An important piece of news went practically unnoticed last month.  Nature, the prestigious science journal, reported (1/18) that China is now the world’s largest producer of scientific articles.

Granted, quantity does not equal quality, thus Chinese publications are not as influential as North American and European studies. Yet, China’s scientific leap forward has geopolitical consequences.

Take the case of research-led think tanks in China. An almost nonexistant entity in the country a few years back, they are now a relevant part of China’s foreign policy establishment and look actively engaged in the mission of making the “Chinese way” more palatable to foreign peoples and governments.

As such, they are the products of ingenious political engineering and marketing by the Chinese Communists.

California is imploding.

20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level.  One-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California, one of four state residents was not born in the United States,  one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, one in four homeless people in the US lives in California.

In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices.

Why? Because in California, the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.

Those rules are:

In what feels like the 27th year of the Trump-Russia-Collusion Investigation, what we have most recently learned is that a group of Russians in St. Petersburg have been trolling us since at least 2014 (what took them so long?), playing both sides against the middle.

Nevertheless, CNN et al. bleat on about Russia, Russia, Russia. I have news for Zucker, Tapper, Acosta and company.  No one's interested.  This is the boy who cried wolf times twenty.

In the process, Adam Schiff may have become the most visible Democrat on the planet, but his face is the image of slimy prevarication. He's Nixon with less hair.

Forget going from the sublime to the ridiculous. This has gone from the ludicrous to the harebrained.  The result?  Lost in a Russia-induced haze, the Democrat Party virtually no longer exists.

The OPEC cartel is to forge a permanent alliance with a Russia-led bloc of producers by the end of the year, aiming to regain control of the world crude market with a super-combine of unprecedented scale and reach.

Suhail al-Mazroui, OPEC’s president, said the two groups are working on a “framework partnership” that would tie them together closely in perpetuity after their current deal to cap production jointly expires later this year.

The new super-cartel would once have been a radical development for the oil industry. Today it’s an awkward and belated response to the threat of America’s "short-cycle" shale frackers, who can respond with lightning speed and are preventing the normal cycle of full recovery from taking hold.

The fracking industry seized on the "ROPEC" cuts to ramp up US output by over 250,000 b/d a month over the winter, with a further 1.3m b/d expected this year.  This places Mr. Putin and Mr. al-Mazroui in a painful Catch 22.

What is the endgame to never-ending wrongdoing?

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

The wide-spread criminality is monumental.  The American public is becoming more aware of it by the day, and that many of the above pictured individuals and their minions need justice to be served upon them.

But will it?  Or will they skate, getting away with everything – as a growing number of cynics believe?  Here’s why it has to be the former, for the consequences of the latter would be too destructive for our Republic to bear.

For law enforcement, Congress and even journalists, exposing misdeeds is like peeling an onion. Each layer you remove gets you closer to the truth.

So it is with the scandalous behavior of the FBI during its probe into whether President Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia in 2016. One layer at a time, we’re learning how flawed and dirty that probe was.

The latest layer is the revelations in the letter GOP Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham wrote to the Justice Department.  There are many more layers of the onion to peel, but here’s where we are now:

It increasingly appears that the Clinton machine was the secret, original source of virtually all the allegations about Trump and Russia that led to the FBI investigation. It’s the dirtiest dirty trick ever played in presidential history.