Which country has the biggest interest in stopping the expansion of the oil and gas industry in Europe and North America? Answer: the Russian Federation is highly dependent -- to the tune of several hundred billion dollars -- on the export of these commodities, particularly to Europe.

It is rational, then, for the Russians to spend upward of a few hundred million dollars to influence politicians to stop gas and oil projects in those countries, with the goal of limiting supply, and thus protecting the Russian revenue stream.

Researchers at the Environmental Policy Alliance, however, have just produced a very solid, well-documented report, which shows how tens of millions of dollars from Russian interests apparently flowed from a dark company in Bermuda through opaque environmental bundlers, such as the Sea Change Foundation, into major environmental lobbying organizations, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters.

There have been a number of press stories during the past week on Russian support of American environmental groups, including a very detailed description of the money flows, by Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon.  In truth, these reports just scratch the surface of the Kremlin bribery operation paying off not just enviro groups but White House people as well.

Entropy is a term from physics that describes the tendency for matter to move from order into disorder. Life can be seen as deliberately working against entropy.

With our minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. The habits that we practice daily, weekly, monthly; they are all based on neural pathways that we have established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines. These habits – if they are good ones - help us to resist entropy and have a sense of meaning, purpose and direction.

When you have a plan, and you are persistent with that plan, your habits become your allies. They work for you to reach your goals, so that you don’t have to work against your habits. What you create through your own fight against entropy is the masterpiece of your life.

The Jade Steps
Chapter Nineteen: The Marriage of Teculehuatzin

For more than two weeks, every day in Tlaxcala seemed more enjoyable to the Spaniards than the previous. The friendship shown to them by the Tlaxcalans was overwhelming. Children were constantly giving them flowers. Everywhere they went in the city, they would be invited into homes to share a meal. Older women, Señoras, were always bringing them food in their quarters, and there seemed to be a never-ending number of young ladies, Señoritas, desiring to share their quarters with them.

One reason for such an abundance of hospitality was the Spaniards’ strict obedience to Cortez’s stern command to take nothing – nothing – from the Tlaxcalans except what was given to them. They vividly remembered when Cortez caught a soldier named Mora stealing a turkey from a village on the way to Tlaxcala and ordered him hung. Mora would have died had not Pedro de Alvarado cut the rope with his sword at the last moment.

While the men were enjoying themselves, Cortez spent as much time as possible with King Xicotencatl and Chief Maxixcatzin teaching them about Christianity.

President Obama has made a not-so-subtle attempt to personalize his administration's war on "climate change" by linking it with his daughter Malia's asthma.

Nice try, Mr. President. But the evidence just doesn't stack up.  It's one more farce for the Climate Fascists.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the EPA's Gina McCarthy and the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have lent their ‘expert' support to the ‘global warming means more asthma' thesis  -- all a classic case of doing their masters' bidding.

Problem is, despite this impressive show of concerted ‘expert' strength, the connection between climate change and asthma is flimsy on stilts.

This becomes evident when you examine the claims made by the CDC website. It certainly sounds authoritative. (How could America's leading national public health institute possibly get it wrong where health issues are concerned?) But none of them bears close scrutiny.

Let's examine them one by one.

If you were a librarian, would you put President Obama's recently delivered State of the Union address in the fiction or nonfiction section?

All presidents puff their accomplishments and gloss over their failures, but no previous president has been so blatant in just making up "facts" and numbers that are so disconnected from reality.

The Islamic State (which is also called ISIS or ISIL) is gaining territory, yet the president said we are "stopping ISIL's advance."

He said, "We're upholding the principle that bigger nations can't bully the small, by opposing Russian aggression." In the year since his last State of Union address, Russia has grabbed Crimea, taken control of part of Eastern Ukraine, and continues to take more territory in Ukraine. If this is success, what would failure look like?

The president's description of the economy was also a trip through Fantasy Land.