Game Theory in The Age of Chaos

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 1
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Game Theory in the Age of Chaos.
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GAME THEORY
IN THE
AGE OF CHAOS
A book of essays
on games and politics
by Mike Selinker

Essays
4 Introduction: What happened?
8 Game theory and the two magic words that
will impeach Trump
14 The gambler: Why Trump keeps doubling
down on an idiotic Russia strategy
20 Co-op mode: Why Trump sees “many
sides” to Nazi murder
27 Abortion rights and the game theory of
armor
33 Good Guys, Bad Guys, and the end of an
armed society
38 Two madmen play poker: The North
Korea bluff-off
44 Sweet relief: How we can pay the national
debt upstream
51 The Kap trap: Why no team will call in
Kaepernick
57 Beating the veto player: How to end sexual
harassment in the workplace
62 Playing chicken with Robert Mueller is a
bad idea
67 The GOP is living in a fantasy world on
taxes—specifically, Star Wars
2 GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS
75 Trump is tanking the presidency
84 Targeting the Clinton Foundation is
Trump’s dumbest move yet
93 For Trump, everything ends when the Wall
comes down
102 How to make a weak man feel strong:
Throw him a military parade
109 The Democrats pick the right strategy
(even though it hurts)
115 The grim trigger: Trump declares a trade
war on himself
122 #MPRraccoon and the puzzle of hope
129 Seizing children is good policy (if you're a
complete monster)
135 Trump gambles for resurrection
142 Conclusion: What happens now?
145 From the archives: An open letter to
Speaker Boehner from a game designer

Introduction
What happened?
July 28, 2018
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 “stick to games!” or other belittling
comments. You’re okay in my book.
As for what else is okay in my book, this set of

essays attempts to use game theory—a thing I’ve
studied a little bit and put in practice a lot—to
explain the strange situation we find ourselves in.
It’s a situation that cries out for explanation. On
November 9, 2016, I woke up to fascists crowing
at their chance to take over the White House.
Maybe some Americans were surprised that they
came out in such abundance. Not me.
Anyone in the game industry knew they were

there. They’d taken over gaming forums with
their love of authoritarianism, hatred of diversity,
and willingness to be driven toward violence,
especially toward women.
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, if we’d looked even a little bit at game

theory at the time, would have been a clear error.
Specifically, the error of zero-sum thinking.
Game theory likes to look at a principle called 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 getting to 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.
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.
It took a man as vile as these people 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. Now, before we

could quell it, we needed to understand it. Before
Trump was elected, I had only written one
political piece in the 2010s, a Tumblr screed
called An Open Letter to Speaker Boehner
from a Game Designer, which you can see at
the end of this volume. It was very popular,
making its way around the internet.
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 the things we would lose after
Trump was elected. It too was popular, raising
$10,000 in direct contributions to the Clinton
campaign and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So after the inauguration, I kicked off a series of

game theory pieces for the Medium site Politics
Means Politics, assisted by Atomic Game
Theory’s Richard Malena. I got compliments for
their balance and level-headedness. I still think of
them as screeds, an alternative to screaming at the
darkness. They’re in this book. I hope they help.

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 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.
Game theory says we need a disruption. 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!” by now. Just add the words “and Pence”
to the end. It’ll take a while 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.
So 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
emboldened 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
1This position will open up when Ryan retires at the end of the
2018 session.
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.
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 Randie faction; 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 in 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.
2
Fun 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.
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
issues can charitably be described as “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, 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. They keep choosing “more.”
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 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 within the
house’s cut of breaking even. 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 martingale 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.
Of course, there’s another road available to the

president. There’s a paradox related to the
martingale that deals with a game of infinite
expected value. Even when you have losses, your
resources mean that 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.
The president might like this theory. It’s called

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

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 had been abandoning 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 and then
everything went
really
really
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 common 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.
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
multiplicity 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 called
upon Trump to denounce white supremacism for
once in his overly charmed life.
Well, wait, not every quarter.

dailystormer.com
3:46 PM:
Trump comments were good. He didn't

attack us. He just said the nation should
come together. Nothing specific against
us.
He said that we need to study why people

are so angry, and implied that there was
hate... on both sides!
So he implied the Antifa are haters.
There was virtually no counter-signaling

of us at all.
He said he loves us all.
Also refused to answer a question about

white nationalists supporting him.
No condemnation at all.
When asked to condemn, he just walked

out of the room.
Really, really good.
God bless him.

