SNIPPETS 13: Trump v Biden, Tory collapse, Ukraine/NATO/China, TikTok

The war didn't start in February last year. It started in 2014… President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invading Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that…So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. (Stoltenberg, 9/23, on TV, directly contradicting the No10/White House/NATO official story, but zero coverage from the old propaganda mainstream news, and most of SW1 remains totally ignorant of basic facts about the context…)

I don’t watch the news anymore. We have the Food Network on all of our TV screens, or video games. It’s very hard to follow it when it all seems like a simulacrum, a preordained narrative that is being fed to you. The mainstream press in the United States right now just seems so fucking fake. (Bret Easton Ellis)

A few thoughts on:

• The strategies of the two campaigns in America and opinion in the key states. As in 2016 much of Insider world is telling itself fake news about the campaign.

• Possibility of total Tory implosion. The only future for the Tories was to let Vote Leave transform them into a new party 2020-24. The Party would now be unrecognisable: CCHQ closed and the party re-opened in the midlands with the rancid old guard ‘retired’, the economy would be extremely different and millions of swing voters would have vanished from the 40% tax rate (pushed up to 100k), MP pay and nurses pay would be linked to the growth/fall of average wages (‘if the voters get a pay cut the MPs get a pay cut’), term limits for MPs, the government would be years into a national project to rebuild the NHS, it would be far more ‘on the right’ on violent crime/borders etc than the median Tory MP, we’d have left the ECHR amid widespread applause that shattered Labour and stopped the ludicrous farce of a major country paralysed in handling a few dinghies, the trans madness and other manifestations of the Left’s Gadarene-psychosis would have been crushed, the broken Northcote-Trevelyan model of a closed-caste civil service recruiting only from within (and optimising for *preserve bureaucratic power/budgets* over *productive adaptation*) would have been pried open to recruit the best people in the world, we’d be very popular with ex-Labour voters, we’d be about to crush Starmer and the SW1 debate would be about a startup party replacing Labour. Instead they broke their deal with us and tried to operate as if it’s ~1999 and 2016 never happened. The collapse in quality of MPs, their delusions about politics and communication, their total obsession with the deranged ‘news’ and punditry of the disintegrating old media instead of how power works — all this guaranteed their own disintegration. Sunak thought about reviving the deal but decided to double-down on trusting the Establishment and the ‘strategy’ of the most Insider-pundit in SW1 to focus on week-to-week party management — a ‘strategy’ that doomed him to fail with the public then an inevitable collapse of authority with the MPs/Whitehall. 2025-9 the old Tory Party will probably be replaced. Who by?

• Ukraine. NATO’s strategy has shattered and they still have no new one. Support for war is falling in Europe and America. Ironically sanctions have, as I said would happen, a) failed to achieve their goals with Russia, b) are totally cheated across the world (our regimes can’t even stop European manufacturers simply shifting exports for Russia to the central republics), c) have boomeranged to strengthen anti-Establishment political forces across NATO and undermined Eurozone economies especially Germany, and d) have boomeranged to incentivise huge global investments in payment systems to escape the reach of US sanctions and courts, thus also accelerating the decline of the use of the dollar which is so central to US power. If Ukraine tries to raise hundreds of thousands of new troops for the doomed war then it accelerates its economic and demographic collapse (if it can even do this without the collapse of the regime which is debatable). Every single aspect of the NATO argument has a) been proved wrong (e.g Russia will run out of everything in 2023, the world will support sanctions) or b) they’ve u-turned (e.g Putin blew up the pipeline, the war has nothing to do with NATO membership). And the old media just spews new lines that directly contravene the old lines without, obviously, explaining to voters how and why the official story has inverted.

• Wider NATO failure. We’ve greatly strengthened China which is making vast profits selling stuff to Russia at high prices to blow up our stuff in UKR. As I’ve said for two years, you don’t need to be Sun Tzu to see the UKR disaster as an enormous win-win opportunity for China. And the West has totally isolated itself globally on another dimension with its shambles of a ‘policy’ on Israel. And we launched missile strikes claiming we would ‘stop’ Houthi attacks — another failure. Our Idiocracy is accelerating its own disintegration on almost every front.

• US TikTok legislation. Yes to enforced divestiture, no to ‘ban TikTok’ and no to the over-wide legislation that will be used by the Democrats to attack all political dissent…

In the third week ofApril the Maths Circles website will go live and we’ll start more active organisation. We’ve made progress and have a path to half a dozen opening in the next 6 months. I’ve given some talks and raised some cash. If you want me to come and give a talk to your organisation, then please email: info at northbanktalent dot com. One of the best things about primary Maths Circles is the kids tell their parents — it’s much harder than normal school maths and much more fun and interesting. Instead of having your child drilled through the National Curriculum and start saying ‘maths is boring’, you could come to us and we’ll help set up a Circle and show the kids what it’s like to think creatively about proper maths.

We are particularly looking at these areas for our next expansion:

• Holy Island / Berwick

• Durham

• Bournemouth

• Bristol

• Cheltenham

• Stoke

If you are a school/teacher who wants a primary Circle there, email network@mathscircles.com — more news soon…

I’m working on The Devils and Dostoyevsky. The Joseph Frank biography is excellent. The Devils opens with this passage from Luke viii, 32-36:

And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid. They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.

In a letter to his friend Apollon Maykov, Dostoyevsky alluded to the Gadarene swine as the inspiration for the title, part of which he used as an epigraph:

Exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine... These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom the devils have departed, sits at the feet of Jesus.

Apart from being an amazing novel it’s also maybe the best thing you can read to understand the psychology of the Left and the way a sort of madness has spread among the old political-media-academia elites in the past decade. The madness has extended to normalising giving children drugs that destroy their health and sanity in order to pretend they have ‘changed sex’. Those promoting this madness, like communist revolutionaries, see themselves as heroes bringing an inevitable future. In Scotland they are about to start enforcing laws, unprecedented in Britain for centuries, attempting to criminalise discussion of this madness. Those who have promoted this madness will be seen as swine who were possessed. The voters will want criminal investigations but Insiders will try to cover it up and move on as usual. And the madness will continue in new forms because it is intrinsic to modernity and the education of the mainstream intelligentsia.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?... Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed…”

The madness can only be beaten by a new idea, a new regime and a new elite — ‘the greatest deeds are thoughts’…