Among the many, many things that starkly define the differences between the Left and the right, none is more wretched than the difference in how they approach life.

Leftists, even when they are in power, are generally miserable, discontent with America as it was founded and as it is, always banging their heads against some perceived wall.

Those on the Right, on the other hand, are characterized by general good-natured love of country and the quest to save America from the radical Left's reprehensible appropriation of the culture, academia, the media, and entertainment.  Conservative people revel in their families, work, and self-reliance and their good fortune to be Americans.  They are grateful people.

Leftist are filled with anger, conservatives are filled with gratitude.  What accounts for this?

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Californians brag that their state is the world's fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.

Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.

But how long will they retain such confidence?  Not for much longer.  Here’s why and it’s horrific.

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“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town).”

These are heavy words to see written by Stanford University Professor of Economics Donald J. Harris, the father of Senator Kamala Harris, a woman who is running for president of the United States on a platform that includes reparations for slavery.

Here is a detailed account by a witness of what happened to slaves owned by Harris’s family. But, is Harris personally responsible for the plight of slaves hundreds of years ago? Of course not. She is no more responsible for actions taken by those in her family’s past than any white person in America is responsible for actions taken by their ancestors.

Yet since she’s made atonement for past sins a current policy platform, perhaps she should lead by example and be the first among us to take responsibility; do what she’s asking much of the rest of the country to do and pay dearly for past transgressions.

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The annual presidential “State of the Nation” address to the Federal Assembly (upper chamber of the Russian parliament) is a big political show in Russia, which tells little about the state of the country but much about the mood in the ruling elite.

The address, delivered by President Vladimir Putin last week (2/20), revealed worries in the Kremlin about the spreading discontent and declining popularity of the leader who took charge nearly 20 years ago (Moscow Echo, 2/20).  His keen attention to particular social problems was supposed to restore the population’s confidence in the benevolence of the supreme ruler (Newsru.com, 2/22).

Putin made no clear attempt to present a coherent ideology purportedly underpinning his reign. Moreover, in his speech, the Russian president only briefly touched on foreign policy. It is, therefore, quite illuminating to note the international matters of major importance to Moscow that he specifically omitted.

And the one domestic issue that everyone except the ruling elite cares most about.

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During the Lunar New Year holidays this month, political circles in Beijing were abuzz with this question: “Who, or what, are ‘black swans’ and ‘gray rhinos’?”

This followed a major speech given by President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping at the Central Party School (CPS) last month, in which the 65-year-old leader raised the highest alert for Party officials to “be on guard against black swans and keep watchful for gray rhinos” (jingti hei tian’e, fangfan hui xiniu / 警惕黑天鹅, 防范灰犀牛) (People’s Daily, January 22).

Noting that China’s national security and stability were under multiple threats from within and without, the “core leader” warned: “We must keep our highest alert about ‘black swan’ [i.e., unforeseen] incidents and take steps to prevent ‘gray rhino’ [i.e., known risks that are ignored] incidents.”

At first, the Beijing buzz was these threats are external, coming from an increasingly successful Trump administration in confronting China.  Now comes the realization that Xi means internal threats to his power and that of the Chinese Communist Party.

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He helped conceive a hoax so outlandish that only the most gullible, craven, or witless person could believe it.

The attack, as he called it, allegedly was executed by mysterious and politically motivated thugs with the intent to inflict harm. It exploited the political climate of the moment given that the chief goal of the ruse—and of the perpetrator himself—was to sow division in an already-fractured American populace for his own gratification.

Lawmakers, journalists, and celebrities acted as accomplices, allowing themselves to be duped and conferring immediate legitimacy to the event. As authorities began to expose the hoax, the mastermind lashed out, blasting his detractors and making incendiary accusations.

No, I am not talking here about Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” actor who concocted an elaborate story about how MAGA-hat wearing hoodlums attacked him in the middle of a frigid night on an underground street in downtown Chicago.  I am talking about…

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Democrats are fighting mad — at each other. For once, President Trump is not the prime target of their rage.

Amazon’s decision to scrap plans for an HQ2 campus in New York sent the circular firing squad into action. The blue-on-blue attacks pit the far left against the far, far left in yet another front of the party’s civil war.

