CHARMING, CHARMING, CHARMING. ::: I have yet to get out of my head the visuals concerning the unilingual visiting Polish man stuck in Vancouver's Passenger Airport Terminal for a long, lonely eight hours or so waiting for his mother to pick him up when Airport Security, alerted by the man's obvious frustration which he took out on some chair nearby him by throwing it, whereupon our charming police were called to the scene where they then tasered the man to death! One of him, and five of them. That story is what I called overkill. Terrifying. ::: OK, with that film stuck in my head, not a singular incident by the way, last night I was treated to the somewhat same cast of characters, the Good Cops and the Occupy My City folks. So what do U.C. Davis do? Tasers? Could have done, but thank God ... never mind .... one "smart" policeman gets out a canister of PEPPER SPRAY, slowly and deliberately walks along a long line of seated, non-armed, peaceful demonstrators and sprays them not once, not twice, at least three times before the filming finally came to a halt. Shades of Kent State. All that in the presence of his fellow officers standing passively by watching this whole bit of idiocy to a understandably stunned crowd. ::: Oh boy! It matters not which side ofthe debacle one wants to take. Something does indeed stink in Rotterdam when the only choice the people we trust to "serve and protect" us are the very ones we need to most fear. It isn't mere coincidence when something happens again and again again with the pathetically weak defense by the Police that they felt "threatened". ::: I never want to be anywhere near a large crowd but to say that somebody who volunteers to put themselves in the line of danger on a daily basis, and knows it long before s/he becomes part of the very scene they are positively going to eventually encounter in one very high risk career such as police work, fire fighting, soldiering - any of them - "threat" is in some part the reason these people chose these high adrenaline producing jobs to begin with. It isn't that they are chose walking little old grannies across the street somewhere in the desert. ::: People do not choose to put their very lives in imminent danger for the sole reason because they are "good guys". Most of those choices are about the legal adrenaline highs most people associate with crack cocaine. ::: There isn't enough money on the planet to get me to willingly join a police force anywhere in the world. If I did, I would have to know that one day I would have to kill somebody in cold blood, or get killed in cold blood - by the very nature of my career choice. ::: The high risk, high personal danger requires a very unique individual with a way above average amount of character, emotional stability, psychological stability, uncommon intelligence, uncommon good judgement and the kind of training one might expect of Navy Seals not your every day policeman, fireman or emergency room surgeon. ::: It would seem they are not getting the proper training. I could be wrong. I could be. But I what I do keep seeing is enough to scare the living daylights out of me. :::