SNIPPETS 12: Paralysed force, gesture without motion -- our hollow regimes...

UKR / Israel / 2024 elections / The Startup Party / elite fragmentation / lab leak case practically closed...

Communism will conquer one day, irrespective of whether the Communists are right or wrong. But this triumph will stand very far from the Kingdom of Heaven. All the same, we must accept that this triumph will come one day, even though none of those who at present steer the world’s fate have any idea about it at all.

Dostoyevsky

Happy New Year

We’re building Maths Circles, per the blog. I’ll post again on this shortly as we are:

• recruiting teachers

• finding interested schools, parents, children

• building materials for Circles, a training program etc.

We plan to start in some state primaries in summer/September 2024. I’m raising cash to build this. Soon we’ll have a bank account where donors can contribute. (If you’re rich and want to help when the account opens get in touch.) A Fermi estimate: roughly £5-6k for an in-person Circle for three terms, including training time (so it would take £4-5 million to provide something special for the top 1% of ability in each cohort, though many of the children we help will not be in this group and Circles are not targeted in this way).

I’ve almost totally avoided the speaker circuit but this is a good cause so if you want me to give a talk to your organisation, then please email: info at northbanktalent dot com. I don’t know what my market rate is yet but it’s got to be above the losers in the Cabinet so be generous in your offer! For just one unit of Boris-rambling-nonsense we could fund roughly 50 Maths Circles across the UK for a year. The likes of Goldman Sachs could stop funding violent extremists and help build something entirely positive for civilisation instead…

I’ll also accept one offer to run one advert on this blog (unless subscribers vote against it, poll at bottom): please email dmc2 dot cummings at gmail dot com and put ‘Substack ad pitch’ in subject line. Conditions: 1) I’m neutral/positive towards your organisation; 2) extremely low friction — you transfer cash monthly/quarterly in advance, everything agreed in minutes not hours, no need for lawyers or a contract >1 page; 3) the cash makes it worthwhile (minimum bid = x4 Circle Units = £24k). Lots of powerful people will read this blog in 2024 so it’s valuable real estate!

Every year I do some freebie events at schools, universities etc. This year I’m doing something at the Oxford Union on 1/2 and something in Durham on 5/6. If you live there come along…

Much more interesting in British politics than the fake election will be what happens from Q3-Q4 2025: who has built what in preparation? In 2-3 weeks I’ll post an update on The Startup Party. I think I’ve found a way forward so we can build in 2024 to prepare for the extremely likely political opportunity in 2025 when:

• people are even more depressed with politics than they are today and it’s obvious to millions both parties simultaneously are rotten to their cores (Tories have another clown leader and Starmer is obviously failing in No10) and they’re desperate for some way out of the current equilibrium of spreading disintegration and Insider delusions, and

• a subset of elites, already today desperate for something new but resigned to watching what happens with Starmer, look at the farce and are prepared to defect from Insider-world to build an alliance with voters (from existing parties and non-voters) and a broad coalition of soldiers, NHS, teachers etc.

This subset needs to watch Labour fail too before there’s a critical mass that will risk the fury of Insiders and openly support something new. I have very little doubt about the direction. We’re generally culturally downstream from San Francisco and you can see the direction clearly. The critical question is the scale and timing of defection: is it enough or too little to generate a critical mass for something new in 2025-6?

In the context of TSP, I’m thinking about dynamic tools to track the collapse/replacement of our regimes. The ninja of visualisation, Edward Tufte (an inspiration, with Bret Victor, for part of what I started building in No10/Cabinet Office) recommends this chart of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia as one of the greatest ever displays of data. It compresses/abstracts a lot of information beautifully (notice you can see disastrous river crossings in the sudden thinning of the line, one of which is described in War and Peace).

This year I’m going to re-read The Devils and Brothers Karamazov and will post on them as I did War and Peace, and this biography of Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche remain the two best people to read to understand contemporary politics and the pathologies of the dominant moral-political perspective of Insiders. It may seem odd to say people writing in the 19th Century wrote more perceptively on today’s San Francisco/SW1 elites than today’s media but it’s true. Artists always see things first.

