Digest 25: Victoria Nuland’s leaked recording; Dom’s Startup Party; U.S. = ‘third world country’
Most interesting highlights from the past two weeks…
Victoria Nuland’s leaked recording
Robert F. Kennedy Jr spoke about a leaked recording with Victoria Nuland (40 secs):
This sounded slightly mad to me. Surely not. The Assistant Secretary of State actually picking foreign leaders?
Let me see if I can find the recording…
It exists!
Here’s Victoria Nuland, as Assistant Secretary of State, in 2014, literally picking foreign leaders.
WTF? Can anyone explain this to me in a non explicitly coup-like way?
Sy Hersh similarly wrote last week: ‘overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, one of the American moves that led us to where we are.’
I’m equally amazed YouTube has allowed this clip up for 9 years – which should prove that it’s not AI-generated. Backup X link here if YouTube does take it down.
The more I look into Ukraine, the more stunned I am that the State department and intelligence agencies do things like this.
‘Team Truth’
Watching these two most recent interviews of Tucker Carlson’s, I’m struck, just as an observer, that there’s an implicit alliance forming between Robert Kennedy Jr and Vivek Ramaswamy – even though they’re ostensibly political opponents.
Given a platform by X (formerly Twitter) and Elon, and hosted/moderated by Tucker and David Sacks, there does appear to be a kind of alliance forming around ‘Team Truth’ (my term) – irrespective of political party.
If this was the coalition we had running the U.S. Government, the world would be in a better place.
Do I think they’ll break through and have an impact in 2024? Probably not. But I don’t think their momentum will go away, and the field should be wide open come 2029/30.
Taking a longer-term perspective, planning for the future, I think come the next election cycle these truth-seeking allies can defy the odds and take down their establishment counterparts.
Top clips:
1) With Robert Kennedy Jr, from ~12:30 here – the most articulate, flowing explanation on Ukraine I have yet heard.
2) With Vivek, at 22:50 mins in here – how to handle Ukraine and Taiwan. An actual prescription, with an eye to avoiding war with China.
Dom’s Startup Party
From Dominic Cummings’s Substack, ‘The Startup Party: Time to Build from September and replace the Tories?’
the MP [Rishi] with probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic and he’s ‘respecting the institutions’ and ‘listening to the MPs’ like a good head boy with personal integrity just the way he’s been told to by Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Insider pundits, the Institute for Government et al
…people increasingly face the rot of the parties and the state of the country and the basic fact that the smartest hardest-working MP can’t stop the ship sinking.
On the proposed Startup Party fielding some candidates in next year’s General Election:
Even winning a small number of votes in a relatively limited number of seats could drive the Tories towards extinction so should be considered. Some people are worried about Starmer having a Blair-like majority. I’m much more worried by the continuation of what I’ve witnessed for 20 years and happy to gamble on Starmer having a Blair-like majority if it means the replacement of the perpetual rotten Tory horrorshow.
On growth:
In 2019 Vote Leave partly captured the Party, started changing it to something new, and started getting to grips with massive issues. Boris-Carrie stopped this. The Party and its pundits were happy — they babble about ‘no growth’ now but when No10 was run by a team manically focused on growth all they could do was bitch that we weren’t focused on them!
And on defence:
There’s growing recognition that the MOD is a disaster and we were right about, for example, the way drones would revolutionise war — something strongly resisted by Wallace and much of senior MOD in 2020.
> Dom and Steve Hsu were writing about this as early as 2015.
Crypto fishbowl
A newsworthy email from my bank…
This is interesting to pair with latest thinking from Russell Napier (clip for ~2 mins) who thinks most governments are now bankrupt, and will have to implement capital controls, so people can’t get their money out (and that we’re soon unlikely to be able to move money around freely).
‘The inability to issue debt at a price they can afford’
I’m not saying the government is encouraging the limit.
There have obviously been a sufficient number of crypto scams to justify banks doing this!
But interesting dovetailing of events.
Literally not being able to move more than £10,000 in a 30-day period into crypto does put us more into a ‘fishbowl’ (as Russell puts it) for us to be taxed in yet-to-be determined ways.
Bloomberg $$$
Just catching this at the top of a Bismarck Brief…
Despite a relatively small and elite user base—only 365,000 subscribers globally—Bloomberg terminals have a base price of $30,000 annually and are estimated to be around 75% of Bloomberg’s revenue.
365,000 * 30,000 = $10,950,000,000
Wow.
…the company is reportedly very profitable. CEO Michael Bloomberg, who owns at least 88% of Bloomberg, has a net worth of approximately $94.5 billion.
Belarusian PM on Ukraine
Interesting clip with Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus (and has been for 29 years), spelling out what he thinks will happen next militarily in Ukraine.
‘You have to take your head into your hands and act on the basis of reality. Act in the interests of this huge and beautiful territory.’
‘In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO’
Looking at present odds, it’s close to 50% likely Trump will be back in the White House in January 2025.
Subsequently, is it implausible that Trump pulls the U.S. out of NATO?
John Bolton said as much last week:
‘In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO.’
And from Trump’s ‘America first’ perspective, I can see why he would do this.
The amount of money the U.S. has sunk into the conflict in Ukraine is staggering – a conflict the Trump administration thinks was eminently avoidable.
Trump has been warning Europe for years: pay your own defence bills. And he urged Germany as forcibly as anyone could to get off of Russian energy. Nobody listened.
Between the UK and France, Europe has its own nuclear deterrent. Europe has had 70+ years since the Marshall Plan. Surely it’s time for Europe to stand on its own two feet.
Consider all of the ‘sacrosanct’ agreements Trump wrenched the U.S. out of: the Paris Climate Accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Do we want to say categorically he’s bluffing on NATO?
Trump doesn’t want WW3 as a result of Poland going rogue and sending its troops in to help Ukraine.
He’s been saying NATO is not in the U.S.’s interest for years. And he follows through with enough things media commentators think are just bluster that we should take him at his word.
Bolton surely thinks this will paint Trump as yet more of a mad man, but might this actually sit well with his base – the startling paradox of so many Trump policies?
From a European perspective, I of course think this would be awful.
We in the UK – and the rest of Europe – need to take the contingency of U.S. NATO withdrawal seriously.
What does that mean? Bring about a peaceful resolution with Russia before the 2024 election.
This is achievable. Unlike climate change and other world problems we’re faced with, this could be solved in a week if a few key leaders applied themselves.
Trump: ‘The U.S. is like a Third World country’
I was struck in this interview to hear Trump liken parts of the U.S. to the Third World. I’ve heard European friends living in the U.S. say this somewhat in jest in the past. Striking to hear a former President/leading Presidential candidate say it! (10 secs)
‘We are already reverting to Third World status in many ways… You look at our airports, you look at our terminals, you look at our filthy roads. We are like a Third World country.’
And a couple of stats (the of course enormously biased) Kudlow displayed – which I still thought thought-provoking, as far as how voters will perceive the two.
I think far too many people are still underestimating Trump.
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