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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It's hard to read the anonymous posting on the Daily Caller from a "senior Trump official" without coming to the conclusion that the current partial government shutdown should remain shut essentially forever. (It won't.  I know. But hear me out.)

Putting aside whatever pro-administration bias the author might have, the article confirms everything one suspects or knows about bureaucracies, especially government ones.

“They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. ‘Process is your friend’ is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.”

Well, it's not as bad as what one former Justice Department attorney told me about life inside the DOJ -- that under-utilized $200K/yr lawyers sit there all day looking at porn on their computers -- but it's bad enough.

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Let’s be clear.  This is a national disgrace of unprecedented historic proportions.

Citing unnamed “former law enforcement sources and others,” the New York Times reports (1/11) that “in the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.”

The mainstream media has touted this story as major breaking news. But, to anyone who has been paying even a modicum of attention, it is crystal clear that Comey’s firing did not precipitate the FBI’s investigation of Trump.

To the contrary, the readily available record facts demonstrate that Comey’s FBI began investigating Trump and his campaign for possible Russian collusion shortly after he won the Republican Party’s nomination.

Even though the Times would have us believe that the FBI investigated Trump out of a legitimate concern for national security, those same facts prove that, in launching and directing the investigation, the leadership of Comey’s FBI was engaging in partisan presidential politics to further their own corrupt interests. Here’s why.

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Our civilization, and especially our country, is based on “the laws of nature and nature’s God,”—standards of right and wrong independent of earthly power—preached by the Christian churches.

But clerics, including popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests have always flirted with the temptation to swap God’s laws for the rulers’ causes and prejudices. When it’s Christians versus Caesar, clerics mostly choose Caesar.

Today, a chapter in that temptation is playing out among us as America’s Catholic bishops consider how better to identify and punish some of their colleagues and the priests they supervise who have been sexually abusing adolescents, 80 percent of them boys and young men.

On November 11, 2018 under pressure from enraged parishioners, and internal resistance notwithstanding, the U.S. bishops were about to vote on some proposals better to identify and expel what, by definition, is homosexual predation. But homosexuality ranks high among the icons of progressives, robed and not. Pope Francis proceeded to denounce the accusers as “tools of the devil,” not the perpetrators themselves.

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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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