusing
himself (and likely a target of the investigation),
Rosenstein has the responsibility to decide whether
Mueller continues. So, they hauled him before Congress
to grill him about Mueller.
Wrong guy here too. He said he saw no reason to

change course. Asked whether he was afraid of Trump
firing him, Rosenstein laughed, “No, I am not,
Congressman.” He has no reason to be, since a Saturday
Night Massacre will end the Trump presidency.
Rosenstein has got more job security than Sessions, by
an Alabama mile.
Neither of these men are veering. They don’t fear the

bridge. The only question is whether the GOP will turn
their car aside. After the results of elections in Virginia,
New Jersey, and most importantly Alabama, the GOP
has to have the self-awareness to know it’s heading for a
catastrophic crash. The words “2018 wave election” are
now in the public consciousness.
Even Newt Gingrich understands that the party must

adapt or be run out of town. This week, he dropped an
editorial with the title, “My fellow Republicans, a
Democratic wave election is coming unless we act right
now.”
Newt doesn’t want the GOP clown car to crash. I
expect most GOP senators and governors don’t either.
But the House is filled with idiots hopped up on
gerrymandering and brimstone.
It feels like they’re driving the car, doesn’t it?
Buckle up, America.

Rich explains: the game of chicken
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but nations get involved in the

game of chicken from time to time. Though they don’t bristle with
teenage machismo and strut around in leather jackets, they do
tend to bristle with adult machismo and strut around in front of
their very large armies. In a military sense, the game often gets
called brinksmanship. Generals talk about the power of walking
right up to the brink of war and watching the other side melt away
into the shadows. It’s an enormous power move built through
overwhelming threat, and it either works or...
Let’s travel back to 1962. In the Cold War, every nation seemed
like a bit player in the political battle between the USA and the
USSR. Endless military actions were completed by these two
supergiants using the world as their chessboard. President
Kennedy moved ballistic missiles into Italy and Turkey, putting
Russia within easy range of a nuclear attack. Not liking that one
bit, Chairman Khrushchev responded by moving missiles into Cuba
to protect the small communist nation. Just like that, the world
spent thirteen days preparing for complete nuclear war.
The Cuban Missile Crisis had one outcome that both countries
rushed towards at ridiculous speeds, though neither wanted that
outcome. We prepared to invade Cuba to remove those missiles.
The USSR prepared to launch as soon as the invasion began. Either
action on this small island would lead to launching the entire
nuclear stockpile of both nations—an unthinkable outcome. Yet,
both sides knew that they couldn’t let the other proceed
unchecked, as that would be seen as losing the game.
After a series of secret negotiations, each nation took small steps

in unison, letting them back down from the brink while retaining a
careful balance of power. Nuclear disarmament strategies
continue this trend, favoring small milestones over large,
sweeping actions. However, the Cold War and the threat of a
nuclear apocalypse have given brinksmanship a new name, better
representing how the game of chicken is doomed to play out for
the rest of history—mutually assured destruction.

The GOP is living in a
fantasy world on
taxes—specifically,
Star Wars
December 24, 2017
This week, Today host Savannah Guthrie noted New

York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s opinion that it was
“pure fantasy” to think the GOP tax bill would lead to
growth in jobs and wages. Guthrie said to House
Speaker Paul Ryan:
“I’ll ask you plainly: Are you living in a fantasy world?”
Ryan sputtered out an answer that was quickly lost to

the aether, but the real answer’s obvious:
Yes, Savannah, the GOP is living in a fantasy world.

Specifically, a science fantasy world, one a lot of us have
indulged in this holiday season. The Republican Party
believes that it’s in Ryan’s beloved Star Wars, that it’s
Han Solo, and that it’s about to win the Millennium
Falcon from Lando Calrissian.
Lando bet the Falcon in the last hand of the Cloud City
Sabacc Tournament, some two and a half years before
the events of A New Hope (a.k.a., Star Wars). Sabacc is a
card game with some unique elements.
This passage comes from the Star Wars novel Rebel
Dawn, by A.C. Crispin.14
Lando was holding two cards in his hand now. The

professional gambler smiled at his friend, then, quickly
punching a notation onto a data-card, he pushed it
and his few remaining credit-chips toward Han. “My
marker,” he said, in his smoothest, most mellow
tones. “Good for any ship on my lot. Your choice of
my stock.”
The Bith turned to Han. “Is that acceptable to

you, Solo?”
Han’s mouth was so dry he didn’t dare speak, but

he nodded.
The Bith turned back to Lando. “Your marker is good.”
Lando, who won the Falcon two years earlier at this

tournament, bluffed Solo with an Idiot and a Two of
Staves against Solo’s Pure Sabacc, which could only be
beaten by Lando having the Three of Staves to fill out
the Idiot’s Array but—
Okay, I probably lost you there. As I’ve run Sabacc

tournaments at Star Wars Celebration, I’m one of the
few earthlings who knows how to play Sabacc, which is
kind of like being crowned Most Valuable Seeker of
your town’s Quidditch league. But just because I know
it doesn’t mean you want to hear me explain it to you.
Maybe I should just talk about poker.
14 Because I’m fair-use quoting Rebel Dawn, I need to review it. My review:
It’s… well, it’s not good.
There are two ways to handle the question of how
much a poker player can bet. The first is called table
stakes. This means that all players can bet only with
money they have on the table. So, if a player has $500 in
chips, he can only bet $500. But what if someone bets
$1,000 to that player? Is he out of the hand because he
can’t pay enough to call? Not hardly. He can go all in,
meaning that he answers the $1,000 bet with a $500 call
that amounts to all his chips. If the player loses, he loses
his $500, and is likely out of the game. If the player
wins, he wins $500 from the player who put him all in.
The key to this, is that no matter how recklessly a player

plays, he cannot lose more than he has staked in the
game. If he doesn’t play the hand, he’s not at risk at all.
In a poker tournament, the key to success is not playing
too many hands, especially with cards that rarely win.
While other players bankrupt themselves on bad bets,
the conservative player retains his chips for when the
cards give better odds of success.
That’s one way to run an economy, and it’s a highly

advisable way. At the end of a year, every law-abiding
American files a tax return that delineates how much he
or she is contributing to the government’s treasury. In a
table stakes economy, that’s what the government can
spend for the next year. It then makes hard choices
about what it will spend its money on, based on the
money it has to play with. Some hands it will have to sit
out.
Turns out we’re not exactly playing table stakes, though.

We have a thing called a debt ceiling, which limits how
much the government can borrow. Its goal is to make
us stay within our means. It doesn’t quite do that.
“Since it was established,” says the Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget, “Congress and the President
have increased the debt ceiling roughly 100 times. During the
1980s, the debt ceiling was increased from less than $1 trillion to
nearly $3 trillion. Over the course of the 1990s, it was doubled to
nearly $6 trillion, and in the 2000s it was again doubled to over
$12 trillion. The Budget Control Act of 2011 automatically
raised the debt ceiling by $900 billion and gave the President
authority to increase the limit by an additional $2.1 trillion to
$16.39 trillion. Lawmakers have since suspended the debt limit
four times between February 2013 and March 16, 2017, when
it will be reestablished at its current level of $19.86 trillion.”
Yowza.
I said there were two ways to answer the question of

how much a player can bet, the first being table stakes.
The second is called out of pocket, the much more
dangerous way to play poker. In an out of pocket game,
any player can bet any amount greater than the number
of chips he has. He can reach into his pocket for more
money to back up whatever he has already put into the
hand.
In the movies, this is when the keys to the Aston Martin

hit the felt. In Casino Royale, Bond is crushing his
opponent. In an act of supreme bravado, the opponent
wants to bet his car. Bond lets him. Spoiler: Bond gets
the car.
Pulling money out of one’s pocket and trading it for

chips takes time, however, so in this kind of game, a
player may “drag light,” or pull chips out of the pot
equal to the amount that he will exceed his stack.
Should the player win, his debt to the pot is erased.
Should he lose, the light chips represent that player’s
further obligation to the winner of the pot. This usually
needs to be produced at once, though an IOU can be
written to cover the light stack.
You can see how tempting this would be. With this
option available, you might play a lot more hands, and
you might not be inclined to fold a hand when losing it
would cost you everything in front of you. You can
always borrow from the future by reaching into your
pocket. That’s why poker has its limits.
A betting limit is a minimum or maximum amount you

can bet at any time. For example, you might be playing a
$1-$2 Texas hold ’em game. That means that the
minimum bet on any opportunity is a dollar, and the
maximum is twice that.
But some people don’t like limits, so they play no-limit,

meaning there aren’t any betting maximums, so anyone
can bet any amount he can cover.
It’s that last bit that’s the problem. Search all you like in
the public card rooms of Las Vegas, but you will be
hard-pressed to find a no-limit hold ’em game that lets
players play out of pocket. You will find out-of-pocket
games, and you will find no-limit games, but almost
never the two together.
That’s because the ability to reach into one’s pocket to

cover a bet that’s uncapped in its maximum size means
that anyone with a sufficient bankroll can buy any pot.
You bet $10, and I raise $1 million. Chances are you
can’t cover that, so you must fold. That’s untenable, and
it’s not really poker, so it’s not played.
In that Casino Royale scene, the dealer tries to insist the
criminal and James Bond play by table stakes, but Bond
allows the criminal to bet his car. At least the dealer tries
to enforce the rules.
The Sabacc dealer doesn’t even try. Despite dealing at a

10,000-credit table stakes tournament, the Bith says
Lando’s marker for an unspecified ship on his lot is
good, if it’s cool with Han. That’s crossing the streams,
and it’s madness.
For most of the 20th century, the federal government

understood that you can’t play table stakes and out of
pocket together. An expenditure might not have to be
covered by the previous year’s taxes, but it had to be
covered from somewhere, even if it was borrowing against
future revenues.
This made choices difficult, and eventually all debts had

to be paid. Investments had to be met with the
expectations of future incomes. This gave an economic
weight to paying for public schools, since an educated
workforce makes more money down the road. Some
administrations spent more on defense and less on
social programs, and some did the opposite, because
choices had to be made.
Until September 10, 2001, the U.S. was playing

reasonably conservatively. The budget was running a
surplus under President Clinton. We were starting, ever
so slowly, to eat into the national debt. The nightmare
of September 11 set all that ablaze. We hit a recession,
began the cleanup, and mobilized against the Taliban. It
wasn’t cheap, but it was within America’s budget—at
least, one with a few overdrawn credit cards.
Since then, though, the “Party of Fiscal Responsibility”
has gone bonkers with spending—they’ve been on tilt,
as the poker players say.
The Bush administration racked up insane deficits

(especially as the economy crashed in 2008), the Obama
administration slowed them down, and now the GOP
has passed a bill that adds one and a half trillion dollars—
more than $50,000 for every American man, woman,
and child—to the debt. Our so-called president gleefully
signed it on his way to Mar-A-Lago, keenly aware that
he makes out like a bandit under it.
Like any poker player, we cannot afford this. Even a

few hundred billion can be spent down eventually, but
one and a half trillion cannot. Eventually the interest we
pay on the deficit will overwhelm the budget, then we
will go bankrupt for good. Sometimes, no matter how
much you want to win, you must stand up from the
table, or you may not get to play another hand.
Unless, like Star Wars superfan Paul Ryan, you’re living

in a fantasy world. Then you might get to be like Han
Solo. That Sabacc story ended with an eye-melting,
mystique-killing paragraph.
Han grinned, then threw both arms up into the air and
whirled around in an impromptu dance, giddy with joy.
“Wait till I tell Chewie! The Millennium Falcon is mine!
At last! A ship of our own!”
Trouble is, I can see Paul Ryan doing just that.

Rich explains: limits
I didn’t get exposed to poker until ESPN broadcast Chris

Moneymaker’s win at the 2003 World Series of Poker. The
subsequent boom—the Moneymaker effect—led me to take a
deep dive, studying the probability of making good hands, table
positions, and the wildly different betting rules and strategies in
the wide range of games that make up the poker pantheon.
The craze coincided with the Bush II administration. In the 2000

election, Gore won the popular vote, while Bush claimed the
electoral college. The talk was that the electoral college had to be
disbanded, as it thwarted the will of the people. But which
people? The electoral college was put in place to let small states
have influence. It glorified small victories in place of sweeping only
a few big outcomes. (The talk subsided after Bush’s clean victory
in 2004, and didn’t return until 2016 went haywire.)
This debate paralleled the reality that some poker players love to
play no-limit and others love to play with limits. No-limit looks
really fun. Everyone stands up when a player goes all-in and the
commentators go wild because someone is about to go home.
Limit players, on the other hand, rarely have to risk their entire
stake in a single hand. They get to play again and again, building
up their winnings throughout the competition.
Imagine a presidential election as sitting heads-up at a limit final

table of the WSoP. The stakes could not be higher. The grand
finale often drags on and on—say fifty nifty hands total. As you
strategically give up a few weak hands to dig down and focus on
the important wins, your foe does something mystifying. With a
wide grin, they push all their chips to the middle. “All. In.” The
referee says that if you agree, you can play the hand no-limit. You
sigh. You looked forward to those smaller wins, which aren’t
crucial to the outcome, but let you make your positions clear to
the nation. Now, your opponent wants to change the game. You’ll
have to focus your energy on just a few huge bets, like California,
New York, and Texas. That is, if you decide to take the deal. With
the future of America on the line, what do you do?

Trump is tanking the
presidency
December 29, 2017
In the last year, I’ve funneled my rage into writing a

bunch of pieces about game theory and politics, more
than a few about President Trump. As someone who
studies games and people for a living, I’ve wondered
something I never pondered before this year:
Is it possible to tank the presidency?
It’s not a crazy concept. Tanking—intentionally losing

now to gain later—sure looks like what the president is
doing. Consider this annus horribilis.
• His approval ratings in 2017 have been
catastrophic, consistently in the mid-30s. His first
three quarters are the three worst first three
quarters since there were ratings. At Christmas, he’s
the least popular president ever.
• He has avoided anything that could improve his
approval ratings, such as being less racist, being less
sexist, or being less lazy.
• He has attacked members of his own party as much
as the opposition.
• He hasn’t looked like he likes the job, spending
more than 100 days in 2017 at his own properties
rather than at the White House.
• He has backed losing candidates, even twice picking
losers in Alabama’s Senate race, with a full-throated
endorsement of an alleged child molester.
• He hasn’t filled most of the jobs in his
administration, and has had a revolving door on
those he has filled.
• Instead of leading with what could’ve been a
popular infrastructure bill—because, y’know, he
builds things—he started by failing to dismantle
Obamacare and then backing a historically
unpopular tax bill.
• He’s probably going to fire his special prosecutor to
keep his son and son-in-law out of jail, which could
get him impeached.
This is remarkably unimpressive even for a boorish fool

like Trump. It’s unclear that he wants to be president
for a full term, despite launching his campaign for a
second term immediately upon assuming the office. So,
why would he want to behave this way? Hanlon’s
razor—“never attribute to malice that which is
adequately explained by stupidity”—suggests he’s just
bad at everything and this is all we can expect from him.
But the more I look at it from a game theory viewpoint,

the more I think it is malice. I think he’s intentionally
not succeeding at being president. Why is unclear.
There’s the Russian plant possibility, but that’s just too
spy-drama for me. Maybe he wants to destroy trust in
institutions. Maybe he’s broken on the inside. Whatever
the reason, his behavior is consistent with tanking.

To learn why, it can help to see what motivates a sports
team to tank. When you tank, you intentionally lose
games to gain later.
One reason to do so is to pick your playoff opponent.

In an Olympic game versus Slovakia, the 2006 Swedish
hockey team intentionally lost 3–0; at one point, they
failed to log a shot on goal in a 5-on-3 with five NHL
stars on the ice. In doing so, they avoided facing the
previous two gold-medal teams and went on to win
gold. If you can choose a lesser foe by losing, you have
no reason to win.
But for the most part, teams that tank aren’t in danger
of making the playoffs. They tank to gain higher draft
picks. Drafts are ordered by loss records (maybe altered
by the falling of ping-pong balls), so having a lower win
total means gaining better players, at least in theory. So,
some teams intentionally lose to have a greater chance
of getting more impressive players.
The NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers are this decade’s tanking

poster child, securing four consecutive top-3 picks by
posting a record of 75–213 over the previous four
seasons. With those picks, they picked up injured
college superstars incapable of playing in the short term,
surrounded them with untalented understudies, and
successfully failed to succeed for years. Throughout this
horrorshow, the Sixers kept saying “Trust the process.”
Then the Sixers drafted consecutive #1 picks Ben
Simmons15 and Markelle Fultz to go with the healed
Joel Embiid and they’re now... slightly below mediocre.
I guess that’s good?
15 Who called Trump an idiot and a dickhead.

Some tank jobs for consecutive top picks are legendary.
The NHL’s Quebec Nordiques got #1’s Mats Sundin,
Owen Nolan, and Eric Lindros after three years of
terrible play, then fled the country to become the Colorado
Avalanche. The Washington Nationals were very bad at
baseball and were rewarded with phenoms Bryce
Harper and Stephen Strasburg. The Cleveland Browns
tanked for the top pick the last two years, which they
ended with a staggering record of 1–31. (Not every
team that gets consecutive top picks will tank to get
there. The WNBA’s Seattle Storm got Lauren Jackson
and Sue Bird back-to-back, but played to win first.
However, they just did the double again, so we’ll see.16)
Though the leagues always say they hate it, they’ve

enabled a clear reward for losing, and game theory says
that it’s the right thing to do, even if it feels morally
bankrupt. A perennially mediocre team has precious
little upside; being always-not-quite-in-the-playoffs or
always-one-and-done demoralizes a fan base. Better to
waste a few years and gamble on signing a transcendent
talent, such as a Tim Duncan or a LeBron James. Right?
Well, there are some problems with this strategy. First,

while ownership and general managers might be able to
trust the process, coaches and players know their jobs
are on the line, and they don’t want to be replaced. So,
they do something their tanking-enamored fans hate:
they try very hard not to lose. Second, if they do win, the
fans start to like it again: Witness this year’s previously
0–9 San Francisco 49ers, who just wrecked their draft
by joyously ripping off four straight wins behind new
superstar QB Jimmy Garoppolo.
16 Answer: They won the 2018 WNBA Championship.

Even if it does work and you lose a lot, you still have to
draft well: If you’re the Cleveland Browns and you whiff
on successive #1 picks Tim Couch and Courtney
Brown, you’re still the Browns.
It turns out that sports analytics suggests you don’t win

by losing. Of the NBA teams with 25 or fewer wins, just
10 percent got to 54 or more wins within five years; of
the teams that had between 34 and 49 wins, 20 percent
got to 54 or more wins within five years. In all sports,
losers trend toward losing, and average teams have a
better chance of being better than average. Finding one
of those transcendent talents atop the draft is
possible—a Peyton Manning, say—but there are a lot
more non-Peytons up there. Game theorists
acknowledge that winning by tanking is theoretically
viable, but practically nearly impossible, especially for
bad organizations who can’t stop being bad at sports.
So, it’s worth abolishing at any cost.
That’s how tanking works in sports. Can it be done

anywhere else? There aren’t many places where being
intentionally, unironically bad at something gets you
rewarded. But politics might be an exception. There’s
no standard for what constitutes success in politics,
except re-election.
Iowa Rep. Steve King is patently a white supremacist.

Dude kept a Confederate flag on his desk even though
Iowa was part of the Union. King has been re-elected
seven times.17 It doesn’t matter to his supporters that
he’s undermining America, so it doesn’t matter to him.
That’s what success looks like in Iowa’s 4th District.
17 King lost in the 2020 primary, because even Iowans run out of patience.
Even with all the racists who vote like Steve King
behind him, Trump is probably not getting re-elected
with a 35 percent approval rating. But, unlike a
Congressperson, he’s got a four-year job. It’s got an arc.
One aspect of that arc is that the incumbent party does
poorly in the midterm after a president assumes office.
Everyone knows that. Even Trump knows that.
Trump is a mean-spirited opportunist, one of the best

ever. So, it’s not impossible that Trump’s goal is to
maximize Republican carnage in November. He’s
checked off the boxes that give his tank job the best
chance of success. People in the executive branch like to
do their jobs—EPA people protecting the environment,
State Department people working for peace, and so
on—and so not filling all those jobs means fewer
barriers to getting less done. People want to like the
president, so picking insane fights with war widows and
popular sports leagues keeps his approval ratings down.
Nothing needs to be said about “draft strategy” when
you have Betsy DeVos running Education, Rick Perry
running Energy, and Scott Pruitt running the EPA.18
A 2018 Democratic wave election tied to an unpopular

and impeachable president amps the carnage. In that
scenario, Ryan19 and McConnell likely retire, Democrats
take over, and, facing liberal challenges from within, the
Pelosi-Schumer bloc figures out it must do something
to stay in charge. While they’re working that out, with
Democrats not quite in possession of the 2/3 majority
needed to evict him from office, maybe then Trump
pivots.
18 Not anymore. Apparently, even in this White House you can get fired
for grifting.
19 Ryan saved himself the embarrassment and retired prematurely.

After a GOP collapse in Congress, Trump now deals
with a Democratic majority that wants him to play ball
or GTFO. Maybe he plays ball. Maybe he starts
becoming more and more popular when he’s the only
game in town for Republicans. Maybe his true centrist,
what’s-in-it-for-me nature takes over. Then, with a 48
percent approval rating and a what-are-you-gonna-do
shrug, he runs in 2020. Essentially, he’s tanking to pick
his opponent, and it’s his own party establishment.
Maybe he wins. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I’m just speculating here. Hanlon’s razor says he’s just

an idiot who can’t Krazy Glue his yap shut. But my gut
says he wants to destroy the presidency. If he gets to
destroy the mainstream Republican Party too, so much
the richer. Then he, Bannon, and Fox News have laid
the path for the fascist party of their dreams. It might
work. In his mind, tanking to win forever could be the
only way he comes out on top.
What’s the Democratic Party to do if this is his plan?

Play to win, that’s what. When they get a majority in one
or both chambers, they impeach him at once. They
impeach Mike Pence too. They leave the Trump White
House in ruins. They win in 2020. Because let’s be real,
cats: The 76ers aren’t going to become a dynasty by
tanking, and neither is Trump. You don’t win by losing.
To win, you have to be a winner.

Rich explains: tanking
“Woe to the vanquished,” they said.
“It’s better to be the hammer than the anvil,” they said.
I’m not sure who they were, but they certainly weren’t talking
about a best-of-five series between the weakest two teams,
battling to determine who will be the very, very worst of the
worst. To the teams, this might just be a utilitarian battle for the
resource net granted to the league’s loser, but why do fans put up
with this nonsense? Because humans just can’t help rooting for an
underdog, even one who is entirely and artificially self-made.
[Mike says: Relegation matches are the best!]
Say you’ve decided that today is finally the day for you to get into
the wild new craze, Sportsball. You eventually focus your fandom
on two teams. One is last season’s champion, while the other is
local but has a losing record. Backing the Champs comes with the
utility of already winning and having a solid chance at ending the
new season as a winner. However, when surprises come to the
Champs, they are seldom positive because, to you, positivity is
routine. Backing the Locals means that you live for those moments
when your team claws their way to victory over the backs of the
usual winners. This joy comes less often, but seems all the
sweeter.
So, what happens when a third choice comes along? The Greats
are tanking hard, losing like professional losers and posting
everywhere about their grand rebuilding plan. The Greats are
widely mocked, but they talk a good game and that catches on.
Imagine a Greats fan. “We’re such a Great team, we’re just

choosing to be bad. On purpose, I swear! Have you heard our
master plan? Any minute now, we’re gonna start winning. You
won’t be able to handle all the winning. So much winning, any
minute now...”
Yeah, I hate those guys too.

Targeting the Clinton
Foundation is Trump’s
dumbest move yet
January 8, 2018
I’ve chronicled why many of Trump’s maneuvers are

logically flawed. On a game theory level, they are, to use
a scientific term, dumb. I’m particularly impressed with
how dumb last week’s strongman attack on the Clinton
Foundation is. It’s probably the dumbest.
To be clear, I don’t mean dumb on the merits of the

case. I don’t know whether there was a pay-for-play
operation in the State Department or not.20Attorney
General Jeff Sessions should drop the probe for one
reason: The statute of limitations on federal non-capital
felonies is five years. Hillary Clinton left office on
February 1, 2013. Unless they can prosecute Clinton in
the next 23 days for something she did specifically in
January 2013, this dog won’t hunt.21
Let’s charitably presume that Sessions knows that dog

won’t hunt—he said it wasn’t a good idea as recently as
20 I’m lying. I’m sure there wasn’t, like I’m sure Trump is doing it because
he can’t let his popular-vote loss to a woman go. But work with me.
21 I assume that’s an expression Sessions uses. I have no particular
knowledge of which dogs will or will not hunt. Also, it didn’t.

November—and is only doing this because his boss
insists on it. Sessions wants to keep his job, because it
allows him to imprison and deport darker-hued people,
which makes him giggle at night. So, no matter whether
he knows it’s not worth it, he’s gotta do what Trump
demands he do. Should Trump demand he do it?
Game theory unequivocally says the answer is no.

Whatever the merits, the administration would be wise
to “let this go,” if it wants to live out the year. But the
administration doesn’t have any game theorists in it, so
they’re probably not reading this essay. I’m not too
worried they’ll listen to me and make the smart decision
to drop the case. But here’s why they should.
Many game theory issues are built around coalitions.

For each game, there’s one big group called the grand
coalition, which includes all the individuals who are
playing and have agreed to play by the rules. Inside that
grand coalition are several smaller coalitions, called
factions, each of which has its own agenda and
strategies against the others. In coalition theory, it
doesn’t matter much what individuals in factions do; it
only matters how each faction acts as a group, and if
that group has an incentive to stay together.
To achieve their goals, factions pay costs in terms of

labor, political capital, and so on. Work is hard, so
factions look to merge with other factions on issues to
reduce the costs. This assumes the factions’ payoffs are
superadditive; that is, if two factions align, their total
payoff will exceed the sum of their personal payoffs.
tl;dr: People have reasons to act in groups and unite their groups
into bigger groups if they can agree on outcomes.
The endgame of the Mueller investigation is the
potential impeachment of Donald Trump. The only way
to assess the likelihood of that outcome is to look at
what those factions that can affect it want.
It’s a small set of factions. No matter what the voters

want, no matter what the White House wants, no matter
what the media wants, none of them have any say in
whether the president gets impeached.
Only three factions have a say; they are the grand

coalition of impeachment. Currently, they don’t have a
strong reason to work together, so there are lots of ways
the Trump regime can go through and around them.
Lots of gaps through which the Trumps can escape justice here.

Faction 1 is the evidentiary faction, formed of the FBI
and the Special Counsel. They provide the external basis
for criminal charges against the Trump family and its
cronies, and for a Congressional impeachment hearing.
(Congress has an internal basis for those, which I’ll get
to in a second.) What Mueller’s team and the FBI want
to do is discharge their obligations to investigate. With
the Trump-Russia investigation, they have a clear
mandate from their supervisors, Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher
Wray, to leave no stone unturned. This is good work,
and law enforcement people like to be perceived as
being on the side of good.
The Clinton Foundation investigation is not good work.

In 2016, the FBI consolidated its cases and concluded
there was no there there, and it looks like only the howls
from the president and his sycophants have stirred it up
again. This is what dictators do, and what the FBI does
not want to be doing. It can’t prosecute anyone, it
doesn’t appear to have much evidence, and it hates
being used as a political football. The FBI’s goal is to
make this case go away, and there’s only one way to do
that: make the president go away. I don’t believe anyone
in the FBI consciously would do anything to push the
Russia case a way it wouldn’t go, but I do believe they’d
want to accelerate it going that way. So, by investigating
Clinton’s foundation, the administration incentivizes
Faction 1 to get further down the path toward
impeachment.
Faction 2 is the Democrats in Congress. Pretty

impressively for them, they haven’t broken ranks over
opposing Trump. But they do have a major internal
disagreement over whether calling for his impeachment
is good for them. What they want is power, and one
way to get it is to portray the Trump administration as
the enemy of American democracy. Since prosecution
of political opponents is a hallmark of totalitarianism,
this is what Democrats are saying Trump is doing with
the FBI. Trump didn’t make his case any better by
saying “I have the absolute right to do what I want to
do with the Justice Department.” Hoo, that’s chilling,
and may tear down Democrats’ qualms about running
Trump out of town.
There are two types of Democrats in Congress. The

larger group is “establishment” Democrats. They love
Hillary Clinton and think it’s their job to defend her.
The smaller group is the “progressive” Democrats. (I’m
putting these words in quotes because they’re basically
all liberals and just disagree on tactics.) The progressives
don’t think much of Clinton, and would love to sweep
entrenched Democratic operatives away. The key here is
that establishment Democrats are the ones who oppose
impeachment. Prosecuting Clinton makes them form a
coalition for impeachment with their progressive allies,
who overwhelmingly approve of it. So, by investigating
Clinton’s foundation, the administration incentivizes
Faction 2 to get further down the path toward
impeachment.
Faction 3 is the Republicans in Congress. They have

tenuous majorities right now, but face a potential wave
election which may bounce many of them back into the
private sector. Their goal is to minimize the damage
Trump will cause them in November. Impeaching a
president from their own party isn’t something they
want, as shown by their internal investigations into
basically nothing of consequence.
But it’s not like they’re saying nothing. In fact, a coven of
GOP politicos is mad at Sessions for recusing himself
on Russia and not investigating Clinton... oh wait, now
he is. To keep the Clinton investigation going, they’ll
need to be in favor of Sessions staying.
As long as Sessions is there, he’ll have to stay away from

the Russia thing, and his deputy Rosenstein has already
made it clear that he’s not firing Mueller. So, by
supporting the investigation of Clinton, they’re
supporting Sessions, and by supporting Sessions, they’re
supporting Mueller.
Mueller will give Americans even more reason to turn

the GOP out on the street. If they suffer a November
bloodbath, they’ll likely turn on the president.
No gaps through which the Trumps can escape justice here.

The only way to avoid that bloodbath is to creep toward
punishing Trump and his kin for the illegal acts they
committed. So, by investigating Clinton’s foundation,
the administration incentivizes Faction 3 to get further
down the path toward impeachment.
This is extraordinarily poor tactics even for an

extraordinarily poor tactician. It’s not going to work on
any level. No one named Clinton is going to prison, and
no one named Trump is helping themselves avoid going
to prison. It’s just creating a true grand coalition
working toward impeachment. The factions’ wildly
different payoffs are superadditive; working together on
impeachment reduces the personal cost each faction
feels for getting it done. Not only is working toward
impeachment easier for all factions, but it’s more likely
to get done because the administration has united the
grand coalition in support of that goal. Now they can all
win if Trump goes.
My advice to Chairman Trump: Drop this Putinesque

foray like it’s a toxic bomb. Oh right, you’re not reading
this. You’re probably deep in your Wikileaked copy of
Fire and Fury right now. I hear it’s a ripping good read.

Rich explains: grand coalitions
Have you ever lost a game so badly you never wanted to play it
again? I was playing a sci-fi wargame called Twilight Imperium,
and a “friend” attacked me on the first turn, taking me all but out
of a six-hour game in the first ten minutes. It’s a good game with
great game theory exercises built in, but then and there, I decided
that I would never again lead the Universities of Jol-Nar into a
mythic age of technology and galactic peace. I was done.
The truth of any game is that we play under the guise of a grand
coalition. Every player pledges to follow the rules, and thereby
gain some measure of utility. Maybe that’s the joy of the game,
the thrill of victory, or mountains of money, but all players must
accept these strictures. Though a lineman is usually attempting to
put the opposing quarterback on the ground, the rules of football
do not allow them to do so with an axe kick to the head.
Everyone in the grand coalition knows it is in their best interest to

keep the game going. As such, each game has an algorithm that
describes what each player should gain in the coalition, known as
the Shapley Value. In some leagues, a winning team gets a ton of
money for winning. Losing teams get much less. To avoid this,
revenue sharing blunts this outcome so all benefit.
Losing is a part of any game, and players who benefit the

competition less are still accounted for in the Shapley decisions.
However, they must earn something, or losers may leave the
league or even become trolls and bad actors. We see this often in
computer games when one team loses all hope of victory and just
starts spamming dance emotes. When we sit down with a group
of friends to play board games, what kind of outcomes are a losing
player likely to accept without leaving the game?
I’m not saying that you should determine the Shapley Value for
your grand coalition of friends. But you should certainly consider
the utility of those who are cooperating with you. If everyone isn’t
getting something they want out of your coalition, they might
consider showing you the door.

For Trump,
everything ends when
the Wall comes down
January 16, 2018
“If the Wall should ever fall, all the fires will go out.”
– Qhorin Halfhand in book two of A Song of Ice and Fire
At OrcaCon this weekend, I had to confess to a nerd-

cred-killing admission: I haven’t read George R.R.
Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire or watched Game of
Thrones.
While I enjoy Martin’s writings, I don’t like unrelenting

displays of misery and brutality, especially ones that
don’t look like they’re going to end on any sort of
schedule. When challenged to put these concerns aside
and give the epic property a chance, I was inflexible.
The Thronies just had to accept that I was not, and
would not be, one of them.
Besides, I already watch an unrelenting display of misery

and brutality: the Trump administration. While I don’t
like it one bit, it is fascinating, and while I don’t know
how or when it’s going to end, I do expect the end to be
satisfying. I feel that we are watching a regime at a crux:
It’s either going to get a lot better in Season Two, or it’s
going to get cancelled sooner than anyone involved with
it expects. My money to date has been on the latter.
No issue defines this crux more than immigration,

Trump’s signature soapbox. Here, his dog whistles are
dragon shrieks. He doesn’t even hide his racism, with
last week dominated by his reputed depiction of Haiti,
El Salvador, and the nations of Africa as “shithole
countries.” It’s a shame, because that crisis overwrote a
fascinating one-hour open session of Trump and
Congressional leaders negotiating over immigration.
That session was the happiest I’ve been with Trump.
Sure, one day later it was all on fire, but for a shining
moment, the “Great Negotiator” was in view. It was
weird. And cool. And a sham. But on a game theory
level, we can look at what happened and suss out who
in the room was likely to come out with what they
wanted. It all comes down to the value proposition of
flexibility, the willingness to change strategies when
faced with new realities. Here’s what I saw.
First off, seven rich white men express concern, then a

rich white woman expresses concern, and—oh hey, it
turns out there aren’t very many non-rich, non-white
people in this room. What a shockingly nonrandom...
oh, forget it. I can’t even feign surprise. These are the
people who stand between thousands of Dreamers and
deportation. Lord help them.
Anyway, Trump starts flexible. He lets everyone talk,

fails to hold onto a single opinion for more than a
minute, and states his intent to sign whatever Congress
passes. This is one of the (many) knocks on Trump. He
is perceived to not have a central set of beliefs, wisping
on whatever wind blows his way. Whether he does or
doesn’t believe anything after “everyone must love me,”
he’s been remarkably consistent in his post-election
choice of positions. His positions are almost uniformly
“I will do the least humane thing I can do at this very
minute.”
Let’s not forget: The only reason these people are here
is that the Department of Justice terminated the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program, likely the most inhumane move of Trump’s
presidency.22 This is a negotiation at gunpoint. Yet here,
he comes off as the reasonable one. His flexibility is the
dominant strategy in the room.
Flexibility in game theory has both positive and negative

ramifications. There’s a game called hawks and doves,
where hawks always fight and doves never fight. There’s
food at stake. Two hawks will always fight each other;
one will always take the food while the other will always
be injured. Two doves will have a non-violent displaying
contest which one will win, but neither will be injured.
A hawk that goes up against a dove will always take the
food from the dove, but the dove will always leave
before it can be injured.
Hawks are hawks and doves are doves; they can’t

change who they are. Hawks get bloodied up a lot;
doves never get hurt. It’s nice to never get hurt. But a
dove needs at least one other dove out there to display
against, or it will never eat. If all contests are against
hawks, a solitary dove will lose every time and die of
Though the time Trump endorsed horse-soring gives DACA a run for its
22
money on the unbelievable-inhumanity leaderboard.

malnutrition. That’s not a strategy that’ll work. So,
Trump is displaying like a dove. He wants a “bill of
love,” he says. But he’s in a room full of hawks. The
Congresspeople say they have bipartisan agreement on
many issues, and just disagree on tactics.
They are lying.
The Democrats must act on DACA before a March 5

deadline sends innocent kids back to places they don’t
want to go. They can’t give up on the children, but they
also will not give away basic immigration policies like
chain migration and the visa lottery. Sen. Dianne
Feinstein wants a clean DACA bill now; she intones
“March is coming” like it’s “Winter Is Coming.”23
Meanwhile, the Republicans are mostly feigning concern

for the children; what they need is border security and a
limit to the size of families who can come in under one
admission. Everyone except Trump is, for the most
part, inflexible. I watch Rep. Steny Hoyer call some of
Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s proposals “controversial” (a.k.a.,
dead on arrival); I watch Rep. Kevin McCarthy tell
Trump that Feinstein’s clean DACA bill means no
security agreement. These are hawks in dove clothing,
when they bother to dress up at all.
By the end, Love-Dove Trump is losing badly. But he

holds out up to the point when he’s ready to send the
press off to write more “Fake News.” I doubt he grasps
how far apart everyone is, but he commits to the peace-
and-love approach. He knows he will take a ton of heat
23March came in like a lion, but it went out as a toothless lion. Like in
every other arena, Trump could not back up his threat.
(“I like heat,” he fluffs). He sure does take it: When
interviewed by professional ogre Lou Dobbs,
professional troll Ann Coulter calls the meeting the
lowest day of the Trump presidency, confirming all the
claims in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: “He doesn’t
listen. He has no command of the facts. He agrees with
the last person who speaks to him.” This is from
someone who supports him. (Yes, I watched Ann Coulter
so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.)
But wait... watch the end of this remarkable meeting. As

Trump is dismissing the press, one intrepid newshound
spurts out, “Mr. President, is there any agreement
without the Wall?” The Wall, of course, is the always
capitalized—sometimes all-capitalized—principle that
America will be made great again once we put a barrier
between us and Mexico. Because, you see, a Wall stops
the bad guys.(To go back to Game of Thrones, the good
guys in Westeros feared the White Walkers on the
northern side of their Wall. That’s where we are. Hold on,
Hans, are we the baddies?)
It’s not clear Trump believes a Wall will work.

Throughout the meeting, he undercuts the idea that a
Wall needs to be 2,000 miles of three-story concrete.
Mountains and rivers will take up part of it. Fencing is
fine in some places. Need for it is declining since
Trump’s tough talk scares away border-crossers. It’s
clear that not one of these Congresspeople—not one
Democrat, not one Republican—is buying that it will
ever stop determined illegals. After all,
“The Wall can stop an army, but not a man alone.”

– Mance Rayder in book three of A Song of Ice and Fire

But when a reporter asks Trump if there can be a deal
without the Wall, he says, “No, there wouldn’t be. You
need it. I’d love not to build the Wall, but you need the
Wall.” Let that sink in for a minute. “I’d love not to build
the Wall,” he says. This is a man whose job is to build
things. He should love the idea of building a Wall. He
doesn’t love it. He has to build it.
He has gambled everything on the Wall; building it (and

getting Mexico to pay for it!) was the heart of his racist
campaign platform, and the #MAGA folks won’t ever
let him forget it. He thinks they will drop him like a
stone if he gives it up. Coulter’s reaction says he’s
almost certainly right. So, there will be no DACA deal
without a Wall. He is suddenly, resolutely inflexible.
What Trump does at the end there is turn into a hawk.

He’s latched onto a strategy called evolving. In an
evolutionary game, a competitor can adopt different
strategies when new information presents itself. In
Hawks and Doves, such a competitor can be either a
hawk or a dove when he needs to be. This is a lot easier
if no one knows what the player wants to be, and for
the first time, Trump’s inability to hold a consistent
position is an advantage. Everybody thought they had
him pegged; he’s now someone else, and they must
adapt their strategies to a new reality. Maybe it’ll work
on immigration.
But in the long term, it probably won’t. I mentioned

that flexibility can be a bad thing. People might say they
like doves, but they elect hawks. People who have strong
opinions elect leaders who will represent their opinions
fiercely; the compromise they want is from the other
side.
“No Dream, No Deal” isn’t a slogan you compromise
on, and the Democrats aren’t doing it. Trump put the
Dreamers’ lives into play; the Democrats will hold the
line for them, because they can smell blood. Trump will
learn that if you have no real positions, politicians with
real positions will take voters who believe in those
positions away from you. Flexibility can kill you.
So, no Wall equals no Trump. The Democrats’ goal is

to get a clean DACA bill and tear down the Wall. It’s
not going to be easy to get, since the President has veto
power. Even though he said he’d sign anything the
people in that room came up with, he’d be a fool to do
so.
It’s possible he was going to do that anyway, but on

Thursday something happened between 10 am and
noon that turned him from a dove to a total hawk.
Senator Lindsey Graham said Trump got really bad
advice from his staff, because several Congressional
hawks seemed to turn into doves toward the end of the
negotiations. Yet the hawks inside the White House
won, and Trump lost. Good luck with that, pal.
Still, I just spent 1,700 words saying relatively nice

things about someone I despise, so I guess Season Two
of this unrelenting display of misery and brutality might
have some interesting moments after all. If Trump can
turn the narrative away from his racist outburst, he
might get something done. We’ll see if the Democrats
try to destroy him if he doesn’t. Because
“On the Wall, a man gets only what he earns.”

—Benjen Stark in book one of A Song of Ice and Fire

Rich explains: evolutionary strategies
Down here in the game theory bullpen, we often ask questions

like “what even is a game?” We point at random objects and ask
“is this a game?” And obviously the right answer is “stop
gatekeeping games and just let people have fun.”
Yet, the question is useful in terms of analysis. In game theory, a

game must have at least two players capable of changing their
minds and evolving their strategies over time. Many modern co-
op board games have learned to create dynamic AIs which adapt
to player choices to simulate this evolution. When my opponent is
malleable and can change tactics, I lose certainty about my own
actions. At best, all I can do is hope to find a series of probabilistic
actions that keep my opponent on their toes.
Sorry. Here in the game theory bullpen, we talk a lot about

probabilistic actions.
Say my opponent and I each have two possible choices. Option A

gives me 10 points, but it can be countered by my opponent
netting me 0 points. Option B is a sure thing but only gives me 3
points. Should I only choose the sure thing when that huge score
is on the table? Of course not, but choosing Option A every time is
clearly a losing strategy. The goal is to determine how often I
should test those waters while generally choosing to gain 3 points.
Once I build up my zig-zag pattern, I run it as hard as I can until
someone else changes the game.
On the other hand, I could also develop a savvy media campaign

painting my opponent as weak on Option B, forcing them to
choose Option B again and again while I merrily take my 10 points
without any risk at all. Or maybe I could cause some Congressional
chaos, stalling any kind of change to the status quo so I can quietly
take Option A while claiming that my opponent can’t counter me
because that would be dirty politics.
At times like these, players need to reevaluate their situation and

change the game. I’m looking at you, DNC.

How to make a weak
man feel strong:
Throw him a
military parade
February 11, 2018
“Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline;

simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness
postulates strength.”
—Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War
It was January 1991. We’d just decided to do the war

thing again. We launched an attack on Saddam Hussein,
a weak man who made a show of strength by invading
Kuwait. Saddam was a “strongman”—a dictator who
harmed his own people. Like all strongmen, he was not
a strong man inside.
At the time I was Mayor Daley’s research director at

the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, helping
to catalogue and combat hate crimes in the city. It was
my job to tell the Chicago Police Department and other
agencies when and where the bad guys would strike. I
told the cops the census tract of every mosque,
synagogue, and veteran’s hall in the city, and
shockingly—given that I was all of 24 years old at the
time—they actually listened to me. After a few very bad
nights, the guys in blue chased our particular breed of
racist thugs back to their warrens. It was glorious.
What the department wanted to do was show strength

where they were weak. Mind you, I never thought of the
CPD as weak. That said, they did have limited resources
and limited response time. They needed Chicago’s
residents to believe they had more capacity than they
did, and targeting those hotspots meant everybody was
confident the cops had this situation on lockdown.
Acknowledging one’s own weakness is the heart of

strategic decision making. Only when you have a true
assessment of your strength in relation to your foes can
you form an effective strategy against them. When you
do, you can think like a poker player. In poker, you
feign weakness when you have good cards, betting
light and hoping others will fall into your trap. Similarly,
you feign strength when you have bad cards, betting
heavy and hoping to chase those with better cards away.
This is basic Sun-Tzu, and it works.
We have a president who cannot admit weakness. It

terrifies Trump; it makes him a lesser person. He is
under assault constantly, for reasons of his own making.
He rails against the manifest unfairness of it all; he only
wants to be loved, despite his unending run of hateful,
mean-spirited, and unconstitutional actions. He is
portrayed as weak. He cannot handle it. He must show
he is strong because he is not strong.
For once, I think he’s right. Politically, he really does

need to show strength in the face of his own weakness.
It’s the only way he can win with his own base. The
only problem for us is: He has control of the nuclear
arsenal. If he wants, he can show massive strength. It’ll
just get him impeached and maybe worse if he does.
Deep down, he probably knows that. So, he doesn’t
start a war... yet. (Never mind the loss of life. That’s not
something that registers with tyrants.)
Imagine Trump’s delight when, thwarted in making any

real display of strength, he went to Europe and saw
another way. In France, they make a big deal of strength
displays in the form of military parades. France’s track
record in modern wars isn’t exactly stellar, so showing
strength when they have a history of perceived
weakness is a good move. The French forget the
Maginot Line, Algeria, Dien Bien Phu. They just see
those displays of weaponry go by, sing “La
Marseillaise,” and feel like they’re strong.
I want one of those, Trump said, and demanded it of

his flummoxed generals. We don’t do that sort of thing
here, Mr. President, and who’s gonna foot the bill? In a
time when we’ve had two government shutdowns in a
month, it’s not a great time to be wasting millions on
parades. The generals hate this idea. Here’s retired Army
Major General Mark Eaton:
“For someone who just declared that it was ‘treasonous’ to not

applaud him, and for someone who has, in the past, admired the
tactics of everyone from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, it is
clear that a military parade isn’t about saluting the military—it
is about making a display of the military saluting him....
Unfortunately, we do not have a commander in chief, right now,
as much as we have a wannabe banana republic strongman.”
Well now. But hey, he wants a parade. If we’re smart,

we’ll give it to him. Because he’s a weak man who
controls the nuclear arsenal. We should surrender to his
need to show strength, so that he won’t lash out in a
show of real strength. One that could kill a whole lot of
us. This is what we get for electing a weak man. We’ll
elect a strong person after we run this fool out. For
now, this is what we got. We win by feigning weakness.
We don’t have to give him everything. We can deny him

right up to his smallest moment of confidence, because
he has to accept what we give him, as long as it makes
him feel strong. That’s how it works. Watch, I’ll show
you.
A few days after we began Operation Desert Storm, the

director of the City of Chicago’s Advisory Council on
Veterans Affairs had a terrible idea. Chicago’s
beloved Casimir Pulaski Day Parade was coming up in
March, and folks wanted to give it a pro-military theme.
So, the director decided he wanted to run actual tanks
down Michigan Avenue. That wasn’t his terrible idea.
His terrible idea was telling me in advance.
See, I most assuredly did not want tanks rumbling down

the streets of an American city during a war in which
those of Middle Eastern descent were victimized
disproportionately. I felt terrifying the citizenry of
Chicago into submission was a wildly undemocratic
idea. I planned to stop him.
I knew that while our men and women hazarded their

lives overseas, I’d never win a patriotism battle with the
director of veteran’s affairs. Not in front of the mayor’s
staff anyway. I had a much weaker position than he did.
I could not pretend I had more strength on the military
front. I took a different tack.
I made it a physics discussion. I calmly explained that
my objection to this plan was wear and tear on the city
streets produced by a column of 60-ton tanks. I
sketched out a bar napkin calculation of the damage
downtown would suffer. When asked about putting the
tanks on trucks, I showed the damage would be much
worse, since (ahem) tanks don’t weigh less when they’re
on trucks. Within minutes, the idea of driving tanks
through the Loop was dead, and we went back to
having a good old-fashioned Pulaski Day Parade.
The director was furious at me, but he soon cooled

down. He knew as well as I did that no matter how
passionate you might be about an issue in Chicago, the
Department of Streets & Sanitation is stronger than
you. That’s just how Chicago does Chicago. The
director was satisfied that he got to make a fruitless
display of strength, and that’s all that mattered.
We didn’t have tanks in the streets during the Gulf War.

We don’t have to have them now. We can say no. We
just have to remember that a weak man needs a show of
strength. Unless we’re ready to remove him now,
playing to his weakness is good for us. We don’t die in a
blue-orange fireball, and we take away his toys in
November. I’ll make that trade. We all should.
But seriously, no tanks. You don’t want potholes.

Rich explains: dominance
When I think about Sun-Tzu and Machiavelli, the two historical

giants of game theory, I picture them sitting quietly together,
drinking tea, and loathing the other with an unbridled passion.
Sun-Tzu, living in the Warring States period of ancient China, had
to develop strategies to defeat unknown foes in a time of fierce
honor and loyalty, all with his life on the line. Machiavelli was a
diplomat who spent his free time writing plays and poetry, and his
position of luxury allowed him to postulate modern theories like
“the end justifies the means” without much worry for his own life.
In particular, I expect the two would spend teatime battling over
the nature of strength and tactical dominance.
Sun-Tzu focused on fighting wars, where victory can turn on a

single moment. Crafting a strategic trap like feigning weakness is
sound advice when you only intend to face a foe once. What’s
important is earning a reputation for winning. In that case, a new
foe sees all their own options as potential losing strategies.
Machiavelli, as a social animal, focused on fighting repeated

battles for power against the same group of nobles. When he
suggested cultivating a reputation for unpredictability, he wanted
to create situations where his foes would always feel at a
disadvantage, even if they were actually stronger.
Both theorists tried to develop a dominant strategy which would

always lead to victory. The warrior believed in feigning weakness
to create strict dominance, finding a strategy which is always
better than any other by having the strength and tactics to back it
up. The diplomat, knowing that he might be in an intransitive
situation where both players had relatively equal strength, used
confusion to create weak dominance, where at least one winning
strategy would be among his options. He would then use
manipulation to move an opponent onto his chosen path.
With two very different paths, the argument might last long into
the night. While I’d pay good money to read that transcript, I’d
expect those two giants would never let anyone know who won.

The Democrats pick
the right strategy
(even though it hurts)
March 2, 2018
Where did the #Resistance go? In the last month,

Democrats gave up a principled government shutdown
and a deadlock on the Dreamers because of what? How
dare they! Why did they sell out the...
Wait, hold on. What did they get?

• Funding for the Children’s Health Insurance
Program for a decade
• $80 billion in emergency funds for hurricane- and
wildfire-ravaged areas
• $6 billion to address the opioid crisis
• $4 billion toward the improvement of veterans’
hospitals and clinics
• $20 billion toward infrastructure
• $6 billion toward the Child Care and Development
Block Grant
• $7 billion toward Community Health Centers
And so on. The Democrats (supposedly) sold out the
Dreamers for kids, disaster victims, the elderly, veterans,
addicts, poor people, and those who need healthcare.
Y’know, the people that Democrats have been saying
they care about for years. Not just congressional
Democrats, but their partisan base. Without a deal to
open the government, there’s no government. A
functional government is what Democrats want. So,
they took a gamble and made a deal. They let one
government shutdown lapse after a weekend, and
another after several hours. They did not embrace the
shutdown strategy as a way of life.
This enraged many liberals. What they wanted from

Democrats was vocal resistance, which sounds great.
But a shutdown is a strategy that Democrats aren’t used
to. In game theory, a take-ball-go-home tactic is called a
scorched earth defense. Its cornerstone is that no
matter who gets hurt, the enemy must suffer. This is often
associated with wartime, such as the Russian Army’s
decimation of its homeland to avoid resources falling to
Sweden... then France... then Germany. Russia is so
proficient at this, they have ruined generations of their
own people to save their nation. It’s something we can
hardly imagine in our country.
During the Obama years, the GOP got extraordinarily

good at this. They stalled funding for Obamacare even
though most Americans wanted health insurance
reform. They stood against the stimulus despite it saving
American businesses. They held the debt ceiling
hostage, which ruined America’s credit rating. When
America drowned in grief over school shootings, the
GOP made itself the face of killing children,
guaranteeing that Generation Mass Shooting would
overthrow them as soon as it was of legal age. In (only)
the short term, this strategy worked. Obstruction
became the Republican brand. Governance did not.
Liberals wanted the Democrats to adopt the GOP’s
scorched earth defense and they couldn’t do it. They
made a deal to keep the government open, without
addressing the needs of the Dreamers, who were still
facing a March 5 deadline for disaster. Then the Trump
Budget—the thing that actually apportioned the money
for the executive branch through 2019—was released
and the Democrats said no thank you, sir. Suddenly, the
budget deal was no longer roses. Everything that
mattered got cuts. The Democrats blocked it. It went
nowhere. Like Trump’s last budget, it’s DOA.
Congress looks likely to ignore the administration as it

crafts a budget. The result won’t be everything the
Democrats want, but it won’t be anything the White
House wants. Both Republicans and Democrats in
Congress are united in one belief: spend more on
everything. Only the White House is left out of the
dialogue. Despite ranting from Trump and grumbling
from John Kelly, they will just have to live with it.
In that chaos, what happened to the Dreamers? They

got caught up in the subsequent debate over
immigration policy, and came out moderately well for a
group that got used as human shields by a vicious
president. The House and Senate figured out a strategy
that saved the Dreamers, gave Trump his Wall, and
punted some of the thornier issues down the path. If
Trump signed it, that is. Trump rejected the deal. He had
a chance to get his beloved Wall, and he turned it down.
He thought he had leverage. Then suddenly he didn’t, as
first a federal judge blocked the administration’s DACA
ruling and then the Supreme Court declined to take up
the case, blowing the March 5 DACA deadline to
kingdom come. Trump had lost.
The Democrats won the budget standoff, even when it
looked like they lost. Trump lost the budget, the Wall,
the sword of Damocles over the Dreamers. March 5
will come and go with DACA still in place, the
government will be roughly the same as it was before
(maybe bigger!), and the Democrats will go to their base
with Trump firmly cast as the bad guy. There is no
rosier scenario possible for the out-of-power party. The
Democrats made the right bet in a rigged casino, and
they won on all fronts.
How did they win? They stuck to their brand, and let
the administration and the Republicans self-immolate by
sticking to theirs. The Democrats could have gone a
very different road, forcing a government shutdown on
behalf of the Dreamers and casting themselves as the
party of obstruction. To do so, they would’ve had to
abandon everyone helped by government.
Holding kids and disaster victims hostage is how the

Republicans work. The Republican brand is anti-
government. They obstruct, collude, and threaten to
burn everything down. That’s their move. The audience
that wants to burn everything down is mostly
Republican. It has a lot of guns and a shortage of
tolerance for those that are unlike them. In short, it’s not
caring.
Democrats, on the other hand, have a brand that’s

about caring. They support families, veterans, sick
people, people of color, the poor, workers, voters, and
immigrants. They don’t burn all those people to help
one group of those people. They make hard choices.
They do what they can when they’re out of power.
That’s not as sexy as “burn it all,” which is why we have
Donald and not Hillary in the big chair. It’s what they
do. They don’t do anything else well. They just care
about people. That’s their move.
Liberals who excoriated the Democratic leaders fell for

a self-inflicted fallacy. They thought saying they cared
about the Dreamers would be more effective than
attempting to win the standoff. This is what us game
theorists call cheap talk, the communication that is
costless to transmit, non-binding, and unverifiable. It
sounds good, but it does nothing. There was no
winning a standoff over the Dreamers with talk of a
shutdown they couldn’t sustain, and that they didn’t
want to occur. The Democratic leaders realized this, and
took the short-term pain of looking bad so they could
smash the opposition. It worked.
I’m a Democrat, and I know the Democrats must

#resist. We need to focus on capturing Congress and
bum-rushing Trump out of town. We do. But we won’t
do it at the expense of families. We won’t do it at the
expense of veterans. We won’t do it at the expense of
disaster victims. We won’t do it at the expense of
immigrants. We won’t do it, unless we have to. If we do,
then we will lick our wounds, get back to work, and
defend them the next day.
If we’re willing to give up all those people to win in

November, we’re not Democrats. We’re just bomb
throwers. Might as well be Republicans.

Rich explains: cheap talk
Back in the year 2000, the mighty Morpheus was held captive by
Agents in the matrix and needed a quick rescue from his besties,
Trinity and Neo. As they reach safety, Neo returns to his usual
befuddlement at his superuser/savior abilities and tells his mentor
that he’d been told by the Oracle that he, in fact, was not the One.
Morpheus, harkening back to old Socrates, says that “there’s a
difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Neo
says something like “uh-huh,” and then immediately goes on to
save the world.
Morpheus is describing game theory communication in perfect

terms. All communication is an attempt to alter the game or
persuade an opponent to change their strategy. As Neo realizes,
meaningful commitments come from a synthesis of both words
and action. Cheap talk refers to any statements that are costless
to transmit, non-binding, and unverifiable. Some cheap talk leads
to eventual commitments, but much of it feels like empty
promises. Or, in the worst case, outright falsehoods.
Cheap talk is easiest to see in the turbulent course of social

change. While there will always be some who resist or seem
ambivalent to progress, there are important distinctions even
among supporters. Are there folks who are happy to say they
support change but do nothing meaningful to make that change a
reality? Do they wish things could be different and more equal,
yet secretly cling to the status quo? Or, even worse, do they fight
to restrict change in private while claiming to be progressive in
public? No matter their intent, without a quantifiable
commitment, each of these actions are just different kinds of
cheap talk.
The opposite of cheap talk is signaling, which has a cost to

transmit. It might be a cost in reputation or commitment to
action; it might even have physical costs, like the deaths of nearly
all of Neo’s band of rebels. The choice and implied threat in Neo’s
final phone call is a clear signal to the Agents that it’s time for
things to change.

The grim trigger:
Trump declares a
trade war on himself
April 11, 2018
Gary Cohn had enough. Oh, not when the President

praised neo-Nazis. That wasn’t enough. When Trump
unilaterally announced steel and aluminum tariffs
against every other country in the world, that was
enough for the President’s economic advisor. Cohn
issued his resignation, possessed of the tax bill his
vulture capitalist friends wanted and not wanting to be
the face of protection. Although he said there was no
one reason, there was only one reason: Trump is an
idiot. For a while he was a useful idiot, but now one of
them had to go. Fly, Gary, fly.
Rex Tillerson also had to go. Tillerson may have been

the U.S. version of an oil oligarch, but he was a
defender of free trade and one of the rare “adults in the
room” in the White House. He found out by tweet that
he was being evicted from the State Department shortly
after Trump put him at odds with his oil buddies over
the incipient trade war. In only one week, two of the
biggest foes of tariffs were on the street and shaking
their heads, along with a great many of Trump’s
supporters.
This tweet may have had a lot to do with it.
Uh, yeah, there’s a lot of nonsense in there. The U.S.

has a trade deficit of over $500 billion, due to softness
in the manufacturing sector, a strengthening dollar in
the mid-2010s, and other factors way too complex for
Trump to comprehend.
But not with virtually every country. We have a

trade surplus with many of our biggest trade partners.
Our trade surpluses include the United Kingdom, Hong
Kong, Australia, the Netherlands, and Brazil. Oh,
Canada as well. Our commenter-in-chief has no idea
that we have a trade surplus with the Great White
North, as evidenced by his admission that he lied to
Prime Minister Trudeau and hadn’t bothered to check if
we had a surplus or a deficit. He doubled down on
Twitter, making us the laughingstock of the world for
the, I don’t know, 60th straight week or something.
The $100 bil he says we’re down on China doesn’t mean

Trump can just stop trading with them. That’s not how
trade works.
Foreign trade makes up a massive portion of states’
gross domestic products. You might expect states like
California and Washington to have significant trade
income, and they do.
But the states with the highest percentages of GDP

derived from foreign trade (30% or more) are these:
• Michigan (38.9%)
• Louisiana (38.7%)
• Tennessee (32.6%)
• South Carolina (31.9%)
• Kentucky (31.8%)
• Texas (31.2%)
All of those are states Trump won. Each of those states

has China as its top export partner, or very near the top.
They’d all be devastated if they suddenly lost hundreds
of billions in trade with China. I can’t imagine that 2020
Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump would like to
lose all support in those particular states.
But I want to focus on Trump’s idiotic statement that

“trade wars are good, and easy to win.” They’re neither
of those. But what might surprise you is that free trade
is not the historical norm. Despite what Adam Smith
taught you in Econ 101, protectionism was the standard
policy of nearly every country prior to World War II.
Only after the Cold War began did nations start to pull
the bandages off and loosen tariffs around the globe.
That’s because on a game theory level, a trade war had a

new parallel apocalypse:
Nuclear war.
Both arms agreements and free trade agreements are
functional because of a communal understanding of
the prisoner’s dilemma, and how fraught it is with peril.
The prisoner’s dilemma suggests that if there is
a possibility of one side betraying the other, there is
a certainty of both sides betraying the other. The payoff
for betraying is always greater than the payoff for not.
Here’s a simple payoff matrix.
We both put in a dollar. If we don’t betray each other, I

get $1 and you get $1. If you betray me but I don’t
betray you, you come out much better. You get $2 and I
lose $1. If we both betray each other, we both get
nothing. So, if you don’t betray, me betraying beats me
not betraying ($2>$1). If you do betray, me betraying
beats me not betraying ($0>–$1). Betraying is always
better.
Some people assume that the prisoner’s dilemma only

functions when it’s a non-repeated situation, meaning
you don’t have to deal with another opportunity
where everyone knows you betrayed. This is also wrong.
The iterated prisoner’s dilemma, also known as
the peace-war game, predicts behavior of participants
in multiple-round negotiations. Imagine you and I have
two identical dilemma situations in sequence, where we
can pick either peace or war.
We both know both of us will pick war in the final one,

because if there’s a possibility of betraying without
consequence, there’s a certainty of it. Since we know
that, then in the previous event, we both know that in
the previous round, we should both pick war, because
we do better in war and because war is inevitable. In
two rounds of this game, it’s all war.
This is the same in three rounds of this game, and four
rounds, and so on until... well, that’s where it gets
interesting. If we don’t know how many rounds there
are, then we don’t know when war will come, so maybe,
just maybe, we can bet on peace and expect war will
happen well after we’re gone.
Except that doesn’t work either. War is still always more

profitable than peace, and since it’s coming eventually,
we should always pick war. This is called the shadow of
the future. We know that war will come, and war is
always more profitable than peace, so we pick war.
Don’t worry, I’m getting to the hopeful part. There’s a

possibility we haven’t considered: that the game will end
with total annihilation at an unexpected point in our
warmongering. This is mutual assured destruction.
War becomes too horrible to consider at that point, and
so we never declare war.
Why this works is a simple logic construct called

the grim trigger. It says that once a side picks war, it
can only pick war until at some point everyone dies in a
wave of annihilation. We don’t know when, but we can
calculate the coming damage in the following way.
Let’s say the daily payoff for declaring war is two trillion
dollars, and peace is only one trillion. Woo! I want that
extra trillion dollars, so on day one I declare war. But
after war is declared there’s some probability that the
world will be consumed in flame the next day. Let’s say
for a minute that it’s 10%. I survive day one! So, now
day two comes, and my gains are two trillion dollars for
day one, but only the day two result of two trillion
dollars times 90%, with a 10% chance that I die.
If I live through day two, then my gains are two trillion
dollars times 81% (90% of 90%), with a 19% chance I
die by then. And so on and so on. By the end of the
week, I’ve made an expected value of ten trillion, with
only a 52% of dying in an inferno. That’s way better
than the ten days it would take me to get to ten trillion
in peacetime.
This expected value will approach $20 million by the

end of the month, but it will never get over $20 trillion.
Meanwhile, the chance of fiery death is more than 96%.
But wait. If I declare war, my opponent will also declare

war. They’re heading down this path too, and if any of
them die, I will die too. For all participants, the game is
finite. We end with twenty trillion dollars and/or death
by fire.
That’s twenty trillion in a month, which sounds like a

lot. But in peace, we get a trillion dollars every day, and
we don’t die by fire. A trillion dollars every day for a
month is thirty trillion dollars. In one month, we’ve
made one and a half times the value of war, simply by
being patient with each other. The grim trigger isn’t so
grim, because it keeps us peaceful.
A trade war works the same way. We’re a little richer in

the short term and doomed in the long term. It’s an
idiotic approach. Yet here we are, with all sides
retaliating. Trump’s trade policy has made everything
more expensive and less desirable. Farmers are hurting.
Manufacturers are hurting. Retailers are hurting.
Practically the only one not hurting is Trump. That’s
because he’s never thought long-term. Not about
anything. Certainly not about trade.
Eventually, this trade war will hurt Trump. There is no
immutable law of the universe that a president’s base
will remain his base. At some point, he will damage the
people who elected him so much that they will turn
away from him. By then, his incompetence and
mendacity will be so apparent to all that his defeat will
be inevitable.
So, now Trump’s policy—if it can even be said to have

been one—has failed. The U.S. and EU will reach a deal
to end Trump’s tariff wars. China and Canada should
follow too. It will all be a massively painful stunt.
In a couple of years, I hope we can say that about the

Trump presidency as well.

Rich explains: the peace-war game
The board game Diplomacy dubs itself “a game of international

intrigue, trust, and treachery.” This makes it an inevitable
conversation starter when two game theorists get together.
They’ll regale each other with stories of slowly building trust
before finding the perfect moment to backstab their way to
victory. I love to toss in a quick follow-up they should really see
coming: “How did you do in the next game with that same group
of players?” The wide variety of responses tells me exactly how
they would fare in the greater game of peace and war.
Picture two households, both alike in dignity. In fair Verona, where

we lay our scene, these families battle by throwing lavish galas.
For each gala, they must decide whether to invite the other
family. As these are major social events, a snub has dire
consequences. Since neither family wants to miss an event, they
cooperate by inviting their rivals, until Mercutio ruins a party with
yet another pun and the rival decides it’s time for a snub.
How should the snubbed household respond? One house leader,

an unabashed Mercutio fan, argues that by breaking the social
contract, they’ve made an enemy for life—snubs eternal! Another
says that any retort would only make the situation worse, so they
should continue inviting their rivals and hope it breaks the
pattern. A third house member pleas for moderation. They
disinvite them one time as a punishment, which they should
expect. If they fall back in line, life returns to normal.
Every war council in history has had this conflict. The first house
offers only a battle to the death. The second hopes that by
offering peace, the foe will return to mutual cooperation. Both
options are losing strategies. If both houses fight forever, the
sneak attack is still a tie-breaking power move. And the other
household can manipulate the peacemaker as they see fit. But
moderation, or tit-for-tat, is a winning strategy; it’s the simple
choice to copy what the foe did last turn. This kind of measured,
proportional response has been a mainstay of warfare for
centuries, though the jury is still out when it comes to puns.

#MPRraccoon and the
puzzle of hope
June 13, 2018
Yesterday a bold raccoon scaled the UBS Plaza building

in downtown St. Paul, riveting the internet to their
computers all day and all night. Minneapolis Public
Radio adopted the raccoon’s cause under the hashtag
#MPRraccoon. No human could help the raccoon
without potentially frightening her into a deadfall. The
St. Paul Fire Department declared that they could not
risk a firefighter’s life for a being they would chase out
of the firehouse with a broom. Despite the viewers’
cries for everything from breaking windows to pizza,
our little pal was on her own.
A cynic’s view of this is that America was watching an

animal die in real time. Only one step back from Naked
and Afraid, and only a half-step away from televised
executions, watching an animal potentially fall to her
death or expire from dehydration was something
uniquely 2018.
That wasn’t how it was seen at all. #MPRraccoon was a

tail—sorry, tale—of American industriousness, of
perseverance in the face of daunting odds, of hope.
Overmatched by architectural complexity and
exhaustion, our furry hero—we named her Rabbit, after
Thor’s name for Rocket in Avengers: Infinity War—
sussed out how to scamper up to safety in the dark of
night. Cat treats and cages were waiting for her on the
roof, which she reached over 18 hours into her journey.
How she got there is worthy of the game theory analysis
that I give to events like the negotiations between North
Korea and the U.S., which also occurred this week and
was a lot less riveting than the raccoon.
That’s because Presidents Trump and Kim didn’t solve

the world’s biggest level of Frogger ever played.
Yes, Frogger! You remember Frogger. It’s the classic

puzzle videogame in which you play a hapless
amphibian who foolishly hops across a crowded and
deadly freeway. Up-left-up-right-right-right-down-left-
up-up-freedom!
Despite having no speeding trucks, our bandit’s path

was no less deadly than the froggy’s. It started from a
seven-story roof, then straight up the north wall’s
central column. Along the way, we saw closely how a
raccoon climbs: claws hooked in from the side, belly
stabilizing against the curvature of the column.
As Rabbit hopped from window to window, resting at

times, it was obvious that the critter was born of
millions of ascended trees through the millennia. To our
heroine, the columns of the bank wall was just an
astonishingly regular forest.
Which made it all the more terrifying when she got up

to the 23rd floor and realized the last twenty feet were a
sheer, flat wall. There are no trees like that anywhere.
Suddenly, Rabbit went from imperiled to doomed. For
six agonizing hours in the dark of night, she pondered
her mortality. Then she bolted up to the vent grates
above and found no recourse there. She could stick her
weary paw into the grate, but forcing herself through
wasn’t happening.
Dejected, Rabbit clambered down one story, and two

bright new possibilities emerged. The first was scaling
down the entire building. Around midnight that’s what
she began to do, descending from the 23rd floor to the
17th. That was a long, perilous journey down.
But then, another path to

success opened up. In her
descent, she moved three
windows to the right and
ended up on the corner
column, which went all the
way to the roof. Gaby and
I could see it. Could our li’l
buddy?
Resting on the first

windowsill of the west
wall, Rabbit occasionally
looked up through the
darkness. She had
imperfect information
about what lay ahead. Who
knew what was
meandering through her
nectarine-sized brain on a
night like this?
Triumph, that’s what. Around 3 a.m., Rabbit took off
up the corner column—run, Rabbit, run!—then boop!
over the rooftop. Rabbit could relax. So could an
exhausted nation. In the process, I mapped her route. I
counted nineteen windows and grates over five columns
and seven floors of the building. That was a strategy
worthy of a Frogger high-score in every way.
I don’t know if Rabbit ever felt hopelessness in her epic

journey, but I know we all have felt it over these two
years. The world is spinning toward a wholehearted
embrace of corruption, regression, and aggression at the
hands of a man-child president and his evil cronies.
That picture of Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe, and the rest
of the G7 attendees exasperated at the unthinkable boor
before them seems just like all of us who don’t wear
MAGA caps. The President’s lobbying for Russia and
his warm embrace of the dictator Kim Jong-un just
cemented it, though maybe for some good? Maybe?
Probably not. Mostly we just got fleeced because our
great negotiator is an unprincipled doof. Hopelessness
is a reasonable response to all this chaos.
But Frogger tells us never to think like this, and for the
most part, we don’t. I’ve described the difference
between a puzzle and a game thusly:
A game is an activity where, if fairly constructed, two

sides given the same advantages will have a roughly
equal chance to win.
A puzzle is an activity where, if fairly constructed, one

side will have all the advantages—preparation, skill,
knowledge of the answer—and despite all of that, the
disadvantaged side is expected to win.
Puzzle games are, by their nature, not unsolvable. They
may be hard. They may be fiendish, in fact. But they
have at least one answer, or they’re not puzzles. Deep
down, humans know this. But here’s what they also
know: Some of us are not good at puzzles. We don’t
even want to be. This is not what we do. Instead, we let
others solve our problems. Presidents, for example.
Well, we can’t always do that. Sometimes we’re

presented with a puzzle and we just have to solve it on
our own. There’s no help coming. We just have to think
our way through to the answer, which is right in front
of us. There’s a corner column somewhere. It leads
straight to the top. We will find it soon.
Just remember, it wasn’t terribly great in 2008 either.

We responded to an attack on U.S. soil by embroiling
ourselves in two forever wars. Wall Street deregulation
crushed the housing market, setting up a brutal Great
Recession. We tortured people. A lot. It was bad.
A smart, kind man came by holding a little book called

The Audacity of Hope. He’d solved the puzzle of
hopelessness and he had some ideas about those
problems the Bush administration and its evil cronies
inflicted on us. It was gonna be hard. Maybe fiendish.
But there were answers. There always are.
Till we find them, just make sure you’re on the right

pillar and keep climbing.

