Jacob Parakilas

Nato foreign ministers demand a say in a future peace agreement for Ukraine - Monocle Nato foreign ministers meet in Brussels following a US-Russia summit in Moscow. Then: we look ahead to Australia’s teen social-media...

Latest Daily on Monocle Radio. @tessaszy.bsky.social and @jparakilas.bsky.social on the day's big stories - and the strange disappearance of the hotel bathroom door - plus @joanamoser.bsky.social meets Heidi Ewing, co-director of "Folktales". monocle.com/radio/shows/...

Innovation and adaptation at war: Supporting Ukraine’s digital transformation RAND Europe authored a series of reports on how to optimize Kyiv’s technological and policy advantages as Ukraine defends its sovereignty.

As a reminder the overall project (with a couple of shorter papers still to come) can be found here:

Wartime innovation and adaptation: Supporting Ukraine’s digital transformation | RAND share.google/GsiYKT6O7asQ...

Tooling up together This report briefly examines the factors limiting the developing of defence-industrial collaboration between Ukraine and its allies, and how collaboration can be improved.

More new research on Ukraine and defense technology from my colleagues - this one on defense industrial collaboration.

Tooling up together: How Europe and Ukraine can improve defence industrial collaboration | RAND share.google/XM9yMYGq5jYQ...

Apocryphally, Bob Dylan heard Jimi Hendrix cover All Along the Watchtower live, turned to the person next to him and said, "Yeah... That's what I meant."

(I realize that "what's your first car" is a fairly common password recovery question but when your first car was the best selling car in America for thirty years you choose a different question)

1999 Toyota Camry
A Zipcard
2010 Toyota Land Cruiser Prado
2019 Volvo V90
2021 Skoda Enyaq iV

I have a rapidly growing handful of junior colleagues who were born after 9/11, a fact I have to keep learning because my brain rejects it as impossible every time it comes up.

Oh, also: turkey is best considered as a platform for other flavors (e.g. cranberry) rather than a flavor in and of itself.

My humble contribution to the annual Turkey Discourse is that I think part of the issue is that turkey does not keep particularly well. So even if you enjoy it on Thanksgiving you're likely to find it pretty hard to stomach as your fourth consecutive leftover meal.

I am that guy, Charlie Brown

At first, yes - the scene where she wails on him in the Winfield House garden while her security detail watch impassively is hilarious - but I think it doesn't know what it is anymore.

My current mood, according to Spotify, can best be described as "seasonally appropriate menace."

Why South Korea is proposing military talks with North Korea

The folks at Monocle24 were kind enough to give me a decent chunk of time this morning to talk about our work in Ukraine on emerging technology and military doctrine - you can listen from about 29:40 here:

open.spotify.com/episode/1jrr...

The thing I struggled with for a while was assessing how far the car extended to my right and left - also never found myself on the wrong side of the road but have I put my passenger right up against a hedgerow because my brain insisted they can't be sitting to my left? Well ... not *recently* ...

Thanks Ian!

The report linked above is the first of four we're going to be publishing over the next month, along with some other ancillary materials. These were written for the ministry, but we think they're valuable for anyone trying to understand the role that technology and innovation are playing in the war.

About a year ago, the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation asked us to produce some research on a series of questions about technology and warfare. We put together a series of research teams to try and answer those questions, using interviews, fieldwork in Ukraine, and other methods.

Innovation and adaptation at war: Supporting Ukraine’s digital transformation RAND Europe authored a series of reports on how to optimize Kyiv’s technological and policy advantages as Ukraine defends its sovereignty.

So here's the first part of something that I've been working on for the last twelve months.

Not every day I get to say that.

www.rand.org/randeurope/r...

Would you also accept a Star Wars Greyhound with the captain of a New Republic Nebulon-B frigate fighting exhaustion and self doubt as they try to shepherd a convoy of transports across an asteroid belt while being picked apart by Imperial remnant ambushes?

At least the political, character, and military-technical elements by the end are all equally ludicrous, which kept me from throwing my phone at the TV screen while yelling THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS during the expository dialogue.

Boy Diplomat S3 really jumps the shark doesn't it.

Well, the years start coming and they don't stop coming
Look at my works ye mighty and start running
Didn't make sense not to live life fair
Your brain gets smart but now you despair

Hey now
You're king of kings
Get your trunk on
Its legs
Hey now
You're colossal
But nothing else
Re maaains

This is genuine praise, by the way. I am - at best - an extremely casual baseball fan and am not really following the series but the posts are excellent.

I've gotta say one upside of being in GMT and having a mostly American follows list is waking up and scrolling backwards through the desperate and unhinged Oh Please Make It Stop baseball posts. Well done everyone, a brief and welcome return to the internet of the Before Times.

... Do they sell Subarus that don't?

Allow me to balance this revelation out with an extremely unsurprising fact about Bernie, which is that - at least according to a video I saw of him turning up at his VT polling place - he drives a previous generation Subaru Forester in light green.

"Where's the safety?"

"... Who needs that though?"

(we did not learn how to disassemble an AK in shop class in central Maine in the 1990s, to be clear... Although I do remember that one of the projects we could make in shop was a gun rack)

Yeah. I actually don't know if it was in Ukraine (I mean before 2022, it obviously is now), but also an interesting question about memory because most of their mobilized infantry are in their 30s and 40s, and I'm not sure I have any comparable leftover skills from eg. my shop class in 1997...

"he picked up this" [holding up an AK] "turned it over and just said, oh yeah, I know how this works."