In addition to sharp differences about a Green New Deal, taxes, socialism, Medicare-for-all and open borders, Dems are now split over how and whether government should work with the private sector to create jobs and boost the tax base.

But while the battle still rages and analysts study the entrails of Amazon’s decision-making, here’s a thought: What if both sides of the Dem battle are wrong? What if both sides are causing the epidemic of the blue-state blues?

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” wrote the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in the opening to The Call of Cthulhu, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

In the Lovecraftian mythos, this refers to the occult world of the Great Old Ones, eldritch gods from outer space, as old as time itself who lie beyond our ken, dead but still dreaming. If we could only grasp their existence and see how fragile our imaginary world really is, we would go mad. Thus, we go on believing in an illusion and subconsciously hope Cthulhu and Azathoth never show us their true faces.

With the Democrat Party embracing full hardcore totalitarian Leftism, the secret to being a successful Democrat is very similar.

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While President Trump was holding his Monday (2/11) rally in El Paso for a packed stadium, the hapless Beto O'Rourke was hosting his own pathetic anti-wall protest, his "March for Truth," a quarter of a mile away.

His little march attracted about three hundred people.  Beto spoke Spanish while his supporters waved  Mexican flags, and his gathering was close enough to the Trump event that the big rally's music could be heard.

It may be safe to say that Beto's potential run for president is over before it has begun.  He is a self-serving, anti-American intellectual lightweight like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and every other Democrat who has thrown his hat in the ring for 2020.

There is a famous poem by Sir Walter Scott published in 1805 that perfectly describes people like Beto, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Schumer, Harry Reid , Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Left:

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“We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom — and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”  --President Donald Trump, February 5, 2019

This was the President’s Declaration of War upon “Socialism,” i.e. Marxism, Fascism, and Communism.

After all, the three greatest mass-murderers of all time were “Socialists” – Hitler the National Socialist (30 million), Stalin the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (40 million), Mao the leader of “the Socialist revolution” of the Chinese Communist Party (60 million).

The reason Trump's outspoken opposition to socialism is so timely, more necessary than ever in our country, is the catastrophe of America’s schools. While few were noticing, our educational system -- from the earliest years through college -- has been turning, indeed has turned for the most part, into a virtual indoctrination program for socialism.

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The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democrat Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths.

The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of its history.

As the party of infanticide and open borders, they are indulging in a frenzy of primal extremism from which they will not recover.

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There were laughter, tears, raucous cheers and awkward silences. But more than anything else, it was a punch in the gut that President Trump delivered Tuesday night.

Time after time, on issue after issue, he laid down a marker about the remaining two years of his term — and the outlines of his re-election campaign.

Speeches that are too long — as this one was — often smother their key points in windy verbiage. But there was no mistaking Trump’s meaning or his intent to seek a second term on the platform of a strong economy, strong defense and secure borders.

The state of the union is frighteningly divided and hostile, but the state of the president’s aim is sound. For all the talk of chaos and churn in his administration, Donald Trump knows what he’s about. As he always has, he’s playing to win.

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Of the many memorable scenes and sequences from the film, “Casablanca¸” one that stands out for both its subtlety and its continuing resonance comes when the Bulgarian Bride—her name is Annina Brandel in the script—sits down with Rick Blaine (Bogart) and asks for some very important advice. Watch the scene above first before we discuss it.

It’s a quandary to which we can all relate. One of her lines of dialogue, however, has an especially timely meaning: “The Devil has the people by the throat.”

In the context of the film, the Devil is Hitler and the Nazis; the Brandels were lucky to escape with their lives. Today, the Devil is much closer to home – right here in America, wearing a pink pussy hat on his horns.

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Not that President Trump will get any credit.

The news obsesses over the recent government shutdown, the latest Robert Mueller arrest, and, of course, fake news — from the BuzzFeed Michael Cohen non-story to the smears of the Covington Catholic High School students.

But aside from the weekly hysterias, the world has dramatically changed since 2016 in ways we scarcely have appreciated.

The idea that China systematically rigged trade laws and engaged in technological espionage to run up huge deficits is no longer a Trump, or even a partisan, issue.