Rich explains: perfection of information
In game theory, the definition of a game has led to one long-

standing rule: A game must be a showdown of players who can
make and change their strategies based on the moves of their
opponents. Because of this, playing against a computer doesn’t
count. As anyone who’s ever exploited a computer glitch can
attest, it’s usually possible to push a program into a corner and
then low kick your way to victory. If an artificial opponent doesn’t
have the cognition to properly respond to your actions, then they
aren’t really an opponent. They’re just an obstacle.
That’s what we thought until computers made the best human

players look like cheap hacks. Checkers was beaten by Chinook in
1994 and chess by Deep Blue in 1997, but it was a deep blow to
humans when Scrabble fell to Quackle in 2006. Checkers and
chess are games of perfect information, with nothing hidden from
any player. Since everyone can see the complete board at once, a
fast enough processor can find the absolute best move out of all
possible moves. With its bag of tiles and hidden racks, Scrabble is
a game of imperfect information, and humans believed they had
an edge there. Until recently, they did.
But in a battle of calculating probabilities, the computer takes

home the win. In 2017, a team of four poker pros lost more than
$1.7 million to Carnegie Mellon’s Liberatus program. The 20-day
event consisted of 120,000 hands, with Liberatus playing four
simultaneous games of heads-up, no-limit Texas hold ’em. The
humans hoped that a combination of their cleverness, trickery,
and ingenuity might win out over the AI. The programmers had
developed some tricks of their own.
Each night, Liberatus was trained to analyze every hand played

that day to modify its strategy for the next. This meant that as the
four pros found algorithmic weaknesses to exploit, those prior
missteps led to deadly bluffs the next morning. Liberatus had
gained a devious poker face all of its own. As the grueling
marathon came to a close, the only meaningful difference in play
between the humans and the AI was the final chip counts.

Seizing children is
good policy (if you’re
a complete monster)
June 19, 2018
“Some of them heard their children screaming for them

in the next room. Not a single one of them had been
allowed to say goodbye or explain to them what was
happening.”
– U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal
I have to commend the Trump administration. After

500+ days in office, it has finally crafted a policy so
completely in concert with its goals that its efficacy
cannot be doubted. A policy so horrifying and
malevolent that it succeeds on every level desired by its
creators. It does something I’ve never thought possible.
It destroys the very appeal of America to foreigners.
(Also to Americans, but let’s put that aside for now.)
The Trump policy of seizing children from their

mothers at the border—usually through duplicity
like pretending to take the child for a bath—works on a
game theory level. It’s brilliant, in the way dropping
a second atomic bomb on Japan was brilliant. It suggests
there is no limit to American cruelty, and no shortage of
resources to enact that cruelty. It is distinctly un-
American, but Trump’s recent praise for Kim Jong-un
and Vladimir Putin suggests that the definition of
“American” is slipping south rapidly. But being
barbarous and being effective are not irreconcilable.
You just have to be willing to live with the monster you
become after you do it.
The administration is using a zero tolerance policy,

which I’ll dissect in theoretical terms. “Zero tolerance”
is an artificial construct—it exists almost nowhere in
legal scholarship—that means law enforcement and
courts have no ability to moderate punishment for any
crime in an arena, no matter what the severity of the
crime is.
The game theory of zero tolerance is this: The penalty

for failure is at its maximum, so the deterrent effect is
supposedly high. That’s what John Kelly thinks, anyway.
Jeff Sessions thinks so too, and he’s got the Bible
verse to justify it. (It’s the same one the Nazis used to
justify killing dissenters.) The most monstrous of the
Trump regime’s thought leaders, Stephen Miller, crowed
over how proud he was for thinking of it.
In the case of American border enforcement, the

Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and
Customs Enforcement division (ICE) is hamstrung by
new rules declaring border crossers criminals. Prior to
the current policy, ICE would detain suspected border
crossers, determine whether they had done so, and then
send them back across the appropriate border. The act
of staying in the United States was prima facie illegal,
but it wasn’t an imprisonable act. It did not have
consequences beyond the remedy of the act.
But with a zero tolerance policy, ICE officials have no
choice but to imprison the entrants—and when the
entrant comes with a child, that child gets put...
Well, it’s complicated. Some of them go missing. Others

are put in migrant detention facilities where they’re
forcibly given injections of psychoactive drugs to
control their behavior. If they’re babies and toddlers,
they’re put in “tender age shelters”—you know, baby
prisons.
We’re imprisoning babies.
Unfortunately, by embracing a zero tolerance policy, the

administration commits the zero tolerance fallacy.
When there is no variation in punishment, there is no
limit to the severity of crime that will be committed.
Any transgression brings punishment, so all who
commit an offense might as well commit the worst
offense, since punishment is unavoidable if caught.
Don’t come alone. Come in droves. Come with families.
Come with children.
The zero tolerance fallacy proves conclusively that

increasing the severity of penalties has no impact on
crime. If someone wants to commit a crime, they will
do so regardless of the severity of the penalty, if a
penalty exists at all. This is called the escalation of
commitment, and it’s unshakable. Those committed to
an action will continue regardless of whether the action
will fail. So, they continue to head to the border, with
the intent of getting to the other side.
A migrant’s reward for success at crossing the border is

potentially unlimited. The penalty for failure is fixed at
its maximum, and therein lies the problem. Zero
tolerance works only as long as you have unlimited
resources. We don’t, of course. Our border courts are
flooded. Our detention centers are overcrowded. Lord
knows what’s happening at the “tender age shelters.”
Because we’ve decided to treat everyone as criminals,
we must build and staff concentration camp after
concentration camp, till they choke the Rio Grande.
They won’t stop coming as long as the America they
envision is kind and just.
There is only one way to fix that. That is by being

monsters. Separate children from their mothers. Lose
children. Leave some wandering free to spread the
story. Let them know America is a dark, evil place.24
Tell everyone you know. You don’t want to come here.
You don’t want to live here.
We don’t want to live here.
Laura Bush doesn’t want this policy to exist. Rosalynn

Carter doesn’t. Michelle Obama doesn’t. Hillary Clinton
doesn’t. Melania Trump doesn’t. All the living First
Ladies don’t. Four had a say in whether their husbands
pursued it when they were in the White House. Maybe
Melania does too. It looks like Ivanka Trump does,
though the supposed “champion for women” has
cowered in darkness instead of speaking out.
Donald Trump is a monster, but maybe he doesn’t like

looking his wife and daughter in the eyes and saying,
“I’m a monster.” Sure, he’ll falsely blame the
24As we got ready to send this book to press, a story broke that ICE was
performing hysterectomies on detainees without their consent. I can’t
think of a way to make it more clear we’re the evil ones.
Democrats for his racist cruelty, but he’s weak in the
face of criticism, and weakest in the face of criticism
from women.
No one wants this except the administration and its

most racist supporters. More than two-thirds of the
American people want Trump to change direction. But
there’s no guarantee he will. There’s no reason he should,
as long as he’s committed to the destruction of
America’s image abroad.
If Trump doesn’t abandon this unthinkably inhumane

policy, we’ll know he’s committed to reducing the
number of foreign-born brown people entering the
country, illegally or legally. He’ll be nothing if not
consistent. After all, the only way racist white people
maintain their tenuous grip on power is if there are
fewer non-white people in the country. It’s simple self-
preservation, KKK-style.
But if Trump follows through on his word and

abandons this policy,25 he will surrender his signature
accomplishment: convincing the world that America is
the worst place on earth. At least until he thinks of
something worse.
25By the time we sent the book to press, the policy was still in place. An
even more horrifying development followed in late summer 2020. A
whistleblower alleged that ICE had performed forced hysterectomies on
detainees. That may be the most shocking family separation of all.
Rich explains: zero tolerance
Zero tolerance policies must sound like a good idea to someone at

the start. They remember bold, sweeping statements like “No new
taxes!” or “You will never see that rotten kid again and that’s
final!” and somehow feel like these come from a place of real
authority and strength. As if we didn’t have an entire legal system
to consider distinctions and render verdicts from human
judgment. Also, as if they didn’t always fail.
Since these policies are always enacted to stop people from doing
something they have chosen to do, people instinctively search for
cracks in these arguments. “Sorry, that kid and I have to finish a
group project for school” or “What if our everchanging world
leads to new technology outside the bounds of our current tax
guidelines requiring the establishment of, whatchamacallit, new
taxes?” When someone decides to break these rules, what
happens then? Well, we usually find out what someone really
meant by “zero tolerance.”
Here’s some perspective. Your workplace enacts a zero tolerance

policy for lateness. Someone in the office shows up late and is
immediately fired. Same thing happens the day after that. One
day, you start to run late and wonder what to do. Will they
actually fire you? In that case, why just be five minutes late? If
they decide to be monsters, you might as well make it worth it.
Show up an hour late. Forget to wear your dress shoes. Take
personal calls at your desk. Embrace the chaos.
When philosopher Sheldon Wein invented the zero tolerance

fallacy, he worried about proposing a new sweeping rule of
rhetoric. However, he argued that zero tolerance policies were
inherently harmful at every level, from the police to the policed,
and must be cast down whenever possible. By removing the
potential for circumstance and compassion to alter punishments
to fit violations, Wein stated, even the police “may simply pretend
not to observe relevant violations of the rule,” resulting in less
deterrence than normal. If justice wins out, then a zero tolerance
policy becomes just cheap talk from a weak leader.

Trump gambles for
resurrection
July 29, 2018
It happened. Not only did Trump take the side of his

ally Vladimir Putin over the American government he
himself heads, but he made it clear that he did not fear
the consequences of doing so. Now media members
and elected officials alike are openly using the word
“treason”—you know, the crime punishable by death—
to describe his behavior. Richard Nixon wasn’t accused
of treason. Bill Clinton wasn’t accused of treason.
Impeachment no longer seems like the worst thing that
could happen to Trump this year.
How could this of all strategies be the right one for

Trump?
Surprise! It’s absolutely the right strategy. Good on ya,

Trumpy.
The Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Special

Counsel Mueller may or may not have proof of it, but it
happened. Vladimir Putin confirmed it. Michael
Cohen’s tapes show Trump greenlit the Trump Tower
meeting in advance. GOP lawmakers aren’t even trying
to defend it any more. They are just accepting that
Trump lied and will continue to lie about it.
He’s absolutely colluding with Russia right now. We all

have proof of that. This, it would seem, is highly
dangerous for a sitting president who wants to stay in
the Oval Office and out of federal prison. But there he
is, cozying up to Putin, accepting a soccer ball, denying
that Russia meddled in our elections. He’s giving Putin
everything he wants: Syria, the Ukraine, the fracturing of
NATO, freedom from reprisals for his treacheries.
It might be the only winning strategy. That’s because of

a game theory term called gambling for resurrection.
Gambling for resurrection is a strategy that involves
continuing to fight a war which looks like a lost cause.
The logic goes like this:
The consequences for loss have been defined. There is

nothing worse than losing. If you admit you’ve lost, you
lose. So, you try to win. You may not have a very good
chance of winning. It might be highly remote.
If you do win, you don’t lose. So, you stay committed to

the path regardless of what damage you inflict on
yourself and others. Here’s why that works.
There’s an element in gambling for resurrection called

the information gap. The citizens under a leader’s
authority don’t know what the leader knows. They don’t
know why the leader might pursue a policy; they only
know the outcome that they can see. They may not
know the good outcomes of success, but they can
definitely see how it hurts them while it’s failing. They
will act on this.
Even if the leader believes he should stop whatever he
is doing, if he conveys that the policy is going well, then
the citizens struggle to reconcile what they see (things
aren’t going well) with what they hear (the leader says
things are going well).
When this occurs, the citizens don’t know if the leader

was right to pursue the policy or if the leader is
incompetent or self-serving. Since they don’t know this,
the citizens assume the worst. If the policy leads to an
actual loss, the citizens will kick the leader out at the
first opportunity. Giving up creates the loss.
If the policy somehow leads to a win, though, it doesn’t

matter whether the leader was right in the first place. He
didn’t lose, and he has a chance of being rewarded for
not losing.
In Trump’s case, he can win in the following ways:

1. America comes to believe, as he does, that the
investigation of him is a witch hunt. In this case,
his collusion with Russia to get elected is nullified
by traitors attempting to overthrow the presidency,
and his continuing collusion with Russia gives him
resources to fight it.
2. America comes to believe, as he does, that
Russia is awesome. In this case, his collusion with
Russia to get elected was a brilliant move (despite
betraying our election system), and his continuing
collusion with Russia is even more brilliant, as it
solidifies our relationship with our new best ally.
3. America’s election system is so compromised
that future elections are cancelled. In this case,
his collusion with Russia to get elected is a mere

symptom of a much more serious failure on our
part, and his continuing collusion with Russia
succeeds in prolonging the time he is in office.
4. America is invaded by Russia. In this case,
Trump is installed as the governor of a puppet
regime in direct subservience to the country that
helped him get elected.
Okay, I put the last one in mostly to see if I could get

you to shout “Wolverines!” I don’t actually think Putin
plans to run tanks down Wall Street. But if he did, I
could see President-for-Life Trump riding one of them.
Anyway, whatever the positive outcome for Trump, all

of those outcomes are terrible for America. We’ve either
suspended the rule of law, allied with murderous
dictators, ended our democracy, or marched the United
States of America into the dustbin of history. We should
be smart enough to stop those from occurring.
And yet...
Brett Kavanaugh sits ready to become the next terrible

Supreme Court justice. Mike Pence salivates at the idea
of the Trump court overturning Roe v. Wade. The
Republicans in Congress are preparing tax cut for the
rich number two. We may actually give John Bolton the
war with Iran he lusts for in his dreams.
Other than this whole giving-away-our-democracy-to-

the-Russians problem, the worst Americans are getting
the worst things for America done. Supporting the
traitor until he hangs from the Senate rotunda is likely
the right move for them as long as they stay in power.

So, the obvious thing that needs to happen is that we
need more non-treasonous people in power. America
has one shot to vote for Democrats in such
overwhelming numbers that it swamps the election
hacking that Russia is doing right now. It needs to
overrun the gerrymandered barriers that keeps the GOP
in office despite its corruption. All concept of protest
voting (or non-voting) must be left at the roadside. We
need to vote in massive numbers for candidates that can
beat Trump’s allies.
Trump is gambling for resurrection. Let’s make sure he

leaves the table a loser.

Rich explains: gambling for resurrection
Unlike most terms we use to describe game theory, gambling for

resurrection kind of speaks for itself. Resurrection tells a story of
return from the void to reclaim life. Sometimes this is an attempt
to reclaim victory in a game where defeat is certain. Other times,
like in politics or economics, there are significantly greater stakes
on the line. The gamble is that a player can build an illusion so
lifelike that opponents come to believe it as reality.
We may not see the chance for resurrection in our daily lives, but
we do get an opportunity to see it on an annual basis in our
sports. Let’s say that our favorite basketball team has just reached
the playoffs as an underdog, and seems likely to drop the first
series. Up next is a rebuilding offseason, as the team evaluates its
players and looks towards the upcoming draft. A few players are
looking at their expiring contracts and suddenly they need to find
a way to convince management to renew them for a few more
seasons.
In a 2014 study out of the Australian National University,

researchers evaluated the choices NBA players made in their final
games of a contract. The study notes that missing games makes it
harder for a player’s contract to be renewed, to the tune of 10%
less likely per absence. A player needs to create the illusion of
health, so they get on the court and play through the pain, no
matter the risk of a greater injury. When it comes to payday, it
doesn’t matter much whether a player lost their contract to injury
or team restructuring.
This behavior leads to another interesting result—a basketball

team is 5% less likely to win a game for each player on the court
who is playing during the last three months of their contract. Most
of this drop-off likely comes from the weakened play of a risk-
prone player trying to make a lasting impression, and it’s easy to
imagine the bleakness of the upcoming void making an impact.
Meanwhile, as this oncoming gloom covers the court, it also
provides a lucky player the perfect atmosphere to gamble on
illusion and show up like a shining star.

Mike Pence is the
Werewolf
September 5, 2018
Today’s op-ed piece in the New York Times got tongues

wagging. Entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside
the Trump Administration,” it was written by an
unnamed senior White House official who scalded
Trump for being an unmoored, untamable child. The
piece stated that the #Resistance in the White House
was the only thing keeping us from annihilation.
In the White House and the Twittersphere, the hunt

began for the author. Trump tweeted “TREASON?”
(to which I replied, “Yes, you did”), insisting the
“GUTLESS” individual turn him/herself in. For what
punishment is unclear, but whatever—Young Donny
needs his pacifier.
Anyway, it’s obvious who wrote it. Either Mike Pence

wrote it or someone is trying to convince Trump that
Pence did.26 Either way, Pence is the Werewolf.
26 At the point we sent this to press, we had no idea who the writer was.
It’s possible that by the time you’re reading this, we do. If so, I hope I
look like a freakin’ genius.
Werewolf is a classic in the genre of social deduction
games. Others include Secret Hitler, Coup, and, quite
fittingly, The Resistance. These games usually feature
two main tenets: everyone has a secret role and
someone’s going to be eliminated. In Secret Hitler,
the liberals are after Hitler, whose hidden fascists aim to
pass terrible laws and assassinate the opposition. In
Coup, multinational CEOs try to kill each other. In The
Resistance, no one dies, but spies are trying to expose
and neutralize freedom fighters in their midst.
In Werewolf, the villagers are beset by werewolves. The

villagers don’t know who the werewolves are; to them,
everyone looks like a villager. The werewolves know
each other and who’s a villager. Every day, the villagers
(including the werewolves shape-changed to look like
villagers) vote to kill one player; if they kill all the
werewolves, the villager faction wins. Every night, with
the villagers closing their eyes, the werewolves collude
to kill one villager. If there are ever as many werewolves
as villagers, the werewolf faction wins.
The Trump White House is a social deduction game.

No one knows who’s playing what role. Everybody gets
eliminated. Pence has outlasted Sebastian Gorka,
Omarosa, Rob Porter, Steve Bannon, the Mooch, Hope
Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, Reince Priebus, Sean
Spicer, Gary Cohn, Scott Pruitt, Rex Tillerson, Tom
Price, H. R. McMaster, and Michael Flynn.
Let’s look at the latest nighttime maneuver, this New

York Times hit job. Media speculation is focusing on the
wrong thing: motive. It doesn’t matter whether Jeff Sessions or
Don McGahn has a motive to sideswipe President Trump. It
only matters what the president does with this
information, because everyone in the chaos den has a
reason to eliminate someone else. Dissent means the
president is likely to terminate someone. That keeps the
engine of government running for one more day. If the
president is blasting out pink slips over his public image
failure, he’s not bombing North Korea.
When trying to figure out who has done a secret act,

only one thing truly matters: who you want to die. You
may not know that another player is a liberal in Secret
Hitler, but you know who falsely accused you of being a
fascist, so you work to get them outed as a fascist. If
you don’t want to die at the liberals’ hands, don’t accuse
anyone of being a fascist. If you’re Hitler, don’t start
acting like Hitler, or everyone will know you’re Hitler.
Just be the nicest Hitler imaginable, and you might live
to burn the Reichstag.
Let’s look at the suspects and how they act. Specifically,

we don’t care who has motive. What we care about is:
Who sounds like they wrote it? Who wants Trump to
believe that someone else wrote it?
Here is a list of candidates, rated by their odds on the

Canadian betting site Bovada. Yes, you can bet on this.
Eliminated villagers
Ivanka Trump (15–1): Oh man, would this be juicy.

But it’s not her, because there’s no compassion. Now, I
think Ivanka’s as compassionate as a bear trap. But I
can’t find any statements like “We came in believing in
the president.” There’s no sympathy for a supposedly
once-great man. No way she leaves her loyalty to her
dad out. It’s all off-brand. It’s not Ivanka Trump.
John Kelly (4–1): While he undoubtedly believes
everything in the article—and is an “adult in the
room”—Kelly is the one person who doesn’t have to
do this. He actually runs the White House, so if he
wants something done, it gets done. Fundamentally,
everyone knows muzzling Trump is exactly his job; it’s
not even news if he does this. It’s not John Kelly.
Kellyanne Conway (50–1): The president’s jester is

already in trouble for doing exactly this—except that it’s
her husband George that does it. The two are miserable
over his disapproval of her work. She’s unemployable if
Trump crashes. She doesn’t care about conservatism, a
bedrock focus of the piece. She cares about being seen
as faithful, and this isn’t. It’s not Kellyanne Conway.
James Mattis (4–1): This is an eloquent piece, and the

Defense Secretary is eloquent. However, he’s eloquent
in a different way. This man said to Iraqi commanders,
“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m
pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck
with me, I’ll kill you all.” Anonymity isn’t the “Mad
Dog” way. He puts his name on it. It’s not Jim Mattis.
Dan Coats (15–1): Sneaky bastard, this one. The

Director of National Intelligence could totally have
written an anonymous letter after Trump sided with
Putin over his dudes. Because the DNI is in charge of
spies, you see. That’s what makes it ridiculous. Forget
the Times; much more duplicitous approaches are
available to this person. It’s not Dan Coats.
Donald Trump (25–1): The author did not scream

“NO COLLUSION!” Not even once. It’s not Donald
Trump.
Surviving villagers
Jeff Sessions (5–2): Did you read the piece? Okay, now
try reading it in the Attorney General’s voice. Did you
hear Jefferson Beauregard’s lilting drawl in the words
“Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored
to any discernible first principles that guide his decision
making”? It sounded good, didn’t it? It sounded...
vengeful. It could be Jeff Sessions.
Nikki Haley (10–1) & Kirstjen Nielsen (unranked):

Despite the Times’s slip-up suggesting the piece was
written by a man, I buy both of these nominees. This is
a desperately serious piece. Both these women are
world-focused conservatives who desperately want to
be taken seriously. They’ve both been battered for
rolling out Trump’s tirades of fear and hate, which can’t
be fun. It could be Nikki Haley or Kirstjen Nielsen.
Mike Pompeo (unranked): The national security team

is the only part of the government described in glowing
terms in this full-on blast. The writer is capable of
writing a campaign speech, and this sure looks like a
campaign speech for 2020. The person on the nat-sec
team that seems most like a candidate for president is
the 54-year-old Secretary of State. It could be Mike
Pompeo.
Jared Kushner (15–1): You’ve heard him speak? He

has no voice. He’s a pipsqueak, not a freedom fighter.
Still, running behind his wife’s back is what a pipsqueak
would do. Espousing conservative principles he’s held
for about thirty seconds is totally a Jared move. Dealing
with Ivanka’s rationalizations is his full-time job. He
owned a newspaper. It could be Jared Kushner.
Don McGahn (15–1): If anyone’s ready to pen a “hope
you die screaming” letter to Trump, it’s his White
House counsel. See what the piece leads with: “It’s not
just that the special counsel looms large.” That’s the
first thing on this writer’s mind. McGahn’s been laser-
focused on keeping Trump (or himself) out of Mueller’s
grasp. It could be Don McGahn.
Melania Trump (50–1): The First Lady has trolled her

deadbeat husband with her clothing choices and her
support of those he hates. This is totally her style.
Admittedly, she doesn’t have the skills to write a piece
this nuanced. Here’s the thing: Melania has no trouble
with plagiarism. Her Michelle Obama imitation at the
2016 Republican National Convention proved that. She
doesn’t have to have written this piece to have submitted
it. It could be Melania Trump.
Good guesses. It isn’t any of them. Here’s who it is.

The actual werewolf
Mike Pence (3–1): The vice president believes every

word in this editorial. He’s a truth warrior, for a truth
most of us find wholly unpalatable. He’s run out of
gratefulness to the man who elevated him within one
chair of the job he wants, likely turning when he had to
rationalize the idiotic “Space Force.” If motive were
relevant, he’d be the most motivated of all.
It’s not, though. What is relevant are the words. Many

have focused on the use of the word “lodestar,” a Pence
favorite. There’s a whole lot more, though. There’s the
mention of the 25th Amendment, which only Pence can
initiate. He must think about that a lot.
Also, get a load of these quotes.
• “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality.”
• “the president’s leadership style... is impetuous, adversarial,
petty and ineffective.”
• “his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and
occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”
• “We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to
be stripped of civility.”
The author is a crusader for a bygone America. The

rough and tumble of Trumpistan is not for him.
Unreliability is the devil’s work. Moderation is our only
hope. We need courtesy back, and how better to regain
it than the bland certainty of a button-down dad from
the 1950s? How better than Mike Pence? It’s perfect.
That said...
In a social deduction game, you want to convince

everyone you are not who you are. If you’re sneaky—
really sneaky—you can make people think you have a
hidden role you don’t actually have. You can make
others think someone else has the role that you have.
You can make people think Pence—the reliable, ever-

useful crusader—wrote this piece. A piece that you
wrote. If you’re sneaky. You’d have to be a real rat
bastard to get your boss to undercut his vice president.
The worst, in fact. Someone who’d be shot into the
heart of the sun by President Pence for being so vile
that the paint peels when he enters the Oval Office.
Nice work, Stephen Miller. Werewolves of the world,

salute your leader.
Rich explains: social deduction games
I don’t know if you can tell, but there’s a riot down here in the
game theory bullpen. Social deduction games are like the purest
form of game theory in Machiavellian overdrive. Each player tries
to claw their way to victory, digging deep into dirty tactics, cheap
talk, evasions, coalition building, and everything that makes the
grand tapestry of game theory worthy of study. I’ve never been of
a mind to think chess is beautiful, but a masterful move in a social
deduction game leaves my jaw dropped in awe.
If you’ve never played a social deduction game, they may look

strange from the outside. Initially, all players believe that they’re
part of the same team with the same goal. Of course, they know
some of their peers are part of a twisted fifth column, biding their
time until they can strike and win in a cruel stroke. As the game
progresses, each statement a player makes is dissected for
werewolf-like tendencies. Those who fail to convince the mob that
they are villagers are removed from play. Even if they were
actually a villager just caught on a very bad day.
Did you breathe at the wrong time? Is that from feigning shock at
an accusation because you’re secretly one of the dastardly
werewolves? Can you convince the rest of the village you didn’t
mean anything by it? Did you vote to take out an innocent last
round, leading your fellow players to turn on you? In this time of
trouble, the untrusting mob must band together, judging signals
and actions to determine who is a villager and who is safe to trust.
Without these signals, all hope is lost. Trust becomes everything,
making an unexpected betrayal all the sweeter.
Is there a better feeling than looking down at your randomly

assigned card and realizing you are the werewolf? In that sudden
panic where you ask yourself, “How do I convince everyone else
that I’m just a poor, simple villager?” Then the calm that drops as
you finish that thought with “... so that I may lie my way to the
victory I so clearly deserve?” To a game theorist, the chance to
test all the ideas found in this book is like getting an all-expense
paid trip to the moon.

Game-changer: How
Democrats won the
Kavanaugh war by
losing the battle
October 6, 2018
Congratulations, Republicans! You’ve gotten Brett

Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court! His face will always
be associated with your victory. His ragey, hateful,
perjuring, conspiratorial face. You’re him now. Today’s
vote to confirm Kavanaugh will work in Democrats’
favor, and eventually America’s as well.
We chose this moment in 2016, as the new president

would probably get to appoint two Supreme Court
Justices. If Hillary Clinton won, it might be Merrick
Garland and a member of an underrepresented group
on the Court. If Donald Trump won, it’d be two highly
conservative white guys. Like, say, Neil Gorsuch, who
succeeded Scalia, and Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump
nominated to succeed to the soon-to-retire Anthony
Kennedy.
On Gorsuch, they lacked a majority in the Senate.

Which would not ordinarily have been a problem.
Simply by being unified, they would’ve stopped him,
because the rule was simple: You needed 60 votes to get
confirmation.
Because no nominee could be confirmed without
bipartisan support, most nominees had bipartisan
support. That is, until Republicans came up with a
game-changer. Two, actually.
In game theory terms, a game-changer is a strategy that

disrupts the rules of a game. When the game-changer
arrives, the game itself no longer functions as previously
envisioned. It’s not cheating, per se. It’s just modifying
how the rules are applied, making it look like a different
game entirely. Sometimes it’s because someone does
something legal that no one else is doing, such as when
dunking became the rage in basketball in the 1950s.
Sometimes it’s because the rules get changed to allow
something someone can take advantage of, such as the
embrace of the forward pass in football in 1906.
The first Republican game-changer came in 2016 after

President Obama nominated Garland. The GOP
refused to let his nomination come to committee, a
historic act of obstruction that was totally within the
rules. The second, more impactful game-changer came
in 2017, when Trump nominated Gorsuch. Faced with
unified Democratic opposition, Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell invoked the nuclear option, removing
the filibuster requiring 60 votes. Now only a simple
majority was needed, and Gorsuch sailed through.
Now the Democrats were in a quandary: The game had

changed. Justice Kennedy retired. Kavanaugh, the
potential doombringer to Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v.
Hodges and everything else Democrats held dear, was up
for nomination. Without a new strategy, they’d lose the
court for a generation. For weeks it looked like they
would not generate such a strategy.
The allegations of Christine Blasey Ford against Judge
Kavanaugh were not a strategy. Neither was her
insistence on an FBI investigation. Neither was airing
multiple other allegations. Those aren’t strategies
Democrats understand. What the Democrats
discovered was that they had in their hands a far bolder
strategy: to let Kavanaugh hang the Republicans.
When Kavanaugh was nominated, the Democrats had a

massive chance to take the House and almost no chance
to take the Senate. That is, they had effort they needed
to spend on the Senate that was being spent on a near-
sure thing in the House. Heidi Heitkamp was cratering
in North Dakota. Beto O’Rourke was a huge longshot
in Texas. Bill Nelson was a tossup in Florida. Joe
Manchin was basically a Republican anyway. At best, the
Senate Democrats were looking at a 1-in-3 chance, but
it felt much less likely.
When facing a minuscule chance of success, you need a

game-changer. You need everyone to see you work. But
politics is funny: If your people see you succeed a lot,
they stay home. Enthusiasm is based on what you want to
happen, not what you have made happen.
The Democrats had only one strategy that might work:

to turn Kavanaugh’s nomination into a battle for the
hearts of America’s women. Ford’s testimony showed
Kavanaugh was a monster; Kavanaugh’s showed that he
was the worst kind of monster. He was the second
coming of Trump: an entitled, angry, sexually
predacious white man. Senate Democrats aimed to
stand up against that kind of monster, and show who
was on the side of justice. Then they expected him to
get on the court anyway.
Wait, what? Wasn’t the goal to make sure Kavanaugh
wasn’t on the court? Well, sure, they’d take it if it
worked. There was a chance—a small chance—that if
they caused a couple Republican defections and voted
Kavanaugh down in any of the three votes, the GOP
could not get a new nominee in time for the midterms,
and there was a chance—a smaller chance—they could
win the Senate and then try to hold the seat open for
two years.
Then Trump would nominate Amy Coney Barrett,

who’s just as bad ideologically but scandal-free and a
woman to boot. Who knows? We might have liked her.
Then it’d be a fight over litmus tests, and they could
lose everything that’s in play in November. We get the
same result, but now it’s a woman on the court
overturning Roe. That’s no good at all. The fight is
against Donald Trump and people like him.
On many levels, it mattered if the gambit kept

Kavanaugh off the high court. On a raw political level,
it didn’t matter if it worked. The Democrats didn’t lose
the votes on Kavanaugh because as the minority they
never had the votes on Kavanaugh. There were no bad
outcomes to letting him show us what he’s made
of. One by one, Senate Democrats—Feinstein, Harris,
Klobuchar, Booker, Durbin, Whitehouse—exposed
Senate Republicans as defenders of sexual violence.
It’s up to women to decide if they want to be

represented by men who silence women. True, the
record on this is mixed. White women voted 53% in
favor of a sexual predator to be president. They might
do it again, because this election is about voting for
Trump again. They might not.
By unsuccessfully putting everything into stopping
Kavanaugh, the Democrats didn’t lose the Senate in
2018—because they never had the Senate in 2018. They
were barely in it to get a razor-thin majority; they were
never in it to get an impeachment majority. You can’t
lose what you don’t have. You can only lose what you
do have. What the Democrats had to lose was the
House and the soul of America. Now, backed by oceans
of rage, Democrats are likely to wave-crush the House
Republicans, as satisfied Republicans kick back and
relax, pleased as punch with their short-term victory.
The strategy of painting the Republicans as champions

of rage against women was a bold one; the GOP was
more than happy to death-clutch the mantle. Now
Mitch McConnell is done. Lindsey Graham is done.
Portrait-of-enabling Susan Collins is for-reals done; her
2020 opponent has raised $3 million already and doesn’t
even exist yet. They’re all done.
When Democrats take the House in 2018 and the

Senate and presidency in 2020, then the battle for the
court will actually begin. We’ll have a president who
seriously considers the possibility of court-packing.
Kavanaugh might be impeached. The retirements of
Ginsburg and Breyer will reshape the court. We will win
because we didn’t get Amy Coney Barrett or someone
more capable on the court.27 We will win because
the Senate put Donald Trump on it.
Now, that is a game-changer.
Ginsburg, sadly, did not retire. As we sent this book to press, Barrett
27
was nominated as her potential replacement.

Rich explains: game-changers
Game theory is a powerful tool to change how we think about

games. This has never been more true than in our modern age of
big data.
Take sports. Over the last decade, NBA coaches have used the
power of statistics to show that three-point shots have a
significant value, even with a lower completion percentage. If a
player fires off a three at the beginning of possession, they gain a
much higher value in terms of timing and momentum than
battling over a more traditional two-point shot. Two of the
greatest three-point shooters in the modern game each won MVP
honors in the same season that they led the league in three-point
field goals—James Harden and Steph Curry.
To many NBA fans, this is a sign that the game has changed
significantly since they were kids. Back in the 80s, it was a rare
year when a player made more than 100 three-pointers. Last
season, Harden banked 378.
Of course, that’s because the three-pointer was itself a game-

changer when officials added the rule to the NBA in 1979.
Implementing a game-changer is an ambitious move, because it’s

often difficult to see the potential consequences of such a massive
change. Adding the three-pointer gave teams new option to make
games more interesting by spreading out players on the court.
Now, forty years later, three-point attempts have become a
dominant strategy to many NBA teams, including the Warriors,
the Rockets, and my personal hometown heroes, the Trailblazers.
Though it seems trivial to say it, whenever anyone comes up with

a game-changing rule, they change the game. Is it possible to go
back to the old game? Probably not. Especially as we begin to
change our playstyle and adapt to our new circumstances.
On a long enough timeline, our only choices are to learn to play

and win the new game, or develop a game-changer of our own.

Playing Diplomacy
with Nancy Pelosi is a
dangerous game
November 20, 2018
Nancy Pelosi should be feeling great these days. The

longtime San Francisco congresswoman just presided
over the largest midterm influx of Democratic
Representatives since 1974, which was freakin’
Watergate. She should be ecstatic, but she’s under a little
pressure right now. A bunch of these new members
don’t want her to be speaker of the House, despite the
fact that she got them their new jobs.
Here’s how: On November 6, the Blue Tsunami

crashed ashore, giving the Democrats the House in
spectacular fashion. With approximately a +40 swing,
Democrats devastated the West Coast arm of the GOP.
For example, reliably Republican Orange County in
California now looks like a blue wall, with no
Republican representatives at all.
Democrats also flipped seven governorships, especially

in the critical Midwest. They gained at least 350
legislative seats, taking control of six new legislative
bodies and complete control of state government in
seven new states.
In the Senate, Democrats didn’t exactly win, but they’re
a much stronger party there now. They traded out four
shaky senators for two seriously strong women in
Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Jacky Rosen of Nevada.
No one in the Democratic minority is ever going to say,
“Wow, I sure miss what Joe Donnelly and Claire
McCaskill brought to the table.”28 It’s fine. They’ll
regain the chamber in 2020, along with the presidency.
Relax.
But back to the House, where Pelosi wants her old job
back. Sixteen members have signed a letter saying they
won’t vote for her. Pelosi needs 218 votes. With an
incoming majority of 30-ish seats, that’s real close to not
happening. It’s unclear if she has an opponent, but we
just saw the Freedom Caucus torpedo the speakership
for John Boehner in 2015. A similar thing could happen
to Pelosi.
That’s because of what game theory tells us about how

people choose allies. Basically, people choose allies
based on how little it costs after an alliance is enacted.
This concept is illustrated by a dilemma known as
Parfit’s hitchhiker.
In it, you’re alone in the desert, and you need a ride to

town. You promise a driver you’ll give him $100 when
you get there. He says no, because once you’re there,
you will have no incentive to pay him. So the driver
leaves you to die. If only both of you weren’t so
rational, the driver might have $100 and you might be
alive tomorrow.
28Boy, was I wrong about this. Freed from the ballot box, McCaskill
became one of Trump’s most effective critics.
That’s a little opaque, but the concept is easy to grok if
you understand a classic board game by Allan B.
Calhamer called Diplomacy.
In Diplomacy, it’s just prior to World War I. There are

seven great powers: Austria, Britain, France, Germany,
Italy, Russia, and Turkey. In the negotiation phase, they
say whatever they want to whomever they want, then
form alliances based on the results. The players then
reveal attack orders, written down in secret.
There are no enforceable provisions; the game can’t

make people do what they promised. If Austria swears
to Italy it will perform a Southern Hedgehog opening,
but then it enacts a Blue Water Lepanto strategy,29 so be
it. In the next round—or in the next game—the betrayed
players can exact revenge on whomever they want.
In the House, the election of a speaker officially occurs

in the first week of the new Congress. The incoming
legislators are in the equivalent of Diplomacy’s
negotiation phase. Members (extant and incoming) are
making all sorts of promises to each other and their
constituents. Will they keep them? Should they?
I’m not going to take a side here. Pelosi’s list of

accomplishments is vast, and it’s hard to find anyone
currently in the House that has a stronger track record
of championing justice. She will succeed at drumming
29In a Southern Hedgehog strategy, Austria spikes out into neighboring

territories to dissuade Russia and Italy from attempting incursions into its
homeland. In a Blue Water Lepanto strategy, Austria gets Italy to fortify
for a drive into Turkey, then betrays Italy by moving into the Adriatic to
threaten it. If you’re not into World War I board games, I commend you
for even making it through this footnote.
up hundreds of votes for investigation after
investigation of the White House’s crime family. She
can draw lines in the sand for immigrants and women
and trans people and minorities, stemming the GOP’s
destruction of their rights. Most of the reasons to
oppose Pelosi are basically Doctor Who’s government-
toppling “Don’t you think she looks tired?” That’s
sexism, deep and pure.
Yet reasons exist to vote her down. She’s the face of the
anti-impeachment movement; if you’ve been shouting
“Impeach Trump and Pence” for two years, you want
her gone. Her record on sexual harassment is
checkered. You might think it’s time for a leader that’s
younger or from a different background to contrast
with the craggy white men on the Republican side. You
can talk yourself into whatever position you want here,
if you’re a Democrat.
If you’re a Republican in Congress, you won’t even

hesitate for a second. You absolutely, positively want
Nancy Pelosi to be speaker of the House.
If you’re a Republican, Pelosi is your best ally as you

seek re-election in 2020. She’s the most dependable
friend you’ve got. Because Republicans hate Nancy
Pelosi; they like Kim Jong-un more than they do her.
To Republicans, she’s everything that is wrong with
America: sharp-tongued, bossy, and liberal as hell. If she
wins that speakership, she’ll be two breaths from being
president.
Which is awesome for you as a Republican. Ain’t no way

a Republican senator defects on Trump when
“President Pelosi” is an option.
So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when Trump
tweeted this:
Trump wants Speaker Pelosi. Every House Republican

should too. What’s amazing is that they can guarantee it.
Because of the weird way the House works, members
have three options when voting. The 435 members each
can vote for someone, against someone, or just “present.”
Voting “present” has a curious effect: It removes that
voter from the voting group, reducing the number of
votes needed to win. Fewer votes means fewer needed
for a majority. So they can do quite the dirty trick.
Diplomacy gambit #1: All of the roughly 200

remaining House Republicans can pledge to vote
“present.” That would make the number of voters
voting yes or no (that is, Democrats) only about 230.
Pelosi would then cruise to the speakership, as she
definitely has 115 solid votes. It’s quite the dirty trick,
and Republicans love dirty tricks. They’ll feel great
about their abstention. Even after being booted out of
power, they’ll still be the party of “no.”
If the Republicans commit to this, what’s an anti-Pelosi
representative to do?
Well, one option is to buckle down and vote for Pelosi,

to make sure the speaker knows she has their support.
But there is another maneuver, one that’s an even dirtier
trick than the one I just outlined for Republicans.
Diplomacy gambit #2: The incoming Democratic

freshmen can sign a letter promising to vote for
Rep. Kevin McCarthy unless Pelosi steps down.
McCarthy just won the vote for House Minority Leader.
Shockingly, no rule requires members to vote for a
representative from their own party. (Actually, no rule
requires them to vote for a representative. They could vote
for Hillary Clinton, and if she won despite never being a
congressperson, she’d be speaker of the House.)
If the rebel Democrats threatened to vote for

McCarthy, he could win. This is not that ridiculous. In
September, Arizona Democrat Tom O’Halleran and
Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick said they
might cross party lines if the new speaker didn’t back
sweeping changes to reform the House. The delightfully
named Problem Solvers Caucus unites congresspeople
who value bipartisanship over party, or at least they say
they do. If they rallied around this plan, it could work.
Still, even if this happens, Pelosi has a counter.
Diplomacy gambit #3: Pelosi can promise to stop

fundraising for those who don’t vote for her. Pelosi
is the Democrats’ best fundraiser. In the last 15 years,
she has raised $728 million for Democratic members. In
the last election, she raised about half of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee’s spending. Half.
It’s pretty hard to fend off a primary challenge if you
don’t have any money from your party. Also, Nancy
Pelosi knows lots of people who would like to be
Congresspeople.
Also, this is madness. Legislatures shouldn’t work this

way. A simple change—say, that “present” votes don’t
reduce the number needed for a majority, or that
members can only vote for those of their own party—
would undermine these degenerate strategies. But
nobody seems interested in that, other than maybe the
Problem Solvers Caucus.
We’ll see if they are all talk or actually the kinds of

backstabbers that veteran Diplomacy players expect
them to be. Nancy Pelosi sure doesn’t know the answer.
But even if rebel Democrats and crafty Republicans

conspire in their secret negotiations, they should watch
out. Because Nancy Pelosi is a great speaker of the
House. If she wins,30 I’ll bet she remembers the names
of everyone who tried to undermine her speakership. I’ll
bet that goes poorly for them.
Because no matter what you do in a given game of

Diplomacy, there’s always another game.
30 Spoiler: She did. By a lot.

Rich explains: Parfit’s hitchhiker
When you go out to eat, you find yourself at one of two kinds of
establishments: fast food or fine dining. At the first, you pay for a
meal before eating. At the second, you pay afterwards. In the
social contract we all live under, our collective expectation is that
the food is good and the payment is fair. Generally, reality meets
our expectations, though every once in a while, someone tries to
pull a fast one and people question that social contract.
We always hear about folks who jump up from their table and
race out the door before paying their bill. Or eat most of a
sandwich before sending it back, claiming to have found a hair. On
the other hand, many of us have eaten at a restaurant and said,
“That’s it? For that price? I’m never coming here again!” While
dine-n-dashers are villains, I don’t attribute malice to a restaurant
when it doesn’t fit my idealized food-to-cash ratio.
Parfit’s hitchhiker feels absurd, because we have been trained that

this social contract is sacrosanct. The hitchhiker asks for a ride and
promises to pay once they get to town, like any good fine diner.
The driver, clearly a lover of fast food, demands payment in
advance. The conflict only appears once we realize that each
player recognizes that the other might be a villain.
The dilemma here is about cost and sacrifice in asynchronous

situations. In each of these two-stage games, players take turns
paying costs and receiving benefits. If the game never reaches a
second stage, then who should gain the first set of benefits and
who should be stuck with a pointless loss? Whether or not the
hitchhiker plans to pay is immaterial. For the driver, the only
answer is to keep on driving and leave the hitchhiker behind.
Political compromise and economic deals are often fraught with

this kind of peril. If one side makes a sacrifice while the other side
just ends the game early, then eventually no one gets to eat
dinner. Even honest hitchhikers are left behind.
Also, hitchhiking is illegal and this essay is about Congress.

Ready Individual One:
The quizzical power
of a lame duck
December 12, 2018
Two years into his presidency, Donald Trump just

became a lame duck.
His team lost the House and hundreds of state seats in

the midterms. New governors and state attorneys
general stand ready to file suit after suit against him. His
own Justice Department called him a committer and
commissioner of felonies in the sentencing of his fixer,
who is going to jail for three years for acting in a case
Trump won. And on Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi laser-
beamed Trump into vapor.
With the exception of fucking up the judiciary beyond

repair, his next two years will feature only investigations,
hearings, and perhaps impeachment. He may think he’s
running for re-election in 2020, but really he’s just
debating whether to resign and get an unmerited pardon
while he has a complicit successor in the Vice President.
Though he may thrash and moan and maybe nuke
someone, this duck is cooked. Democrats (and even
some Republicans) are salivating over running against
“my esteemed opponent, Individual-1.”
Meanwhile, over on Sore Loser Boulevard, the
Republican legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin are
passing dead-of-night laws designed to strip those new
governors and attorneys general of their rightful powers.
This follows the model of the GOP coup in North
Carolina in 2016, when the voters chose a Democratic
governor. The GOP can’t win at the ballot box, but
they’ll be damned if they’re going to give up their guns
at the state capitol.
Trump should pay attention. By realizing they can’t win,

the legislators in those states have figured out
something crucially important in American
politics: Losing makes you temporarily very, very powerful.
Deciding not to run in 2020 will bring Trump almost

limitless power. He’s probably too thick-noggined to
realize this, and that’s good for us normal humans, but
there’s a blueprint in front of him that’s morally
bankrupt, legally questionable, and effective as hell.
In game design, we don’t like situations where a player

can play without fear of consequences. Consequences
are the foundations of rules. By necessity, if you have
no concerns about being penalized, you are willing to be
penalized. This isn’t gambling for resurrection; it’s
instead a willful lack of concern that any rules in the
manual apply to you at that given moment.
Consider, for example, the football penalty of defensive

pass interference. In the NFL, when a downfield
defender hinders a receiver from catching the ball, the
referee whistles the play dead, moves the ball from the
line of scrimmage to wherever the foul occurred, and
awards the offense a first down.
This can be disastrous for the defense, because the line
of scrimmage might be the 50-yard line. If the penalty
occurs on the 1-yard line, the offense gains a 49-yard
pickup, even if the receiver wouldn’t otherwise have caught the
ball.
There’s an exception to the rule that the ref will spot the
ball wherever the foul occurs, and that’s if it’s in the end
zone. At that point, the offense gets the first down on
the 1-yard line. Big deal, right? Four downs to get one
yard? NFL offenses would scoff at the suggestion that
they couldn’t punch it in.
Ah, but wait. The alternative, thinks the defender, is that

the offense scores a touchdown immediately. A chance
that the offense won’t score is better than a certainty that
the offense will score. If that opportunity is on the last
play of the game, the offense will get only one extra play
from the 1, not four.31 One chance to notch a yard is
anything but certain. Thus, the defender is incentivized
to commit such a foul at the end of the game. If he
doesn’t, he’ll get beat on the play, which guarantees
highlights of him being beat played on repeat on
SportsCenter all night.
In college football, it’s even worse. The NCAA

mandates that the defensive pass interference penalty is
15 yards regardless of where it occurs. On first (and
even second) down any time in the game, it’s to the
defender’s advantage to interfere when the ball is
otherwise assured of a catch far downfield. Take the
penalty and lose 15 yards rather than 50.
31 If the opportunity presents itself to commit another foul, there is

literally no penalty other than running the play again.
In both cases, the defender is only incentivized to
cheat if he is certain he has already lost. If the receiver is not
going to catch the ball, the defender would be wise to
pull up and let it fall to the ground. But if the receiver is
sure to catch it otherwise, the defender should
manhandle him all he wants. This is dangerous, because
it can result in injury to the receiver. But it can’t result in
a worse game result than letting the long gain or
touchdown happen. (If you just read all that outside the
U.S. and had no idea what I was talking about,
substitute in Luis Suarez’s handball against Ghana in the
2010 World Cup. Make sense now?)
If you’ve already lost, you have no need to play as if you value

winning. Instead of trying to be a winner in that moment,
you can focus on the longer game: winning later, say, or
keeping gains you’ve gotten. You can do things you’d
normally be penalized for, even dangerous and harmful
things. It may not be morally justifiable, but it’s hard to
argue it’s a tactical error.
This, as it turns out, is what Republicans are doing in

the Michigan and Wisconsin state legislatures. The
GOP gerrymandered the states in preposterous ways, so
much so that Wisconsin Republicans lost by almost
200,000 votes and still scored 63 of the 99 assembly
seats. But you can’t gerrymander a statewide election, so
each state’s governor and attorney general races went
blue in the wave. Had the states not been wildly
gerrymandered, the assemblies likely would’ve both
flipped to the Democrats.
While they have a hold on things—temporary as it

might be—they have to do everything they can to
protect their gerrymandering. The statehouses control
the redistricting process, which will happen after the
2020 elections. They each need a willing governor to
help them do so, and they aren’t going to have them.
Their goal is to eliminate the governors from the process. They
can do that by moving the power from the governor
and attorney general to the legislature, allowing them to
intervene in gerrymandering lawsuits, restricting voting
rights, and even wresting away the ability to appoint
people who will adjudicate those rights. Sure, it’s totally
contrary to the nature of a functioning assembly, but
who wants that? There are victories to be maintained
even in the time of loss.
This is the strategy Trump should pursue. He should

voluntarily terminate his run for re-election and get all
the weaseling in he can. Especially in the next few
weeks. As he said to Pelosi, he could have the House
votes for the Wall in one session. He just can’t get them
from the Senate, which has rules about these things.
Yeah, the Republicans tried to burn them to the ground,
but they didn’t completely succeed. The president is
stymied now, but if he focuses on acting from a
position of loss—where no future elections are at stake
for him or his party—he might just win.
There is a sign that this strategy might not work forever.

That North Carolina coup I mentioned? It got held up
in court and is being challenged by all of the Tar Heel
State’s living governors. Those lawless acts in Michigan
and Wisconsin will too, especially if the new attorneys
general in those states have anything to say about it. But
for the moment, it seems to work. If there’s one thing
that alleged-tax-evader Trump is good at, it’s taking
advantage of a loophole. Especially if it’s morally
reprehensible.
Rich explains: gerrymandering
Back in 2008, a University of Washington project called Foldit

harnessed gamers’ brains for the good of humanity. Its creators
challenged players with a series of proteins, each of which had
increasingly complex spatial and electrical inefficiencies to be
minimized. By dragging molecular pieces around on the screen,
players gained points for building a more harmonious protein.
Within days, scientists were elated to learn that their player base
had developed functional molecules far more accurate than had
been created through computer models and immediately started
using them to battle a series of diseases.
Could gerrymandering be solved with a similar project, fixing the

imbalances within our voting districts in a matter of ten days?
Sadly, even though some gerrymandered districts resemble
inefficient protein chains, the problem is a little more complex.
The first struggle is defining the word “compact,” one of the only
guidelines for drawing new districts. If you’ve ever fit a basketball
into a cardboard box, you’ll know that compact is a complicated
term. Geometry might suggest that a circle has an ideal
compactness, but a state can’t be packed with circles, plus we
shouldn’t ignore geographic features that now divide states into
convenient sections. If we can’t make things geometrically
perfect, can we determine if a Maryland district described by a
judge as “a broken-winged pterodactyl, lying prostrate across the
center of the state” is too outlandish to be compact?
These arguments and others have been advanced by Professor

Moon Duchin and the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering
Group. It uses a planning algorithm and computer simulation to
build a statistical argument for compactness. If computers can
build ten thousand simulated districts in a state using laws and
natural features as guidelines, they can compare real districts to
those simulations. Do most simulations match real boundaries?
Nice work providing a fair landscape for democracy, State!
To use these tools, go to districtr.org. Create your own districts!

The GOP Legacy:
Elections don’t have
consequences
December 18, 2018
Nancy Pelosi isn’t the leader whom the Democrats

should run out of town on a rail. It’s Senate Minority
Leader Chuck Schumer. In a meeting with President
Trump, while Pelosi tried to get a word in edgewise,
Schumer had the unmitigated gall to parrot Barack
Obama:
“Elections have consequences, Mr. President.”
Ha, no. Get me a minority leader who knows what the

hell’s going on. In the weeks that followed the election,
Republicans did these things:
• Initiated coups against incoming Democratic
governors and attorneys general in Michigan and
Wisconsin
• Refused to follow the will of the voters in Florida
by attempting to scuttle a law that restores voting
rights to felons
• Attempted to seat a candidate accused of voter
fraud in North Carolina

• Appointed the loser of the Arizona Senate race to
John McCain’s Senate seat
• Stated that they don’t care about actual crimes
committed by the President
• Threatened to shut down the government they just
lost control of
Elections don’t have consequences if Republicans win.

They only have consequences if people who respect the
rule of law win. Since we are heading toward the
gerrymandering battle of 2020—when Republicans may
have their last chance ever to have a majority of white
voters in crucial areas—the stakes are high.
Disenfranchising minority voters is the only winning
strategy for the GOP, and they’ve embraced it
wholeheartedly. It’s all dirty tricks from hereon in.
This all seems kinda new, right? Like, okay, maybe you
can vaguely recall attempts to limit power on both sides,
but you can’t remember a time when an incoming state
legislature just refused to follow a law approved by
voters? Was there ever a time when the GOP seemed
so... desperate? Did it ever just attempt to cast aside all
the old rules when it won?
If you’re a board gamer, this might sound familiar to

you, even if you can’t quite place it. The concept of
playing on an amorphous, constantly changing
landscape came into vogue with the rise of the
collectible card game in the 1990s, introducing the
golden rule that the cards overrule the rulebook. This
continued with the modular board game in the 2000s,
then the adventure card game in the 2010s.32
32
Disclaimer: I made a lot of these.
One trend of the last decade has been even more alien
than those, and might even end up being more
influential: the legacy game. My buddy Rob Daviau
came up with this concept while at Hasbro, introducing
it in print with Risk Legacy. His later games Seafall,
Pandemic Legacy, and Betrayal Legacy all followed a
similar pattern: The game changes dependent on the results of
your previous actions.
I’m not talking about small consequences: Areas of the

board would be stickered over or crossed out and
renamed. Characters would die and return. New pieces
would come into play and others would be destroyed
forever. Entire sections of the rulebook would be
papered over with new sections. Legacy games were
inherently unstable, and gamers loved it.
To play a legacy game, you must be willing to suspend

your definition of the game, without knowledge of what
it might become. This is hard for some gamers, but
thrilling for others. Imagine if a movie ticket came with
a copy of the film’s script. You can read it before going
to the theater. Would you do so? Did you just say, “Of
course not!”
Now imagine you’re flipping over a newly purchased

copy of Rob’s pirate-themed game Seafall for the first
time. There’s a board pictured, and some cards, and
some nice ships, and this all looks normal and... um,
wait... the text on the bottom says
This game contains 3 x 15V alkaline manganese batteries,

which are required for the game.
Nothing shown on the box should need batteries.

Your mind goes wild: Is it a wind fan? A ship that
moves on its own? Maybe a slowly sinking island? You
don’t know. I mean, you could know. You could just rip
open the box and search it for things that have battery
slots. But where’s the fun in that? You’re willing to give
up something all gamers look forward to doing
(inspecting the pieces before play) for something better
(being shocked by new revelations). That’s the
difference between being told Darth Vader is Luke’s
father and watching for the first time as Vader says it.
(Oh. Hey. Sorry if I spoiled that for you.)
Here’s the development that you aren’t prepared for

when you play your first legacy game: Changing the
rules as you go along is fun. It’s the best, actually. You
aren’t a slave to the rules; you’re an active participant in
making them evolve. If you don’t like what’s happening,
just play more and you’ll like it soon enough.
Seafall teaches us something else too. Most of these

legacy games are cooperative. You change the rules
together, and suffer the consequences as a team. Seafall
is different. Seafall is a competitive game. When you
change the rules, the game permanently tilts toward
those who are winning so far. That means losing one
game means more losing in the future.
We liberals don’t give Republicans enough credit for

seeing this. We think that they’re dour and mean, sitting
in Brian Kemp’s office, tight-fistedly mapping out ways
to screw over minority voters because they have no
choice. No, they’re enjoying this.
Meanwhile, we’re slavishly adhering to the rules, and

grumpily mandating everyone else do so.
Who in your life do you picture when I describe it that
way? Your boss? The referee of your basketball game?
The DMV representative? Are these the people you
want to hang out with? The GOP is playing the game to
win it, not to get participation trophies.
The legacy game teaches us that in a period of

evolution, we need to evolve. You do believe in
evolution, right? We need to embrace that our
democracy is changing, and we have to be a part of
reshaping it.
The gerrymandering battle isn’t about banning

gerrymandering anymore; that’s just creating a level
playing field. If we lose on that, the GOP will still
rewrite all the rules. It’s about reshaping the districts so
that those who disenfranchise voters can never be elected
again. Retaliatory gerrymandering is the only way our
democracy survives. If you got tired of 2018 being
called “the most consequential election of our lifetime,”
you ain’t seen anything yet.
In the next two years, if we’re not creative with the

rules—if we’re not as ruthless as they are—we could
lose the very principle of elective democracy. We’re
seeing the effects of it now. Because Republicans aren’t
content to lose and fight the next election. They don’t
want the next election to happen. The rules say they can’t
stop it, for now. But their legacy is this: Rules can be
changed. And they will be.
What do you want to change them to?

Rich explains: changing the rules
Back in college, I was introduced to a particularly vindictive friend

who loved to play a card game called Mao. He’d deal us each a
hand of four cards and let us know the rules, which are as follows.
“There are eight basic rules of the game. On each turn, you play
one card. Whenever you break a rule, I will give you another card
as a penalty. The first player to play all of their cards wins. The
first rule is that you aren’t allowed to speak. Go.”
As we played, we quickly learned that the eight basic rules had to

do with the kind of card you played. Whenever we received a
penalty, we knew that we’d done something wrong, but not
exactly what. On my vindictive friend’s turn, I’d watch as he played
his own card. I looked for facial tics, gestures, even the rare
spoken word, all to get a glimpse of what I should do on my own
turn. Things like “when you play a diamond, say the number on
your card.” I failed, time and again, always demanding another
round until I finally learned the rules.
Eventually, I could play the game perfectly, and the game got
really interesting. Once you know the rules, you get to make up
your own, and I’d been plotting revenge. My rule was something
like “if you play a red card, and the sum of your card and the one
played before is even, then say ‘oogie boogie,’ but if you play...”
In my pursuit of becoming the most clever and vindictive player,

I’d stepped across a line and broken the spirit of the game. No one
ever figured out my stupid rule and we quickly stopped playing.
Imagine if we’d been forced to, perhaps because we had decided
this game would define voting districts in a coming election. In a
sense, it’d be fair for you to get your turn coming up with your
own gerrymandering rules.
But wouldn’t it be altogether more helpful to define the line of

fairness and make sure no one has an incentive to cross it? The
good news is that mathematicians are trying to forge that
boundary right now. The hard part will be getting everyone to
accept the new rules.

Trump tanked the
presidency. Can he
tank the economy
too?
December 23, 2018
As 2017 ended, I wondered if Trump was tanking the

presidency, intentionally failing to spur a GOP
midterms bloodbath. Jury’s out on that, but a New York
Times piece on Trump at the midpoint has a paragraph
that might corroborate my theory.
“A partisan war may be just what he wants. He has privately

told associates that he is glad Democrats won the House in last
month’s midterm elections, saying he thinks that guarantees his re-
election because they will serve as a useful antagonist. That may be
bravado, but history provides some support. Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama, his Democratic predecessors, both endured even
bigger midterm setbacks and went on to win re-election.”
They did! That might just be meaningless noise, as Bush

the Younger’s party did not lose big at the midterms and
he still won. Maybe presidents get re-elected because
presidents get re-elected. But it sure would eliminate
dissent in the Republican ranks if any of his opponents
lost big to a blue wave. This strategy might not work.
But it only matters if Trump believes it will work, not
whether it will work. Let’s say that he believes it does.
If he does, he sure has put himself in quite the negative
position this week. The government is shut down. He
cannot get Congress to pay for the Wall that Mexico
was going to pay for. His defense secretary quit with a
face-melting letter of protest. He’s pulling out of Syria,
and maybe Afghanistan, to the delight of Vladimir
Putin; he also bailed out Putin’s crony Oleg Deripaska
and turned a blind eye to a Russian bomber base in
Venezuela. He’s railing at his acting attorney general
about all the prosecutions that are ensnaring his friends
and business operations. He can’t find a permanent
chief of staff. He’s scheming to fire the unfireable
chairman of the Federal Reserve, whom he appointed.
The stock market is having its worst crash since 2011.
That’s the stock market whose gains Trump consistently

tweets as his greatest accomplishment as president.
Now he’s not tweeting about it so much.
Which leads me to again wonder aloud:
If Trump tanked the presidency, is it possible for

him to tank the economy? If so, why would he do
it?
My first hunch was that it’s not possible. Presidents

don’t get to decide how the economy does; if they
could, they’d make it rain daisies every day. Clinton and
Reagan had great economies, so they were great
presidents. Carter and the Bushes had awful economies,
so they were awful presidents. Maybe they were, maybe
they weren’t, but it’s unfair to everyone else—especially
those in the business sector—to give presidents sole
credit. Which is fair, because they sure don’t want sole
credit when it goes off the rails.
Presidents have little control over the technological and
demographic forces that shape the economy, and blind
luck is a major part of it. Obama gets credit for a major
turnaround in the economy, and he certainly deserves
praise for keeping a steady hand on the tiller. If you
think he should get credit for the 8.4% job growth over
his eight years, just think about how far down the
economy was after the housing crash of 2008. You can’t
give him credit for the “good luck” of showing up at the
start of a major recession.
Trump, on the other hand, gives himself lots of credit

for good news—good news that should be credited to
Obama much more than him, if we’re doing that—and
no blame for the crash that’s showed up at the end of
this year. Let’s take a closer look at that. This is one case
where we can actually credit the president with the state
of the economy, even though it’s just about the last
thing he wants credit for.
While economists fight over everything, one thing

garners very little debate: The market hates tariffs.
President Hoover agreed to the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs
on October 28, 1929; the next day, the market crashed,
contributing greatly to what would become the Great
Depression. When FDR came in and said tariffs were
“the road to ruin,” the market rebounded with three
years averaging 10 percent growth.
George W. Bush enacted steel tariffs on March 5, 2002.

The Dow Jones on that day was over 10,000, then
began a slide to 7,700 three months later. The tariffs
cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and rang in a
recession that dominated the mid-2000s. It took a major
stimulus from Obama to stem the bleeding.
Trump’s the first president in my lifetime I’d describe as
a “tariffmonger.” He loves them as much as he loves
cheeseburgers. On July 6, he announced a huge suite of
tariffs against our partners. Two months later, for
inexplicable reasons, investment magazines proclaimed
the markets weren’t scared of tariffs any more. They
aren’t writing that today. The market is in a freefall,
having dropped more than 4,000 points since October.
We can hazard that tariffs are one of the rare functional

levers a president has to affect the economy, especially
in a negative way. There’s another lever he has: acting
like a crazy fool. When a president behaves irrationally,
at least as defined by the market, it goes south.
The “Nixon Shock” is a term that describes the

market’s reaction to President Nixon unilaterally
suspending the convertibility of the dollar into gold,
freezing wages and prices, and imposing an import
surcharge of 10 percent. At first it went great, with a
slight uptick in the Dow Jones. But then as Nixon’s
presidency unraveled, the oil market skyrocketed, and
everyone realized unmooring the dollar was a
catastrophically bad idea, the market crashed. From
January 1973 to December 1974, the Dow Jones lost
45% of its value. The ensuing recession embroiled
Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, in a cavalcade of dumb
approaches (WIN buttons!) until finally he signed a tax
and spending cut that stimulated the economy. It didn’t
have to be that way. Had Nixon approached his
presidency like a stable person, he might have survived
Watergate and kept the market healthy. Just a hunch.
Was late-stage Nixon actually crazy? I don’t think so.

Who cares? If enough people believe it, it matters.
If enough people think U.S. leadership is unhinged, the
market responds in a highly negative manner. This
White House sure has a lack of hinges. The crash was a
get-out-now reaction to the Trump presidency driving
itself into a roadbank. There’s no oil shock, no tech
bubble burst, no dust bowl, no housing collapse.
There’s only one collapse, and it’s the executive branch.
I haven’t spent much time talking about game theory

because I wanted to justify to myself that it was possible
to tank the economy from the Oval Office. I think I’ve
done that, so let’s get to the second question: Why would
Trump tank the economy?
On that subject, game theory is quite clear that he has a

reason to do so.
The market is governed by a game theory idea called

the sentiment game. This game isn’t about
determining whether to buy a stock on its merits. It’s
about determining whether everyone else will think it’s a
good idea to buy it, then acting before they can do so.
The sentiment game is a Keynesian beauty contest,

after economist John Maynard Keynes described it
thusly in his epic final book, The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes hated the
sentiment game. He portrayed it as a newspaper beauty
contest where the goal was to pick the woman that
readers would find most attractive.33 Instead of
choosing the model you found most attractive, you’d
have to suss out what traits all the other readers would
like, and bet on the woman who had those.
33 It was 1936. Don’t shoot the messenger.

If the other readers knew that, they’d bet on the woman
that they thought the average competitor would think
that the average competitor would think was most attractive.
That’s not the same as the average person; it’s the average
of everyone playing the guess-the-most-attractive game.
And if they knew that, they might think on an even
higher level about which competitors knew which
competitors were average, and guess how those... look,
it’s turtles all the way down.
The point is that if you keep going up and up the levels

of who is playing the most strategic game, you
eventually talk yourself into a Nash equilibrium that is
far from the rational opinion you might’ve started with.
For example, you play a game where you have to guess

what is two-thirds of the number from 0–100 that the
average person will pick. A random person will pick a
random number, probably 50. A first-level thinker will
pick two-thirds of that, or 33. A second-level thinker,
thinking everyone is smart enough to understand the
game, picks two-thirds of that, or 22. A third-level
thinker, thinking everyone is following along this line of
thought, picks 14, and so on until everyone picks zero.
That’s crazy-thinking, but it’s “strategic,” y’know?
If, hypothetically, you’re a president who thinks you

should get credit for what happens in the economy, you
might just believe you’ve figured out the sentiment
game. I mean, really figured it out. Everybody tells you
that when presidents enact tariffs, the market crashes.
You know what the average person will do—sell like
the building’s on fire—and you know what above
average people (like you!) will do when that happens.
You’ve got a very, very large brain here, so you get this.
But you don’t just listen to that part of the story. You
listen to the FDR part of the story too. He says tariffs
are bad and the market flies back up. You look at the
Obama part of the story. He engineers a stimulus act,
and the economy roars back. You look at the Ford part
of the story. He signs a tax and spending cut bill, and
the economy works its way northward.
None of those presidents get to save the economy unless

the economy gets in trouble first. Deep down, Trump knows
he didn’t save the economy when he came in; it was
running just fine and it kept doing so into his
presidency. The only way to deal with a “problem” like
that is to create a crisis, then claim to solve it.34 Y’know,
just like he did with DACA, with North Korea, with
NAFTA. This is a tried and true method for Trump. It
defines his presidency.
If a madman starts tossing around threats of tariffs and

implements them without the approval of anyone else,
the market is gonna come unglued. Sure, lots of people
will suffer. Whatev. That’s not his concern. What’s
important is that everyone views him as a savior. So hey,
a midterm crisis is great. For his re-election, a rip-roaring
economy in, say, early 2020 is way better than a stable
but unremarkable one right now. Just gotta make that
happen. Plenty of time to do... y’know, president stuff...
and... profit?
Totally gonna work. I mean, how could it not? It’s like,

really smart.
34The day after I wrote this, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called all
the major bank CEOs from his vacation spot in Cabo San Lucas and
assured them the market had lending liquidity even though they didn’t ask, and
the market reacted like it was made entirely of flame.
Rich explains: the sentiment game
Whoever named it the “sentiment” game deserves a

Machiavellian Medal. On first glance, we read it as “emotion” and
might think someone playing this game is acting irrationally, which
is to say that they have allowed emotions to impair their logical
processes. Is this starting to sound a little like Commander Spock,
master logician? Game theorists, like students of the Vulcan
Science Academy, are trained to believe that emotions are
something to be mastered and controlled in the name of pure
reason.
Sadly, all of this is beside the point, because in reality, the

sentiment game—the interaction of people trying to figure out
the feelings of all other people, each knowing everyone else is
undergoing the same process—requires a ruthless pragmatism
that puts most game theorists and Vulcans to shame.
A Warren voter and a Sanders voter walk into a bar. They speak
passionately about their political beliefs, listen attentively to the
other speaker, and converse in a respectful and rational fashion.
They shake hands and leave, never once noticing the sentimental
voter eavesdropping from the next table. That voter is not
concerned about the candidates’ merits. They believe, as Vince
Lombardi once said, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
The sentimental voter weighs not their own political beliefs, but
their savvy about which candidate has the better chance for
victory. This fair-weather fan doesn’t want to be left with the
wrong bumper sticker on Election Day, so they make their choice
with victory in mind. As an added bonus, their support continues
to help their candidate win out.
While a single voter might seem innocuous, the sentiment game is

easiest to see when we look at lobbyists and political power
brokers, battling to gain the most influence. When we move from
bumper stickers to powerful financial agendas, who has time to
back the loser? Just figure out who’s most likely to win and then
crony on up to them, right? How sentimental.

A candidate’s guide
to winning the
rock-paper-scissors
primary
January 22, 2019
Dear Democratic candidates for president:
At this point I admit I’ve lost count of you. Harris.

Warren. Booker. Gillibrand. Castro. Gabbard. Inslee.
Maybe O’Rourke. Biden, maybe? Sanders, probably. At
least two New York City mayors. Buttigieg. Klobuchar.
De la Hoya. Jolie. Yes, Oscar and Angelina.
I am definitely intrigued. Truthfully, I have no idea

which of you actually will make it to the ballots. I expect
that when the first Democratic debate rolls out, there
won’t be a stage in Iowa large enough for it. There’s
going to be a lot of you, that’s for sure.
This is not unusual in sports. Pro baseball, basketball,

football, and hockey start with 30 or more entrants on
day one. By midseason, there are still at least 20 with a
chance. By the playoffs, there are still at least a dozen
standing. If game analogies are useful (and this book’s
premise presumes they are), we shouldn’t judge the
candidates by the size of the candidate pool. It’ll shake
itself out.
But for you? That’s a whole ’nother matter. In a wide
field of actually qualified candidates, you each have to
do something to break away from the pack, or you will
get washed out. Even if you do, you might still get
washed out. I have one piece of advice for you, which
you would do well to heed: Study the lizards.
No, really, I mean this. If you care about surviving, you

should know how creatures survive. It’s life or death. If
you care, you’ll learn. Study the lizards.
The male common side-blotched lizard wants the same

things we all do: relative safety, insects to eat, and a
honey to hunker down with. The female common side-
blotched lizard is a yellow-throated beauty, who will
mate with any male that comes along. She has three
choices of mates, each with its unique features.
The orange male is bigger and stronger than all the

other lizards, and territorial about his harem of women.
The blue male is not as strong as the orange lizard,
who’ll chase him away. But unlike the orange male, the
blue guy’s monogamous, forming a stronger pair-bond,
which means he only has one female to defend from the
smaller yellow male.
The wimpy yellow lizard, however, has got something

that the others don’t: he’s yellow. Yup, he looks just like
all the female lizards. Now, this metrosexuality is never
gonna fool a blue lizard, who’s a stickler for detail. But
it works wonders on the big ol’ orange lizard, who
assumes the yellow male is a female, and lets him pass
unmolested—right until the yellow male steals the
ladies’ hearts. This elemental Nashian matchup has
remained in equilibrium for millennia.
Orange beats blue, blue beats yellow, yellow beats
orange. Does this sound familiar? It might, because you
know this trifurcated mating strategy by the name
of rock-paper-scissors. That’s a game you must
understand if you’re entering a competitive field with a
lot of players. Whether you’re a lizard or a candidate,
you need to know who you can beat and how you can beat
them. The lizards have figured this out. You can do it
too. First, you need to know how the game is played.
Everyone who isn’t into game theory thinks rock-

paper-scissors is random. It’s not. It does have some
randomness. But randomness is something you can
adjust for. Also, you have to know that there are some
people who you can’t beat. That’s okay, because you can
get other people to beat them.
You’ve seen that work before. Seventeen Republicans

made it to Iowa in 2016. Among them were the brawler
Donald Trump, the salesman Marco Rubio, and the
bumbler Chris Christie. Trump knew Rubio was the real
threat, but he couldn’t lay a glove on him. “Little
Marco” was far too slick and polished for the brutish
Trump to best onstage. Meanwhile, Trump was
crushing Christie, a scandal-plagued hobgoblin with a
15% approval rating in his home state. Christie was not
what you’d call presidential material.
Then boom. Rubio took a well rehearsed shot at Christie,

who shot back: “There it is. There it is. The memorized
25-second speech.” Christie got Rubio to sputter out
the same “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t
know what he’s doing” line three times. When Christie
caused the Marco-Bot to short-circuit onstage, Rubio
was toast. Trump just watched the carnage.
Days later, Christie was gone. With no ability to cut into
Trump’s base, his listless campaign registered zero
impact, except he had fatally wounded Rubio. When
Rubio hung it up a month later, Trump was left with
only Ted Cruz as a threat. That guy Trump could beat.
When you Democrats head to Iowa, you should keep

this in mind: You are all the same. You’re impressively
credentialed liberals who won’t win over anyone in a
MAGA hat and will likely sweep everyone else. No one
cares who wins the primaries. We all just want a serious
candidate who can rid us of the criminal malfeasance
and incompetence of the Trump-Pence regime. When
everyone is the same, you need to know the game.
That’s where rock-paper-scissors can teach you things.
As I said, it’s not random. These are facts.
1. Statistics matter. Rock is chosen 35.4% of the
time, paper 35%, and scissors 29.6%. Choosing
paper wins and ties more than any other choice.
2. Gender matters. Men throw rock more than
women do. Though there’s less data, it is believed
that women throw scissors more than men do.
3. Experience matters. Most players won’t throw the
same thing three times in a row. If they throw rock-
rock, switch to scissors and you’re likely safe.
4. Losing matters. A player who loses will likely
switch to a different option. If they lose with paper,
switch to rock and you’re likely safe.
5. Tells matter. Tucking your thumb slightly into
your index finger will telegraph rock, which
experienced players will see and counter.
6. Trash talk really matters. Telling your opponent
that you will throw rock will get them to believe
you won’t, and you can counter by throwing rock.

