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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As a White House Advisor to President Clinton during his entire impeachment proceedings, I’m experiencing 1998 déjà vu.

That’s as prosecutors once again work overtime to turn extramarital affairs and the efforts to keep them secret into impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors.

Except it’s worse.  Unable to get the witnesses to compose the stories they want, today’s prosecutors are discovering they can simply compose the crimes by manipulating the pleas of men desperate to protect their families. That never happened in 1998.

The Michael Cohen Sentencing Memo of November 30 took aim directly at both Cohen and President Donald Trump. It was used, unethically, to cast the president as directing a criminal conspiracy to make “secret and illegal” payments.  Then again, when has Mueller and his gang done something ethically?

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Robert Mueller’s legal team may write a damning report on Trump’s ethics, based mostly on flipping minor former business associates of Trump’s and transient campaign officials by threatening them with long prison sentences.

So far, we know that the U.S. government decided to intervene in a political campaign to help one candidate and to smear the other — under the pretext of Russian “collusion.” That would be Obama’s government helping Hillary to smear The Donald.

And so it hired or made use of spies and informants including Hank Greenberg, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater, and others to contact Trump campaign officials to catch them in supposed collusion traps.

It enlisted the help of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the British and Australians.

It misled FISA courts into granting warrants to spy on Americans and, post factum, threatened long prisons sentences with those surveilled and interviewed.

Why has Robert Mueller investigated absolutely none of this?

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The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs.

The team Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democrat lawyers, including some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge ready to go on day one.

The investigation, I believe, has come up truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the Russian government. They are now trying to find someone, anyone who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that collusion-lite.

But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president. They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator. They are literally creating the crimes.

Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing:

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He came, he saw, he took yet another step towards Making America Great Again.

President Trump scored major successes at the G-20 summit that concluded over last weekend in Argentina (12/01-02).

Specifically, the community of nations agreed in their official communique to “necessary reform” of the World Trade Organization, a top White House priority, recognized the decision of the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, and to still utilize “all energy sources and technologies, while protecting the environment.”

In addition, the Chinese promised to up their purchases of U.S.- made goods and to discuss other demands in exchange for postponing an expected hike in tariffs; President Xi also committed to designating the deadly drug Fentanyl as a controlled substance in China, and vowed to help with de-nuclearizing North Korea.

It was an all-round win-win for the president, who needed one.

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Young Kim was poised to become the first Korean-American woman elected to Congress.

Her 14-point lead was the lone bright spot on an otherwise dismal night for Orange County Republicans. But, over the past week, Republicans have watched the first-generation immigrant’s lead evaporate. With thousands of provisional ballots left to count, her commanding lead is now underwater. She lost one week after the election.

There’s no evidence of ballot box shenanigans. No need. Democrats know it’s easier to erode voter integrity laws than to stuff ballot boxes.

How does a 14-point Republican lead disappear? Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already-weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule. Here’s how, step by step.

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Like a long-running TV soap opera, the Boy Scout Show, starring the lugubrious Robert Mueller as the big bully himself, is back.

Off the air for some months as the people who brought you “Senator Spartacus Battles Brett Kavanaugh” and “Midterm Mayhem,” along with a special workshop on “How Democrats Can Manufacture Ballots at the Last Moment to Steal an Election,” the Big Bully Boy Scout is once again entertaining thousands across the fruited plain.

Well, it’s entertaining the media pundits in Washington and New York, anyway.

The producers of this interminable entertainment have learned a thing or two from other soap operas. For one thing, some of your favorite characters who had seemed to be written out of the script have made miraculous recoveries and, word has it, are signed for important parts in the entire season that just got underway.

One thing that several observers have noted is that only one tranche of characters is getting the limelight. Roger Stone suggested as much when he observed, in one of the best lines of the entire series, “John Podesta makes Paul Manafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas. Where is the New York Times?”

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Thee is a war on for hearts and minds of Americans, and it began long before the first rocks were thrown on Sunday (11/25) along the United States-Mexico border, and federal agents deployed tear gas in defense against aggressive foreign nationals attempting to force their way into our country.

But the media coverage of the border skirmish is more telling of the nature of this conflict than canisters of lachrymator.

The worst offender was perhaps the Associated Press. Making no mention of projectile attacks by foreign nationals directed at Americans, the AP quoted one Honduran to keep the narrative slanted favorably toward would-be illegal aliens. “We ran, but when you run the gas asphyxiates you more,” Ana Zuniga told the AP “while cradling her 3-year-old daughter Valery in her arms.”

What sort of mother would attempt to penetrate a heavily guarded border as part of a violent mob with a toddler in arm?

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In the last decade, every single House Democrat sent to prison for financial crimes was a Congressional Black Caucus member.

In the last twenty years, it’s been over 80%. After the midterms, the CBC has grown past a record 50 members. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting better. Power makes it worse.

Rep. Ilhan Omar is the most famous freshman member of the CBC in the 116th Congress. The CBC’s PAC boasted that she is “the first Somali-American and first Muslim woman elected to Congress”.

She’s also the first member of Congress who had to deny being married to her brother.  Then there’s her rabid anti-Semitism, her trespassing arrest, opposition to an FGM law, the campaign finance fines.

Rep. Omar is already a train wreck before taking office, but that just means she fits right in at the CBC.

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