As I said last year, it’s time to limit/stop efforts to ‘influence’ the rotten old parties — trying to ‘influence’ assumes they want to solve the problem which is false, they want to believe fairy tales about the problem — and instead BUILD NEW THINGS to replace what’s rotting… In 2024 I want to build Maths Circles (totally apolitical but helping people make up for how both parties have wrecked education) and build foundations for TSP in 2025…

Below some thoughts on the US and UK elections, Ukraine disaster, Israel, new evidence on ‘was covid a lab leak’ (documents just leaked show scientists planned to engineer RNA changes that match just what we see in covid and it’s unarguable that the US and UK governments have covered this up, including from successive Prime Ministers)…

Covid and ‘lab leak’ is a great example of why when you hear mainstream figures from the UK government, the EU Commission etc yapping about ‘misinformation’ you should always think ‘they’re lying or deluded or both’. In spring 2020 Whitehall’s top scientists and the top intelligence officials walked into the PM’s office and told the PM and me that lab leak ‘is definitely false’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’. (James Phillips, a scientist and original ‘weirdo and misfit’, said to me: their confidence is totally misplaced, there are MANY highly suspicious signals — and he was clearly right.) Not one hack has noticed that a page of my evidence to the Inquiry was redacted by the Cabinet Office on ‘national security’ grounds. And when I checked with the Inquiry they confirmed this means that the judge also will not see such redactions — even though the joke Inquiry fought legal action to get access to private messages on the basis it needs all information to judge ‘the general context’ of decisions. Clearly this does not include absolutely critical information on ‘general context’ that would embarrass Whitehall. Whitehall wants no investigation of how and why the PM was given such monumentally false advice and encouraged to pass on this duff advice to the world. The real misinformation almost always comes from our rotten regimes and the old media. And remember, this same rotten system is responsible for advice today on multiple wars and biosecurity, AI etc…

According to the Guardian, ‘whatever’ the facts, the ‘real’ cause was ‘the wildlife trade’:

In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines

And according to the New York Times’ covid analyst, it’s ‘racist’ to discuss a lab leak.

They’ve told exactly the same sort of lies constantly about the Ukraine war. If you want to protect against ‘misinformation’, stop believing ‘the news’ in the old political media and either a) stop treating politics as entertainment (per the Twitter NPC pundits/academics) and spend your time on other things and building, or b) look for other content from people trying to figure out the truth.

*THE SYSTEM IS WORKING AS INTENDED*

[I stupidly put DNA instead of RNA, corrected.]

The system is working as intended

If you’ve been reading my blog since 2013 (e.g The Hollow Men 2014) and/or this Substack since 2021 you won’t be much surprised by how daily news exposes our regimes as hollow.

Trying to compress a lot:

• disintegration of our core institutions,

• fragmentation of consensus reality not just between Insiders/Outsiders but within Insiders, as technology pushes us towards a media environment that in many ways will resemble 1815 (very little consensus reality) more than 1940 (Stalin/BBC/Nazis could create consensus reality for hundreds of millions with one decision),

• fragmentation of elites between (very crudely) old politics / old media / old academia (political Insiders) and entrepreneurs/VC/PE/hedgies/deep tech (Outsiders), with a new natural political alliance waiting to be forged between elites-defecting-from-Insiders plus voters across class divisions who want something different to the stagnation and madness and uselessness of the old parties in most of the west (Brexit/Trump a prologue to this story),

• fragmentation of post-1945 international system and its institutions — the EU/NATO/UN/WHO/IMF etc all hugely discredited by scandals, theft, lies, failure etc,

• a clear revealed preference among Insiders to let people die like flies in vast numbers and squander trillions rather than even discuss the core reasons for the disintegration we see everywhere, a total refusal to discuss high performance organisations and the lessons of pandemics and wars etc,

• technology empowering individuals and small groups accelerating all the above, and the speed and scale of system failure, in ways practically invisible to ~100% of Insiders (they couldn’t understand Facebook and 2016, do you think they’ll understand multi-modal generative models and 2024?).

You won’t have been much surprised…

… by AI / LLMs going mainstream as I said in 2022 would happen in 2023.

… by continued insane funding of gain-of-function (e.g new experiments to make covid super-lethal for humans), absolute determination of all western governments to ignore planning for worse-than-covid pandemics, senior scientists working hard to continue the mad world in which their papers in Science and Nature are a more important metric/incentive than millions dead. This madness is in parallel to more and more information leaking out about what some scientists and Fauci were really doing in funding gain-of-function in Wuhan to evade scrutiny.

Just this week new details were released (under FOI, not because the government is actively seeking the truth) showing that the plans for Wuhan experiments engineering viruses, covered up in London and DC, strongly resembled the covid that hit us much more than previously realised: i.e many of the mysteries in covid’s RNA are not mysterious when you realise scientists proposed creating the changes we see in covid RNA. The chances that a) scientists wrote down a specific plan for specific RNA changes engineered in Wuhan then b) a natural virus turned up with these precise changes ‘in a market in Wuhan’ is … close to zero. I like Scott Alexander’s blog but I think his take on this is wrong and I largely agree with Curtis Yarvin (one of the very few who called covid correctly much earlier than mainstream scientists / public health ‘experts’).

One of the original ‘weirdos and misfits’, James Phillips, a scientist who had himself worked on RNA engineering, said right at the start in spring 2020 that official advice on lab leak to the PM was wrong. He was also one of those who said the DHSC had totally botched rapid tests. This is a great example of the value of having an outside perspective / Red Team available to a PM. And a good example of Whitehall’s attitude to truth-seeking: it’s fought bitterly and successfully to stop all such things and Sunak is their faithful servant. Obviously the Inquiry hasn’t bothered speaking to the one scientist working in the PM’s office in 2020 who had worked on engineering viruses. I’ll bet the Inquiry gives Whitehall ammo to exclude such outside voices even more effectively.

… by the farce of the covid Inquiry that, inter alia, hasn’t even bothered calling the two officials responsible for running a) Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and b) PHE, the agency responsible for public health in spring 2020. It’s like having an inquiry into the 2008 Crash and not interviewing the Governor of the Bank of England and the Permanent Secretary of HMT. (I was also told by two independent sources in Whitehall that some of the Whitehall science people who gave No10 duff advice intervened in a recent honours list to knock off some of those who correctly told No10 summer 2020 that rapid tests were a game changer and would work at scale and DHSC had screwed up again. This is sad but entirely unsurprising. The system is working as intended — it doesn’t want any attention on ‘mavericks’ who embarrassed the Insiders, the same Insiders who said ‘lab leak is a conspiracy theory PM’.)

… by the Post Office farce. Watch how NPC-world writes pieces like they always do about how ‘this is so bad it must force change’ but what will happen is what always happens: Whitehall knows MPs don’t care about management, they just wait for it to fade from media (already about there) and everything carries on as normal.

If covid and Ukraine led to both parties and Whitehall doubling down on business-as-usual after VL left No10, why on earth would a Post Office disaster from 20 years ago make anybody change? If the official covid inquiry can literally not even call the official in charge of civil contingencies in the Cabinet Office nor the official in charge of the agency responsible for public health during covid to give evidence, and SW1 doesn’t even notice never mind care, why would anybody think ‘an inquiry’ will change anything?

Factcheck: MPs’ revealed preference is they don’t care about failures killing people and wasting money. AI safety people also take note. Most of what many of you say assumes current Insiders now in charge of gain-of-function a) want to solve safety problems and b) are capable of ‘intelligent regulation’ on something 100X or 1,000X trickier than gain-of-function. This is laughable. It is much more likely that substantial regulation makes things worse like their response to Facebook/2016 made things worse and their attempts at ‘Online Harms’ laws have been pure farce. You should aim differently. If you want ‘AI safety’ then campaign to build institutions we need today for ‘bio safety’. After this triumph it will be relatively easy to tweak them to consider AI safety particularly given AI and bio will become more and more closely entangled. But if you cannot do bio safety you have ~0% chance of doing AI safety well. (Cf. this excellent paper from one of the handful of the world’s leading researchers, and one of the tiny number of such people with ‘the security mindset’. Warning: you will be very depressed after reading it and you’ll realise the UK has mostly gone backwards since 2020.)

… by Sunak’s or Starmer’s failure and you won’t be surprised by the fake 2024 election, fake campaigns, fake ‘strategies’ that don’t exist, fake ‘policies’, and fake ‘spending plans’ based on OBR numbers that are also fake but are treated like Moses tablets by NPCs — fake because of the systemic lying from Whitehall driven particularly by the corrupt disaster zone of the MOD that cannot be discussed by the political media but which renders all OBR numbers fake because of the tens of billions in hidden/classified black holes (see below). All important things will be ignored. Both parties are led by NPC leaders, not Live Players, so it cannot be different.

The most interesting things I see now among SW1 pundits-NPCs are where they glitch to saying things that are correct-adjacent but their explanations for why are laughable — e.g they usually blame Brexit/Trump as causes of things Brexit/Trump are symptoms of, where the underlying problem was clear to some Outsiders pre-2016, and they usually think strengthening the traditional civil service model is the answer rather than the core problem. As the regime crumbles, these glitches become more frequent but the placebo-explanations manufactured by/for NPC Insiders necessarily become more baroque. When voters don’t believe them it’s, obviously, because the voters have been ‘fooled by misinformation’ (when you hear ‘misinformation’ think ‘this person is clueless or a liar or both’ and you’ll be right 99%).

The most interesting aspect of Insider election analysis will be what they do not say because this ‘dark information’ tells the story of unconsciously agreed Insider delusions. You can see this often when they analyse MSM reports on focus groups. ‘Dark information’ is often fascinating. E.g When analysing critical technologies like quantum computation, a valuable tool is the opposite of ‘what can you see’, it’s ‘who goes dark’ — when an interesting team disappears and stops publishing, it’s often very valuable information. A lot of what the best investors and political people do is seek this dark information and by definition there is little discussion of it.