The world did not fall apart after the U.S. pulled out of the flawed Iran nuclear deal. Most yawned when the U.S. left the symbolic but empty Paris Climate Accord. Ditto when the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In retrospect, most Americans accept that such once-controversial decisions were not ever all that controversial.

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Fascism and Communism—those tragic sisters from the 1900s that led to the greatest human suffering, poverty, and mass starvation in human history—should barely be remembered today.

Instead, they are ascendant in the Democrat Party. Cultural Marxism and fascist socialism are the new Democrat chic. The entire country is in an uproar. Everyone feels a sense of doom and gloom.

Conservative pundits have latched onto the fun words “hysteria” and “Trump derangement syndrome.” These words, though cute, mask the seriousness of what is actually happening.  The Democrat Party has become the enemy of America and all it stands for.  It’s time to get real about this.

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After news broke of Robert Mueller’s pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone's home Friday morning in Florida by twenty-nine heavily-armed agents in nineteen vehicles, lights flashing, CNN serendipitously on hand to film the raid, millions of us realized once and for all that we are no longer living in the America we knew and loved.

Mueller was appointed to conceal and obliterate the volumes of evidence of crimes committed by Hillary Clinton; her campaign; and a group of higher-ups in the FBI, DOJ, and CIA, all of whom were involved in a scheme to prevent Trump from being elected.

Mueller’s pure Gestapo tactics make it catastrophically clear that America is no longer a constitutional republic, a nation of laws and justice.  An unelected, tangential officer of the DOJ has for two years abused his position of power to destroy many lives in the cruelest of ways with impunity.

No one is stopping him and his band of legal bullies. Including the President of the United States.

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Unlike the year before, Russia entered 2019 with low expectations and deepening disappointment in its own faltering revival.

In contrast, the World Cup provided a focus for anticipation in 2018, and the presidential elections, pre-determined as the outcome was, raised hopes for increases of pensions and social benefits. Those hopes turned into frustration with the upping of the retirement age by five years.

The smoldering conflict with Ukraine no longer generates any “patriotic” mobilization. Public attention and concerns are currently centered on domestic problems. As many as 57 percent of respondents foresee a probable looming economic crisis, while only 32 percent do not (Levada.ru, December 24, 2018).

President Vladimir Putin still insists on achieving an economic “breakthrough,” but his orders cannot alter the reality of stagnation. Illustratively, the World Bank revised its growth forecast for Russia downward to 1.5 percent; though, even that appears overly optimistic (RBC, January 9, 2019).  The bad news doesn’t end there.

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China’s Far West of Xinjiang is twice the size of Texas and almost as big as Alaska at 640,000 square miles.  It borders Mongolia, a tiny bit of Russian Siberia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, a tiny bit of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Tibet.

Beijing officially calls it the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as almost 50% of Xinjiang’s 25 million people are Uyghurs (wee-gurz), a Turkic Caucasian ethnic group that is Islamic in culture and religion.  Turkic-Islamic ethnicities such as the Kirghiz and Kazakhs comprise another 10%.

To many of them, Xinjiang (“New Frontier” in Mandarin) is East Turkestan, looking upon the 5 “Stans” of the former Soviet Union collectively as inspirationally independent West Turkestan.

Not long ago, together they were almost 100%, but due to massive relocation of millions of Han Chinese to Sinicize the region, their demographic dominance has been seriously diluted by Beijing design.

Thus it is tragically ironic that this “Uyghur Autonomous” province has been increasingly turned into a concentration camp imprisoning vast numbers of Uyghurs and other Moslems.

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The behavior of our national media over the past two and a half years has been contemptible.  Our Democrat Party with their Obama-weaponized FBI, DOJ, and CIA broke nearly every law on the books in their effort to destroy Donald Trump.

They have failed every step of the way but have not given up.  They continue to demean themselves, and this past weekend was a two-fer.

The fake BuzzFeed story that should have been dismissed out of hand was gleefully embraced by every pundit on every news outlet.  They could not contain their joy at yet another "bombshell" that would lead to impeachment.  Only Fox held back for confirmation.  When Mueller's office released a statement that "the BuzzFeed story was inaccurate," they were devastated.