Now say you’re onstage in a debate with many
candidates. A candidate speaks:
1. They’re saying what the audience expects them
to say. You have a strategy: Say something they don’t
expect you to say.
2. You’re a different gender than your foe. You
have a strategy: Counter their aggression with calmness, or
their incitement with quiet strength.
3. They’ve completed a thought on a subject, and
handled a follow-up. You have a strategy: Get them
to think up a new thought on the same subject.
4. They have just been humbled by an
opponent. You have a strategy: Hit them on a
different front, not the same one.
5. They’re about to launch into a familiar talking
point. You have a strategy: Say they will say it and
make them repeat it.
6. They’re handling pressure well. You have a
strategy: Tell them what you think of their strategy before
they enact it.
Whatever they do, whoever they are, you have a strategy for
that person and that situation. It’s not random. You’ve
thought this through.
Sure, you may think the relevant thing is your

experience as a senator or a governor or a mayor or, I
don’t know, maybe a boxer? I’m telling you it isn’t.
You’re just another prospect with enough game to make
the show and the same odds as everyone else. If you
show up with a strategy, you have a chance to win.
Because if you don’t, you’re just another Marco-Bot

waiting to misfire.

Rich explains: rock-paper-scissors
If I may stand on the shoulders of giants for a second, I can’t talk

about rock-paper-scissors without mentioning Len Fisher. In its
purest form, game theory is a dense, arcane topic. Even as a
young mathematician, I just couldn’t find a good translator.
Eventually, I discovered the book Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game
Theory in Everyday Life, where Fisher was able to illustrate these
heady problems in simple and understandable ways. In that book,
on one page, in a single paragraph, is an idea that I have obsessed
over ever since: the truel.
A truel is a three-person duel. It usually ends in a standoff, as seen

with guns in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Reservoir Dogs,
and most memorably with finger guns in The Office.
Imagine that you stand on stage with master magicians Penn &
Teller, and they’ve challenged you to a game of rock-paper-
scissors. Famously, Penn always claims he will throw rock and
then, in the simplest trap ever devised, follows through and
throws rock. In a sense, even though this game is simultaneous,
you’ve been forced to throw second after this bold declaration. So
what do you do?
If you respond by throwing paper to beat Penn, you’ll lose to

Teller throwing scissors—tie game. But you wouldn’t throw
scissors, since you already know Penn will crush you. There, your
best option is a tie! So you decide to throw rock, just like Penn.
You each win against Teller, but you and Penn are tied at one win
apiece. No matter what you do, you can never win. Magic, am I
right?
A truel is a classic problem where three players form a cycle of

checks and balances that keeps one player from easily forming a
dominant strategy. You know, like the United States government.
Or, as Fisher describes, a child following Penn’s strategy and two
parents who want the child to win without losing too much face in
the process. You know, like Republican leadership in the United
States government.

Trump will always
blink
January 26, 2019
I should probably resist this urge to brag, but I can’t. In

December 2018, I promised my dad that the partial
government shutdown would end in the fourth week of
January. The shutdown ended in the fourth week of
January. After one compromise proposal to get his
hallowed Wall approved, President Trump blinked.
How did I know that?
It’s easy: Donald Trump always blinks, and exactly on

schedule.
In this case the schedule was obvious:

• The first week of January, the new Congress would
seat itself.
• The second week of January, the House Democrats
would be occupied with choosing their leader, who
of course would be Nancy Pelosi.
• The third week of January, Pelosi would make it
clear that the House Democrats would not
negotiate while the government was closed.
• The fourth week of January, Trump would cave.

Before Trump shut down the government, he said he’d
“own the shutdown.” Despite his immediate and in-
character attempts to get everyone to forget it, everyone
remembered it. The Trump Shutdown affected not just
800,000 federal workers and their families, but every air
traveler, every food stamps recipient, every victim of a
natural disaster, every national parks visitor, and
everyone who wants safe food.
Republicans want safe food too.
Trump didn’t get $5 billion for his Wall by holding the

government hostage. You’re clearly not surprised. But
you may not know why it’s so unsurprising. It’s because
ultimatums don’t work unless everyone wants them to
work. If you’re going to make ultimatums, be like
Doctor Who. As the Weeping Angels attack, know that
they can kill you only if you can’t see them. Blink and
you’re dead. Don’t blink.
A social experiment called the ultimatum game makes

it clear why, though it does so by doing the completely
wrong thing from a game theory perspective.
In the ultimatum game, two people are at a table. One is

given an envelope containing 100 $1 bills. The one with
the envelope can make one offer—the titular
ultimatum—to split the money in any proportion with
the other, and the other person can either accept or
reject it. If they reject it, the envelope is taken away and
neither gets any money. What do you think happens?
A straight game theory analysis says that people who are

entirely rational will always split the money in whatever
proportion the offerer offers. After all, the offeree will
get no money if they reject the offer. It’s better to get
some free money than no free money, right?
Well, no, it doesn’t turn out that way. Pretty much

everyone will accept an offer of a $50–$50 split;
that’s fair, and people like fair. A $60–$40 split is
mildly unfair, but most people will accept that too; the
person with the envelope has the envelope, so folks will
accept that they should get some advantage from being
in the driver’s seat. But a $70–$30 split? That’s where it
starts to break down. Anything at or below 30% is
perceived as quite unfair, and people are willing to give
up smaller amounts of money for larger amounts of
pride. They want to punish unfairness. They don’t want
to be losers. They want everyone to know they’re
standing up for the little guy, which in this case is
them. Even though they get nothing for doing so.
Is that irrational? Depends on your perspective. If

you’re on the verge of starving, you’d probably give in
to “rationality” and take the smaller amount. If you’re
not in extremis, it makes sense to you to stand up for
yourself. That’s still rational to you. The game theorists
might throw up their hands, but you’re not them. You’re a
human being who wants to be treated with respect.
Giving up a few caramel macchiatos to feel good about
yourself is rational. In fact, the accepted strategy if I’m
the person receiving the offer is to commit in advance
to only accepting an offer of whatever I think is fair. If
you offer me something that I don’t think is fair, I stare
you down and don’t blink.
What happens next is the interesting bit. After I reject

your manifestly unfair proposal, we don’t have the
envelope anymore. We do know who offered the other
a wholly unacceptable outcome. We’re done dealing.
You can’t offer me anything anywhere near a $50–$50
split now. Your ultimatum ended our negotiation.
Now I have the power. If a new envelope shows up in

your hands, you’d better offer me most of it or you can
kiss all of that cash goodbye. You are going to have to
grovel just to get me back to the table.
Trump threatened to kill Obamacare, then he blinked.

He ended all the DACA protections, then he blinked.
He shut down the government, and Speaker Nancy
Pelosi saw how often he blinked and she knew he
would blink. She did the rational thing. When Trump
showed up with an unfair offer—a short-term DACA
extension in exchange for the Wall funding— Pelosi
decided she wouldn’t negotiate with a terrorist. She
rejected the one offer he would ever get to propose.
Then she passed a bill to reopen the government,
kicked it to the Senate, and six Republican senators
voted for it.
Six may not sound like a lot. It is. The 53 yea votes35
meant just seven more Republican senators had to
defect to overturn the shutdown on their own. They
were ready to do it. Majority “Leader” Mitch McConnell
resurfaced from his hidey-hole to read the Vice
President the Riot Act over the shutdown. We were
maybe one week out from open revolt.
So of course #TrumpCaved. The president had bungled

the one chance he would ever get.
35I’m including Nevada’s Jacky Rosen, who missed the vote after busting
her wrist.
See, the ultimatum game is a brutal game. An act of
unfairness hurts everyone. Play the game fairly or you
don’t ever play it again.
Trump isn’t out of the chair yet, but he’s seriously

wounded himself. With the Russia investigation
ensnaring people closer and closer to him, with veteran
Democrats lining up to crush him in 2020, with some
first-time House members itching to kick off his
impeachment, with his approval ratings cratering, the
very last thing he needed was to lose his remaining
leverage.
Sure, he can declare a national emergency over his

fictional crisis, removing Congress from the table.
Raiding the military budget to build the Wall doesn’t
sound like a winning move to me. Okay, you shut down
the Coast Guard for a few weeks? Maybe you can
survive it. You steal the Army’s funding? Good luck
with that.
You might think that if Trump was going to learn that

ultimatums don’t work, he’d have done so by now.
Trump is not what you’d call a learner. But we are. This
week was the week America learned Trump was
ignorable. It feels like a giant weight off our shoulders. If
we need to, Mr. Trump, we can just proceed as if we
don’t have a president. Because when you walk away
from the table, you shouldn’t be surprised if no one’s
sitting there when you get back.
As the good Doctor might say: Blink and you’re dead.

Rich explains: the ultimatum game
Once upon a time, I made a mistake. It doesn’t happen often, as I

am constantly analyzing in terms of game theory and utility values.
Thus, I am obviously perfect. As I taught my students about
games, they began adopting this ideal mindset, the only
conceivable means to gain the tools which could cause this epic
mistake to occur. Sure, that’s it. I made a mistake because I was
too perfect. I designed a simple game about battling for M&Ms.
My students used it to teach me a lesson on ultimatums.
Each player started with a hand of cards from 1 to 10. Each would
choose a card to play facedown. Once they revealed the cards, the
high card would gain M&Ms from the player with the lowest card.
I expected the players would battle for more-or-less a tie game,
with each player winning roughly half the time. The goal was just
to track probabilities as an educational experience. I neglected to
take my players into account. See, they had been waiting all
semester to beat me at a game of any kind. So, when an
exceedingly clever player asked “What happens if I run out of
M&Ms?” I, thinking only of the expected values, said, “I’ll refill
your bank. I’ve got plenty of M&Ms.” You know, like a fool.
In each four-player game, three players played the same card, and
the fourth played a card one number higher. So, three players ran
out of M&Ms at a ridiculous rate. I was refilling banks much
sooner than expected. Initially, I wasn’t tracking all the plays and
simply thought randomness had taken over. Soon, I saw the game
for what it was: a scheme to harvest my M&Ms.
I brought the class to a screaming halt, stating that M&M theft

was not the lesson of the day. We’d try out probabilities without
candy from here on. Before they could do me the discourtesy of
declining, my students gave me a counterproposal. In return for
doling out the M&Ms in equal portions, my students would take
notes and focus on the lesson for the rest of the hour. They
forever remembered that time I caved, but I know I traded two
bucks in candy for 30 minutes of active learning. That’s an
ultimatum any teacher would be grateful to make.

Howard Schultz: The
man who would be
kingmaker
January 28, 2019
“Iowa nice” is a term describing how Iowans always

help out a visitor in need. “Minnesota nice” is a similar
thing. “Southern hospitality” connotes how the natives
of the Deep South will always welcome a stranger, likely
with food in hand. Here in Seattle, we have a thing
called the “Seattle Freeze.” It means that if you move
here despite our warnings about how it rains all the
time, we likely won’t give you the time of day. We’ll
promise to come by and then never do so. Sorry. We
make it up in other ways.
For example, we all hate Howard Schultz as much as

you do.

My fellow Seattleite Ken is being unfair, really. Without
Schultz joining Starbucks as marketing manager in 1982
and taking over their retail division in 1988, the coffee
giant would not be a thing. Maybe Seattle coffee would
have still taken over the world. Just as likely somewhere
else would have burnt beans into candy instead of us.
Many Seattleites owe their careers to Schultz, as many
do to similarly polarizing figures like Jeff Bezos and Bill
Gates.
But Bezos and Gates never lost us a beloved sports

team. When the naive Schultz bungled the ownership
and subsequent sale of the Seattle Sonics to Oklahoma
carpetbaggers, Seattle wrote him off its Christmas list
forever. Many of us, me included, still will not
acknowledge there’s a team in Oklahoma City at all.
You can imagine our city’s shock and dismay when our
boy Howie went on 60 Minutes and told the world he
was “seriously considering a run for president.”
Not as a Democrat, mind you, despite the Democratic

Party matching up with his views on same-sex marriage
and AIDS. No, as a fruitless, pointless, wrecking-ball
independent, “egotistical billionaire asshole,” as a
heckler called him the other day. Schultz and I
even agree the deficit is the greatest threat to America
(other than Trump), yet no part of me likes the idea of
him running as an independent.
That’s because of how third party candidates function in

our current system and a concept from board games
called a kingmaker scenario. It’ll get a bit complicated,
but the most important thing to remember is that if
your game allows a kingmaker scenario, that’s bad.
Kingmaking is when a player coming in third or worse
place decides which higher finisher wins. It may be
named for Andrew McNeil’s classic wargame
Kingmaker. In it, players jockey for control of nobles
with fun names like Scrope and Percy, aiming to pick
the monarch who’ll end the Wars of the Roses. A player
who’s way behind in nobles might throw the game to
someone they like, rather than playing to their own
advantage. Even if the player has the best of intent—
even if they say “I’m just trying to do the best I can for
myself!”—they’re still choosing who wins. The problem
has shown up in many games since. They’ve embraced
different ways to combat it, most unsuccessfully.
In the train game Ticket to Ride, players try to complete

routes. They place lines of colored trains on sections of
track based on cards that say which cities they need to
connect. If you know you cannot win on points, you
can still drop a car smack in the middle of the tracks
that a player needs to golden-spike to make their route
complete. If you do so to stop that player from winning
or take resources from them, that’s kingmaking. Ticket
to Ride tries to solve this by hiding the players’ routes
from each other, which works a bit. What works better
is not inviting the jackass to the next game night.
To understand how effective kingmaking can be,

imagine a track sprint where, at the moment two
runners cross a midpoint line, a gun with one bullet in it
is dropped on the track near the third-place runner. If
she stops and picks up the gun, thus making certain she
can’t win, she can legally shoot either runner ahead of
her. What horrible rules design that would be! Who
gives a runner the ability to kill one of the two athletes
in front of her?
Our electoral system does. It starts by telling all
participants that only candidates from the two main
parties can win federal office. That’s not completely true,
which inspires a brazen few to upset the apple cart.
Before I return to kingmaking, let’s review the record.
In 1970, New Yorker James Buckley won a Senate term

as a member of the Conservative Party, the last time
anyone won a first Congressional term from a party
other than Democratic or Republican. The only time
since that anyone won a seat from another party was
when sitting Senator Joe Lieberman ran on the
“Connecticut for Lieberman Party” ticket36 after being
defeated in the Democratic primary; he was never a
member of that wholly fictional party and remained a
Democrat at least in name thereafter.
Wait, what about Bernie Sanders and Angus King?

Neither had a party. After four terms as mayor of
Burlington, Sanders won a Vermont House seat as an
independent on his second try in 1990, then in 2006
won a Senate seat when Democratic leader Chuck
Schumer promised Bernie no Democrat would run
against him. Another independent, Maine’s King is the
only person since Buckley to win a real three-way race
for a first-time Senate seat. In 2012, Republicans alleged
King cut a deal to get the Democratic frontrunner, Rep.
Chellie Pingree, to drop out of the race the day after he
announced. Regardless of the truth of that, he was a
popular ex-governor (and a Democrat!) at the time. So
in the last half-century, four Northeastern indies have
won federal races, the last three undercutting support
for the Democrat (or eliminating them).
36 Yes, I threw up a little in my mouth there too.

No one has won a modern presidency from outside the
two parties. Since 1968, only three non-Democrat-or-
Republican candidates have placed higher than 3.5% in
votes. That year, racist fearmonger George Wallace
siphoned off enough Southerners to get 13.5% of the
total vote and five Deep South states, probably not
affecting Richard Nixon’s narrow victory over Hubert
Humphrey. In 1980, Republican-turned-indie John
Anderson could’ve been a spoiler but his 6.6% wasn’t
enough to account for Jimmy Carter’s 10-point loss to
Ronald Reagan. The most successful independent run
came in 1992, when H. Ross Perot snagged 19% of the
vote with his aw-shucks billionaire charm. The next
election, Perot did much worse fronting the Reform
Party, getting 8%. In neither case did Perot affect the
outcome, splitting his votes equally between voters who
would have otherwise voted for Clinton or Bush.
It isn’t the best performing candidates that had the most

impact, though. Two from the Green Party deserve
particular note. In 2000, votes for Green candidate
Ralph Nader decisively flipped Florida away from fellow
climate advocate Al Gore, throwing the election to a
corrupt process steered by Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother
of Republican candidate George W. Bush. Then in
2016, as libertarian Gary Johnson pulled from both
parties, progressives voting for Green Party candidate
and Putin favorite Jill Stein pulled just enough support
from Hillary Clinton to flip Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
to Trump. With Nader and Stein, the Green Party sadly
has been the single most potent force against efforts to
prevent climate change in U.S. history.37
37In 2020, Green nominee Howie Hawkins incurred liberals’ ire by tying
up ballots in swing states after failing to get on them legitimately, taking
Republican assistance in his court cases. He lost those cases.
Here’s what Schultz needs to understand: For more
than 50 years, no independent candidate has had a
significant impact in a race for president except for two
progressives whose efforts engineered a Republican
presidency. Or maybe Schultz does understand it. Trump
got through a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich. Schultz is
not a philanthropist on the level of Bezos and Gates,
who have given away billions; he’s given away less than
0.5 percent of his income. Schultz wants to keep his
cash. If he can’t be president, at least he gets a
Republican in office for four more years. Despite
Howard’s being a liberal on every other issue, being
president and Trump Part Deux are both wins for him.
Therein lies the problem. Our system allows for

intentional spoilers. Nothing in the current system of
electing presidents can stop them. The only thing you
can do is to hope they register no impact at all, either
splitting the votes like Perot or Johnson, or failing to
drag votes from the candidate you hope will win. In this
case, that’s literally anyone who isn’t Donald Trump. In the
general: one candidate good, two candidates bad.
But remember the Maine electorate, because they’re

showing a way out. After two gubernatorial elections
where lawyer Eliot Cutler ran as an independent— thus
handing the governorship to Neanderthal Paul LePage
both times—Maine voters had enough. For the 2018
elections, they authorized ranked-choice voting.
Here’s how that works. If more than two candidates
make it to an election and none gets 50% of the vote,
the candidate with the lowest vote total is eliminated
and their votes are redistributed based on preferences
the voters expressed in case their candidate didn’t win.
This happens until a candidate gets 50% and wins.
Shocker: It actually worked! In House District 2,
incumbent Republican Bruce Poliquin came in first with
46.3% of the vote over Democrat Jared Golden, who
got 45.6%. If there was no ranked-choice, the
Republican would’ve held the seat. But independents
Tiffany Bond and William Hoar together pulled 8.1% of
the vote. When they were eliminated and their votes
redistributed to the voters’ next preferences, Golden
stood atop the heap with 50.6% of the vote. Once the
inevitable lawsuits got dismissed and LePage certified
the result of what he called a “stolen election” as one of
his last acts in office, America finally had a political
Jared it could be proud of.
That’s a great story. On a state level, it is happening

literally nowhere else,38 except maybe in Schultz’s ego.
Since we don’t have federal ranked-choice voting, and
likely won’t ever, you can’t waste your vote on a third-
party candidate, because you don’t want the candidate
who is least like yours to win. Sure, you might have other
reasons, like hoping your party gets the required five
percent to stay on the—Look, it’s just insane. If you
want to save the planet from the depredations of
Trump and his cronies, just remember the Green Party’s
effectiveness in electing the least environmentally
friendly administrations of all time. If you can’t get
ranked-choice voting, nothing in game theory gives you
a reason to “vote your conscience.”
Your vote is a weapon. Don’t aim it at your own head.

Leave the kingmaking to mean-spirited board gamers,
and vote for a candidate that can win.
38After I wrote this, this changed. In the 2020 Democratic presidential

primaries, Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming tried out ranked-choice
voting. Iowa and Nevada used it for absentees in their caucuses.
Rich explains: kingmaking
There aren’t many terms in game theory that are more poorly
named than kingmaking. The term evokes this idea of a Cardinal
Richelieu-esque power behind the throne, manipulating events to
seat a weak leader for their own purposes. Or maybe your
idealized kingmaker is more like Merlin than Grima Wormtongue
from The Lord of the Rings.
Unfortunately, whatever headcanon you choose is completely

wrong, because all of those kingmaking characters fail at the most
basic definition of kingmaker—none of them are also vying to be
the king.
Imagine that you are playing a three-player game of Risk. The

game is getting tense and, after a plague of bad dice rolls, you
aren’t sure if you’ve put yourself in the best place to succeed. In
fact, it’s fair to say that you can’t possibly win. But here you are,
about to take another turn and another step towards inevitable
defeat. What are your choices?
You could try to break Player A’s control over North America,
though it would cost most of your units. Whether or not you
succeed, Player B will be in a prime position to sweep through
your territory with minimal effort. As you reach for your first
piece, Player A stands up and shouts that you’re throwing away
the game and B is going to win! B always wins! It’s not fair! I’m
going home! Knowing Player B is even more prone to melodrama,
and sadly that the table is far too heavy to flip, maybe you just
sigh and skip your turn. The other players applaud your level-
headed approach to fairness and continue the game.
And yet. What are you doing? You showed up to play, not
surrender as soon as things got tough. Even so, any action you
take which wounds one opponent simply serves to hand the game
to the other.
Finally, you are the true kingmaker—a hopeless player who can
only crown the winner by being the worst loser of all.

In politics, the cost of
apologizing is
astronomical
February 7, 2019
I re-read my high school and college yearbooks this

weekend. There I am with a full shock of hair and a
career-prophetic Paul McCartney “What good’s a puzzle
when you haven’t a clue?” quote. There were some
dorky things in there, a few surprises, and a bit of
romantic awkwardness I wish I could scrub from my
brain. Still, I checked really hard, just to make sure.
Turns out that at no point in any of the yearbooks did I

appear in blackface or in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
For Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, the yearbook

review didn’t go so well. On his medical school—
yes, medical school—yearbook page, there’s a couple of
high-humored blokes in such attire. When this came to
light, Northam felt real bad. He apologized twice. Then
he unapologized, claiming it wasn’t him—but then he said
he dressed in blackface to imitate Michael Jackson, and
made a crack about shoe polish being really hard to get
off, and... hey, I dunno, man, maybe just stop talking?
Especially when your lieutenant governor, the most
chivalrously-named Justin Fairfax, is African American.
Northam’s apologize-apologize-retract-implode
sequence came against the backdrop of some other big
apologies last week.
• The Telegraph apologized to First Lady Melania
Trump after reporting inaccuracies about her family
and modeling career.
• Tom Brokaw apologized awkwardly for his
statements suggesting Hispanics should work
harder to assimilate.
• Cindy McCain apologized (sort of) for accusing a
woman of human trafficking when she brought her
daughter of another race to the airport.
• Spoiler candidate Howard Schultz apologized to
Seattle for somehow misplacing the keys to the
SuperSonics franchise twelve years ago.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren told Cherokee Nation she is
very sorry she took a DNA test and announced her
minuscule Native American heritage.
• Actually, just about every Democratic candidate for
president is sorry for something. They really, really,
really want you to know that.
But you know who didn’t apologize this week?
Roger Goodell, that’s who. After his referees’

incompetence stole a Super Bowl from the New
Orleans Saints, the milquetoast NFL commissioner
never said anything to Saints fans. Perhaps still stinging
from his failed reprimand of the Saints for Bountygate,
Goodell buttoned his piehole and let Saints fans stew.
Outraged, those fans bought “NFL BLEAUX DAT!”
billboards near the Atlanta stadium where the worst
Super Bowl ever played out live. For some reason,
Goodell considered this a job well done.

Goodell knows something that The Telegraph, Brokaw,
McCain, and those candidates may not, and Northam
definitely doesn’t: The cost of apologies in the public
forum is too darn high. Despite what you may have
heard, it does hurt to say you’re sorry. That’s part of why
our dialogue is so screwed up.
In game theory, all actions have a cost. Earlier, I

contrasted the strategy on government shutdowns for
Democrats (for whom shutdowns are incredibly
expensive) and Republicans (for whom they are less
expensive, but still have a serious cost). When your
action is saying something, it is possible for the cost to
be nothing, or almost nothing; that’s just cheap talk, as
noted a few essays ago. But even talking has its costs.
Signaling is a type of communication that is costly,

meaning I won’t do it if its cost is too high for me.
When I signal to you, I decide whether to reveal my
preferences—that is, whether I am resolved about
something or whether I don’t care. This is a matter of
showing strength or weakness. If we’re just talking, and
if talk is cheap, I will always represent strength, and you
will not know my true character. If my signal actually
costs me something, you will know whether I am
resolved by seeing whether I’m willing to pay the cost.
Even if you’re not a game theory wonk, you’ve heard

this word in a phrase that’s been perverted beyond its
intent: virtue signaling. Conservatives and internet
trolls use this phrase to suggest a liberal is doing some
uncostly gesture—change their Facebook icon, say, or
carry a reusable bag—to signal to other liberals that they
are concordantly aligned. (Obviously, accusing someone
of virtue signaling is in fact virtue signaling.)
The origin of the term points a different direction. It
originally described the costly rituals religious people
use to show faithfulness to their religion. These are not
easily faked; you’re either willing to spend a day every
weekend in worship or you’re not. These signals
demonstrate commitment. They allow someone who
cares to determine whether you also are someone who
cares.
Apologies are a form of costly virtue signaling, for three

reasons. One reason they’re costly is that apologizing is
a declaration of guilt. If I tell you I’m sorry I ate all the
pie, you can infer that I did in fact eat all the pie.
Another reason is that apologizing is a promise to
change behavior for it to mean anything. If I say I’m
sorry I ate all the pie, I have to not eat all of the next pie.
A third reason is that apologizing is an acceptance of
consequences. If I say I’m sorry I ate all the pie, I may
have to accept a loss of all future pie.
If my transgression is more serious than eating pie, I

may lose a valued relationship or have to pay damages
or even go to jail. Or maybe I have to accept that
people think I’m a worse person than I said I was. A
loss of status can be the worst penalty.
If I want to avoid all of that, I really don’t want to

apologize. For Brett Kavanaugh, apologizing to
Christine Blasey Ford for assaulting her at a high school
party would have been political suicide, because he
already knew he would lose his Supreme Court seat if
he admitted the allegation was true. His belligerent
defense was horrifying to many, but it may have been
the only course that led to his confirmation. Apology
was not an option for Kavanaugh.
For those who are caught red-handed, though, apology
is the only out. For Donald Trump, the Access Hollywood
tape prompted a rare if shallow apology, because there
was a sense that it would derail Trump’s candidacy. A
shockingly timed drop of damaging information on the
Clinton campaign was the only thing that made it
possible to ignore this story; well, that and a willingness
of some to not care that their candidate was a monster.
Predictably, he backtracked on the apology later, saying
it wasn’t him on the tape. That’s because, left to his own
devices, Trump will never apologize. That’s a cost he
cannot pay. His base will not allow it. His ego will not
allow it.
For many who do admit error and apologize for it, the
consequences are dire. Senator Al Franken apologized
for boorish behavior toward an actress; he lost his
Senate seat. Fox News firestarter Laura Ingraham
apologized for blasting a young survivor of a high
school massacre; she lost her advertisers. Anchor
Megyn Kelly apologized for saying a crazy thing about
blackface; she was fired. Florida Secretary of State
Michael Ertel apologized for appearing in blackface; he
had to resign. All were in the same spot: Their sins were
manifest, and they might have believed that admitting
them would save their standing. If so, they were very
wrong.
To be clear: What they did was wrong. We don’t want to

be represented in politics or the media by people whose
actions we can’t abide. This belief has led to the rise of
“cancel culture,” where punishment for transgression
is instantaneous, unyielding, and final. Now we end
people on Twitter before the sun rises. We’re cool with
that. Bad acts should lead to bad outcomes.
I have no desire to criticize cancel culture. A
phenomenon that started on Black Twitter and the
#metoo movement doesn’t need a white man weighing
in on whether it’s correct or not. Rather, I’m just going
to point out that in signaling theory, the signaler isn’t
the only one who evaluates their own cost. The
recipient of the signal puts a price on whether they
accept the message and what they do with it. When it
comes to apologies we receive, we can either pay the
price of giving forgiveness or not.
Cancel culture says that the price of accepting an

apology is high. When we embrace it, we declare that
accepting an apology and moving on is something we
put a very high value on, and it is not to be given out
lightly. This has a paradoxical consequence: Those who
apologize and don’t meet our price get excommunicated
immediately, but those who don’t get to stay while we sort
it out. Apologizing is a death sentence; not apologizing
is now a survival tactic. That does seem wrong. The value
of an apology should be understanding, but the cost is
too high. We are pricing contrition out of the
marketplace. By undervaluing apologies, we are
overvaluing fighting back, especially when contrition is
the morally correct act.
Back to Northam’s ping-ponging on the truth.

Statement #1 came the day after a conservative website
found and leaked the photo. “I am deeply sorry for the
decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for
the hurt that decision caused then and now,” he said.
“This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today.”
He would not resign, he said, against a drumbeat of calls
for him to do just that, lest the voters punish
Democrats in 2019.
Three hours later, he issued statement #2, in which he
said, “I’m deeply sorry. I cannot change the decisions I
made, nor can I undo the harm my behavior caused
then and today. I accept responsibility for my past
actions and I am ready to do the hard work of regaining
your trust.”
Forgiveness was not in the offing. Democratic

presidential candidates, Nancy Pelosi, GOP leaders, the
Virginia House Democratic Caucus, the NAACP, and
many others called for him to step down. Obviously,
Northam didn’t want to resign, so what could he do?
No iteration of this strategy would work, so he went a
very different direction.
Statement #3 had him saying, “I reflected with my

family and classmates and came to the conclusion that I
am not the person in the photo.” He was now not
apologizing for what he apologized for, then apologized
again. “I want to apologize to the many people who
have been hurt by this episode,” he said. “I am ready to
earn your forgiveness.”
Forgiveness for what? By not admitting anything, he had

picked a survival strategy: apologize and deny.
While none of this went over particularly well, it at least

bought him the time to come up with a new strategy,
which, his potential replacement Justin Fairfax
insinuated—and then backtracked on the insinuation—
may have been to embroil Fairfax in a very unchivalrous
sexual harassment scandal. To this report, Fairfax
responded with a Brett Kavanaugh-like scorched earth
defense. Again, that might be the right call, especially if
he’s innocent. It sure undermines the believe-the-victim
argument from the Brett Kavanaugh debacle, especially
now that Fairfax has retained Kavanaugh’s attorneys.
Hey, just in case you thought maybe Northam and

Fairfax would resign and Virginia’s attorney general
could be appointed in their stead, AG Mark Herring
admitted he wore blackface in 1980 too. If Northam,
Fairfax, and Herring all resign, the Republican speaker of the
House becomes governor.39
If your mind is reeling, I can’t blame you. Mine is too.

I’m still staggering over the fact that we’re talking about
blackface in 2019. This is where we are. Even if your
infringement against modern mores is in the past,
apologizing gets you nothing except calls for the highest
punishment in the present. There are no intermediary
grounds anymore. You’re canceled.
Again, this could be a positive thing, a sign of awkward

progress in a more enlightened era. People like
Northam shouldn’t slip by without suffering serious
consequence. A mere five days later, I’m impatient that
Northam still sits in the governor’s mansion. Possibly
like you, I expected justice by the end of the weekend.
Nobody who has so compromised his ability to lead can
govern a state.
But if you’ll forgive a step away from the game theory, I

don’t like that I feel this way. I want a less final
approach that punishes bad behavior but doesn’t smack
of knee-jerk vengeance. I want to value contrition. My
acceptance of game theory tells me that by pricing out
apologies and forgiveness, we’re in danger of removing
39 This assuredly did not happen, requiring me to write the next essay.
our only midpoint consequences and leaving ourselves
only ruination. If we incinerate everyone for everything,
we might find we’re left with nothing.
Meanwhile, I encourage you to check out your old

yearbooks, if only to confirm to yourself that you were
not as stupid as Ralph Northam.

Rich explains: signaling
Signaling always makes me think of slow summer nights and minor

league baseball. I picture the third base coach gesturing wildly to
send commands to their runners, desperately clinging to those
tiny bases in a field surrounded by enemies. All eyes turn to the
dancing coach, hoping to glean secrets from those mysterious
moves, but only their team can unravel this code.
No one wants to tell me their secret, but I know the code is

complex. If the bunt signal was only used in a sequence when
someone bunted, you’d expect the other team to figure it out
over the course of a series. But if it’s used in a sequence where no
one bunts, then there must be more complexity to the code. Only
the first signal counts? Ignore a symbol after a double nose swipe?
Choose the signal three moves after this quick waltz?
The code can’t be limitlessly complex, as it must be passed from

manager to third base coach to player under stressful conditions.
No matter how much they want to conceal their intentions from
me, they only have a few seconds to convey the plan. The more
complex the code, the higher the signaling cost.
The goal is to make it so I can’t crack the code. But I can if I have a
computer. In 2019, science YouTuber Mark Rober began to design
a machine which could learn to predict what signal was being
given by a base coach. Like game theory, machine learning is a
logical process that is focused on outcomes. If a process doesn’t
reach a desired outcome, the machine learns and adapts its
process. Over many iterations, it eventually cuts through the noise
and finds the signal.
Like I would expect from a former NASA engineer, Rober took his
device for a series of field tests. While his video feels tense, the
power of the machine learning algorithm leaves no room for
doubt. After a number of overwhelming successes, I expect that
the Baseball Police eventually imprisoned the mad engineer and
his nascent AI before he could do irreparable damage to our long
tradition of dancing third base coaches.

Pawn sacrifice: Justin
Fairfax and the case
for in-party
impeachment
February 9, 2019
Justin Fairfax is in a heap of trouble. Previously, he was

the gallantly-named paladin saving Virginia from the
unearthed depredations of Gov. Ralph Northam. Now,
rape charges make his future as lieutenant governor
hazy. What must it be like to be Justin Fairfax? I can’t
relate to how hard it must be for him.
Then again, it must be much harder to be the women

who, presuming their allegations are true, have had to
live with what Fairfax did to them for more than a
decade. Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson assuredly
did not want their names in the papers this way. What
they are claiming is awful, and if true, it’s grounds for
not just removal from office but imprisonment. There’s
no statute of limitations on rape in Virginia,40 so he
faces a potential swing of outcomes he could not have
imagined a week ago.
40Virginia does indeed have no statute of limitations on rape, and neither

does North Carolina, where Fairfax is alleged to have attacked Meredith
Watson. But Massachusetts does, and that’s where Fairfax is alleged to
have assaulted Vanessa Tyson in July 2004. That limit is 15 years, so that
exposure ended in July 2019. Delay had a very strong payoff for Fairfax.
Nearly everyone in the Democratic Party of Virginia has
called on Fairfax to resign. State legislator Patrick
Hope—what is it with these names?—has sworn to
introduce articles of impeachment against him on
Monday if he does not. On Monday. That is an
extraordinarily swift rush to verdict for an allegation
that arose Friday. Fairfax wants an investigation, likely
of the seven-day FBI kind that Brett Kavanaugh got to
make him a justice. Instead of that, Fairfax will be lucky
if he’s not on the street by the weekend.
I’m not here to evaluate whether he should be. I’m

interested in why Democrats went nuclear so fast. This
remarkable escalation of power has far broader
implications than for him. It shows how impeachment
power can be used to ensure outcomes of a political
nature in a hurry. We need to know how the Fairfax
case went down, and what the theory is behind it.
I could lose my game theory license by making it this far

without describing the most game-theoryish game of all:
chess. Chess is a wargame on a tightly bound battlefield.
Pieces are not just limited by their own restrictions, but
by the placement of other pieces. Sometimes this
protects them; other times it stops them from
functioning. I don’t know if chess has a “designer” per
se, but I give him or her props for doing something I’d
never have the guts to do: make the most common
piece the most complicated one.
The pawn has more rules than any other piece. It has a
unique movement limitation (can’t move backward or
sideways), a unique opening (one space or two), a
unique capture (in a different direction than it moves),
and a unique rule if it doesn’t capture (en passant).
Also, it has a unique transformation. If it makes it to the
other side of the board, it can become any piece other
than a king. This promotion concept makes the pawn
the piece with the most potential, as the only piece more
powerful than a queen is a second queen.
Fairfax makes a fine analogy to a pawn. A charismatic

African American lawyer who worked his way up as a
federal prosecutor, Fairfax ran for attorney general in
2013, losing to its current occupant Mark Herring (more
on him in a bit) by only 4,500 votes. In 2017, he won
the lieutenant governorship. His advance was
methodical and impressive. When Northam got into
trouble over a racist yearbook photo, Fairfax’s
promotion seemed inevitable. Then Tyson’s allegation
came out, and Fairfax suggested it was a hit job by
Northam. Herring’s ascension looked likely, then he
admitted, unprompted, that he’d worn blackface too.
Because of the nature of the 2017 Virginia House of

Delegates election, things now got very interesting.
Virginia Democrats did astonishingly well in 2017.
Republicans went in with a 66–34 majority but lost 15
seats, resulting in a 50–49 GOP advantage. That 100th
seat got a bit hinky. The 94th District had a recount, but
its results weren’t certified due to one questionable ballot.
This made the result a tie, then a random drawing from
a ceramic bowl (wait, we do that?) gave the seat to
incumbent Republican David Yancey. This created a
51–49 GOP majority, which meant that Republican
Speaker Kirk Cox was now fourth in line for the
governorship, behind Northam, Fairfax, and Herring. If
all three resigned at once, Governor Cox would appoint
the new lieutenant governor and attorney general. All
would be Republicans.
When your only three options for the top office are
mortally wounded but refuse to resign, one must
be forced out. Whoever is governor can appoint someone
scandal-free to fill the void, then the other two can be
forced out so the scandal-free candidate can ascend.
Either Fairfax or Herring has to go. Fairfax has the
greater alleged offenses, so he’s the obvious choice.
Democrats are rallying around impeaching their
lieutenant governor not because of moral outrage over
his actions, but because it’s the way they keep the
executive branch. Someone has to be sacrificed.41
The chess player knows that while all pawns have an

ability to be promoted, there’s no way you’re promoting all of
them. Some contenders are just in the way. While you
don’t have unlimited pieces, you have enough to win.
You just have to keep some of them alive.
Not so much for Richard Nixon. Despite Democrats

controlling both houses, he was in no danger of losing
his office. Democrats could get an impeachment vote
out of the House, but were at least ten votes short of a
two-thirds Senate majority. Yet Republicans knew that
Nixon was their albatross. They faced a bloodbath in
1976 if they stood behind him. So, one week Nixon was
swearing he’d survive impeachment, the next he was
waving from a helicopter. The GOP abandoned him
because preserving the Republican presidency was of far
greater import than preserving the Nixon presidency. (If
Ford hadn’t made the fool mistake of pardoning Nixon,
they might’ve kept it. A cautionary tale for the next
Virginia governor.)
41None of this happened. All three executives stayed in office, and

Virginia’s statehouse swept blue in the 2019 election. Shrug?
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was in no danger.
Despite his dalliances and prevarications, Democrats
sensed America was not behind the removal of a
president for bad judgment. In hindsight, you can make
a case that the Senate Democrats should have cut bait
after the House impeached him, because Clinton’s
untrustworthiness had a dampening effect on the Gore
campaign. If he had been President Gore already, he’d’ve
established some of his own legacy and probably would
have squeaked out that 2000 win.
This has got to be going through the heads of some

Republican members of Congress. The epic failure of
the GOP to retain the House portends total disaster in
2020. Investigations into the malign nature of Trump
and his cronies will produce an anchor around the
GOP’s neck. Mike Pence is a moral man that could
serve as an antidote to the profligacy of the Trump
presidency. He’s many awful things, but he’s not a thief,
a Russian agent, or an accused rapist. He’s a better
gamble than Trump. Probably. Maybe. If you’re in
Congress, you’d have to think about it, right?
I’m not saying it’s a good idea to turn on your people.

Loyalty is a virtue. But we’re the one of the few western
countries that doesn’t allow votes of no confidence. In
nations like Canada and the U.K., you can remove a
leader without a trial. Impeachment is all we’ve got. In
stressful circumstances, it’s the right call to make a
change on your side. Because when you’re a political
party, it’s not about them winning, it’s about you winning.
You can sigh and fret for appearance’s sake if you like,
but sacrifices must be made.
Also, if I were Stacey Abrams, I’d move to Virginia.

Rich explains: sacrifice
Do you remember the first game you decided to master?
For me, it was DuckTales for the original Nintendo. I played for
hours, hopping an 8-bit Scrooge McDuck around the moon with
his ridiculous pogo cane on a search for adventure. Then it was
hearts. Diplomacy. Half-Life. Scrabble. I played games endlessly,
searching for dominant strategies and tactical perfection among
cardboard tokens and wooden meeples.
Chess intimidates the hell out of me.
Sure, maybe I’m shaken by the purity of play or the austere

symmetry of the board. Maybe it’s knowing that masters are
trained as children to dominate chess in a way I can only
understand from The Hunger Games. I think it’s simply knowing
that my sacrifices are based on probability while a master
sacrifices with total certainty.
Chess is a game of perfect information—that is, both players can

see every piece and know all of those pieces’ potential. This
means that a master can play to their full potential without
worrying that I’m holding on to some secret plan. I’m a better
hand at poker, where I can lay traps and plans based on the
imperfect information of pure probability, but winning is only
certain in the final moments.
Sacrifice plays are all about paying a large cost in order to direct
play. Chess masters often force opponents to capture a sacrifice in
order to reshape board alignment and create new, dependable
opportunities for attack. Poker stars drop big bets with only
chance as their guide. They’re both sacrifices, but they change the
game in different ways.
When you’re playing a game, know what game you’re playing,

especially if you’re the one being played. I can only imagine the
frustration in thinking you’re playing chess only to learn you’re
stuck with a Fairfax-like pawn betting big with a losing hand.

Mr. Trump’s
crime code
September 5, 2018
“It would be no different if I said, ‘That’s the nicest

looking tie I’ve ever seen, isn’t it?’ What are you gonna
do, you gonna fight with him? The answer is no, so you
say, ‘Yeah, that’s the nicest looking tie I’ve ever seen.’
That’s how he speaks. He doesn’t give you questions.
He doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in a code. And
I understand the code.”
—Michael Cohen,
before the House Oversight Committee
“Mr. Trump,” as reformed goon Cohen calls the man

who cast him to the curb like a Filet-o-Fish wrapper, is
the Don (see what I did there?) of a shockingly
unsophisticated criminal outfit. Per Cohen’s testimony
last week, Trump operates amid an easily pierceable veil
of secrecy. Because he doesn’t want to be implicated, he
tells his underlings to do his dirty work in ways they
understand but he thinks no one else does. The crime
gets done, and Trump can say he never told nobody to
do nothing. Capeesh?

Sorry, allegedly. Let’s presume I say that in every
sentence. The point stands. Eighteen months earlier, I
wrote this tweet. I feel pretty good about it now.
For confirmation, take a look at his bagman-in-law

Jared’s security clearance. Trump says, hey General
Kelly, you take care of this whatever way you see fit. If
Cohen got that instruction, he’d just take care of it.
General Kelly doesn’t speak that code. He is a
decorated serviceman and doesn’t acquiesce when the
nation’s security is at stake. He filed a memo outlining
his justifiable lack of confidence in Kushner. Trump
and his daughter Ivanka were apparently outraged. Kelly
didn’t get—or didn’t accept—the coded instruction.
Trump ordered it done anyway. Now he’s exposed. Not
the way it’s supposed to go in the Trump Crime Family.
This is how mafia members speak. Cohen’s words

caused every prosecutor in America to nod along, and
me to wonder: If this veil is so easily pierced, so easily
(and willfully) misinterpreted, why speak in code at all?
Why lie? Why leave a trail of thugs who can divulge the
shadiness of your operation? Why be so stupid?
The answer is in the nature of codes. If you’ll permit a

little puzzle theory in your game theory, I’ll spell it out.
You won’t even need a decoder ring.
Normal humans conflate two different types of
communication under the banner of “codes” (which I
will also conflate after this paragraph, frustrating nearly
everyone who cares about this subject). One type is
symbolic codes like Morse code, sign language, and
Braille, where letters and numbers are transformed into
non-alphabetic representations. The second is ciphers,
where letters and numbers are exchanged for each
other. These can get way more complicated than T=X
or T=⠞. Encryption has advanced quite a bit beyond
our capability to process it. A single letter in a password
can be encrypted into thousands.
A coded message has three components: a plaintext (an

actual message or understood way of expressing
concepts), a key (the method of changing that to
something else), and a ciphertext (the output in
encrypted form). Using these three features, a code’s job
is to shift the balance of comprehension in favor of the
intended recipient. A code must create certainty in the
recipient and increase ambiguity in those who don’t
know the code.
Let’s say I have the plaintext “The British are attacking

by sea.” If I shout from the rooftops “The British are
attacking by sea!” the British might hear me. Instead, if I
put two lanterns in the Old North Church, the British
might think “Blimey, those are some cracking good
lanterns on that church steeple” but you might think
“We need to defend the harbor right now.” That’s
because you know the code “one if by land, two if by
sea.” You learned that from Paul Revere. He taught you
the key, which you used to change the ciphertext of
“two lanterns” into the plaintext “The British are
attacking by sea.”
Or let’s say I follow the prophet Jesus, and I need to tell
other followers they can meet in my house. I might put
up a symbol of a fish. This is way before the loaves and
fishes thing, so the Roman soldiers don’t know that fish
are associated with Jesus. They also don’t know the
Greek invocation Ιησούς Χριστός, Θεού Υιός, Σωτήρ
(“Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior”) has as its first letters
ΙΧΘΥΣ, which spells “ichthys,” the Greek word for
“fish.” Persecuted Christians inscribed the fish symbol
on houses to celebrate their savior without giving away
their faith to the uninitiated.
Or say I’m Sgt. Jeremiah Denton, a prisoner of war in

Vietnam in 1966. I’m forced to record propaganda, and
I need to tell my people I’m being tortured. I blink out
the word “TORTURE” in Morse code, alerting
Americans to my true state. I’m gambling that my
captors don’t have the key. Thankfully, they don’t.
American intelligence officials do. Now they know U.S.
POWs are being tortured in North Vietnam.
These codes saved lives. They disguised the substance

of the messages while imparting understanding from
those who knew their secrets. These examples show the
other reason to use a code: that the nature of your
communication is illicit. Revere was a revolutionary; he
risked being killed for treason against the Crown. The
Christians were adherents of a banned savior; they
risked being crucified for their beliefs. Denton was a
POW; he risked being killed for revealing the North
Vietnamese Army’s violations of the Geneva
Convention. Their codes were ways to communicate
without revelation of behavior punishable by death.
These are just the good guys.

The bad guys use codes like there’s no tomorrow,
because if they slip up, there isn’t. The early thieves’
cant (later the “Rogues’ Lexicon”) disguised the
confidence games of grifters. American gangs use
complex combinations of clothing cues, hand signals,
and color displays to show allegiance and warnings.
Russian thugs emblazon ornate prison tattoos on their
bodies to describe their crimes and connections. These
codes require effort from law enforcement to decipher
and counter, all the while wondering if the malefactors
have changed the codes.
This assumes authorities can get to those malefactors.

Quadriga Fintech ran Canada’s largest cryptocurrency
exchange. In the bitcoin crash of 2018, QuadrigaCX
users couldn’t access their funds. As the Canadian
Imperial Bank of Commerce froze Quadriga’s accounts,
they learned that founder Gerald Cotten had died under
mysterious circumstances in India in December. The
entire exchange was on his encrypted laptop. No one
knew the password. So $250 million owed to 100,000
customers just vanished. Meanwhile, Quadriga was in
exit scam mode, still blithely accepting deposits even
though it had ceased functioning.
I can’t avoid mentioning the Aryan Brotherhood. In

1997, the white supremacist gang aimed to wipe out the
DC Blacks, an African American gang being transferred
to various supermaxes. They got clever. The gang used a
400-year-old binary alphabet Bacon cipher written in
invisible ink to coordinate murders in prison. This
might have worked if these were smart white
supremacists. One decoded the dates improperly and
shivved his target a day early, leading to the plot being
busted before further murders could be executed.
Which, in a weird way, brings me right back to our
white-supremacist-in-chief and his cronies. They had to
speak in codes. They needed both benefits: to increase
certainty for allies and ambiguity for enemies, and to
hide illicit behavior amid seemingly innocent actions.
For a long time, per Cohen, this approach worked, but
Trump made a singularly foolhardy mistake.
There’s a third benefit to criminals using codes:

They compartmentalize information. When codes are used
properly, they can tell one part of an organization
something crucial without exposing it to another. If one
member falls to the authorities, he can’t betray
information he hasn’t been exposed to. Even if the
information was shared in plain sight, the criminal
doesn’t have the key, so cannot divulge the truth.
Trump had a small circle of trusted associates, and he

used the same code with all of them. Listen to Cohen talk
to Rep. Justin Amash, the only Republican42 on the
committee to treat the word “oversight” as if it didn’t
mean “Sorry I didn’t do my constitutional duty, it must
have been an oversight.”
Cohen: “I understand the code, because I’ve been around him for
a decade.”
Amash: “And it’s your impression that others who work for
him understand the code as well?”
Cohen: “Most people, yes.”
By making his thugs use one code, Trump ignored

codes’ biggest problem— not that they can be pierced
or misinterpreted or lost. It’s that codes are exhausting.
42 For a hot minute, until he left the GOP and became an independent.
Imagine translating what appears to be plaintext but is
really ciphertext through a key to a new plaintext every
day. Cohen was Mr. Trump’s fixer for ten years. He was
on the alert 24/7 for the correct interpretation of his
boss’s non-order orders, from which he then threatened
50... no, 100... no, 200... probably 500 people on
Trump’s behalf. That wears a person out. The only
thing that kept him doing it was Trump’s loyalty.
Yet Trump gave none. He broke the other criminal code

that says you don’t sell out allies. When Cohen got
snared by Mueller and SDNY, Trump had his back for a
nanosecond, then called him a “rat.” That’s straight-up
mobster talk. As Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings
noted in his eloquent closing, getting called a rat is a
huge deal. You don’t want that word around your neck
when you enter federal prison—exactly where Cohen
was headed.
Trump broke the code. Cohen gave everyone the key.

One by one, his gangsters—Allen Weisselberg, David
Pecker, Felix Sater, even the deliciously named Matty
Calamari—will turn on Trump for breaking the code.
Because if you can’t stand by your fixer, who will you
stand by? Nobody, that’s who.
With investigations ranging from the Russia probe to

bank, tax, and insurance fraud, the Trump Mob is
looking at a large number of jail sentences. Yeah, the
Don can pardon his coworkers, his kids, maybe even
himself. He will have to. Meanwhile, the knives are out on
the state level. He’s looking at a life worse than those of
Nixon and his criminal V.P., Spiro Agnew. There’s no
good future for anyone in TrumpWorld. Nothing hard
to decipher about that.
Rich explains: codes
When I’m not telling stories about game theory here in the
Machiavelli Villa, I’m usually plunged headfirst into a world of
codes and ciphers. There is a unique joy in finding yourself in a
secret narrative simply because you cracked or crafted a code. I’m
fascinated by codes that provide instant solves as well as those
decrypted by long hours in dim, candlelit chambers.
My favorite cipher comes from Mary, Queen of Scots. After a

quarter-century reign over Scotland, Mary Stuart was jailed for the
remainder of her life in castles across England. Eighteen years into
her imprisonment, her supporters began plotting to assassinate
Queen Elizabeth I and restore Mary to the throne. This latest
effort, the Babington Plot, was merely one in a long line of
attempts by English Roman Catholics to bring back Mary’s reign,
each resulting in the execution of the plotters and even less
contact between Mary Stuart and the outside world.
To prevent yet another discovery, the Babington Plot employed

the careful use of cryptography. This special cipher used a single
symbolic substitution for each individual letter, which would be
simple to decrypt, even in the 16th century. If you’ve tried out the
Cryptoquip in the newspaper, you’re probably used to searching
for patterns in a line of ciphertext and seeing what happens if you
use common words like “the” or “an” in their place. Which is why
the plotters also added unique symbols to stand for most
common words! Only a few centuries before, this adaptation may
have proven truly undecipherable.
While this did bring their ciphertext alphabet up to a whopping 66

symbols, some standing for full words and others for letters, it
wasn’t enough to stop the Privy Council of Elizabeth I. Using a new
method of codebreaking, these frequency analysts easily broke
through the cipher, leading the former Queen of Scotland to her
execution in 1587. While Mary protested her innocence to the
end, the damning evidence came from her final and fatal coded
correspondence to her collaborators: “Let the great plot
commence.”

The FBI showed
college is a broken
game, and Elizabeth
Warren can fix it
April 25, 2019
“Every year, hundreds of thousands of hard-working,

talented students strive for admission to elite schools.
As every parent knows, these students work harder
and harder every year in a system that appears to grow
more and more competitive every year. And that system
is a zero-sum game. For every student admitted through
fraud, an honest, genuinely talented student was
rejected.”
—United States Attorney Andrew Lelling,
Operation Varsity Blues press conference
My favorite Chicago joke is: “You know how you know

someone went to Northwestern? They’ll tell you.”
I went to Northwestern. My parents couldn’t afford to

pay for my education then, and likely couldn’t manage it
now. I wasn’t getting in on anything I could bring
financially to the university.

About the only way I could have gotten in NU’s
prestigious Medill School of Journalism was ace the
application, which I did by writing about the wisdom
teeth I just got pulled. Oh, and rely on my high grades
and school newspaper awards. Oh, also, I got an 800 on
the word portion of the SAT, and journalism schools
like words (and didn’t care about my vastly less
impressive math score). I had a good profile, you see.
People trying to get into Medill would have wanted to
look a lot like me. At the time I couldn’t perceive this,
of course. To me, only I looked like me.
If parents are rich and dishonest enough, though, their

kids could be made to look exactly like me, or whoever
they wanted. The FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues, the
second most talked-about scandal of the year (behind
everything Trump), ensnared 50 parents, coaches,
administrators, and criminals in a manipulation and
bribery scam on behalf of rich kids who did not have
the profiles to get into the schools of their (parents’)
choice. Likely many more will be charged. The principal
manipulator, Rick Singer, is alleged to have helped as
many as 750 parents fake their kids’ way into college.
Parents reportedly paid an average of $250,000 to

$400,000 per student, much of which went to bribes
and cheaters. The parents are among the elite and
powerful, ranging from actresses Felicity Huffman and
Lori Loughlin to chairmen and CEOs of law firms,
vineyards, fashion houses, and investment companies.
In our rigged justice system, this is an atypical list of
people who face prison time.
But that’s the not the rigged system worth talking about
here.
Though no colleges were charged in this dragnet,
college admissions have long been worthy of scrutiny
due to flagrant abuse of a game theory concept
called zero-sum thinking. This mindset has damaged
American learning beyond any sort of repair. Short of a
complete rethinking, higher education will continue to
be America’s most poorly managed resource.
Zero-sum thinking is the belief that you are part of

a zero-sum game, a construct in which a win by
anyone comes at the cost of someone else losing.
Perhaps many someones. The key concept is that no
wealth is either created or destroyed. It is merely
redistributed. If one person gains wealth in a zero-sum
game, another person must necessarily lose it. What an
awful game.
Zero-sum thinking is easiest to understand when you

consider whatever you are talking about as a scarce
resource. If there are only so many widgets, and we all
want widgets, some of us won’t get widgets. Those
unlucky or unskilled enough to remain widget-free are
the losers of the widget allocation game.
It’s very tempting to apply this standard to college

admissions. There are, after all, only so many spots in
colleges, and the spots in the top colleges are desired
more than those elsewhere.43 The colleges vastly benefit
from doing so. Creating competition for precious
admissions causes the value of those admissions to go
up. And up. And up.
43This applies regardless of what criterion you use to justify the word
“top.” A football powerhouse in the SEC might be more attractive to a
high school cornerback than, say, Dartmouth would be.
In the 1970s, the cost of putting a child through college
was a plausible amount. The average family could afford
it. For those who couldn’t, the system underpinned
itself with grants and student loans to let those parents
put their child in school and food on the table. In the
1980s, that started to not be enough. The growth of
tuition cost broke away from the American family,
doubling the growth of the median family income, and
started to match the income growth of the top 1%,
briefly hitting it in the early-1990s recession and then
settling somewhere between for a while. Hard to
manage, but maybe still manageable.
Then in the 2000s, it just went off the rails. At 3½ times

the growth rate of the median family income, tuition
growth matched the entire income growth for the top
1% step-for-step, and then in the 2010s it blew right by
it. By a lot. By 2014 not only has tuition growth
surpassed the income growth of the top 1%, it has
surpassed the income growth of the top 1% plus that of
the median family. That’s for one kid.
Over that decade of the 2000s, college tuition growth

rose far faster than any other cost in American life.
While other categories of goods and services rose
around 25% on average, the cost of tuition doubled. In
one decade. By the mid-2000s, the average year of work did
not pay for the average year of college.
Only one thing causes that kind of spiraling cost:

extreme scarcity. That is what a run on a bank looks
like. Yet, from 1950 to 2013, the number of students in
college each year quintupled, from 4 million to 20
million. Half of our population gains since 1970 have
been college students.
The massive increase in cost has come with a massive
increase in availability. We’ve had a 13% increase in
population since 1970, and a 100% increase in college
students. That should be dragging the price down, not
up. But it’s not, because another thing keeps it rising.
That thing is something that has been shrinking

elsewhere: American consumers’ access to loans. Want
to start a small business? Sorry, the Small Business
Administration under World Wrestling Entertainment
mogul Linda McMahon has nothing for you. How
about getting a health care fund going? Nope, the
Trump administration is closing those down. But if you
want to bury yourself in student loan debt, prepare for a
world of options. Student loans now make up the
largest chunk of U.S. non-housing debt. At $1.4 trillion
in 2018, student loans outpace auto loans ($1.2 trillion),
credit cards ($800 million), and “other” ($400 million).
Operation Varsity Blues exposed the most egregious

element of this system. Despite the high cost of this
zero-sum game, one that you would think would price
most of the players out of the system, there exist players
who are willing to pay even more.
Lori Loughlin was not willing to accept a world that

featured her Instagram-influencer daughter Olivia Jade
being left out of USC. This was the daughter who
famously said:
“I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend, but I’m
gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I
can try and balance it all. But I do want the experience of, like,
game days, partying,... I don’t really care about school, as you
guys all know.”
It was very, very important that this person be allowed to
go to the college of her choice. Through Singer,
Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli faked
Olivia and her sister Isabella’s high school crew careers
and paid off USC crew coach Zenon Brabaj to sign off.
This actually worked. At least till the feds showed up.
Now Olivia’s influencer career is in ruins, she and her
sister are dropouts, and their parents face years in jail.
Operation Varsity Blues was shocking not because we

learned that parents were caught scamming the already
scam-centric system, but that they might actually go to
jail for it. The zero-sum game makes the value of a
degree so preposterous, well-heeled parents actually
bribe athletic coaches to get their children in. If they’re
doing that because they can afford it, think of how
damaging it is for those who can’t. Decades of debt isn’t
worth it. Yet not taking on that debt is tantamount to
condemning your kid to poverty. This is how steroids in
sports work: If you’re not cheating, you’re not winning.
This is not a sustainable equilibrium. It has to change.

It just might.
On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled a

blueprint for how it could. Warren is not the only
Democratic presidential candidate pushing a college
plan, but hers is the most detailed and ambitious.
Here’s what she said about the plan.
“College shouldn’t just be a privilege for those who can afford to

take on the significant expenses associated with higher education.
Like K-12 education, college is a basic need that should be
available for free to everyone who wants to go.”
Here are its main features:
• Automatically canceling $50,000 in student loan
debt for each person with income under $100,000,
and $1 less in debt for every $3 in income above
$100,000.
• Giving every American the opportunity to attend a
two-year or four-year public college without paying
any tuition, fees, room, or board.
• Making higher education of all kinds more inclusive
and available to every single American, without the
need to take on debt to cover costs.
• Creating a $50 billion fund for historically black and
minority-serving schools.
• Providing additional funding to states that show
improvement in enrollment and graduation rates
for lower-income students and students of color.
• Requiring public colleges to rectify shortfalls in
those enrollment and graduation rates
• Banning for-profit colleges from federal dollars.
• Prohibiting colleges from considering citizenship
status or criminal history in admissions.
This is how to end the zero-sum game. Making college

free means students can make smart decisions that
won’t bankrupt them for decades. If someone wins, no
one loses. Sure, there will always be rich people buying
their kids into school. At least we’ll think they’re crazy.
Of course, this will cost $1.25 trillion, and thus it’ll be

hard to get through the current Congress. So in 2020, all
you need is for Democrats to win both chambers and
for a respected female senator from the Northeast to
win the White House... Okay, fair warning. Don’t count
your canceled student loans till they’re hatched.

Rich explains: zero-sum games
I’m a big fan of heist films, because I, like Hannibal of The A-Team,
love it when a plan comes together. Plus, there’s the joy of
watching the team scramble when an unexpected variable shows
up to the party. As I rewatched Ocean’s Thirteen, I was struck
once again by a bizarre line that stops me in my tracks every single
time. The line is delivered by a human, and yet, how could it
possibly be delivered by a human? “Congratulations on the
enormity of your success.” What possible response could follow?
This line haunts me because as strange as it sounds, that line
perfectly describes almost every game I ever want to play.
Danny Ocean’s team is trying to win a zero-sum game vs. casino

lord Willy Bank. At the end of the day, one team will have all the
money and the other will have none, plus legal consequences
outside the scope of the game. This is akin to most games I played
as a kid. Monopoly. Risk. Warhammer. No one ever says “that was
a close one” after these games. Certainly no one says
“congratulations on the enormity of your success.” There is a
victor and a loser, they hate each other forever, and that’s it.
I’m not sure which non-zero-sum board game I discovered first,

but among them was Catan. As I built my weaving road between
hexagonal fields, I found myself in a game that was competitive
but played out in a different way than I expected. My inevitable
victory didn’t come at the expense of my foes. They were fairly
victorious as well; they just didn’t reach the enormity of success I
had found. We were competitors in a race for victory points.
Zero-sum games create enemies and enmities, like those that fuel
sports fandoms. They populate our literature with heroes and
villains. But they don’t create situations where silver medal
winners can beam with pride and applaud the golds. They don’t
provide situations where a group of friends looks down at the
board, sees how they could improve, and asks to play again. And
they never, ever, provide an opportunity for a well-meaning robot
to look you right in the eyes and say, earnestly and honestly,
“Congratulations on the enormity of your success.”

Barr Sinister: How to
beat a corrupt referee
May 3, 2019
Let’s play the Newly-Impeachable Game! Our bachelors

are the three appointed and acting attorneys general in
the Trump epoch:
1. Attorney General #1 is a slithering, racist demon

who lives every day hoping he gets to jail more
brown people, and lied to Congress about his
contacts with the Russians during the Trump
campaign.
2. Attorney General #2 is a thuggish, lying brute who
worked for a scam company fined $26 million for
deceiving customers under his watch.
3. Attorney General #3 is a principled, mannered
scholar whose experience as Attorney General 25
years earlier heralded a return to competence for
the Department of Justice.
Now, which of these men do you think earned the

highest chance of impeachment for his duplicitous and
criminal behavior? If you sidestepped Jeff Sessions and
Matthew Whitaker and picked AG #3, William Barr,
congrats on winning.
Since he got Robert Mueller’s report, Barr has been
doing some world-class truth manipulation. He has:
• Released a four-page summary that lied about its

contents, clearing the president of crimes the report
didn’t clear him of.
• Released a redacted report that confirmed those
crimes, then lied about its contents again.
• Lied to Congress about the report’s contents.
• Skipped out on a Congressional hearing about how
he lied to Congress.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Barr “lied to

Congress and that’s a crime.” Robert Mueller wrote that
Barr “did not fully capture the context, nature, and
substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.” Rep.
Jerry Nadler has threatened to hold Barr in contempt.
Reps. Eric Swalwell, Maxine Waters, and Kathleen Rice
have called for his impeachment. These are bold words
about the top law enforcement official in the country.
I think impeachment’s unlikely, but it might actually be

the cathartic victory the Democratic Party wants and
needs. It’s going to be challenging, of course. Typically,
when Congress wants to hold someone in contempt,
they ask the Attorney General to arrest that person. Is
the Attorney General going to arrest himself? Have we
ever even asked that question before?
All of this gets to the heart of a complex issue that is

central to life in the Trump era. Barr’s behavior calls
into question a very thorny problem in game theory:
What do you do when the officials who prosecute

corruption are themselves corrupt?
There are three ways I know to look at this problem.
The first is to look at the behavior of officials in corrupt
systems. That way is going to disappoint you because
you’ll see that incentives exist for the system to stay
corrupt. Bribery is a particularly insidious form of
corruption in which some money exists to move a person
toward illegal action, but not enough money exists to
move the entire system toward wholly legal action.
If you give every official enough money to make bribery

not worth the penalty, you can stop it. Otherwise, you
create incentives for some people to give in to bribery.44
If you are far enough below a reasonable level of
compensation, the entire system will give in to bribery.
That’s why 30% of Latin Americans report bribing an
official last year.
In systems like this, there’s either no change or

revolutionary change. We might not want revolution.
We might just want the boring mostly-non-corrupt
executive branch we had a little while back.
Do you remember Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman

James E. “Hoss” Cartwright? No? I didn’t either. He
was the only high executive branch official convicted of
a crime during the Obama years, in his case for denying
he was a press leak. After Obama left office, former
CIA director David Petraeus pled guilty to a
misdemeanor of mishandling classified information.
Otherwise, the eight-year administration was crime-free.
We have that level of spotlessness in our recent history.
We should be able to get it back, despite the crime den
currently in power.
44 Or, as it is known in Washington, quid pro quo.

We need better role models. The second method I
know of to analyze corruption is to look at bees and
ants. Then you might get the results you want.45 In
insect societies that are eusocial—that is, developed for
good societal behavior—it’s a bad thing for anybody
but the queen to make more insects. You can argue
whether that’s good or bad strategy for the insects, but
that’s the plan they’ve got.
Sometimes a rogue queen lays eggs—I swear to Heaven

that’s called a “gamergate,” unrelated to the web
harassment campaign of the same name. What happens
to a gamergate that lays eggs? She gets hammered, that’s
what. In a concept called “worker policing,” the
workers seek out the rogue’s eggs and eat them. Here’s
the part that might shock you: In species like tree wasps,
this worker policing comes from workers who also lay
rogue eggs. That’s right, the criminals police the
criminals. That makes sense when you think about it.
There’s a limited amount of space for eggs. The
criminals can only succeed in their criminal behavior if
other criminals don’t succeed in theirs. The incentive
for community policing is high even among offenders.
In a sociobiological sense, worker policing is a harsh but

necessary facet of an eusocial society. It’s a kind of thing
we can apply to our society, by empowering workers to
call out and (within reason) act upon transgressions we
can’t abide. We’re not going to eat each other’s eggs, but
we can make sure no one subverts the rules of society.
We just have to police our leaders a bit better, and try
not to get killed for it.
45 This is where I get a little gushy about my decades-long devotion to the

theories of sociobiologist Edmund O. Wilson. His textbooks The Ants and
On Human Nature are where I get a lot of my expertise. Check them out.
Maybe insects aren’t your jam. Maybe you need to get
your direction from humans, and not of the political
variety. I understand that. I suggest that you focus on
the third place I know where officiating can determine
outcomes: sports.
Specifically, you gotta watch the end of Game 6 of the

2002 Western Conference Finals between the
Sacramento Kings and Los Angeles Lakers, part of the
greatest NBA conference finals series of all time. Game
6 was watched by millions, yet the ref crew—which
somehow had an extra referee in Donaghy—gave the
Lakers 18 more free throws than the Kings in the fourth
quarter.
I watched the game live and I knew. I just knew. I was

screaming at the TV so loud, I’m not sure I actually
heard anything the announcers said. I assume they were
saying, “What are these referees doing?” Because it sure
looked like the outcome of Game 6 was being decided
by an officiating crew.
What the officiating crew—or at least referee Tim

Donaghy—was doing was fixing the game. A game is
fixed when the outcome is predetermined before the
participants head onto the court. It might be that a key
player has financial incentive to underperform, or
perhaps injure an opposing player. That’s awful, but at
least the system is performing well despite rogue
elements on one of the teams. You can handle that, if
you can isolate the problem and remove it from the
game. That’s what happened in 1951, when the FBI
found the 1950 CCNY Beavers basketball team were
shaving points. They arrested everyone involved and
restored order to college sports.
When it’s the refs? Holly hobby, that’s another matter.
Donaghy fed the mob outcomes of games he would
arrange through application of foul calls and no-calls.
During the season, he would routinely shift outcomes
by enough points to come in over or under the spread,
the difference in points between the teams. He might’ve
gotten away with it had he been less greedy.
The foul discrepancy was just enough to get the game to

tip to a Game 7, the desired outcome. Desired by whom
has been the subject of much debate. Kings fans believe
the NBA wanted the Lakers to win, which is
understandable but backed up by no evidence at all.
But there is no debate that the game was fixed, and that
the Kings lost a Finals trip because of it. If you watch
the whole fourth quarter, you cannot reach any other
conclusion. If you are on the Kings in that scenario,
there is nothing you can do. The game is not in your
control. You are going to lose. You have a corrupt ref,
and he gets to win, at least for the moment. Donaghy
went to jail, so he didn’t get away with it. If you’re a
King, what you care about is your ringless finger.
The reason Donaghy got caught is the interesting part.

It wasn’t that the NBA offices saw the game and
decided it was officiated in a corrupt manner. It was that
the whole world saw it and decided that very thing. In a
column the next day, The Washington Post’s Michael
Wilbon wrote, “I have never seen officiating in a game
of consequence as bad as that in Game 6.” At the time,
he didn’t ascribe malice to the refs. The Feds saw the
game differently. They looked into Donaghy’s past and
found a degenerate gambler who was in deep to the
Mafia. They crushed him till he sung.
The so-called “gentleman’s sport” took fan policing to
an even higher degree. In golf, people watching TV could
call penalties on the players.
During the 2013 Masters, millions watched Tiger

Woods drop a shot on the 15th after plunking one in
the water. One of those viewers, David Eger, had a
relevant skill set. In addition to being a Champions
Tour golfer, he was a tournament director with both the
PGA Tour and the USGA. He knew the rules. Woods
broke them by taking a drop instead of returning to a
divot, qualifying him for disqualification. The officials
didn’t see it, but because they got called by Eger, they
had to assess a penalty. Woods avoided the DQ, but
received a two-stroke penalty which hobbled his bid for
a fifth green jacket. (He got it this year, of course.)
Eventually, even the PGA deemed that too much

gentlemanliness, and terminated the decades-old rule
that viewers could call in penalties. I was sad to see that.
Golf courses are big. You need eyes everywhere.
When ordinary people can call the officials to task,

those officials are put on notice. They change their
behavior or they change their jobs. I’m obviously not
talking about balls and strikes here. But the 2019 NFC
Championship, where the Saints got robbed by
incompetence from the officials? Maybe we need the
ability for fans to say “enough is enough.”
It’s worker policing, plain as day. The ants and bees and
wasps have it right. Empower people to call out
corruption and the corruption gets dealt with. Leave it
to the officials who are corrupt and you get more
corruption. It’s as simple—and as complex—as that.
In the case of Bill Barr, for the moment, worker
policing might be working. Barr has been bribed by
Trump to clear him. Not with money, of course, but
with power. He’s not on America’s side, he’s on
Trump’s side.
Now, when Barr issues a report, we must discard it for

sampling bias. In statistics, that’s when the reporting
population is not representative of the total population.
If you can find why a source might be skewed away
from representativeness, you can discard their data. In
this case, the source is tied to Trump’s re-election—for
no Democrat would ever keep him in office—so we can
discard everything he says as potentially false.
In this case, the falsehood is demonstrable to even the

least probative observer. Barr exonerated Trump when
a cursory read said the Mueller Report did not exonerate
him. The Report is clear. There was serious
malfeasance. You can debate whether it’s collusion
and/or obstruction, but what it most assuredly is not is
vindication for the president. Barr pretended it was, lied
about whether it was, and then grandstanded before the
Congress he lied to. No attorney general has ever been
successfully impeached. Barr might be a trailblazer here.
Here’s why it’s working. The Democratic base has a

huge groundswell of support for impeaching the
president. We all know the Senate will never vote to
confirm his impeachment and we don’t care. For those of
us who feel this way—and there are a lot of us—
standing up for the rule of law is important even if the
Republican majority in the Senate doesn’t. We are all
watchmen. Our representatives in Congress hear us. We
expect them to act.
The thing is, impeaching a president is hard work and it
might backfire. Speaker Pelosi doesn’t even want to
think about it. It’s hard to blame her for that. For Barr?
She’s not even going to spend a moment’s hesitation
when it comes to a contemptuous attorney general who
lied to her colleagues and stonewalled her committees.
Mueller showed clearly that offenses worthy of potential
impeachment had occurred. Barr tried to sweep that
under the rug when everyone was looking. He became a
Tim Donaghy—just another corrupt official who plied
his crimes on the highest stage.
They caught him. We caught him. We’re just doing a bit

of worker policing here. Because if you stick your hand
into a wasp nest, you’re gonna get wasps.