At left—though I presume they’d prefer at alt-
right—is a post from the Daily Stormer, the
neo-Nazi website3 used as an organizer for this
year’s “Summer of Hate.” It claims that
promoting violence is not allowed, but every
comment there is about promoting violence. It’s
about as bad a group of people as you can
imagine.
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 real 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’s cooperative, and co-op
games are very different from competitive ones.
3The Daily Stormer is down now, but one presumes it just

creeped up somewhere else.
Since I’ve designed a lot of co-op games, I’ll spell
out how they work. In co-op games, everybody
works towards a common goal. We win together
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.
In Trump’s case, he’s cooperating with white

supremacists, and that cooperation helped get
him elected. This game works for him, so he
would be loath to cut the supremacists 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 dislike
him, so he’s unlikely to gain ground. He’ll drop in
popularity even if he does the right thing. Poor
Donnie.
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 well known among gamers: the so-

called Pandemic problem, named for the classic
board game which didn’t actually invent the
problem. In a co-op game, since everyone is on
one side, one alpha-gamer can direct the whole
game, taking everyone’s turns for them. The other
players then disengage from boredom or
frustration. It’s kind of awful.
Modern co-op games solve this problem by
undermining the alpha-gamer, by introducing
traitors or encouraging self-interest or
destabilizing the value of experience.4 This is
generally perceived as a good thing. But—and
hey, stop me if you saw this coming—Trump is
the ultimate alpha-gamer. Trump wants to take
everyone’s turns: the 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-gamer in favor of… well, many sides.
The second problem of co-op games is more

subtle, but it’s really 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 the rules—suddenly disappears. In a
competitive game, one side can call the other out
for cheating, and 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 for the rules to be enforced 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 cards? Screw it.
4Disclaimer: Those links lead to Betrayal at House on the Hill, the

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and Apocrypha, which are all
games I helped design.
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—from the White House. 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
removed from the White House. Miller remains in his job,
apparently in control of immigration policy.
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” 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.6
It’s not very good at it.
This is because of Texas’s other propensity: faring

spectacularly poorly before the U.S. Supreme
Court. Here are some legendary losses before the
most august body in the land:
6 One proposed bill just banned abortions outright. That one

failed. Something about having a Supreme Court.
• 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, no loss seems 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 Texan 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:
Guys, this law was severable by individual word.

This was madness. Even Alito, defending the clause
in dissent, was gobsmacked at the overreach.
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.
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
consequences of trying to clamp on the most
bulletproof, Hulkbusterish legal armor possible.
Writing for the majority, Breyer seemed ready to
embrace Texas’s wishes for severability:
Gee, that must have felt reassuring. And then…
OH HI THERE. Breyer showed nary a whit of

enthusiasm for parsing the infinite number of
conceivable rules required to save this patient.
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. And
severability is no longer all that trustworthy a 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 post. 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.

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 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 attend music festivals, this might help.
Game theory is often applied to gun control,

usually on the anti- side. I’ll go through this logic,
which is called “Good Guy With A Gun.”

