Contributing editor at Arena Magazine
San Clemente, CA
Joined May 2010
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Brian retweeted
NASA’s giant Echo satellites in the 1960s. Essentially enormous metallic balloons designed to reflect radio signals across the planet.
Brian retweeted
Bill Gates being the undisputed richest guy in the world and spending all his money on mosquito nets, versus Musk building starships and doing stuff like this pretty well sums up where we were in the first part of the century v. now.
Whitepill.
Brian retweeted
TIL that CAD came out of the Cold War, via @bbalkus’s piece in @arenamag, “The Drawing Machine: How the United States Invented Industrial Software.”
The Soviets tested an atomic bomb in 1949, the Pentagon had no way to track their bombers in real time, and MIT’s answer (Lincoln Lab, SAGE, the TX-2 computer) eventually produced Sketchpad, the ancestor of every CAD program. War efforts have historically produced the tools the rest of society uses a generation later, the current defense and industrial buildout will be no different.
In 1972, Ben Rich, who would go on to run Lockheed’s Skunk Works (its advanced R&D group), wrote a memo calling computers a scourge of the industry because he thought they made engineers lazy and blunted expertise. A few years later one of his own engineers wrote a program called Echo 1 to predict radar cross-section, and Skunk Works used it to design the prototype for the F-117 stealth fighter.
Similar claims of builder laziness have followed agentic engineering tools as they’ve spread over the past few years. But the expertise moves with the tools rather than disappearing. People become experts at a task, encode that expertise in software, then move on to becoming experts at the next one, and the loop repeats.
Brian retweeted
The future belongs to whoever builds the machines that design machines.
In @arenamagdotcom, Fellow @bbalkus traces CAD from Cold War air defense to Bezos’s push for an “artificial general engineer," and outlines why China wants to get there first.
arenamag.com/articles/the-dr…
Brian retweeted
Does a nation, its laws, its institutions, its economy, its rulers… owe special favor to the well-being of its own people over that of the rest of the world?
Simplest test of political legitimacy imaginable. And yet many, even on the nominal right, can’t pass it.
Brian retweeted
Obviously true. I believe in Fullback Nationalism.
How Republicans decided it's okay to hate South Asians theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
Brian retweeted
Just as all knowledge-making institutions are reaching historic nadirs of trustworthiness and competency, a technology arrives—virtually overnight—to completely usurp their authority and make them obsolete in almost every way.
You will appreciate the blessings of AI soon enough.
Brian retweeted
Does anyone remember this amazing story? On July 2, 1982, a truck driver from California flew 16,000 feet into the sky in a lawn chair. Larry Walters, 33, from San Pedro, had dreamed of flying his whole life. He bought 42 eight-foot helium weather balloons, tied them to a regular Sears lawn chair, strapped on a parachute, packed a BB gun to pop balloons to descend, a CB radio, sandwiches, and a six-pack of beer.
He expected to float a few hundred feet above his backyard. He cut the rope and shot up like a rocket — to 16,000 feet. He drifted directly into the main approach path for LAX. Two airline pilots radioed the tower: they had just passed a man in a lawn chair holding a gun at 16,000 feet. For 45 minutes, he floated over Los Angeles, freezing cold, too scared to shoot balloons because he might fall. Finally, he started popping balloons one by one and slowly descended.
He landed tangled in power lines in Long Beach, California, causing a blackout. When police arrested him, they asked why he did it. He said, "A man can't just sit around." The FAA fined him $4,000. He became a national folk hero — Lawnchair Larry — and inspired the movie Up.
Brian retweeted
One of the coolest uses of a text effect that I’ve seen in a long while. Bravo @hermeuscorp!
Brian retweeted
We as a country should not allow Boeing to discontinue the 747. It is the most beautiful jetliner.
Brian retweeted
In his debut for the New Outlook, @Daniel_Bring writes on the permitting regime ended American energy dominance.
America produced 60% of the world's oil at the outset of WWII and supplied 85% of Allied wartime demand.
Then, in 1970, we decided the question was no longer where you can't build, but whether you can build at all.
Brian retweeted
Air Force opened its football practice with low passes from an F-16 flown by the team's former fullback Nate Walker, now a fighter pilot 🇺🇸
Brian retweeted
$200B/y or $2T/10y. Seemingly no segment of the Democratic coalition is seriously thinking through fiscal constraints and/or how their competing priorities interact with one another.
Brian retweeted
Samo Burja on why America should hand 50,000 green cards to Europe's best young engineers:
"What I would honestly do, and this is politically completely impossible, is run Operation Paperclip Maximizer. Give 50,000 green cards to German engineers and tell them, you can come work here for 150,000 euros, and that's big money in Germany, and extremely cheap here. Then those high-precision engineers could be employed at US companies that would scale."
"It's not gonna be in US-allied nations, because all of those companies are super old. The one exception is South Korea. Japanese companies are dominated by the old, German companies are dominated by the old. The CEO of Rheinmetall mocked drone production in Ukraine as if it's something housewives assemble in their spare time. That's not the kind of attitude where the young engineers get to do the cool stuff."
"If we let that talent from Europe, and frankly Japan, an immigration opportunity directly targeted at entire industrial verticals, to just take them en masse and bring them here, US companies would make very good use of them."
"We do have some US talent, but it takes players like Elon, and he'd have to prioritize. Tesla would need a capital injection and would need to prioritize its humanoid robots over its cars, and then I'd totally believe it could do that. But why do that when you can still make the cars even better, keep your share in China, and eat up the remainder of the legacy car companies here in the US?"
"I think every car in the US basically should be a Tesla based on fundamentals today. I think it should be the iPhone of cars."
@SamoBurja @bismarckanlys
Brian retweeted
Littoral combat is about to get genuinely insane
Yesterday, using multiple one-way attack surface drones, CENTCOM forces successfully struck a submarine and ship maintenance facility in Iran. Three Corsair unmanned surface vessels hit the port at Bandar Abbas Naval Base, marking the first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations. Last night’s strikes degraded Iran’s ability to continue attacking commercial shipping.
Brian retweeted
I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.
I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:
• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.
• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.
• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)
• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.
• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.
• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.
• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.
• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.
• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.
• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.
• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.
That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.
What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸
