CIVILIZATIONAL CONFIDENCE
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published in TTP on December 28, 2006. It was a plea that America regain the civilizational confidence that we had lost 20 years ago. Last Friday (2/13) that plea was answered. As Mike Ryan was writing his astonishingly brilliant HFR – which is an absolute must-read – at the same time at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was delivering an unabashedly heroic call for Western countries – what was once called Christendom – to regain their confidence in Western Civilization. Nothing could be more important that it be regained.]
TTP, December 28, 2006
Here’s a tip for all of you younger folks in your 20s and 30s. If you think the world is strange now, wait ‘till you get older. For the older you get, the weirder the world looks.
There comes a time for us when the observation of scientist J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) regarding the ultimate laws of physics governing the universe comes into play, that “the Universe is not only weirder than we suppose, but weirder than we can suppose.”
Then again, Haldane had an unusual sense of humor. His famous reply, when asked what attribute of God, the Creator of the Universe, he personally found most remarkable, was: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
There are an estimated five to eight million separate species of beetles comprising the order Coleoptera.
But far weirder to me than beetles and science’s inability to explain sub-atomic particles in terms other than probabilities is being at an airport.
Specifically, being at an airport waiting to board an incredibly complex machine that will lift me and hundreds of other people thousands of feet into the air, and land us safely on the ground thousands of miles away in a few hours – a simply astounding achievement of reason and civilization – while a few minutes before I had to take off my shoes and had a tube of toothpaste confiscated because of fear of proto-hominid barbarians chanting Allahu akhbar who want to destroy such achievements.
What is stone cold weird is that the civilization capable of such achievements tolerates the proto-hominids for a picosecond.
So we come to the key fundamental issue of our day, the outcome of which will determine our future: civilizational confidence.


Espionage isn’t what it used to be. Trench coats and dead drops are relics. Today, the battlefield is invisible: software supply chains, industrial permits, energy grids, logistics corridors. Foreign powers position factories near critical infrastructure, embed in supply chains, and quietly shape the flow of data and resources. Proximity is leverage. Legitimacy is cover. The system itself delivers the advantage.


Democrats remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress. Polls show President Donald Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating.
In yet another return to sanity, the Trump administration is now planning to roll back a key Obama administration climate "finding" that was used to regulate the daylights out of energy production in the United States. That Obama-era regulation identified six greenhouse gases requiring regulation, which included CO2.