… by the way in which Insiders’ attempts to destroy Trump have provided him with great energy and his situation has been transformed for the better in 2023. After the midterms, even MAGA fans were depressed by how Trump had campaigned on ‘I won the 2020 election’ when the whole country wanted to move on. There was a huge opportunity for other GOP candidates and the White House. Both blew it. DeSantis’ efforts will long be remembered as a case study in disastrous campaigns.

… by the UKR disaster. See below.

… by the farce of EU Single Market regulation on AI/data and other new technologies. 

Me, 2018, on how SW1 opinion on Brexit/regulation will change 

Prediction: just as Insiders now talk of how we ‘dodged a bullet’ in staying out of the euro, within ~10 years Insiders will talk about being outside the Charter/ECJ and the EU’s regulation of data/AI in similar terms (assuming Brexit happens and UK politicians even try to do something other than copy the EU’s rules).

Silicon Valley regards EU regulation of data and AI as a bad joke and an obvious advantage to be outside its grasp. This has not yet sunk in in tech-ignorant SW1 but it will. Insiders will default to ‘we have no option but to accept the EU’s version’ but as the EU’s version gets more obviously self-destructive there will be defectors. Ironically, much of hardcore Remain is also most hardcore pro-war and if you’re pro-war (or pro NATO / pro being close to America) it makes even less sense to undermine defence cooperation by shooting yourself with the EU’s data laws rather than aligning more with DC.

… by the rise of *actual* far right/left (rather than what Insiders *call* ‘far right/left) and other non-traditional parties across the EU. The EU doubles down on bureaucratic centralism, anti-growth, anti-technology, anti-democracy policies, says there’s no alternative to free movement and ‘diversity is strength’, and calls opponents fascists or ‘Putin stooges’ (ironic given how the Commission was an effective Putin stooge for 20 years). All as VL said would happen 2015-16…

… by the way the nutjob left is pressuring the Insider left. As Nate Silver writes, the recent Harvard row was a good illustration of the phenomenon. The Biden White House pandered to the nutjobs in many ways thus making Biden’s re-election harder. You can already see this in the way the nutjob left is driving the desertion of Biden by pro-Palestine / pro-Hamas networks in some of the critical states. Yes, many of these people now say ‘fuck it let Trump win I won’t support Biden’s genocide’. David Shor has often pointed out how such pressures from young Left activists push the DEMs to do things that are irrational (from the perspective of *winning*) but the nutjobs just scream or ignore him. This trend is important but is practically impossible for NPC-media to discuss. 

… by the Tory ECHR/HRA farce. Since before the referendum I’ve pointed out how Tory leaders and Whitehall concoct ludicrous schemes to con Tory MPs who always fall for them because a) they’re so bad at politics and b) they want to believe fairy tales rather than face reality. (I even watched this farce play out before 2010 with the laughable Grieve-Cameron ‘ECHR reform’ proposals, classic ‘strategic eyewash for fools’ swallowed by all ERG-types.) It’s been the same story with each leader with the single exception of when VL was in No10 and we got the lawyers to explain the facts to the PM, which went down like a lead balloon and after we left he reverted to the normal Tory-mode of conning the MPs with the joke Rwanda scheme. 

I’ve said this will eventually fail, MPs and members will demand we leave, and endless stories, previously mostly hidden, will pour out, and the Tory establishment will totally and utterly botch the entire thing. I wrote after the referendum that Westminster’s ignorance about the ECHR meant it hadn’t clocked another feature of the  referendum — that most thought that vote solved the ECHR/HRA problem and voters would be mad when they discovered No! Me, 2017:

If I get involved in politics again, then a referendum on the ECHR should be high on the agenda — and bear in mind most people probably think we’re already leaving it because of the 2016 referendum, so imagine how mad they’ll be when they realise we’re still in it.

Here we are. After Sunak lands in Santa Monica for Christmas 2024 and the next hapless leader takes over, the membership will want an Opposition leader committed to leaving and the Osborne-Establishment wing will argue that rejection of this, and continuation of fairy tales, is a sign of ‘modernisation’ and ‘sensible mainstream politics’.  

*The system is working as intended… The government doesn’t control the government, doesn’t want to and couldn’t if it tried… The regime can’t take even nuclear weapons seriously so never assume it’s taking today’s crisis seriously… Insiders are the true victims of moral-misinformation stories, not the voters…*

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Insiders stalled on their new Ukraine script

Me, March 2022:

It’s inconceivable that our governments will handle all this well. Even if they suddenly started thinking better, the bureaucracies for things like energy infrastructure are so dominated by extreme friction they could not act fast.

From the start I said the West was delusional about Ukraine and Putin and the strategy would either A) create a 1962-style nuclear crisis or B) lead to another failed Western war to join Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc. After some wobbles towards (A) it’s trending towards (B).

I said repeatedly that 1) NATO acts like only it chooses how and what is escalated but Russia and others can escalate in ambiguous ways (e.g by getting others to blow up our stuff/people like we’re doing to them) to undermine NATO, and 2) others will take advantage of the West’s UKR policy by pressuring it in other places/ways, which will be shocking to our NPCs.

