Dominic Cummings: prediction

Transcript context

…It’s worse in a lot of ways. I saw recently that Peter Thiel said that we don’t see much about how the NSA works and his assumption is that in lots of ways, the NSA is worse managed than the DMV. There is, unfortunately, a lot of truth to that. But the position is mixed there in the same way it’s mixed generally. You can’t just say it’s all a shit show and the people are all rubbish. In the world of intelligence services and special forces and things like that, there are obviously a lot of incredibly able people and incredibly public spirited people, people who make huge sacrifices believing in what they’re doing. But it’s also simultaneously the case that a lot of the very worst, most appalling aspects of the bureaucracy happen in that world. And part of it, obviously, is that they can classify things and use classification to hide extraordinary public disasters. For example, the situation in terms of China’s infiltration of critical infrastructure and data systems in Britain is much, much worse than practically all MPs have any comprehension of. I’ve been in meetings where these things have been discussed and the now PM, then Chancellor, have sat literally with their mouths wide agog at the extraordinary tales that they’ve been told. “What the fuck? Are you kidding me?” The number of MPs who know that is probably like a handful at most, and it’s almost all completely hidden. Similarly, on the nuclear side, I spent a lot of time in 2020 in bunkers without phones, talking to officials about the state of the nuclear enterprise, weapons safety infrastructure. And the truth is absolutely horrific there as well. And it’s horrific because for year after year and administration after administration, they haven’t faced hard problems. They’ve punted off. So you have a combination of things. You have normal catastrophic procurement, which just means it’s totally normal for everything to be fucked up. Well, that also applies to the nuclear enterprise. You also then classify a lot of that so that it’s hidden. And that means it’s even easier for things to keep going for longer. It also means that the budget problems are hidden. A lot of what happens in terms of the public discussion about M.O.D budgets and the national accounts in general is massively distorted by the fact that in reality, you have literally tens of billions of pounds that are going to have to be spent on the nuclear weapons infrastructure that don’t appear in the official accounts at all. Simultaneously, you have parts of that infrastructure that just don’t work properly. Appalling safety that’s been neglected for year after year. So that’s cyber and nuclear. Speaking of Bio, I organized a meeting on biosecurity in summer 2020 as well, given that at the time there was COVID, and we were thinking, “Is it a lab leak? Is it not? What’s the truth about all of this?” So we organized a meeting and asked various questions. er 2020 as well, given that at the time there was COVID, and we were thinking, “Is it a lab leak? Is it not? What’s the truth about all of this?” So we organized a meeting and asked various questions. I didn’t say that one of the people that I actually took to the meeting was themselves a brilliant young scientist who’d been working in the States in the Janelia lab on neuroscience. And so all these people inside the system said, “Don’t worry about this, Dominic. This will never happen. This is impossible. This is science fiction. This is ten years away. Blah, blah, blah.” And everything was about trying to reassure me that I shouldn’t really worry about this. At the end of the meeting, I asked, “So James, what do you think about this? ” Of course, these people have no idea who he was. And his answer was that pretty much everything that everyone has said is impossible or will take ten years, I have personally done in the lab in the last two or three years. Now, does that mean that the whole system for biosecurity is a disaster? No. Does it mean that everyone involved in it is a nightmare? No. There are obviously brilliant people everywhere. But across all of these things, there are budget horrors. There is a chronic inability to build long term. There are constant bureaucratic incentives to not face reality and the truth. And that’s the case across all of these secret systems. Why hasn’t there been a disaster? In many countries, the systems are as much of a shit show. And I mean, this is the West. Russia has nukes. Pakistan has nukes. And you can only imagine how fucked up their systems are. What has prevented it? You could say that the system is so fucked up that actually there was a lab leak and that was COVID. And so maybe there already has been a disaster. But what is the explanation for why other parts of the system haven’t crumbled in a disastrous way yet?…

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