When you get to the extremes, the left and right wing become indistinguishable. Fascism is the control by the state for the good of the state. Communism is the control by the state for the good of the people. The common bond here is the control by the state. The original concept of the United States was that the people controlled things, not the state. A very different philosophy.

All the fascist (right wing) states practiced torture - Germany, Spain, Italy. The one communist (left wing) state practiced torture - Russia. What political faction in America started practicing torture, defended the use of torture, and continues to practice torture today (irrespective of the fact that they have some Democratic enablers)?

Of all the major players in WWII, only one - Germany made crusade against a flavor of religion. Russia doesn't count since they simply outlawed all religion as the opiate of the masses and tried to stamp them out (although as Bill Watterson pointed out, Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet). Who is making crusade today? Well, that'd be the United States. But we're making the same crusade that Christianity has made for more than a millennium - against Islam, not Judaism.

It was Christ who said, "So as you do unto these, the least of my children, you do unto me." Are these Jewish groups so stupid that they don't see that the kind of crusade we are making against Islam could just as easily be made against them? Or, that doing unto others as was done unto them is not the right answer? (Yes, I realize we aren't gassing Muslims but the repression of Judaism in Germany began with the Crystallnacht, not the gas chambers which were a whole decade in the future.)

I personally would have thought that the Jewish groups would have eschewed any political organization that espoused greater state control because it was the state, and not individuals, who were responsible for the pogroms, forced conversions, expulsions, and segregations (into ghettos) that are the hallmark of Christian Europe's relations with the Jews. But, apparently not. Apparently, they'd rather manipulate the world's bully into being on their side; never apparently realizing that sides can be changed but that principles such as tolerance, freedom, and liberty have no sides.

OBTW, Jonah Greenberg is clueless. He clearly equates similarity of behavior to similarity of philosophy which is fallacious.

Presumably, you're gonna fall in love with him, not her because the last time I checked, a drag queen was biologically male.

It's not clear to me why the female needs fashion role models or, indeed, what the impossible representation of womanhood is but if this is a problem, you need to get a grip on it. I know you lot like to blame us for all your woes but, trust me, we're not fooled. Bruce said it best ... "and the girls all dressed up for each other..."

Hells bells, we're talking about the boys of summer here and in places like Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Detroit they could be getting snowed on by the end of the series. That's ridiculous. Pretty soon baseball will be like Hockey where the season streaches well past when you can actually play the original game (i.e. outdoors). Professional hockey, at least, is played indoors. Why would I want to sit and freeze my ass off in an open stadium when it's almost winter already?

Somebody writes something that looks at the bigger picture. From my perspective environmentalists are neo-Luddites. They decline to embrace the science and engineering that got us to our present state and call it bad. They only embrace the science that tells us what is going wrong and sometimes they don't embrace all of that.

In point of fact, the progress we've made to date is irreversible without a massive die off of humans. Environmentalists seem to want to dial the global society back to around 1850. Unfortunately, the engineering & science of today can't be sustained by an 1850s society. Like it or not, the same engineering that got us where we are today is going to be used to get us out of the corner we've been painting ourselves into.

You'll notice I've been talking about engineers. Scientists (which would include me) don't design things; engineers do. Give an engineer a problem and he'll take my science and design a solution. It is, however, time to move past the relatively small scale engineering we have heretofore done. It will need to be global in scale

Auto emissions can serve as my vehicle. I described the bankruptcy of the environmental approach back in the late 60s when pollution controls were first proposed. You can reduce the pollution from each car (a good thing) but as the numbers of cars increase, you'll start chasing your tail. You will need increasingly tight (and expensive) pollution controls to offset the results of an increase in the number of cars. And that's exactly what has happened over the last 40 years.

So now it is time to do what I first suggested 40 years ago. Develop systems to clean the pollution (or CO2 for that matter) out of the air. The environmentalists, being neo-Luddites, refuse to even consider such large scale approaches. They would prefer to sit around shivering about potential problems. I don't want to dismiss the possibility for disaster with this approach. It's very real. But I also know that this approach has a chance of success and the environmentalist's doesn't.