New fronts are opening up all over the place as Russia, China, Iran and others exploit our disastrous policies, systems, and leadership. America, Britain and others are now firing hugely expensive missiles at much cheaper drones to defend ships in the Red Sea and keep the Suez Canal open. When I wrote a decade ago about this, and about the then-obvious trends that would make traditional naval calculations non-viable, NPCs laughed. Ditto in 2020 when we started getting the MOD to focus on these things. Now all this is playing out. (NB. The media presents the attacks from Yemen as a general attack on shipping but this is more lies from our regimes, it’s clearly specifically targeted at USA, UK, Israel etc — they are trying NOT to hit boats connected to China and Russia. The MOD now routinely tells blatant lies about such things and lies almost as much as the Cabinet Office. E.g when the massive UKR intel leak happened in America, the MOD briefed the old newspapers here it was ‘Russian misinformation’, just like the CIA briefed Hunter’s laptop was ‘Russian misinformation’. The MSM report all such lies as fact and when the lies are revealed they’re memory-holed.)

I’m still worried that the White House will feel unable to accept the UKR loss before the election and may do highly dangerous things to try to push facing reality after the election, so that if Trump regains the White House the DEMs can blame him for ‘losing Ukraine’ when he does a deal. I feel very sorry for Ukrainians as they look likely to get similar treatment to Afghan translators. It’s very dangerous to be an ally of NATO these days.

The core reason for our UKR disaster isn’t bad judgements about the way war is changing or about Putin/Russia. More important is Insider delusions about themselves and their institutions.

It should not have been hard to predict the fall in support or even interest among western voters because this always happens.

It should not have been hard to predict the failure of sanctions as sanctions don’t deter states from pursuing existential priorities.

It should not have been hard to predict the disasters of industrial capacity/procurement (why NATO is running out of critical stuff) because this is now a core feature of western regimes and was global news in covid and our regimes very obviously refused to change.

It should not have been hard to predict that simultaneously attacking China over Taiwan would incentivise China to help Russia to screw us over.

I guarantee you’d get a better analysis of the West’s industrial capacity in Beijing than in SW1 because it is NEVER discussed in SW1. It’s even less discussed after two years of war than it was in 2020 even though it’s obviously central to what’s happening in UKR. But — easily solved! Just disappear UKR from the news, like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan…

Across the West, politicians, hacks, academics and the think tank world hyped predictions of UKR success in its ‘summer offensive’ and hyped predictions of Russian dysfunction and failure.

Throughout the offensive, characters like Professor Phillips O’Brien kept attacking those who said it was failing as ‘Putin stooges’. Their story was: the Ukraine army is led by super-soldiers, the Russians are fools on the brink of collapse, if it looks like Russia is succeeding it’s because you don’t understand how clever the UKR military is, UKR success is imminent.

Then the failure became so obvious that even the UKR leaders had to admit it and flip the line to ‘it’s failed so we need even more NATO involvement’.

One of the Telegraph military pundits

At the same time everyone’s attention turned to the horrors in Israel/Gaza.

The West has no new agreed script on UKR. The NPCs are stuck in a holding pattern.

1. The West is nominally still committed to ‘UKR must win, Putin must lose and leave’ but has no credible story on how.

2. The West said repeatedly ‘Russia is about to run out of everything’. Instead the West is running out of ammunition, weapons etc. Our politicians and officials refuse even to discuss changing critical systems on industrial capacity and procurement, like other past civilisations that hit a terminal point of over-complexity and institutional rot.

3. Meanwhile Russia is supplied by China. Western Insiders lied to themselves and us again claiming that the sanctions regime has worked brilliantly and is crushing the Russian war machine (remember all the stories about the idiot Russians scavenging for chips from washing machines?). Nobody should be surprised as sanctions repeatedly fail to deter countries from pursuing what they see as core interests.

4. The non-NATO world isn’t helping because they think WE are the dummies and should cut a deal. And we picked a fight with China over Taiwan and threatened China if they supported Russia. China supported Russia and called our bluff.

5. Support for continuing the effort is sinking in America and Europe. In America, Biden is in big trouble (see below). He’s increasingly vulnerable to the attack from Trump: ‘Biden is spending hundreds of billions on the UKR border while deliberately destroying our border’.

6. The West’s political and media leaders are focused on the Middle East again. The structure of core institutions means the same crucial 10 people are in the same meetings on UKR and Israel therefore if Israel is leading the news, massive institutions de-prioritise UKR. And if skirmishes kick off with Iran and/or Taiwan, then UKR and Gaza will get less attention.