Next came the wholesale sliming of a group of Catholic schoolboys who did nothing but gather to wait for their bus after marching in the pro-life rally.  This has brought the degeneracy of the Democrats and their media propagandists into full flower.

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As the shutdown heads into its fourth week, the nation is getting used to the radical idea that we can actually do without the fleets of bureaucrats who, in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, have been "sent hither to harass our people and eat out their substance."

For decades, as the federal leviathan has grown ever larger, and poked its voracious snout into all manners of unconstitutional fodder, the people of the United States have largely sat idly by, hoping to catch some of the droppings from the creature's maw in the belief that it will not eat them too as it forages merrily along.

Still, life has gone on otherwise pretty much as before -- and the longer the shutdown continues, the more easily the way we were can be forgotten.

So the longer Donald Trump wrangles with his two superannuated cartoon antagonists, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the stronger the president's position becomes.

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America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges.

On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan.

On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences of America’s universities are expensive engines of propaganda and intolerance.

Few believe any more that current liberal-arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge.

By and large, the bachelor’s degree, even in a liberal-arts major, no longer certifies that a graduate will be able to read, reason, compute, or draw on a body of knowledge far more effectively than those without an undergraduate degree.

The decline of the university has been an ongoing tragedy since the 1960s, but the erosion has accelerated because of ideological bias and its twin, incompetence. Here are five major recent and additional catalysts.

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Just as the Republican Party is purging itself of hackneyed lawmakers, bitter neoconservative commentators, and insatiable interventionists, along comes Mitt Romney to remind us of what we definitely are not missing.

In a late New Year’s Day sermon published in the Washington Post, the incoming senator expressed his disappointment in the president and, by extension, in all of us. It was filled with the sort of juvenile platitudes that at one time mollified Republican voters, but now either amuse or enrage them.

The reaction on the Right to Romney’s missive was fast and furious. His niece, head of the Republican National Committee, sided with Trump, while the President again teased the man he once teased with the prospect of a cabinet position, tweeting yesterday morning:

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Washington has long been a stranger to principle other than the principle of self advancement.

Yet, something new seems to be emerging across the country. Politicians have long felt the need to disguise raw political agendas in the pretense of principle. That pretense has disappeared.

In this Age of Rage, voters seem to have no patience, let alone need, for leaders speaking of abstract principles. They want immediate unequivocal action in supporting or opposing President Trump.

For Democrats, that all-consuming purpose has led to the abandonment of core unifying values, including many that first drew me to the Democrat Party. While they would vehemently deny it, Trump is remaking the party in his inverse image. This past month shows how far that transformation has gone.

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Pittsburgh—It’s just before 7 p.m. on a frigid December night, and already the Allegheny Elks Lodge No. 339 on the city’s North Side is filling up quickly—both the long bar and the tables in the adjacent hall.

There’s a woman collecting for a 50-50 raffle. (You may as well give in; she won’t take no for an answer.) Elks volunteers young and old are manning the bar and the kitchen, where the special tonight is a gourmet grilled cheese (black forest honey ham, Gouda cheese, and bacon).

Upstairs a six-lane sparkling white and red art deco bowling alley straight out of the 1920s is filled with young people from a local league. The floor above that is where lodge meetings are held; it is a beautiful ballroom also straight out of the Roaring ’20s.

The beer is cheap and cold. The food is cheap and tasty. Soon the entire building is packed to the rafters, people lining the walls in the hall and the bar. It’s as if Frank Capra made a movie in this century.

Civic life like this has been dying for decades, accelerated by the isolating effects of gaming and smartphones, and the anti-social components of social media. Today, the sense of community, security and civic duty that fraternal organizations can cultivate is returning.

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Thanks to the flow of foreign information into the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea is changing from the inside out — and Kim Jong Un is running to catch up. The growing split between the North Korean people and the state is proving difficult for the Kim regime to reverse.

The influx of foreign media and knowledge has been growing for years, and like the red pill from The Matrix, it has the power to transform North Koreans’ understanding of the world. It permeates all levels of North Korean life, and civilians are becoming increasingly self-aware.

