☢️🚨☢️ 1/ Russia announced the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile is now active. The world is now one conventional strike on Russia away from nuclear war. Burevestnik’s deployment is part of a new defensive posture by Russia that seems misunderstood in the West. 🧵 2/ The key to understanding the novelty is twofold. First, its power source: a nuclear-powered ramjet engine. The mini nuclear reactor produces enormous amounts of heat. This heats the air and propels the missile.

1/ Central bank independence is probably coming to an end. In the short-term, this is due to radical and somewhat political moves made by the Trump administration. But in the long-term it is a failure of the ideas that were used to justify independence in the first place. 🧵 2/ Central bank independence is a technocratic competency that came out of the new model of "stakeholder democracy" especially associated with Clintonism and Blairism. Basically this is a euphemism for "rule by experts".

1/ WESTERN POWERS HAVE PLUNGED INTO THE BAUDRILLARDIAN SINGULARITY
Consumed by the simulation, they’ve abandoned reality. Western officials have replaced diplomatic rituals with a symbolic autism—unable to understand the actions of their foreign counterparts. @hu_conservative 🧵 2/ The West is currently experiencing crisis at multiple levels in its governance structures—but critically in the communications space.
In a few short years the West has gone from a highly coherent, professional and effective information to one marked by complete chaos. Ironically, this breakdown is generated by the West’s addiction to that same information space – and has completely destroyed its capacity to engage in rational communications or problem solving.

1/ Everything is NOT going according to plan in Milei’s Argentina. The trade deficit is reopening, the peso is once more starting to collapse and is being propped up with an IMF loan. This was obviously going to happen to anyone familiar with the Argentinean economy. 🇦🇷🧵 2/ When Milei was first elected he promised to dollarise the Argentinean economy. Like most of his schemes this was unrealistic and so it never happened.

1/ The @Harvard foreign student ban is the clearest indication that America is in the midst of a serious revolution right now - easily comparable to the end of USSR. But our preconceptions - political and intellectual - prevent us from seeing this reality. 🧵 2/ Let’s start with @Harvard. It is the keystone on the entire US elite class. The American system is a “credential aristocracy”. Harvard is the top of the credentialising pyramid. Without Harvard the rest of the system - populated with Harvard grads - starts to fail.

1/ 🇨🇦🍁What we see in Canada is the collapse of global liberalism cranking into high gear. The collapse is now leading to the proliferation of ethnic tensions that are tearing the Anglo-liberal world to pieces.🧵 2/ For many years, the British made extensive efforts to maintain the Commonwealth identity of Canada. It was one of the final bastions of British soft power after Suez.

1/ You may have seen press coverage of big anti-government rallies in Hungary where it is claimed that the opposition is now ahead in the polls. When you look into the polls, however, there is something very strange going on. Strong evidence of manipulation. 🧵 2/ The main source that you see cited for the status of polling around the Hungarian 2026 election is Wikipedia. Everyone is snobby about Wiki, but the reality is that it's a go-to for journalists and researchers.

1/ Short thread on why $NVDA is way overvalued and why the stock looks set to fall hard these next few weeks - including some very rough estimates that show a 75% price decline. 📉🧵 2/ $NVDA has been soaring on rapidly growing data centre revenue. Companies are buying up GPUs to gear up for the AI revolution.

1/ What is actually happening in Argentina? Has Milei fixed the country? Or do the deep structural problems remain - and are they getting worse? 🇦🇷🧵 2/ The main positive headline is that the Milei government’s cuts have created a government surplus. They have, but this is a distraction as the government deficit was never causing the inflation.

1/ The media isn’t reporting it but the Biden administration appears to be going into full Hitler-in-the-bunker mode and trying to destroy global energy markets to crush the EU economy and lower American living standards through more inflation to hurt Trump. 🧵 2/ It started with a new sanctions package quietly rolled out on Nov 21st a few weeks after the election. Most didn’t pay attention as the Russian sanctions have been seen as redundant by smart people for over a year now.

1/ EXCLUSIVE. After extensive investigation and months of on-the-ground reporting I am now able to provide a deep anthropological exposé of the Turboamerica Ecosystem. Join me as I explore this strange and exotic phenomenon. 🚀🇺🇸🧵 2/ The ecosystem is populated with two broad species of creatures. At the top of the hierarchy we have the ‘slopbloggers’ and at the bottom we have the ‘chudpoasters’.