7. The West’s political systems remain systematically unable to engage in realistic public debate regarding ourselves, a fortiori we cannot do it regarding Russia, China, and Iran. One of the most basic errors of those most aggressive on UKR is their refusal to face the proven reality of previous decades: the American public, media and DC cannot sustain focus in the ways a successful empire has to. Post-1991 America cannot do empire and it is always going to go wrong when they try. (Pre-1991 America was also bad at empire but not as bad as now.)

8. We can’t expect these leaders to say ‘yeah we screwed up another war and wrecked another country, sorry, let’s change course’. So far they are just disappearing it from the news. Big western media companies have moved teams from UKR to the Middle East. After Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan they just stopped the news, talked about other things, and all those responsible for the debacles escaped all consequences and made lots of cash in the system after retiring from public service. The same thing is happening on UKR. Boris will rake in millions for introducing shady characters to discuss ‘reconstruction’.

9. We can’t expect historical literacy or honesty. ‘Elite’ public Insider discussion among politicians and hacks entirely excludes the historical context of this conflict. The most anti-Soviet/Russia Cold Warriors said in the 1990s it would be insane to try to bring UKR into NATO. It attacked an existential Russian interest for something irrelevant to NATO and, if UKR were to join, it would simply increase the chances of a nuclear war. The West pushing this appalling idea since 2008 is central to the UKR problem. This can be true and ‘the invasion was wrong’ can be true at the same time! There never needed to be a war over UKR. We should have stuck to the principle that UKR would be neutral and de-escalated confrontation over NATO expansion. Remember the classic narrative whiplash we should be used to by now — closing the borders is racist, embrace herd immunity, lab leak is a conspiracy theory… closing the borders is sensible, herd immunity is pro-Brexit insanity, err lab leak is irrelevant! In February 2022, it was ‘the war has nothing to do with NATO’. This rapidly became ‘UKR must join NATO’ — exactly as Putin accused the West of in February. But the few among Insiders aware of this history never discuss it. The Official Line remains delusional and ahistorical.

10. Part of the problem is a significant fraction of US foreign policy elites do not want to accept they have to share power and accept a reduced role for the US as China/Asia grow. They are still trying to maintain the 1990s bipartisan idea of America as uniquely dominant while ignoring the historical reality that America was wired not to do empire and is bad at it.

11. Even before the attacks on Israel, there were clear signals that DC elites were changing their minds. E.g leading Insiders like Richard Haas wrote about a ‘redefinition’ of victory for UKR that amounted to: UKR abandons victory and does a deal sacrificing land Russia has grabbed and won’t give back.

12. It’s now clear that London and DC deliberately steered UKR away from discussing a deal in 2022. Key UKR figures have said so. The story has spilled out but in the new-normal way: it appears on the internet, Outsiders point it out, Insiders laugh/ignore, a few weeks/months pass and it becomes accepted by Insiders and the Insider line changes from X to Y as if it was always Y, the NPCs themselves immediately forget that they argued the opposite for months, another narrative whiplash executed. (See here for some details from Edward Druce.)

13. UKR domestic support for the war is fracturing as the demands of mobilisation grow. I feel extremely sorry for them because we’ve done the same as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere — we said ‘we’ll stick with you, don’t surrender, we won’t abandon you’ and now it’s becoming clear in UKR our regimes were talking rubbish as usual. Shame on Sunak for continuing the farce when his own staff know now it’s Potemkin. If you’re in UKR, plan on the basis that you’re going to be abandoned amid incredible cant, hypocrisy and lies.

14. Classic Insiders laughed at Elon, David Sacks and many others from the start. It’s increasingly obvious to non-Insiders that Insiders are on the normal trajectory for another botched war. The Insider compulsion for wars to write about every day will find new outlets in the Middle East so perhaps they won’t fight so hard to keep UKR going.

15. A lot of smart people have watched the same script since 9/11, the same mobilisation of the MSM, the lies and failure and disappearing the debacle from the news. Many elites now assume the Insider line on things like UKR is deluded or lies or both. It’s become easier to con political Insiders (partly because they herd themselves via Twitter) but harder to con other subsets of elites because of the internet. (I.e the internet both pushes destructive herding and helps open-minded people find the truth.)

16. I said repeatedly that we should have been welcoming to Russians leaving Russia instead of persecuting them in ways that would be inconceivable and seen as ‘totally racist’ if applied to any other group (apart from maybe Israeli citizens). Instead all over the West, Russians have been banned from sports, music and so on. (I’ve tried on two occasions to help Russians leaving who would be of enormous value to UK R&D but obviously the Foreign Office is 100% useless as it sees its job largely as how to surrender to foreigners in ways that make good talking points at Islington dinner parties.) In Russia they mock us for it, pointing out how this attitude has helped Putin. It’s another example of incredible stupidity.