Rich explains: sampling bias
Math can be wrong for non-mathematical reasons. In my stats

class, a perennial favorite is the Hawthorne Effect, named for an
efficiency study at Illinois’ Hawthorne Works. I teach my class that
managers tried to determine if productivity increased due to
changes in lighting, breaks, or compensation. They balked when
everything they did seemed to boost productivity, never realizing
that employees worked harder simply because they knew they
were being observed in an experiment. Then I pause and tell my
students, “Just like you’ll do better on the next quiz because, deep
down, you know I’m always watching.”
The act of observation has an interesting relationship to the

concept of truth. When a student tells me about an argument
between other students, often they can’t help but say “but they
started it!” Whether or not that’s true, it would be irresponsible to
smile and tell them, “Thanks to your observations, I’m going to
expel that student immediately!” No, I’m simply going to thank
them for the report and talk to the students involved. It isn’t that I
can’t trust them. They mean well, but they can suffer from
observer bias—the tendency to see what they expect to see. It’s
why detectives aim to solve crimes through means, motive, and
opportunity, and only use bystanding witnesses to narrow their
search. Bystanders may misattribute cause and effect or report
based on biases they may not realize they have.
The other problem the student can’t avoid is volunteer bias—

those who volunteer have different motives than those who don’t.
This student may want to get another in trouble, or gain status as
an authority, or get on my good side before I grade their test.
While these motives may not be malicious, they add a new
dimension to the report which demands consideration.
If we police using a “see something, say something” mentality, we

must know both sides of that equation have bias. This means we
often must leave judgment to experts. Unless they, like Tim
Donaghy, are also biased. Then we seek out detectives. Then
Internal Affairs. Then the FBI. Then the Attorney-Gen—OH NO.

I don’t think she knows
about Second Brexit,
Pip: How Theresa
May’s war of attrition
killed everyone
January 16, 2018
Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher ascended to 10

Downing Street, beginning a dozen tension-fraught
years of iron-fisted rule. No fan of the European
Economic Community, Thatcher believed European
integration was at odds with her desire to privatize and
deregulate the government’s assets.
In a 1988 speech, she said:
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in
Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a
European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Thatcher’s passed now. What would she have thought

of the chaos reigning over Parliament in the wake of the
2016 Brexit vote? Would she have been happy to see a
fellow female prime minister stand against European
hegemony? Would she support Theresa May’s
adversaries in her own Tory Party as they struck down
deal after deal? Would she warn against a Labour surge
if the party didn’t align over a common notion? Would
she simply watch from a distance with a smile?
No, she would wade in there, crush everyone, and
impose the voters’ will. She’s not the Iron Lady of the
Western World for nothing. If the will of the voters
changed, she wouldn’t care. She’d still walk out of
Parliament with a clean Brexit deal. She’s Margaret
Freaking Thatcher.
Theresa May is many things, but she’s no Margaret

Thatcher.
Which is not to say she’s not a survivor. Vote after vote

has been disastrous for the permanently disastrous P.M.,
but she has not lost a no-confidence vote. Her own
Tory government seems hell-bent on railroading her
out, but she has not been railroaded out. A lesser
politician might not have survived her limp response to
the Grenfell Tower fire, but she did. Hecklers shout at
her, “Why don’t you resign?” Nevertheless, she persists.
She has a tenacity that’s admirable. As the punsters
might say, “Where there’s a will, Theresa May.”
Friday’s local elections might be too much even for her.

Out of a possible 8,400 seats, the Tories lost more than
1,300 of their seats. That is an immense number. They
started with 4,896 seats and 137 of the 259 council
majorities, and ended up with 3,562 seats and 93
councils. For my American friends, this is like if the
Republican Party lost half the Deep South.
At the heart of the Tory drubbing is the party’s

contentious wrangling over Brexit, the European
quickie-divorce that a fair number of its “Leave”
backers regret intensely. The “Bregretters” form the
basis of a hopeful movement to overturn the 52%–48%
referendum with a proposed vote on a “Second Brexit.”
The margin was narrow enough in 2016 that “Remain”
might take the field after another vote, should it come.46
The Tories who oppose the deal May negotiated with

EU leaders refuse to believe it is good for the U.K.
Instead of controlling its own institutions—which, after
all, was the point—the U.K. would be subject to EU
terms but not be capable of shaping those terms. Folks
who live in D.C. are nodding along right now. That
doesn’t sound so crazy, except when you look at the
alternative: a “cliff’s edge” Brexit where every British
citizen and firm is discombobulated when the EU cuts
Britain off. A cliff’s edge is 100% chaos from the
opening gun. Theresa May doesn’t want that, so she
fights her own party. The Friday election results are a
decent indicator of how that’s going for her.
To step aside from the Tories for a moment, let’s look

at the other side. If the Tories lost 1,300 seats, what
happened with their longtime foes, Labour? Jeremy
Corbyn’s party was expected to pick up as many as 400
of those Tory seats. It had to be a celebratory night on
Victoria Street. How’d they do?
Terrible, as it turns out. Labour lost 82 seats—nearly a

500-seat swing from their own expectations. They lost
control of Labour bastions like Bolsover, Stockton, and
Middlesborough. In the midst of a Tory wipeout,
Labour crashed out among the voters. This is like if the
Democrats lost half of New England. How could
something like that happen?
46Though, it’s worth considering how daft it is that something as critical

as membership in your own continent comes down to a simple majority. Is the
word “supermajority” not taught in British schools?
Where the Tories have been staunchly for “Leave,”
Labour has been on the side of “Be Annoying.” They
neither oppose nor support Brexit; they just oppose the
Tories. This is an untenable approach. Jeremy Corbyn
has been anything but a leader. Indeed, he’s been
wallowing in a fake scandal about his supposed
antisemitic views. Which is kind of a tragedy, but Britain
needs a rallying point against the Tories’ views, not the
Tories’ chaos. Labour chose to be “the other guys” when
they could’ve just been “the guys.”
Corbyn fell into this trap despite the warnings of

members of his own party. Listen to the words of his
party’s economic spokesperson, Shadow Chancellor
John McDonnell.47
“I think an overwhelming majority oppose anything that smacks

of being no deal. Then we could be into a situation of a war of
attrition within parliament of amendments to legislation taking
place and uncertainty continuing.”
That’s exactly what it is.
In game theory, a war of attrition is a game in which

each side can fight to gain a monetary prize or fold to
gain nothing, but each round of play costs both sides
part of their potential prize. If you repeatedly fight a war
of attrition, eventually even victory isn’t worth it.
You’ve cost yourself so much that you would have been
better off doing something else entirely. So has your
opponent.
47Okay, that’s the coolest thing I’ve said so far. I mean, why can’t we have
Shadow Chancellors here? I would make a boss Shadow Chancellor. I’d
bring my own cloak.
In real wars, these are measured in lives; World War I,
for example, was a war of attrition that accomplished
little of merit for both sides. In business, a hostile
takeover that becomes a war of attrition can leave a
shell of a company. It’s bad.
You should never fight a war of attrition that you can’t

win early. Every loss you take is a sunk cost. That loss
cannot be regained, no matter whether you win or lose
the game. The cost might affect whether you win the
game, as you might not have the strength to continue
playing.
May’s Brexit strategy—bring vote after vote in hopes

one will eventually pass—is a necessary approach for
Britain to beat a deadline for a Withdrawal Agreement
that blunts the catastrophic economic damage Brexit
will inflict. It’s also the wrong approach for the Tories,
and May has assuredly known that from the start. Each
subsequent “no deal” has cost the Tories greatly, to the
point that the voting public has checked out of
Torydom for good. May would have been far better off
abandoning the deal proposals until her party came
together around a plan that worked for all of them.
The Labour Party, caught up in its own glee at seeing

the Conservatives clash, played along. But they never
took a stand for a position. They could have painted
themselves as the face of “Remain,” knowing that in a
three-way war between “Deal Tories,” “No-Deal
Tories,” and “Remain Labourites,” they might prevail.
Reading the winds has never been Corbyn’s strength.
Being an annoyance has been. That’s why the U.K. only
occasionally thinks of him as prime minister material.
Labour needs a new face, just as the Tories do.
Speaking of “Remain,” I haven’t yet mentioned who
won Friday’s election. No, it wasn’t UKIP, the
archconservative party of “Burn It All Down.” They got
smashed too, losing 145 seats, down to a mere 31. For
all meaningful purposes, UKIP no longer exists. Don’t
let the ashcan of history hit you on the way out, chaps.
The real winners of Friday’s election were the Liberal

Democrats, who have unreservedly backed “Remain”
since day 1. The Lib-Dems want an exit from Brexit.
They gained 703 seats, half of what the Tories lost, to a
total of 1,350, more than doubling their representation.
They added 12 councils. With an 8% uptick in votes,
that is one of the all-time great jumps in Britain.
Meanwhile, the Green Party, who also back “Remain,”

picked up 194 seats, and they started with 71. They
nearly tripled their representation. They have a natural
alliance with the Lib-Dems on issues like this and
others. If the two parties form a bloc, they can
stop anyone from forming a government.
If a Second Brexit referendum happens, Remain is very

likely to win. Polls have consistently shown more than
50% of the populace for Remain, and around 45% for
Leave. That’s a freight train of anti-Brexit energy.
There’s a deadline, though. The EU has a hard and non-

negotiable rule: Two years after you invoke Article 50 of
the Treaty on European Union and say you’re going to
leave, you’re out, deal or no deal. If the U.K. is going to
vote on Second Brexit, they had better get going.
Except... Article 50 was invoked on March 23, 2017.

We’re past the two-year mark. The deadline, once
claimed irrevocable, was extended until Halloween. The
government will likely be in recess for a lot of that time,
but maybe, just maybe, the Tories and Labour have
learned their lesson. The war of attrition killed them
both, and UKIP with them. The Lib-Dems and Greens
may unite to force a reckoning. Labour may have to
make a real choice about what they stand for. The
Conservative Party might have to consider the
unthinkable and unify behind a deal. There’s no
guarantee any of them will be that smart.
My thruppence is on a new referendum in which Brexit

is defeated. Someday, when I’m old and gray(er), I’ll be
able to tell the unbelieving youth that there was a time
the U.K. lost its fool mind, but it got it back in time.48
They’ll ask me about who would do such a thing, but I
won’t remember who Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May
were. I’ll just remember that Europe is forever.
48Eventually, May lost the confidence of her party, and howler monkey
Boris Johnson stepped in for an autumn of pure Parliamentary chaos.
Elections set for December revolved around whether a second
referendum would occur. It did not. The U.K. did lose its fool mind.
Rich explains: wars of attrition
One perfect illustration of an opponent falling to attrition comes

to us from the earliest days of Islam. As the young religion moved
to the welcoming city of Medina, they left enemies behind them
in Mecca, including the influential Quraysh. In an attempt to keep
the early Muslims from gaining power over the region, the
Quraysh gathered their forces and rode north to attack Medina.
To really understand what happens next, I need to make some

rapid generalizations. I’m not a military tactician, but every
teacher is certainly a historian of bullying. A bully practices three
aggressions to pull on their victims: the sudden attack in the halls,
the oh-so public parking lot fight, and the lurking terror waiting
just outside a zone of safety. The last is a war of attrition, testing
the bully’s patience against the besieged victim’s stress and fear
until a fight starts or someone manages to escape.
Most tribal warfare, including those on the Arabian peninsula,

came in the form of sudden raids. A successful raid meant stealing
supplies and dealing damage before the defenders managed to
organize a response. Knowing that a much larger Quraysh force
could strike at any time, the Medinans searched for answers.
Then, Salman al-Farsi made the perfect suggestion.
He dug a trench. A big trench.
At the now-famous Battle of the Trench, Salman’s eponymous

fortification stopped one thousand Quraysh raiders in their tracks.
The sudden switch to siege warfare completely confused the
unprepared aggressors, who only inflicted four casualties before
turning tail and running home. With their defenses secure,
Medina continued to gain power even in the face of future
attrition tactics by their enemies.
Eventually, the Quraysh were forced to surrender as their

influence waned in the region, placing Islam firmly on the path to
empire. All because Salman al-Farsi decided to dig a hole in the
ground.

No one wants to go to
war with Iran. We’re
going anyway.
May 25, 2019
Have you been to Abilene?
It’s a small city 150 miles west of Fort Worth, Texas.

Jessica Simpson is from there, and so is quarterback
Case Keenum. Vinnie Paul from Pantera too (RIP).
It’s probably a lovely place. I don’t know because I’ve

never been there.
I’m thinking we should go. Do you want to come

along?
The Abilene paradox, first detailed by management

analyst Jerry B. Harvey, is a story about four people
who don’t.49
49 According to Harvey, this is a true story, starring his own family. In his
telling of it, he thinks, “What, go to Abilene? Fifty-three miles? In this
dust storm and heat? And in an unairconditioned 1958 Buick?” and still
only says “Sounds good to me.”
On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the
family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch,
until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip
to Abilene (53 miles north) for dinner. The wife
says, “Sounds like a great idea.”
The husband, despite having reservations because

the drive is long and hot, thinks that his
preferences must be out-of-step with the group
and says, “Sounds good to me. I just hope your
mother wants to go.” The mother-in-law then says,
“Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene
in a long time.”
The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive

at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive.
They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.
One of them dishonestly says, “It was a great trip,

wasn’t it?” The mother-in-law says that, actually,
she would rather have stayed home, but went along
since the other three were so enthusiastic. The
husband says, “I wasn’t delighted to be doing what
we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of
you.” The wife says, “I just went along to keep you
happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go
out in the heat like that.” The father-in-law then
says that he only suggested it because he thought
the others might be bored.
The group sits back, perplexed that they together

decided to take a trip which none of them wanted.
They each would have preferred to sit comfortably,
but did not admit to it when they still had time to
enjoy the afternoon.

I’ll bet you don’t want to go to Abilene now. The
cafeteria may have improved in the last 45 years, but
why take the risk? If someone suggests going to Abilene
and you think everyone else agrees, all you have to do is
speak up. You probably won’t. You will think your
preferences run counter to those of the group, so you’ll
nod along, unwilling to rock the boat. Except everyone
wants someone else to rock it.50 That’s how insidious
the Abilene paradox is.
Which brings me to our impending war with Iran. The

last time we had an unpopular Republican president
whose election was clouded by malfeasance and who
hated some folks from the Middle East, we went to war
with Iran’s neighbor, Iraq. Then-Vice President Dick
Cheney believed that wartime presidents were the most
popular presidents, so he used the pretense of 9/11 to
gin up an attack against the Bush family’s nemesis,
Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11.
America was looking for payback against someone,
anyone, who might be responsible. George W. happily
agreed to solidify his dad’s legacy, and our eight-plus-
year war in Iraq defined American adventurism abroad
for the new millennium.
We find ourselves in a similar situation—with an

unpopular Republican president whose election was
clouded by malfeasance and who hates some folks from
the Middle East—but this time you’ll be hard pressed to
find anyone who thinks going to war with Iraq’s
neighbor is a stellar idea.
50A classic example of the paradox at work is Watergate. Harvey quotes

several participants in the coverup as having personal qualms about it but
being afraid to voice them, and they all went to jail.
At the time we invaded, Iraq was a nation of 25 million
people with no weapons of mass destruction. Iran is a
nation of 80 million people—a million of which are
active soldiers—and they do have weapons of mass
destruction. They have the largest ballistic missile array
in the Middle East. Unless you want Fajr-3 rockets
raining on Tel Aviv, you don’t want to fight Iran.
Of course, if you’re John Bolton, that’d be the best day

ever. Possessed of a shimmering walrus mustache and a
lifelong desire to nuke Iran, Bolton got Trump’s
attention by fluffing up his administration on Fox
News. Fresh off dumping “adult in the room” H. R.
McMaster, Trump blindly nominated Bolton to be
National Security Advisor. This despite Trump’s allies at
Fox warning that war with Iran would be like Christmas
for Bolton.
When the Trump administration designated Iran’s

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign
terrorist organization, it marked the first time an
element of a foreign government had been officially
designated a terrorist entity. We followed that up by
alleging without proof that Iran was involved in a
sabotage effort against an oil tanker group.
This unilateral escalation is essentially an act of war. It

announces that the administration is ready to go to war,
and it doesn’t plan to ask Congress’s permission when it
does so. Bolton engineered this so he could get his war,
daring his own administration to remove a terrorist
organization or face the consequences.
Except the administration isn’t ready to go to war with

Iran. Not even a little.
Trump isn’t ready to go to war with Iran. He won on a
platform of getting us out of entanglements, and he’s
been amazing at it. The next president’s day-one
checklist is going to look like the one below.
This is the profile of a man who retreats from foreign

relations, not compounds them. Despite tweeting that
“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of
Iran!” he mused to his acting defense secretary that he
does not want a war with Iran.
That acting secretary, Patrick Shanahan, isn’t ready to go
to war with Iran. He said our efforts have deterred
Iranian attacks (for which he provided no evidence),
and did not expect that we’ll need to go to war. Mike
Pompeo isn’t ready to go to war with Iran. The
secretary of state warned Iran not to attack, but said we
didn’t seek a military conflict. Jared Kushner isn’t ready
to go to war with Iran. While lining his pockets with
Saudi payments, the crown prince has been promoting
his as-yet-unveiled Middle East peace plan. Missiles
over Riyadh don’t get that plan rolling.
The unease extends beyond the administration.
Congressional Republicans aren’t ready to go to war
with Iran. Senator Lindsay Graham said he didn’t know
any more about Iranian tensions than what he read in
the newspaper, and urged the Department of Defense
to explain itself. Our allies aren’t ready for us to go to
war with Iran. As we rolled out a military surge against
the Islamic Republic, Spain boldly removed its warship
from our detachment. This is our crisis to navigate, our
allies said. Don’t expect help.
Iran is definitely not ready for us to go to war with it.

They’re showing bravado when a confident power
would simply offer to talk it out. The Iranian foreign
minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, responded to Trump
on Twitter.
But we’re still going to war, because America believes

we are. Despite everyone’s reservations, John Bolton is
the bored father-in-law that proposes going to Abilene
for dinner. With Congress winning on every front in the
race to paint Trump as a danger, things will get bad at
home for his family. As everything falls apart for
Trump, Bolton will simply turn into Dick Cheney.
“A wartime president is a popular president,” he’ll
whisper in Trump’s ear.51 Stephen Miller will throw his
Muslim-hating voice in there too. Trump will listen,
because he has no off-ramp with Iran. He’s stoked fear
of Muslims since descending the escalator. Now he has
to back that up.
Uncomfortably, Trump will say he wants to go to

Abilene. Fearing being booted from office, Pompeo and
Shanahan52 and Kushner will begrudgingly agree they
want to go too. The Republicans in Congress, fearful of
primary challenges, will get in the car. Even a few of our
allies will form a Coalition of the Unwilling. None will
want to, but no one will choose to rock the boat, and all
their reservations will turn into dinner reservations.
Only one force can turn this car around: Trump’s

voters. For Bolton’s war, Trump needs soldiers.
Trump’s base has stood with him in crisis after crisis.
Will they be willing to die for it, or send their sons and
daughters to do so? Especially when there is no reason
for doing so other than to keep the Trumps in power?
My money’s on yes. Trump’s base is secure, even if they

start dying in droves. That cafeteria in Abilene should
prepare for a whole lot of us to arrive soon.
51 He undoubtedly did, but was unceremoniously fired by tweet before he

got his war. Bolton claimed he resigned, and held enough of a grudge to
become an intriguing figure in the Ukraine scandal that followed.
52 Shanahan withdrew from consideration for the Secretary of Defense
position due to domestic violence incidents in his family. If Trump is

going to war, it’s with an entirely new team of bloodsuckers.
Rich explains: the Abilene paradox
As a game gets more complex, the theory behind it often takes

some intriguing twists and turns. A simple move of self-interest in
a single turn may be seen in future turns as an act of betrayal,
completely changing the strategies of our opponents. The more
turns there are, the more careful we need to be with strategies,
signaling, betrayal, and so many other possible outcomes. The
rules seem to change dramatically. Sometimes, a multi-move
game has a solution that just isn’t possible in a single turn game.
Frustratingly, Abilene remains paradoxical no matter how many
times we’re all asked to change our minds!
The Abilene paradox isn’t all that different than a multiplayer

game of Chicken. Remember James Dean and his Rebel Without a
Cause rival, Buzz? As they drive headlong toward certain doom...
do you think for a second either wants things to end in a crash? I
mean, as they say in the movie, “you gotta do something,” but the
scene still speaks more towards a reckless masculinity than pure
fatalism. In Chicken, the two players are trying to be the one who
avoids being a coward. Though they could bail out of the cars at
any moment, they keep driving towards oblivion.
Imagine a third car thrown into the mix. With three players, the
balance shifts towards long-term survival because now two of you
are destined to be cowards! With the odds now set against you,
there’s less reason to battle all the way to the end. Sure, there’s a
winner, but you need to avoid being the worst loser. You buckle
in, knowing the value of this trip is low and not likely to get much
better, because we’re all battling for second place.
As this pack of cars heads down the long stretch toward Abilene,
we can see we are all doomed. If someone stops this ridiculous
trip, they end up in last place. There’s no moment when the
penalties or rewards change, so no one has an incentive to change
their strategy. Plus, the more players there are, the more likely we
are to end this game in the middle. If I’m not likely to win this
game, but I can keep from losing by keeping my big mouth shut,
then I guess we’re all headed to Abilene.

If Trump’s not indicted
because he can’t be,
he should be
May 29, 2019
To paraphrase Pearl Jam, Robert Mueller spoke in class

today.
Both today and in his report,53 Mueller described a vast

Russian conspiracy to defeat Hillary Clinton that often
intertwined with advisors to President Trump. Today,
he spent most of his time telling America that it had a
criminal president, but that he could—and would—do
nothing about it.
Let’s take a hard look at the sentence everyone’s

quoting now.
“If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a
crime, we would have said so.”
There’s a lot to process there. Let’s take a long garden

walk through it.
53Really two reports. The first focuses on collusion, the second on

obstruction. Compelling reading if you get a free week.
In this single sentence, Mueller is saying three things
without ambiguity:
1. Investigating the president for crimes of
conspiracy and obstruction was merited at the
outset. They devoted two years to the investigation
of Trump’s possible crimes (among those of others,
whom they charged in great abundance).
2. If his office could be reasonably confident that
the president committed no crimes, that would
have been what they reported. Since they did not,
they were not confident the president committed
no crimes. Thus, they did not clear the president of
criminal actions.
3. If his office was not confident that the
president committed no crimes, they would
have to look at the Department of Justice’s
policies to act further. They were at that point of
having some belief that the president committed
crimes. Now they needed guidance.
Here’s what he said about how they got that guidance.
“We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the

president did commit a crime. The introduction to the volume two
of our report explains that decision. It explains that under long-
standing Department policy, a president cannot be charged with a
federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even
if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that
too is prohibited. The special counsel’s office is part of the
Department of Justice and by regulation it was bound by that
Department policy.
“Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an

option we could consider.”

From the get-go, Mueller’s team knew it would be
bound by the Office of Legal Counsel’s long-debated
1973 memo that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
Now, I don’t think it says that, but President Clinton’s
DoJ memo from 2000 takes that position as gospel, so
Hillary Clinton is not getting justice because of her
husband’s Department of Justice. Super great.
Mueller’s team was playing by the rules of the game.

Game theory exists in an environment of rules. If you
play sports or games, you think rules are a documented
script that you can look at and determine conclusions
from. That’s really not how the world works.
Rules are usually a lot more like that 1973 memo:

collections of rambling theories about what is
permissible and what isn’t. That is the basis of how the
Supreme Court works, for example. When they evaluate
a law (which is a type of rule more like a sport or game
manual), they look to precedent to determine what to
do. Disentangling 200-plus years of legal opinions into
the case the individual justice wants to make, or feels
they are forced to make, is the hard work of the court.
Rules are precedents, and precedents are often spongy.
Rules based on precedent rather than statute command

two types of responses. The first, often called
constructionism, says that if you can’t find a way
around what precedent tells you, you follow precedent.
The second, often called activism, says that precedent

can guide you toward conclusion but you need to
balance it against what you feel the society needs.
Today, Bobby Three Sticks pounded nails into the idea
that he’d ever be an activist.
Mueller believed that his office was bound by that
precedential pair of memos, and no one else has to
believe that for it to matter. The next president could
appoint a different set of DoJ officials, who could write
a different memo about it, and that would govern the
next special counsel investigation. But no matter how
many memos were issued, it wouldn’t change whether the
president had committed a crime.
Mueller continued.
“And beyond Department policy we were guided by principles of

fairness. It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a
crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.”
Mueller caps this off by saying that he didn’t reach a

conclusion on whether to indict the president because
he couldn’t take the president to court. In the absence
of the ability to do so, tarring the president with a
conclusion of guilt would merely hamper his ability to
function without any sort of resolution.
When it’s put that way, it’s hard not to empathize with
Mueller’s team. They would have been blasted for
issuing a statement that could not be backed with
prosecution by their own office. So they didn’t say
anything about that most crucial issue that the American
people had been wondering about for two years.
But he left a door open, one the president certainly

would prefer was closed.
“The opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other

than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting
president of wrongdoing.”
Oh right, it’s important to know who this press
conference was for. Mueller was reminding Congress of
its duty to pursue impeachment based on the 448 pages
his team issued, detailing a systematic pattern of
obstruction that even the most loyal Trumpist has to
shout la-la-la-la with their fingers in their ears to avoid
comprehending. In chronological order:
1. Asking FBI director James Comey to clear National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
2. Attempting to force Attorney General Jeff Sessions
to “unrecuse” himself.
3. Firing Comey.
4. Attempting to fire Mueller.
5. Attempting to get Sessions to denounce the Mueller
investigation.
6. Attempting to bury emails about Donald Trump Jr.
and Jared Kushner’s meeting with Russians in
Trump Tower.
7. Attempting to get Sessions to take control of the
investigation.
8. Telling White House Counsel Don McGahn to
deny that he wanted the Special Counsel removed.
9. Asking Flynn for early warning on information
damaging to the president and commending
campaign director Paul Manafort for not flipping.
10. Threatening personal attorney Michael Cohen.
These are crimes. They’re not kinda-sorta-maybe

crimes. They’re just crimes. What Mueller said today
was that the Department of Justice cannot be trusted to
investigate and indict a president under the current set
of spongy and debatable rules defined by the agents of
presidents. He dramatically spelled out Congress’s
responsibilities in this regard and then told Congress he
didn’t want to be a part of it.
“There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress.
Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It
contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the
decisions we made. We chose those words carefully and the work
speaks for itself. And the report is my testimony. I would not
provide information beyond that which is already public in any
appearance before Congress.”
Mueller defined the Mueller Report as testimony against

the president. The split Congress might choose to heed
that in the House and not bother with it in the
Senate. So be it, Mueller implied. I have defined for you a
pattern of criminal activity and was bound not to define it as
such, so I have not done so. It’s your turn now.
Mueller laid out a

Venn diagram of
the highest
importance.
There’s Mueller’s
responsibility
which includes
jailing criminals in
the president’s orbit
and laying out a road map of the president’s possibly
criminal behavior, and there’s Congress’s responsibility
which also includes laying out that road map and
possibly punishing the president. It’s important to
acknowledge where the overlap is, Mueller implied.
Among the Congressional candidates for president, the

response was swift. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris,
Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders all echoed the call for
impeachment. Democrats rallied around this action,
except for Tulsi Gabbard, because of course she didn’t.
One Republican—just one, but you have to start
somewhere—was on board. A couple nights ago, before
Mueller gave his statement, GOP Rep. Justin Amash of
Michigan laid out on Twitter the case for Trump’s
impeachment.54 That’s one vote for, which might
counter Nancy Pelosi’s one vote against. While no other
Republicans leapt to Amash’s defense, it’s not too
farfetched that the tide will turn enough that Republican
Senators need to be worried about the consequences of
voting against conviction, should it come to them.
Rules may be spongy, but they define peoples’ actions

nonetheless. Robert Mueller is not going to change the
rules for us. The Congress could define the rules for
special counsels better. They could do it this term if
they wanted. Regardless, we have what we have. If you
want Trump impeached, you might get that. If you want
Trump convicted, you may need to wait till 2021 at
least. By then he’ll be out of office (and thus indictable)
or he’ll face a new Congress (which might be more
inclined to remove him).
Regardless, the Mueller Report stands as a roadmap to

impeachment. It is a work by a man who has done his
job and wants to go away now. I expect, however, that
we will hear from him again, whether before Congress
or in some other setting.
As Pearl Jam taught us, once the kid who never speaks
in class decides to speak, no one will rest until they
know why.
As noted earlier, Amash then walked out on the GOP, to no one in the
54
GOP’s regret.
Rich explains: Venn diagrams
Have you ever tried to sit down and write a set of rules? Not a
basic set of guidelines, but a comprehensive list of rules with the
clear intention to abide and enforce each rule presented? People
often suggest that I gather my students on the first day and
collectively compose an egalitarian set of rules about how
everyone should behave to create the maximum amount of
personal responsibility and cooperation for the rest of the school
year. I tried it once and almost quit the very next day.
You’ve seen a Venn diagram, right? Math folk use it to define sets
and explore their identities and operations. Consider two sets, A
and B, as circles which overlap a bit. We call that overlap an
intersection, and we call all items in either set A or B the union. As
we try to create rules, we might hope to make it all-inclusive and
representative of everyone’s needs—the union set of rules. But if
we create the rules in a combative way, we get the intersection
set of rules. This compromise leaves none of us happy, but at least
we covered the basics.
It was the first day of school, so all my shiny happy students and I
were on the same page. Together, we built a list of rules based on
the union of what we all wanted. What a pleasant bunch of
academic idealists! We laughed as we planned a bright future,
never noticing what lay lurking in the dark corners of the room.
See, when we put things into sets, we can’t help excluding other
things. That clever Venn diagram pun on your T-shirt? You can’t
forget about the rest of the shirt! We call that the complement,
and it’s a killer. It represents the great unknown, which is why a
student felt it was cool to toss a chair out the school window as no
one had thought to write a rule on furniture defenestration. I
quickly organized an amendment committee which eventually fell
into the benevolent dictatorship of every school classroom. And
sure, that’s a funny story, but the complement is also filled with
assault rifles and high-count magazines and I will let furniture
defenestration stick around forever if someone will figure out how
to keep those out of our classrooms.

If you liked Jeb!,
you’ll love Joe!
June 2, 2019
If you’ve watched Joe Biden’s campaign for president

unfold, you probably noted two things: one, that he has
a massive lead in every poll well before anyone has
voted, and two, that he has not really campaigned at all.
Sure, he’s been on talk shows (especially The View,
where he is beloved) and the like, but:
Where are his campaign rallies? He had a kickoff in

Pittsburgh and a couple of fundraisers, has booked a
few day trips in New England, and no clear plans
afterward.
Where’s his platform? While other candidates have

issued nation-changing plans for education, health care,
gun control, and the environment, Joe’s Vision for
America is mostly Obama-era platitudes.
Where’s his outreach to leftist voters? For a centrist

candidate whom progressives have criticized, he’s not
exactly out there winning friends.
Overall: Where is Joe?

For a campaign with this much star power, it sure is
low-wattage. What he’s doing stands in marked contrast
to the content-rich campaigns of Warren, Booker,
Harris, O’Rourke, Inslee, and the like. Only Pete
Buttigieg is following Biden’s model of just occasionally
being places and hoping a campaign will happen around
you. Why is Biden doing this?
One possibility is that he’s letting the other candidates

churn out their news cycles before dropping a real
campaign on us when we get bored with them. Dude is
76, and an 18-month war might not be what the
geriatrician ordered. Then again, 69-year-old Elizabeth
Warren is campaigning like she’s 28. Warren
undoubtedly believes she has to work harder and be
more aggressive to get the same attention as a man, and
she’s probably right about that.
Another possibility is that he’s focusing on building his

team first and rolling it out when they’re all in line. He’s
got a stellar list of staffers, but it still looks incomplete.
Shouldn’t there be more than one person in Iowa?
Maybe there’s behind-the-scenes work to do before we
see Biden in all his resplendency.
Personally, I’m buying another reason, and it’s worth

saying that I’m totally cool with a Biden candidacy,
though I favor some other candidates. He proved
himself as VP, and has apologized for past sins,
especially those involving Anita Hill. The issue of his
ooky behavior toward women is troubling, to be sure.
Assuming he owns it, I’m Team Biden.
Here’s what I think’s going on, and why he’s going to

lose if he doesn’t change course fast.
I think Biden is intentionally ignoring the primary. What we
are seeing is the difference between candidates who are
running to be the nominee and a candidate who’s
expecting to be the nominee. It’s not clear if he believes it
or if everyone around him does and that’s fine with him.
There’s more than a year till the Democratic National

Convention. When he gets to Milwaukee, Biden
presumes he’ll have all of Democratic America on his
side. That’s because he is not campaigning against
Democrats. Biden is campaigning against Trump. He’s
forging a campaign that’s about winning the general,
and he’ll never mention a candidate other than Trump
(who is more than happy to get in the ring with him).
Here’s Joe from his announcement video:
“If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he

will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—
who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
This is a man who knows, like Hillary Clinton knew,

that the nomination was just around the corner. It’s as if
his campaign slogan is “Biden: My Time.”
In game theory, this is called fighting the next war.

This is the preferred strategy, as it contrasts with
fighting the last war (as in the aphorism “Generals
always fight the last war”). When someone fights the
last war, they pick opponents and tactics founded on an
outdated understanding of political and environmental
realities. Britain fought the last war in the American
Revolution. We fought the last war in Vietnam. Iraq
fought the last war in the Gulf War. We’re fighting the
last war against Russian hackers. Fighting the last war is
easy since you know how to do it. It just doesn’t work.
Biden’s approach, if I have it assessed right, is to avoid
the Sanders-Clinton dynamic of the 2016 election. For
him, there are no liberals and no centrists; there’s just
people who’ll vote for someone who has the best
chance to beat Trump. Biden’s probably a better
candidate than Hillary Clinton, and she actually beat
Trump in the popular vote. A few focused efforts on
places Trump barely won to secure the nomination and
an all-out blitz on Trump from July to November of
next year means President Biden in 2021.
For now, I’ll take it as a given that Biden’s the best

candidate to beat Trump. This is not maybe-bad-
President Trump; it is catastrophically-bad-President
Trump. You get two old white guys in there and I think
Biden runs away with it. That’s not the point. The point
is we’ve seen this before with another J.B. It went
disastrously.
Hearken back to May 2015. In a rare flash of self-

awareness, Mitt Romney declined to run again. That
cleared the road for John Ellis “Jeb” Bush. The third
Bush to run for the office, the Florida ex-governor had
most folks believing he’d cruise to the nomination.
Trump had yet to descend an escalator, so Jeb’s most
fearsome declared foe was Ted Cruz. Seriously, anybody
could beat Ted Cruz, right?
This is Bush’s response to Fox’s Megyn Kelly about his

brother’s invasion of Iraq, in a pre-campaign interview
that aired on May 11, 2015.
Kelly: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized

the invasion?”
Bush: “I would have, and so would’ve Hillary Clinton.”
The entire Kelly interview is focused not on Bush as a
person, but his ability to vanquish Hillary Clinton, who
did not then have a single primary win. Clinton was
thought of as a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination,
as Bernie Sanders had floated his intention to run less
than a month earlier, and was weeks out from launching
the campaign that galvanized liberal America. Bush
planned to run against Clinton, and was unconcerned
over what would soon become the most crowded
Republican field in history. Prior to announcing, he
sized the task up in a quixotic manner.
“I kind of know how a Republican can win, whether it’s me or

somebody else, and it has to be much more uplifting, much more
positive, much more willing to, you know, to be practical now in
Washington-world. Lose the primary to win the general without
violating your principles—it’s not an easy task, to be honest.”
Wait, lose the primary to win the general? As was obvious

to all, no candidate makes the general election without a
primary win. Yet that was exactly what he proceeded to
attempt. When running his campaign, Bush projected an
air of being above the fray of the contested primaries.
He led polls from November 2014 to June 2015, by
which time other candidates like Scott Walker (c’mon
now, America) had inched up to contest the race.
As I hardly need to spell out for you, it all went spinning

south for Bush fast. The lifeless exclamation point logo
(“It connotes excitement,” he offered). The Wreck-It
Ralphy “Jeb Can Fix It” slogan. The slow horror of
“Please clap.” The mind-blowing internet-written
musical of his campaign. By October 2015, Bush was
clocking the lowest numbers of the surviving
candidates.
Meanwhile, you could feel the dynamism—hatemonger
though he was—from Trump as he hammered on
Bush’s “low energy.” Similarly, Marco Rubio and Chris
Christie were on television because they were clashing
with each other. People rallied around Bush’s foes
because they were focused on beating other Republicans.
Looking past the primary cost Bush the general election.
He was out of the race before Super Tuesday in
February 2016, a bumbling afterthought in Trump’s
unsettling rise to power.
For Bush, the Republican primary was what sports fans

call a trap game. When a team looks beyond its next
foe to a future one, they run the risk of falling into a
trap and failing to get out. Sometimes it’s a failure to
beat a point spread that angers bettors. Other times...
well, it’s time for a look at one of the most famous trap
games ever.
Going into the 2007 season, the Michigan Wolverines

football team was ranked #5 in the nation. They were
stacked up and down the line with future NFL players.
Like pretty much every college team you’ve heard of,
Michigan played in the Football Bowl Subdivision
(FBS), the top level of NCAA football.
There’s another, less heralded division called the

Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) that features
smaller schools. When FBS schools want an easy win,
they schedule a home game against an FCS opponent—
and pay them to be there. These visiting FCS teams are
called “cupcakes” because playing them is the
competitive equivalent of a human vs. a cupcake.
Colleges schedule these cupcake games to give their
boosters an easy win to celebrate.
Because of a friendship between the coaches, Michigan
paid the Appalachian State Mountaineers $400,000 to
visit the Big House on September 1. The largest stadium
in America, with a capacity of 115,000, welcomed a
team from Boone, North Carolina—population 17,000.
From the participants’ reflections, the Wolverines

greeted the game without fear.
“I had never heard of them. Even watching their film, it was

really grainy and bad quality. I felt like I was watching a high
school highlight tape or something. I personally wasn’t worried or
concerned about the game.”
—Michigan wide receiver Greg Mathews
Vegas sportsbooks were just as overconfident, as they

did not give a betting line on the game. That was a
tactical error, as App State was ranked #1 in their
division, had won the previous two FCS championship
games, and were expected to win a third. The
Mountaineers were as good a cupcake as cupcakes could
ever be. They were ready.
“We didn’t start getting ready for them in August. We started

getting ready as soon as we knew the game was happening. We
knew that conditioning was going to be huge.”
—Mountaineers coach Jerry Moore
Moore pumped the Michigan fight song through the

Mountaineers’ practices all summer. They hated the
Wolverines by game day, whereas Michigan wasn’t quite
as fired up. They faced a highly regarded Oregon team
the week after ASU, and didn’t focus on their season
opener. Instead, they focused on something else:
partying their asses off.
“Throughout that week, there were a bunch of parties. Every
night of the week, it was like a crazy, insane party. I just didn’t
manage that very well. Guys were missing practice, coming to
practice hungover, having to sit out because they were hungover.”
—Mathews
Even if you’ve never heard of this game, I bet you can

see where it’s headed. App State’s 34–32 win over
highly ranked Michigan was one of the greatest upsets
in sports history. And also one of its greatest cautionary
tales.
Michigan looked past the Mountaineers as if they

weren’t there, and the next day the Wolverines had
fallen out of the top 25. They fell into the trap, lost big
at home to Oregon the next week, and only then
realized what they had failed to do. To their credit,
Michigan reeled off eight straight wins thereafter, and
finished with a respectable 9–4 record. Most places,
that’s a good year. Not in Michigan.
So much was lost on that day in Ann Arbor, because

the Wolverines looked ahead to play the next game
without worrying about the one in front of them. A
decade later, all they did that year was eclipsed by the
one thing they didn’t.
We all do this, though rarely as spectacularly as

Michigan did. We forget to fix the storm windows in
the sunshiny days before the rains come. We spend so
much time planning the kid’s birthday party that we
forget our anniversary. We blast a candidate in the
primaries without predicting the effects of that when
they make it to the general election. As Admiral Ackbar
can tell us, traps are everywhere.
It is impossible to know yet whether Biden is falling
into a trap like that. By ignoring the primaries and
focusing on his presumed opponent in the general
election,55 Biden could become Jeb! 2.0. That didn’t
work out well for Jeb! 1.0.
Still, there’s plenty of highway ahead. Let’s see how this

goes for Joe!
(Ugh. I’m sorry. I’m never putting that exclamation

point there again.)
55 One could say it started to go very badly for Biden, since after this piece
came out, he completely fell apart in the first debate, notably being eaten
alive by Kamala Harris. That was a bit of a wakeup call for Biden, and
most people would say he performed better thereafter. Of course, he won
the nomination and made Harris his V.P. nominee. Which is why they are
candidates and I write games.
Rich explains: inertia
You know what I like? Term limits. The idea that elected officials
have to stand up and ask their constituents to allow them to keep
serving is the core of a government for and by the people.
However, Isaac Newton long ago warned us that these moments
of re-election wouldn’t be the free and fair elections we might
imagine. He just hid his nuanced political thoughts where few
politicians would look—the law of inertia.
Consider South Carolina, where Lindsey Graham has been a sitting

senator since 2003. As a well-known member of Congress,
Graham has always had the backing and the support to render any
re-election campaign trivial. He has never had to worry about a
serious contender. In fact, when first elected, Graham became the
first new senator from South Carolina since 1965 after the
retirement of forty-eight-year Senate veteran Strom Thurmond.
That’s a lot of inertia.
See, Newton said that objects in motion tend to remain in motion

unless acted upon by an outside force, but he was really talking
about political careers. Once begun, incumbent inertia takes over,
and it takes a wrecking ball of a candidate to force them back out.
Even so, the percentage of congressional incumbents who have
won their election has rarely dipped below 80% in the last twenty
years.
For Senator Graham, it means he’s never needed to fight the next
war. He’s free to rest on his laurels and campaign based on past
victories, since Graham’s dominant position means he can almost
ignore his opponents and ride a wave of incumbent inertia. Any
challenger must push the battlefield to the next war and they
rarely have the means to do so. Which is one reason political
theorists have warned of Congressional stagnation since the
1970s.
Similarly, if Donald Trump rides a wave of “but her emails” all the
way to re-election in 2020, just know that you’re seeing inertia at
work.

When your senator
threatens to kill state
troopers, your system
is broken
June 26, 2019
While my wife and I were drinking our way through

Oregon this weekend, I noted that the street corners
were not filled with state senators using lethal force
against capitol troopers. So I didn’t stop drinking. The
specter of that outcome existed due to this quote from
state senator Brian Boquist:
“Send bachelors and come heavily armed.”
Wowsers. When I heard that, I had to make sure I heard

it right. I learned Senator Boquist is a CIA-connected
Army vet who owns an ammunition company. If there’s
one state legislator who could credibly make good on
winning an armed standoff with police, it’s Boquist.
If his statement got my attention, it surely got theirs.

Why would anyone threaten to kill the very capitol
police that protects him on a daily basis?
For this to make even a shred of sense to those outside

the Pacific Northwest, I’ll run the tape back. Here’s
what’s going down south of my border.
In a few days, the Oregon legislative session will end.
More than a hundred bills await votes. One of them is
an expansive climate change bill, which, like all such
bills, the GOP opposes. Now, the legislature and
governorship are controlled by Democrats. The bill
doesn’t require a supermajority. All it should need is for
Democrats to vote yes and the governor to sign it.
As it turns out, that’s not all they need. They need a

quorum, a minimum of 20 senators to vote on the bill.
There are 30 seats in the Senate. Democrats control 18.
If 11 state senators refuse to show up for work, the
Democrats can’t hold a vote. That’s what they did,
prompting an intriguing request from Senate Leader
Peter Courtney, which Governor Kate Brown heeded:
“I’m requesting you direct Oregon State Police to assist Senate for
purposes of establishing quorum.”
I’ve heard about this kind of thing. When I was at the

Washington capitol, Senator Steve Hobbs (who wrote
this book’s foreword) told me of a 1970s dustup where
legislators jumped over railings rather than be caught by
police. These Oregon senators had heard it too, so they
fled Salem. Some even fled to Idaho, which, being
Republican-held, washed its hands of the thing. An
Oregon militia called the Three Percenters swore to
stand between senators and police, presumably with
guns drawn; the senators were smart enough to turn
down that helpful offer.
The senators on the lam needed someone to speak for

them. Boquist elected himself their spokesman. Before
the walkout, he said, “I’m not going to be a political
prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.”
Then he threatened troopers and said his threat was not
“thinly veiled.” The NRA backed up his threat.
Despite being an arms dealer, Boquist is no friend to

the NRA; he got its ire up when, in memory of a son
who killed himself, he cosponsored a law prohibiting
possession of firearms by a person who presents a risk
of suicide or injury to others. If his threat of violence
was being backed by the NRA, this was a huge deal, on
the level of Ammon Bundy’s militiamen occupying the
nearby Malheur National Wildlife Preserve. Everybody
within one state in any direction took Oregon politics a
lot more seriously. When gun-toting chaosmongers get
legislators to take up arms, our future looks bleak.
It’s hard to know how this will end. It’s easy to spot
how it began. The rules requiring a quorum greater than
half the body’s size mean every bill requires a de facto
supermajority unless the minority allows it. Under these
rules, the minority is incentivized never to show up for
votes. That walkouts don’t happen much is the shock,
not that they happen at all.
Legendary game designer Jonathan Tweet coined the

following maxim that has stuck with me, and I’ve
applied it to every game I’ve designed: “Don’t pay players
to do things you don’t want them to do.”
When a player sees they can do something without

penalty, and that thing is in their best interest, they will
do it. If that thing stops the game from functioning, the
rule that allows it is broken. Brokenness is a term game
designers use to isolate problems; a rule might seem
good on the surface but cause unintended side effects
that derail play.
Exploiting broken rules is called degenerate behavior.
A normal player might feel comfortable acting against
their best interests in the spirit of the game, but a
degenerate player would not. Tweet’s rule says that if
you reward players who do things that break your game,
it’s not their fault. It’s yours for making a broken game.
An example from a game everyone knows: In

Monopoly, some resources are infinite. Money, for
example, is unlimited; the rules tell you that “If the
Bank runs out of money, the Banker may issue as much
more as needed by writing on any ordinary paper.”
Others, including houses (the building blocks of higher-
value hotels), are finite. The rules say, “When the Bank
has no houses to sell, players wishing to build must wait
for some player to return or sell his/her houses to the
Bank before building.” I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
I’ll further bet you didn’t know that a completely viable

strategy is to buy house after house and never convert
them to hotels so that no one else can get any houses. Is
that a dick move? Sure is. Is it legal? Is it strategically
valuable? Yup on both counts. What it might not be
is fun. Fun is one of the main reasons to play a game.
Thus, if a game rule doesn’t let your game be fun, you
need to fix that rule. That’s just basic game design.
In the Oregon legislature, fun isn’t the goal; serving

one’s constituents is. Here, Republicans believe that cap
and trade rules will hurt their rural constituents
disproportionately. They can’t win if there’s a vote, so
they win by suspending the basic functionality of
governance. In this case, it seems to have worked. On
Wednesday, Senate President Courtney said House Bill
2020 “does not have the votes on the Senate floor.”
That’s among Democrats, not Republicans. The GOP
standoff obviously galvanized enough constituents of a
few Democratic senators to turn them from yeses to
nos. This is how climate bills die.
If Democratic senators don’t want that to be possible,

they should schedule one vote at the start of the next
session: a parliamentary vote that makes a quorum equal
to half the number of senators. Of course, GOP
senators won’t show up for that either, but it’s one thing
to go in hiding from the cops for a few days. It’s quite
another to lam out for a year. Force the GOP senators
to choose between doing their jobs and living in the
state at all. Or (gulp) get arrested for pulling a gun on a
cop. There are 11 fugitive senators out there. Only one
is Brian Boquist. The rest might not have the stomach
for extended exile. Even if they do, voters might decide
this is no way to run a railroad and vote them out.
There’s only one risk in this tactic (other than senator-

inspired bloodshed): you can’t walk out yourself. While
the last three walkouts (in 2007 and twice this year) were
by Republicans, the one prior was a 2001 redistricting
protest by Democrats, including then-Minority Leader
Kate Brown. Yes, that Kate Brown, the governor now
sending police out looking for AWOL GOP senators. If
Democrats want to preserve that option for themselves,
they can’t suspend it for their foes. Cutting off this
safety valve comes with risks if they fall out of power.
My strategy would be to bet on Oregon staying blue.

Oregon can’t be held hostage by its own government.
Time to fix the rule. Because you can’t blame the GOP
for taking the only out they have. If your game’s
broken, don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
Rich explains: brokenness
I was born and raised in Portland, so seeing Oregon in the news

these days always make me a little nauseous. From the Proud
Boys turning the city into a battleground to the Bundy Boys and
their armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge,
there’s always something new and distressing coming from the
Beaver State. Senator Boquist is just the latest in a run of
consequences to some seriously broken rules. When your rules
are broken, it leads to degenerate player behavior, which you
can’t have without some degenerates.
In 1844, the Oregon territory stretched across the entire Pacific

Northwest. This frontier was sparsely populated by settlers who
were entirely white. Though it would eventually enter the union in
1859 as a free state, Oregon was seen by some as an opportunity
for a racially pure region, and still is by white supremacists across
the state. This was all possible due to variations of the sundown
laws, which banned any non-white person from being out on the
streets after dark.
The dire penalties for breaking these rules were written up in the
“Peter Burnett Lash Law.” Named for a local judge, the law let a
slave be kept for three years, after which the slave could be
whipped if they didn’t leave. But where could they go? A series of
laws to deny housing and close hotels to non-whites made the
entire Pacific Northwest into a de facto segregation zone. The
extremely broken sundown rules allowed whites to mercilessly
apply degenerate behavior and create sundown towns across the
country. These exclusionary laws weren’t repealed in Oregon until
1926, more than fifty years after they became unconstitutional.
This system of discrimination meant that in the 1990s, Portland,

Oregon—a place nicknamed “Little Beirut” by Bush Sr. as he
declared the place too liberal and revolutionary to visit—was also
a place where there was only one African American family in my
high school of 800 students. One. Even 150 years later, Oregon is
still suffering the consequences of a deeply broken system of
rules.

You don’t have to
want to save the
planet.
You just have to.
July 28, 2019
It’s hot. Too darn hot. America is baking, Australia

suffered a blistering summer a few months ago, and
national heat records are falling in Europe. Why’s it so
hot? Well, that depends on who you ask. If you talk to
scientists, they’ll tell you it’s our fault. If you talk to
anyone else, they’ll either tell you they believe scientists
or make up something idiotic on the spot. Are they
idiots? No. They’re just weighing personal cost against
public benefit.
A lot of choices involve weighing personal cost against

public benefit. If I donate to a charity, it will cost me
time and money, but I know I’m helping make lives
better so I do it. In 2018, my company used our games
and books to raise $100,000 for nonprofits that help kids
in hospitals, foster children, and girls learning to program
and make games. It was a lot of work, but it let us feel
great about ourselves and humblebrag like I just did.
Those feelings matter. Game theorists like me often blow

off the concept of emotion and assume people are
rational actors. That’s not how anything works.
We contribute to the common good not just because it’s
in our best interests, but because we feel good doing it.
We want to help. The fact that it’s voluntary makes it
work. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t feel as good about it. I’d do
it, because I follow the rules. But it’d feel more like taxes.
I pay taxes because I like firefighters, the military, social
security, inspections, and other things the government
provides. Even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have a choice. If I
blow off my taxes, I get a vacation in a tax-funded jail.
Which brings me to two related but importantly different

ecological fields: environmentalism, where we try to
stop humanity from killing the world, and
immunization, where we try to stop the world from
killing humanity. Inside these arenas, we have ceded
some of our rights to choose on the basis of emotion. In
nearly all of the world, we say, you don’t have to feel
good about contributing to the public good. You just
have to do it.
Sadly, in the USA, we’ve undermined that by adopting a

foolish philosophy dubbed by ecologist Garrett Hardin
as the tragedy of the commons. That’s a concept from
the 1800s about cattle.
Picture a common for livestock. If each farmer is allowed

to let 10 cows graze there, the land will replenish itself
and the common will thrive. Say all the farmers agree to
that and no one watches for violations. One farmer
might think, “I can let an 11th cow of mine graze, since it
will hurt no one.” Another farmer might think, “I can let
a 12th cow of mine graze, since it will hurt no one.” As
every person tries to squeeze out more benefit from the
shared resource, the field is overrun and never grows
back. Now we need a new common.
In the tragedy of the commons, the unrestrained self-
interest of individuals overwhelms the public good. If a
resource is eventually going to be used up, whoever uses
it the most benefits the most. The cost/benefit ratio is
minuscule to an individual, as the benefits go solely to
the user and the costs are spread amongst all users. We
all pay the cost when the resource is inevitably drained.
The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons is that we’ve

known what it is for a couple centuries and we still do
this. Regulation slows it down, as does community
policing, and informal property rights. But typically, the
bad actors will overwhelm the good actors in a fight over
the commons. After all, we all want to feed one more
cow. It’s just one more cow!
The tragedy of the commons in immunization
Falling prey to the tragedy of the commons puts a big

target on our backs. We see this in immunization, the
fortification of the body against disease. We think a lot
about disease. Disease doesn’t care what we think. Its job
is to kill us. So we try to kill it first, with our
superweapon against contagions: herd immunity. Here’s
how that works, starring our old foe measles.
Left alone, measles would catch hold everywhere,

because nine out of ten non-immune people exposed to
the virus catch it. That’s a brutal transference rate.
Without herd immunity, if any child catches it, many more
will. Since we can’t cure the virus, we must destroy its
opportunity to transmit itself. The more people that are
vaccinated against measles, the slower the disease can
spread. Susceptible children can’t easily meet contagious
children if most children are immune.
We vaccinate as many children as possible and keep the
disease in check. Those who can’t be vaccinated yet, such
as infants and pregnant women, are insulated by the herd.
This is how we eradicated smallpox and polio. If we get
90–95% immunity, we can stop a disease from
killing anyone.
Measles aren’t cute. No one will be sad if we eradicate it

from the earth. In Africa and Asia, 20 million people
contract measles a year. Global efforts have reduced the
death rate to about 100,000 people a year. That’s a lot,
but it’s not the 2.6 million people who died of measles in
1980. This is all to the good, but we should be aware how
good we have it here at home.
We chose to stay on this side of the tipping point. We

eliminated measles in the United States in 2000, and from
the Americas in 2002. The only cases for a decade and a
half came imported from the eastern hemisphere, and
then only a handful. An entire hemisphere came together
and said no.
We killed measles dead from Canada to Chile. Take that,

measles.
But then...
In 2017, a case of measles arose in Maine, the first in 20

years. In 2018, 500 Oregonians were exposed to the
virus; over 40 were not immune. 200 people in Brooklyn
caught the disease this past winter. More than 50 people
got it in my home state of Washington this year. A cruise
ship of Scientologists got marooned in the Caribbean
when someone got measles. Our old foe was back and
wasn’t going away any time soon.
You know why. Measles didn’t get stronger. People just
got more obstinate. The scourge of vaccine hesitancy led
science-impaired parents to deny their children
immunization. Anti-vaxxers like Donald Trump dumped
so much toxic fear into the water supply that just enough
children were left unimmunized. Finding a foothold built
on a foundation of willful negligence, measles roared
back strong. We just let it do so.
Some of us can’t handle that. Legislatures like ours in

Washington are now banning philosophical exemptions
from vaccinations. We’ll see if that takes hold. We’ve
been telling people that their beliefs don’t exempt them
from needing to perform abortions and marry gay
couples, and some of them got real het up about it in
2016 and gave us a Trump sandwich. But if we don’t find
some backbone, we’re just gonna let measles run wild
again.
The tragedy of this particular common is that

immunization only works if it’s mandatory, but some are
allowed to think it’s optional. They are actively killing their
fellow citizens. Thankfully, we’re still on the edge of
holding the line against communicable disease.56
The good news: Amid the measles outbreak, Trump

changed his tune, saying “They have to get the shots.” If
Trump can change, maybe everyone can change.57
Maybe.
Hold the line.
56 Boy, does this sentence look naive now.

57 This one looks even worse.
The tragedy of the commons in
environmentalism
We are not even close to the line when it comes to the

environment. We’re losing, badly. With the extinction of
thousands of species—maybe including us—on the line,
we are very bad at mandating participation in keeping the
planet healthy.
It’s easy to understand the tragedy of the commons when

it comes to big polluters. The reason we have laws about
how much toxins companies can dump into waterways is
that on their own, companies will fall prey to the
commons problem and dump way too much. Of course,
this only works if we enforce the laws and... oh, it’s time
to talk about the Lovecraftian horror that is Trump’s
Environmental Protection Agency.
Despite being booted out due to metastasizing scandals,

Scott Pruitt remains the most successful member of
Trump’s cabinet, at least in terms of workload. As the
worst president possible, Trump’s goal was to appoint
the worst people possible to head every agency. He got a
doozy in Pruitt. The self-described “leading advocate
against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Pruitt took control of
that agency and gutted it to the best of his ability.
Pruitt lifted restrictions on air and water pollution, rolled

back vehicle efficiency standards, and cut the number of
inspections the EPA made in half. Fines collected from
polluters dropped to their lowest levels since 1994, from
$3 billion in 2017 to $88 million in 2018. The minimum
number of Criminal Enforcement Division agents
required by the U.S. Pollution Prosecution Act of 1990 is
200. There are now 130.
Pruitt and his successor, coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler,
have kneecapped the EPA, but that’s no reason to
despair. After all, international agreements we signed
should... nope, we threw those away too. The Trump
administration pulled out of the Paris Agreement on
climate change, so our polluters are emboldened to set
our sky afire again. We’re like a smoker who quit for
twenty years, got a brutal divorce, and just re-embraced a
three-pack habit. It’ll make us look cool for a while, I
guess, till we can’t breathe again.
Once again we can look to the tragedy of the commons.

We let an insidious lie take hold among the GOP-
inclined among us: that preventing climate change costs
jobs. Sure, it might cost some of our 175,000 coal jobs.
But it doesn’t cost jobs on a larger scale. You want 24
million new jobs? Embrace a green economy. That’s what
the United Nations says, anyway. Of course, if you don’t
believe in international accords, you’re not going to
believe the United Nations. That’s why Trump
torpedoed our relationship with the UN.
Is it reasonable to distrust international accords?

Generally, no. The Paris Agreement isn’t controversial
anywhere else. It’s one of the few international
agreements that has complete international agreement.
Here’s a list of countries that aren’t on board with the
plan to cut emissions: the United States. That’s everyone.
Across the world, we’re seeing the rise of people who

oppose common sense steps to save the environment.
Trump and U.K. demagogue Boris Johnson are lost
causes; we can only hope that Johnson is so occupied
with pulling the U.K. out of Europe that he doesn’t get
around to pulling the U.K. out of the Paris Accords.
Australia prime minister Scott Morrison was propped up
by the collapse of Malcolm Turnbull’s aggressive climate
plan. France’s Emmanuel Macron faces a wave of
“yellow vest” protests that could flip the nation to the far
right. This isn’t good for the world.
It’s a lot of gloom and doom, but it’s not all gloom and
doom. Predictably, most of the excess carbon pumped
into the air is from cities. Organizations like C40, a group
of nearly a hundred of the world’s biggest cities, are
watching global leadership wither in its responsibilities,
and are taking up the charge. After all, they’re the ones
that suffer when destabilized weather burns out
transformers, floods urban areas, and increases snow
removal costs. With the EPA broken beyond repair, it’s
the cities that will hold the line.
The tragedy of the commons in your life
It’s easy to get outraged about what governments aren’t

doing to stop pollution, and heartened by cities’ attempts
to step up. It’s harder to figure out what you should be
doing. For that, I want to talk about sporks.
In the 1970s, the plastic spork—the intensely utile

portmanteau of spoon and fork—became a fast food
staple. With every takeout meal, a plastic-wrapped spork
was released into the environment. Now, you have
silverware. You don’t need a spork. Now think about the
times you’ve remembered to tell the server not to include
a spork with your food. Think about how often you
remembered to do that on an airplane. Think about it for
every single-use plastic object you’ve touched. You will
get overwhelmed fast. Society is built to hand you plastic.
You can’t get away from it.
The spork is the symbol of the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch, a 1.4 million square kilometer area of plastic-
infused water. There are 87,000 tons of plastic in the
Patch, made up of 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.
Microplastics (pieces under 5 mm) account for 94% of
the pieces, but make up only 8% of the mass; more than
75% of the mass is large solids, called macroplastics.
Every plastic bag, every water bottle, every spork you
threw away might have made it into this poisonous
deathtrap the size of six Frances.
We made this giant patch in only 50 years, basically since

the spork became popular. Every part of the lifecycle of
plastic is poisonous. As soon as it gets into the ocean, it
starts to kill marine animals. Nearly half of the world’s
sea turtles and basically all of its marine birds have
plastics in their stomachs. You know how when you go
fishing, you sometimes catch a plastic bottle instead?
Well, by 2050, there will be as much plastic in the ocean
as fish.
How do you stop that? By stopping using plastic and

convincing everyone to do the same. That’s insanely hard
to do, and you have to do it while everyone else is
consuming and disposing of plastic at a prodigious rate.
It’s impossible to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Disclaimer: I admit I set you up there. I started talking

about old-timey farmers ruining the world, but you’re not
an old-timey farmer. Then I talked about anti-vaxxers
ruining the world, but you’re not an anti-vaxxer. Then I
talked about big polluters and big nations ruining the
world, but you’re not that big. Then I got to plastic, and
you realized you’re as vulnerable to the tragedy of the
commons as all those forces you just blamed.
You’re not special in that regard. I’m not special either.
It’s okay. That’s why the choice has to be taken away from us.
When it comes to saving the world and saving ourselves,
we either all have to be in it together or we’re not going
to hold the line at all.
The rescuing of the commons
The commons’ fate is left to lawmakers: The European

parliament banned single-use plastic by a vote of 571–53
last year, and hopes to see its ban go in effect by 2021.
Canada aims to ban single-use plastic by 2021, and India
by 2022. Great Britain has a similar measure going
forward. In the U.S., we haven’t quite gotten there, but
Trump signed a bill that punishes ocean plastic polluters,
though he seemed to believe that other nations were at
fault. (Hint: When it comes to damaging the
environment, we’re always at fault.)
Maine banned styrofoam containers, and similar bills are

underway in Vermont, Colorado, Oregon and New
Jersey. Many U.S. jurisdictions have banned plastic
straws, starting in my home city of Seattle and moving to
New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Here,
Trump is Trump, selling Trump straws at $15 a pack to
enrage the liberals.
He’s going to lose this fight, since all the major

corporations are backing off from plastic straws—
Disney, McDonald’s, Starbucks, American Airlines,
Hyatt, Hilton, and so on. Even Trump’s own Vegas hotel
is buying paper straws, though predictably it’s late paying
for them. No matter. When no restaurants will give you
plastic straws, you’ll have to bring your own. Who’s
gonna do that? Some MAGA-heads and no one else.
On a federal level, it’s going to take some time, if it gets
there at all. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
Senator Ed Markey’s proposed Green New Deal focuses
on replacement of fossil fuels and non-renewables,
cleanup of toxic sites, and reduction of inequality—all
great things. What it doesn’t do is talk about restriction
of choice. Now, in the Congress, the Green New Deal is
probably going nowhere. Even if it does go somewhere,
it’s not going to actually work unless it enforces action on
a person-by-person level. When you talk about climate
change, you must start by accepting we’re at fault. It’s not
other people. It’s us.
There are limits to this approach. It’s not just the

farmers; it’s the cows. Because we eat a lot of meat—and
I count among the most inveterate of meat-eaters—
we’ve added 40% of the methane to the atmosphere. The
greenhouse gas methane is highly effective at trapping
heat, so it contributes to global warming. The massive
increase in livestock since the Industrial Revolution has
poisoned our air. That’s not sustainable. But let’s be real.
We’re not going to let governments ban the eating of
meat. We have to focus on what we can reasonably
control.
The tragedy of the commons is that we are all commoners.

But therein lies our strength as well. We can accept that it
isn’t just the big polluters and the bad Republicans who
are responsible for the problem. We can support each
other as equals. When we have to make difficult changes
in our lifestyles, we can console each other by knowing
we’re saving each other. We need to imagine a better
world, free of garbage patches and measles outbreaks.
We can get there if we just give up control of our worst
impulses. I’m willing to commit. Are you?
Rich explains: tragedy of the commons
Have you ever stopped to think about Smokey the Bear? As a kid
camping in the mountains, I’ll never forget signs of the ursine
Ranger reminding us that “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires.” I
resolved to keep the woods free of flame. Everyone else pledged to
do the same, since Smokey’s reminder was targeted to each of us
as individuals. That’s because Smokey is a wicked smart bear who
knows all about the tragedy of the commons.
Consider an alternate Berenstein Bears universe where “Smokie the

Bear” signs dot mountainous highways. Smokie wields the same
shovel and, with the same earnest look, reminds us that “When We
Work as a Team, We Can Prevent Forest Fires Together.” You look
past the signs and see fields of ash instead of trees. Monster trucks
kick grey plumes skyward as they tear across the hellscape. You see
Mad Max sitting on the roadside, eyes wet with tears. “There were
just so many fires. So many...”
Compared to Smokey, Smokie is a game theory noob. The tragedy

of the commons is about the willingness of the majority to pay a
cost to reach a goal. Smokie assumed that by imploring us to join
the majority, its goal could be achieved. Smokie did not think about
the minority who ignore the cost but still gain the benefits of the
goal. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that group? When I realize I
can gain a benefit without a cost, I join that group. Soon, that’s the
majority, and the fires start to burn.
Smokey knows humans don’t want to pay unnecessary costs.

Instead, Smokey seeks the moment of minimal cooperation, when
you feel your effort is what will turn the tide and prevent forest
fires. When you are in this moment, you see that unless you pay the
cost, the benefit vanishes! You can’t leave it to the team, because
they can’t do it all. You help or everyone loses.
Like any good activist, Smokey knows that if he can’t convince you
to prevent forest fires, or save the whales, or reduce, reuse,
recycle, it just won’t get done. The effort must be individualized. If
not, the cost doesn’t get paid and the benefits go up in smoke.

The Epstein–Barr virus:
Why conspiracies
beget more
conspiracies
August 10, 2019
“Conspiracies have generally been set on foot by the

great, or the friends of the prince; and of these, as many
have been prompted to it by an excess of benefits as by
an excess of wrongs.”
– Machiavelli
Just in case you didn’t feel like you’re living in that

comic book version of Earth where the Justice League
is replaced by the Crime Syndicate of America and evil
always wins, Jeffrey Epstein killed himself Saturday.
Bill Barr was upset. The Attorney General was appalled,

in fact. So appalled that the Barr—who the Alliance for
Justice notes “is highly skeptical of independent
investigations,” having hamstrung the Iran-Contra and
Mueller investigations—appointed an independent
investigator to look into how the American most likely
to die in custody somehow got free of his suicide watch
restrictions long enough to hang himself. A person who
implicated dozens if not hundreds of powerful men in
his child-trafficking ring, not the least of which was his
former buddy, the president of the United States,
Donald J. Trump.
No one believes it.
Not even Trump, who broke free of his handlers to

retweet this.
Let me roadmap this for you:
1. The president retweeted a conspiracy theorist who

accused his 2016 opponent of arranging murders.
2. Said conspiracy theorist used a hashtag—
#trumpbodycount—that accused the president
himself of arranging murders.
3. The supposed murder itself was against Epstein,
who in 2007 was convicted of child trafficking and
arranging encounters for his elite friends, including
those in government.
4. Epstein had injuries from a suicide (or maybe
murder) attempt last month while in custody, and
was placed on suicide watch.
5. That suicide watch was mysteriously lifted at
roughly the same time his case was unsealed,
implicating powerful men in the rape of teenagers.
6. The death occurred in a system headed by Barr,
who quashes inquiries into Trump’s wrongdoing.
7. In 2016, right before the election, Epstein and
Trump were named in a horrifying child rape case
by a woman using the pseudonym of Katie
Johnson, who then mysteriously dropped the suit.
8. The unsealed files revealed that a victim of
Epstein’s, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, was recruited
by him at Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago.
9. Barr worked at Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm that
represented Epstein in 2008, which Barr testified
would mandate his recusal from such cases.
10. Barr then un-recused himself from Epstein’s case,
but not from the investigation of Labor Secretary
Alex Acosta’s 2007 sweetheart deal for Epstein,
which another K&E attorney negotiated with
Acosta, leading to his resignation in July.
11. Barr’s father Donald Barr hired Epstein in the late
1970s to teach at the Dalton School.
12. While at Dalton, the younger Barr introduced
Epstein to Donald Trump, who, prior to the
Trump Airlines bankruptcy, sold him an airplane
that became known as the “Lolita Express.”
Actually, that last part’s untrue. I made it up. It sounded

good, right? I even namechecked Epstein’s sex plane to
make it more real. Which makes it fit with everything in
the tweet the president of the United States just
retweeted, all of which is false.
Admit it: Some part of your brain wants Epstein’s
suicide to be a homicide. You likely hate Trump or
Clinton or even just billionaire pedophiles enough to
want to see Epstein go out screaming for help and then
choking in terror. I know I do. I’m not proud of it. I
also know this will make prosecuting Epstein’s clients
much harder, and that makes me angry too.
Especially if one of those people is Epstein’s former pal,

Donald J. Trump. I use his middle initial because that’s
what I read over and over in the Johnson suit, where
phrases like “sex slave” and “underage sex parties” get
closely associated with the name “Donald J. Trump.” If
I ever think, hey, maybe I should start respecting this
guy, I remember that phrasing.
That’s not the only reason. Trump is the vector of all

the most loathsome conspiracies of the last two
decades. Obama’s birth certificate? Check. The
supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism?
Definitely. 9/11 trutherism? Regrettably so. Climate
change not real? Of course. Hurricane Maria’s death toll
faked? Afraid so. Millions voting illegally? Yup.
Windmills causing cancer? Man. Anything Alex Jones
spouts, Trump echoes full bore.
Trump really likes unfounded murder theories,

especially those involving his opponents. He said Ted
Cruz’s dad killed JFK and Joe Scarborough killed an
intern and some nameless person killed Antonin Scalia.
Of course he most dedicatedly proclaims those about
the Clintons. He fanned the flames with this quote: “It’s
the one thing with her, whether it’s Whitewater or
whether it’s Vince or whether it’s Benghazi. It’s always a
mess with Hillary.” Whitewater and Benghazi were
investigations of varying validity, but Vince Foster’s
alleged murder is a right-wing fantasy. Similarly with
Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich,
where a lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration
worked with Fox News to spread the theory that
Clinton’s team colluded with Wikileaks.
I chose the word “vector” explicitly. Conspiracies work

like viruses. They find a host, make them an incubator,
and impel that host to share it with others. The
connection between the reprobates Epstein and Barr is
an easy link to draw, but it’s probably not a truthful link.
The fact that Barr worked at Kirkland & Ellis does not
make him a murderer. It also doesn’t clear him of
murder. It’s just a fact. If you want Barr to go down in
flames with Epstein, it’s a fact you might use to bring
that outcome about.
Big conspiracies like murdering Epstein are unlikely to

work, at least for long. The bigger the conspiracy, the
harder it is to keep it bottled up. Say you decide to
commit a crime, and you tell no one. Let’s say you have
a 5% chance of revealing the crime, whether
accidentally or not. Well, then you have only a 5%
chance to be caught.
Let’s say you bring on a friend to help with the crime.

