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.]