Today we have a guest cat who’s pretending to sleep in the early morning sunshine of Watts. She wasn’t sociable enough to come visit with me, but was perfectly happy to pose quietly as long as I stayed in telephoto range. When I tried to get closer she ran off to her apparent home at the Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center.

You may be thinking that if I was in Watts taking pictures of cats, I must have been at the Watts Towers too. Your conclusion would be both sensible and correct, and of course I took some pictures. None of them were especially memorable, but one of these days I’ll post them.

Earlier this week, final 2019 enrollment numbers for Obamacare were released. This is for states on the federal exchange only:

This means that 2019 ended up about 4 percent lower than 2018. However, there are several state exchanges, including big ones like California, that haven’t closed enrollment yet. When you account for this, and also for some Medicaid expansions that probably cannibalized some customers from the exchanges, it’s likely that net enrollment this year will end up down by 1-2 percent or so.

Over at Vox, Dylan Scott summarizes a few theories about why enrollment declined, but to me this looks like just a random fluctuation, especially since 2018 was a year of strong economic growth—which means more people got jobs that offer health insurance and therefore left Obamacare.

Overall, then, Obamacare is doing fine. So far, the loss of the individual mandate doesn’t seem to have had much effect, though it’s a little early to say that with any assurance.

Prices aren’t rising fast enough in Japan:

Japan has virtually given up on reaching 2% inflation after nearly six years of trying. An argument gaining ground in Tokyo holds that the inflation goal, once seen as paramount, doesn’t matter so much after all.

Six years? How about 20 years? Here are the past two decades of inflation in Japan:

There’s a grand total of one year above 2 percent. What’s more, over the course of two decades Japan has only two years over 1 percent. By my back-of-the-envelope noodling, prices have risen a cumulative total of about 1 percent between 1998 and 2018. That compares to a cumulative increase of about 54 percent in the United States. Of course, you might wonder if anyone should even care about this when you compare economic growth in Japan vs. the US:

Total GDP in the US has grown faster than in Japan, but that’s because our population is increasing while theirs is declining. If you look at GDP per working-age adult, both countries are doing about the same. In fact, Japan is doing slightly better.

So who needs inflation? I keep wondering this for two reasons. First, the case for positive inflation is that it allows the central bank to set effectively negative interest rates during a recession, and this allows a faster recovery than a merely zero interest rate. But does it? Japan seems to have recovered from the Great Recession about as quickly as we did.

Second, it remains unclear to me how central banks can produce inflation on demand. In theory, they can produce any inflation rate they want, but in practice they seem to have very little control over it. They can lower the inflation rate by crashing the economy, but they don’t really seem to know how to increase it.

In other words, I remain befuddled. The conventional wisdom suggests that, if anything, the US should have an inflation target of 4 percent, not 2 percent. I’ve always accepted this. But how do we get there? And is there really much evidence that it would help us even if we did?

Tolga Adanali/Depo Photos via ZUMA

Why did President Trump suddenly decide to pull American troops out of Syria? Mark Landler takes a crack at answering:

If there was a common thread in Mr. Trump’s actions, it was his unswerving conviction that his political survival depends on securing his conservative base. Those supporters have pounded him relentlessly in recent weeks for his failure to build a border wall with Mexico — one of the bedrock promises he made during his improbable journey to the White House.

He rejected the stopgap budget deal because it failed to fund the wall. He criticized the Fed because its policy is dampening the stock market, which until recently he viewed as a barometer of his success. And he pulled troops out of Syria because it fulfilled a campaign promise to extract the United States from foreign wars.

Nah. Trump’s base was certainly pounding him about the wall. And he did promise them jobs and a strong economy. But did Trump really promise to withdraw troops from Syria? Not really. He said ten different things at ten different times. Nor was his base upset about it now. I don’t think there was a single person in the Republican Party, Trump supporter or not, who had so much as mentioned Syria in the past few months. It just wasn’t an issue.

So what really motivated this sudden U-turn? I don’t know any more than you, but here’s my guess: it was the Friday afternoon call from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan informing Trump that Turkey’s army was about to launch an attack on the Kurds in Syria. This gave Trump two options. He could have told Erdoğan to bring ’em on and gotten ready for a fight. Or he could have backed down and told Erdoğan to hold off for a bit while he withdrew American troops.

I think it was the latter. Erdoğan threatened him and he caved. A guy like Erdoğan understands that this is the best way to deal with Trump. There’s not much more to it than that.

UPDATE: I wrote this before I read this AP dispatch, which confirms that the Erdoğan call was what prompted Trump to get out of Dodge. Ironically, it turns out that even Erdoğan was surprised at how quickly Trump backed down. He expected Trump to withdraw over a period of a few months, which would have given Turkish troops time to prepare for their assault. Instead, in his typical fashion, Trump just ordered an immediate withdrawal. This will likely produce a little more chaos than Erdoğan wanted.