You both individually have a 5% chance of revealing it,
so you have nearly a 10% (5% + (95% of 5%)) chance
of being caught. You get eight more co-conspirators.
You now have more than a 40% chance of one of you
revealing the act. Ten more co-conspirators gets you to
about 65%, and that’s only until only one of you reveals
it. Any number of you might after that, raising your
chances of a full-blown reveal.
Per physicist David Robert Grimes:
“For a conspiracy of even only a few thousand actors, intrinsic

failure would arise within decades. For hundreds of thousands,
such failure would be assured within less than half a decade. It’s
also important to note that this analysis deals solely with intrinsic
failure, or the odds of a conspiracy being exposed intentionally or
accidentally by actors involved—extrinsic analysis by non-
participants would also increase the odds of detection, rendering
such Byzantine cover-ups far more likely to fail.”
That’s why I’m sure the moon landing is real. A moon

landing would require a whole lot more than 20 people
to fake. I feel good about JFK. I’ve seen for myself that
the earth is spherical, so don’t get me started on that.
Machiavelli had this one on lockdown. In his Discourses

on Livy, he devotes a chapter to the game theory behind
conspiracies—not the kind that gets people to freak out
about fluoride, but the kind that gets autocrats killed:
“There are two risks, then, in communicating a plot to any one

individual: the first, lest he should denounce you voluntarily; the
second, lest he should denounce you, being himself arrested on
suspicion, or from some indications, and being convicted and
forced to it by the torture. But there are means of escaping both
these dangers: the first, by denial and by alleging personal hatred
to have prompted the accusation; and the other, by denying the
charge, and alleging that your accuser was constrained by the force
of torture to tell lies. But the most prudent course is not to
communicate the plot to any one, and to act in accordance with
the above-cited examples; and if you cannot avoid drawing
someone into your confidence, then to let it be not more than one,
for in that case the danger is much less than if you confide in
many.”
Machiavelli understood that the conspiracy game is a
sequential game. A sequential game is one where
participants take turns, having learned from a previous
player’s turn what they did and adapting thereafter. That
conspiracies come in sequences is what makes a
conspiracist likely to fall prey to a conspiracy.
Machiavelli notes the story of the emperor Commodus,

whom you may know from his appearance in Gladiator.
“The Emperor Commodus had amongst his nearest friends and

intimates Letus and Electus, two captains of the Prætorian
soldiers; he also had Marcia as his favorite concubine. As these
three had on several occasions reproved him for the excesses with
which he had stained his own dignity and that of the Empire, he
resolved to have them killed, and wrote a list of the names of
Marcia, Letus, and Electus, and of some other persons, whom he
wanted killed the following night. Having placed this list under
his pillow, he went to the bath; a favorite child of his, who was
playing in the chamber and on the bed, found this list, and on
going out with it in his hand was met by Marcia, who took the
list from the child. Having read it, she immediately sent for Letus
and Electus, and when these three had thus become aware of the
danger that threatened them, they resolved to forestall the
Emperor, and without losing any time they killed Commodus the
following night.”
Under his pillow! Dude, you are lucky to have been

played by Joaquin Phoenix. Anyway, if Barr wanted to
kill Epstein, in the light of his highly publicized unsealed
files, he’d need quite a large conspiracy. He’d need
people on the inside of an agency he only recently
inherited, and in a jurisdiction hostile to the president.
He’d need cameras to conveniently go out, which the
internet wanted so much to believe.
Barr is a lackey of the first degree, but it takes a lot to
transition that guy into a murderer, and even more to
transform the system into one. That said, it’s tempting
to believe it’s impossible for Epstein to have committed
suicide. For this to work, the Metropolitan Correctional
Center staff would have to give Epstein the tools to do
himself in. This seems highly unlikely, given what a
prisoner who’d been there said about the place.
“There’s no way that man could have killed himself. I’ve done too
much time in those units. It’s an impossibility. Between the floor
and the ceiling is like eight or nine feet. There’s no way for you to
connect to anything. You have sheets, but they’re paper level, not
strong enough. He was 200 pounds—it would never happen.
When you’re on suicide watch, they put you in this white smock,
a straitjacket. They know a person cannot be injurious to
themselves. The clothing they give you is a jump-in uniform.
Everything is a dark brown color. Could he have done it from the
bed? No sir. There’s a steel frame, but you can’t move it. There’s
no light fixture. There’s no bars. They don’t give you enough in
there that could successfully create an instrument of death. You
want to write a letter, they give you rubber pens and maybe once a
week a piece of paper. Nothing hard or made of metal. And
there’s a cop at the door about every nine minutes, whether you’re
on suicide watch or not. There’s up to 80 people there. They could
put two in a cell. It’s one or two, but I’ll never believe this guy
had a cellmate. He was too blown up.”
I definitely believe that. And also:
“Some of the guards are on a major power trip. They know guys
there are suffering. They know something the rest of the world
hasn’t seen, that a place like this exists in this country, and they
get off on it. If the guards see that the guy is breaking, they’re
going to help you break.”
Do I believe that Barr ordered Epstein killed? No, I do
not. Do I believe that it’s incredibly suspicious that the
suicide watch was lifted after a suicide attempt by the
most dangerous person in America to the president? I
absolutely do. Do I believe the MCC staff might’ve
made it so hard on Epstein that he followed through
with his previous plan? One hundred percent.
Killing Epstein would be a massive conspiracy. It’s hard

to grok how big that would have to be. Just walking
away and letting him die? Easy. And quite convenient
for some powerful people, including the president.
That’s a conspiracy I can believe in. I’ll bet you do too.
Only Trump makes this possible. He’s the one who
said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and
shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That’s
a man who’s capable of ordering a hit on a witness.
Not everyone comes across that way. It’s not easy to

imagine Pete Buttigieg spreading conspiracies willy-nilly
only to be tripped up by them himself. He’s an honest
fellow. Donald J. Trump has lied over ten thousand
times in a couple of years. If lies and conspiracy take
this new Commodus down, I’m down with that.
Conspiracy begets conspiracy. Machiavelli again:
“There is, then, no greater misfortune for a prince than that a

conspiracy should be formed against him; for it either causes his
death, or it dishonors him. If the conspiracy succeeds, he dies; if it
be discovered, and he punishes the conspirators with death, it will
always be believed that it was an invention of the prince to satisfy
his cruelty and avarice with the blood and possessions of those
whom he had put to death.”
Yeah, that sounds about right.

Rich explains: the conspiracy game
Conspiracies are a tough study in game theory, because us game

theorists like to think we’re way too smart to fall into any kind of
trap. We talk a lot about perfect information and mixed strategies
to build up the best outcome, but most of our rules go right out
the window once someone starts lying about their goals. It’s
enough to make someone paranoid.
When it comes down to it, conspiracies don’t show up as often as

you might think, and the main reason is just simple arithmetic.
Because they are based on false premises, they rarely get the
conspirator any real utility. But they take a lot of work to pull off,
even if they’re not successful. If my actions don’t work towards
my goals, then I’m sabotaging myself. Why would I purposefully
put myself in a position to gain less utility? I can think of two
quick reasons.
Either
A) The Long Con That No One Will See Coming,
or
B) A series of regrettable choices with no payoff.
First off, if you’re the kind of mastermind that can sit in a

compromised condition for turn after turn and then somehow win
it all in the final round to my complete surprise and dismay, more
power to you. But when I look at most games, there isn’t usually a
pile of utility sitting around to gather in a single turn. Winning a
game takes some effort over time, right?
On the other hand, maybe this is the moment when Moriarty

shows up and declares that it was all about the dark utility, hidden
in distant north! Conspiracies, like every good villainous plot, are
all about keeping values secret. Unfortunately for the villains, as
our world has progressed, secrets have become much more
difficult to keep, and the rest of the players can see the con
coming. Which just leaves the villains to sit and smile, refusing to
accept that their choices are doomed to bring the game crashing
down around them.

You can’t spell
“believer” without
“lie”: A look at why
Trump lies so much
September 16, 2019
“Trust is like glass: shatters in an instant, with a

single blow, and takes a long time to restore.”
– Kathy Sullivan, chief of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration under President Obama
The world was riveted last week at the ruin wreaked

during Hurricane Dorian. The storm blew the Bahamas
to Kingdom Come. Officially 50 people are dead, but
with at least 1,300 missing after almost two weeks, that
count is sure to skyrocket. Seventy thousand people are
without homes. Then a new storm smashed into Grand
Bahama, ravaging the island further. Through all of this,
the world could not turn away.
Not from the storm damage. The world was riveted by

the spectacle of the president of the United States
doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and quintupling down
on an outright lie that Dorian was likely to hit Alabama.
He made a mistake about the storm’s direction, to put it
charitably. No matter who told him he was wrong, he
insisted he was the rightest meteorologist ever.

This caused the Birmingham branch of the National
Weather Service to tweet:
That should have been that. A sane human would have

said, “Welp, you’re the weather people. Good job,
folks!” Alabamians would’ve inched out from under
couches to a summer sky and sighed in relief. Instead,
Trump claimed he was right all along, tried to get Fox
News to back him up, then took out a Sharpie and drew
his own weather forecast on a map.
It got worse. Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney asked

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to fix the problem.
Ross threatened to fire employees who disagreed with
Trump’s forecast. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration issued an unsigned
statement that threw NWS Birmingham under the bus.
With investigations underway, the weather report was
now a political document.
Why did the president care so much about covering up

so obvious a lie? Well, he’s nuts. Also, he lies all the
time. Specifically, he utters a public lie an average of 13
times a day, for a whopping whopperfest of more than
12,000 lies in 28 months in office. It’s unthinkable that
he could be that efficient at something.
We talk about believers in Trump living in their own
reality, disconnected from any notion of the truth.
That’s easy to understand, but hard to explain. Who
benefits from divorcing themselves from reality? What
value could there be in believing that a hurricane would
hit somewhere it wouldn’t?
Game theory makes it easier to explain. In multiple

studies, players were given the chance to lie about an
amount of money they’d give another player.
Participants were more sensitive to changes in their gain
from lying than to their opponent’s loss. In general,
people find it difficult to lie. But they’re more willing to
get over it as incentives to lie go up. Meanwhile, as the
consequences to their opponents go up, people don’t
care as much.
Trump has insanely high benefits for lying. Since those

that don’t like Trump really hate him, his power
depends on him keeping those who like him happy.
Telling them the truth regularly—admitting error,
especially—probably won’t get that done. Lying to them
about the magnitude of his successes makes it more
likely he will get their vote again, or get them to commit
chaos in his name. It might make some members of his
base a bit freaked out on occasion, but their loss is low.
Even when members of his base suffer—say, soybean

farmers who get told China will pay for his idiotic
tariffs—Trump’s payoff for caring about their suffering
is lower than the value of continuing to lie. Even if the
lies are blatant.
There’s a very good reason that he does this: It’s a

loyalty test.
Just ask chess master and dissident Garry Kasparov:
Loyalty is a deeply studied concept in game theory. It’s

put through millions of non-academic tests every
minute. You’re probably serving as a test subject in
dozens of those tests right now.
Just look in your wallet. How many loyalty cards you

got? Three? Ten? Twenty? You might have them for
coffee shops, salons, airlines, grocery stores, hotels,
pharmacists, and any number of other programs. They
bet on your willingness to restrict your information and
make suboptimal choices. They’ll pay you to do so.
Here’s how loyalty cards work. Every business is

incentivized to retain customers. It’s commonly (though
not universally) believed that it’s more effective to keep
customers than to try to get new ones. So a company
will offer you an extra payoff (“a free haircut...”) if you
make several payments (“...after ten haircuts”).
Now, if you like your hair stylist, you’ll sit through ten
haircuts to get the free one. I do. I love my stylist; she’s
a gamer who makes me look good. Since I get about six
haircuts a year, it’ll be a couple years before I get that
free one. Who cares? I’m in it to win it. My hair stylist
makes me like the game I’m playing.
But boy, if I didn’t. There’s no reason to believe my
stylist’s shop is the best economic choice on any given
day; in fact, it’s almost certainly not. If I were willing to
look around, I’d save more money than the value of
that free haircut, and I’d have that money right away.
The use of my loyalty card is a terrible economic
investment. I don’t care. As a customer, I’m aware of
the switching costs, the price of changing my behavior.
I could get a bad haircut if I shopped around. Screw
that. I like the service I get, I think the payoff is okay,
and I don’t want to do the research. My stylist makes
the switching costs high, even if every choice I make is bad.
Behaving this way can have costs I can’t see. Extreme

loyalty is fundamentally a bad idea for the person being
loyal. If I restrict my choices—if I don’t think—I will
make bad decision after bad decision. If I have a limited
amount of time to consume news, I could either look at
different sources on different days, or the same source
every day. If I choose only one, and if that one is the
commentary shows on Fox News, I’ll only know what
Hannity and Carlson and Dobbs tell me. If they lie to
me, I’m only going to know lies.
In politics, a base is a group of loyal people who have

intentionally restricted their choices to one set of
politicians. I’m part of the Democratic base: In the last
20 years, I have only voted for a few Republicans in
primaries, and only when I had no meaningful choices
as a Democrat. I’m not part of the progressive base or
the mainstream Democrat base; I vary between those
groups because I’m looking for good choices among
(mildly) different sets of political views. Being part of a
highly restricted base can hurt. For example, if you’re so
wedded to progressivism that you’ll tear down a
moderate candidate of your party, or so wedded to
moderateness that you’ll tear down a progressive, you
may cripple that candidate when you need them.
Trump’s base is built on lies: immigrants are all

criminals (they’re not), voter fraud is rife (it isn’t), the
media is the enemy (they aren’t). His believers are
motivated to tell him they believe his lies, because they
need him to represent their views. When he says
Alabama is in a hurricane path, and says over and over
“No, no, it’s really true, I really mean that,” what he is
saying is “You should always believe me.” They might
just. They’ll make suboptimal choices to show they
continue to be loyal.
Trump continues to lie because he needs to profit off

future lies. He lies about immigrants because he needs
people to fear them when he steals money from the
Pentagon to build his Wall. He lies about voter fraud
because he needs to sow doubt in the election system in
case he comes up short in the polls. He lies about the
media because he needs people not to believe them
when they say he’s unduly influenced by Vladimir Putin.
He lies about Alabama because he needs his base to
believe he is infallible.
This week, we saw how dangerous these lies could be.

The Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for a
drone strike that disrupted Saudi oil production.
Without producing any evidence, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo blamed it on Iran. Even with John
Bolton pounding the pavement, the administration
knows it might need a war with Iran to remain in
power. Wars aren’t just things you can launch willy nilly;
you need a justification. If you lie about who did
something awful—say, you baselessly conflate Saddam
Hussein with 9/11—you can get the justification to
attack whomever you want to. People aren’t going to
believe you in a vacuum; you need to have prepped
them by inundating them with lies and seeing who
remains loyal. That’s how you keep your base. That is, if
you build your base on lies.
Thankfully, there’s an upside to Trump lying all the

time. When his people make an outlandish claim such as
that Iran bombed the Saudis, Trump has already told so
many lies that people outside the base don’t believe
them. In essence, there’s an anti-base, one that won’t
believe the administration even if it appears to be telling
the truth. Trump’s bar for war with Iran is higher in the
face of lie after lie after lie. We may no longer have truth
as a bedrock, but we don’t follow liars easily either. If
his anemic approval polls are to be believed, more of us
are in Trump’s anti-base than the base.
I can’t guarantee that Trump’s loyalty gambit won’t

work out for him. The electoral college is weighted
toward Republicans and also incumbents. My hunch is
that it won’t, at least in 2020. Most of the Democratic
candidates are building their campaigns on truth, and
the truth is more compelling than Trump’s continued
dispersal of lies. If we can get out of our own way—if
we can focus on the goal of defeating Trump first and
enacting potentially divisive policies later—we will
probably win this thing.
We’ve chosen truth over blind loyalty. That’s a base I’m

happy to join.

Rich explains: deception
Not all lies are told by someone shouting at the top of their lungs,
but it turns out that the two activities have a lot in common. They
are both perceived differently based on how many people are
doing it and how often they are doing so.
Imagine that you’re in the library, having a hushed conversation

about Machiavelli’s lesser known work, Discourses on Livy.
Naturally, you get excited and start to raise your voice, gaining you
a stern glare from the librarian.
Of course, when you’re out having the same conversation at a

busy restaurant, no one comments on your excitement. Soon
enough, you start to lose your voice trying to make yourself heard
over the roar of the crowd, because Machiavelli had some good
points!
All right, that’s enough imagining for now. The problem is that
you’ve fallen prey to Weber’s Law, which describes the limits of
human observation—the necessary amount of noticeable increase
in a stimulus is proportional to its intensity. Raising your voice in a
quiet room is instantly noticeable, but doing the same thing in a
loud arena barely makes a dent. Experiments have shown that
humans are equally terrible at noticing small differences in tons of
places, including measuring weights and distances, brightness,
color, and even in price.
Consider that the difference between a game for $63.99 and

$64.99 seems all but meaningless, but a $2 candy bar seems like a
crime when set against its $1 candy neighbors. The dollar lost is a
very different dollar in those cases.
When an honest person gets caught in a lie, our ears perk up like a
wild pack of librarians. But consider an environment of discourse
filled with endless fibs and falsehoods. How do we even begin to
tell the difference between egregious and outrageous? According
to both Weber and Machiavelli, it might be much harder than we
think.

The Thunder in the
Rotunda: How Nancy
Pelosi rope-a-doped
Trump
September 26, 2019
This week I was in DC and saw people just trying to get

through this thing called life. On Monday morning,
when a Secret Service agent was asked why they cleared
Lafayette Park for no apparent reason, he shrugged and
told my companion, “Hey man, it’s the White House.
You never know what goes on in there.” At lunchtime,
a Trump International Hotel gift shop employee said, “I
love my job, because nobody ever buys anything.” On
Monday afternoon, a Capitol cop pointed out a shady
area and told me, “Over there’s a good place to hide
from people.” Three years in, the beleaguered residents
of our capital were waiting for all this madness to end.
On Tuesday, I saw them breathe in and realize it might

just.
Sure, they all know Democrats eat their own,. House

Democrats looked like they’d live up to expectations.
Last week the Judiciary Committee brought in former
Trump campaign manager and Senate hopeful Corey
Lewandowski, who grandstanded and chest-puffed his
way through the hearing. Chaos erupted.
The reply from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to
kneecap her own people. “I would have held him in
contempt right then and there,” she said, hovering over
Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, who fumed at
Lewandowski but let him snake out without charges.
For months, Pelosi had clashed with Nadler and
progressives over their obsession with impeaching
Trump, which she did not want to do. Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and other
progressive legislators stated that the biggest crime they
saw in DC was the Democrats’ failure to act on
Trump’s smorgasbord of offenses. Pelosi said she did
not have the votes—about 160 of the needed 218
Democrats favored opening an impeachment inquiry—
and the public wasn’t there anyway. According to
Politico, Pelosi had a different goal:
“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison.”
This made some sense. Pelosi’s job is not to put a

Democratic president in the White House. It’s to
remain speaker. She only gets to keep that job if the
Democrats keep the House. If she believed
impeachment would lose the House, she would not do
anything to endanger her position as speaker.
This week, a whistleblower complaint broke the

floodgates open. If the memorandum of a call between
Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky are
to be believed—and trusting anything in this circus is
risky—then the day after Robert Mueller testified to
Congress, Trump offered to release hundreds of
millions in withheld foreign aid and sell Ukraine some
needed Javelin missiles. This had to make the newly
elected Zelensky feel quite good.
Then Trump said, in the tenor of a mob boss,
“I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
Zelensky would get his missiles to fight off encroaching

Russians if and only if Ukraine helped to find the
servers that presumably contains the hacked DNC
emails. Worse, Trump asked Zelensky to work with
Attorney General Bill Barr and attorney Rudy Giuliani
to concoct an investigation of Democratic frontrunner
Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who joined the board of
the gas company Burisma Holdings after it got
investigated in 2013. Zelensky and his people were then
visited by administration officials and Giuliani to discuss
how to “navigate the president’s demands.” After the
story broke, Ukraine says it believed the aid was tied
directly to them playing ball with Trump. Giuliani
copped to all of this on TV in a whirlwind tour of self-
immolation.
That Trump’s request was entirely without merit is

almost beside the point. This was a massive abuse of
power, manipulating foreign aid to falsify a hit job on an
opponent—the one polls say is most likely to defeat
Trump if nominated.
This is something Trump crowed that he would do if

given the opportunity. He had already asked Russia for
help against Hillary Clinton in his 2016 campaign, saying
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the
30,000 emails that are missing.” After the Mueller
Report came out, George Stephanopoulos asked Trump
if he’d accept a foreign country’s help to undermine his
opponent. Trump said “I think I’d take it.” If reports
are true, he did so less than a month later.
With all of this evidence, Nancy Pelosi cast aside her
public lack of desire to impeach Trump. “This is a
violation of law,” she said, and then made it clear that
she would make sure that “No one is above the law.”
She used the word “Betrayal” even more than I do. In a
mere 24 hours, the House went from 160 votes for an
impeachment inquiry to an astonishing 219—a majority
of the House. All because a speaker who opposed
impeachment became one who supported it.
Then again, maybe she never opposed impeachment at

all.
I know that’s hard for progressives to believe, but

Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress a very long time.
She’s a master of the long game. She’s worked the
room. When she makes a move, she knows how people
will perceive it. She knows that sometimes, you just
need a good rope-a-dope.
If you’re a boxing fan, you know that term from

Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle strategy, 45
years ago in Zaire. The 24-year-old heavyweight champ
George Foreman was a big dude who could punch
anyone into the mat. 32-year-old Ali had superior
quickness, but knew he couldn’t win on finesse.
Instead, he and trainer Angelo Dundee hatched a

dangerous strategy: Starting in round 2, Ali would rest
against the ropes and let Foreman pummel him on the
arms and midsection. Ali would deflect some blows,
dodge others, and accept the beating from the rest. In
return, Ali would punch Foreman right in the face when
he could. And he’d taunt Foreman. A lot. “You can’t
hurt me!” he shouted. “You punch like a sissy!”
After a half dozen rounds of beatdown in the 90-degree
heat, Ali had taken blow after blow. Rounds 3 through 5
favored Foreman. But around the end of round 5,
Foreman visibly tired. His swings became wilder and
slower. Then in round 7, Ali came back swinging. He
thrashed Foreman’s right eye shut, let him whiff on a
punch that made Foreman nearly fall out of the ring,
then knocked Foreman to the mat in round 8.
Exhausted, Foreman struggled to stand. That was that.
The refs stopped the fight, and Ali was back on his way
to being the greatest of all time.
The rope-a-dope Ali performed had two main features.

The first is the rope. In a rope-a-dope, the rope absorbs
much of the beating taken by the fighter against it.
Plastic deformation occurs when a struck object
doesn’t give way. A fighter in the middle of the ring has
to use their leg strength to stay upright, so the beating
they take is entirely absorbed by the body. A fighter on
the fringes lets the ropes carry them backwards, leading
to more elastic deformation. They can quite
literally bounce back.
The tactic only works if the opponent lets it. An

unwilling opponent will move back into the ring, risking
extending the fight but not tiring themselves with longer
swings. Only if the opponent foolishly moves toward
the ropes with the fighter employing the rope-a-dope
will they fall into its trap. As announcer Howard Cosell
noted, to do a rope-a-dope, you need a dope.
The dope du jour is Donald Trump. Here’s how Pelosi

got him. Her first step as newly elected speaker was to
caution against impeachment until the Mueller Report
dropped. Then, when it did not directly conclude that
Trump colluded with the Russians, she resisted calls for
impeachment on the grounds that Trump tried to
obstruct the process. The public needed to see
both action (collusion before his election)
and reaction (obstruction after his election) from Trump
to back his impeachment, she concluded. She let herself
be hit, over and over and over, by both Republicans and
progressives for not rising to impeach on somewhat
shaky grounds.
Pelosi had a lot of rope behind her—decades of

building power and relationships. The House
Intelligence chair, Adam Schiff, supported her stance on
impeachment. So did Oversight chair Elijah Cummings.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the
committees were not engaged in impeachment inquiries.
These were resolute people, and they could handle
whatever the impeach-the-motherfucker progressives
could dish out, at least between primary seasons. They
stood together and did not budge from the rope until
something better came along.
As is obvious now, they knew it would. Believing he

had been exonerated by Mueller, Trump was
emboldened to try the foreign-influence tactic again.
Pelosi felt confident he couldn’t resist screwing things
up. When he did, it would be an action as president, not
as a candidate. Simple, clear, and dumb as a concrete
block. They trusted Trump to be Trump, to self-
impeach. Boy, did that dangerous strategy pay off. Now
nearly every House Democrat supports impeachment.
By resisting the impatient wailing of people like me—

and I was whining at her as late as last Tuesday—Pelosi
came roaring out like a champion. She played Trump
and her Democratic detractors, ending up entirely in
command of all wings of her party. Of course, the fight
is not yet over. It’s round 7 of the Rumble in the
Jungle—the “Thunder in the Rotunda,” let’s call it—
with Trump loyalists tiring but still expecting to win. In
a press conference, Trump went full dictator mode:
“Nancy Pelosi, as far as I’m concerned, is no longer the
speaker of the House.” Not a good look.
Round 8 is still to come, and we don’t know what will

happen. The House Democrats could still bollix this up,
Rudy Giuliani-style. Of course, even if they do impeach
Trump, two-thirds of the Senate has to vote to convict
before he can be removed. Highly unlikely in these
hyperpartisan times.
Then there’s what this means for the Democratic

candidates. Biden, already losing ground in the polls,
could suffer further damage from baseless Republican
attacks on his efforts to get the Ukrainian prosecutor
removed years later and his son’s proximity to the
situation. Or he could get sympathy for being the Nancy
Kerrigan to Trump’s Tonya Harding, and rise in the
polls. Depending on who you want to be president, you
could see this story as helping or hurting your
candidate—that is, interfering in the election.
Let’s focus on the clear thing: The House Democrats

are swinging hard against an opponent that took the bait
and overthrew his punches. Somebody’s gonna get
knocked out. For the first time, I think Pelosi is going to
be the one with the gloves in the air when the final bell
sounds.

Rich explains: elasticity
I’m not into boxing, but when Mike explained the tactics behind
the rope-a-dope, it hit me at a visceral level. See, when I’m not
teaching math, I’m teaching about physics, and I always look
forward to the day I get to talk about the complexities of the
balance between momentum and impulse. It just never occurred
to me that Muhammad Ali had them down cold.
Objects in motion have a momentum (p), which physicists

calculate as the product of their mass (m) and velocity (v). In a
collision, we care about the change (Δ) in the velocity at the time
of impact.
Say a car with a mass of 3,300 pounds accelerates to a speed of 30

mph. That results in a momentum of just over 20,000 Newton-
seconds. Okay, that unit is very strange—Newton-seconds?
Fortunately, they perfectly describe what it takes to bring that car
to a halt. I need to apply a force (F) over an interval of time (t).
That’s my impulse (J). In an impact, the momentum equals the
impulse.
p=J p = mΔv J = FΔt FΔt = mΔv

The longer the interval, the less force I need overall. But if I want
to stop the car on a dime, I need a massive force.
Boxing is a sport that depends on these equations. Boxing gloves

already help to increase impact time, resulting in a smaller force
to an opponent’s face. By adding the ropes to the equation, Ali
may have been able to double or even triple the impact time of
those punches, dropping the force he felt to half or even a third.
Basically, Ali was dealt potential knockout punches as if they were
coming from a child.
With his clear mastery of Newtonian mechanics, Ali was able to

hammer out a ruthless strategy on that fateful night. In so doing,
he made us all feel a little less certain whenever we have our
opponents “on the ropes.”

Game theory and the
four magic words that
will convict Trump
October 10, 2019
I kicked off this series with a column called “Game

theory and the two magic words that will impeach
Trump.” Those two words were “and Pence.” The logic
was that since then-House Speaker Paul Ryan yearned
to be president, a movement to impeach both Trump
and Pence at once would get Ryan, the next in the
succession line, to join that movement. A cornerstone
problem, though, was that Pence was not yet implicated
in Trump’s impeachable actions.
What a difference a “yet” makes. Pence is implicated in

the Ukraine scandal, the backbone of the House inquiry
to impeach Trump. Pence is a target, and we’re likely
going to find out he was more involved in Trump’s
shakedown. At minimum, Pence canceled a trip to
Ukraine as a warning to its new president that he’d
better play ball. At maximum, he’s been the bagman for
Trump the whole time. Either way, his defense has been
shallow and evasive, as if he didn’t think he’d ever be
thrown under the bus by Trump. Pence is in a
prisoner’s dilemma, the game theory conundrum that’s
central to the original “and Pence” strategy.
In a prisoner’s dilemma, two prisoners are given the
options to cooperate with each other or betray the
other. As it turns out, “betray” typically has the higher
payoff for both participants.
Of course, it bears wondering: Is there any point to

impeaching Trump if the Senate is just going to have a
30-second trial and acquit him? Is there anything
Democrats can do to make it more likely that Senate
Republicans will observe their oath of office and
actually convict Trump? I think there are four words that
would make it significantly more likely. The words can
only come from one person. The weight bears on the
rest of us to convince that person to issue them.
Those words are “I decline to serve.” They must

come from Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Here’s why: If the Republicans vote to convict Trump,

and Pence was just as guilty, there will be a groundswell
to remove him as well. As every schoolchild knows,
when the president can’t serve, the vice president steps
in. But when the vice president can’t serve, the
president appoints a new one, subject to congressional
approval—not Senate approval, the whole congress. If
they’re both removed at the same time, the speaker of
the House becomes president and appoints a new vice
president.
Since that’s Pelosi, that’s unpalatable to Senate

Republicans. Especially if Pelosi might appoint Hillary
Clinton as her vice president and immediately resign,
making Hillary president. While that’s a highly unlikely
scenario, it’s armageddon for Republicans. So they can’t
support Trump’s conviction as long as it’s in play.
Surprisingly, this is not the first time this scenario has
come up.
In fall of 1973, VP Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading

no contest to tax evasion. That might’ve been the year’s
biggest scandal had not President Nixon a mere ten
days later fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the
Saturday Night Massacre. With Agnew’s successor,
Gerald Ford, facing a rocky confirmation by Congress,
speculation turned to House Speaker Carl Albert—a
Democrat from Oklahoma.
If Nixon resigned without a vice president being

confirmed, Albert needed to know what to do should
he become president. Speechwriter Ted Sorenson
steeled his resolve with a legendary memo that explored
all the possibilities that Albert might face. Sorenson shot
down the idea that Albert should appoint and then step
aside for a Republican VP.
Instead, Sorenson instructed Albert to throw out all the

crooks left in the White House, lock down Nixon’s
records for investigation, address Congress, and, above
all, decline the opportunity to seek re-election. Sorenson
urged Albert to say:
“At no time did I seek this awesome burden; but I cannot shrink
from my responsibility. Under the statute long ago considered with
care and lawfully enacted by the representatives of the people
convened in Congress, my election by the House of Representatives
as Speaker placed me next in line for the high office to which I
have now succeeded. Between now and January 20, 1977, I
intend to fulfill the obligations of that office to the best of my
ability. I shall not be a candidate for the Presidency in 1976 or
at any other time.”
Nancy Pelosi remembers how wrenching Watergate was
for America, which is why she’s never publicly backed
impeachment until the Ukraine scandal made it
impossible to avoid. She’s in a powerful position: she
can say the House speaker will decline to serve if the
president and vice president are both convicted. Then
the succession would move to the Senate president pro
tempore, which is currently Iowa Senator Chuck
Grassley.
Let’s chat about Chuck. He’s a Republican, sure. He

believes what Republicans believe. But he’s a respected,
uncorrupted politician. He’s 86 years old and he’s plenty
likable. Look at his Twitter feed: It’s half University of
Northern Iowa volleyball scores. How adorable is that?
If you have to have a Republican in the White House,
you’d take Grassley in a heartbeat.
Chuck Grassley likely doesn’t want to be president. He

would be if the other option was any of the fools and
parasites currently in the White House.
Beyond Pence, you can cross off Secretary of State Mike

Pompeo, Attorney General Bill Barr, and Energy
Secretary Rick Perry, who are already embroiled in the
Ukraine scandal. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is
right behind them.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, HUD Secretary Ben

Carson, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross are mired in their
own scandals. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao is
tangled in scandal with her husband, Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (and, being foreign born, she
can’t serve anyway).
About the only people on the succession schedule that
might survive impeachment and the subsequent purge
are Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Interior Secretary
David Berhardt, and HHS Secretary Eugene Scalia, who
haven’t been there long enough to wreck their agencies
the way most Trump appointees do.
Grassley takes the gig over them. At 86, President

Grassley’s not going to run for re-election, not after
turning on Trump, anyway. Getting President Grassley
installed gives the Democrats the most wide-open path
to taking the White House in 2020. Weirdly, it also gives
Republicans the most wide-open path to keeping the
Senate, as they will not be saddled with an impeached
and tyrannical child-president. Independents could vote
for Republicans again and feel good about it.
The only way to get President Grassley is if Nancy

Pelosi guarantees she will not assume the presidency if
Trump and Pence are convicted. She should decline to
serve, then let the ball roll. The ball might roll in
interesting ways. Emboldened by the possibility of
losing the presidency to Grassley, Pence might turn on
his boss, invoking the 25th Amendment. Barr might
discover enough self-preservation instinct to open an
investigation that he doesn’t quash. Perry, after removing
the knife from his back, might tell all to Congress when
he capitulates to his shiny new subpoena. Grassley
might unexpectedly decide to spend more time with his
family, making the next president... why, it’s Moscow
Mitch McConnell, of all people. (He could be
impeached with his wife!)
All of this happens because the unthinkable outcome—

President Pelosi—is taken off the table.
This is a game theory strategy called the optional
prisoner’s dilemma. In the typical prisoner’s dilemma,
both sides have only binary options; they must decide to
betray each other or cooperate with each other. But
“cooperate” and “betray” aren’t the only two options in
some dilemmas. There’s also “abstain.” When a player
in an optional prisoner’s dilemma abstains, they get
what’s called the loner’s payoff, which isn’t the higher
payoff of a winning player (if there is one), but it is
a guaranteed payoff. The loner wins by not playing.
As anyone who’s ever seen WarGames knows, when

destruction is mutually assured, the only winning move
is not to play.
There’s a cost to stepping aside, of course. Pelosi would

be giving up the only shot she has to be president ever,
and, if a resurgent Biden rallies people around Trump’s
unfair attack, maybe the only shot we have to get a
woman president at all. There’s no indication she wants
to be president, and she has only a very small shot—a
moonshot, really—of achieving the White House this
way. She undoubtedly knows it’s out of reach.
By abstaining from the battle over who gets to be

president in the wake of impeachment, Pelosi and the
Democrats can let the Republicans feed on each other.
They’re already turning on each other over the
president’s shocking decision to abandon the Kurds in
Syria to Turkey’s onslaught, so we know they can do
it.58 We just need to give them the reason.
58In one swoop, a unified House and a unified Senate approved a

landmark resolution that recognized the Armenian genocide. Because it
was a nonbinding resolution, Donald Trump didn’t get a chance to veto it.
Pelosi’s been making all the right moves on
impeachment lately. Can she make one more, designed
to actually make impeachment matter? That’s unclear to
me. The winds are favorable: For the first time,
according to a Fox News poll (!), 51% of Americans
support both Trump’s impeachment and his removal
from office.
So, the question to Pelosi: You’ve shown you can make

the country take this massive leap, but can you stick the
landing? America waits to find out.

Rich explains: optionality
Perhaps surprisingly for such a cornerstone of game theory, the

Prisoner’s Dilemma is a strange problem, because few of us ever
find ourselves in the given situation. So unless you’ve ever been
one of two prisoners each offered a deal, or a member of law
enforcement, I suppose, you’ve never thought about betraying a
friend for a reduced prison sentence.
On the other hand, every Republican in America has the chance to

play the Optional Prisoner’s Dilemma in 2020. If you’re a
Republican, you may have voted for Trump in 2016. You can be
forgiven for imagining he might turn into a better person. The
office could have humbled him. Anything could have happened.
But now you know. Nothing’s changing. He’s exactly who he told
you he’d be, and he’s only going to get worse.
Ignoring the possibility of impeachment for a moment, let’s make

an assumption that Trump has no problem maintaining his
supremacy over the Republican Party. Or, more likely, his
continuing stream of gaffes and scandals are simply hand-waved
away with zero consequences. A Republican who wants to create
change might vote for a different candidate in the primaries.
However, if Trump wins the nomination, they may lose face and
position in a wasted effort. Or, if enough people turn the page,
they may nominate a candidate who can’t defeat the Democratic
nominee and the entire party loses.
Classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, right? Maybe in the primaries, but the

general election provides a new option for Republicans who want
to be done with the current nightmare. Vote Democrat. Hell, vote
Independent. You’ll have to take the loner’s payout by losing the
White House, but you gain the privilege of voting for a country
seeking unity over a party dragged into decay by a corrupt
administration.
The Republican presidential nomination game may be rigged, but

you certainly don’t have to play. You’ve got options. Even as
Trump’s prisoner.

Andrew Yang, Tulsi
Gabbard, Donald
Trump, and the bet
against America
October 19, 2019
Nobody ever asks how I feel about Amy Klobuchar. I

don’t get grilled about my confidence in Julián Castro or
Bill Weld. Mark Sanford’s not a strange being, except
for that thing he did that one time. Folks look to Cory
Booker for inspiration, Beto O’Rourke for animation,
Kamala Harris for rage, Joe Walsh for contrarianism.
We’re onboard with a front-running pack of a socialist,
a retread, and a demolitionist in Bernie Sanders, Joe
Biden, and Elizabeth Warren. Even a gay man like Pete
Buttigieg doesn’t cause any rumbles in this enlightened
age. These are all acceptable candidates in 2019 and
we’re all wondering which will reach the mountaintop.
There are just three candidates which I always get asked

about. Three that seem like space aliens to most and
inspire diehard fanaticism from their adherents. No, I’m
not talking about Marianne Williamson, a curiosity
straight out of an early 2000s California jungle primary
for governor.
I’m talking about Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and

Donald Trump.
These candidates could not be more different in most
ways, yet are eerily similar in others. One I like. Another
sparks my curiosity. A third fills me with rage. I make an
emotional connection with all of them. I can’t support
any of them, because I don’t bet against America.
Let me give you an analogy. The casino game craps is a

baffling ride for the uninitiated. It has a million
undecipherable bets, most worse than the ones you can
decipher. Also, it’s loud. Whereas poker is pin-drop quiet
during play, people get raucous playing craps.
Which is weird, because it seems like only one person is

playing. That lady with the pair of dice—the shooter—
controls the outcome for nearly everyone. She’s trying
to roll a 7 or 11, avoid a 2, 3, or 12, and, if she initially
rolls a 4 through 10, to roll that number again before
she rolls a 7. Everyone else bets on the shooter. Many
pick the “pass” line, where they win if the shooter wins.
When the stickman crows “Winner, winner, front line
winner,” they all win. They’re riding one roller coaster.
They scream in unison, draw in breath at once, and
high-five at the end. It’s a grand, communal experience.
Except... there’s the one guy on the rail. He looks like

he’s not having fun. That’s because he’s betting the
“don’t pass” line. The don’t pass line wins when the
shooter loses. Since the crowd wins when the shooter
wins, the don’t pass bettor shuts the hell up when
everyone else fails. He collects his chips and tries not to
be noticed. No one likes the don’t pass guy.
Betting against everyone else makes you an outsider.

Being an outsider is hard. Outsiders have trouble
making friends when the spotlight is on. When they do,
those friendships run deep, but they’re rare. Me, I like
people who bet with the crowd. Not everyone feels that
way, but a lot of us do. That’s what makes us the crowd.
So, to Yang, Gabbard, and Trump, and why they inspire

passion in some and overflowing rage in others.
Andrew Yang, the friendly outsider
I like Andrew Yang. He’s a dork. I’m a dork. We dorks

should stick together.
Though we both like Marvel, math, and charity, I have

never found common ground with Yang. It’s not
because he won’t wear a tie to a debate, or his ooky
exceptional-Asian jokes, or that he calls his band of
followers the “Yang Gang.” None of those would deter
me if I could get behind his policies. Don’t get me
wrong: I want to get behind his policies. Yang’s
economic message is as terrifying as Trump’s was in
2016, but his is rooted not in illegitimate fear of
immigrants but in totally legitimate fear of robots.
The way Jay Inslee hammered on climate change and

Beto O’Rourke focuses on gun control, Yang is the only
candidate to make automation his raison d’être. It’s his
main strength on economics; his trade policy is nearly
nonexistent, and his desire for “human-centered
capitalism” nobly tries to replace conversation about
money with conversation about people. It’s likable. It’s
nice. In the Elizabeth Warren sense, it’s only barely
policy.
But he just crushes it on automation. Listen to him in

New York in May:
“How did Donald Trump become our president in 2016? The
explanations go something like Russia, Facebook, the FBI,
maybe a dash of Hillary Clinton thrown in there. But I looked
at the numbers... and Donald Trump is our president for one
simple reason: We automated away four million manufacturing
jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri,
Iowa, all of the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win.”
Holy God.
I mean, I disagree with the assessment that economic

anxiety drove Trump’s election; I’m much more
sympathetic to the data that shows the diploma divide
among whites and their views on race and ethnicity
were responsible. But I can’t see any argument that can
overcome Yang’s logic about automation. The
manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back. We can hope to
get back jobs we exported, but not jobs we obsoleted.
Yang’s critics say that if he were right, productivity
would rise and employment would shrink; instead,
productivity is stagnant and employment is rising. This
is similar to suggesting a person with no symptoms of
cancer won’t be killed by it. The robots are coming.
Though he misses the bigger issue of our bonkers trade

policy, Yang’s got part of the problem diagnosed
perfectly. After you accept it—and you should—you
can look at his solution. It’s his “Freedom Dividend,”
giving every American adult $1,000 a month, adjusted
for inflation, locked in by a constitutional amendment.
Per his website, “this would enable all Americans to pay
their bills, educate themselves, start businesses, be more
creative, stay healthy, relocate for work, spend time with
their children, take care of loved ones, and have a real
stake in the future.”
His Freedom Dividend is another name for a decades-
old policy called universal basic income (UBI). The
concept only applies to a payment that’s unconditional
(everyone of qualifying age gets it), automatic (it is
received on a regular basis), non-withdrawable (it can’t be
canceled or reduced), individual (it is per person, not per
household or community), and given as a right (it applies
to all legal residents regardless of status). When Kamala
Harris talks about giving families who make less than
$100,000 a stipend of $500 a month, she’s not talking
about UBI, because that’s not unconditional or
individual, and probably not non-withdrawable.
A few nations have tried UBI. As of today, only Iran

remains a UBI nation, giving each citizen a cash transfer
equivalent to $1.50 a day. From World War II till the
Berlin Wall fell, Poland guaranteed employment and
income; it didn’t work, but a lot of things about
communist Poland didn’t work, so it’s hard to judge. It’s
also been done here once. Since 1982, Alaska has had a
thing called the Permanent Fund Dividend. Alaska has a
lot of oil, and the people get some of the profits. So
every year, every citizen who lives in Alaska all year and
doesn’t commit a felony gets a check for between $1000
and $2000. (That no-felony thing is slightly anti-UBI,
but we’ll let it pass.)
A grand or two a year is real nice. Those who get it love

it. It’s not much of an income. You can’t restructure your
life around $1,000 a year. A 2018 study showed that the
Alaska dividend had no effect on employment, and
increased part-time work by 1.8 percentage points (17
percent). “Overall,” the study said, “our results suggest
that a universal and permanent cash transfer does not
significantly decrease aggregate employment.”
Yang’s $12,000... well, that might just have an effect.
The average household spends just under $10,000 a year
on food and clothing. What if no citizen ever needed to
worry about paying for food and clothing? That’d be
sweet. A married couple could instead wish away their
entire housing cost of $20,000 a year. Giving most
people free housing is pretty awesome.
Here’s the catch: That level of awesome costs $3 trillion

a year. The federal government spends a bit more than
$4 trillion a year on everything. So 75% of our current
deficit-exploding federal expenditures would go to UBI.
The details are where Yang’s policy gets really nasty. We
already pay the expenditures of many of our poorest
citizens, and Yang wants those people to choose between
their current services and UBI—a choice not made by
those who already make way more than $12,000 a year.
He wants to add a regressive value-added tax of 10%,
which even UBI advocates say would penalize poor
people even more. For the mere price of nearly all our
federal spending and a whole bunch of regressive
policies, a person like me gets to live rent-free. I could
stop generating revenue for others! How great!
One of America’s core visions is that we can work our

way out of our problems. Giving everyone the freedom
not to work for the basics sounds good, but it cuts
against the bootstrapping grain of America. The Yang
Gang believes reality has already lost that for us. They’re
bold, innovative, and profoundly pessimistic. For some,
it’s the exact recipe for our dire situation. But not me. I
don’t want to live in the Matrix. I want to work for my
supper. For me, Yang’s an outsider betting against
America. Even though he has a ton of cash to continue
his run, I expect that outside is where he’ll stay.
Tulsi Gabbard, the interloper
One person who fully endorses UBI is Tulsi Gabbard.

The Hawaii congresswoman has had a rough week.
After missing out on the September debates, she
returned to the debate stage looking like a real winner.
But she led it off with a wobbly, infuriating answer on
impeachment, a course she was slow to embrace and
hesitant to support. She began by blasting Democrats
for wanting to impeach Trump after he won in 2016.
“If impeachment is driven by these hyper-partisan interests, it will

only further divide an already terribly divided country.
Unfortunately, this is what we’ve already seen play out as calls
for impeachment really began shortly after Trump won his
election. And as unhappy as that may make us as Democrats, he
won that election in 2016.”
Gabbard then blasted the debate’s eminently blastable

hosts, CNN and the New York Times, for calling her a
Russian asset—a claim I expect many viewers had not
ever heard. Then she started talking like a Russian asset,
highlighting her time with Syrian strongman Bashar al-
Assad and questioning our protecting the Kurds in
Syria. The only other veteran on stage, Pete Buttigieg, lit
her up like a Roman candle, saying she was parroting
Trump’s policy and undermining American soldiers.
When your claim to fame is that you say what Vladimir
Putin would say if he were onstage, your brand is in
serious trouble.
Sure enough, yesterday Hillary Clinton came straight at

her. Speaking on the Campaign HQ podcast, the
world’s foremost expert on having Russia screw with
one’s presidential prospects said of the Russians:
“I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the
Democratic primary, and they’re grooming her to be the third-
party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a
bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.
And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might
not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian
asset! I mean totally! They know they can’t win without a third-
party candidate. And so, I don’t know who it’s gonna be, but I
can guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third party challenge in the
key states that they most need it.”
A lot to unpack there, and boy, does it hit Putin pal Jill
Stein where it hurts. But on the point:
Clinton did not use Gabbard’s name, but everybody

could tell she wasn’t describing Amy Klobuchar.
Gabbard, a fixture on Fox News and a favorite of the
alt-right and white nationalists, went nuclear on Twitter.
“Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of

warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the
rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have
finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I
announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to
destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know—it was always you, through your proxies and
powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of
the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you
and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race
directly.”
This is some A+ clapbacking right here. But it is

dramatically inconsistent with maintaining a campaign
for the Democratic nomination. Democrats agree upon
two things in 2019: (a) we want Trump gone and (b) we
don’t want Hillary to run this year. If Gabbard believes
her boast to Clinton that “this primary is between you
and me,” she is stone-cold delusional. Neither Clinton
nor Gabbard will be the Democratic nominee in 2020.
Gabbard calls herself a threat, and it’s hard to see how
she is one, even as an independent. Democratic voters
are not looking for an anti-abortion, ex-conversion
therapy crusader for Assad in 2020. But let’s not rule
out some crazy here. Look at those hearts on Twitter.
Those are not just Russian bots working overtime.
Also, let’s not ignore her central thesis here: Endless

wars are very, very bad. Buttigieg, who excoriated
Gabbard for her Syria comments, states that a person of
service age might not have been alive on 9/11. It’s each
candidate’s desire to bring our troops home from
Afghanistan, for example. That war needs to end,
maybe not in the next president’s first year, but soon.
You could imagine a similar statement about Syria. But

abandoning Syria is also betting against America.
There’s an American principle that we stand against
genocide. Sometimes that sends us places we don’t want
to go, and sometimes we do horrible things in those
places. Our hands are anything but clean. Overall, we
stand to defend those who need defending. Our allies
don’t die on our watch.
Gabbard thinks America will stand against what

America has stood for. That’s not a safe bet. She will
gain some adherents, and they will be very devoted. She
will gain opportunists who use her as a pawn if they can.
(Earth to Tulsi: Tucker Carlson is not your friend.) She
won’t score with me. I believe she’ll stay on the outside,
like Yang, as the race coalesces around others.
Donald Trump, the outsider on the inside
I don’t want to tear down Yang and Gabbard. They’re

Democrats. In this Bizarro universe, they may actually
win. If so, I’ll back them furiously against the ultimate
outsider. Trump would love to face an establishment
Democrat like Clinton—who today was cleared of
wrongdoing again in the politically directed State
Department probe of her emails. Absent Clinton, a tilt
with Joe Biden, whose son Hunter did him no favors by
suggesting he was on Burisma’s board due to his name,
lets Trump paint Democrats as the party of corruption.
Yet every day brings new evidence that Trump is setting

the gold standard on that for generations. Starting from
his meltdown in front of Nancy Pelosi, he and his
senior staff displayed all four reasons one might remove
a sitting president early in one day:
1. proof of commission of crimes and misdemeanors

2. obstruction of justice
3. violation of the Emoluments Clause
4. mental or physical incapacity to govern
Heck, in one press conference, acting chief of staff Mick

Mulvaney announced there was quid pro quo for
Ukraine to receive aid for investigating the Democrats,
that Trump had awarded the G-7 summit to his own
resort, and that we should just “get over it”—“it” being
the use of federal funds to benefit Trump.
In Syria, he has upended the world’s belief that

America’s word is its bond. We could have seen this
coming, of course. He had betrayed all our allies in trade
and support of global agreements. But he didn’t actually
cause our allies to die in droves before that. All because
his outsider status left him ill-prepared to handle foreign
policy. He got rolled by Turkey, just like he got rolled by
North Korea and rolled by China and rolled by Russia.
Some of this is the reason we got here. In 2016, faced

with yet another Clinton and with signal boost from
Russia, just enough Americans in just the right places
chose Trump because he was an outsider. Trump
promised to burn it all down, and he’s doing a darn fine
job of that. By promising to upend Obama/Biden’s
triumphs, he resonated with some people in ways he
will never resonate with someone like me.
He’s been there for three years, still pretending to be an

outsider—fighting generals and intelligence officers,
ripping apart international agreements, clashing with
Republican leadership, stonewalling his impeachment
inquiry, abandoning our allies, praising our enemies. All
while threatening economic ruin if not re-elected.
Trump’s still betting the don’t pass line against America,

raking in his winnings but not being part of the table.
But now he’s an insider, and we know it. He’s fighting
to hold onto what little he has left, not shake up what
has stood before his arrival. It’s a harder sell. He might
win re-election, since that’s what incumbents usually do.
So far polling suggests an insider like Biden, Warren, or
(yup, now an insider) Sanders likely will beat him.
Now, polling can be wrong. Maybe these insider

candidates need a little of the contrarian spirit of Yang
and Gabbard. Regardless, I think we need more faith in
Americans to do the right thing. Given the candidates
who actually have a shot, I think we can count on that.
Rich explains: inequality
The introductory concepts in game theory generally stem from

the notion that all players are fundamentally equal, focusing on
our utility and outputs more than our initial inputs. Some of this
must come from our childhood focus on fair play, especially in
sports. Each kid should have the same chances of making it
through tryouts but it takes almost no effort to see that this is just
theoretical. What does fairness even mean when you’re battling
for a starting position against the coach’s kid?
As soon as we dive into applied game theory, we are suddenly

forced to deal with this asymmetry between our players. Massive
businesses, like sharks, search for smaller creatures to devour and
hold up to their stockholders as proof of their dominance of the
economic order. There’s no chance of an equitable outcome for
the smaller business! However, these smaller fish find themselves
gaining an unexpected bit of control with some classic game
theory.
The Ultimatum game considers a negotiation between two

players, one with all the control and choice in the world, but the
other has the ability to walk away and shut it all down. The control
player often begins by making an ultimatum which is manifestly
unfair to their opponent. As the opponent threatens to walk away,
leaving each player with nothing, the control begs them to stop
and sends over more favorable terms. Sometimes the opponent
even begins making demands as well, and the two players must
choose between failure or compromise.
In the modern political arena, with presidential primary brawls

between a score of opponents, the vast majority of the
competitors are hopeless underdogs. As they battle, refusing to
cede their time to the eventual candidates, these small fish try
their best to push their policies and ideas into mainstream
conversations. Whether or not these politicians truly believe they
can win, the lasting legacy of their candidacy is to ensure that the
sharks are forced to compromise if they hope to unify the party
and win the nomination.

The Butt Fumble: Rudy
Giuliani and the
incompetence gambit
October 26, 2019
At first glance, Rudy Giuliani and Mark Sanchez might

not seem to have a lot in common. Sure, they both
played on the biggest stage in New York, leading to
fascinating moments of Big Apple pride. You can’t tell
the recent history of NYC without either of them.
Giuliani was an autocratic mayor who cleaned up the
streets and then rallied the citizenry after 9/11. Sanchez
was the quarterback of the Jets from 2009 to 2013,
leading the team to back-to-back AFC Championship
Games in his first two seasons.
Sanchez isn’t known for those AFC Championship

Games. He is much better known for one single
Thanksgiving play vs. the New England Patriots. That
play—in which an improvising Sanchez careens directly
into the backside of his lineman Brandon Moore, loses
the ball as he is sat on by 250 pounds of man, and
watches helplessly as the ball is run back for one of
three Patriot touchdowns in a 52 second span—is part
of every football blooper reel.
It’s now hilariously known as the Butt Fumble.

Now, Giuliani—who parlayed that mayoral career into a
sycophantic role as President Trump’s personal
attorney—can join Sanchez in the pantheon of New
Yorkers having legendary butt problems. On Friday, it
was revealed that Giuliani butt-dialed an NBC reporter
twice, leaving accidental voice mails in which he alleged
crimes by Joe and Hunter Biden and shook down the
Crown Prince of Bahrain for half a mil.
Here is a transcript of a dialogue that I did not make up.
Giuliani: “Tomorrow I gotta get you to get on Bahrain. You

gotta call. You gotta call Robert again tomorrow. Is Robert
around?”
Some Guy: “He’s in Turkey.”
Giuliani: “The problem is we need money. We need a few
hundred thousand.”
Guy: “I’d say even if Bahrain could get, I’m not sure how good
[unintelligible words] with his people.”
Giuliani: “Yeah, okay.”
Guy: “You want options? I got options.”
Giuliani: “Yeah, give me options.”
Just for entertainment, let’s run down some of the

preposterous things Giuliani has done in “service” of
his client, Mr. Trump.
• Revealed that Trump asked him how to implement
a ban on Muslims, which the president had denied.
• Admitted that Trump’s legal team had a witness-
tampering backchannel to Paul Manafort, which the
president had denied.
• Admitted that Trump paid $130,000 in hush money
to porn star Stormy Daniels, which the president
had denied.
• Said the attack on Robert Mueller’s team was a PR
strategy to sway opinion rather than based on facts,
which the president had denied
• Denied and then admitted pressuring Ukraine for
dirt on the Bidens, which the president had denied.
• Showed texts on his iPad that proved the State
Department was involved in his schemes, which the
president had denied.
I’m only waterlining the iceberg here. There’s so much

more insanity you can discover just by typing “Rudy
Giuliani admits” into Google. His incompetence is
legendary. It’s baffling how Trump, who only hires the
best people, lets him go out there and babble for him.
Now the Department of Justice and the Southern

District of New York are investigating Giuliani for
criminal conspiracy, along with his two central-casting
Ukrainian associates. Rudy’s legacy as mayor might now
be the second thing mentioned after “jailed Trump
crony” in his eventual obituary.
Which made me wonder: Could all this be intentional?

Is issuing stupid, unhinged, self-incriminating public
statements a strategy? After all, I am a firm believer
in Hanlon’s razor, the wry philosophical statement
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
explained by stupidity.” I couldn’t comprehend how
it could be more malicious to be more stupid.
Turns out I’m not the first to imagine incompetence as

a potentially effective game theory strategy. The great
analysis on this comes from Russia, a country that
hobbled itself through decades—maybe centuries—of
self-inflicted wounds. The world’s second most
powerful dictator, Vladimir Putin, never made it beyond
lieutenant colonel in a military state, and was noted for
his petty and corrupt businesses. Putin is no genius.
He’s just effective at being awful. Some of his people
love him for it. Others don’t. In an environment where
sometimes people just disappear for totally inexplicable
reasons, Putin has survived a very long time. But how?
If you listen to people like advertising wizard David

Ogilvy, the way to survive in business is to surround
yourself with people smarter than you. In 1968, Ogilvy
wrote to executives, “If you ever find a man who is
better than you are, hire him. If necessary, pay him
more than you would pay yourself.” He once presented
his board of directors with Russian nesting dolls, each
of which contained a folded paper deep inside. It said:
“If you always hire people who are smaller than you, we
shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other
hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you,
we shall become a company of giants.”
That’s not how Putin does it. The way he does it is by

removing anyone smart enough to overtake him. This is
a process called negative selection. In a totalitarian
bureaucracy, when you cull the competent because they
are a threat, the people below them fill their roles. Since
they are less experienced than those that came before,
the entire organization gets dumber. Negative selection
works for the selectors, but when they are removed—
and they always are—what remains is staggeringly
incompetent. It’s a combo of the Dunning-Kruger
Effect (everybody thinks they’re more competent than
they are) and the Peter Principle (everybody rises to
their level of incompetence) but with a side of
dictatorial murder-purging thrown in.
Donald Trump has not proven many things, but one is
that he is definitely less competent than Vladimir Putin.
The people he puts in his kakistocracy—that’s
government by the very worst people—have to
be really bad at their jobs. Some do so by pure
mendacity and corruption; I don’t think Steve
Mnuchin’s an idiot, just a liar and a thief. But many do
so by being capable of being manipulated by an
incompetent president—so by definition they are even
less capable than Trump.
Since the career federal bureaucracy is not staffed by

idiots, Trump set out from the beginning to marginalize
and intimidate them. The officials at State and the EPA
and the CIA and so many other places have been
quitting in droves and not being replaced. That permits
Trump’s band of looters and reprobates to ride herd, far
less impeded by competent and experienced experts.
This tactic allows two divergent views of the Ukraine

scandal.59
View one is that Trump wanted to get Biden through

any means necessary. Those means included diverting
Congressionally mandated foreign aid unless the
Ukrainians did his bidding. That fits with Trump’s
M.O., from “Russia, if you’re listening” to “China
should start an investigation.” This is elevating one’s
re-election above one’s country, and it’s unassailably
impeachable conduct.
59Warning: I Googled to see if anyone agreed with me on this conclusion.

I was horrified to learn that someone did, just yesterday... and it was Ben
Shapiro. I’m going to make an argument much like Shapiro’s, so plan
accordingly.
View two is a bit different. That view says Trump is
obsessed with the 2016 election and believes every rock-
dumb conspiracy theory about it. He is too stupid to
realize when he is being conned and too egotistical to
hire people who tell him he’s being conned. So he casts
about for proof that confirms his idiotic beliefs. He gets
told about Ukraine having the Crowdstrike server, so he
asks for it. Also maybe the Bidens did something?
Gimme that too while I get you those Javelins. He’s
bumbling in the darkness hoping to hit something that
confirms his priors. That’s awful—it’s probably 25th
Amendment stuff—but maybe not clearly impeachable.
That “maybe” is pretty shaky. Crimes are crimes

regardless of rationale. You might get manslaughter
rather than murder, but it’s still illegal to shoot
someone. This is a desperate defense, but might be the
only one left after Trump admitted to the crime, then
gave Congress a transcript of the crime, then obstructed
investigation of the crime. You can’t deny the act, but
you can paint it as idiocy rather than malice. You can
Hanlon’s razor Trump into keeping his job until Biden
or someone else takes it from him.
To make this defense, you must surround yourself with

idiots. Run your crime through a Secretary of Energy
who couldn’t remember that he wanted to eliminate the
department he now heads. Get your crime justified by a
White House Counsel who writes letters like a child
throws tantrums. Send out a Chief of Staff to say you
do that crime pretty much every day. Have your toadies
in Congress storm a hearing many of them were already
attending. This is a level of stupid that is hard to ignore.
So maybe, just maybe, you get away with stupid rather
than going to jail for evil.
Might work, might not. A famous legal mind once said:
“A lot of alleged criminals are not that smart. That’s how we

catch them.”
That was Rudy Giuliani, amid a torrent of lies on

September 25, just before the White House released the
Ukraine transcript.
I guess we’ll see if he’s right about that one.

Rich explains: Hanlon’s razor
When’s the last time you thought about America’s Funniest Home
Videos? For me, it’s locked into the same era as Saved By The Bell
and Pop-Up Video, so I was very surprised to learn that AFHV has
been around for thirty seasons. Thirty! Even The Simpsons,
American TV’s timeless juggernaut, has only been on the air for
one season longer. As I remembered countless videos filled with
sudden falls, painful slips, and surprising kicks, I realized that this
endless show is the perfect distillation of our national fascination
with incompetence.
Turning incompetence into a long-term strategy might even cause

Machiavelli to raise an eyebrow, but we see it happen in the world
all the time. Dogs often show their bellies to favored humans as
an act of submission. As a frequent target of predators, the
opossum’s main defense mechanism is to play dead—curling into
a comatose ball, exuding a foul stench, and sticking out its listless
tongue. The predator, more interested in live prey than in chewing
on a decaying corpse, leaves for greener pastures. The opossum
returns to a happy life of scavenging for the next meal.
Similarly, I can easily remember the puppy-dog eyes of many

fellow Risk players, sitting on the far side of the board, begging me
not to forcefully eject them from the game. Maybe they’re holed
up in Australia, just wanting to be left alone while the world
changes hands around them. Maybe they claim that they’re just
exploring the game and don’t intend to try to win. Whatever the
sob story might be, they’ve put me into a tough corner.
As a player who wants to win, I now have to decide how to react

to an incompetent opponent. Spending the time to attack them
might leave me vulnerable to a more powerful player. Victory
might feel hollow, and I may lose resources overall from the effort
spent. I might also think, “how bad could it really be if I just allow
incompetence to stay in the game?”
What am I saying? It’s 2020. We all know the answer to that

question.

How much of history
is random?
November 9, 2019
It’s the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

today, and it’s got me to thinking. Everyone knows
that’s one of the most momentous events in history, but
how did it happen? Did how it happened give us any
guidance as to the complex situation we Americans find
ourselves in today? Thinking about the Wall crumbling
made me think about how we got another Wall builder,
and how we might knock down his Wall too.
Every day seems momentous now. This week we saw

the governorship of reliably Republican Kentucky
change hands over 5,100 votes between Democratic
challenger Andy Beshear and incumbent Matt Bevin,
less than a half a percent. That’s a margin similar to the
razor-thin victories Donald Trump gained in Michigan
(10,704 votes), Pennsylvania (46,765), and Wisconsin
(22,177). There have been many explanations for these
victories: weak candidates, voting irregularities, job loss,
and so forth. Still, these are awfully small numbers, less
than a percent. What if there’s another reason?
What if it’s just random?

That sounds impossible to fathom. Trump is president
and Beshear is (likely) governor because of mere
randomness? Clearly turnout among voting blocs is the
real factor, right?
Well, right, but think for a minute about when you last
voted. Maybe it was Tuesday. It’s not a federal holiday,
so you likely had all sorts of things going on that day. I
know I gave my ballot to a coworker really late in the
day. What if she got a flat tire and didn’t get to the
drop-off site in time? That would have been two votes
uncounted. Surely there must be all sorts of dumb
reasons people don’t make it to the polls. When
someone wins by 5 percent, you can just discount those
errors. When they win by 0.4 percent? Maybe you can’t.
Maybe it’s just random.
An event is random if and only if it happens by

chance. We usually mean it when we know of two or
more meaningfully distinct and pivotal outcomes, such
as whether you roll doubles to get out of jail in
Monopoly. Unless you are monkeying with the dice,
your multiple turns in jail aren’t your fault; it’s just the
luck of the dice. Now, the world isn’t totally random,
because after your third turn in jail, you’re sprung
regardless. Humans tend not to like environments that
are limitlessly random, but we’ll play with some chance
because gambling is fun for a while.
In games, of which electioneering is surely one,

randomness is an element often introduced to balance
out skill. We can know that one team in a basketball
game is better statistically, but if a sequence of shots
fails to fall in the right span, a no. 16 seed will someday
beat an overall no. 1 seed. That this has now happened
in both the NCAA men’s and women’s March Madness
tournaments says that superior coaching and talent
matter a ton, but they are not invincible. Sometimes
chance just takes you down. We all believe that.
We also believe in the big picture. Surely the big stuff

must be invulnerable to chance, right? Of all the straw
man questions I’ve teed up over the last few paragraphs,
this seems the most important. If it really matters, it
must be the result of intention. How could it not be?
Who could live in a world where it wasn’t?
Let’s look at the Wall. You may think of the Berlin

Wall’s demolition as a decision by Mikhail Gorbachev
to end the Cold War after a speech by Ronald Reagan
demanding he “tear down this wall.”
It was not. It was in fact a bumbling comedy of

foolishness and misunderstandings that changed the
world forever.
The border that the new East German government

intended to address was the border with Czechoslovakia,
which East Germans were crossing in droves. East
Germans were turning up at the West German embassy
in Prague and seeking asylum in numbers too great for
West Germany to handle.
The West Germans wanted the Czech border closed.

New East German leader Egon Krenz issued a set of
vague and unsettling regulations which the West Berlin
mayor called “complete trash.” West Germany wanted
the tide of fleeing East Germans stopped, and Krenz’s
fumbling approach caused ⅔ of the Politburo and the
prime minister to resign.
Krenz asked his travel ministers to prepare a new policy.
They added one new crossing to allow permanent
emigration of refugees, but that seemed unfeasible to
those administering it, so they allowed people who were
already approved to emigrate to do so at any exit. Later
the ministers tacked on that temporary travel—
not emigration—could also be requested at those border
crossings. They allowed the Council of Ministers to
determine when it took effect. Satisfied that they had
stemmed the tide, they passed this on to the party boss
in East Berlin to hold a live news conference about it.
That boss, Günter Schabowski, had not been briefed on

the regulations, and Krenz gave him no instructions on
how to handle it. After uttering a long list of confusing
administrative changes, he announced that West Berlin
had exhausted its capacity for refugees, so new rules
were being issued to allow permanent emigration at any
crossing. Schabowski seemed surprised when reporters
asked him when they would take effect. He did not
know, so he guessed.
“As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay.”
When asked if that applied to Checkpoint Charlie and

the other five Berlin crossings, he read a bit further
down and concluded it did as well. Satisfied at a job well
done, Schabowski left the room.
Within minutes, around 8 p.m., a West German news

agency announced that East Germans could cross the
border right then. A reporter on the evening news said,
“The GDR has announced that, starting immediately, its
borders are open to everyone. The gates in the Wall
stand open wide.”
Now, television waves don’t stop at border walls.
Everyone inside East Berlin heard that. So they all
showed up at the Wall with bags packed, ready to leave.
No one had told the guards.
Faced with the largest mass of people ever to attempt to

storm the gates of Berlin, the guards tried to get clarity
on what to do. At first they were told to give the most
aggressive people permanent revocation of their
citizenship and send them to West Berlin. Okay, but
there were still many thousands of people angrily
demanding the passage they’d been promised. The likely
response was machine gun fire. Among all of the East
German high command, no one wanted to be the one
history recorded as calling for a massacre. The troops
stood down, and the gates all opened.
Wessis greeted their Eastern brethren with flowers, and

started jumping on the Wall. They began taking it apart
with devices called “wall woodpeckers.” Now, if the
East German guards did not have permission to murder
East Germans trying to get out, they sure didn’t have
permission to murder West Germans dismantling the
Wall. Throughout the night, the Wall became so
compromised that there was nothing that could be
done. East German officials hurriedly announced ten
new border crossings, and bulldozers showed up.
Germany was reunified without a shot being fired.
Nobody planned this. A cavalcade of fools opened the

door to a massive revolution. Margaret Thatcher and
Francois Mitterrand tried to stop Mikhail Gorbachev
from ratifying the mistaken East German policy, but he
threw up his hands. This was the way the world was
going. Big change happens when little people make big
errors.
Krenz and Schabowski are not among history’s greatest

leaders. They are consigned to the ashbin of history,
part of the laboratory ant farm of incompetence that
was the last-stage East German government. As
underwhelming as they were, it’s easy to imagine a
world where the two take thirty minutes to talk through
the intended policy and its expected gradual rollout.
Thirty minutes where Krenz says, “Now, under no
circumstances should you say we’re opening the
border.” Thirty minutes where Schabowski considers
how poorly history will remember him, if at all, if he
bungles this very important press conference.
They didn’t take that time, and that single fact seems
completely random. The Wall fell, and so in quick
succession did the Communist governments of Bulgaria
and Hungary and Russia, because two men could not
meet for coffee when it counted. Whatever skill they
had at ruling their country, it was overwhelmed by a
single failure to launch. If that’s not randomness, I don’t
know what is.
Yet, none of that matters if the people aren’t ready to

seize the opening created by this random event. On
November 9, 1989, they were. They were so ready to
end the divided state that in one night they tore it down.
They were primed by Reagan’s speech and Gorbachev’s
perestroika and decades of just plain exhaustion. That’s
why history isn’t random. It is a series of intended
events punctuated by randomness, not the other way
around. History marches, not stumbles.
The lesson for wall-building dictators: When the people
demand change, and you don’t want it, you better be on
your game.
Because you make one slip, just one, and your wall’s
coming down.

Rich explains: randomness
I know I’ve talked about randomness before, but one truism bears
repeating: humans are the worst at recognizing random events.
Imagine sitting in a small room with a robotic light switch, flipping

the switch every time a coin flip lands on heads. Set the coin to flip
every ten seconds. After a few minutes, the light flips on and stays
on. How long would you sit there before wondering if the game
was over or the robot was broken. A full minute? Would it be
different if you were sitting in the dark?
I’m from Portland, Oregon, so I think about coin flips a lot. Back in
the 1840s, my hometown was just known as The Clearing north of
Oregon City, the end of the Oregon Trail. Settlers arriving from
back east started inquiring about The Clearing, and the two
founders of the nascent city each had their own idea for a new
name. To settle the debate, Francis Pettygrove and Aja Lovejoy
stood on the bluffs high above the Willamette River and flipped a
coin. That Pettygrove won is important, because otherwise, I’d be
from Boston, Oregon.
That coin is housed in the Oregon Historical Society if you want to

check it for fairness. But you might be surprised that using a coin
as an arbiter of fairness is enshrined by law.
Back in 2000, the nation watched in agony as Florida botched a

presidential election with faulty voting machines and unabashed
avarice. I am, right now, filled with disgust as I type out “hanging
chad,” a term I should never have to think about.
Only four years later, Florida showed why it was so adamant about
arguing over every last vote. The hallowed depths of Florida law
state that a tied election must be decided by a coin flip. This has
decided recent city council races in Florida, Alaska, and Idaho.
Distilling our votes, our voices in the political process, down to a
simple coin flip seems almost criminal. All of Florida’s many, many
lawsuits that year were a painful attempt to avoid turning the
entire presidential election into a single coin flip.