17. I know a lot of smart, powerful, rich people who voted Obama now saying privately ‘Trump again would have some downsides but one massive upside is it’s a lot less likely he starts another dumb war than four years of Biden or President Kamala’. This is underrated in the MSM.

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Israel / No10 policy

Just a few points:

1. It’s now de facto allowed to advocate violence against Jews and British voters. Many do this openly. Very few are stopped by the police.

2. This is clear to those who want to be violent so we should expect more violence.

3. Insiders do not want this discussed. The priority of No10 and Whitehall continues to be maintaining pretences, avoiding accusations of racism, ‘abuse of human rights’ etc and continued membership of the ECHR. The priority is not the traditional priority of stopping threats of violence and religious hatred.

4. In keeping with my rule — ‘the government doesn’t control the government, doesn’t want to…’ etc — the PM has been reduced to tweeting his hopes for what the police might do. No10 doesn’t and won’t try to control the police. If they tried SW1 would scream (unless it was to, for example, have a clampdown on ‘ultra right white nationalism’ in which case nobody would care about ‘constitutional innovation’). This extends what I saw for myself in summer 2020 with BLM.

5. While the Left generally sees itself as anti-racist, Jews count as white so it’s ok to be anti-Jew among large parts of the left in Europe and America.

6. Jews are re-considering basic assumptions including whether they will be safe here over 10-20 years and where might be better, given anti-semitism is now clearly acceptable again in Europe (and elite US universities).

7. Mainstream ‘conservatives’ are as incapable of discussing all this as they are everything else. The difference in what happens on the streets is probably ~1% depending on whether Sunak or Starmer is PM. Most Tories are indistinguishable from Labour. Parliament just wants this to vanish from TV, they don’t want to solve it (like procurement).

8. When the next terrorist attacks happen in UK, both sides in Parliament will coordinate as usual in spreading a mix of a) things they think are true but are false and b) some lies about the intelligence/surveillance situation and the role of the ECHR/HRA.

9. I fear Israel’s response is both a) not ruthless enough to destroy Hamas and b) too ruthless to be compatible with maintaining sketchy alliances with NATO countries. I fear Israel’s government has, like Austria in 1866 or NATO vis UKR, not thought through the hardest questions and developed clear political priorities. Without this, military action always has a tendency to go wrong. Netanyahu clearly cannot create a coherent plan or explain his incoherent plan. Parts of the IDF and intel services are doing their own thing and telling their own story. Netanyahu looks doomed when conflict ebbs so he is personally incentivised to keep it going (also given legal action against him). The sooner he is replaced the better.

10. The West finds itself massively isolated globally on another conflict and is again largely delusional about this, babbling about the views of ‘the international community’ as if it’s 1998 (the year Insiders emotionally want to return to, here and DC).

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The Harvard debacle and the fragmentation of elites as entrepreneurs bail on the Establishment

It’s interesting how SW1 NPCs have largely ignored the battle over the top US Universities.

Their line for years has been ‘claims from the right about the collapse of elite US universities are mad / exaggerated / far right attempts to undermine healthy institutions’ etc.

They are therefore doing what SW1 NPCs always do when reality contradicts their analysis and predictions: mostly ignore it.

If you look at how some of them do ‘end of year retrospectives’ in which they do a fake version of Tetlock’s Superforecasters and analyse their record, they simply … ignore Ukraine, ignore everything they were wrong about or that’s uncomfortable. Easy!

The very explicit way in which much of US academia has sided with Hamas and allowed violence and threats of violence against Jews is best ignored.

The way in which Claudine Gay has been caught red handed plagiarising in her rubbish papers was ignored. Until she finally resigned. Now elements of the UK Left are following the US Left and defending her, attacking those demanding her resignation as ‘fascist’ etc.

There’s so much that could be said about this but I’ll just make a few points here.

1/ As I’ve said many times and which will be a major theme of 2024, one of the most critical political and cultural developments underway is the fragmentation of elites and the way in which US entrepreneurs are abandoning political Insiders. The Harvard battle is a good example. People like Bill Ackman used to be content to try to climb the Establishment’s greasy pole, now he’s sawn it off and set it on fire.

2/ Gay’s piece in the NYT is a classic:

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal…

Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence…

I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism…

Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be.

It epitomises aspects of Left elite language:

1. The attacks on her are an attempt to undermine our institutions and attack experts by opportunists spreading cynicism.

2. These attacks are driven by the belief that advancing extremism/racism comes from ‘undermining our institutions’.

3. She is the real victim.

4. Those who accused her of breaking clear standards for scholarship are themselves ‘laying waste to truth’.

5. Diversity is strength.

The very people who have corrupted elite institutions now pose as their defenders and cry foul when people say ‘they’re corrupt’.

3/ In the 1960s when the modern Left was born, they saw themselves as iconoclasts. It’s ironic that as they captured the old conservative institutions and corrupted them, these characters who think of themselves as the successors of 1968 now are conservatives fiercely defending the power of elite institutions because they control them.