I have three quick things on my mind that aren’t really worth a full blog post each:

Wall. DC insiders know not to use definite articles in front of agency names. It’s “CIA says,” not “the CIA says.” Now this bit of grammar policy has spread to Trump’s border wall. Josh Marshall explains:

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me the word has apparently come down from the White House that the wall, as in the wall to be built along the southern border, must now be called “wall”….Today in a congressional hearing, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Rep. Tom Marino: “From Congress I would ask for wall. We need wall.”

this is an actual quote from the secretary of homeland security of the united states, and not the incredible hulk. “from congress i would ask for wall. we need wall.” hulk smash. pic.twitter.com/VH4d4LRPYu

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) December 20, 2018

Nicotine vaping. Writing yesterday about vaping, I said that although it’s better than tobacco smoking (no lung cancer = big win), nicotine addiction is still pretty bad. But is it? I’ll make two quick remarks about that. First, the effects of nicotine per se on health are fuzzy. It appears to have some harmful effects, but probably not terrible ones. This isn’t really why I think the Juul fad is potentially so bad.

So here’s remark #2: Nicotine is wildly addictive. Withdrawal symptoms are between those for heroin and cocaine, and the difficulty of quitting is higher than for any other common drug. This is what I mean when I say it’s “very bad.” Kids who start vaping as teens are likely to get addicted pretty quickly, and that means they’ll be spending $1-2,000 per year on their nicotine habit for the rest of their lives. Even if nicotine has no negative health effects at all, I still count that as “very bad.”

Syria withdrawal. I’ve gotten several responses about Syria explaining that our troops there basically act as a tripwire: Working with the Kurds, they’ve stabilized the northeast part of the country, and all other combatants stay away because they know that killing a significant number of American troops would result in a massive reprisal. I’m not entirely convinced of this, and in any case it prompts my usual question: how long? We’ve been there four years. We’ve been in Afghanistan for 17 years. The Middle East is obviously not going to stabilize anytime soon, so does that mean we stay there forever? Or what?

A couple of weeks ago, as you know, I visited the LA Arboretum. But first I had lunch at the Farmer’s Market. After that, in the time between the arboretum closing and then reopening for their evening show, I dropped over to Caltech to take a few pictures and check out the monopod.

You’ll see photos of all of this eventually, but let’s start with the Farmer’s Market. I frequently get complaints that my lunchtime photos are not related to lunch at all, so here you go: a pair of pastrami sandwiches from Phil’s Deli. That’s a lunchtime photo.

First Trump refused to sign any budget deal that didn’t include $5 billion in wall funding. Then he caved in. He’d just fund the wall from “other” sources. Now he’s changed his mind again. Congress has agreed on a short-term budget bill to avert a government shutdown, but suddenly Trump won’t sign it unless he gets his wall. “The President is continuing to weigh his options,” says Sarah Sanders.

Trump is, by nature, a lousy negotiator. But he also can’t be taken at his word, and this makes him a terrible negotiator. What’s the point of even trying to deal with him?

Anas Alkharboutli/DPA via ZUMA

As you know, President Trump has announced that he’s going to pull out all American troops from Syria. According to news reports, he made this decision without really telling anyone first, and the withdrawal will almost certainly be done in the worst, most slapdash way possible. That’s our commander-in-chief for you.

That said, the response to his decision has been remarkably apocalyptic. For example, here’s Victoria Nuland:

With his decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, President Trump hands a huge New Year’s gift to President Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State, the Kremlin and Tehran … Everything about this mercurial decision imperils U.S. national interests as defined by Trump himself … As soon as the United States withdraws, the Islamic State will make three moves. It will claim victory over the U.S. infidels, turbocharging a recruiting binge across the Middle East and South Asia. It will pour fresh fighters into eastern Syria. And it will come out of the shadows to retake territory across eastern Syria.

Iran will also flood the zone the United States is abandoning … Iran will also gain control of the major oil fields in Deir al-Zour protected by U.S. forces and the SDF, allowing it to self-finance its land grab … Moscow is celebrating, too … Maybe it will allow Tehran to split the spoils from the Deir al-Zour oil fields; maybe all that cash will go back to Moscow.

Of course, both the Islamic State and the beleaguered SDF will fight for that territory, too, setting off another cycle of bloodshed and Iranian weapons shipments into Syria. That, in turn, will draw Israel’s concern and kinetic response.

This is, believe it or not, fairly typical, even among liberals. If the Weekly Standard were still alive, it would probably spontaneously burst into flames on newsstands across America.

So I’d like to take this chance to remind everybody of something: We’re talking about 2,000 troops. That’s it. And they aren’t fighters, they’re trainers. They were there to train 40,000 or so allied fighters, something that we’ve never, ever shown ourselves very competent at in the first place.

To step back a bit then, we’re supposed to believe that withdrawing 2,000 troops, performing a job we’re not very good at in the first place, will open up Syria and the entire Middle East to hellfire and Armageddon. Seriously?

Look: if 2,000 troops are the only thing holding back the forces of hell in the Middle East—well, let’s just stop there. They aren’t. Can we all just settle down a bit over this?

Monday is now Evil Dex day, which means that Thursday is crash day. But I’m awake now and blogging will commence shortly!

Just for the record, here’s a copy of the letter of intent that Donald Trump signed on October 28, 2015, expressing his interest in building a “first class” Trump-branded development in Moscow:

This was signed four months into Trump’s primary campaign, and we now know that the Moscow project stayed alive at least until the summer of 2016 and quite likely until November—a period during which Trump was insisting that he had no interests, no loans, no deals, no nothing going on with Russia. He was, obviously, lying, and this goes a long way toward explaining why he was being so obsequious toward Vladimir Putin at the time (“I’d get along great with him,” “He’s a leader,” “I’ve always had a good instinct about Putin,” etc.).

UPDATE: The first sentence of the last paragraph has been revised for accuracy.