Here’s the logic: 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 the concept of payoffs, we need
to look at the two sides’ payoffs separately.
Let’s look at the payoffs for the Good Guy. Bad

news: They’re 100% negative. Obviously, 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 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 and
doesn’t care about consequences. Then, the Bad
Guy goes five football fields away and opens fire.
64-year-old white male millionaire 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 upon
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 music concert in Nevada, not

Lilith Fair; if the genre’s demographics holds,
many attendees owned guns. But they didn’t have
them. If they had, the body count would have
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 declaration, 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 of their own, as
I expect they would have killed dozens of
innocents inside the Mandalay Bay.)
If you have two people with handguns, you have

an okay possibility the Good Guy With A Gun
wins. But if you do any of these things to the gun:
• 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 vs. this Bad Guy nearly

always is 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 that gun homicide
rates are 25 times higher in the US than in other
such countries. We learn that the US 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, the UK has had 1
since then, and the US has had 1,500 mass
shootings since Sandy Hook.
And 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 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 US, 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 his
assault weapon, which 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 keep killing 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.
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 aggressive 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 personalities. It’s
called the madman theory.7
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
7Trigger 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.
near the Soviet border. By convincing Leonid
Brezhnev he would risk nuclear war, Nixon
thought Brezhnev would beg for peace.
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. But 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 the
expected value of those hands. 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 should lose pretty much all the time,
because someone will have a better hand than
him and play it, while the rest of the players will
let him do it. 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 busting out at the
other’s hands—but now there’s a maniac with a
large stack of chips.
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, damn
the torpedoes. 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 current standoff in North

Korea is that both players are apparently 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, that is.
Trump only has the big stack if he is 100%

irredeemably 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 only one who wants to de-
certify Iran’s nuclear pact compliance; he’s the
only one telling Putin that he won’t re-up the
START agreement; he’s the only 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.
But it only works if Kim Jong-Un thinks it’s a
reasonable play, and, 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. So they sat on their cards
until I 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, for

example, 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.

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 US Treasury bonds, a big part of the $6
trillion we owe to foreigners. Our orgy of
spending in the last quarter century has been
underwritten by the Chinese and Japanese
banking systems. They took 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. Because
of 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. And 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, that time might
come to an end.
So 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 US
economy is still pumping along at its innovative
best. We could do some trimmings 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 US 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 on 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 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 means that

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.

How upstreaming works: Blue is the low hand and owes $3 to Teal
and $3 to Purple. Teal is the middle hand, and owes $3 to Purple.
So instead of Blue paying $3 to Teal and then Teal paying it to
Purple, Blue pays $6 to Purple, satisfying everyone’s debt to the
high hand. (Graphic by Atomic Game Theory’s Richard Malena.)
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 no upstreaming occurred.
He’d want whatever he was owed from the
middle hand, and 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 US 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.
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. In Five-Card Draw, if you have
four consecutive middling cards (say, 6–7–8–9)
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.
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.
Certainly exchanging the American debt straight-
up for less reliable Brazilian debt is a bad idea for
China. But there must be some rate at which the
Brazilians will pay their loans, and pot odds tell us
that 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.
So let’s say Brazil is only 1/3 as likely to pay as we

are. Then if America offers China $4 US in
Brazilian loans for each US 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 US and China are better
off.
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.
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 President 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, and 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.
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 other
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 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 real
good, and it got him a six-year, $126 million
contract. 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. At 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. 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.
The players show up to work. So far, the fans are
still there. The money flows. It’s a very careful
equilibrium.
And 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 are apt to
do so if the most vocal Anthem-protester is
under center 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 when he’s the one who
signed Greg Hardy, for example. 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. But the problem for Kap is that it’s not
necessarily collusion, at least of the malicious kind.
It could just be 32 hunters who gamble 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.
But they might miss the big picture: that

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
hunters’ 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.
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 Conyers8, and
Donald Trump have preceded… well, a
complete lack of consequences so far, but we’ll
see.
8The day after I published this, Conyers resigned his seat. A few
days later, Franken announced his resignation. Moore still ran, and
Trump endorsed him, and both lost the Alabama Senate race.