Foreign media infiltrating the North — South Korean dramas, in particular — have done the most to reshape the way North Koreans view their southern neighbors and, in turn, their own realities. From fashion to an awareness of human rights, foreign ideas now increasingly color the lives of ordinary North Koreans.

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The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.”

By “rule of the best” ( the Greek aristokratia), I mean the ancien régime was no longer understood to suggest wealth and birth (alone), but instead envisioned itself as a supposed national meritocracy of those with proper degrees, and long service in the top hierarchies of government, media, blue-chip law firms, Wall Street, high tech, and academia.

The 2016 election and refutation of the ruling class did not signal that those without such educations and qualifications were de facto better suited to direct the country. Instead, the lesson was that the past record of governance and the current stature of our assumed best and brightest certainly did not justify their reputations or authority, much less their outsized self-regard.

In short, instead of being a meritocracy, they amount to a mediocracy, neither great nor awful, but mostly mediocre.  Let us count the ways they are and how Donald Trump is their repudiation.

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How as Americans do we explain the intransigence of the Left when it comes to national security?  'Tis a mystery.

These people, these Democrats in Congress, are among the most privileged persons on the planet.  They have enjoyed, more than most, the blessings bequeathed by the Founders, the authors of the Constitution.  Yet they are determined, like Obama, to transform us into something this nation was never meant to be: a land without borders.

While all of them are on record supporting a border wall in the past, now that Donald Trump is president, they all oppose it with every fiber of their being.  They know that it will work, and they cannot abide Trump having a win.  These people – Schumer, Pelosi, Gutiérrez, etc. – are truly venal.

It should be obvious to every American by now that our “progressive” regressive Left does not have the best interest of Americans at heart.  Quite the opposite.  They have become a Curse blighting our beloved country.

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Regarding my TTP article last week (12/20), The Left Vs. Thermodynamics, Julius Wroblewski on the Forum reminded me that “Many of the 9/11 Islamo-kamikazes and Aum Shinriyo gassers were STEM boys, after all.”

Great point. Julius.

STEM alone is not the central point. As Julius noted, a STEM education can be a fine thing but is not the solution by itself.

From my personal experience, there are problems with STEM programs as presently taught. I have been one of the State of Ohio finalist judges for the State Science Fair since 1991. I was a regional judge before that.  These many years of judging reveal some trends.

First, the understanding of the Scientific Method has eroded in the public schools  The second trend is an erosion of an understanding of thermodynamics itself and specifically the concept of entropy. And that enables us to defeat the left with it.

To be a leftist, fascist, communist, Islamic terrorist, etc. is to have a worldview that excludes universal thermodynamic laws. Their designs always fail given enough time. Always.

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Merry Christmas, America! As we gather with families and enjoy this holiday season, let us pause to consider: things could be much, much worse. Some perspective is in order.

The Christmas holiday this year delivers a welcome and much-needed time out. Our country is anxious on many fronts. Our nation’s leaders in Congress appear unable and unwilling to lead, and financial markets have turned volatile and fearful, giving up the gains of the past year as traders prepare for a slowdown.

Meanwhile, Democrats – especially their media propagandists and those planning to run for president in 2020 -- are desperate to topple President Trump.

So, where’s the good news?  How about this? Notwithstanding the gloom factory that is the liberal media, the country remains upbeat.  They know it’s a MAGA Merry Christmas.  Our troops in Iraq sure know it.

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[Note by JW: Here is more proof that so much of the unique value of To The Point lies in the brilliance of TTPer contributions to the Forum. Duane Purvin’s comments on Victor Davis Hanson’s The Evil of the Global Elite (12/18) are an example, while Mike Ryan’s are simply breathtaking.  Again, the best Christmas Present you can give a friend or loved one is a Gift Subscription to TTP!]

Duane Purvin said:

“Even the Constitution is being re interpreted, the New Testament, Gender, conversion of concepts of individual liberty/freedom into identity politics and Reality as recognized by an educated, sentient man as now created and fed to humankind in the trough of social media, propaganda, omission and lies.”

The problem is a product of the humanities departments at the elite universities as Hanson pointed out. The sciences and applied science departments are much less of a problem.

