Happy Monday

Hey there.

It’s me, JB, with a little bonus Sideboob for you.

If you’re in the mood, the very dark mood, for some end of the world anxiety—and who isn’t! Amirite!—these three pieces should have you in a fine lather by the time you’re done.

The Boston Globe has a long report on a bunch of high level US political operators war gaming the end of the Trump regime.

A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty:

Using a role-playing game that is a fixture of military and national security planning, the group envisioned a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, one in which Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it.

It meshes nicely with this ABC report on a couple of social scientists appointed by the Clinton White House to develop a model to explain why states fail, who woke up recently to realise their model had turned sentient and eaten America for breakfast.

In the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton was in the White House and the United States looked unshakeable, the administration appointed Jack Goldstone to study how states fail. They meant other states; not the US. Few expected that his model would later predict their country's collapse.

In an unpublished paper submitted for peer review, Professor Goldstone, who is a sociologist, and Peter Turchin, an expert on the mathematical modelling of historical societies, have concluded that the US is "headed for another civil war".

And finally, if you want to just give on today, on the future, on life itself, and do a real deep dive on our Darkest Timeline, the United States Studies Centre in Sydney hosted this fascinating (read:terrifying) discussion with ex-ADF officer David Kilcullen on the data pointing towards violent political conflict in the US later this year. (I’ve started the video at 7 mins to save you the preamble)

Happy Monday.