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.
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 am
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 invulnerable. After
the firing, other women came forward against
Lauer, but did you notice something? Unlike with
the accusers who brought down Weinstein, you
never learned their names. Because honestly, that’s
how it’s supposed to work. When someone alleges
harassment, their life shouldn’t be required to 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, and 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 revealed
patterns of behavior, and a management willing
to listen.
It’s 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.
What #metoo has done is created an ability for

women in an organization to band together and
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’s got to
steamroll the Nancy Pelosi-like enablers that
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.
OK, 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.

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, the idiots will crash and kill each other. But
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.
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.
(Trust me, 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 Schneiderman9 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
have gotten 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 very close to him.
• Fifth, he interviewed everyone except those
most endangered by his probe: the president,
the vice president, and the attorney general.
9 Schneiderman crashed and burned due to harassment

allegations, but the case continues.
• Sixth, he has subpoenaed Trump’s bank
accounts and likely has his tax records, in
defiance of Trump’s 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 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 ends the Trump
presidency. He’s got more job security than his
boss, 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.

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, it’s Han Solo, and 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).10
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. As I’ve run Sabacc
10 This is from the book Rebel Dawn by A.C. Crispin. Because I’m
fair-use quoting it, I need to review it. My review: It’s … well, it’s
not good.
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. Maybe I should just talk about poker.
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 stack of 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’s opponent wants to bet his car, and 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 sometimes 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 play a $1-$2 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 allows players to 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 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 US 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
national debt. Our so-called president gleefully
signed it on his way to Mar-A-Lago, 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.

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 hasn’t looked like he likes the job,
spending more than 100 days in 2017 at his
own properties rather than 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 has attacked members of his own party
as much as the opposition.
§ 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? The
Hanlon’s razor is that he’s just bad at everything
and this is all that we can expect from him. My
tendency is to believe that, because I never
attribute to malice what I can to incompetence.
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 too spy-drama for me.
Maybe he wants to destroy trust in institutions.
Maybe he’s a broken person on the inside.
Whatever the reason, his behavior is consistent
with tanking.
To understand why, it might 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 a 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 either of 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 intentional 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
Simmons11 and Markelle Fultz to go with the
healed Joel Embiid and they’re now… slightly
below mediocre. I guess that’s good?
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 straight years of terrible play,
and then fled the country. The Washington
Nationals were very bad at baseball and were
rewarded with Bryce Harper and then Stephen
Strasbourg. The Cleveland Browns tanked for
the top pick the last two years, which they’ll end
Sunday with a staggering record of 1–31. (Not
every team with consecutive top picks tanks to
get there. The WNBA’s Seattle Storm got Lauren
Jackson and Sue Bird back-to-back, but they
played to win first. However, they just did the
double again, so we’ll see.)
11 Fun fact: Simmons called Trump an idiot and a dickhead.

Though the leagues always say they hate it,
they’ve enabled a clear reward for intentionally
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 crippled their
draft by joyously ripping off four straight wins
behind new superstar QB Jimmy Garoppolo. But
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-Peyton Mannings
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 almost 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 now been re-elected seven times. 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.
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
election 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.12
A 2018 Democratic wave election tied to an

unpopular and impeachable president amps the
carnage. In that scenario, Ryan13 and McConnell
likely retire, Democrats take over, and, facing
liberal challenges from within, the Pelosi-Schumer
12 Not anymore. Apparently, even in this White House you can

get fired for grifting.
13 Ryan saved himself the embarrassment and retired prematurely.

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.
After a GOP collapse in Congress, Trump now

deals with a Democratic majority who wants him
to play ball or GTFO. So 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.

