There was A LOT wrong from BOTH sides. However the ONE thing that MANY people seem to have forgotten is this tiny little statement:

I don't think municipalities need this equipment free or not. And you are right it's free or mostly free though I'd bet someone makes a buck from it somehow perhaps shifting decommissioning expenditures to the reallocating assets column.

Part of the problem is that when police forces purchase military equipment, or institute special units like SWAT, it involves a considerable expenditure of money, so there's pressure to demonstrate that the city hasn't thrown the money down a rathole; this creates a tendency to bring out this equipment or special…

From what I've been reading (local paper & NY Times), much of this equipment, at least the MRAP vehicles, is given to municipalities for free. All they have to do is apply for ownership. Many municipalities would not be able to purchase said equipment otherwise. According to this NY Times article, the equipment would…

Why doesn't Homeland Security just distribute vets with the weapons? Better yet, let the VA distribute the weapons; then by the time the police finally got them, they would have plenty of time to learn when to use them.

I have hope that these terrible events that the people of Ferguson have suffered through can sustain the attention of the general population. We are all, collectively, finally seeing the results of war on ourselves. The Drug War has lead to this. When you combine it with the fear, anger and paranoia 9/11 fuelled we…

These articles about over-militiarization that I have seen thus far all delve into the problems of police having all of this military gear they don't generally need, but nothing I've seen so far talks much about the fundamental absurdity, or perhaps creepy implicit ideology, of the fact that Homeland Security…

Yeah, I think the whole country is starting to realize that we need peace keepers instead of armies policing our own streets. I'm not saying we shouldn't have a certain amount of this equipment available to our officers, especially SWAT units and shooting response teams, but it is clear that this kind of militarized…

Thankfully, the governor finally realized what a cluster**** this was turning into and seems to have put someone sane in charge of the policing duties who is capable of showing empathy and respect.

"That's not controlling the crowd, that's intimidating them." Understatement of the year.

This isn't just about personal preference or what puts cash in our pockets. Renewable energy sources are not as good as fossil fuels. They do not produce as much energy, what energy they do produce is not produced as consistently, the energy produced cannot be transmitted as far, they do not create as many jobs, and…

Its harder to push your agenda when there isn't a crisis

Trenberth "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't."

Water. Water. Water.

I'm willing to bet that the climate will continue to change though...

A climate change article on IO9 that actually discusses climate change as a part of life on this planet and not just as a human driven apocalypse? It seems that more and more people know enough about science to know the world is warming but handily forget that this has happened before and prior to Homo sapiens…

Hey Strauss, most of the 97% AGW consensus is of a second order consensus, as the vast majority of cited scientists are not actively involved in actual climate science. It's also clearly split by party lines. How much clout would you have given Happer if he were defending AGW? If you're honest with yourself,…

By that logic, you should submerge someone in a tank of water until he drowns and then declare water a poison.

Mythical? Nope!
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming…

Mythical?