Why? The intersection of Rationalism and Empirical science is known as thermodynamics.

Nothing like it exists within the programs favored by the Left. Show me a conservative university department, and I will bet a box of donuts that thermo is part of the curriculum in one form or another. Either to be taught as physical laws or as spiritual or philosophical virtues.

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It's bad enough that Russia’s only aircraft carrier was damaged in a mishap involving the country’s largest floating repair dock -- the only one big enough to maintain the flagship of the Russian Navy.

What's worse is that the decades-old dock is now sitting on the bottom of Kola Bay, not far from the major Arctic Circle city of Murmansk.

But even that may not be the extent of the bad news.

The dock, even if it is raised to the surface, may be beyond repair, meaning Russia’s only aircraft carrier, several of its largest naval ships, and at least one ballistic-missile submarine may not be able to be serviced for months, if not years.

That’s a not-insignificant setback for Kremlin efforts to upgrade the country’s fleet, experts say, an effort that parallels a larger ongoing modernization of Russia's armed forces.  Indeed, Putin’s plans for Russia’s Navy are sinking.

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All of Washington is focused on the political peril President Trump faces from Robert Mueller's investigation. But the Mueller probe could very well turn out to be a disaster, not for Trump, but for the Democrats.

The special counsel was appointed to investigate whether Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. If Mueller finds incontrovertible evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, then the president will be -- and should be -- removed from office.

But it is very likely that Mueller will not find evidence that Trump conspired with Russia – resulting in Mueller or federal prosecutors in New York's Southern District finding evidence for some other charge unrelated to a conspiracy with Russia -- such as Trump's hush-money payments to alleged former mistresses or crimes related to Trump's family business.

That would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats, for three reasons.

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Moscow’s dispatch of strategic bombers and heavy transport planes to Venezuela last week (12/10), and its subsequent obliging Washington to remove them only four days later (12/14), highlights both what has and has not changed in the in the “new cold war” between Russia and the United States.

Indeed, as Moscow-based military expert Aleksandr Golts argues, the appearance of two Russian Tu-160s in Latin America this week highlighted that the present-day hostility between Russia and the US could far more easily go “hot” than was the case in the “old” Cold War (Otkrytyye Media, 12/12).

That’s because, given the weakness of the Russian Federation today compared to the strength of the Soviet Union in the past, Russia’s nuclear stockpile remains the only resource Putin has that allows him to claim any kind of superpower status for his country.

This results in a foreign policy of “Putin Realpolitik” –  not the sophisticated kind reflected in the works of Henry Kissinger, where the major powers balance economic, political and security interests, but a primitive kind that’s dangerously delusional..

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It’s time for all of us to admit that Alphabet, Inc. is the 21st century equivalent of Ma Bell: it is an almost all-controlling monopoly that restricts consumer choice in order to maximize profit for the company.

We all know what Ronald Reagan did to AT&T. He broke up that monopoly so Americans could have real choices and the free market could actually work.

So it’s time for the Trump Administration to break up the Alphabet, Inc. monopoly. But unlike the Ma Bell monopoly, Alphabet, Inc.’s monopoly—which includes the search-engine behemoth Google—isn’t just about greater competition and more choices for the American people.

It’s about so much more: free political discourse and our privacy rights as citizens.

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Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?

The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline?

Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers?

The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?

The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit?

The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?

The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.

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Yesterday (12/10), I received an email from the Motion Picture Academy informing me that if I didn't pay my dues, I wouldn't be able to vote in the Oscar nominations in a couple of weeks.

I debated for a few minutes.  Dues have inflated since I joined in the eighties and are now a hefty $450 per annum.  Nevertheless, spendthrift that I am, I bit the proverbial bullet and went for it. Call it the inability to break a bad habit. Or an addiction to the non-stop influx of screeners that arrive at my door every December, not that I watch many of them. (I suspect I'm not alone in that.)

But it wasn't just the money that had made me hesitate.  On one level, I wouldn't have re-upped up for $4.50, let alone $450.  I mean -- what was the point of this? Does anybody care who wins the Oscar anymore?  I certainly don't -- and I'm a voter.

Here’s why this year the Oscars will continue on their downward spiral toward life support.

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