Targeting the Clinton
Foundation is Trump’s
dumbest move yet
January 8, 2018
I’ve chronicled why a large number of Donald

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. (I’m lying, of course. I’m sure there wasn’t,
just as I’m sure Trump is just doing it because he
can’t let his popular-vote loss to a woman go. But
work with me.) Attorney General Jeff Sessions
should abandon the probe for one obvious
reason: Secretary Clinton can’t be prosecuted for
anything that happened while she was at State.
The statute of limitations on federal non-capital
felonies is five years. She 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.14 (I assume
that’s an expression Sessions uses. I have no
particular knowledge of which dogs would or
would not hunt.)
But let’s charitably presume that Sessions knows

that dog won’t hunt—he said it wasn’t a good
idea as recently as 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
that it’s not worth it, he’s probably 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 article. Thus, 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 problems in game theory 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
14 It didn’t.
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
specific issues to reduce the costs. This assumes
that the factions’ payoffs are superadditive; that
is, if two factions align, their total payoff is higher
than 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
those groups have any say in whether the
president gets impeached. There are only three
factions, shown below, that have a say; they are
the grand coalition of will-there-be-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. (The
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 would
consciously do anything to push the Russia case a
way it wouldn’t naturally 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 the 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.
Moreover, 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 some entrenched
Democratic operatives away. The key here is that
the 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
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. Naturally, 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 are very 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 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. The only way to avoid that bloodbath
is to creep toward punishing Trump and his kin
for the illegal acts they committed. So by
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
Now there are no exits through which the Trumps can
escape justice.
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.

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.
Because 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 probably a sham. But on a game theory level,
we should look at what happened here, and suss
out who in this room was likely to come out of it
with what they wanted. It all comes down to the
value proposition of flexibility, the willingness to
change strategies and goals when faced with new
realities. Here’s what I saw when I watched it.
After we see seven rich white men express
concern, then a rich white woman express
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 sure looks like he’s being

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 position is almost uniformly “the least
humane thing I can do at this very minute.”
(Click all those links if you want to be angry for a
full hour.)
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.¹15 This is a
Though man, the horse-soring thing gives DACA a run for its
15
money on the unbelievable-inhumanity-of-Trump leaderboard.
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 ever 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 vs. hawks, a solitary dove will lose
every time and die of 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 that they have

bipartisan agreement on many issues, and just
disagree on tactics. They are lying.
The Democrats need to act on DACA before a

March 5 armageddon sends a bunch of
innocent kids back to places they don’t want to
go. They cannot 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.”16
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
here except Trump is, for the most part,
inflexible. Watch Rep. Steny Hoyer call some of
Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s proposed policies
“controversial” (a.k.a., D.O.A.); 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 all the way up to the point
where he’s ready to send the press off to write
16March 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.
more “Fake News.” I don’t think he grasps how
far apart everyone is, but he commits to the peace
and love approach. He knows he’ll take a ton of
heat (“I like heat,” he fluffs). He sure does take it:
While being interviewed by professional ogre Lou
Dobbs, professional troll Ann Coulter describes
the meeting as the lowest day of the Trump
presidency. She says it confirms 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… you have to 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
But when the 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. Sen. 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, we’ll see if
he can get something done. We’ll see if the
Democrats destroy him if he doesn’t. Because
“On the Wall, a man gets only what he

earns.”
—Benjen Stark in book one

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
memorized and detailed 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 good 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. But they did have
limited resources and limited response time. They
needed Chicago to believe they had more capacity
than they did, and targeting those particular
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.
Correspondingly, 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.

Today, we have a president who cannot admit
weakness. It terrifies Trump; it makes him a lesser
person in his eyes. He is under assault constantly,
for reasons entirely 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 being weak, and 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 deposed
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.)
So 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, they said, and seriously, Mr.
President, 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
strong man.”
Well now. But hey, Trump wants a parade, and 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,
because then 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.
But 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 there
was a reasonable desire 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
disproportionately victimized. I felt terrifying the
citizenry of Chicago into submission was a wildly
undemocratic idea. I planned to stop him.
But 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 all-powerful 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
prepared 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.