Did Boris Johnson just
show Nancy Pelosi
how to destroy
Trump?
December 19, 2019
Okay, hear me out on this. It’s going to get weird.
Donald Trump just got impeached on two articles of

impeachment: abuse of power (230–197–Tulsi) and
obstruction of Congress (229–198–Tulsi). The common
belief is that the impeachment trial will now go to the
Senate, where Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham
will jury-rig an acquittal for Trump during the early
primary season for Democrats. Which, I guess, the
Democrats might not want? (That’s really not clear.
They might already have all they want, but this column
presumes that they want more.)
Bad news for liberals, right? Well, there’s a victory

strategy I started thinking about over a year ago. I never
wanted to say it out loud for fear it would... well, I don’t
know what. Now, it’s started to come out of the
shadows. It might actually be the greatest comeuppance
of all. It could be fun to see it play out.
Nancy Pelosi should “Merrick Garland” Trump’s

impeachment.
You remember Merrick Garland. In February 2016,
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died, handing
President Obama the miracle of a Supreme Court seat.
He outfoxed Republicans by nominating the centrist
Garland, he thought. Then that weaselly ol’ Mitch
invoked the nuclear option and refused to bring the
nomination to a vote. Obama shouldn’t have the right
to fill a seat in his last 11 months of office, McConnell
said. When Trump won, he slid Neil Gorsuch into that
seat, stealing a Supreme Court chair. If Trump had not
won, who knows what would have happened with
Garland. McConnell bet on delay, and it worked.
Flash forward to 2019. Across the pond, Prime Minister

Boris Johnson loses a series of humiliating votes, so he
suspends Parliament so that it can’t vote on a hard
Brexit. This is condemned from all sides. Case after case
is filed to dislodge Johnson’s mandate. Johnson loses
nearly all of them and then his majority as members
defect, but all this has the curious effect of delaying the
Brexit vote past the EU’s Halloween deadline. Now the
Tories are torqued beyond reason. They might lose
Brexit entirely. They stake an entire election on one
principle: Do you want this done or not?
Meantime, the Labour Party peddles an olla podrida

that nobody wants: maybe Leave, maybe Remain,
maybe free broadband, I guess? Its muddled message
and mediocre leaders fail to resonate. Not only does the
Conservative Party win big, but sends milquetoast
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn packing and loses Liberal-
Democrat leader Jo Swinson her seat.60
60 Swinson gets this curious entry in Wikipedia: “In her four and a half
months as party leader, she became both the youngest leader in her party’s
history, and its youngest ever ex-leader.”
That stall, whatever the personal sacrifice, was genius.
Johnson wasn’t concerned with the wave of losses prior
to the December 12 election. He was concerned with
one thing: Brexit. He’ll get it. Liberal fantasies of a
second Brexit vote are motes in the sky. The U.K. as we
know it may never have another election.
That kind of conservative victory would sound great for

Trump. It’s not. Trump is riding on being declared
exonerated again (he wasn’t the first time either, but
whatev). He’s stated that he wants a trial. What he really
wants is a show trial, where the Republicans show fealty
and the Democrats are punished for their hubris. Rivals
like Warren and Sanders are pilloried for rising against
him. How can he lose, he thinks? How can he be
stopped?
There seems to be one way. Nancy Pelosi could just

hip-pocket the impeachment—delaying transmission of
the articles—until she can get a fair trial. Why would the
trial not be fair? McConnell has already guaranteed he
will make it unfair. “I’m not an impartial juror,”
McConnell said, as he described his coordination with
the White House throughout the trial. Graham echoed
this skullduggery. I’m sure every Republican short of
Mitt Romney has thought this. It doesn’t matter what
the Democrats have. It doesn’t matter what the truth is.
This is our guy and you can’t take him away from us.
That’s it. That’s the trial.
So Pelosi says no. By stalling the trial, she makes the

2020 election about the trial. You want this guy gone,
she says? Give us more Elizabeth Warrens. Vote out
McConnell by backing fighter pilot Amy McGrath.
Boot perennial loser Martha McSally for astronaut Mark
Kelly. Send Cory Gardner home and make the world
shout “Hickenlooper!” A blue wave destroys the GOP
Senate majority, giving Democrats both houses. Likely,
it also gives the Democrats the White House, but even
if Trump wins re-election, as sitting presidents often do,
you have a Senate that can do the job fairly. Sixty-seven
votes to convict is still a million miles away, but the
threat is always there. In effect, the second term of the
Trump presidency is neutralized.
Does this trick work? I have no blessed clue. But I have

seen it work in games. The simplest example I can think
of is the genre of “player judge” games. A player judge
game is one where each player gets a turn judging the
actions of the rest of the players. When that player is
done, the role of the judge rotates to the left. The most
notable purveyor of this concept is the 1999 game
Apples to Apples. On their turn, the judge puts out a
“green apple” adjective like “Popular” and the other
players play “red apple” nouns like “Vacations” and
“James Bond.” The judge decides which matches the
adjective best and awards the green apple card to the
person who played that card. The person to the left of
the judge becomes the judge for the next turn.
You might have seen this in a number of subsequent

games like The Big Idea and Snake Oil, but the one you
likely know best is Cards Against Humanity, which, per
Ellen, “never fails to liven up the party.” The same
mechanic is used here, except it has black cards with
sentences like “I get by with a little help from ______.”
The white cards are examples like “Joe Biden,”
“Puberty,” and “Three dicks at the same time.” That’s
just a little different than Apples to Apples, whose
raciest answer might be “Black Holes.”
You can see what the effect of the rotating judge is. If
the judge is your Aunt Molly and she’s on her third
mimosa, you might want to open up a little more
liberally than if the judge is your pastor. If the judge is a
seven-year-old,61 you might hold back the cards with the
big words on them. Bring the right cards to the right
judge, and you can win a player judge game.
Choosing your judge is a way to steer the outcome. It’s

not a surefire strategy—judges are notoriously fickle—
but it’s a lot better than showing up for a kangaroo
court. McConnell wants Chief Justice John Roberts to
preside over a trial where McConnell sets the rules.
They can do that because they’re in the majority. But
only when they’re allowed to start.
Pelosi can stall the impeachment trial until the State of

the Union, making sure Trump is under impeachment
when he addresses Congress. She can stall till Trump
takes the stage for his coronation at the Republican
National Convention. She can hold out till November,
when the election is on the line. Americans will be
presented with a choice: Do you want this done or not?
My expectation is that a majority of them will. When the

power exists to get a fair trial for the President, in which
his alleged high crimes and misdemeanors will be duly
considered rather than swept into the corners.
It’s a crazy gambit, but Boris Johnson is nothing if not

crazy. It worked for him. It might just work for us.
61 That
assumes you’re playing Apples to Apples with the seven-year-old.
For God’s sake, don’t play Cards Against Humanity with a seven-year-old.
Rich explains: timing
One of my favorite games to teach at game nights is a little

wonder called Las Vegas. Each player has eight dice, and you roll
all of them each turn. After you roll, you can choose any number,
taking all of your dice of that number and adding them to that
number’s casino. Play continues until all players run out of dice.
The player with the most dice placed at each casino wins a cash
prize. Simple game to pick up and a great primer on probability,
but it starts becoming ruthless once each player figures out the
key to the game: timing.
Often, three dice is enough to secure a prize. Say you roll a trio of
fours and drop them down on a casino, shouting to the rooftops
that you desire that prize. Say you do it on the first turn. Suddenly,
I’m interested. I still have all eight dice and you only have five left.
The odds that I can roll four fours isn’t terrible. Even if I only roll
two fours this turn, I might roll two more later on and add to my
attack. Suddenly, you realize that you haven’t secured a prize at
all. You’ve only secured your own personal place in conflict.
On the other hand, say I decide to slow-play the game. I try to

place only one die each turn. I’m not winning any prizes yet, but I
savor my handful of dice, hoping I can make a big move later on.
As I continue to lose one die a round, my odds of making a big
move decrease, but I still feel in control as other players drop even
more of their dice on casinos. Eventually, I’m the only one still in
the game, making small plays as I try to secure victory, and
everyone else watches helplessly.
Besides Las Vegas, games like hearts and poker do an amazing job
teaching you about the power of timing. Leading a trick in hearts
gives you control, but also puts you in danger of taking points each
round. When you aren’t in the lead, you have both less risk and
less control over the game. In poker, the strength of your hand
can get you in early trouble if you aren’t in the right betting
position. Each game moves the lead around, because both designs
realize that mastering timing can provide an unbeatable
advantage.

The politics of
believing in God
December 25, 2019
It’s Christmas! Let’s talk about God.
Growing up I read stories about God. In the Old

Testament, he was a real guy. He said things directly to
people. Sometimes he was a jackass, like in the book of
Joshua, where at his direction the titular warlord spends
half the book wiping out every living being in his path
and the other half dividing the treasure. Not keen. It
took reading the New Testament to learn that God had
a nice side, and being in God’s love was a warm and
comforting thing. Way too late for me. The God I knew
was one you’d pray to if you wanted something to
happen, but it didn’t have to be for good reasons. If he
liked what you proposed, he might make it happen.
Maybe that’s not how you were taught it. YMMV.
Because I got the unadulterated O.T. version, and had

parents who treated me as a mostly formed human who
could handle my decisions, I remember making choices
about how close I wanted to get to God. For example, I
flat-out rejected the idea of a Bar Mitzvah. I’d read the
Old Testament in English. I sure as heck wasn’t going
to reread it in Hebrew, a language I had no desire to
embrace. Religion was not a thing I wanted to ritualize.
I got what I wanted out of it, which was just this:
I believe in God.
Maybe that means you think I believe in other things,

like the afterlife or the story of Noah. None of that
took. Some of it is great storytelling, and boy, that Jesus
guy could pack a lot of good stuff into a sentence. I read
every word he said, or those that people said he said. I
had lots of questions about Jesus. Real person? I
absolutely believe that. Son of God? No way. More of a
self-motivated latchkey kid, kinda like me.62
The point here is that I made my choices. I turned into

sort of a religious tourist, someone who dives into the
trappings of a lot of religions just to see how other folks
think, but doesn’t believe in the teachings of any of
them. I’ve visited Christian fundamentalist services,
Baha’i temples, Moonies cult rooms, Buddhist Zen
gardens, Scientology centers, Satanist rituals, Baptist
choirs, and of course lots of synagogues. They’re all
fascinating and kind of precious, in a good way. They all
take themselves way more seriously than I think they
should. But whatever gets you through the day.
The question I asked myself as a kid: Is there

a reason to believe in God? Is there a clear value one
way or another? What does game theory say about it?
Turns out it says quite a lot, and it’s pretty fascinating.
62 I saw a church sign referring to Joseph as Jesus’s stepfather. C’mon now.

Joseph raised Jesus from birth. That’s what you call a dad. Up till Jesus is 12,
Mary and Joseph think they’re his natural parents. Joseph’s own son tells him
that he’s someone else’s kid. Joseph’s the tragic hero of the Gospels.
I’m not talking about the value of professing that you
believe in God. That has clear tactical value. Here is a
list of all the atheists in Congress:
1. [sound of crickets]
That’s the list. The few who don’t identify with a branch
stop short of saying that they’re agnostics or atheists.
California Rep. Jared Huffman calls himself a
“nonreligious humanist” and Maryland’s Jamie Raskin
saying he’s a humanist “with a small h.” Arizona
Senator Kyrsten Sinema describes herself not as a
nonbeliever, but one who prefers a “secular approach”
and “is a student of all cultures in her community.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, who once said he was part of
no organized religion, came out strongly in a debate as
“proudly Jewish,” though frustrated with Israel.
Whatever their internal beliefs, these legislators are
saying the right things to stay in office.
You can see why: A whole lot of people don’t trust

people who don’t believe in a power greater than
themselves. Only 60 percent of Americans would vote
for an atheist. Yet the opposite is also true: A whole lot
of people don’t trust politicians who invoke the Bible or
the Koran for political purposes. It doesn’t seem
right. It’s not just the separation of church and state that
matters. It’s specifically what they say.
For one, Jeff Sessions. When he invoked Romans 13 to

justify family separation at the border, folks exploded.
Romans says, “Let everyone be subject to the governing
authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has
established. The authorities that exist have been established by
God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is
rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so
will bring judgment on themselves.” Sessions’s secular, racist
policy was not what a lot of religious people had in
mind when they read Romans. Also, Romans 13 is
bunk. Jesus rebelled against authority because that’s the
point. You can take your Romans 13 and stuff it, Jeff.
So, yeah, saying you believe in God is a win-win thing,

even if you’re lying. That’s awful. You should be able to say
you’re an atheist or an agnostic and not have it color
believers’ trust in you. You should be able to say you’re
a believer and not have it color what atheists and
agnostics think of you. It’s all about choice. If we
believe in that for other things, we should believe it for
religion. Maybe that’ll get fixed someday.
But to actual belief: Yes, there are political calculations to

believing in God. The key principle is a thing called
Pascal’s wager. Seventeenth century mathematician
Blaise Pascal posited that humans literally bet their lives
on whether to believe in God. In the Christian tradition
(or at least the one Pascal knew), a believer who lived a
good life would be rewarded with eternity in Heaven,
while one who lived a bad life would be cast down to
Hell. Since Pascal’s Christianity believed that not
believing in God was synonymous with living a bad life,
such a person was removing any doubt that their
actions were bad, and thus condemning themselves to
burn. That’s if God existed. If God didn’t exist, then the
believer’s losses (maybe some sin) were trivial in the
face of the limitless oblivion that awaited. So, even if
there’s a minuscule chance God exists, the infinite
payoff is so astounding that it is impossible to ignore. If
you can somehow convince yourself that the unseen is
manifest, Pascal says, bet the house on God:
“A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance
where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... It is not
optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us
see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You
have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to
stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your
happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and
misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather
than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point
settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in
wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you
gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then,
without hesitation that He is... There is here an infinity of an
infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite
number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our
proposition is of infinite force when there is the finite to stake in a
game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the
infinite to gain.”
This was groundbreaking probability theory. It preceded

the prisoner’s dilemma by three centuries, and was just
as influential. It was unlike anything religious thought
had seen. Like every question, it has an answer that is
simple, easy to understand, and wrong.
Upon its spread, the critiques of Pascal’s wager flooded

out. Voltaire called the wager “indecent and childish,”
suggesting the mere motivation to believe in something
was not proof that it was rational. Diderot noted that
many religions demanded things of their believers, and
believing in one could mean alienating another, an act
of consequence if that religion turned out to be right.
Souriau noted that just because a person wagered was
no guarantee God intended to honor the bet; in fact,
God might only honor bets made the opposite way.
The most significant critique of the wager is this: Pascal
himself said that people should believe in God even if
there was only a minuscule chance he existed. Here, the
argument collapses. Poker players and stock investors
make bets on expected value; if the outcome averages
a higher reward than the investment, you make the bet.
But expected value has its limits, A recasting of Pascal’s
wager called “Pascal’s mugging” makes them evident.
Pascal is mugged by a thief who forgets his knife. So he

uses logic as a weapon. He promises Pascal that if he
surrenders his wallet, he’ll bring Pascal twice the money
tomorrow. Pascal scoffs. The thief ups the ante, saying
he’ll bring four times the money. Pascal refuses. How
about a quadrillion times the money, the thief asks?
Okay, now Pascal is interested. At worst he loses his
wallet, but at best he’s got cash forever. If the thief has
even a minuscule chance to bring back a near-infinite
reward, surely Pascal should give him his wallet. Right?
No, he should not. A math guy like Pascal would tell

you that probabilities that are effectively zero are not zero.
That’s why this thought experiment makes Utilitarians
say to give up the wallet. But that word “effectively”
should give you pause. How much effort are you going to
put into chasing down something that has almost no
chance of being true? If you believe that God has
almost no chance of being real, no amount of potential
reward—not even an infinite amount—makes the effort
worth it. Expected value is a guideline, not a mandate.
Just as notably, Pascal should never make a deal with an

extortionist. Fundamentally, the logic behind Pascal’s
wager is extortion: believe or have a nonzero chance of
eternal Hell. That’s where a whole lot of people,
including me, part company with Christianity. If you
can’t get people to trust you except by invoking
damnation, how is that trust, exactly?
A more interesting approach, to me anyway, is

the atheist’s wager, which posits that living a good life
regardless of whether one believes in God is a far
superior strategy than just believing in God. If a
benevolent God exists, and you live a good life, you go
to Heaven; if He exists and you live a bad life, you go to
Hell. But if He doesn’t exist, then nothing changes
about your state; you just cease to be. You should
gamble on living a good life, because there’s a chance
you’ll be rewarded, and no chance you’ll be punished.
This works for me, except it posits that God isn’t a

tyrant who demands fealty in addition to good works.
For me, it all goes back to the Old Testament, where
God wasn’t nice at all. New Testament believers may
think God will do them a solid if they believe the right
things, but nothing about the Old Testament suggests
God is in the solid-doing business. There’s just as much
likelihood that God is evil as that He is good.
This dilemma makes Jesus a problem child. C.S. Lewis’s

“Mad, Bad, or God” trilemma points out that Jesus said
outright that he was the son of God. This means one of
three things: he was nuts, he was lying, or he was the
son of God. Occam’s razor does Jesus no favors here.
To believe Jesus was the son of God, you just have to
believe.
This is why I believe in God: Because for thousands of

years, most smart people believed in God. That’s it. It’s
why I believe in science too. I have not personally done
the work to convince myself that life evolved over
millions of years; I have no more proved it to myself
than I have proved a tornado swept through a junkyard
and assembled the first Boeing 747. But I believe in
evolution because smart people have told me it occurs.
It’s advanced beyond belief, actually. I know that
evolution exists, for certain, deep in my heart. It’s not
inconsistent to me to believe in God in the same way.
Atheistic proof has existed for my lifetime, maybe a
little longer. It’s still got work to do. Again, it’s just my
belief. You should believe what you want to believe.
Still, I’m the last of a dying breed. Americans who

believe in science and religion are vanishing. Millennials
are leaving religion in droves and never coming back.
They’re more likely to say they have no religion than say
they’re Christian. They’re making a mockery of Pascal.
A key element of this is the strong tie between the

Republican Party and conservative Christianity, which is
driving young people to the exits. The deal for right-
wing evangelicals was simple: rally around the man who
was the living embodiment of everything you despise,
and you get Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges
overturned. You win by losing your soul forever. Young
people know what they’re looking at. For the majority
of young people in Christian households, Donald
Trump is not the Chosen One they were hoping for.
Younger people in Christian households tend to be cool
with gay marriage, gun control, and freedom of religion;
they tend to be less cool with oppression. Yet that’s the
direction the churches are moving.
It’s not just the evangelicals. The reactionary Netanyahu

regime in Israel is pushing young American Jews out of
Judaism’s embrace. The Chinese crackdown on religion
is the most brutal in 50 years, leading to a diminished
status of Judeo-Christianity in the world’s largest nation.
Some conservative Catholics believe that they no longer
have an ally in the Pope, who seems hell-bent on saving
Catholicism from the dust heap of history, whomever
he ticks off. Religion is in trouble.
This has problematic consequences. The link between

faith, hope, and charity is severing. U.S. churchgoers are
more likely to volunteer for humanitarian causes, for
example; the likelihood you helped out last week if you
went to services was 45 percent, versus 27 percent if
you didn’t. Churchgoers give an average of $2,935 to
charity each year, versus $704 for the non-attenders.
With religious identification collapsing, so too is our
non-governmental safety net. Will we see a coequal rise
in non-religious charity giving? Jury’s out on that.
If religion is only practiced by right-wing, gun-loving

kooks, its positive message will get trammeled. We’ll
think of believers as the bad people, and that’ll just be
another great divide that cuts our nation and world
apart. I suppose it could all turn around, though. Good-
thinking religious people could stand up for what they
believe in and throw out the rotters who sin in God’s
name. Could happen. It’s going the way it’s going.
Where does that leave us, on Christmas of 2019? Game

theory doesn’t settle the question. For every Pascal’s
wager, there’s a Pascal’s mugging around the corner. It
comes down to what you believe. That’s about you and
no one else.
Happy holidays, whatever they are.

Rich explains: Pascal’s wager
Blaise Pascal is a fascinating figure in the history of mathematics.

Among his many accomplishments, Pascal helped found the study
of probability after some prompting from a friend. Unlike most of
the applied math I enjoy, Pascal wasn’t motivated by some heady
topic like politics or economics. Pascal and his friend, the Chevalier
de Méré, just wanted to learn how to gamble. Every high school
textbook that covers probability should have a big, smiling picture
of Blaise Pascal right at the front of the chapter. He’s that
important to our modern day understanding of the field.
Within a year, Pascal would almost entirely give up his work in

mathematics. In 1654, Pascal had an intense religious experience
he called the “Night of Fire,” causing him to convert to a very
individualized brand of Catholicism. Pascal quickly began
publishing criticisms of religious thinkers and authorities, including
Pope Alexander VII, for using reason and logic in a circular attempt
to justify immoral acts.
He also published his Thoughts, which combined his mathematical

expertise with his religious doctrine we now call Pascal’s wager.
Though unfinished, the Thoughts set out an apology for Christian
belief, in the face of a wide variety of criticisms and scandals.
Pascal’s wager was intended as a reason for individual people to
have faith outside of the structure of organized religion.
Arguments like this hinge on existence and infinity, two concepts

humans have trouble understanding. While Pascal’s intentions
don’t seem selfish, others have used similar arguments for their
own gains. Modern televangelists often request a “seed,” a
financial donation which will be repaid in spiritual gains later on.
This “Prosperity Gospel” banks on the same structure as Pascal’s
wager: it is better to sacrifice than to miss an infinite reward.
Pascal surely wasn’t intending to purchase his own private jet to
use as a “preaching machine” on his way to luxurious vacations,
but his faith-based theory is impossible to argue against, because
existence and infinity are just beyond comprehension. In the end,
this logical argument all hinges on what you choose to believe.

America is in a game
of Cyberball, and it
hurts. Just like love.
February 4, 2020
The Iowa Caucuses have ended in an inferno, with no

results reported, the fourth-place candidate claiming
victory, and the frontrunner’s campaign suggesting the
results of an election are invalid. A trial of the president
for darn-near-treason will end in an acquittal after no
witnesses were called, as potential witnesses literally
played recordings of Trump committing crimes against
America. The Democrats’ next debate will include Mike
Bloomberg, who has not met any donor thresholds
because he has absolutely no donors. The president
prepares for a State of the Union Address tonight where
he is emboldened to commit even more crimes, since he
knows no consequences await him as long as he can
cow the GOP into subservience. Everything feels awful.
With all of that bleakness, it’s time to talk about why

you feel so terrible. It’s time to talk about Cyberball.
Cyberball is one of the greatest sports ever. Maybe

you’ve never heard of it. Don’t worry, I’ll explain. It’s
not played in stadiums or gymnasiums. It’s played in the
psychological testing labs of Purdue University.
In a game of Cyberball, players stand apart from each
other and throw a ball at each other. Most times, an
opposing player catches it. Pure, athletic action, all on a
computer screen. While you play it, you’re encouraged
to think about what the other players are like, where
you’re playing, and what the day is like. It’s important to
get your brain right.
Now, you’d be forgiven if you think Cyberball is a game

for two players. It’s not. See that little hand in the
middle of the picture above? That’s you. You’re ready to
catch the ball, right? Except those jerks aren’t throwing
it to you. They’re just chucking it back and forth,
excluding you from participation. This despite the fact
that you want to play. You want to play a lot. It hurts
that you’re excluded. It’s devastating, actually. Your
opponents must be cruel people to leave someone as
great as you out of the fun.
Here’s the big problem, though. You, like everyone else

who’s ever played Cyberball, are not playing against real
opponents. You’re playing against a computer program.
Before you ever sat down, the programmers decided
how often you would be thrown the ball, and may have
decided that after a certain point, you would never be
thrown the ball. They just didn’t tell you.
Cyberball is an experiment on your brain. It’s designed
to measure, in a way that’s a little difficult to
understand, how love affects the body. As anyone
who’s heard the Nazareth cover of the Everly Brothers
song knows, love hurts. It wounds and mars. Maybe
you know that from experience. What you may not
know is that there’s actual scientific proof that it hurts
as much as physical pain. Sometimes much more.
Here’s how Cyberball began. In 1983, Purdue researcher

Kipling Williams and his dog Michelob were relaxing in
a park when he got bonked by a Frisbee. He threw it
back to the two guys playing, and they threw it back to
Williams. How jovial! This continued for a minute and
was great fun. Then, for no apparent reason, the two
original Frisbee-ers just returned to tossing it between
themselves. They cut Williams out without saying
anything. He was stunned how sad, angry, and
embarrassed this made him feel. After Williams slunk
back to his faithful Michelob, he resolved to know why.
To understand ostracism, Williams built the Cyberball

program.63 The experiment, which was performed more
than a thousand times, showed some interesting results.
Participants got cranky when thrown the ball too often,
for example. Having to deal with half the throws was
too much work. Even one-third—completely equal
inclusion—wasn’t the sweet spot. Players generally felt
better when they only got one-sixth of the throws. Then
they felt included and supported.
63His collaborators at various times were Kristin Sommer, Blair Jarvis,

Karen Gonsalkorale, Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman, Ilja van
Beest, Wayne Warburton, David Cairns, Rick Richardson, Joseph Forgas,
Wilma Choi, Christopher Cheung, William von Hippel, and Lisa Zadro.
You know who felt the worst? The people who got
none of the throws. Completely ostracized participants
demonstrated lower levels of belonging, self-esteem,
control, and meaningful existence.
Some players were told the other players didn’t exist,

that they were playing against a machine. It didn’t
matter. The players still suffered the same loss of self.
Others were told the falsehood that the other players
were Ku Klux Klan members, and players still wanted
to be thrown the stupid ball. By the damn KKK. This is
even true:
“(The researchers) asked participants to play Cyberball inside an

MRI chamber in which the blood flow in their brains could be
monitored. They reported more distress and showed activation of
the anterior cingulate cortex—the same region of the brain that
registers physical pain—when they were ostracized during
Cyberball, even when they thought that their computer was not yet
connected to the computers of the other two players.”
Whoa. They still felt ostracized even when told the

game was not on. This is some serious pain. It’s backed
up by further studies where participants were exposed
to different levels of hot stimulation on their forearms
at the same time they were shown pictures of ex-lovers
who’d broken up with them. The two types of pain
registered increased activity in the same parts of the
brain. Science tells us rejection is hot. Love really hurts.
When ostracism is this intense, it impairs cognitive

function. This makes perfect sense to me. As a game
designer, I know all about the effects of ostracism. Sure,
I know a little bit about it because I was a bit of a dork
growing up, but that’s not what I’m referring to.
I know about ostracism because I’m an expert on
player engagement. That’s our term for how hooked
in a player is on the game we’re playing. You might be
surprised that the game’s system is far more important
than anything the players are doing. It doesn’t matter
whether they can effectively play the game or whether
others assist them in doing so. It mostly matters
whether the system lets players seize the spotlight.
Have you ever played Cranium? That’s the board game

where you sing, solve word puzzles, do some Play-Doh
stuff, and so on. It’s not great at any of those things,
though. I’d rather play Sing It!, Boggle, or Claymania,
because they specialize in good implementations of each
of those things. Cranium is kind of a mishmash, really.
Oh yeah, it’s one of the most popular games of all time.

I asked Cranium developers Andy Forrest and Alan
Pruzan why it was so popular. They gave me a simple
answer: “It makes everyone feel like they’re great at
something.” Cranium moves the spotlight from player
to player. Everyone has their moment in the sun, doing
the part they like the best. How awesome is that.
Cyberball does the opposite. It makes you feel you’re

not good at anything. You’re not even worth including.
Think about the worst you’ve felt when you got to try
your hardest and still lost a game. You can handle it.
The worst is when you hardly got a chance to play.
With all that in mind, let’s look at why politics makes

you feel so bad these days. All this assumes you’re
concerned about rampant corruption, sexism, racism
and fascism. If you like those things, maybe you feel
pretty good these days. I’ll assume you’re not.
From the minute the House voted to impeach Trump,
you knew it was going to be rough going. There were
never going to be 67 votes to convict in the Senate.
Even with that knowledge, you thought there might
be... more. As Adam Schiff masterfully stood up for
righteousness, you looked across the gallery and knew it
was falling on deaf ears. The Republicans didn’t want to
be here, and they sure didn’t want you here.
By refusing to allow witness testimony, the GOP shut

our team out. Maybe we were never going to win, but
we wanted to play. The trial reinforced the feeling we’ve
gotten from the Senate for years. There’s no progress,
no accountability, no professionalism, no hope. We saw
there were no greater angels under the rotunda, just
more crushing disappointment. You wondered, without
representation, do we even have a government?
At least you had the primaries to look forward to. You’d

see a ratification of the great strides our candidates had
made. That’s what you wanted. But first, before anyone
could vote in a primary, you had to get through Iowa.
The wildly Byzantine and undemocratic caucus system
may not make complete sense—why exactly couldn’t
caucus-goers switch away from viable candidates on the
second alignment, and what exactly was viability
anyway?—but at least the overwhelmingly white voters
would give their say. Barely one percent of the delegates
would be awarded at the caucuses, but with people
voting, the start of the balloting would feel good.
It didn’t. In the words of gun-jumper Pete Buttigieg,

“Iowa, you have shocked the nation”—not by reporting
results favoring him, but for reporting no results at all.
The word “clusterfuck” never had so real an example.
You could hear the confusion in the words of the Story
County precinct captain who couldn’t report his results.
Here’s Shawn Sebastian talking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Sebastian: “I have been on hold for over an hour with the Iowa
Democratic Party. They tried I think to promote an app to report
the results. The app by all accounts just like doesn’t work. We’ve
been recommended to call into the hotline, and the hotline has not
been responsive. I can hear just the music that I’m hearing.”
Blitzer: “Shawn, have you gotten any explanation at all as to
what’s going on?”
Sebastian: “No, I have not, no. I’m just waiting on hold and
doing my best to report my results from my precinct.”
Blitzer: “What are you hearing? I know you’re listening to a
conversation from the Iowa Democratic Party.”
DNC worker: “This is [name inaudible] with the Iowa
Democratic Party. Can I help you?”
Sebastian: “This is a real coincidence, Wolf. I just got off hold.
So I’ve got to get off the phone to report the results.”
DNC worker: “Hello? Hello?”
Blitzer: “Go ahead. Can we listen in as you report them,
Shawn?”
Sebastian: “Yup. Okay, hi. Hello?”
Blitzer: “So let’s listen in.”
DNC worker: <CLICK>
Sebastian: “They hung up on me. They hung up on me. Okay,
I’ve got to get back in line on hold...”
That’s just devastating. The disaster robbed the Iowans

of their voice. Even if someone technically wins the
caucuses, the story of Iowa is that the system—literally,
the reporting app and telephone system—let the people
of America down. The Iowan voters were ostracized;
they could not claim any success for their candidates,
just failure for their system.
Iowa screwed up the entire nominating process, and if
you can’t trust the results of the nominating process, did
you even have one?
Now Iowa is done. Everything the state built for five

decades is history. It will never have a Democratic
caucus at the front of the primary season again. New
Hampshire might get to keep its technically-first
primary, but big states like Florida and Michigan likely
will take Iowa’s place near the front of the line, to say
nothing of California, which may blot out the sun.
The real winner of this week is Mike Bloomberg. The

billionaire bought his way onto the debate stage with the
DNC’s enthusiastic consent and ignored the caucuses.
He just spent millions saying “Mike Will Get It Done”
to anyone with a TV. What is “It”? That’s unclear. He’s
basically Trump with a good set of policies. It’s not that
he is a bad candidate. He’s a competent administrator
and has spent billions fighting climate change and gun
violence. He might have a chance.
But nothing about his campaign makes you feel good,

because you can’t engage with it. You can’t donate to
Bloomberg, because he doesn’t take donations. If you
live in New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina, you
can’t vote for him, as he’s not on the ballot. He’s just
waiting to push a stumbling Biden out of the way and
muzzle Sanders and Warren. He is the living
embodiment of “The Party Decides.” You’re standing
on the sidelines watching whatever drama (or salvation,
if you prefer) that he brings to the table play out. It’s
not you. The ability to not support a candidate is the
definition of democracy. If you can’t not support a
candidate, do you even have a candidate?
Tonight might top all of this. When Trump delivers the
state of our disunion, he won’t inspire you. He’s not a
leader. He’s barely a fully formed human, a grifter who
aims to be king. Tonight, he may crown himself. You
can’t engage with him, because nothing he does or says
causes him any sort of shame or remorse. For him,
norms are for suckers. He won’t agree to debates, he
won’t stand up for America, and he won’t do anything
to get you on his side unless you’re a racist. He doesn’t
even want elections, just adulation. He’s a jerk who
won’t play the game you need a president to play. He’s a
cyberbullying Cyberball game brought to life. Without a
real president, do we even have a democracy?
All of this hurts, because we care so much. We love

America, and we want to save it. But do you know
what’s great? Americans respond quite negatively to
being shut out. You just have to look at the armies of
Sanders activists, of Warren selfie posters, of Buttigieg
field operatives, of elderly and minority Biden ride-or-
diers. These people are coming, and even if they can’t
trust their candidates to do the right things, they’re
angry as hell. There’s not going to be any “I’m sure our
side can count on Minnesota” this time around. This is
going to be the most active presidential cycle in history.
I don’t know if the good guys will win. I know they’ll

fight. We’ll get our chance to participate, at least if the
party learns its lessons from Iowa and gets the hell out
of the way. Even if they don’t, the Sanders/Warren
people are going to put up a hell of a fight.
This year, if anyone tries to take the Frisbee away, walk

up to them and tell them you’re in the game. If you can
bring a dog named Michelob, so much the better.
Rich explains: player engagement
Ahh, player engagement. The golden goose of gaming. I love

listening to titans of game design talk about the lessons they’ve
learned engaging their players, because it changes the nuts and
bolts of how I think about a game. I usually focus on obvious
qualities like mechanics, themes, artwork, shiny things. But there
is a big divide between learning how to play a game and seeing
how it engages a player. There, I can see that player engagement
has a purpose: player retention. Designers want their game to
grab players and keep them playing.
I’ve played a few massively multiplayer online roleplaying games

in my time, but let’s focus on the all-time best: Puzzle Pirates. As a
new sailor, you quickly learn that the general shipboard tasks of
any pirate vessel are solved through puzzles. Want to sail? You’re
playing Dr. Mario. Need to clear out the bilge? That’s Bejeweled.
The captain usually assigns you to a station, and as the voyage
continues, the puzzles all pause at regular intervals to let you
know how everyone in the crew is doing. If you’re only doing a
middling job at navigation, you might find yourself sent to repair
the hull or even thrown from the ship.
These breaks are a genius moment in the game, because it serves

to create an important gameplay loop. Station assignment leads to
a puzzle activity, which leads to public assessment. From there,
you can decide to continue at that station or find a new one if the
puzzle has grown stale. That loop exists within the travel loop,
where a voyage eventually ends, and players have to decide
whether they want to go for more loot, or chat with their new
friends. When those get dull, there’s also a larger marketplace
loop that lets you deck out your pirate with the fanciest of hats.
By immersing myself in these intricate loops of engagement, I

experience both short and long term satisfaction. I find the player
engagement I’m looking for and the designers get the player
retention they need for the game to be successful. And if we can
do all that while sailing the high seas playing carpentry Tetris, then
I’m all for it.

Bernie’s campaign is
the best ever. It may
not matter.
February 7, 2020
Up until this week, I thought the 2008 Obama

campaign was the best-run Democratic campaign of all
time. I’m taking that off the board. Bernie Sanders has
the best-run Democratic campaign of all time. It likely
won’t lead to him being president, but it’s worth
watching a master at work.
Part of the reason is the sheer number of supporters

Sanders has developed over two elections. If you simply
want the most votes or contributors or dollars, Bernie’s
your dude. Now, you might want the most votes in
specific areas or the most contributors of a certain
demographic or the most contributions of a certain size,
and then maybe someone else is who you want. But in
raw numbers, Sanders leads every general metric. Better
than anyone, Bernie can mobilize an army.
You might not like certain members of that army.

Maybe you don’t like fans of Joe Rogan or residents of
Twitter. Maybe you think Sanders supporters talk down
to (or even sabotage) other candidates, such as the
recent #MayorCheat pile-on. Maybe you just don’t like
the Russian bots that pretend to be Sanders supporters.
I feel all those things, and its why Sanders isn’t my
candidate. Bernie I like fine; his friends not as much.
Still, it’s hard to argue with volume. The Democratic

Party likes to think of itself as the big tent, but the
Sanders campaign is the bigger tent. They have many
non-Democrats backing their campaign, and it’s hard to
point to anyone else who has that kind of evangelism.
Sanders also leads all other candidates in supporter
enthusiasm, meaning they are more likely to help him
win than other candidates’ supporters.64
Sheer numbers don’t make a campaign. You also need

to be smart. While the Sanders campaign has leaders
and supporters who blurt out just the dumbest things,
its internal operations are brilliant. I’ll show you how.
In game design, we adjust for a special kind of player

called a rules lawyer. A rules lawyer is a player who
knows the rules of the game cold, and is willing to share
that knowledge at any time, regardless of whether it
benefits anyone. This can be quite useful, especially
when others don’t know the rules. When they do, it can
cause unlikable outcomes. It can mean they observe the
letter of the rules but not the spirit.
For example, in the game Dungeons & Dragons, the

Dungeon Master is the person tasked with setting the
game in motion and describing the events that occur. If
the rules lawyer keeps interrupting the DM, they may
get frustrated and impose penalties.
64I swear to Heaven, I was writing this and a Vermont number lit up my
caller ID. Sure enough, a Bernie call.
This week showed just how rules lawyery the Sanders
campaign is. They know the Iowa caucuses are an
assortment of insane and arcane features. For example,
sometimes delegates just get added out of nowhere.
Coin flips to decide ties are done by partisans; in 2016,
Sanders won exactly one of seven coin flips against
Hillary Clinton, a sequence called the “Miracle Six.”
Results are often not known until weeks after the
election; in 2012, Mitt Romney was dubbed the winner
for two weeks before Iowa changed its mind and sent
all its delegates to Rick Santorum, who missed out on
the Iowa bounce and became irrelevant (or at least
solidified his irrelevance).
This week, Iowa gave untrained volunteers an untested

app developed by a company called ACRONYM who
hired an app maker called Shadow, Inc.—wow, what
1990s Sandra Bullock movie am I in again? When the
app failed spectacularly, careless precinct workers let the
Iowa Democratic Party’s hotline number be shown to
the internet. The Trump fans on 4chan flooded the
hotline so no results could be reported.
The silliest aspect of the Iowa election has to do with

satellite caucuses. Iowa doesn’t award delegates by the
number of votes cast for a candidate across the state.
Instead, each of 1,681 precincts does a baffling dance to
test the viability of candidates. Those who get 15%
support keep all their voters, while those who don’t see
their voters wander off to other candidates. That’s what
happened to ex-frontrunner Joe Biden, when many
precincts declared his campaign “not viable.” His
fourth-place finish was barely above the 15% threshold,
and he’ll head into New Hampshire with a hobbled
campaign.
Sanders, however, will go into his next-door-neighbor
state riding high. He and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg
basically tied at the top of the polls. Buttigieg swept
many of the rural counties, while Sanders dominated in
the cities. He also dominated the satellite caucuses, and
this is where the true power of the Sanders campaign
can be seen. Non-satellite precincts all work like this:
No matter how many people show up, each precinct
awards the same number of state delegate equivalents,
or S.D.E.’s (basically, fractions of delegates).
Hypothetically, Mayor Pete might win a precinct with

200 farmers and Bernie might win a precinct of 700 city
folk, and both would send the same number of S.D.E.’s
to the state delegation. That’s pretty far from one-voter-
one-vote, but that’s how it’s done in the Hawkeye State.
No one paid much attention to how the satellite

caucuses were run. These caucuses were held in 87 sites
inside and outside Iowa, such as Florida, Arizona, and
Rhode Island (but not Ohio, Texas, or Colorado). There
were three overseas: Paris got one, as did Glasgow.
They were even Iowans voting in Georgia—not the
state, the country.
Per the caucuses’ website, here’s who could participate:
“Any registered Iowa Democrat can participate in the satellite

caucuses. Most of the satellite caucus sites are open to the public
and closed caucuses are at private residences or workplaces. This
means that Iowans can attend a public satellite caucus if it’s more
convenient to their home or workplace than their regular precinct.
Or Iowans who want to caucus in a different language or in a
more comfortable setting can do so at one of the 11 language and
culture sites across the state.”
Hey, that’s keen. It’s Iowa nice. And it’s incredibly bad
game design. There are many loopholes in this system,
which was adopted this year and not tested. First,
Iowans were no longer bound by their precincts; it was
now possible for a supporter to go wherever their
candidate would benefit most. Second, Iowans were no
longer bound by the time of the caucus; they could
show up at a more convenient time than the rest of the
caucus-goers. Third, Spanish speakers could now go
away from their precincts to places where they would
caucus in their own language.
The Sanders campaign, alone among all of them, took

full advantage of all these bugs. His supporters flocked
to competitive satellites and away from surefire wins at
home. They created entire satellites at times when they
were highly organized. They targeted Spanish speakers
and funneled them to language sites in large numbers.
All of this wouldn’t have created any outsize results if

not for the worst aspect of the Iowan design: that the
satellites did not award S.D.E.’s equally. Instead, they
got representation proportional to their attendance. The
Sanders campaign sent out an army. They spiked the
vote totals in all the satellites, virtually sweeping them.
They essentially created super-precincts. It was a
masterstroke of rules lawyering. Sanders won Iowa by
6,000 votes, and pulled even with a Midwesterner
centrist due to mastery of the system.
This is, of course, pure foolishness in system design.

But the Sanders campaign didn’t make the rules. They
just understood them better than anyone else. This is
hardly a surprise; Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and
Elizabeth Warren have never run for president, and Joe
Biden didn’t make it past Iowa the last two times.
Sanders ran a magnificent campaign in 2016, and he
only learned how to do it better in 2020.
With all that, why might it not matter? Despite Bernie

being the best campaigner, he is not the best Democrat.
Establishment Democrats don’t love that amid two
runs, Sanders is still an Independent. He runs against
the establishment, in part because it seems to keep
screwing him over. To get to the general election, where
he can pit his campaign’s offensive firepower against
Trump’s even more offensive (in two ways) firepower,
he must first get through a primary studded with people
who don’t want him to carry the Democratic flag. They
seem hell-bent on stopping him. They’re playing
defense and hoping it slows him down.
How much of this is real is open to debate. Does Hillary

Clinton not like Sanders? That seems likely. Does she
really want to give Trump an extra term if Sanders wins
the nomination? That seems unlikely. Same with Obama
and John Kerry. The billionaire class might have a
stronger opinion, though, and they have the money to
put up a formidable barrier. Mike Bloomberg has
dropped $200 million of his own cash, and he’s just
getting started. If Sanders gets momentum, Bloomberg
will aim to quash Biden and Buttigieg and go straight at
Sanders. This is likely to be quite the defensive stand.
The commonly accepted wisdom in American team

sports is that, as Alabama coach Bear Bryant once said:
“Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships.”65
65Or maybe he didn’t. Bryant was an alcoholic, and did not recall saying it.
Shrug emoji? Anyway, let’s say he did.
Playoffs in the five main American men’s pro team
sports have a solid parallel to how we do elections in
America.66 In these leagues, the best teams in each of
two conferences play rounds of internal games, then the
champions of each conference play in the finals. That
matches up with our system of primaries and caucuses
winnowing to a nominee for each of two main parties,
then those two going at each other in the general
election.
It is true that a really good defense can stop a really

good offense cold. The offense might find a way to win,
but it’s not going to be its usual high-flying self while it
gets there. Here’s a tale you almost certainly know, but
it’s always good to put this one on instant replay.67
In 2007, the New England Patriots won every game in

the regular season by stunning margins. They won their
first eight games by 17 or more, and only had four
decided by a touchdown or less. The last of those was a
38–35 squeaker against the New York Giants in which
Tom Brady racked up a record 50th passing touchdown,
cementing the first-ever 16–0 season. In the playoffs,
the Pats thumped the Jaguars by 11 points and the
Chargers by 9.
Meanwhile, the Giants snuck into the playoffs as the

lowest seed, then improbably beat the #4 Buccaneers,
#1 Cowboys, and #2 Packers. They were seemingly no
threat to the Patriots juggernaut.
66 I say “men’s” because the WNBA and NWSL do playoffs radically

differently these days. So I’m leaving them out of this discussion.
67 For science, I mean. Not because I hate one of the teams for a goal-line
interception that robbed my Seahawks of a well-deserved second

consecutive championship. I definitely mean that.
I’ll bet you know how their Super Bowl turned out. The
Giants began the game with a ten-minute drive that
ended in a field goal, and the first half ended 7–3 Pats.
The Patriots had not been in a defensive struggle all
year, and, despite coach Bill Belichick’s Hall of Fame
credentials as a defensive genius, they were not prepared
for one. After a scoreless third quarter, the teams traded
touchdowns in the fourth. The final one came after Pats
all-pro cornerback Asante Samuel dropped an easy
interception of Giants quarterback Eli Manning.
Then, on 3rd down and 32, while in the grasp of a

surefire sack that could end the game, Manning aired
out a seemingly foolish pass toward receiver David
Tyree, who caught it with his helmet. The Giants quickly
scored a touchdown. Game over, underdog wins.
The greatest play in Super Bowl history would be

irrelevant if the Giants defense didn’t hold the record-
setting Patriots offense to 14 points. What a defense it
was. Michael Strahan’s “Stomp You Out” defense led
the NFL with 52 sacks during the regular season, and
stomped out five sacks of Brady during the Super Bowl.
Even the G.O.A.T. can’t win when a 300-pound
defensive lineman is resting on top of him.
In that game, a smothering defense smothered what was

at that point the greatest offense of all time. Then in
2014, the Denver Broncos’ Peyton Manning piloted the
even-more-greatest offense of all-time up against the
Seattle Seahawks’ Legion of Boom, and suffered a 43–8
shellacking. The two greatest offenses of all time scored
a total of 22 points across two Super Bowls. Defense
doesn’t always win championships, but it often makes
great offenses mortal.
Bernie Sanders has a stunningly good offense. It’s about
to run into a blender. For some well-heeled backers, it’s
about whether Sanders (or Warren) would take billions
from the billionaires. I suspect that for most, it’s just a
belief that America won’t vote for a Democratic
socialist. It’s a myth called “electability,” and it depends
on you believing that the person who can garner the
most primary votes, the most contributors, the most
dollars, and the most enthusiasm is not electable.
I think that’s nonsense. My opinion doesn’t matter. The

Democratic establishment is coming for Sanders, and it
is not easily turned away.
If you’re a Sanders fan, it’s hard to know what to do

about that. Here’s one good idea: Be the better person.
Instead of dragging down all the other nominees,
actually support your own. Organize the way Elizabeth
Warren’s campaign organizes. Yeah, I know, you hate
her because you think Bernie would never say a woman
couldn’t win. Please get over yourself. It’s the future of
the free world and your guy might just win. Make us
want to join you. I’m in if you are.
Defense doesn’t actually win championships. Great

defense wins championships, but so does great offense.
When a great defense meets a great offense, sometimes
the defense wins, but often the offense wins (like this
year’s Chiefs over Niners). The only real truth in team
sports is that great players playing on great teams win
championships. Sanders supporters, you’ve got a
superstar candidate and a great team of great players
who know how to game the system. We’re with you, as
long as you don’t destroy our chances of taking back the
White House.
Rich explains: rules lawyers
As a game theorist, I am legally required to be a fan of rules.

Which is good, since as a teacher, I’m also legally required to
teach game rules whenever asked. Sometimes, it’s quick work to
scan through a rulebook and figure out how to play a game, but
other times require a much deeper dive and make me glad I spent
time in high school mastering the nuances of Robert’s Rules of
Order.
Even simple games need rules to help define the boundaries of

play. Take wallball, the most popular game at fourth grade recess.
The basic rules are simple: On your turn, you have to hit the ball,
bouncing it once along the ground before it hits the wall. Play
continues until someone fails at this simple task.
However, you can bend the rules of the game by shouting out a
name and doing the special move that goes with it. A Fireball lets
you slam the ball against the wall without bouncing first. Or you
can catch your breath, dribbling the ball endlessly while calling out
the letters of the Alphabet. In each case, the rules encourage you
to expand the boundaries of play through public consent. But if
the other kids don’t like your move, you’re out.
To truly understand the dislike for rules lawyers, you have to dive
into game rules designed to obstruct. Players have to learn
nuances and follow rules exactly, because they are punished when
they fall out of bounds. In Diplomacy, if you fail to write your
orders using a very specific format, your plans can completely fall
apart. In Blood Bowl, if you forget to move your turn marker at the
beginning of your turn, the other player can call a penalty and
immediately end your turn. Not only does the ruleset punish you,
but players who do master the game can exploit your ignorance
with perfectly legal tactics.
Do obstructive rules help propel games onto the top shelf of

classically loved games? Absolutely not! But for those trying to
learn to defend themselves by mastering rules, there are no
better games to see rules lawyers at their worst.

The Progressive
Voltron: How to buy
an election
February 22, 2020

“This is Bernie Sanders!”
“Hi, Bernie, it’s Liz.”
“Elizabeth! Great work on Mike! We will show
the billionaire class what—”
“Bernie, everyone thinks you’ll have the most
delegates when the convention comes.”
“Well, sure. That said, there are many contests
left and a lot—”
“We should talk about what happens when
you don’t get a majority.”
“... I think that if you look at the numbers, our
odds are pretty, pretty—”
“They might be, in which case we don’t need
to have had this talk. But in the world where
you come up even one delegate shy, what do
you think’ll happen?”
“For the good of the party, the majority of the
superdelegates will have to support the
candidate who won the most delegates.”
“Seven hundred and seventy one of them, all
chosen and backed by... what do you call them in
your mailers, ‘the Democratic establishment’?”
“...”
“Yeah, I thought so. Okay, here’s what I
propose. Right now, before South Carolina, we
make a public pledge that whichever of us gets
the most delegates going into the convention,
the other’s delegates will be pledged to support
that person. We create a supercandidate.”
“Hmm. Hypothetically, let’s say I’m interested.
How would that work exactly?”
“You know those delegates you won in Iowa?
Do you know their names?”
“No one knows their names. They haven’t
been— Oh. Oh, I see.”
“Precisely. Elections for delegates in states that
have voted aren’t scheduled until April or
later, so we have time to make sure delegates
pledged to us agree to this pact. I even wrote
up a contract for them. I’ll text it to you.”
“If you wrote it, Elizabeth, I’m sure it’s
bulletproof. So your delegates would vote for
me if I don’t have enough to win outright. That
creates a pool of delegates that can’t be taken
away from us. I can see how that would work.
But, I don’t know how to say this delicately...”
“Go ahead.”
“How do I know you’ll have enough delegates
to make our total add up to a majority on the
first ballot?”
“You don’t. I might only have a few hundred.”
“So why—”
“You just know I’ll have seven hundred and
seventy one superdelegates on my side when
they’re allowed to vote in the second ballot.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you will be tearing the Democratic
establishment down all the way to the
convention. They will hate you.”
“You’re damn right I will! But then I wonder,
why would they support our, what did you call
it, ‘supercandidate’? They won’t want me to
win any more than they do now.”
“That’s correct. They’ll be supporting me for
president, not you.”
“But I’ll have more delegates!”
“You’ll be the nominee if we win on the first
ballot. But if we don’t, I’ll be the nominee on
the second. Since I’ll have all your delegates and
the superdelegates, I will win. But only if it gets
that far. If we do this deal, you’ll get a better
chance to be the nominee on the first ballot in
exchange for a near-certainty of me being the
nominee if it gets to the second. It’s a win-win.”
“Why won’t some of the superdelegates
support, say, Amy?”
“I called her before I called you. I told her that
I’d lay off her during the debates if she bound
her delegates to me if she drops out. I told her
that if she didn’t like that idea, I’d call Pete.”

“Of course you did. So... the vice presidency?”
“Whoever doesn’t get the nom gets first crack
at it. They can say yes or no.”
“Sounds fair.”
“Bernie, this comes with a cost. You’ll tell your
supporters about our agreement—obviously,
you should leave some of these details out. But
it must be clear that if any of your surrogates
attack me or call me a snake or anything, they
are evicted from the campaign. At any level,
from your strategy center to the street teams.”
“You know some of my people. I can’t—”
“Any of them, Bernie. Or I tell Joe our deal is
off and I’ll pledge my delegates to him.”
“Okay, okay.”
“We can win this, you know. We haven’t been
fighting for the American people for this long,
just to roll over now.”
“It has been a long fight, it’s true.”
“I’m glad to be your friend, Bernie.”
“I’m happy not to be your enemy, Elizabeth.”
“Ha. I’ll take it. I’ll send over the paperwork.”
“I’m sure it will be exhilarating reading.”
“Now, let’s talk about our Senate seats when
we get to the White House. How did we both
end up with Republican governors?”
“I’ll bet you have a plan for this too.”
“Well, now that you mention it...”
And... scene. I hope you all enjoyed my one-act play,
The Progressive Voltron. Now I want to talk about
collusion. It’s such an unfashionable word these days.
For example, when Trump does it, we want to put him
in jail. But collusion isn’t all bad. Sometimes it’s just
called “partnership.” We want our leaders to unite for
the betterment of all. Who wouldn’t want that? It’s only
collusion when it’s done by people we oppose.
Collusion is an agreement between suppliers to avoid

competition by price fixing or market sharing. The goal
is to achieve joint profits similar to that which would be
gained by a monopolist. We all agree monopolies are
usually bad for consumers, always bad for competitors.
But in an environment where monopoly is a likely
outcome—when a lack of collusion lets the monopolist
crush all competition—collusion between those who
don’t gain by the monopoly becomes a desirable option.
It may or may not be a legal option, but what is legal
seems to change on a daily basis.
Consider a poker game for three players. The Big Stack

has $5000. The Medium Stack has $2000. The Little
Stack has $1500. Even if the Medium Stack goes all-in
against the Big Stack, she still can’t get ahead, as she can
only win what she can bet. So the two smaller stacks
wait till the Big Stack folds a bad hand, then the Little
Stack intentionally loses $1000 to the Medium Stack in
exchange for a commitment to split the pot if they are
the final two players. Now it’s $5000, $3000, and $500.
The Medium Stack repeatedly goes all-in against the Big
Stack until she bites. If the Medium Stack wins, the
formerly Big Stack is crushed 3-to-1 against the new
chip leader. This is a win-win for both players who were
trailing before.
It’s also illegal. This is called “chip dumping,” and it
destroys the game’s integrity. Yet it happens, especially
in online poker, where identities are obscured. When
casinos and websites catch someone doing this, they
ban both the chip dumper and chip recipient.
It’s not illegal in every game, though. NASCAR drivers

draft, where a racer tails behind a teammate to conserve
fuel by letting the lead racer suffer the wind resistance.
Also common is bumping, where a teammate physically
pushes the leader at the cost of their own fuel. But it’s
not okay for a driver to wreck an opponent just so his
teammate can scoot ahead. Racing has found the sweet
spot between banning collusion and embracing it.
Our politics barely have rules at all. When they exist, the
crafters’ motives must be weighed. For example,
superdelegates are a uniquely Democratic maleficence.68
In the 1980s, the Democratic National Committee
designed the superdelegate concept to avoid unelectable
candidates like 1972’s George McGovern or Jimmy
Carter in 1980. The party created PLEO delegates—
Party Leaders and Elected Officials. This new 14% of
delegates would put the brakes on a marginal candidate
winning, embracing the concept of “the party decides.”
By 2008 the PLEO percentage had metastasized to 20%

of all delegates, roughly equal to the elected delegates of
the three largest states: California, New York, and
Texas. That is one hell of a large “state.”
68Republicans don’t have superdelegates. Each state gets three unpledged

nominators, but they must vote the way the state voted. Still, superdelegates
might become a GOP institution if Trump loses. In 2016, Republicans lost
control of their party to the mob. Mainstream Republicans may wish to
avoid that in the future. If there are any mainstream Republicans left, that is.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton went into primary season with
almost all of them. Sanders would’ve not only needed to
beat her in delegates, but done so handily. Even 55%
wouldn’t have guaranteed him the nom. (He got 46%.)
A ghastly quote from DNC chair Deborah Wasserman

Schultz has been ringing in my head for four years.
“Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders

and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are
running against grass-roots activists. We, as a Democratic Party,
really highlight and emphasize inclusiveness and diversity at our
convention, and so we want to give every opportunity to grass-roots
activists and diverse committed Democrats to be able to participate,
attend, and be a delegate at the convention. And so we separate
out those unpledged delegates to make sure that there isn’t
competition between them.”
Even I, a diehard Clinton supporter, knew this was

poison. Due to how unfair this was, after 2016 the
Democrats agreed to keep superdelegates out of play on
the first ballot. If one candidate shows up with a
majority 1,991 of the 3,979 pledged delegates or more,
they just win. If not, they have to win 2,376 of all 4,750
delegates, including superdelegates, on the second or
subsequent ballot.
With Nevada being merely the third state to vote,

Democrats are already tiring of having so many
candidates. Lots of voters were willing to back a
billionaire who didn’t even enter the first four contests.
At least until Wednesday. Mike Bloomberg’s implosion
on live TV at Warren’s hands cost him 30 points (!) of
favorability with moderates. Yet that may not be
enough to stop him.
That is because of the obscene cash being poured into
the election. It’s being bought by billionaires. This can’t
be stopped. Citizens United made it impossible to thwart
the flow of dollars. Get used to the idea that the
election will be bought. You can react to that in two
ways: You can fling up your hands, sneer your lips, and
storm off into the night. Or you can buy it yourself.
We’re watching a three-way battle between three

billionaires, yet only two are real billionaires. Bloomberg
and Tom Steyer—crusaders for climate sanity and
getting guns off streets—put their money where their
mouths are, pouring $600 million into vanity campaigns.
Steyer does take other people’s contributions, meager as
they are. Bloomberg famously takes no contributions,
projecting an air that he, unlike democracy itself, cannot
be bought. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is anything but a
billionaire and is not self-funding his campaign. But his
cronies in Trump’s Death Star (yes, that’s its name) plan
to spend a billion dollars—that’s illion with a b—on a
disinformation campaign to guarantee his re-election.
Some hope to pump the campaigns of non-billionaire

Democrats. Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have both
accepted a lot from billionaires, though the numbers
pale beside Steyer and Bloomberg’s self-contributions.
The good news: Non-Steyer/Bloomberg billionaires are
split between Biden and Buttigieg. Billionaires are likely
underinvesting in politics because of the results they get.
(Not when they bet on themselves, though.)
Where does that leave ordinary people? If you’re

reading this, I expect you’re not a billionaire. It’s okay.
You can still become one. All you need to do is
contribute as much as you can to Sanders and Warren.
With his average $12 contribution, Sanders raised
$108,379,982 through 2019. Warren isn’t far behind
with $81,291,562. It’s a lot of money, equal to the
spending in the entire 1992 election. Whichever wants
to win has to raise a lot more. To win a nomination
against billionaires, they must at least triple that. To win
the general, the nominee will need a billion dollars.
Sanders and Warren’s hauls—nearly all on the backs of

individuals—suggest they could get there. The rub is
that only one at most can win. All the cash spent on the
non-winner is wasted. Well, not wasted. The candidate’s
still there discussing corruption and Medicare 4 All and
whatever. That’s nice. You want your candidate to win.
That’s why the Voltron scenario makes sense. In that

world, neither candidate’s backers are wasting money.
They’re betting on an outcome with a higher chance of
success than just betting on one. The Warren-Sanders
bloc has raised $200 million-plus. They could raise a lot
more. With your help, you and millions of your friends
can become a billionaire. If you don’t want to—if you just
want to support your factional candidate and hope for
the best—that’s up to you. Billionaires will collude no
matter what you do. Bloomberg said so at the debate.
He’ll poach delegates from Biden, Klobuchar, and
Buttigieg against the candidates’ will. He’s in mergers
and acquisitions; he knows how to Voltron.
Will “collusion” like this happen on the left? No idea.

There’s a lot of ego in this race. I don’t see Warren or
Sanders making the call. Both should. If they don’t, they
can’t complain when they both lose. They will, of
course. But they’ll know the chance to win passed them
by. Because I just told them. Maybe you should too.
Rich explains: collusion
For a word that feels so criminal, collusion happens in games all

the time. Whether we’re talking about wind drafting in cycling or
multi-team trades in the NBA, players working together to give
themselves a leg up over the competition is a classic gaming
strategy. In fact, it’s so classic that everyone’s first taste of game
theory is literally the textbook example of collusion.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is often described as a battle over utility

with two players. Each prisoner can snitch on the other, gaining a
lighter sentence in return. But this completely ignores an
important solution to the dilemma by hiding the third player in the
room. When the prisoners work together and stay silent, they
collude against their captors. Game theorists wave this away by
focusing on the closed system of the two prisoners, but most
applied games need to pay attention to a larger context.
Have you ever made a pact to make sure someone else lost?
Maybe you and your partner agreed you wouldn’t charge each
other rent while you waited for the other players to land on your
Boardwalk hotel? Or that you’d each leave just one army on the
border of North and South America while your armies split the
rest of the world in half? Or that you’d smother a player with
double-team defense, even though someone else might have an
easier time scoring? Collusion, one and all!
Collusion is just two players teaming up to increase their chances

of beating the competition. But really, as long as I’m colluding with
another player in the game, then I’m not changing the nature of
the game itself. When I promise not to Tag my best friend, the
rules and strategies of the game don’t change.
It’s not like I’m a magician planting a “volunteer” in the audience.

Or an American presidential candidate gaining aid from a foreign
power. Those would both be easy examples of unfair collusion
well outside of the established rules of the game. I’m unclear if
the magician is breaking some kind of magic law, but the
presidential candidate certainly did.

Respecting the game:
My endorsement for
the 2020 primary
March 5, 2020
With Washington state in play on March 10, my primary

vote will matter for the first time in decades. We had a
“show primary” for years, providing an advisory vote
following a caucus that undemocratically selected our
choice for nominee. Now I’ll get to cast a ballot that
affects the future. As of this morning, with my preferred
choice of Elizabeth Warren exiting, I am down to two
angry old white men: Joe Biden v. Bernie Sanders.
On its face, this is a bad choice. Since James Buchanan,

whenever Democrats have nominated a candidate older
than 60, they’ve lost. When they go young, they win.
Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg are not
walking through that door. These are our contenders.
But what contenders they are. On resume, Biden has

everything. His Senate career runs circles around
Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar, Booker, Bennet,
Gillibrand, and Harris combined, and his executive
experience as vice president and chief policy negotiator
of the most inspiring presidency ever is unshakable.
When Joe says he was there, he was there.
Meanwhile, Sanders has the bona fides. His unwavering
ideological faith and front-line righteousness paints a
vision more clearly than any candidate has since JFK.
Everything about him screams “This man will change
everything.” He is our FDR, if we give him the chance.
We are lucky to have both of them.
Policy-wise, both are liberals through and through. They

disagree on some details, but agree on principles. More
significantly, though, they are highly different politically.
Their starkest difference comes in whose money they
accept and what support they welcome. You could go
either way on this: Bernie’s purity test leaves many
resources at the door; Biden’s lack of same leaves the
people wondering who he will support if he wins.
For me, it comes down to the issue of who can win

against Trump. I have already killed the myth of
electability, and I am not going to revive its corpse here.
By age and gender (though not religion), they’re
essentially the same man anyway. But what the
candidates say and who they are is relevant to whether
they will win. Therein lays a huge difference.
Joe Biden is the everyman. His life has been writ large
before us. He lost a wife and a daughter in a car crash,
and another son to the same brain cancer that killed his
friend John McCain. That friendship is one of the most
remarkable things about Biden, pointing to a quality
essential in healing America after Trump is dispatched.
Biden is a living, breathing fireside chat. We need that
right now. With the virus bearing down on us, with the
economy on a precipice, with the world destabilized by
Trump’s tariffs and embrace of dictators, we need a
president who can make it be okay. Biden can do that.
And oh, does he not like Trump. He may have disliked
him earlier, but the extreme personalness of the Ukraine
scandal has electrified him. The man who lost two
children just saw Trump attack his son. One on one,
Biden will boil over on Trump. If Trump looms behind
him in a town hall debate, Biden will punch him in the
throat. We’d all love to see that. Biden is the vector of
our rage against Trump, and will not be extinguished.
Bernie Sanders is not that man. For someone who

wants to occupy the most public position in the world,
he does not let anyone in. He is famously private; we
barely know his wife, we never see his kids, and I don’t
even know if he has any pets. While that’s certainly fine
on the surface, there’s also a clarity that he doesn’t let
anyone else into his decision-making either. We’ve seen
what that’s like the last three-plus years with Trump,
and it’s not good. Bernie is minted; he’ll change nothing
about himself ever. This inflexibility makes it hard to
imagine any idea he articulates will ever become reality.
Yelling at clouds doesn’t end the rain.
That has manifested horrifically for him in the last few

weeks. He has been badly outplayed by the moderate-
liberal wing of the Democratic Party, after demonizing
them. This tweet was the end of all hope for unity:

This is not so bright if you want the Democratic
nomination. In one very on-brand moment, Sanders
proclaimed that he had to win on the first ballot,
because the knives would be out on the second.
Hooboy, it didn’t go well for him after that. Biden’s win
in South Carolina was followed by a near-instantaneous
ranks-closing by the Democratic Party. Buttigieg out,
Klobuchar out, Bloomberg out. Sanders had a chance to
ally with Warren, and didn’t take the shot. Biden has the
“JoeMentum” now, and if either he wins a majority or
Sanders wins a plurality, Biden will win.
That has been coupled with Sanders’s complete

fumbling of his moral edge. The Castro comment was a
turning point for me. On 60 Minutes, he said:
“But you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. When
Fidel Castro came to office, you know what he did? He had a
massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel
Castro did it?”
No matter whether that’s true, you never praise Castro.

Bernie threw away Florida. Biden will beat him there by
35 points. This is very bad.
Bernie Sanders is not a strategic politician. He’s an

ideologue. If you don’t agree with him, you’re a bad
person. It’s reflected in the tone of his supporters. To
his credit, this finally is penetrating his thick skull.
Yesterday, he went on MSNBC and excoriated his
followers for their “ugly, personal attacks” on Elizabeth
Warren. This is the only time he has taken personal
responsibility for the toxicity in his movement, without
blaming Russian trolls and the media. My guess is he
senses he will lose if he is perceived as a bully.
It’s probably too late for that. The world has rallied
against Bernie, and it will be very hard to get it back.
Even if he wins the nomination, the confirmation of his
socialist label will drag on him in the general, and may
also tank moderate candidates for the House and
Senate. This is why Trump is rooting him on.
I hypothesize that Biden has a better chance to win in

the primary, a better chance to win in the general, and a
better chance to get what he wants accomplished if he
wins. With all that noted, I’m voting for Bernie Sanders.
I believe in game theory as a guide. Not a manifesto,

just a guide. Game theory depends on understanding
payoffs. You don’t have to like your situation in the
prisoner’s dilemma. You need only know what everyone
else will do, and act in your best interest. Because you
expect me to, I’ll explain my choice mathematically.
Your choice depends on what numbers you set. Those

numbers will vary from person to person. I’ll theorize
that Biden has a 60% chance of beating Bernie, a 60%
chance of beating Trump, and a 60% chance of enacting
his agenda, and Sanders has a 40% chance of each.
Since a candidate must win the first battle to attempt the
second, and the second to attempt the third, you could
multiply the value of whatever Biden hopes to get by
.216 (.6×.6×.6), and what Sanders hopes to get by .064
(.4×.4×.4). Doesn’t look good for Bernie, right?
Maybe not, but now you have to look at what they

want. Biden is promising you a return to Obama-era
sufficiency. That’s good. But it’s not great. What Bernie
Sanders hopes to get is everything: Medicare for All. An
aggressive climate change policy. Trade agreements that
put workers first. Free public college. An end to the
corruption of politics. And on and on. Bernie may not
have a plan for that, as Warren might say, but he does
have a dream. He has a chance of getting it through. It
may not be the best chance, but it’s a chance of
something fantastic. This isn’t like Pascal’s wager, when
you’re betting on whether God exists. It’s betting on
whether God exists when he’s standing right in front of you.
If I do the numbers, I rate what Biden wants as a 30 and

what Sanders wants as a 100. I want those things too.
Multiplying those amounts by my numbers from before,
Biden gets a 6.48 (.216×30) rating and Sanders a 6.4
(.064×100)—basically identical. Despite everything, to
me, Sanders is as good a bet as Biden, because the
upside of a Sanders presidency is so much higher.
If that’s effectively tied in my head, how did I get to

supporting Sanders? There is one area where Sanders so
destroys Biden that it can’t be ignored. That is game.
You know what game is. It’s the sense that the
opponent you face is just better than you. The saying in
basketball is “Game recognizes game.” To win the ring,
you better have it.
Kevin Garnett knows game. When he was a trash-

talking rookie, he tried to rattle Michael Jordan. KG’s
teammate, the veteran J.R. Rider told Jordan, “Hey
Mike, he don’t know the rules of the game, he’s just a
young pup.” Jordan said, “Okay...” and the next six or
seven minutes of play, Jordan destroyed both KG and
Rider, turning a 2-point game into a 25-point game. KG
never again talked trash to Michael in his life. KG’s a
Hall of Famer. He knows game when he sees it.
Joe Biden has run a terrible campaign. Out of the gate,
Biden embraced the principle that the nomination was
his, and he didn’t have to campaign. He failed to staff
up, and then maxed out his donors and frittered away
their donations. He fumbled valid concerns about his
treatment of women. Then he crashed and burned in
debate after debate. He made multiple gaffes, like he
always does, but some of them stuck. He could not
muster a believable defense of his son’s employment by
Burisma. Going into South Carolina, he lost every state.
His candidacy was deemed not viable in many caucus
sites. To put it in terms an Amtrak devotee like him can
understand, the Biden campaign has been a train wreck.
Meanwhile, Sanders has put together the greatest

campaign of all time. It has succeeded far beyond the
candidate’s personal shortcomings. The Sanders
campaign has more contributors, more contributions,
and more (non-Bloomberg/Steyer) money than any
primary campaign ever. It mobilizes like no other,
especially in the support of young people—though, to
be fair, those young people better start voting in droves
soon, or he’s toast. Everything about the Sanders
campaign is historic. It is a juggernaut. Juggernauts can
be stopped, but it’s the kind of juggernaut that I’d take
my chances on. The upside is so high. Democrats win
when they run on youth, which I’m willing to gamble
applies even if the “youth” in question is very old.
I bet on game. Even with a stuck-in-his-ways old man at

the helm, it’s got a damn good chance of steamrolling
everything in its path. The train must drive uphill, but I
trust its engine. I just hope its engineer is up to the task.
Go, Bernie, go.

Rich explains: respect
One of the greatest problems game theorists need to overcome is

defining the field. Board games spring from military and tactical
concepts, yet game theory usually focuses on economics and
politics, topics few would associate with the word “game.” This
usually means that whatever situation entices you to look deeper
at the underlying game theory is usually not a situation game
theory was meant to describe. Talk about branding problems.
Take, for example, a cornerstone assumption of game theory:

respect your opponent as if they are as rational and smart as you.
When I make my decisions, I need to assume that my opponent
sees all the same options as I do. Banking on my opponent’s
missing out in a connection they could make in a game isn’t just
mathematically foolish, it’s mean. What benefit do I gain by
winning a game against my friend when I see their winning move
and keep it to myself? To quote Bredon in Patrick Rothfuss’s The
Name of the Wind, “Why would I want to win anything other than
a beautiful game?”
War is a different story. Sun-Tzu opens The Art of War with “all
warfare is based on deception,” before delving into the myriad
ways of dividing an opponent from their resources and plans. “If
your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to
be weak, that he may grow arrogant.” These aren’t endearing
ways to deepen your friendship through shared pastimes. This is
how you treat an enemy that you mean to destroy.
So, here we have the development of wargames based around a

need to utterly defeat your opponent by exploiting their mistakes,
a mathematical theory based around perfect knowledge and
rational actions, and the happy fun times of a family game night.
When these different mentalities collide, things get very
interesting. There are two duels in Hamilton that end with a noble
hero firing a pistol in the air while his opponent shoots him stone
dead. That happened twice in one family. The Hamiltons both
showed up with the right kind of respect. They just brought it to
the wrong battlefield.

“I don’t take
responsibility at all”:
Trump fails the Trolley
Problem
March 23, 2020
I’m writing this from Ground Zero in Seattle, the

epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic. With 2,000
confirmed cases and 95 people already dead from the
disease, Seattle is being treated as a plague town. Thus, I
have time alone to think about the Trolley Problem and
how it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, some
“training” exercises.
The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment defined

by virtue ethicist Philippa Foot in 1967. It weighs deep
on philosophers, but it’s also a highly debated question
in game theory. I’ll run it down (pun intended) for you.
You are standing at a switch. A runaway train car heads

toward a track section containing five people, and will
surely kill them all. You can turn the car onto a side
track which will save them, but a bystander is on the
side track. Do you kill the bystander or let the five on
the main track die?
Most people kill the hapless innocent. After all, five is

more than one.
You can make them change their mind by changing the
phrasing. Folks are more likely to save the innocent if
it’s a child or cancer researcher, or if they have to push a
person off a bridge to stop the train. But these are
details. Most people are Mister Spock, who in Star Trek
II: The Wrath of Khan said:
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”
Except maybe... maybe when the one is you. Per moral

philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “trilemma”
scenario, when given a suicide option, people were far
less likely to kill the innocent—that is, they not only
wouldn’t kill themselves, but also they wouldn’t save the
people in the car at all.
Though you may believe it’s only a hypothetical

experiment reinforced by its memorable appearance on
the metaphysical sitcom The Good Place, the Trolley
Problem is a real thing. It actually happened in 2003,
when 30 unmanned Union Pacific train cars barreled at
50 miles an hour toward Los Angeles. With only 30
minutes to react, railroad officials switched the train to a
siding that sent it crashing into a residential community
in Commerce. Thirteen people were injured. No one
died. Thank God.
When you’re at the switch, you have to make hard

decisions. You have to take responsibility. You have to
triage problems and, if needed, people. You have to be
willing to take the consequences, even if saving lives
kills you. But not everyone will.
This is why I know that in plague-ridden Washington

state, no one is coming to help us.
Mike Pence, the administration’s designated crisis
manager on the outbreak, isn’t coming to help us. He
came to our state, but didn’t travel further north than
Joint Base Lewis-McChord, likely in fear of infection.
He and Governor Jay Inslee made nice as Pence
pledged help to the hardest hit state. For one day, Pence
didn’t suck. It could almost make you forget the AIDS
epidemic he spawned in Indiana. As governor, he put
his religious beliefs ahead of people’s lives, and 200
rural Indianans—his base—caught the deadly disease.
The CDC isn’t coming to help us. Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield hasn’t
held a press conference for 11 days. Redfield, whom
CNN called an “abysmal choice,” is one of a long
pattern of Trump appointing the worst people to high
profile jobs. During the AIDS crisis, Redfield promoted
a fraudulent drug and faith-based treatment. A week
ago, he was destroyed by Rep. Katie Porter on Capitol
Hill and hasn’t shown up since. He’s useless to us.
The Fed isn’t coming to help us. Chairman Jerome

Powell fired every bullet in his gun in a three-day span,
throwing $1.5 trillion into the ocean, then dropping
interest rates to zero and removing banks’ restrictions
on cash on hand. The market reacted like a Molotov
cocktail in a munitions depot, the Dow Jones plunging a
record 3,000 points the next day. Now he’s dropping a
trill a day like he can print money. (He can.) Perhaps
these things are all he can do to forestall a depression.
Sure seems like those trillions could come in handy.
They won’t, because the Senate isn’t coming to help us.

