David Burbach

@dburbach.bsky.social

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Prof. of International Relations & National Security. Space, civil-military for work. Cats, science, general nerdistry for fun. Naval War College but strictly personal tweets - don't speak for US Navy or anyone else.

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I dont have any gross / scary stories, but when one guy moved out with no notice on the last day of the month, three months into a 12 month lease, that did suck. Fortunately Boston's a tight market and I found someone quickly despite it being the middle of a semester.

Alright, I have a distraction thread. What is the worst thing your flatmate ever did? I'll start: I came home early from work and caught him, wanking in MY bed 🤮

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It's interesting to read this text from 1979 alongside Posobiec's speech. This argument, that "liberals" are basically Communists who must be fought to the death before "we" are killed by "them," has long been common within a particular political subculture that used to be more fringe in the US.

Here is a full transcript of Jack Posobiec's alarmingly fascist speech about the war against "un-humans," which he delivered from the main stage of the National Conservatism Conference this week, immediately before a speech by a US Senator. Read it for yourself www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/jack-posob...

Jack Posobiec's Speech About "Un-Humans" at the National Conservatism Conferencewww.hamiltonnolan.com Read this for yourself, please.

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I think part of the failure of the media right now is that if anyone is going to suffer in the Trump regime it’s not going to be national columnists who are 65 year old straight white people making six figures. Like if they don’t seem particularly alarmed it’s because they aren’t, they’re just bored

I don't blame @andrewleber.bsky.social given the questions, but fundamentally, someone explain to me how it is in US interests to throw US tax dollars (and possibly US troops) at KSA in order to push them off of a detente with Iran into a confrontation stance. It's just madness.

Answered some questions from Kevin Huggard over at Brookings regarding a US-Saudi defense pact. www.brookings.edu/articles/mak...

Making sense of a proposed US-Saudi deal | Brookingswww.brookings.edu Andrew Leber breaks down what a proposed U.S.-Saudi deal could mean for the two countries and the Middle East.

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I will bang this drum forever: in THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45 Milton Mayer interviewed 10 ordinary Germans after WW2 to learn how fascism took hold. There was never a moment when everyone woke up:

if you’re waiting for everyone around you to wake up, you’ll wait forever. this is how the people grinding our bones to make their bread WANT you to be. paralyzed, alienated & purposeless

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It’s nice when somebody actually does the assigned reading

Personal interest I grant, but as an example of the granularity of Project 2025, "eliminate faculty tenure at the military academies and war colleges" is actually a bullet point in the chapter on plans for DOD. This time they are showing up with a detailed plan, and minions ready to carry it out

The one constant in my conversations about “Project 2025” is that almost everyone is taken aback by what’s in these plans, even people who really pay attention to politics - if not by how radical it is, then by how far-reaching, detailed, and aggressively explicit it is.

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Importing this @volts.wtf thread from the bad place. It opens with a link to a piece that used official data to establish that yes, crime rates are indeed very much down recently. But here’s the thing, Project 2025’s Trump 2.0 promises to destroy that world in which we can “know” things like this.

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This is my coauthor's library. You fucks delayed our project on the abolition of pay walls to evidence based practice. She has to spend her days fucking patrolling the physical space now

So infuriating www.oregonlive.com/crime/2024/0...

Portland State in midst of expensive, ‘marathon’ race to repair damaged library before fall classes beginwww.oregonlive.com The university expects to pay around $750,000 to fix the building.

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He gave TS/SCI material to his mistress, who was working on a hagiographic tribute book to him. He was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor for "mishandling" classified info. Any other federal employee would've got years behind bars. The fact that he continues to get platformed is enraging.

A lawyer, she practices in divorce court, restraining order court, and previously criminal court. By comparison, my mundane husband failings don't look too bad to her at the end of the day 😘

I like this idea, please tell me your favorite things about your partner 💕

This also meant an automatic "what'll we do today?" activity with buddies was go to the bookstore (i.e Powells), or the game store, or the comic store, video rental, etc. (points to Portland: big enough city but with a thriving inner core and decent transit (bus) system)

hitting up second-hand bookstores and record stores used to be this miraculous process of discovering things you'd read *about* but never got to experience

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I mean, sure, but this advice is why (for example) most surveys are useless, phone banking for elections is less effective, and just plain ridiculous to have to do. Destroying a primary communication channel under a wave of fraud should cause more tumult that "just stop using your phone." Right?

The first rule of avoiding scam calls is to never answer unknown numbers, and even some known ones. Curious? Bored? Worried it’s an emergency? Wait the extra minute it takes for the call to go to voice mail, then decide if it’s legitimate.

Sick of scams? Stop answering your phone.www.washingtonpost.com Phone scams are still hugely popular — and they depend entirely on people curious enough to answer.

ARPANET is almost closer to World War 1 than today. On military tech I try to remind myself that, for example, we are as far from the introduction of Aegis as Aegis was from Chain Home, and even if the ships look the same now one probably shouldn't assume the same about the electronics and software

That Comstock is still intact on the books is a prime example of this. There have been efforts to get rid of it even when Dems had trifectas and before Dobbs raised the stakes, but ultimately the body wasn't willing to take that tiny risk of blowback

I think one of the really under-appreciated things in the US is how much SCOTUS' statutory interpretation decisions are damaging--and they are--but almost exclusively because of /Congress/ being a failed institution.

A thought I had recently was that when I -- GenX -- was in high school, there was barely 15 years worth of high fidelity stereo recordings of pop/rock music. Vs sixty years worth today.

In a few months, the Apollo 11 moon landing will be closer to the start of World War 1 than to us

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the Supreme Court specifically said “the only reason the VRA exists in its current form is that legislators are afraid they’ll be voted out if they change it, therefore the court has a duty to rewrite the legislation to protect their careers” and we somehow didn’t just disband it

same thing as happened in Sackett last term: Alito decided on a (scientifically wrong) definition of "wetlands" that *he* thought made sense and added it into the law because he thinks government has too much power to keep water from getting contaminated (i will never not be mad about Sackett)

Been using Facebook somewhat this year and beyond it being amazing that 80% of the feed is sponsored crap, it's interesting how sure it is I want a diet of Boomer nostalgia posts. Though it has shifted from mostly classic car posts to aviation history posts, which is at least closer

Would be interested to know to what extent this reflects Facebook dying / becoming unuseable. For quite some time it was funneling millions of clicks to the right-wing media universe and now it's (???? seriously what is it even for anymore)

For my New Mexico mutuals here, flying out to LA recently we had an unusually southern track basically due W across the state on a line just north of Los Alamos -- first time scenery for me

Conference went well, as did catching up on beaches and foods in which RI is lacking

Heading to LA for the Future Military Space Technology conference, on a panel re policy developments plus military space education with Wendy Whitman-Cobb and Madison Walker. Smallish conference but if any followers are there, hope to say hello smgconferences.com/defence/northa

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Make a band milder: 9,000 Maniacs ZZ Above the Fold Pig Iron Dan Sex Muskets

make a band milder okaytreyu

Make a movie milder: The Militarized Interstate Dispute of the Worlds

Make a movie milder: The Adequate Gatsby

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Any normie CNBC analyst should be echoing Scaramucci: “You need a democracy to have effective capitalism. If you don’t, you get cronyism. You get oligarchy. You get crony capitalism. You get arbitrary & capricious administration to the law, which reduces people’s tendency to invest in your country”

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Brilliant essay from my colleague @jondmichaels.bsky.social in Foreign Affairs www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

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“Denaturalization.” Thank goodness we don’t have any fascist threads in the American political tradition we need to be concerned about moving forward.