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 funding 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
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.
Yet during the Obama years, the GOP got

extraordinarily good at this. They stalled
funding for Obamacare even though the majority
of 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 was overwhelmed with 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 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,
and despite ranting from Trump and grumbling
from John Kelly, they will just have to live with it.
But 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.
But 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. But 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. But it’s
what they do. Fundamentally, 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: that saying they cared
about the Dreamers would be more effective than
attempting to win the standoff. This is what 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. That is, 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.

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.
But 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.
This tweet may have had a lot to do with it.
Uh, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. The US

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 find out if we had a surplus or a deficit. He
doubled down on it on Twitter, making us the
laughingstock of the world for the, I don’t know,
60th straight week or something.
And 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 Candidate
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
chance 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 warmaking. 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 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 damage
that’s coming in the following way.
Let’s say the daily payoff for declaring war is two

trillion dollars, and peace is only a 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 profit is a trillion dollars for day one, but
only the day two result of a trillion dollars times
90%, with a 10% chance I die. If I live through
day two, then my profit is a trillion dollars times
81% (90% of 90%), with a 19% chance I die by
then. And so on and so on, until I get to a top-
end value of ten trillion dollars and/or death by
fire.
But wait. If I declare war, my opponent will also
declare war. They’re heading down this path too.
For all participants, the game is finite. We end
with ten trillion dollars and/or death by fire.
That’s ten trillion, which sounds a lot better than

one trillion for peace. 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 three
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.
So now Trump’s policy—if it can even be said to

have been one—has failed. The U.S. and E.U.
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 few years, I hope
we can say that about the Trump presidency as
well.
#MPRraccoon and the
puzzle of hope
June 13, 2018
Yesterday a bold raccoon scaled the UBS Bank

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 it could not risk a
firefighter’s life for a being it 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
overwhelming odds, of hope. Overmatched by
architectural complexity and exhaustion, our furry
hero — we named her Rabbit, after Thor’s name
for Rocket in 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 I give to events like the
negotiations between North Korea and the US,
which also occurred this week. And it was a lot
less riveting than the raccoon.
That’s because Presidents Trump and Kim didn’t

have to solve the world’s biggest game 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! It’s the
stuff that great musicals are made of.
Despite having no speeding trucks, our bandit’s

path was no less deadly than the froggie’s. It
started from a seven-story roof, then straight up
the middle of 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 suddenly emerged.
The first was the possibility of scaling down the
entire building. Sure enough, around midnight
that’s exactly what the raccoon started to do,
descending from the 23rd floor to the 17th. But
still, that was a long, perilous journey down.
But then, another possible path to success

opened up. In her descent, Rabbit moved laterally
three windows to the right and ended up on the
corner column, which went all the way to the
roof. My Basket of Adorables partner Gaby and I
could see it. Could our li’l buddy?
Run, Rabbit. Run

Resting on the first windowsill of the west wall,
Rabbit occasionally looked up through the
darkness. Who knew what was meandering
through her nectarine-sized brain on a night like
this?
Triumph, that’s what. Around 3 am, Rabbit just

took off up the corner column, and then boop!
right over the rooftop. We don’t know what
happened then, but presumably a high-five was
involved. Rabbit could relax, and 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. (Don’t @ me if you spent hours counting to
a different number.)
I don’t know if Rabbit ever felt hopelessness in

her epic journey. I know we all have felt it over
the last 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 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 warm embrace of the dictator Kim 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.
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, say.
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 late 2008

either. We responded to an attack on US soil by
embroiling ourselves in two forever wars. Wall
Street deregulation crushed the housing market,
setting up a staggering Great Recession. We were
torturing 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.

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 basically nowhere in legal scholarship—that
means that law enforcement and courts have no
ability to moderate punishment for any crime
in a particular 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 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 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 for the administration, by
embracing a zero tolerance policy, it 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 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. 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. Rosalynn Carter doesn’t.

