It's almost as if scientific learning and schools didn't exist before Christ. I bet if Christ hadn't come around, founded his Church, which eventually led to the Trinity College's formation, Newton would have been a mentally deficient chimney sweep.

Not ironic at all, really. Simply a misattribution of credit.
Now, you want some real irony? Much of Newton's success in celestial mechanics and physical sciences hinged on work by al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham, an Iraqi Muslim. So perhaps we have Muhammad to thank for Newtonian Physics?

Sadly, that's rarely the case in my experience with the devout of any Abrahamic religion.

They all take blasphemy pretty seriously, the difference is it's a lot harder for Western Christians to get away with stoning you to death. The North-east Indian, African, and Lebanese Christians, however? They're happy to oblige.

Nonsense. Einstein gets all the credit for that. Every single weapon today is based on mass-energy equivalence.
Of course, if ballistic weaponry had not existed prior to Newton, you'd have a much better argument...

I'm not a Christian, but you've nailed it. It was an indictment of followers, not Christ. The only explanation for the outrage is their own insecurity. It's hard to back up blind faith, and even harder to defend it from attack and you yourself don't really understand it.

It's hard for a moderate Christian to accept that they're just as culpable for the murder, rape, and terrorism committed by fundamentalist Christians as every single Muslim they paint with their own culpability brush.
Nobody likes to look in the mirror and see the evil they hate; so they choose to delude themselves with justifications for their form of evil.

I think that's more of a cultural thing than religious. I assure you that fundies of all religions are quite murderous in the less civilized parts of the world.

Lebanese Christian militias terrorizing, murdering, and raping Islamic and Druze refugees and villages from the 70's to 90's? Lord's Resistance Army?
Army of God?
Concerned Christians?
"Jesus was the first Klansman"?
National Socialist Council of Nagaland's conversion of the Naga to Christianity, by the sword?
Eric Robert Rudolph and the Centennial Olympic Park bombing?

Frankly, I'm less scared of my Muslim coworker than any devout Baptist that hails from south of the Mason-Dixon.
Shame on you.

The evidence also supports the hypothesis that the lesser problem escalated into violence because the cop was a shitbag.

Again, I assert, that anyone willing to cross the line into actually assaulting an officer (as opposed to Rodney King's violent assault on the officers that "detained" him) care little about a camera.

No reading comprehension problem at all. I'm taking issue with your assertion that the problem person has justified lethal force.
Frankly, unless the officer's life was in danger, if he employed lethal force, the problem is *always* the officer.
If his hard is too dangerous, hard, or scary, he can go dig ditches or flip burgers.
The quelling effect a camera has on the suspect is to prevent them from triggering an abusive officer's propensity to use excessive force. It doesn't stop the subject from physically assaulting the officer. Nobody willing to cross that line is giving a rat's ass about a camera.

I have read it. And as long as "escalation" can mean "abusive" behavior like mouthing off to a cop and "forcing" him to resort to physical violence, then ya. I concede. The study makes no attempt at deciding whether that particular path is a problem or not, and doesn't make any claims as to what the "escalation" is. People trying to claim it's stopping people from physically assaulting a cop out of nowhere are basing this claim on ludicrous apologist delusions, supported by exactly no evidence.

This is not insightful, this is stupid.
A camera is not going to deter someone from violence against a police officer. I'll tell you what it deters them from- it deters them from calling the cop an asshole.
What you refuse to accept, (or perhaps condone) is that mouthing off to an officer is casus belli for a police officer to kick the teeth in- i mean detain the citizen, i mean perp.
That is wrong and fucked up.

The only case where I'll accept that it was necessary to be violent with a citizen of this country with free agency and civil rights, is where he presented a clear and present danger to someone else (and maybe, arguably, himself). If you're arguing that cameras lower the incidence of that occurring, you're a fucking moron.
If you're arguing that it lowers the incidence of people calling cops assholes and the resulting getting their teeth kicked in, I'll buy that. But that still leaves the original problem in place, the cop shouldn't be a cop.

This is legit.

Totally. Violent criminals usually think twice about attacking an officer because he's wearing a camera. That makes so much sense, I can't believe I didn't think about it.

Yes, those criminals who wanted to violently assault a police officer thought twice because they were being watched. By a camera. Cough.
I will buy that it reduced false reports, though.

"Sir", or "Ma'am" work if addressing directly. "The gentleman", or "The lady" if not? I can think of a dozen different terms to use when referring to or addressing a non-LEO, that aren't pejoratives used by the military, which the police now seem to fancy themselves as. Police used to the civilians. Constabulary officers who kept peace and enforced laws. Not this crazy fucking gestapo trend where they increasingly consider themselves a branch of the government/armed forces.

You're dead-on. My military friends are fond of using "civilian" as a pejorative, and now several friends of mine who are police. Those friends are also former-military. I think that may be part of a trend, or at least it seems to be from my perspective. A lot of people are getting out of the military and going into law enforcement. I'm not sure those people have the right mind-set to be civil servants in a lot of cases. One of those friends recently made his first heroin user bust, and was bragging about ripping the guy out of his car and how hard the take-down was. This was just a dude shooting up in a car. Non-violent, breaking a law, sure- but did he deserve that?
My friend sounded like he was bragging about taking down a terrorist.