The House put together a relief package called the
Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which was
pretty bold when the Democrats wrote it. But House
Republicans watered it down to “okay, two weeks paid
sick leave, but you can still be fired, and maybe a tax
credit in 2021 during which I’m sure you’ll still be alive.”
The Senate took a relaxing long weekend, then resumed
concocting a $1.8 trillion bailout to let airline, cruise,
and casino execs line their pockets, foisting the onus of
their laid-off employees to states. Nothing about jobs,
nothing about student loans, nothing about evictions,
nothing about elections, nothing about hospitals.
President Trump? Not only is he not coming to help us,

he is killing us. Instead of taking measures to slow the
virus or rally the nation, his incompetent, self-serving,
and dishonest response has been to downplay it, restrict
our ability to tackle it, blame the Chinese for it, and
claim credit for things that haven’t happened. In January
and February, he did nothing at all.
In March, he realized he was being blamed for a

disaster. So he lied that the disease was under control,
lied that he hadn’t been warned about it, lied about
when the outbreak started here, lied that anyone who
wanted a test could get one, lied that cargo was banned
from Europe, lied that things were improving in Italy,
lied that he didn’t shake hands in India, lied about
Obama’s response to H1N1, lied that he reversed an
Obama rule that he said slowed his response, lied that
Google was compiling a diagnostic database, lied about
closing borders with Iran and China, lied that travelers
from abroad were tested, lied that the FDA approved a
malarial cure, lied that he hadn’t torpedoed the Global
Pandemic Task Force, lied about carmakers making
ventilators, and, tellingly, lied that his approval rating on
his handling of the crisis was 78%. It’s not 78%.
The stock market agreed, falling in real time every time
he spoke. It erased his entire presidency in 30 seconds.
Trump owns history’s 16 worst DJIA point drops, with
11 since February 24. He has the second and fifth worst
one-day percentage drops, joining 1987’s Black Monday
and the first two days of the Crash of 1929.
Crashes happen when you can’t control the train.
Deep within his dim, dark mind, he’s realized he might

not only go down as America’s worst president, but also
the person who killed the most Americans. That’s not
good for the brand. He’s running this from a point of
fear, giving himself a 10 out of 10, like someone who
suspects he deserves maybe a 3.5. This spilled over into
a briefing in which he could not do the simple task of
reassuring a scared public. NBC’s Peter Alexander asked
him, “What do you say to Americans who are scared
right now?” His response: “I say that you’re a terrible
reporter.” Not helping.
Our most important person is in a tailspin. Caught in

his own trap, Trump has bowed to authority figures,
notably strong governors like Inslee, Republican Mike
DeWine of Ohio, and Democrat Andrew Cuomo of
New York. He has begrudgingly deployed the Army
Corps of Engineers in hard-hit states and promised to
fund the National Guard where governors have
activated it. This doesn’t help states with spineless
governors, like Republican Ron “Slayer of the
Healthcare Industrial Complex” DeSantis of Florida
and Republican/Democrat/Republican Jim “Go to Bob
Evans” Justice of West Virginia. Those places—where
Trump’s base lives—are on their own. Where you don’t
have good governors, you’ll see a lot more dead.
Trump has also bowed to one authority figure we didn’t
know a month ago: National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who seems
to be president now. Dr. Fauci has bravely corrected the
president’s lies, in real time, onstage next to him. Fauci
had to say, “I can’t jump in front of the microphone
and push him down.” When he wasn’t on a briefing last
night, #WhereIsFauci trended on a panicky Twitter. If
the 78-year-old doctor caught this thing, Americans
would be more scared than if Trump did.
The quote that will define Trump’s presidency came on

the White House lawn on March 13. Asked about
catastrophic failures in testing, Trump declared:
“I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Here lies the problem. We desperately need someone to

take responsibility. It’s never going to be him. Of all the
people in the world to be tested by the Trolley Problem,
Trump might be the worst since Neville Chamberlain.
Instead of nationalizing the country’s medical supply

chain, calling for a moratorium on rents and student
debt, or demanding industries make masks and
ventilators, Trump has done only one clear thing on his
own: send villainous Attorney General William Barr to
get the power to jail his political enemies indefinitely.
This inspired an “Oh, hell no” response from liberals
and conservatives alike.
Yesterday, Trump said Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker and

other governors shouldn’t blame the federal
government for their own shortcoming in tackling the
virus. Pritzker was not having any of this.
Trump should pay attention to the governor of Illinois,
because Illinois politicians know the effects of the
Trolley Problem first hand. In 1979, the nation’s worst
blizzard paralyzed Chicago for weeks. Mayor Michael
Bilandic diverted the snowplows to clear roads and bus
lines that, according to many at the time, favored white
neighborhoods over African American ones. He made
CTA trains skip over stations in black neighborhoods,
leaving thousands in the cold. He failed a literal Trolley
Problem—with actual trains—and was booted out of
office a month later in favor of reformer Jane Byrne.
That’s what happens when you flinch at the controls.

The Trolley Problem has a simple answer: If you can
save lives, you save lives. Trump put his re-election,
properties, and public appearance before the lives of
our citizens. He failed the test. But he can still pass it.
I mentioned that the Trolley Problem is of interest to

both ethicists and game theorists. Ethicists say there are
two sides to the Trolley Problem; that’s what makes it a
problem.
The deontological viewpoint is that actions should be
taken based on the morality of the rules, not the
consequences of the actions; since diverting the train is
an act of murder, and murder is not allowed, it should
not be a permissible harm. The consequentialist
viewpoint is that is that outcomes matter more than
rules; since not diverting the train kills more people, it is
a permissible harm. Game theorists tend to take the side
of maximizing utility, and are more likely to support the
consequentialists. For a game theorist, the Trolley
Problem isn’t a problem; more people saved is better.
The current debate is over whether to let older people

die to keep the economy going; that’s the deontological
approach. I associate this moralistic approach with
Republicans, who seem ready to loot the Treasury and
let the rest of us fend for ourselves. Don’t let the trolley
go off the rails, or it’ll crash into rich people’s yards.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the Senate GOP put a

proposal on the table to give $1,200 to families via a
means-tested payment. It’s not universal basic income
in that (a) you can only get it if you make less than
$75,000 a year, or somewhat less if you make less than
$99,000 a year and (b) it happens only once, so it’s only
going to be a speedbump for the crash. But it’s a
surprising start down a consequentialist path. This is
triage, Trolley Problem-style. We’ll see where it goes.
Here in Seattle, the city hardest hit by the virus so far,

we looked forward to the arrival of a ship called the
USNS Mercy. That’s one of the two big 1,000-bed
hospital ships the Navy runs, the other being the
Comfort, which is off to New York City. Governor
Inslee wrote to the president:
“I can think of no better way to signal to the residents of
Washington that their Federal government is fully committed to
their health and survival than the sight of a large U.S. Navy
hospital ship dropping anchor in the harbor at Seattle. The
psychological value to our citizens, not only in Washington but
also across the nation, would be of major importance. Thank you
for your support of this request.”
A U.S. official told ABC the Mercy was Seattle-bound.

At the last minute, the Defense Department pulled the
plug on this idea. The Mercy will head from San Diego
to L.A. and stay there. Even though we have twice as
many deaths as California, Seattle won’t get relief. No
one, not even mercy incarnate, is coming to help us.
We’re a much smaller city than Los Angeles. If a

breakout occurs there, the Mercy can offload the city’s
medical emergencies while local hospitals focus on the
virus. That could be a far greater need than ours. It could
be. It isn’t yet. But if you expect the worst, you put your
resources where you think they’ll help the most. You’d
better be right. You must make hard decisions when
you’re at the lever and a trolley rumbles down the track.
I hope Trump learns how. I hope the rest of us do too.
When this ends, whether you make it or not, you’ll be

judged by your actions. Did you stay home or ignore the
warnings? Did you aid your neighbor or hoard supplies?
Did you pay your workers or kick them into the cold?
Did you lead your citizens or put yourself ahead of
them? Did you fight to end Trump’s presidency or
rationalize his shameless and harmful actions? When we
emerge, did you pass or fail the Trolley Problem?
I’m counting on you. Godspeed from Seattle, everyone.

Rich explains: the Trolley Problem
Due to its simplicity and general gruesomeness, the Trolley

Problem has been used in philosophical arguments for more than
a century, even though the proverbial trolley is a behemoth of
absurdist thought. Most of us, unless we are a cartoon villain or a
certified railway lever puller, will never find ourselves swinging a
lever to send a trolley down a path towards certain death and
destruction. Regardless, as we wait for the next viral hit from the
Trolley Problem Meme Generator, it might help to remember the
lesson this experiment and its many corollaries is designed to
teach us—ethics is a tricky business.
The classic counter to the Trolley Problem is about a surgeon with

five patients who each require an organ transplant by nightfall to
survive. That same day, a healthy patient walks in for a checkup,
having the right set of five organs for all five patients. If “the needs
of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” shouldn’t the
surgeon immediately begin a series of surgeries that will save five
patients and only kill the one, formerly healthy patient? Suddenly,
the needs of the many seem like the greater evil.
They’re the same problem, though. Both statements begin with a

similar basic premise: one victim versus five, and the person
making the choice has no personal attachment to any victim. But
we feel a deep unease with the surgeon’s decision. In each, all the
victims wish to live, and the decision maker despises both choices.
So why do we grapple with the concept of the surgeon causing
death, while the station master gains our sympathy during a single
anguished decision?
As you struggle with this problem, you are forced to realize that
the trolley exists to consider philosophical arguments in direct
opposition. The needs of the many is a Utilitarian construction,
while our anger at the surgeon comes from a deontological
viewpoint, where actions must be judged based on the rightness
of the action itself, not its consequences. More than any right
answers, seeing these two ethical systems in contrast is what
makes the Trolley Problem meaningful. That, and the memes.

Humanity at the
Crossing: Defining the
value of work in an
unsafe world
May 18, 2020
On March 20, America braced for impact. Incubated in

Asia, a contagion swept through U.S. cities and small
towns, confining thousands to their beds. It consumed
lives. You could get it just by talking to someone who’d
already got it. Once you got it, the odds said you weren’t
going to recover any time soon.
I speak, of course, of Animal Crossing: New Horizons,

the second most infectious thing to hit the world in
2020. Like going out to play Pokémon Go defined the
summer of 2016, staying in to play Animal Crossing on
the Nintendo Switch is defining the spring of 2020. Like
that magical summer four years ago—four decades ago?
hard to tell—the weather is brilliant this spring. Doesn’t
matter. Can’t go outside. Gotta play Animal Crossing.
New Horizons isn’t the first Animal Crossing game. It’s

the 19th. But it’s the first to stop all other videogames in
its tracks. Square ENIX released a long-anticipated
reimagining of its greatest game, Final Fantasy VII, and
Animal Crossing ate it alive. A closed beta of Riot
Games’s upcoming 5x5 first-person shooter Valorant
launched last month, and I expect it to eventually
shatter records. Not this spring. Spring is for animals.
Players average three to five hours a day in Animal
Crossing. I’m sure tens of thousands of fans play twelve
hours a day. It’s an astounding time sink, in a world that
has, in two months, lost all conception of time.
We’re playing Animal Crossing twelve hours a day

because we’re not playing life twelve hours a day. Animal
Crossing gives us things that many of us can’t access
any other way now. Most articles have focused on the
intense interpersonal connectivity of the game; it is a
way to see friends you can’t see in real life. These
analyses miss the point completely. Animal Crossing is
dominating life because it’s the only true workplace
economy that makes sense anymore. It gives us the
chance to understand how humans gravitate toward
work even when play is an option. Let’s look at why.
Animal Crossing is a life simulator game. These games,

often called sims, are some of the biggest games of all
time: Farmville, Second Life, World of Warships, and,
obviously, The Sims. Per PCGamesN, “Sims differ
from other PC games in that their raison d’être isn’t
necessarily to entertain, at least not primarily. You want
fun and excitement? Tough. Operating a submarine is
not that. It is, however, fascinating, terrifying, and
hugely satisfying as a long-form experience.”
In Animal Crossing, you’re a new person in a world

where stocky zebras, alligators, and octopi predominate.
You’ve come to their archipelago after purchasing a plot
from a raccoon dog mafioso named Tom Nook. As you
meet your new neighbors, you learn you’re just a strange
new animal to them. You’re not anything special here.
You can’t die. But you do have to work for a living, if
you want stuff. There are thousands of things you can
own. Some you make, some you get from animals, some
you order from a catalogue, some you fish from the sea,
some you knock out of trees, and some you shoot out
of balloons. If you want more than a tumbledown tent
to live in, you must work from sunup to sunset to make
your mortgage payments. For that you need bells.
Bells are the economy’s main currency. You can buy

things with bells and you can sell things for bells.
Notably, turnips. The turnip economy is robust. It has
its own—wait for it—stalk market. Each Sunday, a cute
boar named Daisy Mae sells you turnips for about 100
bells. During the week, Nook’s henchraccoons Timmy
and Tommy will buy them for a seemingly random
amount up to about 600 bells. Market spikes are
common and somewhat predictable (“never sell on the
first spike,” the mantra goes). If you manage your
turnips correctly, you’ll become a “bellionaire.”
Other people want to be part of your economy. You

can leave your gate open so people can take seaplanes to
your island. They can tend your fields, buy from your
vendors, pick up fragments of the sky that fall on your
beachfront, and tempt away your neighbor animals
when they get tired of living near you. Playing Animal
Crossing alone is possible but pointless. Other people
are vital to your continued advancement in the game.
Let’s review: It’s a world where everyone has a home

and can pay off their mortgage, where work is plentiful
and valued, where travel and visitors are frequent, where
the stock market works for everyone, and where death
is kept at bay. How’s your real life on these fronts?
Amid the pandemic, even if you have a home, you
worry about how you’ll pay for it. Rent, utility, and
mortgage relief has been slow to come, though evictions
are mercifully barred for a while. Heck, if you rent
homes to people, you’re panicked about where your
money is coming from. This week, the House passed
the $3 trillion HEROES Act to supplement rent and
student loan payments, which the Senate plans to block
and President Trump plans to veto if it reaches his desk.
It’s “DOA,” he says. So are a lot of people.
The American job market has never seen a run like this.
From mid-March to last week, thirty-three million
people lost their jobs. Thirty-three million. The
unemployment rate hit nearly 15 percent, a number
unthinkable in the modern era. If anything, that number
is underreported. Paul Ashworth, the chief U.S.
economist at Capital Economics, theorized that the real
unemployment rate is 23 percent. That’s one in four
people who want to work not having a job they can go
to. Thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders, people on
unemployment got their full paychecks for a few
months, maybe a little more. Those months are ticking
by, and jobs don’t seem to coming back in abundance.
Even if you have a job you can go to, you probably

can’t go to it. This month, old divisions like “upper
class” and “working class” fell apart, maybe forever.
America reclassified itself into two classes this past few
weeks—the essential class and the non-essential class.
My wife is essential: She’s a bakery manager, and people
need food. I am non-essential: I’m a corporate
executive, and thus totally unnecessary. If you’re in the
essential class, you can go to your workplace. If you’re
not, your ass better be on the couch.
You can’t go anywhere. Certainly not by plane. It’s easy
to bash the airlines for taking bailouts and then laying
off their workers. Understand this reality: 2.4 million
people passed through TSA checkpoints on April 2,
2019. On April 2, 2020, that number was 124,000.
When your business drops by 95 percent in a year, your
business is in serious trouble. People I talk to at air
industry companies do not imagine a fast recovery.
People can’t come to see you. Unless they’re delivering

you food, people aren’t just dropping by. Just as
importantly, your housemates can’t leave. That includes
your kids. They can’t go to school, the country’s largest
industry in terms of people leaving home. At least 54
million children are home from school; of them, more
than 9 million have no internet and many have no any
instruction from school at all. Their parents have to
monitor them during the workday. America’s workforce
just got turned into an unpaid child care industry.
The stock market has lost its damn mind. After sensibly
driving off a cliff when the pandemic hit, it rebounded
in force in April as twenty million people got laid off. It
was as if the age-old mantra “buy in April, sell in May”
was hard-wired into Bloomberg terminals no one was
watching, and they bought all the stocks automatically.
Now they’re venting them like an airlock in Alien.
Death is everywhere. As of today, more than 90,000

Americans have died of COVID-19. Staying home has
flattened the curve, but we are not out of the woods.
Immunologist Rick Bright, director of the Biomedical
Advanced Research and Development Authority before
Trump fired him, just warned of the “darkest winter in
the modern era” if we don’t take extreme precautions.
With all of this dysfunction, who can blame much of
America for retreating into a videogame world? Animal
Crossing functions. It looks like America on a good day,
only with singing squirrels and hippos, while America
looks like a red ring of death. In Animal Crossing, you
can go to work, travel, and come within six feet of your
neighbors. I want to go to there. Of course, there’s a
live, efficient, metastasizing virus outside my window.
Still, I can’t see it. What you can’t see, you can ignore.
Now, some governors and the president are pushing for

people to go back to their everyday lives—“vaccine or
no vaccine,” Trump says—putting the country at risk of
a second wave of infection before the first wave is done
killing people. Militant fools with guns shut down the
Michigan legislature in protest of rules that keep them
alive. In places like Georgia and Florida, where
governors are weak and corrupt, beaches and parks are
packed with unmasked sunbathers. People trust in God
and chance and sheer cussedness to keep them safe.
Many employers are set on reopening fast. The CARES

Act got some smaller ones through a few paychecks.
The larger ones had banks to fall back on. Somehow,
business works over Zoom. But it’s hard for a CEO to
sign off on paying people for doing nothing, on paying
rent on empty buildings, on paying for equipment that
makes people want to work at home. Actually, you can
imagine that because Elon Musk told you. This week,
the Tesla supervillain reopened a plant against Alameda
city orders, risking—nay, inviting—his own arrest.
But you know what? I agree with Elon Musk. Not

about him getting arrested—okay, I agree with that
too—but about wanting desperately to reopen.
Work is the fundamental activity of humanity. Whether
paid or volunteer, it is healthier to do something than to
do nothing. Per a 2006 U.K. study, unemployment leads
to higher mortality, poorer physical and mental health,
higher medical consultation, higher medication
consumption, and higher hospital admission rates.
I get that. I want to be out there. I want my office to

open again. I need to get around a table with people to
test my board games. I want conventions to open so I
can sell my products. I want my employees to be able to
count on their hard work keeping them employed. I’ve
been at this for just two months and I’m going bonkers.
I want America to reopen, right now. I want to work.
I’m not always happy at work. Work can be dangerous

and soul-crushing. A lack of work is just as soul-
crushing—maybe more. Work’s not just about utility,
it’s about identity. After we ask people their names, we
ask what they do. Except we don’t do that now. Now
we ask how they are doing. It’s a big transition, one with
some positive features. Long-term, it’s going to hurt.
And I don’t even have kids. Any parent who’s suffered

a chicken pox cycle can handle kids at home for a few
weeks. Make it a year, and America goes crazy. All of it.
Offices can’t function when the nation is on child duty.
We have to know who’s watching our kids. We must
reopen schools soon to make any sense of our society.
People need to go to work, not just because they need

money but because they need work. We need to let
them. That’s what I think.
And what I think is entirely wrong.

To know I’m wrong, I just look at Sweden. If there’s
any society that you’d count on to handle a pandemic,
it’s Sweden, right? Well, it didn’t button up like South
Korea and Germany, or lock down too late like the
United Kingdom and Brazil. No, Sweden took a totally
different path: It let everyone catch COVID. Sweden
decided herd immunity would stave off excess mortality,
with no evidence it would. This is what it got out of it:
In Stockholm, more than twice the usual number of

people died last month. Across Sweden, almost 30
percent more people died than is normal during this
time of year, matching the U.S. and outpacing its
neighbors. Next door, Norway had no increase in
deaths at all. Sweden trusted in failed science and
needlessly killed a whole bunch of its citizens.
Yet there’s Rand Paul. The faux-libertarian Kentucky

senator tested positive, didn’t self-isolate, didn’t die, and
thinks he’s invulnerable. Paul loves what Sweden did.
“What we ought to do is open the schools and see how we do, and
if we have outbreaks in schools we have to make judgments on
that. But Sweden has left the schools open the whole time, and the
death rate in Sweden is about the same as the rest of Europe. In
fact it’s a lot less than Britain, France, Spain, and Italy.
Sweden’s doing better than those countries even though they didn’t
close down any of their economy.”
Rando here wants to gamble with your kids’ lives. But

herd immunity doesn’t work without a vaccine. Despite
“Operation Warp Speed,” we’re a year out on a vaccine.
Until we get one, we’re not getting rid of the virus. We
might figure out how to work around it, and as Paul
shows, we have absolutely no federal leadership at all.
This is why we have a president. At least, this is why we
used to have one. Because sometimes, the thing your
brain wants isn’t the thing you can have. Not if you
want to stay alive, anyway. In a pandemic, you need laws
to stop you from killing yourself and killing your
friends. This is what our last real president said in his
address to the graduating class of 2020 this weekend.
“Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy—that’s

how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups,
including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think
that way—which is why things are so screwed up.”
Some leaders agree with President Obama. In a few

states, the laws are holding. In a test run of the faux-
nation Pacifica, five western states banded together and
are reopening very slowly. An alliance in the Northeast is
doing the same. Lots of business leaders are bucking
their own governors in resisting reopening quickly. Not
every employer is Elon Musk, thank heavens.
If we’re going to obey our need for work—not just

money, work—we also must guarantee we can do so
safely. It’s on employers to entice our employees back
by creating the safest environments. That means contact
tracing, mask mandates, temperature checks, unlimited
sick leave, staggered shifts, removing doorknobs, air
filters, and dynamiting the open plan office. That’s for
starters. We have a lot of work to do. Thankfully, we
have a lot of workers out there who’ll be willing to help.
If you don’t want to do the hard work of keeping

people safe, there’s always an alternative. You can
always play Animal Crossing. I hear turnips are going
for 550 bells on my wife’s island today.
Rich explains: unfairness
Have you ever considered the fairness of income inequality? I

don’t mean questioning the simple fact that we live in a society
that believes income does not need to be equally distributed
among our citizens. The First Corollary to the American Dream
Theorem suggests that since hard work brings financial success,
those who are poor just didn’t work hard enough. In a theorem
designed to be short and easy to remember, there’s no room in
there for any extenuating or mitigating circumstances. As we look
around at the current state of the United States, it is clear that, at
least on a societal level, we have bought into this theorem of
inequality.
If that makes you mad, and it should, you might be interested to

know that a field of macroeconomics deals with questioning how
much unfairness is fair. That is, given that unfairness exists, how
much of it are we willing to put up with? According to most
studies, the U.S. and the U.K. sit on a broadly unfair economic
base, but the population has been conditioned to just deal with it.
Writing this in the middle of quarantine, watching daily reports of

the skyrocketing profits of the billionaire class, I’m forced to
contend with the fact that much of game theory is written to
support this inequality. The thought experiment that considers
how long society is willing to deal with those cheating the system
is called the Free-rider problem. You know, named after the
hordes of homeless surfers living in their cars along state beaches
and, most importantly, not paying taxes. In their own climb
towards the American Dream, those early game theorists focused
more on the cheaters at the bottom of the system than those
lurking at the top.
Maybe it’s about time to start renaming this dilemma. Isn’t it time
to wonder how many MuskBezos can siphon a disproportionate
amount of wealth from the public good before we finally call in
the authorities to clean up the beaches? How many of these
irresponsible, tax-avoidant billionaires are we willing to put up
with? There’s a real question for game theorists to sort out.

When the social
contract dies,
it’s time to riot
June 7, 2020
The protests after the murder of George Floyd by

Minneapolis police have led me to think on a question
I’ve avoided to this point: When is it time to riot?
I don’t mean protest. It is always time to protest. Injustice

doesn’t take holidays. No matter what day it is,
protesting is both justified and desirable.
I don’t mean loot. Indiscriminate looting is just crime.

You bust up a Cheesecake Factory, you’re unlikely to
inspire change.
I mean riot. I mean burn police cars, shatter windows,

overrun barricades, storm the houses of power, lie
down in front of military vehicles knowing they might
try to run you over. I’ll define “riot” as an attempt to
intimidate the government into changing its behavior by
giving it fear of cracking down. Usually, this means
putting yourself in immense physical danger. If the
word bothers you, substitute the much more heroic
word “rebel.” Just know that the people on the other
side are using the word “riot” and acting accordingly.
To think of it in game theory payoffs, we need to know
what rioting gets you. The presumption is that rioting
intends to turn opinions somewhere, whether in the
seats of power, the media, or foreign allies. Somewhere,
someone will respond in a way that helps your cause,
and with luck they will eliminate both the need and the
desire to break stuff. You gain or preserve freedoms by
showing the risks to those who try to take them away.
There’s a counterbalancing factor: You might die. At

minimum you risk your freedom, but there are worse
consequences. You could get other people killed. You
could destroy important things that can’t come back.
You could inspire the other side, and make heroes out
of its villains. You could chase allies away from your
cause. If resistance from government forces is quick,
lethal, and unpunished, you could lose without effecting
change at all. The calculation is tragic but simple:
When being killed by authorities for rioting is not

yet the norm, then rioting is justified, as you gain
or preserve more freedoms than you lose. When it
is the norm, you may gain nothing but your death.
I’d argue that there’s an inflection point, where the

government has not yet cracked down on rioters in the
harshest manner but has endangered the lives of its
citizens. Are we there? Before we try to answer that,
let’s talk about a place that definitely is.
In Hong Kong, that time is now. Or rather, it was last

year. The Hong Kong government floated an
amendment to a law called the Fugitive Offenders
Ordinance. It allowed nearly unlimited extradition from
Hong Kong to China, destroying provincial law by
subjecting Hong Kong residents to penalties that a
million Uighurs, for example, already suffer. China is
famous for using the law enforcement tactic of
disappearing, and that year, booksellers in Causeway
Bay went missing after selling books about political
figures such as Chairman Xi. Hong Kong was shaken.
Hong Kong’s people had everything to lose. A million

people protested. On June 12th, with the reading of the
revised Fugitive Offenders Ordinance scheduled at
Government Headquarters, the people showed police
how much they cared about their freedoms. They tore
down barricades and chased the police out. A hundred
people were injured. The reading did not occur.
The pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong explicitly

rejected the word “riot” to describe this and other
actions against the police. Their demands were fivefold:
withdrawal of the bill, investigations into police
brutality, release of all arrested protesters, retraction of
official characterization of the protests as riots, and
resignation of Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam
with all citizens able to vote in her replacement.
The Hong Kong government, propped up by China,

replied with crackdowns. As the protests filled the
streets, reprisals were swift and violent, including one
brutal event on a main train line. Hong Kong police, for
no known reason, stormed Prince Edward Station and
ruthlessly beat passengers and families with batons.
This is a total breakdown in what philosophers call the

social contract. That is an implicit agreement among
members of a society to cooperate for social benefits.
This requires giving up some individual freedoms for
state protection. For example, people who want to drive
cars on public roads must accept speed limits and
penalties for breaking them. As long as both sides
respect the social contract, society can continue.
This is a cornerstone principle in the games my team

makes. When people ask us questions, we often reply,
“We do not adjudicate social contracts.” If players want
to play by different rules, we don’t stop them, but we
also don’t guarantee the game will hold up if they do.
When your character dies in our Pathfinder Adventure
Card Game, you’re supposed to lose it forever (a
condition called “perma-death”). We had people beg us
to remove the perma-death rule, because they loved
their characters. But it was part of what held the game
together. We told them we would not adjudicate their
social contract. They could change the rules, but what
happened thereafter was up to them to adjudicate.
The social contract isn’t perfect. It leaves some people

behind. The homeless. People without medical
insurance. Veterans suffering PTSD. Victims of child
abuse. And so on. But on a day-to-day basis, it allows
society to function as well as it does. That’s its job.
It is not clear if anyone died in the Prince Edward

Station attack. But it was unprovoked, brutal, and
terrorizing. If that is what you can expect when you take
the train to work, you cannot go to work. The agents of
the government destroyed the social contract. With the
social contract broken, you must redirect your efforts
toward a way to effect change. Would riots help? Hard
to say. After many deaths and 6,000 arrests, the
situation in Hong Kong remains unresolved. It is clear
that acquiescence did not help.
Are we there? I don’t know. But I do own an umbrella.
Seattleites as a general rule do not own umbrellas. We
think it shows weakness in the face of rain. In the Hong
Kong clash, normal people used umbrellas as riot
shields to fend off tear gas. In a protest this week in my
hometown of Seattle, police tore a protester’s pink
umbrella away, triggering a tear gas and flash-grenade
assault by police. We all own umbrellas now.
With the burning of the Minneapolis Police

Department’s 3rd Precinct, the protest movement
against police brutality had its Bastille. Swiftly, the
Twitter list of trending topics became just a list of cities.
Everyone knew why.
As protests spread around the country, all eyes were on

Washington, D.C. At the White House, Trump, savaged
for hiding in a bunker during the previous night’s
protest, did the most horrifying thing he’s done in 3½
years of horrifying things. As he declared himself “the
president of law and order” who would use his military
might to “dominate” the cities, shots rang in the
background.
In accordance with Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s

demand that the military “dominate the battlespace,”
Attorney General Bill Barr ordered police to clear
Lafayette Square.69 With no provocation, police tear-
gassed the protesters. The tear gas curtain was extended
to St. John’s Church, hitting members of the clergy.
This allowed Trump to walk across the square to the
church and hold a bible. It was violence as photo op.
69 Barr has since tried to distance himself from giving that order.
This action shredded the social contract between the
federal government and America in three notable and
catastrophic ways. Julia Azari and Perry Bacon Jr. of the
website FiveThirtyEight cited these violations:
• By not supporting protests against the killing of
Black people by police, Trump violated the value
that we ensure people are treated equally, regardless
of race.
• By breaking up the protest, Trump violated the
value that we support the right to peacefully
protest.
• By involving the National Guard and senior military
officers, Trump violated the value that the military
and police are not to be used for political purposes.
If you’re looking for clues as to whether Trump respects

the social contract, there’s your answer. It is likely
unsurprising, given Trump’s infatuation with dictators.
His show of might came, perhaps coincidentally and

perhaps not, on the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square massacre in which the military killed 10,000
protesters. Many recalled that he approved of it:
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese

government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were
horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the
power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak...
as being spit on by the rest of the world.”
It’s spine-chilling that such a person is in charge of our

tanks. For four years, Trump attacked the free press as
enemies of the people. Now police are attacking them
directly.
Per The Guardian, nearly 150 journalists were attacked in
the U.S. between May 29 and June 2.
Linda Tirado, a photojournalist, was shot with a “less-lethal”

round while covering protests in Minneapolis on Saturday,
permanently losing vision in her left eye. Michael Adams, a Vice
News correspondent, lay down when ordered to do so by police,
holding a press pass above his head. He was still pepper sprayed
in the face. Kaitlin Rust was broadcasting on WAVE3 News
in Kentucky when an officer appear to take aim before hitting her
with pepper balls. “I’m getting shot,” she shouted live on air.
If these outrages were limited to Trump, it’d be easy to

handle as a red-vs.-blue issue. It’s not. Overwhelmingly,
police violence has come in cities run by Democratic
mayors. As one, those mayors defaulted to siding with
police as they turned on their own constituents.
• In New York, after a police SUV drove directly
through a group of protesters, Mayor Bill de
Blasio—formerly an intolerable candidate for
president—said the protesters were at fault.
• In Seattle, after police tear gassed a crowd over the
pink umbrella, Mayor Jenny Durkan said police
didn’t have their bodycams turned on because they
disliked the idea of a surveillance state.
• In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti let the LAPD
use UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium—let that
name sink in—to house 3,000 arrested protesters,
without requesting permission from UCLA itself.
The social contract depends on mayors of cities

protecting their citizens from harm, especially from
their own employees. All of these mayors walked some
of this back. But it sure hasn’t been a good look.
Even when they’re trying to help, the ineffectualness of
Democratic mayors is staggering to watch. Outside his
home, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey faced a crowd
that wanted him to give them a reason to hope. He said
he had “been coming to grips with my own brokenness
in this situation,” promising to revamp “a systemic
racist system.” He said “the police union needs to be
put in its place.” He pledged to rework police practices.
The crowd wanted a simple answer to one question:
“Will you defund the police?” He would not commit to
abolishing the police department. He was shamed back
to his house by chants of “Go home, Jacob!”
The worst display (so far) of Democratic mayoral

ineffectiveness was in Buffalo where Mayor Byron
Brown supported the police who pushed a 75-year-old
man to the pavement, making him bleed from the head.
The police said he “tripped and fell.” If you watch the
video, he “tripped and fell” when pushed over by a cop.
That video is worth watching for another reason. What

is notable about this video, in addition to the elderly
man being assaulted by cops, is just how bad these cops
are at walking in formation. That is because despite how
they are armed, police are not trained members of the
military. Keeping control of a populace en masse is not
what they know how to do. That activity is reserved for
the National Guard. As the fabric of the social contract
comes apart, this is where we might look for hope.
The military has decided there is one enemy it will not

fight, and that is the American people. Former Defense
Secretary James Mattis excoriated the president as a
threat to the Constitution the military is sworn to
uphold.
“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath
to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that
troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any
circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow
citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected
commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that
our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’ At home, we
should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare
occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we
witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false
conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the
moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and
women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and
of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests
with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their
communities and are answerable to them.”
Perhaps spurred by Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

of Staff Mark Milley wrote to all his colleagues from the
services this extraordinary three-part order:
1. Every member of the U.S. military swears an oath to

support and defend the Constitution and the values
embedded within it. This document is founded on the
essential principle that all men and women are born free
and equal, and should be treated with respect and dignity.
It also gives Americans the right to freedom of speech
and peaceful assembly. We in uniform—all branches, all
components, and all ranks—remain committed to our
national values and principles embedded in the
Constitution.
2. During this current crisis, the National Guard is
operating under the authority of state governors to
protect lives and property, preserve peace, and ensure
public safety.

3. As members of the Joint Force—comprised of all races,
colors, and creeds—you embody the ideals of our
Constitution. Please remind all of our troops and leaders
that we will uphold the values of our nation, and operate
consistent with national laws and our own high standards
of conduct at all times.
Thereafter, the leaders of the services sent out similar

messages to their commands. A reading of this chain
suggests the generals were floated some action that they
could not in good conscience follow through on. The
clear direction is that if someone gave a command that
was unconstitutional—even the Attorney General—the
military was to disobey it.
To the police who would commit violence against

peaceful protesters and journalists, the military said, you
are on your own.
As the military abandons Trump, he has apparently

turned to a ragtag group of officers from random
agencies to restore order in Washington. Officers with
mismatched gear and no badges or insignias—but
plenty of assault weapons—have been seen patrolling
D.C.’s streets. This motley crew has no training working
together, no police authority, and no accountability.
They are inexplicably more problematic than the police
that cleared Lafayette Square.
The social contract is being held up, for now, by the

military and by some governors and mayors who’ve
realized that maybe the police don’t have their backs
after all. Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser fired a
warning shot by invoking the Third Amendment
(where’ve you been, friend!) and kicking the Utah

National Guard out of D.C. hotels. She even changed
the name of the street in front of the White House to
“Black Lives Matter Plaza” and had the words painted
outside Trump’s front door. At the mayor’s urging,
Secretary Esper—he who coined the term “dominate
the battlespace” for suppression of peaceful protest—
then disarmed the National Guard in D.C. and made
plans to send them home. This morning, Trump took
credit for the idea, not mentioning that they were
leaving without his approval anyway.
So where does this leave us?
I’ll go back to the formula I put at the beginning of this

piece. When being killed by authorities for rioting is not
yet the norm, then rioting is likely justified, as you gain
or preserve more freedoms than you lose. When it is the
norm, you may gain nothing but your death.
I’ll leave it to others to decide whether rioting is

justified. It still seems too dangerous on many fronts,
while other options are available. I will say that we are
within the zone where it’s harder to condemn it on
moral grounds. In addition to forty million unemployed
and a hundred thousand dead from a pandemic the
administration encouraged, we have an election called
into question. We now have police committing violence
against African Americans and protesters with seeming
impunity. The solution may not be at the ballot box, if it
ever was. It’s looking a lot like Hong Kong did last year.
I think, though, that the police are not as invulnerable as

they think they are. There are a million of them, but
that’s a lot less than the number of people who might
turn against them if they continue to behave this way. In
Minneapolis, the school board has already cut its
contract with the police. Los Angeles cut their budget
by ten percent. Seattle has taken away their tear gas for
30 days. The biggest payback could be yet to come.
It pains me to say this, but the problem is the unions.

Normally, I’m 100 percent behind public unions, but
police unions exist for one purpose: to stop bad officers
from being punished. After this week, the “one bad
apple” myth will be the province of Osmonds songs.
Police departments cannot claim they’re composed of
mostly good cops when none thought it wise to help a
75-year-old man bleeding from the head off the
concrete. People who use the “bad apple” metaphor
forget that it means the whole bunch is spoiled.
For many police unions, that’s intentional. The

Minneapolis police union is repped by Lt. Bob Kroll,
who allegedly wore a white power motorcycle patch and
refers to his state’s African American and Muslim
attorney general as a “terrorist.” The NYPD’s head of
the sergeants union, Ed Mullins, has “declared war” on
his own mayor. These are not public servants. These are
thugs. Their membership has elected people like them
over and over.
For those who trusted the police, that trust is shaken.

For those who didn’t, the anger is a hurricane that is
coming for America’s police. Their unions face contract
negotiations, and they have stunningly engaged in a
nationwide campaign to cripple their own leverage. The
power of the police exists only if there is funding for
police. Unions can be busted. Budgets can be cut.
Departments can be defunded. Contracts—even social
contracts—can be renegotiated, or rewritten entirely.
But I must ask: Then what?
There more than a million gang members in America.

Who will arrest them when they commit crimes? There
are 15,000 murders per year in America. Who will
investigate them? There are nearly 400 million guns in
the hands of Americans. Who will take them away if
gun control legislation is passed? What about the guns
in the hands of those million police officers?
We cannot have a nation without police. They’re part of

the social contract. When they join us in enforcing the
social contract, such as Michigan Sheriff Chris Swanson
did when he marched with protesters, they are welcome.
If we can’t have a nation without police, we also can’t

have a nation where police don’t fear consequences for
attacking civilians. Something must bring them to heel.
Someone. A lot of someones. Police estimated this
weekend’s entirely peaceful crowd in Philadelphia at
8,500 people. C’mon, now. I know crowd sizes. That
was a hell of a lot more than 8,500 people. The police
had to notice and do the math. The math says they
cannot win.
I don’t know if it’s time to riot. Seems like time for the
police to think we will.
#BlackLivesMatter

Rich explains: social contracts
Most important game theory problems, like the Prisoner’s

Dilemma, deal with a single choice. Admittedly, not the greatest
way to model the complexities of the real world, but as we start to
increase the number of players or the magnitude of the choices,
our game theory texts start to resemble fourth dimensional
calculus. As you might imagine, a social tapestry is a
mathematically tangled mess, which is why we usually stick to
action and consequence.
In game terms, Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield

called the smallest possible moment of choice an “atom.” A
strategy is simply a series of atomic choices, each with a specific
end goal. In hearts, the winner is the player who takes the fewest
points, which means players attempt to win low-point tricks. But
since points can only be gained by winning tricks, some players
choose to “slough”—trying never to win a trick at all. Both are
solid strategies, but what happens when someone flips from one
to the other? If I’ve been successfully sloughing the whole game,
what do you think when I suddenly leap forward and take two
tricks in a row?
As creatures of habit, we get bent out of shape when someone

begins acting in an unpredictable way. We very quickly lose our
ability to make predictions, forcing us to upend our strategies and
reconsider our choices at an atomic level. Should you assume that
I will be battling for tricks this hand, or am I just throwing out false
signals before returning to my former strategy? Whatever I
choose to do, I’ve forced you to think twice about your response.
Social contracts are all about human predictability. When

someone acts outside of our expectations, we can’t help but react
as we consider whether our strategy has been thrown into
disarray. Sometimes, empathy kicks in and we realize the social
contract should adapt. Other times, hostilities erupt. In most
cases, this feeling of confusion stems from wondering whether or
not a strategy needs to change with a single, atomic decision and
an uncertain future.

The Klan is a terrorist
organization; Antifa is
neither
June 11, 2020
Amid the chaos of the George Floyd protests, President

Trump’s base cheered when he uttered these words:
“The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA
as a terrorist organization.”
The United States is opposed to terrorist organizations.

We have authorized the use of fearsome powers against
them. When a domestic cause like Antifa gets labeled as
terrorist, we can expect a mighty reply from the U.S.
government. Which, if you’re fighting against fascism,
makes you worry that your proto-fascist government is
about to target you.
Because we have codified free speech into our Bill of

Rights, we believe our government doesn’t label
domestic groups as terrorist. We do so because of a
principle called the law of unintended consequences.
Whenever a nonspecific rule is instituted, there will be
consequences that the institution does not intend. (Or
maybe it does intend and will only claim it does not
intend.) This principle leads people like me to resist
applying the label to any U.S. group.
Even the Ku Klux Klan.
This week, prominent activists argued that the KKK,

which commits terrorist acts, should be designated a
terrorist organization. I argued that because Trump was
wrong to declare Antifa a terrorist group, it was
dangerous to label the similarly domestic Klan as one.
Better to continue to use the hate group label, I said.
All of that was wrong. A cursory search of the internet

would have told me I made four critical errors before I
made the fifth critical error of posting it. My action did
not have the consequence I intended, and had some
pretty severe unintended ones. In other words, I was the
law of unintended consequences incarnate. Here’s what
I believed that turned out to be false.
Mistaken belief #1: We only label

international organizations “terrorist.”
This was true once, but not anymore. Our government

labels terrorist organizations in several ways, the most
notable being the Department of Homeland Security’s
Big, Allied and Dangerous (BAAD) database. There
aren’t any U.S. organizations in it. But that database isn’t
the only way the U.S. government labels organizations.
Here’s the FBI’s website on the Weather Underground.
On January 29, 1975, an explosion rocked the headquarters of

the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. No one was
hurt, but the damage was extensive, impacting 20 offices on three
separate floors. Hours later, another bomb was found at a
military induction center in Oakland, California, and safely
detonated. A domestic terrorist group called the Weather
Underground claimed responsibility for both bombs.
If the FBI labels you as something, that label is going to
stick. The FBI calls the Weather Underground a
terrorist group. It does so for Timothy McVeigh’s group
that planned the Oklahoma City bombing, and others.
If it can do that, it can do that for the Klan.
Mistaken belief #2: The U.S. has no

definition of domestic terrorism.
This used to be the case. Title 18 of the United States

Code described terrorism solely as “international
terrorism,” and defined these acts as occurring primarily
outside the jurisdiction of the United States.
On Tuesday, I reread the highly problematic post-9/11

USA PATRIOT Act. I discovered that it amended the
definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism.
(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a
violation of the criminal laws of the United States or
of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the
United States;
Domestic acts are fully laid out in the PATRIOT Act as

equal in nature to that of international terrorists. The
ACLU site has problems with the definition, noting that
it could be used against groups like Greenpeace and
Operation Rescue. I thought these concerns had
stopped this amendment. They did not.
However, there is no federal domestic terrorism crime.
“Acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries” is
a federal crime. Domestic terrorism is prosecuted as
other crimes, due to concerns that a domestic terror law
would run afoul of First Amendment rights. That said,
the PATRIOT Act documents that the U.S. defines acts
of terrorism, both domestic and international. There are
grounds to prosecute the Klan for domestic terror.
Mistaken belief #3: Agencies that fight

terror can’t investigate domestic groups.
The powers that the government has to investigate and

prosecute terrorists are vast. I believed that it was illegal
to use these powers on Americans, other than on those
that support groups like Al-Qaeda.
That’s not true, and hasn’t been for a long time. The
FBI created an anti-terrorist task force with the FBI in
1980, long before the PATRIOT Act. The North Texas
Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating the KKK
in 1997. The government has used its antiterrorism
powers against domestic groups now for forty years.
Since it can use and has used its antiterrorism powers

against the KKK, the U.S. government has precedent to
designate the Klan as a terrorist group.
Mistaken belief #4: Trump had designated

Antifa as a terrorist group.
The president’s designation scared me. I did not want

antifascists disappeared. So when Trump called Antifa a
terrorist organization, I assumed (like many others did)
he could bring those powers to bear against protesters.
It turns out that he can’t legitimately do so. (Whether he
will do so anyway is open to guesswork.) That’s because
Antifa isn’t an organization. It’s an umbrella term for
antifascism efforts. To get into the BAAD database, a
group must have definable membership. Antifa doesn’t
have a definable anything. It’s a philosophy that you’re
antifascist and want to do something about it.
I worry that groups like Black Lives Matter could be

targeted the same way. That might happen, but it has
the same likelihood of occurring as Antifa getting the
label. BLM’s structure is very loosely defined. It doesn’t
meet the definition either, in my estimation (and of
course, it’s not terrorist).
The Klan is a murderous organization with leaders and

headquarters. When its racist goals turn to action, as
they have on many occasions, I think that’s terror. The
Klan meets all the criteria except having been
designated a terrorist organization. If we want to use
new tools to fight violent racist groups, this one appears
to be a legitimate, if a bit risky, tool for that purpose.
As the law of unintended consequences shows, there

are always consequences to acting. That shouldn’t stop
you from doing so. When you can enumerate the
potential consequences, you should act in a way that
shores up your action from those consequences. We can
define the domestic terror groups as racist, destructive,
and organized. By all of those definitions, Antifa and
other friendly groups do not meet the criteria.
It’s worth acting. To have unintended consequences,

you must first be consequential. That’s how you make
change.
Rich explains: unintended consequences
Have you ever stood in front of a group of teenagers and

announced a sudden new rule? As a teacher, it came up often.
And I don’t just mean the rules that naturally arise because
someone jumped out of my second story window for a physics
project and I didn’t anticipate needing a public Defenestration
Policy. Back in high school, I watched too many kids get sent to the
doctor after a compass injury. So when I became a geometry
teacher, I set a blanket ban on these “tetanus compasses.” You
know, that golf pencil attached to a sharp, rusty nail.
As I came to learn, many parents grab school equipment when the

sales start in early August. Inevitably, a few kids already had a
tetanus compass. I’d talk about the new plastic ones that are
much easier to tighten, providing a smoother circular drawing
motion. I mentioned that I love geometric art and that I intended
to have multiple art projects throughout the year that would
require compass practice. Those kids who went to purchase a
compass often picked the right one. But other times, they were
forced to choose between a tetanus compass and nothing.
Since some kids didn’t have compasses, I made sure to buy a

bunch of extra compasses for kids to use during class. There were
never enough, since compasses and protractors get lost at school,
but I also started noticing something else. As the year progressed,
my compasses started vanishing, while the bin started overflowing
with tetanus compasses. Kids were trading up! Eventually, I could
only offer these metal castoffs during class, ensuring that I was
the primary breaker of my own rule.
When we don’t fully think through the consequences of our

actions, we get news features about quarantined students doing
homework on their phone at Taco Bell. A general solution to
COVID and school suddenly becomes a stark statement about
classism and resource inequities in education. This doesn’t mean
the solution was bad. Unintended consequences are simply the
result of every change and often point us towards a new avenue
for progress.

Southern discomfort:
Lose the Confederacy
or lose billions
June 17, 2020
The antiquarians of the South always summon this

bizarre canard for why they need all these
commemorations of their traitorous rebellion in defense
of enslaving human beings:
“We must save Confederate monuments lest we forget history.”
It’s a curious argument. As a Jew, I’ve never thought,

“We need a statue of Hitler in front of the U.S. Capitol
so that we don’t forget the Holocaust.” It’s top of mind
without a radiant Fuhrer in front of a sweep of swastika
flags.
At their best, memorials help us remember those who

suffered at the hands of the unjust, like the racist
Confederate general and inaugural KKK Grand Wizard
Nathan Bedford Forrest, who massacred a garrison of
captured black soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. At the
site, there’s a plaque about the helpless African
American soldiers who were slaughtered by General
Forrest. This is a dignified commemoration of a tragic
injustice.
Head down I-40 to Nashville, and you’ll see a 25-foot
carousel monstrosity known as the Nathan Bedford
Forrest Statue. I can’t think of a finer use for a bazooka
shell than this third-grade art project. The king of
Southern cowardice is depicted pointing his revolver
backward while atop a terrified copper steed. The
monument was designed by Jack Kershaw, co-founder
of the white supremacist group the League of the South,
and a lawyer to James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King Jr.’s
killer. Kershaw defended the statue by saying,
“Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.” No,
nobody needs to do that.
Southerners who want to preserve these failure trinkets

want them for one reason: They are proud of them. The
white people of the South are relentlessly smitten with a
movement called the Lost Cause, which portrays their
Rebel past in the best possible light. Now, why anyone
would want to embrace something called “the Lost
Cause” eludes me. I can’t find many examples where the
losing side of a war beats its chest as if it could credibly
rise up again. You don’t see annual gatherings of
Carthaginians toasting the pre-salting-of-the-earth days.
The South had to be dragged screaming into the 20th

century, and last week’s elections in Georgia suggest it
has stumbled into the 21st without much finesse.
There’s much to be said for Southern hospitality,
though. Southerners can show great love for their
country. If they can be helped over this tragic hang-up
over their racist failure, they may surprise us with their
dedication to this nation and all of its people.
If not, fuck ’em. Let’s burn their treason toys to the

ground.
Protestors this last couple weeks have done some
mighty fine destruction of these statues, and show no
signs of stopping. Sometimes they rip them down,
sometimes they cover them in graffiti, and sometimes
they intimidate the town so much that the town beats
them to it. Since June 1, more than three dozen
Confederate monuments have come down or been
earmarked for removal.
There are a lot of these symbols left. Seventeen

hundred, to be somewhat exact. There is a limited
supply of bazookas, and anyway, it’d be best to get this
disposed of without anyone getting hurt.
Plus, it’s not limited to statues. Confederate flags are in

abundance, though NASCAR ended its infatuation with
The Dukes of Hazzard and banned the flags. One driver,
Ray Ciccarelli, quit over this. He was standing in 51st
place in the Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series. (As
comedian Steve Hofstetter noted, “Ciccarelli has never
been good at anything race-related.”)
Many buildings of dubious vintage are in the protesters’

sights. In Richmond, Virginia, the national headquarters
of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was set on
fire, and a bunch of Stonewall Jackson memorabilia was
destroyed. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, the Market
House slave auction site was torched, and there’s a
popular petition to tear it down entirely.
On a federal level, scrutiny has targeted the military

installations named after traitors against the very Army
they house: Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Lee. That
last one is particularly egregious, as Robert E. Lee
opposed commemoration of rebel generals. Lee said:
“My conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings
of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the country
would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its
accomplishment, and of continuing, if not adding to, the
difficulties under which the Southern people labour.”
General Lee would not have approved of Fort Hood,

Camp Beauregard, Fort Pickett... wait, hold the phone,
Fort Pickett? We have a U.S. Army base named for
George Pickett? The idiot who committed the greatest
blunder of the Civil War, charging across the
Gettysburg battlefield and killing or wounding his own
troops at a 4:1 ratio to the Union soldiers? That Pickett?
What are you fool Virginians thinking?
Okay, calming down.
We also have roads and bridges and college sports

teams and even entire counties named for Confederates.
You can’t tear down a county. We’ll need cooperation
here. Fortunately, we have something they want.
Only 2 percent of Southerners said they “just about

always” believe Washington will do what’s right. TWO
percent. If I asked you, “Why does the South hate the
federal government?” what would you say?
Your first guess will be the Civil War.
Your second will be states’ rights.
Your third guess might be Southern independence.
You’ll be wrong about all of those, and really, really

wrong about the third one.
In market economics, there’s a market failure called the
free-rider problem. It is defined as the burden on a
shared resource created by people who don’t pay their
fair share for it. The free-rider has less incentive to
contribute to the resource since they can enjoy its
benefits even if they don’t. The producer of the
resource becomes undercompensated, and may not be
able to produce the resource at all. It is common nature
to act like you despise the thing you are stealing from,
lest you get called out for wanting it too much.
The federal government is a resource we all use. We

enjoy military defense, environmental protection,
Medicare, the court system, and thousands of other
offerings. Since we all use it, a free-rider problem
emerges.
Our federal government has a concept called the

“balance of payments.” It’s the amount of revenue a
state’s economy pays in federal taxes, minus the amount
of federal spending in that state. States that pay more to
the federal government in taxes than they receive are
called donor states. Using the numbers from 2017, here
are the top eight donor states:
THE TOP EIGHT DONOR STATES BY

INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION (2017)
1. Connecticut (–$4,000)
2. New Jersey (–$2,368)
3. Massachusetts (–$2,343)
4. New York (–$1,792)
5. North Dakota (–$720)
6. Illinois (–$364)
7. New Hampshire (–$234)
8. Washington (–$184)
Each Connecticuter (that’s a word that real people use)
pays $4,000 more than they get in federal revenue. Their
return rate is 74 cents on the dollar. New Jersey,
Massachusetts, and New York aren’t much better,
between 82 and 86 cents on the dollar.
You may also notice that nearly all these states are
Democratic strongholds. Hey, let’s look at the top eight
states that take more from the federal government than
they give it. Wonder if they have anything in common?
THE TOP EIGHT TAKER STATES BY

INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION (2017)
1. Virginia (+$10,301)
2. Kentucky (+$9,145)
3. New Mexico (+$8,692)
4. West Virginia (+$7,283)
5. Alaska (+$7,048)
6. Mississippi (+$6,880)
7. Alabama (+$6,694)
8. Maryland (+$6,035)
Many of these are Republican strongholds or fairly

recent converts to the Democratic side. In the latter
camp is the fair state of Virginia. It gives each resident
ten grand of federal value more than he or she puts in,
far and away the worst taker here. Each resident pays
about $10,000 in federal taxes and receives $20,000 in
federal dollars into the state’s economy.
The entire South is also in the “taking” camp. South

Carolina, Missouri, Louisiana, Tennessee, and North
Carolina are all takers too. The Northeast, Midwest, and
West subsidize the South. It’s like a Marshall Plan for
former traitors.
Taker-state king Virginia also just happens to lead the
nation in another category: most Confederate
monuments. Unsurprisingly, a whole bunch of taker
states show up on this list too.
THE EIGHT STATES WITH THE MOST

CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS (2017)
1. Virginia (223)
2. Texas (177)
3. Georgia (174)
4. Mississippi (131)
5. North Carolina (139)
6. South Carolina (112)
7. Alabama (107)
8. Louisiana (88)
All of this can change.
If Democrats take back the Senate and presidency, the

federal government can make the South a simple deal:
lose all the symbols of the Confederacy or President
Biden will sign a bill normalizing the money returning to
states to be proportional to their contributions. If
Virginia kicks in $10,000 per resident, it gets back
$10,000 in value. Or whatever’s proportional to its
contribution. It ain’t gonna be $20 large per Virginian.
Virginia has 2.7 million taxpayers. Each brings in a

surplus of $10,000 a year. That’s $27 billion a year that
Virginia stands to lose if Democrats ascend and
normalize the states’ disbursement of federal payments,
if they want to.
Nancy Pelosi might want to. So might Elizabeth

Warren. They came out swinging in the wake of the
George Floyd protests, Pelosi demanding removal of 11
Confederate statues in the Capitol and Warren
authoring a bill to rename the 10 Army bases as well as
Navy vessels like the guided-missile cruiser USS
Chancellorsville. Senate Republicans started to hop on
board, at least until the President, drowned in criticism
for his handling of police brutality protests, shot his
mouth off in opposition.
Trouble is, Donno, they already had. Not all of them

want to be remembered the way Trump will be, as the
backers of the traitorous rebellion against the Union.
Fittingly, Virginia will be the battleground, as it was a

century and a half ago. This month, empowered by now
having the governorship and both houses for the first
time in decades, Virginia began the struggle of ridding
itself of its racist past. After protesters toppled statues
of Jefferson Davis and William Carter Wickham,
Richmond accelerated its timetable for removal of its
four remaining Confederate monuments.70
70By this writing, four were torn down, but the statue of General Lee
remained. I don’t think he’d like that.
Around the state, Norfolk removed its Johnny Reb
statue. Fredericksburg moved a slave auction block
from downtown to a museum. Maybe Virginia will
proceed quickly, but it’s likely that the ardor will die out
and the state will revert to its sluggish ways.71
That said, Virginia’s state budget was recently in

meltdown over a $2.2 billion gap. Make that gap $30
billion overnight and it’s the apocalypse. When you’re
facing a fiscal apocalypse, you’ll re-examine your
priorities. Principles, especially antiquated and racist
ones, can be very expensive.
But sledgehammers? Sledgehammers are cheap.
71At the time of this writing, more than 100 monuments had been
removed or slated for removal, including at least 27 in Virginia.
Rich explains: the free-rider problem
Aha! I knew we’d circle back to the Free-Rider problem! You can’t
delve into economic game theory without crossing this
treacherous ravine. But good news, friends! While the problem is
indeed devious and seemingly insurmountable, you learned
everything you’ll ever need to know about this dilemma in
seventh grade during your first group project in social studies
class.
In my school, students were always split up into teams of five.

Most times, selection was random, which meant five was just big
enough that it always included kids I didn’t know very well. As we
worked, describing each facet of our specific historical event, our
individual efforts compiled into a somewhat cohesive whole. At
least, that’s how it was supposed to work.
You know the drill. In every group, one person doesn’t quite do
their share. Is it just laziness? Of course not. It’s because they
know the teacher is unlikely to dig down to the individual level.
They just want to see your sweet poster on the Louisiana
Purchase! As long as the teacher is happy, it doesn’t really matter
if one person takes a free ride along the way. The more important
question is whether you, as a member of the group, decide to turn
that student in to the teacher.
That’s the Free-Rider problem in a nutshell. In any game involving

a communal goal, there will be some players who gain the
benefits while contributing less than their fair share, if anything at
all. As self-interested humans, we might decide to let this slide,
but eventually we all have to choose between joining in the free
ride or causing our own fuss.
The hardest truth about the Free-Rider problem is when you don’t
realize you’re part of the game. Across the nation, the Black Lives
Matter protests continue to reframe racism in the United States
by showing white privilege as a free ride. For many, it’s hard to
reconcile their daily lives with the kid who didn’t write two
paragraphs on Napoleon.

The irrelevant
elephant: On script,
Trump’s GOP turns
heel
July 26, 2020
“A question arises: whether it be better to be loved than

feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one
should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite
them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than
loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with....”
—Machiavelli
I’ll let Machiavelli host this column since I’m too busy
watching Portland. On the streets of Rip City last week,
President Trump’s unbadged federal troops descended
on protesters, forcing them into unmarked vans. As the
alarms went out, an unarmed, unclad woman stood in
the street and sent the cops and federal troops home.
She posed no threat except the threat of confidence
directed at bullies. That was enough. She won.
Yes, I know, Portland is weird. That’s its brand. It’s also

fierce. Its people take no guff from anyone. Which is why
they’ve been protesting for 60 days. Harmlessly, I
should point out. The occasional graffiti, a small fire or
two, in a condensed three-block area. That’s it.
In reply, they got jackbooted thuggery from Trump’s
lackeys. Facing a motley mix of untrained Customs and
Border Protection, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, and Transportation Security
Administration personnel in preposterous camo garb,
Navy vet Chris David stood his ground as some
unbadged federal punk wailed on him like he was
swinging a flyswatter. Chris David wasn’t going
anywhere. They broke his hand and he still backed them
off their ground. Vets across the country jumped in cars
and headed to Oregon to join him.
A wall of mothers appeared the next night. When you

are the impotent federal officials with guns, the very last
thing you want to shoot is a wall of moms. Shoot them
they did, though, but the wall stood fast. Suddenly there
were walls of mothers in every city.
Embattled in conflict with the protesters, Oregon’s

elected officials knew what side to get on, and fast.
Governor Kate Brown and Mayor Ted Wheeler
demanded federal troops stay in their buildings or leave
the state. This is our conflict, the Oregonians said, so
find somewhere else to stage your optics.
Brown: “This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. If the Trump

administration was really interested in problem solving or public
safety, they would be focused on reducing the confrontation and
retraining their officers. It’s clear, however, that they are only
interested in political theater.”
Wheeler: “Federally-directed intervention is uninvited,

untrained, and unwelcome. The violence was being contained and
started to de-escalate before they arrived. They intervened and
escalated tensions to new levels.”
Wheeler then walked into the protest area to dialogue
with the protesters—and got tear-gassed by federal
agents. That got everyone’s attention too.
Whatever side of the protests they were on, Portlanders

stood strong against the unwelcome federal invasion of
their city. They are the kind of people that make folks
realize there’s an America worth fighting for. And, as it
turns out, an America they’re fighting against.
“...Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that

they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and
as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will
offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is
said above, when the need is far distant; but when it
approaches they turn against you...”
Trump’s venomous approach to the protests is familiar

to any fan of professional wrestling: he turned heel.
You may be surprised at me using a pro wrestling

metaphor in a game theory column, as wrestling is often
decried as “fake.” That reputation is decidedly unfair;
the litany of devastating injuries wrestlers suffer makes
it troublingly real. Rather, wrestling aims for “kayfabe,”
portraying staged events as real. The President is a
major promoter of the sport, once battling owner Vince
McMahon in a match with head-shaving on the line.
Trump was inducted into the WWE’s Hall of Fame in
2013; he paid it forward by making WWE co-owner
Linda McMahon the least qualified Small Business
Administration administrator in history. Wrestling
leaned into its “fake” rep by wholeheartedly embracing
America’s fakest billionaire.
Understanding the heel turn requires diving into the
sport’s character classes. Wrestlers are traditionally
divided into “faces” (good guys, shortened from
“babyface”) and “heels” (bad guys). Wrestlers are
pushed up the popularity ladder by embracing one of
these two positions, aiming to reach a clash with the
champion of the other side. When a wrestler loses
popularity because their shtick is stale, they do a turn to
the other side. Everyone feigns surprise and the push
begins anew. It doesn’t always work. WWE attempted
to turn beloved champ Becky “The Man” Lynch into a
heel, and fans still loved her anyway. When you can’t get
people to boo your heels, you gotta change it up.
But Donald Trump knows how effective this trick is on

the marks, which is what wrestling calls its willingly
gullible fans. Trump believes he has his own marks, and
they think of him as a face. You might have trouble
believing that, given the whole kids-in-cages/good-
people-on-both-sides thing. But it’s true: Trump is a
face. He routinely touts his own popularity, milking
cheers from his crowds by playing to their racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic views. He showers himself in
their adoration, his only motivator for the job he deeply
hates. The face draws the cheers.
But now, in a pandemic he helped create, he’s been

stripped of his rallies. COVID-19 has reduced his
remaining few to dangerous mockeries. He ginned up
his team for a convention in Jacksonville; with no
security in place and only one staffer on the ground,
that plan fell apart at great cost. Robbed of his
audiences, his popularity is cratering. Being a face isn’t
working. From his bunker in a walled-off White House,
Trump is concocting a highly scripted heel turn.
“...And that prince who, relying entirely on their
promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined;
because friendships that are obtained by payments, and
not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be
earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need
cannot be relied upon...”
Undeterred by his troops’ ineffectiveness in baiting the

peaceful Portland protests to violence, Acting
Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf—he
who stole away former FEMA Director Brock Long’s
title of the regime’s least interesting action hero name—
promised a rollout of these same tactics elsewhere.
Federal troops showed up in Chicago, Seattle, Kansas
City, Albuquerque, and other places the Democrats held
power. Trump’s “Operation LeGend” is putatively
named for 4-year-old shooting victim LeGend Taliferro
(but it’s clear who Trump thinks the “legend” is). It
aims to expand violent force across America, especially
in cities where the mayors rejected their “help” with a
barrage of lawsuits and threats.
Declaring war on America is a curious re-election

strategy. One hundred days from the election, the
president’s approval is underwater by 15 points, and
he’s trailing challenge Joe Biden by anywhere from 8 to
15 points. Senate Republicans are running scared;
House Republicans melted down in an internal strategy
meeting that devolved into a screaming match.
Republicans meekly objected that this authoritarian
move would sink their re-election campaigns. Rand Paul
denounced the invasion of Portland, saying there was
no place for “federal agents kitted out in military or
paramilitary trappings... rounding up people at will.”
Caught in the war, Trump’s GOP defenders are fearful
they will become irrelevant in the upcoming election.
There will only be two choices on the ballot: the
Democrats and Trump. As Trump bungles the twin
crises of the coronavirus and police brutality protests,
looking at who the president has lost reveals some
staggering trends:
• Trump is trailing Biden in the suburbs—you know,

the ones Biden “wants to abolish”—by about 10
points. That’s a 14-point swing from 2016.
• Trump is losing in the swing states of Florida,
Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota,
Wisconsin, and North Carolina, and only tied with
Biden in former GOP lock Texas.
• Biden is crushing Trump with independents by 13
points, with whom he tied Hillary Clinton in 2016.
• Biden leads Trump among elderly voters by about
6 points. That’s a 13-point swing from 2016.
• White voters with college degrees, which Trump
won by 4 points in 2016, are backing Biden by 28
points. Among women in that cohort, Biden’s lead
is 39 points.
• Even white evangelicals, which Trump won 81
percent of in 2016, are jumping ship, with his
favorably numbers down double digits.
I know they seem like our main export sometimes, but

there are not enough racist, white, undereducated men
in America to make up for all that.
All this points to a November bloodbath, which is why

Trump has decided to try to scare white Americans—
the “silent majority,” he calls them, as if he invented the

phrase—into rising up against the (mostly black and
Latinx) monsters in their imaginations. Last week,
Trump repealed a rule that blocked redlining—a
discriminatory mortgage practice that keeps blacks out
of white neighborhoods—and ended investigations into
banks that did so. He hopes to remind suburban whites
that they fled the cities for a reason, no matter how
morally bankrupt that reason was.
In Machiavellian fashion, Trump is embracing fear over

love. Like a wrestler, he just has to get his entrance
music right. In a fan-made video the Trump campaign
tweeted out last week, Trump is an apocalyptic
destroyer of dissent, to the strains of a cover of Linkin
Park’s “In the End.” This horrorshow was taken down
in hours due to infringing on Linkin Park’s copyrights.
When you can’t defeat a Linkin Park cover band, what
makes you think you can defeat America?
But the approach was a success, and a few days later,

Trump rolled out a doomsaying video featuring the
slogan “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,”
using violent images of Donald Trump’s America.
“...and men have less scruple in offending one who is

beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by
the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of
men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage;
but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which
never fails...”
So, we end up with a Trump who not only encourages

racism but must depend on it. It must come through for
him in greater numbers than it has so far, or he’s toast.
As far as I can tell, his strategy (if it can be called that)
boils down to five moves.
1. Turn heel. With much hang-wringing and rending
of garments, Trump declares war on America.
2. Rely on Fox News to tar the protests as
ultraviolent. Trump’s overlords at Fox are doing
their part (at least at night), hyping the moral panic
that the protesters are burning down American
cities. Trump is all too happy to let Americans
believe they are, even if it’s not true.
3. Hope some federal officers get killed. Trump
aims for a Remember the Maine-style outcome
where America sees the federal troops he put in
harm’s way as the victims. In his twisted fantasy,
these sacrificed soldiers become his George Floyd,
and white America rallies to his side.
4. Have Bill Barr and Chad Wolf commit some
atrocities. In response, Trump’s quislings will
“put down” the protests in some awful way,
blunting their message and terrifying people away
from the protest sites.
5. Turn face. After a summer of violence, Trump
declares the mission accomplished, reins in Wolf,
and returns to his smiling ways, taking credit for
saving America. The cheers carry him to victory.
It could work, especially if Trump’s new postmaster

general Louis DeJoy wrecks the post office so mail-in
balloting fails. Biden’s Democrats should not get
complacent or start swinging for the fences. (No, we are
not going to turn Kansas blue. Just stop it.) Already,
Trump has narrowed his deficit to Biden from 9.6
points a few weeks ago to about 8 points today. That’s
still a landslide, sure, but a lot could happen in four
months. A lot has happened in four months, after all.
The case for Trump beating these numbers on a shaky
theory called the “enthusiasm gap.” Nearly everyone
who didn’t love Trump has abandoned him, so his
remaining supporters really love him. After a bruising
and divisive primary, maybe Biden voters don’t feel that
way about their guy. In a YouGov poll, Trump voters
were enthusiastic about their candidate 68 percent of
the time, compared to 31 percent for Biden.
Problem is, Joe Biden’s supporters are really enthusiastic

about one thing: showing Trump the door. Per
FiveThirtyEight, 80 percent of Biden voters find Trump
detestable, while only half of Trump voters hate Biden.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports “a roughly ten

percentage point gap in favor of Biden on which candidate they
trust to do a better job maintaining law and order (51% trust
Biden vs. 41% trust Trump) and the coronavirus outbreak
(50% vs. 41%). There are even larger gaps in favor of Biden on
issues including health care (53% vs. 38%), police violence (55%
vs. 36%), and race relations (58% vs. 34%). When it comes to
handling the economy, similar shares of voters trust President
Trump (49%) as trust Biden (45%).”
Which is why Biden’s response to Trump’s heel turn is:
1. “Let me know when you’re done.”
“Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a

way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred;
because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is
not hated.”
Ah, thanks, Machiavelli. Carry on, heel.

Rich explains: identity
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, the famed Italian free-

thinking diplomat, aristocrat, and political theoretician, would
have totally dug modern wrestling. I can see him up in the stands,
face shining with glee above some epic Renaissance neck ruffles,
certainly only needing to use the faintest edge of his legitimately
purchased seat. And if you think that WrestleMania is a far cry
from Italian politics, then it’s time for a brief history lesson.
Machiavelli was born during the collapsing throes of the Western

Roman Empire and the rapid rise of the Italian city-state. He lived
for 58 years, long enough to see nine cardinals ascend to the
Papacy, including the vaunted Warrior Pope, Julius II. These
religious leaders battled against a mob of squabbling secular
leaders, culminating in the bloody Italian Wars. Niccolò himself led
a small army of 400 Florentine soldiers to lay siege to nearby Pisa.
Throughout his life, Machiavelli was witness to “power grabs”
unlike any we have seen in modern, domestic, American politics.
Take George W. Bush as an example. With our gentler transfers of

presidential power, he is free to paint to his heart’s content. The
former president is invited to receptions and events, even by his
political opponents, as a continued reminder that America holds a
measure of respect for those who lead the country. A more
Machiavellian power grab would see the former president
crushed and debased, wholly unable to consider returning to
power. “If you do them minor damage they will get their
revenge... If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that
you do not have to fear their vengeance.”
And here, finally, we see where Machiavelli would find an ally in

modern politics. Trump doesn’t just want to defeat his rivals, he
wants to see them publicly humiliated. Even his allies are injured
when they eventually choose to turn and walk away.
It’s unabashed authoritarianism, providing zero utility in terms of

governance. But it would certainly give Machiavelli another reason
to buy an entire seat and only need the edge.

All a prevent defense
does is prevent your
presidency
August 8, 2020
Joe Biden knows football. He was a star running back at

Archmere Academy, and at the University of Delaware,
he was one of the Blue Hens’ stalwart defensive backs.
As a defensive back, he assuredly knows what a prevent
defense is. He assuredly knows why you might use it,
and why you might not.
A prevent defense is the defense you employ when

you are winning a football game in the fourth quarter.
You take out your blitzing rushers who were getting you
sacks and run stops, and send in seven or eight speedy
defensive backs to cover all the long throws the
quarterback tosses toward the end zone. You’re willing
to give up the runs and the short passes as long as the
clock doesn’t stop and the receivers don’t catch the long
bombs.
It’s a tried and true strategy when you’re up and you

don’t want to end up down. Except, as legendary coach
John Madden once said:
“All a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.”