1/ With China beefing up its gold reserves and largely opting out of the market for foreign holdings of US Treasuries - which is already causing liquidity problems - it’s useful to get a sense of what the Chinese are saying about this internally. 🧵 2/ Here we turn to the latest issue of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations’ journal. CICIR is an important government-affiliated think tank that has been around since 1965. So borderline official doctrine coming from this shop.

1/ Now that we have the results let’s take a look at the Shy Trump Effect and how it performed. Remember: when applying the Shy Trump Effect to the polls all we are doing is standard statistical practice. Why can’t @NateSilver538 and @FiveThirtyEight figure it out? 🤷‍♂️ 2/ Some of the swing states haven’t been called but we have some idea of spread. In what follows I will use ‘Trump’s Lead Over Harris’ as the measure. Just as in the original Shy Trump Effect prediction thread.

1/ The US election is here. If you analyze the polls properly you'll see that @realDonaldTrump is ahead of @KamalaHarris by anywhere between 2.4% and 6.9% in the swing states. The reason the media won't tell you this is because they don't understand the Shy Trump Effect. 🇺🇸🧵 2/ The polls show consistent bias against @realDonaldTrump. This is not due to cheating but due to quirks in the polling. More later. For now, let us just look at polls versus outcomes. Here are the November polls in 2020 versus the actual results. They were way off.

1/ Despite not becoming Tory leader @RobertJenrick tried to raise serious economic issues in the recent contest. Britain appears locked into 5 year old culture war issues even as its economy looks on the brink of collapse. Britain needs a serious debate on this ASAP. 🧵 2/ @RobertJenrick recognised that one key issue is energy. He advocated switching from green investments into nuclear, specifically small modular reactors (SMR). Britain needs a new energy policy ASAP but it seems highly unlikely the country can develop its own SMRs.

1/ We have been treated to 48 hours of hot garbage on what happened at the BRICS summit around alternative financing relationships. In this thread we will go through the garbage and look at what actually happened. 2/ Start with the silliest first. Some people were circulating a picture of an actual BRICS banknote, as if the BRICS would adopt a single currency like the euro. This would be like the G7 adopting a single currency. Nonsensical.

1/ What Britain is witnessing is the beginning of Dark Blairism. This is the final stage in the collapse of the country. 🇬🇧🪦🧵 2/ The first iteration of Blairism was a happy-go-lucky affair. Blair and co were Marxists of a variety, but happy Marxists who rejected state socialism and embraced cultural radicalism - a new, freer society where different groups would live in harmony.

1/ In a new study undertaken in partnership with @hiia_budapest I compare the relative geoeconomic strength of NATO and the BRICS+. We do not think a war between these is likely, but a war between members might turn these into autarkic trading blocs. 2/ Our first major finding is that the economies of the two groupings are now roughly the same size, with BRICS+ being slightly larger. This is an enormous development. Policymakers seem to imagine that we live around the year 2000 in this regard. They’re dead wrong.

1/ Here is a thread on why recent record sales by the Chinese of US Treasuries might be one of the first signs of a major fiscal crisis in the US. There is a lot of confusion about how this would work so let's go through it step by step. 2/ What matters here is not overall US government debt but rather the balance of payments. If a country runs a trade deficit this must be offset by financial inflows on the financial account to maintain equilibrium.

1/ A new paper is out with the @hiia_budapest. In it we explore reindustrialisation. With governments across the world waking up to the catastrophe caused by a decline in manufacturing we want to explore what reindustrialisation might entail and what might constrain it. 2/ Do not believe those who tell you deindustrailisation is driven by technology. A portion of it is, but most of it is a redistribution of manufacturing capacity from the Western countries to the emerging BRICS+ bloc - especially China.

1/ Ever since the pandemic the Western world has started to talk about ‘derisking’ and ‘decoupling’ which are both euphemisms for increased protectionism in the West, especially vis-a-vis China. A study I worked on with @hiia_budapest shows that this has not been thought through. 2/ Through globalisation the world has become highly interconnected. It used to be that China relied heavily on imports but now the EU is more reliant and the US is as reliant.