4/ Gay’s plagiarism is the tip of the iceberg. It’s obvious that much of academia has a massive problem with fake science. Apart from plagiarism and the replication crisis, one of the next big scandals will be the discovery of massive fraud with photoshopped images in medical ‘research’.

5/ The reputations of elite universities as centres of scholarship committed to truth-seeking  and meritocratic entry (e.g widespread abandonment of objective tests for entry) are plummeting. This is good, it’s healthy, it reflects reality. They have been transformed into openly far left political campaigning institutions.

What we’ll see inside these institutions in 2024 will be a version of what we saw with political elites responding to Brexit and Trump in 2016: a fake story they tell themselves louder and louder, thus the flywheel will spin faster, particularly with the election where everything will become polarised by the DEMs and old media as pro/anti fascist. To normal voters they seem like lunatic asylums run by inmates but this will take years to sink in.

6/ I’m constantly depressed how little ‘conservatives’ understand the parallels between what’s happening now and the rapid spread of Communism  in the early 20th Century which also saw widespread double-think and generated Orwell’s creation of the term. I think almost all conservatives are waaaayyy too optimistic about chances for things like ‘a campaign to capture and reform of Harvard’ and greatly underestimate the amount of energy and talent needed for real regime change.

Curtis Yarvin has a pithy way to summarise the difference in view among the dissident Right: are you going to cross the Rubicon or fish in the Rubicon? The Right often talks like it’s going to cross but when it gets close it pulls out its fishing rod and fishes. Fishing is MUCH easier for fundraising but … doesn’t really do much.

He’s right. In the referendum then 2019-20 we started to cross then Boris-Carrie panicked, pulled out the fishing rod and fished instead and tried to re-make friends with the old regime, with predicted/predictable effects…

Cf. Andreessen & Horowitz podcast below.

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More coming on 2024 elections etc…

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Interesting

I strongly recommend Steve Hsu’s podcast, Manifold. Also the Aarthi & Sriram Show.

Steve did a podcast with Erik Torenberg (who I did the interview with last year) on: AI, China tech, universities abandoning truth and meritocratic admissions etc.

Fantastic podcast with Charlie Munger, almost the last interview he gave, with John Collison. I also strongly recommend buying Poor Charlie’s Almanack, reissued by Stripe Press.

Andreessen & Horowitz discuss the chaos in universities. I’ll post some notes on this. If you want to understand how US universities now work this gets to the heart of ‘the bundle’ of services and incentives.

Andreessen & Horowitz discuss longevity with Tony Robbins. Interesting that stars like Tony R are doing stem cell therapy on themselves in places like Panama and Costa Rica and it works!

Lex interviews Bezos.

John Gray interviews Peter Thiel.

Dan Wang update on China and tech.

Milei’s speech in Davos which is the talk of the town, dubbed by an AI into English with his accent!

Look at the podcasts. Nothing from UK.

It’s interesting that the most left place on the planet, San Francisco, and the US tech world generally, culturally very left, now has a thriving ecosystem of podcasts that challenge/attack the Left consensus on politics and technology: e.g Moment of Zen, Upstream, Manifold, Dwarkesh, Lex et al.

There is not ONE such product in Britain. The political podcast ecosystem is a totally SW1 thing therefore boring to almost everyone, has no reach outside SW1 obsessives, and the political outlook is a) mainstream left, b) further left, c) mainstream conservative (so brain dead), d) ERG-style conservative (so brain dead in a different way).

None of them get interesting UK entrepreneurs on, so a fortiori little chance of characters like Bezos. The biggest shows like the BBC lefties’ podcast or Campbell/Stewart are products for the Today program audience skewed even further Left. The right doesn’t notice, care or understand because it’s so brain dead. As I’ve said before, a useful signal for ‘the right’ is they don’t even TRY to create something alternative to the New York Times, which you could do for the amount of money wasted in the pointless SW1 ‘conservative think tanks’, every one of which should be closed — nobody cares what they say except the donors funding them for often iffy reasons. Their stuff isn’t even read by each other. In 14 years of ‘Conservative government’ the sum total of their influence rounds to zero.

I’ll’ go further — the quality of information in some US podcasts on some subjects is higher and more reliable than that in classified briefings on critical technologies available to UK ministers. E.g I would bet that the Ben & Marc podcast on AI and Hollywood has no analogue at all in official briefings from officials to UK ministers.

If you think I’m wrong send a link to a UK political podcast you think proves me wrong and is roughly as interesting as those above, or a conservative think tank product that had some significant influence (saying ‘do X’ when X was happening anyway doesn’t count).

Ps. Having spent so much time on Bismarck, I gave myself a mental break but obviously I will read all the comments and reply!

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