[From "I am back"]

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I am feeling optimistic about my safety, because I have taken some additional precautions, and the move seems to have taken me off the radar. About America, not so much.

After the Republic died in Rome, it took a long time for a new political order capable of cohesive action to appear, and even after Caesar Augustus took power, it took him twelve years to get things in some sort of order.

Elections and due process have gone down, and most of the civil service is in similar shape.
[…]
There is an interesting mathematical theorem from computer science that it takes at most one third of the parties engaging in Byzantine defection to subvert any process. It does not take majority defection, and unless the process is robustly designed to resist Byzantine faults, like the processes of the Venetian Republic in the days of its greatness, which requires immense amount of bullshit and heavy overheads, it takes far less than a third defecting.
[…]
If Biden gets in, then the people pulling his strings will find that the way they got in makes it impossible to get anything done. Until they start shooting judges and public servants, which I expect to start happening around 2026 or so if Trump fails to start shooting people sooner than that.

In the Roman Republic, the processes stopped working. Caesar incorrectly assumed that it was still impossible for respectable people to publicly murder other respectable people in public. And his assassins incorrectly assumed that after they assassinated Caesar, it would once again become impossible. He was wrong.

And they were wrong. Interesting times ahead.