$10k defense grants + divorce reality tv + where immigration reform goes to die
friday bites
$10K GRANTS FOR PARADIGM-BREAKING DEFENSE ANALYSIS
Last month, I published a piece on how no organization today captures 1950s RAND energy. To answer my lament, a shadowy cabal calling themselves The Defense Analyses and Research Corporation have decided that it’s time to build. DARC’s manifesto:
Since we launched, the team at @DefenseAnalyses has been hearing more and more from current and former defense thinktankers who are straightjacketed by the stifling bureaucracy and deep risk aversion endemic among @RANDCorporation, @CSIS, @CFR_org, @BrookingsInst and elsewhere. This is an unforced error of gigantic proportions. In this critical time, the United States must ensure that the dynamism of its strategic thinking keeps up with the pace of global change.
We must foster a new generation of defense intellectuals that follow in the best traditions of Andy Marshall, Herman Kahn, and Edward Luttwak. Instead, a sclerotic establishment continues to pile on its limp everything bagel statecraft in the pages of rags like @ForeignAffairs: saying nothing, proposing nothing, committing to nothing.
DARC seeks to create a coalition of those unwilling to wait for the retirement party to bring about change. We believe there would be much progress in defense thinking if analysts simply did not fear the career impact of saying what needed to be said.
To that end, DARC will be publishing an ongoing series of working papers as part of its new Senior Fellows program. These papers will be published pseudonymously, allowing for a candid expression of real views. We are seeking work on the following topics:
Defense Strategy: What are the sacred cows of the defense strategy and foreign policy world when it comes to the war and conflict? Why are they wrong?
Procurement and Supply Chain: What must be done to revitalize armaments innovation and production in the United States? What are authorities that could be used to accelerate progress rapidly?
Future of Conflict: Where is war and conflict going? How does conflict in other domains such as politics, culture, and gaming inform our forecast?
Thinktanks: What has gone wrong with the defense thinktank ecosystem? What can be done to make it better?
To support this work, Senior Fellows will receive between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the complexity and depth of the work.
No, this is not a joke. DM them to apply.
再见爱人4—divorce reality tv road trip
The biggest show right now in China (and by big I mean national phenomenon blocking out the sun on weibo and wechat) is a reality show where three celebrity couples all married for at least ten years and on the verge of divorces take an 18-day road trip together. It is some of the most gripping content I've ever seen.
I’ve assembled a starter pack of clips on YouTube below to get you all hooked. There are English subs which are subpar but enough to give nonspeakers the gist. We’ll be recording a special episode to discuss with Emily of the excellent
Substack next week.
For some biographical context because you'll be jumping around…From left to right in the image:
couple 1:
Maimai, housewife with no hobbies who doesn’t care about music. Li Xingliang, singer who's moderately but not super successful. They have two kids.
They bicker alot in the first few eps where she wants to be comforted emotionally and he is super logical and not empathetic, then he has his big revelation: 5 min here then the conversation continues over into next ep. Next, the husband breaks down in car and a very helpful friend helps them see things more clearly. That evening they have a conversation in bed where for the first time in their 20-year relationship about how their parents raised them!
couple 2: Jessica Alba and an even more awful Tony Robbins
Huang Shengyi, the most famous person on the show, an actress whose biggest role was 20 years ago in the classic Kung Fu Hustle. ChatGPT says her American celebrity analogue is Jessica Alba. I’d suggest Hillary Duff. Yangzi, her husband (who started out as her manager...) is a former actor now a dilettante who does antiques and livestreaming and random things. They have two kids, live mostly separately, but she really wants him to still be a part of their kids' lives and he comes in thinking there's nothing wrong with their relationship.
Scene-setting argument featuring Yangzi mansplaining why he stays up till 3am every night with his friends and doesn't on ski vacations with his kids because he doesn't want to support 'western' as opposed to Chinese hobbies (the other couples make fun of him for 'mansplaining' and he doesn't know the word and thinks its a compliment!)
Next up, another legendary argument about him not supporting her professionally where you start to see her push back! Finally, there’s a friend lunch where he talks about his childhood and argues "my parents weren’t around and I turned out fine so why should I be around for my kids..." In the latest episode Yangzi was tolerable for a day and Huang Shengyi said she didn’t want to divorce him but the whole country is hoping she comes to her senses…
couple 3: Scott Disick and someone he doesn’t deserve
Ge Xi, housewife who's now more of an influencer, can support herself and sells things online. Her husband is Liu Shuang, who used to be a very big personality on weibo but is less famous now. They have no kids.
We're gunna skip them for now as they're a little less engaging, but basically he's depressed and not nice to her and she is flowering as a person and realizing she doesn't need him.
If you're intrigued by the clips, I'd next watch the first episode as it gives broader context to the relationships.
Immigration Reform…ish
This is a thing that happened.
Divyansh continues: “The J-1 Skills List required international students from certain countries to return home for 2 years after studying in the U.S. For Chinese STEM scholars, this meant being forced back to China to share cutting-edge knowledge with CCP-controlled industries and participate in its civil-military fusion strategy. The State Department deserves credit for recognizing and addressing this glaring vulnerability. However, the fact that it took nearly 16 years to fix this speaks volumes.”
It is absurd for the Bureau of Consular Affairs to take this long to emerge from their bureaucratic coma to be 2% less terrible to America’s most talented immigrants (not that they should be terrible to any immigrants, which of course they are to thousands on a daily basis…).
This was the most obvious fix Biden’s politicals clearly have been hammering on for years. The fact that they deep stated this change of all things until December 2024 underscores the rot in CA. Here’s to hoping against hope that Trump sticks to what he said about green cards and the Rubio team takes a hammer to CA to make sure it happens.
America spends $700m a year on “Consular Systems and Technology” In 2023 OIG found practically no progress on IT modernization, uncovering that in the 2010s the “CA’s original procurement package” was so bad that “the acquisition process had to be started over, delaying implementation of the CSM program by approximately 58 months.” That five-year clock started in 2012. As of Jan 2023, of the 90 things that IT effort was supposed to modernize, only one was half-fixed. The rot runs back decades.
State shells out another $300m a year on visa adjudication that could be done for $1m of o1 tokens, and a cool billion dollars on passport services. Dear DOGE: we can shave billions off the CA budget while cutting lines to process visas and passports by letting AI do first pass adjudication!
Behold—the first defense think tank that would describe itself as BASED. (Which is, in itself, pretty based.)
Thanks for the watch recommendation!