Try reading some old dragnet scripts for a feel of what it used to be like.

I think they used "citizens" sometimes in the bits before the show talking about the city and more often they used "people" but also used "the public" and "man" and "woman".
I don't recall "civilian" being used.

http://www.otrr.org/FILES/Scri...

There's a blog from 2009 about this
http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/in...

It looks like the international definition of civilians includes police officers. ("A civilian under international humanitarian law (also known as the laws of war) is a person who is not a member of his or her countryâ(TM)s armed forces or other militia. Civilians are distinct from combatants." )

I've been unable to google when the police started using "civilian" widely. Most states still advertise for "civilian police force" jobs. So the police are explicitly civilian in the state's eyes.

They are out protesting in large numbers because the video evidence of the obvious unwarranted and undeserved death motivated them more than simple hearsay.

The police department is changing its training policies as a result. The police department lost a lot of political capital even tho the two police officers were nobilled.

The city and the police department are spending a lot of extra money and going thru a lot of unpleasant times because of the video which will hopefully encourage them to be more careful next time they might want to illegally choke someone to death.

And two officers may have been killed* which is really terrible. But hopefully the police will work on community relations to regain the trust and support of the citizens.

*Or it may have just been a whacko who would have shot the police officers anyway.

Do you realize that american police officers kill united states citizens at over 50x the rate UK and German police officers kill their citizens?

Do you realize that american police officers kill more children each year (including 7 year old girls) than UK and german police officers kill all citizens (including adults) combined? And basically at an infinitely higher rate.

United states police have reported* killing over 400 citizens per year since 9/11. Meanwhile, germany and uk have killed reported killing under 4 citizens per year in the same time period.

*United states police forces are NOT required to report citizens killed and many do not so the actual number of citizens killed in the united states is higher than reported.

Go back a little before that and the average temperature was 12c higher than now for hundreds of millions of years at a time.

http://geology.utah.gov/survey...

http://geology.utah.gov/survey...

Basically, we are still in the middle of an ice age that peaked 20k years ago and started about 65 million years ago.

In farenheit terms- we average 58 degrees globally today (and rising) and we averaged 72 degrees globally from 65 million years ago to 185 million years ago.

The largest place I see ei playing out is in things in limited quantity.

Most the population is being priced out of things which used to be generally free or affordable.

In texas, the beaches were always free but now some stretches are being locked up. On the east coast, large stretches of beach are "private".

Amusement parks are grossly over crowded but if you have money (5x the standard price), you don't have a line.

Collectables that used to be affordable if you saved up are now going for more than your entire life income because when a person has a billion dollars they can afford to drop a million dollars on a comic book.

Likewise, there are private ski resorts, special "extra money" ski privileges in areas that used to be affordable to all and equally open to all.

Likewise for the front rows at concerts, opening nights for shows.

When the wealthiest made 52x what the rest did, their spending was constrained. They could have anything but they couldn't have everything. Now at 350x to 452x, they can pretty much have everything special and unique.

The balance of wealth between the richest and poorest in society determines how we share rare things in our society. Currently, we've reached a point where the richest get everything and even the "non-rich" get a lot less than they did in the past.

I agree completely.

Russia has a long heritage of eating up invaders. I think it is solid and will be stable as a state.

It has a problem with crony capitalism and it's first attempt to throw off fascism failed. But I think it will eventually gain the same corrupted kind of hybrid self government the rest of the world has. Essentially, the people will have some actual say in local, territorial, and national government while the corporations will have too much sway.

But the russian people must become intolerant of corruption. Bribery and graft are tolerable in small doses but they destroy your economy and your government when they become an accepted way of doing business.

I wish russia and the russian people success in getting over this obstacle on their path to being a modern state with relatively free people and less hostility and phobia of other countries.

And seriously- any attempt by china to take over russia would be the largest mistake they ever made.

Don't like Canada? What's wrong with it? Its's beautiful, it's rich, it's got huge... tracts of land.

Most of their products are "nice to haves" not "must haves".

Do I need a new TV when mine isn't broken? Nope.
Do I need a new computer this year instead of two or three years from now? Not really.

Meanwhile, the loss of income would be immediate and lead to social unrest which they really try hard to avoid.

Wish I could mod you up.

Informative, interesting, insightful.

Another denier argument. All models are far from infallible. They're models; an imperfect representation and they always will be since, at least in this universe, since it is impossible to obtain perfect information about a system. The aerodynamic models for jet aircraft are wrong. The models for bridge and building stability are wrong. Every single one of them are wrong. However, just because a model is wrong doesn't mean it isn't useful. All models have errors, and by accounting for those errors a model will still yield predictive skill. Error analysis is very important in modeling and is used constantly to establish everything from structural integrity limits to likelihoods of future droughts. It's a fundamental component of numerical analysis.

That's not a denier argument. It's perfectly valid to question the models. Just because our "best available evidence" leans one way doesn't make it 100% infallible proof. Not too long ago, scientists figured out they were vastly overstating temperatures over time because they didn't fully understand the heat sinking capability of the oceans (the whole "where's the missing heat?" debate). That variable alone completely rewrote the book on future projections of climate based on current CO2 numbers. Denying global warming may be dumb, but questioning the suppositions and conclusions drawn from the current level of "100% faith in the models" is another. I give different levels of credence to "string theory" and "quantum physics" and "gravity" and "evolution" for very good reasons. Some are rock solid with hoards of reproducible evidence and sustainable models. Others are borderline guesses with models changing annually. Stop pretending that the current "best guess" of scientists is infallible proof.

Check out the Last Policeman series - 3 books based on knowing the world will end in a year from an asteroid impact. Very bizarre and very good reading.

And even more lens flare?

I'll be happy to match your ex-Bush list one for one with someone from the Clinton or Obama groups. Don't pretend it's a one party issue.

Wouldn't "we the people" have standing?

I may not agree with Monsanto's labeling, but I do agree that they should be allowed to sue over it. They are directly impacted by the chance, so why should they not be allowed to fight it?