Michelle Obama doesn’t. Hillary Clinton
doesn’t. Melania Trump doesn’t. All the living
First Ladies don’t want this policy to exist, and
four had a say in whether their husbands pursued
it. Maybe Melania does too. It does look 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
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 the reduction 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, 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.

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.
And 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.
But it might be the only winning strategy. That’s

because of a game theory strategy 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. But 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.
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.
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.
But if the policy somehow leads to a win, 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.
OK, 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 probably the
right move for them as long as they remain 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.

Conclusion
What happens now?
March 12, 2017
Now that you’ve read all this, maybe you’re angry.

Maybe you’ve been angry since November of
2016, perhaps quite a bit before. Every day brings
a new outrage, a new betrayal, a new moral low
ground. It’s exhausting to think about fighting it,
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?
While hosting a JoCo Cruise panel about the

2016 election called The Night Everything Broke, I
drew a chart to show why this happens.

The chart 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
always follows the one next to it, as long as there
are new outrages to react to. (Protip: There will
be.)
The thing is, there aren’t any arrows on the chart.

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!”)
But just as many people go the other way. The

Reaction-Inaction-Action 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
important. 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 Facebook and Twitter, 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 get
the attention to effect long-term change; without
slow actors, the fast actors will burn out and
dissipate before accomplishing anything.
Together we can act effectively, if not always
harmoniously.
The Trump administration is something we have

to fight. It is a corrupt, backward-thinking, violent
organization, and it 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 different ways

than you do is the first step to accepting them as
allies. If we could all accept that there is no right
or wrong way to fight tyranny, we might be better
at fighting tyranny.
From all of us at Basket of Adorables, have fun

storming the castle.

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 the 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 50 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 of 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, and I hope this is useful.
Mike Selinker

Game Theory in The Age of Chaos

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GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 1

You are reading an exclusive

Here’s another book from

The Ghastlytrump Tinies

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 1

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 3

July 28, 2018

If you only have a vague idea of who I am, you

As for what else is okay in my book, this set of

Anyone in the game industry knew they were

Which, if we’d looked even a little bit at game

Game theory likes to look at a principle called the

But an election is not just about a comparison of

So all it took for the worst American imaginable

You know, Nazis.

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 5

It took a man as vile as these people to rally them.

Alexander Hamilton had this one, by the way.

6 GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS

So, hey, we got the whirlwind. Now, before we

Before the election, my Basket of Adorables

So after the inauguration, I kicked off a series of

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 7

July 23, 2017

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that game theory

But even those who voted for disruption didn’t

Game theory says we need a disruption. I think

Those words are “AND PENCE.”

I’m guessing you’re used to saying “Impeach

Here’s why. Game theory has this little gem

So let’s talk about Mike Pence. He’s worse than

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 9

We need to guide Rep. Paul Ryan’s behavior. As

And if Pence knows Ryan knows Pence fears

The thing about getting out in front of a train,

The train—the Republicans’ Rambo Coalition—

The Racists, Zealots, and Randies basically hate

So if the Rambo Coalition keeps the president in

Only one thing will do that: making them fight

However, one more thing is needed to make that

So they need to fear too. We must threaten every

The prisoner’s dilemma works on a lot of people.

In the most recent play in which they will

This requires Guildenstern — or maybe it’s

Then again, these guys are idiots.

Which brings us to the president of the United

• When faced with an FBI investigation, Trump

These are likely the actions of a man who believes

And if this is true, he is like millions who believe

Now, the events of the Trump team’s collusion

This is because Trump believes he is due for a win.

When you pursue a martingale, after every loss

The poorhouses are filled with people who

The other is less obvious: If you keep doubling

Herein lies the trap for the president: He believes

It’s kind of odd that a casino owner like Trump

Of course, there’s another road available to the

Now, you and I don’t get to deal with infinite

The president might like this theory. It’s called

GAME THEORY IN THE AGE OF CHAOS 19

August 13, 2017

Quite the week for Donnie Darkest-Timeline: He