The prevent defense loses by putting the ball in the
hands of the opponent, letting them rack up small
victory after small victory. Small victories count. They
tell a desperate team that they can win. Meanwhile, the
defending team watches the opponent chew up yards
and back them toward their end zone. It demoralizes
the team that’s ahead until it isn’t any more.
Joe Biden knows this first-hand. On January 7, 2011,

the vice president was in attendance as his beloved Blue
Hens lined up against the Eastern Washington Eagles in
the NCAA Division I Football Championship game. Up
19–0 late in the third quarter, all Delaware had to do
was stop the Eagles from scoring. You can guess what
occurred. Eagles QB Bo Levi Mitchell ignored the
downfield defensive backs, landing short pass after
short pass en route to a 20–19 win over the Blue Hens.
If you take nothing from that, take these two things:

1. there’s a team that calls itself the Blue Hens with a
straight face, and
2. any lead can be overcome in the final quarter if the
team that’s ahead lets the other team control the ball.
It’s August, and Biden is up at the end of the third. He’s

sitting on a lead of 7.5 points nationally, and is ahead or
tied in all the battleground states. He has a dozen routes
to victory. Despite his threat to delay the election (which
gets him President Patrick Leahy72), Trump only has one.
72 If there’s no president selected by January 20, the current president’s

term ends. The vice president is also out of work. All the House members
would not have jobs. Neither would any senator up for re-election. Only
sixty-seven senators would remain, and there would be a Democratic
majority of them, so the Senate president would take over as president of
the United States. That’s Patrick Leahy.
Unfortunately, it’s the one that he used to degrade
Hillary Clinton’s similar (though not as big) summer
lead in 2016: be a racist, cause chaos, solicit help from
Russia, disenfranchise voters. This time he added a
horrific twist: the dismantling of the U.S. Postal Service
before a mail-in ballot election. Republicans will cheat in
broad daylight in a desperate attempt to retain their thin
majority. Every small victory they get will inspire them
more. They don’t even care if people die, as long as they
win. This is not a team that will lay down in the face of
a big deficit. After finding trillions of dollars for their
donors in the middle of a pandemic, it’s clear they
barely know what a deficit is.
Faced with an undermanned but desperate opponent,

Biden has done... well, very little. While it’s not true that
he’s “hiding in his basement,” as Trump says, Biden is
letting Trump control the airwaves. Trump is an
incompetent fool at the worst possible moment, so
letting him kill his own chances sounds like a good idea.
But Trump has the ball. The more attempts he makes,

the more chances he has to score. He might not. But he
can. Today, with Congress deadlocked, Trump signed
four questionable but likely popular executive orders on
unemployment, evictions, student loans, and payroll tax.
That’s a chance for him to score. Biden has to find his.
Take New York Attorney General Letitia James’s

decision to go after the National Rifle Association. If
she had said she was aiming to dissolve their governing
board, at least half the NRA would’ve supported her.
For years, that board has existed to line the pockets of
professional ghoul Wayne LaPierre and friends at the
expense of its members. But that’s not what she said.
She aimed to dissolve the NRA itself. Instead of rallying
gun owners behind throwing the rotters out, she turned
them into an army against Democrats. There was much
garment rending from the politerati. Trump pounced on
an opportunity to reverse his ratings skid. He tweeted:
That’s an opportunity to play offense. Left unchecked,

Trump’s excoriation of the New York AG’s aggressive
approach might cost Biden some percentage points.
With the electoral college stacked against Democrats,
those are points he can’t afford to lose.
Now, a conservative approach to this controversy

would be for Biden to say, “Well, I don’t like the NRA
board one bit, and they don’t like me—they gave me an
F, don’tcha know—but the Second Amendment is a
constitutional right and the believers in that right should
have a group that represents that position. So, no, I
don’t support dissolving the NRA.” That’s the prevent
defense approach and I expect Biden to take it if asked.
But here’s what someone still playing offense would say:

“I can see why supporters of the Second Amendment
are up in arms, so to speak. But look, the NRA is a
fraud and a Russian front. Its members deserve an
organization that doesn’t cheat them blind and support
the mass murder of children. They should make a new
one, because this one is about to be blown off the stage.
I support the NRA’s dissolution. Go get ’em, Tish.”
A campaign playing offense doesn’t care about what the
other side thinks. Democrats hate the NRA, so Biden
would gain points with people who back his positions.
He’d lose some Republicans, but that number would
pale next to increased turnout from progressives in the
Democratic Party, which waver too often for comfort.
Get all the Democrats to vote Joe, and Joe can’t lose.
Biden could force Trump to fight a losing battle over

the Postal Service. A campaign playing defense would
put out a press release supporting voting rights, which
Biden did. A campaign playing offense would get its
House allies to impeach Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy this week. Let Senate Republicans struggle to
justify throttling the most popular government agency
amid a pandemic. I’m sure that’d be a winning platform.
If the Republicans are playing to cheat, we need to play

to crush them. Have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blanket
TikTok with videos targeting those protesting brutality.
While the Trump campaign is knocking on a million
doors a week, don’t settle for your campaign knocking
on zero. Indict—not impeach, indict—Census Bureau
Director Steven Dillingham for ending the decennial
census early to undercount Black and indigenous
Americans. Don’t let Trump win the ad war with Gen
Z. Coordinate governors’ responses to COVID-19 as if
he is already president. Back Medicare for All after the
collapse of the health care system. Propose a ten-trillion
dollar infrastructure campaign to rebuild after the crash.
Get laws passed that, in keeping with the Supreme
Court’s new ruling that faithless electors can be
punished, the punishment for failing to follow a state’s
vote for Biden is 30 years in prison. Show up for the
convention in Milwaukee, for Pete’s sake.
Showing a commitment to winning is critical, and it
shows up most significantly in Biden’s halting selection
of his vice presidential nominee. It’s cool that he
committed to selecting a woman as running mate during
the March debate. That ended Bernie’s campaign for
good, if it wasn’t dead already.73
But which woman? The news media and political

Twitter chew up every choice in the most sexist manner,
especially the African American ones. To these critics,
Sen. Kamala Harris is too disloyal and ambitious;
Ambassador Susan Rice is too foul-mouthed and too
rich; ex-Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
wants the job too much; Rep. Karen Bass is too friendly
with Communists and Scientologists; Rep. Val Demings
is actually a cop. Meanwhile, Michigan Governor
Gretchen Whitmer and Senators Elizabeth Warren and
Tammy Duckworth get praise for taking on their sexist
critics, but the African American women must step
gingerly or be cast aside. Not great.
A campaign playing defense would pick whichever of

these women (or others) would not upset the apple cart.
Even though she’s as much of a fighter as Elizabeth
Warren, no one could imagine Gretchen Whitmer riling
up the Republicans against her. She’d be Tim Kaine II.
That doesn’t make her a bad choice, to be clear. She’d
probably be a great vice president, and later president,
perhaps. But there’s nothing in her story that is going to
be a lightning rod for the campaign. Outside the Upper
Midwest, the needle won’t move, and that might be
what the campaign wants at this time.
Though, wow, doesn’t Andrew Yang look like a fantastic choice now?
73
Man’s basically a prophet.

Susan Rice? She’d set the needle on fire. Republicans
would trip over themselves setting up more Benghazi
hearings. The media would go crazy trying to make her
lack of electoral experience a story. But she would tear
Mike Pence into pieces in a debate. Michelle Obama
would be at every one of her campaign stops, high-
fiving her and roiling the crowd into a frenzy. Susan
Rice would have some quotes, let me tell you.
It’s not my place to tell Biden which running mate

would put him over the line, if any of his choices would.
He’s probably not looking at a Sarah Palin apocalypse
no matter who he picks. But I can guarantee him that
his choice will be viewed through the lens of whether
he’s trying to win or trying not to lose. That will matter.
Even if Joe wins, it matters how he wins. A squeaker

one-point win like Eastern Washington got over
Delaware nine years ago will not do. Trump has laid the
groundwork for cheating enough to gain a house
advantage, flooding the channel with October surprises
like untested miracle vaccines, and contesting the
election if it’s close. He’s going all out.
Biden can too. Georgia, Texas, and Ohio are in play if

Biden is willing to seize them. The Senate might even
flip, as might statehouses looking at post-census
redistricting. A win is important, but an overwhelming
win is vastly more important. The GOP needs to be put
out of business for entertaining fascism as a platform.
All of that is on the table for an aggressive campaign.
On the other hand, taking a knee on the 50-yard-line at

the start of the fourth quarter is suicide. Biden knows
that. Let’s see if he shows it.
Rich explains: trick plays
Look, I’m a sucker for a trick play. All I need is a headline about
some little team in a game that didn’t matter for beans
conquering their opponents through deviousness and utter
resolve, and suddenly I’m engrossed.
I don’t even need to be a fan of the sport! Give me a pitcher

throwing a potato into the stands to convince everyone that the
actual ball can’t possibly be right in their hands! Give me that fake
punt to turn a boring fourth quarter into a spectacle. No-look
passes turned into incredible dunks. I want to sit with my jaw
dropped watching the opposing team stand with their jaws
dropped. A successful trick play is a true art form.
And yet, why does anyone use a trick play? In games like
basketball, quick back and forth turns means that a tricky move
can happen at any moment. But football requires much more
planning and dedication. The entire team has to sell a move
without the opposition figuring out what’s going to happen. That’s
hard work. Honestly, it’s much easier to just win the game in the
first place, which is exactly the point. Teams who are winning
don’t go for trick plays. They don’t have to. They rest their
starters, letting less experienced players get some reps.
Okay, you’re right. Sometimes, a winning team decides to run up

the scoreboard and isn’t ashamed of throwing in a trick play or
two along the way. John Heisman, all-around legendary coach,
told his players “when you find your opponent’s weak spot,
hammer it,” and then in 1916 led Georgia Tech to a drubbing of
Cumberland College with a final score of 222-0. In football. But
that was an act of showing off. Of malice and cruelty. Of utter
supremacy. No fan would ever look at that game and call it an act
of fair play.
To sum up, trick plays get used either when a team is losing or
when they want to show off. Trump is both losing and showing
off, so don’t be surprised when you see every single trick in the
authoritarian playbook.

Kamala Harris finally
finds her brand
September 10, 2020
If you believe the polls, Kamala Harris has a better than

50% chance to become the most powerful woman of
color in American history. This is an unprecedented and
barrier-shattering event, one that could change the lives
of generations of girls and people of color. Let’s take a
look at how this happened.
On night 4 of the remarkable online Democratic

National Convention, Cory Booker led an even more
remarkable Zoom call of seven candidates who ran
against Joe Biden in the primary. To Pete Buttigieg,
Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang, Booker kicked it
off with this line: “You can think of this like Survivor, on
the out interviews of all the people who got voted off
the island.” Which, ha-ha funny, but this tribal council
ignored a reality that none of them mentioned.
That Harris, the VP nominee they’d all praise mightily,

got voted off the island before nearly any of them. She
played the game with abysmal results and didn’t make it
to the first vote. Yet here she was, back in the game.
Now, Survivor does this trick a lot. The 22nd season
introduced a gimmick called Redemption Island, where
those voted off dueled each other to be “resurrected”
and have another shot at winning the game. There have
been entire seasons devoted to previous losers getting
another go at the prize. Bringing back former
contestants is just good business for Survivor. They’ve
invested in these personalities, so why not reward fans
for investing in them?
This what advertisers call branding. It has worked for

as long as there have been brands to invest in. The
Mesopotamians put logos on food and drink to identify
the qualities their purchasers desired. A curvaceous
woman on a bottle meant something different than a
virile man. This is no different than what we do in
advertising today. Nike knows what it’s selling when it
markets Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars high-tops—
classic, dependable, always the height of cool—and you
do too. That’s why Kamala Harris has so many of them.
Troublingly for this uncomfortable metaphor about a

Black woman, the concept of branding came from
physically applying brands to living beings in bondage,
whether livestock or Black people in slavery or Jews in
the Holocaust. They are declarations of dehumanization
and ownership. Branding often isn’t voluntary; it can be
applied to you by those you don’t want to define you.
Their intentions might be totally contrary to yours.
In politics, branding can be both dehumanizing and

humanizing. The masters of political branding control
their brand decisions, if they can. Bernie Sanders may be
the most anti-corporate presidential candidate ever, but
he’s one of the best at branding himself. You know
exactly what you’re getting with Bernie; he’s never going
to make a decision that isn’t tied to the agenda he has
clearly articulated. The woman who followed his speech
at the DNC, Michelle Obama, is a master too. Her
brand is defined perfectly as the politician who hates
politics, by the motto she invoked at the 2016 DNC:
“When they go low, we go high.” So if something
enraged her enough to go even slightly low, she was
going to destroy that thing. Boy, did she.
Those politicians who don’t control their brands have it

controlled for them. John McCain was a war hero and a
statesman, but he let it slip away when he chose Sarah
Palin as his vice presidential nominee; the media turned
on him, painting him as a fool who was being controlled
by the Tea Party. Democratic candidates Gary Hart and
John Edwards didn’t control their brands, so both were
easily felled by mild sex scandals. Mike Bloomberg
wanted to be seen as a climate defender and a gun
control advocate, but he got tarred as just another out-
of-touch billionaire with more money than sense.
The 2020 primaries were all about the battle of brands:

progressive versus moderate, old versus new, cerebral
versus empathetic. Enter Senator Harris, who had a
fighting shot. While it is unreasonable to expect
followers of one woman of color to transfer to another,
it’s worth noting that Michelle Obama was probably the
most popular political figure in America as the 2020
primaries got going. America was the readiest it had
ever been for a Black woman to run for president.
If you weren’t from California, what you probably knew

most about Harris was that she was a brutal cross-
examiner of Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious
confirmation hearing. In an amazing exchange between
her and Kavanaugh, she made the judge look like an
evasive criminal. (I’ll leave it to others to decide whether
this was a reflection of reality.) This exchange led some
idiot to tweet that
Hey, it was my birthday, so I was probably intoxicated.

Anyway, that didn’t exactly happen. Harris had trouble
defining her brand to anyone in the presidential race.
On several different measures, she fell victim to
consistently misperceiving or being perceived
incorrectly in the Overton window of the Democratic
party, and often misjudging the approach needed.
The late policy wonk Joseph Overton envisioned his

“window of discourse” to mean the range of policies
and positions that is deemed acceptable by the
population (or a subset of it). Fall inside it, whether
more liberal or more conservative, and everybody says
“Sure, okay, what else should I know about you?” Fall
outside it, and you’re a dangerous kook.
This window moves a lot. Some obvious examples are

that abortion was viewed as far outside the mainstream
until suddenly it was the law of the land, and marriage
equality forged a similar path. Now, it’s nearly
impossible to be a Democratic nominee for anything
without complete adherence to these positions. The
window shifted and the party shifted with it.
The window can also move on concepts a candidate
can’t control. Where was the window on “a Black
president” in the 1980s? The Reverend Jesse Jackson
was a popular figure in 1984, but wasn’t given much of
a chance in 1984. But then he won five primaries and
caucuses, and the window started moving. In 1988, he
won eleven such contests, and was briefly the
frontrunner.74 Jackson moved the Overton window on
whether an African American man could be elected in
America, though it took 20 years for that to happen.
Let’s look at how the Overton window affected Harris

on several issues, some of policy, some of performance,
and some of straight discrimination. I’ll talk about how
these issues affected her negatively in the primary and
are now advantages in the general election.
Issue #1: A female candidate’s electability
Harris found herself in a crowded primary, with more

than 20 candidates. Six of them-Senators Harris, Amy
Klobuchar, Kristen Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren,
plus Representative Tulsi Gabbard and guru Marianne
Williamson-were women. Each one of them claimed a
brand space quickly: Klobuchar was the folksy,
pragmatic Midwesterner, Warren the plan-conscious
super-teacher, Gillibrand the connection to suburban
moms, Gabbard the fed-up combatant, Williamson the
space case. Some of those brands worked better than
others, but all connected with a subsection of voters.
Harris claimed a spot early, and it might have killed her

campaign. With her “That little girl was me” attack in
74 He beat Joe Biden! On a perhaps related note, our nominee is old.

June 2019, she went after Joe Biden in a way that led the
pundits to believe she was the most likely front-runner.
This led to an immediate and premature reckoning on
whether a woman, especially one who stood up to
powerful men, was “electable.” Because Hillary Clinton
lost, the window on whether America would accept a
woman president had narrowed. Before we knew
Harris, we were already telling her she wouldn’t win. It
seemed to affect her greatly. She responded poorly to
being atop the polls, because she couldn’t punch up.
Without being able to attack other candidates, she
found no purchase, and surrendered ground fast.
As Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee, though, that

electability argument goes out the window. Biden
essentially made the case that he couldn’t win without a
woman on the ticket. He’s probably right. Undoubtedly
there are still people who won’t vote for a woman who
could become president, but there are a lot of women
out there who will be happy that Biden kept his
promise.
Issue #2: An African American’s electability
That electability discussion also revolved around

whether America would vote for a Black candidate
again. This discussion dominated pundits’ analysis of
the African American voters in particular. Why, when
presented with two Black candidates in Booker and
Harris, were they not backing them in large numbers?
The general conclusion was that Black voters believed
white America wouldn’t vote for another Black
candidate after the Trump backlash to Obama. Which
might have been a correct reading of the Overton
window, but ignored a critical reality.
There’s a concept in Black America called the
“cookout,” and I am not in any way qualified to discuss
it. I first saw members of Black Twitter discussing it
years ago, suggesting that certain white celebrities
(Adele, Steve Nash) were invited to the cookout, and
others (Kylie Jenner, Donald Sterling) were not. One
defining feature of many “invited” people was giving
due props to their Black coworkers, and no one is more
known for that than Joe Biden. For a powerful white
senator to serve as a younger Black man’s wingman for
eight years spoke volumes to Black voters, especially
older ones. African Americans supported Biden in
droves. It’s not that Kamala Harris was necessarily a bad
candidate to Black voters; it’s that she wasn’t Uncle Joe.
Unable to make inroads in that community’s voting
bloc, she had no base.
In the general, Biden needed a woman of color.

Prominent African American leaders were not a bit shy
about that. Rep. Maxine Waters told Essence that Biden
“can’t go home without a Black woman being VP.” The
implication was that African Americans gave Joe Biden
the nomination, and Jim Clyburn’s endorsement in
South Carolina suggests that is true. More specifically,
the George Floyd protests made it clear that certain
parts of America needed to see change at the top. Harris
was the candidate they pushed for, and they got her.
Issue #3: She’s a “progressive”
Progressives get mad when I tell them Kamala Harris is

a progressive. They have the right to be mad, but being
mad doesn’t make them right. Harris’s voting record in
the Senate is near spotless; she’s among the top five
most progressive senators. She has supported the
Green New Deal, Medicare for All, universal basic
income, and ending the death penalty. The window
shifted on progressive ideas, with the 2016 Sanders
campaign showing a substantial number of voters
wanted those ideas to become reality. Harris was a vocal
proponent of those ideas.
But she wasn’t the progressive. That was Sanders, with

Warren on his heels. There was no room for her in that
lane. Thus, when pushed on Medicare for All, she
caved. Harris was falling in the polls and flailing for
answers. That is not a good look. It suggested that she
was a progressive when she needed to be a progressive
and a moderate when she needed to be a moderate. In
other words, nobody’s candidate.
In the general election, that is working for her like

nothing else. The Trump administration keeps trying to
pin Biden as a Trojan horse for liberals. Trump called
Harris “the most liberal person in the U.S. Senate.” It
rolls right off Biden because of his moderate record,
and Harris doesn’t seem to folks like she’s a Warren or a
Sanders. So it’s not working, and Biden’s poll numbers
haven’t suffered. Harris just wants the job. That’s her
platform.
Issue #4: She’s a “cop”
First off, she’s not a cop, any more than our

commander-in-chief is a soldier. But while Harris was
attorney general of California, she supervised a lot of
cops, and called herself the “Top Cop.” Progressives
focus on her record on the issue of police brutality,
which has become one of the most important issues of
this election. It’s not great. She largely avoided cases of
California police officers killing suspects, notably a
string of 2014 police shootings in San Francisco, her
former jurisdiction as district attorney. Even with
national attention focused on the case of Michael
Brown, she did not step in.
Since leaving for the Senate, Harris has sung a different

tune. She’s been a voice for police reform, sponsoring
the banning of choke holds, racial profiling, and no-
knock warrants. She has pushed unsuccessfully for the
prosecution of Breonna Taylor’s murderers. She wants
African Americans to believe she will stand up to the
nation’s police. But being a cop doesn’t have the
political cachet it had before this year’s protests. With
her record, this is a tough sell.
Here’s what’s not: When Harris was selected as Biden’s

running mate, Fox News hosts tried to paint her as anti-
cop and pro-riot. They misquoted her interview with
Stephen Colbert where she said of the protests,
“They’re not gonna stop before election day in
November, and they’re not gonna stop after election
day.” That’s not about riots, but whatever, Fox.
Anyway, Harris’s rep as a tough-as-nails prosecutor has
deflected these critiques. You can’t make it stick that
she’s both pro-police brutality and pro-riot.
Issue #5: She’s “not African American”
Harris is mixed race. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is

an Indian biologist of Tamil ancestry; her father,
Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican professor at Stanford .
This has led Republicans to say she’s not African
American. Radio host Mark Levin said, “Kamala Harris
is not an African American, she is Indian and Jamaican.
Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery, to
the best of my knowledge her ancestry does not go back
to slavery at all.” To which I say, how do you think
Black people got to Jamaica, Mark?
This critique, if that’s what it is, scored with some

African Americans too. Obviously, it’s not my place to
tell African Americans who they should think is African
American. Harris was born in Oakland, was bused to
public school, went to Howard University, and suffered
discrimination for her skin color. But also she grew up
in majority white institutions and has pursued a
prosecutorial career. It’s complicated. The window is
moving on who can speak for African Americans, and
for some, Harris was outside of it.
That said, her mixed heritage has helped her in the

general election. The more people bring up her mixed
race, the more it puts her in the same camp as Nikki
Haley, who is also of Indian heritage. She’s a voice for
Black people in a summer of intense activity around
race, but she’s not only Black. She can speak to the
immigrant experience, speak to the growing Asian
voting bloc, and speak as part of the new face of
America.
All of these issues have coalesced to finally define the

candidate Kamala Harris is. Racist white people
shouldn’t be frightened because she’s Black or a
woman; they should be frightened because she’s the
future. She’s not pro-police or anti-police; she’s pro-
safety in every respect. She’s not progressive or
moderate; she’s ambitious and aggressive about getting
whatever change she can get. She’s not easy to pin
down because America’s not easy to pin down.
Here’s her defining quote of the year, the one that will
resonate throughout the election. After she met with the
family of Jacob Blake, the victim shot seven times in the
back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, she said:
“People are rightfully angry and exhausted. And after the

murder of Breonna and George and Ahmaud and so many
others, it’s no wonder people are taking to the streets, and I
support them.”
Kamala Harris’s brand is this: She’s the voice of

exhaustion. 2020 has been an exhausting year, as the
Overton window has moved on life. What is acceptable
now is entirely different than it was at New Year’s. Day
after day, it’s a new punch to the gut.
It’s hard to find anyone who has been hit from more
sides than Harris. You can’t land a blow on her because
she’s weathered everyone’s blows. She’s come through
it. She speaks for a nation that is tired of all the bluster,
all the racism and sexism and anti-immigrant bias, all the
lies and corruption, all the failed leadership that has
killed hundreds of thousands. She’s just done with it.
If you’re on the side of America that wants more chaos,

she’s done with you too. Her running mate wants to
reach across the aisle. That’s great. Let’s hope it works.
If it doesn’t, Kamala will go in there with a bazooka.
She’ll do it reluctantly, with that Marge Simpson voice
and a “You know I gave you a chance” attitude. Then
she’ll lace up her Chucks and do what needs to be done.
She’s not who Republicans will want to see coming.
We’re all tired, Kamala. Thanks for still having the

energy to fight.
Rich explains: the Overton window
Everyone familiar with the last four years already has a solid
understanding of the Overton window, but to avoid that for at
least a paragraph longer, consider haggling. In a classic haggling
scenario, the buyer opens with a pitch that is far too low while the
seller counters with a price that is far too high. Somewhere in the
middle is a “fair” price, though it’s possible neither haggler knows
exactly what that might be. The opening bids are just attempts to
see what the other side is willing to accept.
The Overton window is all about whether an idea will be accepted

by a public majority. Just like the hagglers who eventually arrive at
a price both are willing to pay, Joseph Overton showed that public
policy is simply a matter of bargaining and time. Ideas that are too
radical for current policy may be accepted in the future as the
window shifts. This has clearly been the case in terms of voting
and civil rights, as today’s window is dramatically different than it
was back in the 1960’s.
Of course, the Overton window can also be used as a kind of

litmus test for bad ideas, which is exactly how we’ve seen it used
most recently.
As the TV show 24 gained in popularity, it began shifting the public

view of torture more toward that of Jack Bauer, an anti-hero with
a death count to make Clark Kent weep. This led Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia to proclaim “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles...
is any jury going to convict him? I don’t think so.” As 24 made
America more comfortable with torture, the Overton Window
pushed dramatically towards its acceptance and policy.
The worst offender of shifting the window towards the fringe has
been President Twitter himself. By throwing out an endless litany
of horrible statements on social media, Trump is able to both
offend his opponents and push the narrative of his followers. The
more those ideas are stated out loud, the more palatable and
normal they sound, and the window shifts yet again towards
chaos and tyranny.

2020 vision: What to
do when everything is
life-or-death
September 13, 2020
This week: My wife and I miraculously get a week off

together not long after our 25th anniversary. We hastily
plan a vacation down to Oregon. There’s one worry,
though: Parts of our home state of Washington are on
fire, as is much of California. Oregon could start to
burn too.
Let’s take the gamble, we say, and drive straight into the
apocalypse.
The sky has turned orange, and the blood moon is high
at 3 p.m. Walking the dog is a challenge; running with
the dog is unthinkable. A million acres of land near us
are currently burning. The skyline is invisible.
A few days later, we find ourselves in a Masonic-temple-

turned-rustic-hotel with many refugees from the blazes
that have left half a million people on evacuation alert.
Their children, their dogs, they’re all here too. We might
be the only people on vacation here. The evacuees are
keeping their spirits up. A pastor tells us of her
congregation hall being prepared to become a refugee
shelter. But first, she and her family need to take care of
themselves. Once they are safe in this hotel, they can
tend to hundreds of others.
They have made their choice, a very different one than

we did. But all of us are doing something that everyone
in America has had to do for most of the year: gamble
with our safety, in some cases our very lives. Sometimes
we’re taking a flier on a shred of normalcy: a vacation, a
haircut, a movie. At other times it’s the hardest choices
we’ve faced in years: send a child to school or sacrifice a
job, vote in public in a pandemic or bet on a
kneecapped postal system, protest fascism or hide from
militias and government shock troops bring AR-15s to
the fray. This is not normal, but it is the new normal.
How do we carry on when a single decision could be

fatal? It’s so tempting to abrogate the decisions entirely:
bunker down, never do anything, just wait it out. After
all, we’re “in the middle of a pandemic,” which must
mean there’s an imminent end to the pandemic? Right?
Sadly, there’s no guarantee of that. This disease could be

with us, in this form or many other possible mutations,
forever. It’s true about everything else too. Even if the
good guys win, the fascists are here for good, and at
least 40 million people will out themselves as fans of the
end of democracy. Cops killing brown-skinned people
has not slowed down because we’ve given the problem
attention. The forest fires, the hurricanes, the bomb
cyclones, the fire tornados, the 100 degree heat in
Siberia—it’s all here to stay.
Just because 2020 is horrible doesn’t mean 2021 won’t

be worse.
In all that, we have to make choices. We are all Vizzini
in Ted Cruz’s favorite movie, The Princess Bride. Vizzini
faced Westley in a battle of wits, in which Westley took
two goblets behind his back and poured poisonous
iocaine powder into one of them. They would drink at
the same time. Which goblet should Vizzini sample,
Westley asked? Here was Vizzini’s response:
“But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know

of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into
his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the
poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a
great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great
fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you
must have known I was not a great fool. You would have counted
on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.”
Vizzini knew two things: never get involved in a land

war in Asia, and never go in against a Sicilian when
death is on the line. Well, he thought he knew the latter.
But (spoiler alert) Westley poisoned both goblets, so
drinking from either was fatal, unless like Westley you
had spent years building up an immunity to iocaine
powder. They were both bad choices.
Vizzini should have chosen not to play against a

superior opponent, or if he had to play, change the
rules. When Vizzini distracted Westley with a “What in
the world can that be!” he should not have switched the
goblets. He should have poured out his goblet. He did
not, and now he’s dead.
When you have nothing but bad choices, how should

you decide? Game theory has some answers. They’re
not great answers, but they are answers nonetheless.
There’s a concept called voluntariness in game theory.
If you have other options than compliance with a
direction, you are not coerced to that direction—that is,
you have a choice, and are responsible for your actions.
If a situation is involuntary, you have no choice, and are
absolved of responsibility. But if you have choices, even
if all of them are bad, you must maximize your choices.
The canonical example here is (trigger warning: high)

abusive relationships. A person in a physically abusive
relationship may not be able to leave without risking
their life. Leaving could mean the loss of other elements
of their life: children, income, housing, insurance,
everything. It may appear that no exit strategy exists,
even if one does. It is crucial for a support system to
exist outside this relationship so that the abused person
sees they have choices, bad as they are. The existence of
battered women’s shelters, for example, helps turn an
involuntary situation into one with a potential exit. All
choices have bad results, but choices can be made.
Because talking about the canonical example is

exceedingly stressful, I’ll talk instead about blackjack.
(I’ll get back to the horrible stuff later, I promise.)
Unlike in other gambling games like poker and craps, in
blackjack you play against another player, but one with
different rules and advantages. This player is called the
dealer, but more accurately they are the “house”—the
entity that runs the game and sets the terms of play.
In brief, the rules: After putting in a bet, each player

gets two cards, then the dealer gets one card faceup.
The cards have values equal to their points—2s to 10s
are worth face value, face cards are 10, and aces are
either 1 or 11. The goal is to get as close to 21 without
going over (busting). Once the dealer’s card is exposed,
each player may either stand on what they are showing
or hit—that is, take one or more additional cards. But if
they bust, they lose their bets. If any players don’t bust,
the dealer flips over another card. If the dealer has less
than 17 (or in some cases, a 17 with an ace), they must
hit until their hand totals more than that. If the player
exceeds the dealer or gets a 21 regardless, they win. If
they tie, they get their bet back. Otherwise, they lose
their bet. (There’s more, but let’s leave it at that.)
If the dealer’s showing a 5 and you’ve got an 18, you

have good choices. According to Mike Shackleford—
the “Wizard of Odds”—the dealer has a 42% chance to
bust on a 5. You’re not assured of a win, but you’ve got
a great chance.
Now, let’s flip that around. Say the dealer has an ace
and you have a 15. The dealer’s ace is very bad for you.
But you’re already in the hand. You have no good
choices. You will probably regret standing on a 15
against a dealer’s ace. You will also probably regret
taking another card.
This is why two other concepts exist in blackjack:

surrender and insurance. If the dealer has an ace, you
can surrender, meaning you give up and get back half
your stake. Or you can take insurance, meaning you take
half your bet and put it on the dealer to have a 10-value
card, getting 2:1 if you’re right. You now have choices,
and some feel better than others.
But here’s what Mike Shackleford tells you about that:
“Never take insurance. Period. No exceptions.”

You should never take insurance. Plus, Shackleford
says, the only time you should ever surrender is when
you have a 16 and the dealer has a card with a value of
10. In all other cases, the odds do not work out for you.
The house wouldn’t offer these options to you if you
won more than you lost. They may feel like the right
thing to do, but the data says that they are terrible ideas.
Just because a choice exists doesn’t mean you should ever take it.
There are situations that look voluntary, but in fact are
not. You need to know when you’re in one of those.
Vizzini didn’t, and he’s dead.
The data is really the only thing that matters. Let’s get
back to the horrible stuff. I’m not going to tell you what
to do in these circumstances. But I am going to spell
out your choices like they matter. Then I’m going to
show why the situation is much worse than it should be.
I’ll start with the virus. Trump says we’re “rounding the
corner” on COVID. National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is
smart about these things, says we are not. CNN’s Wolf
Blitzer’s asked him, “When it comes to discrepancies
like this, who should the American people trust: you or
the president?” Here’s what Fauci said.
“I say look at the data; the data speak for themselves. You don’t
have to listen to any individual. And the data tells us that we’re
still getting up to 40,000 new infections a day and 1,000 deaths.
That is what you look at. Look at the science, the evidence, and
the data and you can make a pretty easy conclusion.”
The conclusion is indeed easy. But is the decision made

from that conclusion?
The most wrenching decision you might have now is
whether to send your kids to school or continue to
homeschool them. So first, let’s look at who is telling
you that you must send the kids back to school: Betsy
DeVos, Brian Kemp, Donald Trump. Then look who is
telling you to be careful: every immunologist on the
planet. When making your choice, you would be smart
to consider the valuations of grizzled veterans of
pandemics over those who are in their rookie season.
But this assumes you have a choice. You may have a job
that you will lose if you stay home. You may have a
district where your child will not advance if they do not
receive in-person instruction. You may be actively
harming your child’s education by homeschooling them
and trying to do your job at the same time. These
situations take away your choices.
Yet, you still have a choice. You can say, “Nothing

matters to me more than keeping my household from
contracting COVID-19.” If that happens, some of you
might die. There’s no class your child could take that
would be worth losing a parent over. But you know
what you are doing, because you are looking at the data.
You are looking at the many school districts that are
closing immediately after reopening due to outbreaks.
You are looking at the job market giving back its recent
gains and weighing whether you could get a new job if
you lose this one. You are considering that COVID is a
super-effective spreader but not the most effective
killer. You are looking at the dysfunction in Congress
and thinking you’re not getting a new stimulus check.
These observations will sway you one way or another.
You are making rational choices even while the world
seems entirely irrational.
Maybe kids in school isn’t the challenge you’re facing.
The wildfires are very bad. They are making the air
unbreathable, and have killed 28 people and destroyed
entire towns. Should you stay inside? Look at the data.
What data you look at matters, though.
A statewide wildfire map will show you small pockets of

fire, and that data will look less significant than it is. An
air-quality index will show you huge clouds of smoke,
and that data will look more significant than it is. The
maps we looked at when we set out suggested a much
smaller impact than there was. But you guessed that.
Maybe you’re deciding whether to go out and protest

police brutality. Protesting is a choice, right? Not to
some people. To them, it’s a demand. For them, failing
to stand up now, when Black people are being choked
to death and shot in the back, is tantamount to suicide.
Maybe not now, but eventually, it’ll come back around.
But there’s a pandemic, and the people who don’t want

you to protest are exactly the types who refuse to wear
masks in public. Some of them carry AR-15s; when they
use them on you, they get hailed as heroes by QAnon.
The troops sent to “reinforce” the cops aren’t the same
kind of law enforcement officers; they’re unbadged and
untrained and possibly ordered to start trouble even
when none is underway. The president has called you—
you, a peaceful antifascist protester—a terrorist. This
ramps up the degree of danger through the roof.
The bad guys are draining your support. By continuing

protesting under these circumstances, you may steer
allies away from your cause. It’s not clear if this is
actually helping the president, but it is clear that people
aren’t viewing the protests as favorably now as they did
in June. You are falling victim to the law of diminishing
returns. Maybe now is time to hang it up.
Yet: If not now, when? The iron is hot, but may cool if
protests stop. If you’re Black, you make life or death
decisions every day the rest of us can’t comprehend.
Just jogging in the wrong neighborhood could be fatal.
So the effort now could give you far lower risk later.
You can make this choice by looking at the data. Police

chiefs in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Rochester,
Nashville, Dallas, Milwaukee, Seattle, and at least ten
more cities have resigned since protests started. Cities
like L.A., New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Austin,
and Washington, D.C. have cut their police budgets.
You can decide whether that’s enough, or whether you
need to do more, despite the escalating risk.
As the next weeks roll on, you’ll have another hard

choice to make. What method of voting do you trust?
Do you even have a choice?
The safest thing, from a COVID perspective, is to vote

by mail. But Trump’s toady, Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy, has hamstrung the Postal Service, slowing down
the mail, removing boxes and sorting machines, and
throwing a spanner in the works. Will the broken post
office get your ballot in, or let it die with the live chicks
in the dead letter office? Trump has questioned the
validity of mail-in ballots and urged his supporters to
vote twice. So you could go vote in public—masked, of
course—but you might have to stand in a long line with
a lot of people. Let’s escalate your blood pressure even
further: He plans to send in armed poll watchers—not
necessarily federal officials—to “make sure the votes are
counted” (that is, to intimidate people they don’t want
to vote). This could be a harrowing election day where
people’s lives are literally on the line.
You might not even like your choices. Trump is a

monster, but you may think Biden isn’t much better. (I
think you’re wrong, but this is about you.) One
candidate pledges to stand up to tyrants, and another
will replace democracy with white supremacy. Your
vote is about life or death on a very real scale. So is this
the time to vote third party or, even worse, stay home?
Let’s be clear as daylight: The data says you must vote.

No matter what dirty tricks await, if you’re concerned
about the rights you will have left if the GOP retains the
White House and Senate, you must get your vote
counted. your only chance of affecting the nightmare
we’re in is to vote. Those of us voting by mail (my only
option) must vote for Biden/Harris in such large
numbers that Trump has lost before Election Day.
Then, any attempt to invalidate the election in the days
that follow will be seen as what it is: a fascist attempt to
overthrow the American system of government.
Every decision you make can—and must—be evaluated

this way. Should you go to a motorcycle rally, knowing
that a study called Sturgis a superspreader event? Should
you open your office or keep paying every month for a
space no one uses? Movie theaters may reopen, but
Tenet will be the same movie on Netflix that it will be in
theaters, so do you want to risk it? Is rage-tweeting at
the president, as I do every day, a good idea that will
stop him from winning, or a bad idea if he wins and
goes full dictator? You gotta make these calls yourself.
With all of this, there’s one big problem. You can only
make data-driven decisions if you have the data. What
we have learned the last few days should rattle your
confidence to the core.
This week, Bob Woodward’s book Rage revealed that

Trump knew COVID-19 was going to be a mega-lethal
pandemic in February. All that time he was downplaying
its severity, saying it was a hoax, saying it would just
disappear, saying it could be cured by oleandrin and
hydroxychloroquine and bleach, saying masks were silly,
and holding huge superspreader events where he bashed
scientists, he knew. He willingly withheld data from the
public so they could not make informed decisions. He
made sure the CDC couldn’t tell you by having data
rerouted to Alex Azar’s goons at HHS. He muzzled
scientists who told him he needed to do more. He
decided you could not choose for yourself. By
encouraging people to spread the virus he knew would
kill them, he made the voluntary into an involuntary
choice.
There’s a simple term for this: mass murder.
With almost 200,000 dead so far and likely another

200,000 by year’s end, Trump will intentionally cause
more American deaths than any American in history.
His intent was criminal, valuing his own re-election
above American lives. By robbing you of the data you
need to make your choices, he has taken the mantle of
this pandemic entirely on himself and his accomplices.
If you made a bad decision, you can blame him. Society
can blame him. The justice system can blame him.
But only if you make the right choice.

Rich explains: voluntariness
I can’t recall who first told me about the history of Levi Strauss.
No, not the father of modern anthropology who developed the
broader theory of structuralism, I mean the one with the denim
and the rivets. The story I heard was from back when Levi had just
developed his first line of jeans. Heavy rivets and well-made denim
were a winning combination. News had spread, reviews were
stellar, and customers were lining up to grab themselves a pair. All
of which gave Levi an idea.
Since Levi’s jeans were built to last, he needed to give his

customers a reason to buy another pair. So, Levi developed a
second line of jeans. Twice the options meant twice the sales, he
must have thought at the time. Of course, as the story goes, this
was a moment that almost destroyed Levi’s fortunes entirely.
Levi put himself in a dangerous corner of voluntariness. With only

one choice on the table, customers happily purchased their pair of
jeans. If the fit was imperfect, customers rightly placed blame on
Levi and his product. But once a second choice was available, the
fault fell away from Levi and the customers took on the blame for
making the wrong decision in the first place. Choice meant that,
overall, customers felt significantly less satisfied with their
purchases and Levi felt that resonate in his newborn revenue
stream.
While that story may be apocryphal, the modern world is truly

filled with an endless panoply of choices. Whether we’re scrolling
through Netflix or trying to decide on a dinner restaurant, we are
forced to live with the possibility that no matter what we choose,
there was always a better option. This inevitable dissatisfaction
can lead us to avoid choice or to gratefully allow others to make
our decisions. After a wide-open primary battle, voluntariness
battles with optimism, giving cynicism an opportunity to take hold.
It leads voters to dislike the winner, convinced that one of the
twenty other candidates could have done better. Our attachment
to our choices keeps us from rallying to the only chance we have
for a brighter 2021.

A wargame designer
defines our four
possible civil wars
September 19, 2020
I’m a wargame designer. I co-developed the first reboot

of Axis & Allies and its D-Day edition, made a
mythological Risk game called Risk Godstorm, and
burned down both the Roman Empire in Gloria Mundi
and dark ages France in Veritas. I even wrote a Civil
War card game with monsters in it, called Yetisburg. I
write about game theory learned from simulating battle
outcomes. It’s my job to guess how wars will go.
Like many people, I’m stuck on this as the likely

outcome of our situation:
We’re facing a civil war.
Up until yesterday, I wasn’t thinking a civil war was

probable. Then Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg died. With her likely went the last chance the
2020 election will end peacefully. She told her
granddaughter:
“My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new
president is installed.”
It seems unlikely that her wish will be heeded, though
with everything this year you never know. Republicans
now have a three-and-a-half-month window to install an
unbreakable 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court. If they
do, abortion rights, voting rights, and gay rights—
actually, just all civil rights in general—are doomed.
But it’s worse than that, because we expect this election

to be contested. If they have that majority before then,
it doesn’t matter who wins the election, as a 6–3 court
will kit-bash a reason to hand Trump a second term.
The Democrats are threatening that if Ginsburg’s seat is
filled, they’ll create two to four more seats if they win
the Senate. They might add D.C. and Puerto Rico as
states, or change the rule of apportionment. They
might, as my friend Cyndi calls it, “act Ruthlessly.”
This is the stuff that wars are made of. We find

ourselves in a country where both sides can’t imagine
their loss would be legitimate. If Biden loses, his
supporters will blame GOP trickery and voter
disenfranchisement. If Trump loses, his supporters will
blame voter fraud and riots. It doesn’t matter that the
first one of those is real and the second isn’t. We are
heading toward a reckoning.
Because the stakes are this high, both sides have a huge
incentive to fight for their outcome. Those AR-15-
wielding thugs that intimidated the Michigan legislature?
Nobody stopped them then. Why would they be shy
about it now? The only barricade to the Senate filling
the seat is four Republicans (perhaps Lisa Murkowski,
Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and Chuck Grassley)
breaking with their party and refusing to vote for a
replacement. They will get thousands of death threats.
With an open Supreme Court seat and an election
whose incumbent has already called it fraudulent, this is
as bad a constitutional crisis as we have seen in a
century and a half. You don’t have to take my word for
it. The Transition Integrity Project, a group of more
than 100 current and former senior political campaign
leaders on both sides, simulated the election in a
wargame in June. They tested four scenarios: a big
Biden victory, a narrow Biden win, an indeterminate
result like in 2000, and a narrow Trump victory. In all
but the Biden blowout, the country descended into
chaos. They write:
“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to

stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from
both sides. The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly
since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
Trump’s supporters expect two large-scale riots in the

fall. One will come right after Election Day, when
Trump will be ahead in the vote count. This is because
we’re in a pandemic, and Republicans will vote in
person while Democrats will vote by mail (in fact,
several Democrat-run states mandate it). Trump will be
ahead on election night if this holds. The second riot
will come when the Democrats “discover” millions of
mailed-in ballots which will give Biden the win, which
the Republicans will call fraudulent.
The last time we had this kind of crisis was the election
of 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden
were effectively tied. Three southern states sent in
competing ballots of electors—that is, each party
claimed their guy had won. It took till the Compromise
of 1877, where the Republican Hayes got the presidency
in exchange for the Democrat Tilden getting federal
troops out of the South, condemning generations of
African Americans to the ravages of Jim Crow.
And the time before that...
If I ask you what single event started the Civil War, you
might say “the siege of Fort Sumter.” But that’s just
what started the shooting. What started the war was the
election of Abraham Lincoln.
Because of their famous debate, most people think the

1860 general election was between the Republican
Lincoln and the Democrat Stephen Douglas. There
were two other candidates, Constitutional Unionist John
Bell and Southern Democrat John Breckinridge. Only
Breckenridge was pro-slavery. Lincoln won only a
plurality of the 81% turnout (!). Bell won three states in
the South and Breckenridge won seven more, because
in the South, no ballots that contained Lincoln’s name were
distributed. Lincoln could not have won the popular vote
in any manner other than a mass write-in. He sure
wasn’t going to get that.
When Lincoln won a clear majority of the electoral

college, Southern secessionists banded together in an
attempt to throw the election to the House of
Representatives—the current one, not the newly elected
one. It didn’t work, but the ground was laid. The South
was leaving and not coming back voluntarily. 750,000
soldiers died before the Union was restored.
A rebellion against a president with a majority of the

electoral college, but a minority of the popular vote—
now where have we heard that before?
We are primed for a similar struggle. The U.S. has 393
million guns—more than it has people. Of those, only a
million are registered. Gun sales went stratospheric this
year. Whether spurred by fears of COVID, rioters, or
federal invasion of the cities, people stocked up. In the
month of July alone, Americans bought 3.6 million
guns, per FBI background checks. We don’t know how
many were bought without those checks.
I suspect, but do not know, that many of those guns

were bought by right-wing Christian militias. This week,
North Carolina evangelical pastor Rick Joyner, the head
of MorningStar Ministries, called a civil war inevitable,
and urged his followers to take up arms against Black
Lives Matter, “the KKK of this time.” He said:
“We’re in times of war. We need to recognise that. We need to

mobilize. We need to get ready. I’m talking to law enforcement,
I’m talking to people. One of the things I saw in my dream I had
related to our civil war was that militias would spring up like
mushrooms. And it was God! These were good militias. What I
also saw in my dream was the Lord had seeded our country with
veterans from the Iraq War, Afghanistan, all these wars we’ve
been in recently. Many who know how to fight in urban warfare
are going to be a part of the leadership of these militias and help
us in what’s about to unfold in our own country.”
In his dream. That’s not good. But there are many kinds
of civil war, and it matters which one we get. I want to
look at those four scenarios tested by the wargame think
tank. In each case, I’ll compare it to a historic war and
consider the likelihood of us getting into it and out of it.
Most importantly, none of this is what I want to happen. I’m
just simulating possibilities, just like I do every day at
work. Best case scenario, this is just another wargame.
Scenario #1: A Biden blowout
Analogous war: The American Civil War
This was the scenario the Transition Integrity Project

wasn’t worried over. If Biden wins 400+ electoral votes,
they think Republicans will be so devastated that they’ll
search their souls and come out a different party for it.
That’s nonsense. Lincoln took office after an electoral
blowout, winning 180 of the 303 electoral college votes,
with no other candidate getting more than 93. One
month later, he was evacuating Fort Sumter.
In this case, Biden will have the authority to be seated as

president. Trump can fight it, but it’ll require states
decertifying their own electors to give him a fraudulent
majority. They might do it out of loyalty to the death
cult. It’ll be up to the Supreme Court to decide a state
can override its people’s vote. There will at best be four
votes for that, because Chief Justice Roberts hates
Trump’s overreach and Neal Gorsuch is too
independent. Even if Trump stalls out the electoral
college deadline of December 14, the Democrats will
have gained a thin majority of delegations in the House
too, and they’ll put in Joe. In that case, the military will
not let Trump stay after January 20. It’s not clear if he’ll
leave in a helicopter, in handcuffs, or in a body bag.
Point is, he’ll leave.
The crushing of the Republican party will lead to a

breakaway movement. Whether it’s as “clean” as voting
for secession isn’t clear. The battle here won’t be
between the states, but likely inside multiple states. You
know Biden will attempt a compromise similar to the
Compromise of 1877. Might work. He’s that good. If it
doesn’t, he should get ready to put down a rebellion.
Biden will have the military, which has rebelled against
Trump’s use of force for show. There’s a huge
difference between winning a war when you have all the
tanks and winning a war when your opponent has all
the tanks. You’d much rather have the tanks. (Not
scared yet? Change “tanks” to “nukes.”)
The government’s opponents in this case are right-wing

militias and some radicalized police forces. They’re
super-dangerous, but not as dangerous as our military.
Biden will have all the good generals. In the Civil War,
some Union commanders were famously mediocre, but
when Ulysses S. Grant took over for George McClellan,
the South never won a major battle again. Having the
right command makes a long conflict into a short one.
I’m not saying the military would be unified in this case.

Civil wars are messy. The American Civil War had more
court martials and executions for desertion than all
other American wars combined. Granted, it’s a lot harder
for Americans to desert from Vietnam than Vicksburg.
But it’s the violence-against-other-Americans thing that
gives many soldiers pause. I doubt it will be our
military’s finest hour, but I think they’ll hold.
We will also have allies. Russia wants as much chaos in

the U.S. as possible, but the rest of the world just wants
us to regain our sanity. If we need help, we’ll get help.
The American Civil War was a disaster for both sides.

Its outcome transformed U.S. race relations and the
economy in ways we’re still dealing with. The result was
a preserved Union, the end of slavery, and an occupied
South. We could be heading there again. This is the
good scenario, but only if Biden wins a massive victory.
Scenario #2: A close Biden win
Analogous war: The Russian Revolution
This is the scenario where the Democrats scrape out a

close win for the presidency, get to 50 senators
(including Arizona’s Mark Kelly, who is seated in
November because of his special election status), and
the GOP hasn’t gotten a replacement into Ginsburg’s
chair just yet. Trump calls foul and refuses to leave. He
swears he should not only be president for the next
term but for eight more years after that, because of
Democrats’ dirty tricks. The Congress is gridlocked,
Trump doesn’t budge, and America freaks the hell out.
Here we have an offensive group on the outside of

power with a somewhat clean victory and a defensive
group on the inside that doesn’t let go. This is the
outcome that Russia is likely rooting for, because they
know it from experience.
When the February Revolution hit Russia in 1917, Czar

Nicholas II and his family were still alive. But Russia
barely was. Devastated by World War I, famines, and
strikes, Russia saw the autocracy step down in favor of a
Russian Provisional Government, which lasted only
eight months. The Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin gained
the support of the people in that window, and launched
the October Revolution in which they toppled the
interim government. But they didn’t have the army.
So they made one. The Bolshevik Red Army was more

than five million soldiers strong. This was an army for the
out-group; the interim government was backed by the
White Army, which had a still-impressive three and a
half million troops.
The first thing the Red Army did was kill the czar and
his family, to make it clear they weren’t kidding around.
But they were far from assured victory.
Notably, the rest of the world—the U.S., Britain,

France, etc.—was on the White Army’s side. Supply
from these nations made a short civil war into a long
one. In 1923, the Red Army won, and soon became the
largest standing army on earth.
In our case, we would have a popular candidate with a

moral imperative to insist upon his rightful win. Of
course, Biden could again be the source of
compromise—it’s in his DNA, for good or ill. A trade
of the White House for a law fixing the Supreme Court
size at nine justices might do it. A communications
director for a Republican Senator told Yahoo News:
“I think a 6–3 court is worth the White House and Senate. The
pro-life community has been waiting on this forever. There has to
be a vote.”
If that’s the deal he can get, the rest of the victorious

Democrats likely won’t give in, because abortion would
be illegal in a year. You could see Biden removed from
the ticket and Kamala Harris backed by the Democrats.
Lots of possibilities here.
But the important problem is the military. Here, they’re

being asked to back an insurrection—a righteous,
justified one, but an insurrection nonetheless. Joint
Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley has already
declined this opportunity before Congress. They very
likely sit out this scenario entirely, at the start of it
anyway.
That leaves militias and cops and a lot of street corner
bloodshed. The military can’t sit out forever. Trump will
use his ragtag band of troops where he isn’t favored,
and the National Guard where he is. It’ll get very ugly.
This scenario also brings the possibility of a military or

Secret Service coup. Since we’ve never had one here (Al
Haig doesn’t count), it’s hard to know what that looks
like. It probably starts with the Joint Chiefs of Staff
suggesting the president leave office. If he says no, I
have trouble imagining a senior officer drawing a gun
on the president. I wouldn’t depend on the military.
Also, I wouldn’t count on the nations of the world on

this one. In the first scenario, it was clear that they
would back a Biden presidency. But if the conflict is
based on a court battle and a confusing electoral
system? I dunno. That’s a lot of courage to ask from
Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, to say nothing
of Boris Johnson.
Putin’s all-in on this scenario. He will pour poison in

Trump’s ear daily. This is his golden opportunity to
supplant the U.S. as the world’s foremost superpower.
He might even get China’s help. China went through its
own civil war along the Russian model, and as far as I
can tell its leadership is pretty happy with the results.
The Russian Civil War outcome is a very bad one. It’s

hard to say whether the good guys won or lost that one.
The important thing is that a whole lot of people died.
Seven to twelve million people, mostly civilians. Then
nothing got better in Russia for at least five decades. If
we have a narrow Biden victory, this is the scenario
we’re looking at. You don’t want this.
Scenario #3: A contested result
Analogous war: The Irish War of Independence
This is a scary scenario involving the Blue team getting

enough states for a win, not quite enough senators to
take over the Senate, and a Ginsburg replacement in the
lame duck session. Unlike the previous scenario, here
split slates or decertification in key states gives Trump a
plausible majority or at least a plurality. It doesn’t even
have to be razor thin; a 320-vote win for Biden can be
turned into a loss with only the Republican legislatures
in Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin failing to
follow the voters’ will. The three Trump appointees,
Alito, and Thomas ratify these shenanigans over the
objection of Roberts, then all hell breaks loose.
The first shots likely will be in Wisconsin, as every

member of the state legislature is targeted by one side or
another. But it’ll soon spread. In this scenario, no
elected or appointed official will be safe. The National
Guard will be called in everywhere, and not for the
same reason each time. This is a true brother-against-
brother scenario. If you’ve never seen a city with
soldiers at every road entrance, this is what it looks like.
Here, we have a ruling authority seen as illegitimate and

tyrannical by some but not all of America, and that
punishes people that don’t vote for it. Trump’s military
will try to remain neutral, but there will be plenty of
armed soldiers at Bill Barr’s command. The pandemic
will ravage unchecked, leading to supply shortages and
hunger. This conflict will drag on for some time. In the
heart of that, we’ll find out what Joe Biden is made of.
He talks a good game, all spitfire and bluster, but this is
a real test. Al Gore conceded after Bush v. Gore, and
Biden knows what that did for the nation. He’s a
Catholic. Is he willing to be an antipope?
Biden’s an Irish Catholic, so he knows the history of

Ireland over the last few centuries. Perhaps still angry
over the failed (and French-backed!) Irish Rebellion of
1798, the British Crown let an entire nation starve in the
Irish Potato Famine. The Irish never forgot that. In the
wake of World War I, the Irish Republican Army was
born. The conflict kicked off in earnest with the Easter
Rising of 1916, in which 485 people were killed. The
IRA waged a guerrilla war campaign against the
outnumbered but well supplied British troops.
By 1920, republicans won control of nearly every Irish

county council, and had seized control of the south and
west, leading to the Crown instituting emergency
powers. On Bloody Sunday, the IRA assassinated eleven
police and a civilian informant; in response, its British-
aligned counterpart, the Royal Irish Constabulary,
opened fire on a crowd at a Gaelic football match. Cork
city was burned to the ground. Reprisal after reprisal
ensued, with more than a thousand dead by the time a
ceasefire was signed. The Irish Free State would self-
govern but remain part of the British Empire.
It did not mean peace was in the offing, though. Over

the next few decades tensions simmered, then boiled
over in the Troubles. The main issue was over the status
of Northern Ireland, some of whose inhabitants wanted
to return to British rule while others wanted to be part
of Ireland. As the invading force, the British Army was
targeted by Irish loyalists, with civilians caught in the
crossfire. A half century after the first Bloody Sunday,
another tore the country apart. After 3,500 deaths over
three decades, the Good Friday Agreement was signed,
cementing Northern Ireland’s status as part of Britain
until a majority of its citizens wished to join Ireland.
In the scenario where a constitutional crisis leaves the

presidency open on January 20, with both sides claiming
it, the out-of-power party will take to the streets. This
administration has signaled that it will fiercely put down
rebellion. So, the goal of the insurgent group must be to
sever the loyalty between the administration and the
military. That is typically known as terrorism. Americans
don’t have much of a stomach for that in their streets.
This revolution will be televised, and every element of it
will be a recruitment video for one side or the other.
The left doesn’t have much experience with this kind of
organization. Despite the drumbeats on Fox, there is no
Black Lives Matter militia. If this is where we go, leftists
will have a huge military disadvantage on day one. I
don’t see this as a winning approach.
A possible outcome of this scenario is the breakup of

the United States. It could be similar to Ireland breaking
away, with the West and/or Northeast forming a new
union. Or it could be smaller nation-states, similar to
what followed the Yugoslavian Civil War. The west and
northeast is three-quarters of the U.S. economy, so
don't expect states to be allowed to leave quietly.
That said, a guerrilla war might actually be the best

combat outcome. Since both sides will know they don’t
have a stranglehold on power, they will act as if any
engagement could be their last. Ireland managed to
function for all of the twentieth century, through civil
war, occupation, and eventually free rule. We can do
that too. It’s certainly not something to be hoped for.
Scenario #4: A Trump win
Analogous war: The Rwandan Civil War
I saved the worst for last. In this scenario, Trump

clearly (though probably not without some voter
suppression) wins a narrow majority, and the
Democrats don’t take the Senate. Ginsburg is replaced
because Trump has a mandate. Biden and his fellow
moderates are blamed for blowing the election, whether
or not it was actually their fault.
This is the opposite scenario of the Biden blowout. The

Democrats collapse, and progressives become really,
really angry. Those who voted Green or stayed home
are called out and threatened. The Sanders wing leaves
the party for good. You know, normal political stuff. If
that’s all that would happen in this scenario, we could
live with it.
That’s not going to happen. Republicans won’t be

content with a win. They will burn every civil right they
can find. Trump’s Hitler Youth-like “patriotic
education” plan will become a reality. Gun control will
become a remnant of history. A disillusioned left will
become exactly what Fox News wants them to be:
violent. The president will be thrilled to meet fire with
an inferno.
The defining feature of life in 21st century America is

tribalism. That’s a belief that the other side is basically
a completely different species. Nations overcome
tribalism by finding common causes, often common
enemies. We’ve been given a perfect opportunity in
2020. But the coronavirus has not brought us together
against a common enemy.
Instead, it has highlighted that one side is gun-toting,
mask-avoiding morons and the other side is fake news-
loving, baby-killing libtards. What we do not have is a
belief that everyone on the other side is worth saving.
That is the recipe for the worst kind of disaster.
A full-tyrant Trump encouraging violence upon his

enemies will be followed by violence upon his enemies.
It will take only one clash to put us where Rwanda was
on October 1, 1990.
Prior to the 1960s, the Tutsi ethnic group’s Belgian-

backed monarchy ruled over the Hutu majority, as well
as the Twa minority. In the Rwandan Revolution of
1959–1961, the monarchy was overthrown in favor of a
Hutu-run republic. Many Tutsi fled to neighboring
countries. They formed armed insurgent groups which
the Hutu government called Inyenzi (“cockroaches”).
These units sought chances for guerrilla combat, even
once approaching the capital of Kigali. The Hutu
regime ruthlessly put them down, killing thousands.
In 1990, after a couple decades of occasional clashes, a

Tutsi unit invaded northeast Rwanda, breaching 60
kilometers into the country. A month of clashes
followed, and then a couple years of light guerrilla war.
With 1993’s Arusha Accords, a truce was reached. But it
was only a cover. A faction of the Hutu regime planned
a Hitler-like “final solution” to its Tutsi problem.
On April 6, 1994, the assassination of Rwandan

President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian
President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, broke the
flood doors wide. Within a hundred days, nearly a
million people died in violence directed by the Hutu
against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Even so, the Tutsi
won and seized control of the nation, installing one of
Africa’s most repressive regimes. This is what happens
when one side sees the other as cockroaches.
I have met many people—different ones, to be sure—

who’ve pointed to the positive outcomes of the
American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the
Irish War of Independence. I have never met anyone
who believes anything positive occurred in Rwanda in
the first half of the 1990s. But that’s what we have to
look forward to if a re-elected Trump administration
becomes warlike.
There’s no guarantee that will occur. It’s possible that

the left will accept defeat in the wake of Georgia’s voter
roll purging, the Ukraine scandal, the demolition of the
Postal Service, and Russian attempts to meddle again. If
you believe that, you’re not reading my Twitter feed.
If a Rwandan-style war does break out, expect complete

military compliance with the re-elected Trump regime.
There will be no crises of conscience from the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, because they will be a different Joint
Chiefs of Staff. One with fewer compunctions about
killing Americans.
Those are four plausible scenarios of civil war after this

election. All wars are different, so we could see any
number of variations on these themes. It should be clear
that if you are facing one of these options, what you
want is the clearest moral authority, the widest
acceptance by your military, and the broadest coalition
of international powers on your side. You want the
tanks in the hands of the person who wants peace.
Oh, one more detail: In three of the four wars I laid out,
the leader of the country was assassinated.75 The
fighting continued, despite the regime change. Trump is
not the only warrior here. He’s sure not the best. If he
isn’t there, someone else will take his place.
Biden is not the only peacenik here, either. Plenty of

people on both sides don’t want a civil war. We should
be thinking about it anyway.76 If violence is inevitable,
we should know what types of violence we might get,
and vote for the one where the responsible people have
the firepower.
When you vote, vote as if a civil war is coming, and you

are deciding who you want to have the nuclear
weapons. Personally, I would not want that to be
Trump.77
The Doomsday Clock is set at 45 days to midnight.
75 An hour after I posted this, the government announced that they had
intercepted a ricin-coated letter addressed to the president. It came from
Canada. Scary stuff.
76 Two days after I posted this, Florida’s governor proposed a slate of
laws making most protesting illegal, Trump said he could enact a law that
refused to give the presidency to Biden, and Attorney General Barr
declared New York City, Portland, and my hometown of Seattle
“anarchist jurisdictions.” That is a side preparing for violence. So, yeah,
we’re thinking about it.
77 Four days after I posted this, Trump refused to say he would commit to
a peaceful transfer of power and said it would be better if we got rid of all
the ballots. Apropos of nothing, that day this nightmare fuel became my
most popular essay ever.
Rich explains: choices
Look, folks. My goal in these pages has always been to help

explain some of the game theory topics found in Mike’s essays.
But if this is going to be the last one, then it’s my last chance to
point out the game theory situation that you, dear reader, are
caught in right now.
On the outside, every election is a simple payoff matrix between

you and the rest of the country. If you voted against the majority,
you have four years to convince the majority to change their votes
next election. It’s just preference matching. The America I believe
in brings together people of different faiths and beliefs,
backgrounds and creeds, in the name of progress and community.
Even when I’m in the political minority, I want to believe that
progress is still being made to make our lives better. That no
matter what, our leaders are working together towards a better
America.
And yes, I feel naive writing that. I know that even the leaders I
admire make choices with which I disagree. I hope that sometimes
they do it because they’re listening to classified intelligence and I’ll
never know what the worst options might be. I hope that the
public good is a higher priority than personal or political
advantage. I want our people to be stronger and happier and get
more out of their lives, and I hope that our leaders, even those I
disagree with, want that too.
Any election, especially this one, is about choice. But 2020 isn’t
just about simple preference matching. We are deep in the
Ultimatum Game. One party has spent four long years telling us
exactly what their demands are about. They’ve shown that they’ll
turn our hopes for progress and justice into a joke. When the
nation struggles, they’ll send us distractions and division instead of
compassion and assistance. This election is about deciding if these
four years are what we’re willing to accept in America.
This is the ultimatum. It’s America’s chance to walk away from

Trumpism and build a better future together.

Conclusion
What happens now?
September 27, 2020 (my birthday)
The story, as told by Nancy Pelosi, Neil Gorsuch, and

pretty much everyone else in D.C., goes like this:
Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional
Convention at Independence Hall. Socialite Elizabeth
Willing Powel asked Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what
have we got: a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin
replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
That persons with as divergent views as Gorsuch and

Pelosi latch onto this tale is telling. Both believe in the
Constitution’s mandate. They just disagree on what it
requires of us. No matter. They’re both patriots, of a
sort we hope to see at the helm of a republic.
It has been troubling to have spent these four years

wondering if America believes its Constitution matters.
As Trump has shredded the document, nothing has
moved 40 percent of America from supporting him. If
he lets them keep their guns and threatens abortion, he
can abuse any law and make any claim. Forget shooting
someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Trump could
nuke Seattle and he’d still have his base.
The founders planned for this, but did not see all the
ramifications. As a game designer, I’m lucky if my
rulebooks last a few years. The founders’ document
held up for a quarter of a millennium before meeting its
match: a demagogue whose fire-eyed adherents cowed a
major party into abject paralysis. With willing senatorial
conspirators, he peppered the judiciary with quislings
and set himself up to be America’s first king.
As I write this, I don’t know how the story ends. But

you do. If we fell short of holding onto the republic, it
was a great run. If we took the republic back, I hope we
can keep it.
Then I hope it’s time for a rest. It’s exhausting to think

about fighting all the time, especially when you think
you might be fighting your own like-minded friends
about it. But why is that? Why aren’t you always in
alignment with those who share your opinions? I often
draw a chart to show why this happens.
It shows three phases of dealing with an outrage:

reaction to something that has gone wrong, action to
address the problem, and inaction to process what has
happened. Each follows the one next to it, as long as
there are new outrages. (Protip: There will be.)
The thing is, the chart has no arrows. That’s because
people go through this loop in two different ways. The
Reaction-Action-Inaction loop is when people jump to
respond to a problem, act, and then rest afterward.
(“Let’s do something before it’s too late!”) Just as many
people go the other way. The Reaction-Inaction-Action
loop is a look-before-you-leap approach. (“Let’s figure
out what to do and then make it happen.”) Both are
valid approaches, but they are in conflict.
There’s no avoiding the Inaction step; no one can fight

all the time. But when inaction occurs is crucial. Those
who prefer the clockwise loop can’t understand why
their friends won’t act immediately; those who prefer
the counterclockwise loop can’t understand why their
friends act without thinking. Fingers are wagged on
social media, friendships are damaged, alliances are
undermined, progress is thwarted.
There’s no need for that division. Fast actors gain

attention and marshal supporters. Slow actors figure out
strategies and implement them fully. Without fast
actors, the slow actors will never effect long-term
change; without slow actors, the fast actors will burn
out before accomplishing anything. Together we can act
effectively, if not always harmoniously.
Tyrants cannot be allowed to redefine the essence of

America. We need everyone to do what they can. But
only what they can. Allowing your friends to fight in
their own ways is the first step to accepting them as
allies. If we all accept that there’s no right or wrong way
to fight tyranny, we’d be better at fighting tyranny.
From all of us here, we’re glad you’re on our side.

From the archives
An open letter to
Speaker Boehner
from a game designer
October 6, 2013
Hello, Speaker Boehner. Thanks for reading this.
We haven’t met, so let me introduce myself. I’m Mike

Selinker, a game designer from Seattle. I’ve worked
on lots of games, mostly board and card games. It’s
my job to entertain people, and it’s a far less important
one than you have. But every now and then, my job
can be useful for someone who has one like yours. I
hope today is one of those occasions.
I’d like to talk to you about something you said on

Friday, October 4. You said, referring to the
government shutdown: “This isn’t some damn
game!”
I would like to commend you for that statement,

because as a game designer, I can tell you that it’s
absolutely true. But I think you’ve only scratched the
surface of why.
That’s because the shutdown your party caused isn’t a

game. It’s a puzzle.
As someone who designs both puzzles and games
professionally, I often get asked to define the
difference between a game and a puzzle. There are
many possible answers to this question, but the one
I’ve settled upon is this:
A game is an activity where, if fairly constructed, two

sides given the same advantages will have a roughly
equal chance to win.
A puzzle is an activity where, if fairly constructed,

one side will have all the advantages, except that the
disadvantaged side is expected to win.
If you don’t mind, let me break that down a bit. In a

game (say, chess or basketball or Hungry Hungry
Hippos), both sides face each other on a more or less
even playing field. They may or may not have the
same tools, and they may or may not be able to access
them at the same time (such as the 11 players on
either side of the football having very different roles).
But if both sides show up with equal knowledge, skill,
and preparation, there should be a reasonable question
as to which will win.
One critical aspect of creating a fair game is

acceptance of a set of rules. We can’t be expected to
play hockey if my team brings hockey sticks and your
team brings machine guns. Thankfully, the rules of
hockey are rather strict on what equipment we can
use. If someone breaks those rules, they’re not
“negotiating,” they’re cheating.
If the shutdown were a game, your side would have

broken the rules. The rules of the American
government are that if the Congress passes a law, and
the President signs a law, and the Supreme Court
upholds a law, the law should be enacted. As of last
count, your side had decided 40+ times to stop
playing by the rules.
Which, if this were a game, would be cheating. But as

I said, this is not a game, it’s a puzzle.
In a puzzle, the field of play is horribly imbalanced.

The puzzlemaker has as much time as desired to
prepare, a totally different set of skills, and knowledge
of the answer. The puzzle solver has none of these
things. She is expected to solve on the spot with no
understanding of how the puzzle came together or
what its solution is.
The puzzlemaker would, in a game situation, be

favored to triumph every single time.
So, to put this in context, the GOP has placed this

puzzle in front of the Democrats:
“We have all agreed to fund the Affordable Care Act.

However, the House has hidden the government’s
funding. What is the set of actions that will get the
government funded? Is it to capitulate? To threaten?
To do nothing?”
It’s a tough puzzle. But this gets me to the final piece

of my definition, which is that, if the puzzle is
properly constructed, the puzzle’s disadvantaged side is
expected to win. In a puzzle, the puzzlemaker isn’t
looking to beat the solver. Instead, the puzzlemaker
gives the solver all the tools to beat him. If the solver
attacks the puzzle in the right way, she will defeat the
challenge. So, the puzzlemaker must be comfortable
with losing every single time.
That’s why you’re losing. The Democrats are figuring

out the puzzle. When the House unanimously
promised back pay to furloughed workers, you paid
800,000 government workers to do nothing. That’s
counter to your side’s principle of crusading against
wasteful government. The more Democrats encourage
you to abandon your principles, the better off they are.
And—I hope this doesn’t come across as too

judgmental—I don’t think you know how to solve
your own puzzle. In fact, I’m pretty sure that a fringe
group of maybe fifty Tea Party Congressmen designed
it for you, and encouraged you to give it to the
President. I would never present a puzzle I didn’t
design and didn’t know how to solve.
So, here’s what I would suggest:
Take your puzzle back and redesign it. Test it on some

of your more rabid party members, threatening to
block all their proposals until they adhere to the rule
of law. Or maybe just shoot it into the heart of the
sun. Either way, realize that you’re not playing a damn
game either.
Thanks for listening, Speaker Boehner. I hope this

helps.
Mike Selinker

Game Theory in The Age of Chaos: 2017-2020 Omnibus Edition

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Game Theory in The Age of Chaos: 2017-2020 Omnibus Edition

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

More books from Mike Selinker and friends

The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design

Coordination and production

The authors would like to thank

Lone Shark Games, Inc.

2 Game Theory in the Age of Chaos

4 Game Theory in the Age of Chaos

Four years later, my first re-election featured the same

You’d think after that first victory I would’ve played the

Now you’re thinking, “Right, Steve, you’re just saying

To think, when I played all those decades of Axis &

My political science professor once defined politics as

This book uses game theory to explain individual and

September 16, 2018 and September 16, 2020

If you only have a vague idea of who I am, you might

As for what else is okay in my book, these essays use

On November 9, 2016, I woke up to fascists crowing at

Which would have obvious to us as a clear error if we’d

Game theorists like to look at a principle we call the

But an election is not just about a comparison of

So, all it took for the worst American imaginable to

You know, Nazis.

To be clear, most people who voted for Trump weren’t

These were real Nazis. It took a man as vile as these

Alexander Hamilton had this one, by the way. Writing

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a

10 Game Theory in the Age of Chaos

Before the election, my Basket of Adorables partner

After the inauguration, I kicked off a series of game

This book covers the four years of the Trump

And now, some magic words.

July 23, 2017

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that game theory is a

But even those who voted for disruption didn’t know

Trump provided a disruption. Game theory says we

Those words are “AND PENCE.”

I’m guessing you’re used to saying, “Impeach Trump!”

Let’s talk about Mike Pence. He’s worse than Trump,

We need to guide Rep. Paul Ryan’s behavior. As speaker

And if Pence knows Ryan knows Pence fears

And if Ryan knows McConnell knows Pence knows

And if Pence knows Ryan knows McConnell knows

The thing about getting out in front of a train, though,

The Racists, Zealots, and Randies basically hate each

So, if the Rambo Coalition keeps the president in

Only one thing will do that: making them fight over

However, one more thing is needed to make that

The prisoner’s dilemma works on a lot of people. But

Hi, I’m Rich Malena-Webber. I’m a math teacher who tries to

Everyone’s first exposure to game theory is the prisoner’s

The prisoner’s dilemma

Game Theory in the Age of Chaos 17

In the most recent play in which they will eventually be

This requires Guildenstern—or maybe it’s

Then again, these guys are idiots.

Which brings us to the president of the United States.

These are likely the actions of a man who believes he is

And if this is true, he is like millions who believe in the

The gambler’s fallacy, reduced to its essence, is that if

This is because Trump believes he is due for a win. A

But it sounds good, and that’s all some people need to

When you pursue a martingale, after every loss you

The poorhouses are filled with people who pursue this