Welcome to the club. I left years ago. And except for your blog, I no longer read or follow anyone who is 'progressive' because, pretty much, they're as you describe them. Wrose, if you try to explain to them that their outrage is based fake assertions and they're falling for it because their being exploited... Wow, you hear/get a lot of it.

Take the whole 'cultural appropriation' yammering about those girls wearing the qipaos. Thing is, that style of dress was appropriated from WESTERN culture. The only thing left of the chinese traditional qipao is the coller. The old dress was loose and hung straight down and, basically, looked like a tent. The 'culturally appropriated qipao' takes its lines, except for the collar, from western dresses.

You point that out and you're 'whitesplaining.' And a racist. Which I was called.

Neither one of you understands the underlying drivers. Brazil has the highest murder rate in the world. They have 8 guns per 100 residents which is below the world average of 10 guns per 100 residents.

China is 12th. They have 4.9 guns/100 which is half that of the world-average. Yet France, 9th in gun ownership, is 75th in Murder Rate.

The US, which has 101 guns per 100 residents (we're #1!) is 14th. Lower than China and Brazil! So despite 20x the number of guns of China, and 12x that of Brazil, we have a lower murder rate. France, with one-third our guns, has a far, far lower murder rate. Well below one-third of ours.

Now, in the US, the highest murder-rates are in the areas with least guns -- urban areas. On a per-capita basis, rural people own 2.4x the guns of urban. Suburban per-capita ownership is in between rural and urban. Yet gun violence is is 75% more common (per capita) in urban over rural and 37% more common in urban over suburban.

And that's just the tip of the problem. Which isn't guns per-se, but why it's happening. And that's, for the vast majority of gun-violence murders, gang-shootings related to the drug trade. Or as the CDC said a few years ago:

"a staggering 80% of gun homicides are gang-related. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), gang homicides accounted for roughly 8,900 of 11,100 gun murders in both 2010 and 2011. That means that there were just 2,200 non gang-related firearm murders in both years in a country of over 300 million people and 250 million guns".

Decriminalize the drug trade and, like with Mob-violence after prohibition was repealed, the violence will drop significantly. But until then, these criminals will get guns and shoot each other left and right. Just like they do in Chicago and Oakland, both of which have some of the toughest gun laws in the US.

If prayer worked, ambulances would take people to church, not the hospital.

I wouldn't be surprised if he did it. I've always found the more people scream about morality, the more likely they are to have dubious morals.

Good. Because it's almost all snake oil. Best thing to do is just eat right and get some exercise.

What's funnier in all this, is that many of these 'alternatives to "Big Pharma?' herbal things you see in the health food stores are owned by "Big Pharma" or are big companies themselves, employing hundreds and hundreds of people with some of them raking in up to half-a-billion in sales a year all while pretending to be some hippie-granola mom-and-pop company.

Like New Chapter. Bought by P&G in 2012 for $250 million. You look at their website, it's a granola-hippie with polish. And they still have this on their website:

?Our founders, Paul and Barbi Schulick, started New Chapter over 35 years ago to bring natural wellness to others. We believe in the healing power of nature, and that's why we're committed to using whole-food and quality ingredients to make our supplements.?

As they keep pimping out the 'mom-and-pop' aspects.

Ok. I rarely post anymore. Though I do stop by and catch-up with what's happening. But, for me, the Atheist/Skeptic movements have been destroyed by the cultural marxists and their intolerance coupled with their irrational and idiotic post-modernist, contra-science BS.

The racist BS around the Red Cross had to do with a swimming poster. In short, something entirely trivial.

It was never about equality. It was to retain all social rights and privileges of women (and there are many) while gaining all social rights and privileges of men. Do you see women demanding that they go to jail for domestic violence even though they commit half of it? Serve jail sentences as long as men for equal crimes? Loose everything in a divorce, including their relationships with their children?

I'm sorry, but that is modern feminism. Bogus claims and petty attacks while real injustices around the world go unaddressed. And I can see you pretty much blew the Google memo.

Two things:

1. As much as I can't stand them, it's very, very rare for the right-wingers to start violence in any of their permitted parades/protests.

2. Antifa and BLM have a history of physical attacks against people, especially when they're counter protesting. That's why the come dressed with helmets, shields, clubs, etc. Let's not pretend that they were there to hand out flowers like the hippies did in the 1960s. They came there for violence and got the violence THEY started.

Which gets me to what happened. The raw footage you get ahold of shows that well before the incident, Antifa & BLM goons were attacking people. That includes the car in the driving incident. Before he hit the car in front of him then backed over the protesters, he was being attacked. There is video of them, pre-crash, busting his windshield, leaping on his car and smashing out the rear window and the side windows with bats and other deadly weapons.

So, in the end, if your'e going to be honest, Antifa and BLM (and their supporters/enablers on the left) need to own a huge chunk of this and look in the mirror at how they are also as guilty. Had they not come there and attacked nothing would have happened but a insignificant group of jackassses would have blown their wad then gone home after accomplishing nothing.

Instead, we got a near-riot that ended in tragedy.