The dog's "owner" says he feels bad for the cop. I don't. Too bad he only shot himself in the leg. And that's a "large dog"? Ha. It is to laugh.

Instant Karma: Cop Shoots Himself While Trying To Shoot Friendly Dog (Video) (Americans Against the Tea Party)

A Riverside County Sheriff’s spokesperson said the deputy was serving an eviction notice at around 2 p.m. on Wednesday when a “large” dog tried to attack him. It was the usual story. “A dog came at the deputy in an aggressive manner,” Deputy Armando Munoz said. “The deputy...pulled his service weapon, shot one round, and injured himself in the leg.”

When a KNCB news crew arrived on the scene, they found a medium-sized pit bull named “Precious” not running loose in the street, but confined to a pen and playing with several kids. According to the dog’s owner, it was barking when the officer arrived.

Perhaps it was intended as a (stupid and misogynist) April Fool's joke of some sort?

PAC to Shut Down After Name Draws Furor, by Aman Batheja (The Texas Tribune)

A Texas political action committee called Boats 'N Hoes PAC will be just a memory by Thursday, according to the Republican political consultant who is the boss of the man who started it.

Houston consultant Allen Blakemore confirmed Wednesday evening that his firm’s bookkeeper, Shaun Nowacki, started the PAC, which is a reference to a song from the 2008 film Step Brothers....

... Nowacki filed paperwork with the Texas Ethics Commission to create the PAC on April 1 and named himself treasurer. The PAC has not filed any fundraising reports since its creation two weeks ago. It is the only PAC Nowacki is listed with on the Texas Ethics Commission’s website.

Ah, sweet sweet irony. This, folks, is how and why bigotry always falls in the end.

Prop 8 lawyer's views on gay marriage evolving

The lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court in favor of upholding California's ban on gay marriage learned while he was handling the case that one of his children is gay and now is helping her plan her wedding with another woman.

Attorney Charles Cooper says his view of same-sex marriage is evolving after having argued in court that gay unions could undermine marriages between a man and a woman.

...

Cooper learned that his stepdaughter Ashley was gay as the Proposition 8 case wound its way through appellate court, according to a forthcoming book about the lengthy legal battle.

Cheaters never prosper...except when they do.

Match-Fixing Took Place in Ancient Greek Wrestling

Researchers have deciphered a Greek document that shows an ancient wrestling match was fixed. The document, which has a date on it that corresponds to the year A.D. 267, is a contract between two teenagers who had reached the final bout of a prestigious series of games in Egypt.

This is the first time that a written contract between two athletes to fix a match has been found from the ancient world.

...

Although this is the only known contract recording a bribe between ancient athletes, there are references in ancient sources indicating that bribery in athletic competitions was not unusual. By the time of the Roman Empire, bribery in athletic competitions was getting more prevalent as the events became more lucrative, Rathbone said.

1.) No, the Intratech .22 is not a "submachine gun", it's a quite ordinary pistol. As usual, anything you read in the corporate media about firearms is likely to be wrong, meant to cause eyeball-grabbing moral panic. 2.) Whipping out a gun to protest taxes, guy could almost be a teabagger. 22 cents, .22 caliber, someone could make an interesting tax protest slogan here. 3.) Illinois has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, and Chicago bans the sale of guns within the city limits. Yet this convicted felon had a gun. Huh, how about that. Maybe, instead of worrying that if we let law-abiding citizens have their rightful access to the tools of self-defense they might suddenly go insane and hurt people, we need to devote our resources to supervising people who have actually already gone and hurt people?

Angry over 22-cent tax on soda, man pulls out submachine gun in store: police - Chicago Sun-Times

Nahshon Shelton didn’t want to pay the 22-cent tax on his $1.79 two-liter of Pepsi on Saturday afternoon, Chicago Police said.

So he allegedly pulled a blue-steel Intratec .22-caliber submachine [not. -tms] gun out of his Gucci satchel inside the convenience store in the 4000 block of West Madison Street where they tried to make him pay it — and he threatened to kill everyone there, a prosecutor said.

DMARC ("Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance") is the latest hare-brained scheme to reduce spam and phishing. Like some previous such schemes (I'm looking at you, SPF), it breaks some completely legitimate uses of e-mail.

In this case, it's all about the "From:" line. The "From:" field of an e-mail message is supposed to indicate the author of a message, which can be different from the sender. As RFC 5322 explains

The "From:" field specifies the author(s) of the message, that is, the mailbox(es) of the person(s) or system(s) responsible for the writing of the message. The "Sender:" field specifies the mailbox of the agent responsible for the actual transmission of the message. For example, if a secretary were to send a message for another person, the mailbox of the secretary would appear in the "Sender:" field and the mailbox of the actual author would appear in the "From:" field.

In today's world, the "secretary" is more likely to be some mailing list software. It's quite legitimate for some random internet domain ("example.com") to a mailing list. This list accepts messages from subscribers, such as "some_fake_guy@yah00.c0m"[*], and sends a copy of each such message to each subscriber of the list. The "From:" line of each copy has "some_fake_guy@yah00.c0m", while the "Sender:" is something like "mailing_list_17@example.com".

([*] 0's instead of o's in the address above so it's definitely a bogus address. I'm deliberately picking on Yahoo here.)

The problem is, DMARC lets Yahoo say, "no one but Yahoo! can send an e-mail message with a Yahoo address in the From: line". This breaks the world.

Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's

DMARC is what one might call an emerging e-mail security scheme. There's a draft on it at draft-kucherawy-dmarc-base-04, intended for the independent stream. It's emerging pretty fast, since many of the largest mail systems in the world have already implemented it, including Gmail, Hotmail/MSN/Outlook, Comcast, and Yahoo.

...

For a lot of mail, notably bulk mail sent by companies, DMARC works great. For other kinds of mail it works less great, because like every mail security system, it has an implicit model of the way mail is delivered that is similar but not identical to the way mail is actually delivered.

Mailing lists are a particular weak spot for DMARC....

The reason this matters is that over the weekend Yahoo published a DMARC record with a policy saying to reject all yahoo.com mail that fails DMARC. I noticed this because I got a blizzard of bounces from my church mailing list, when a subscriber sent a message from her yahoo.com account, and the list got a whole bunch of rejections from gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, and Yahoo itself. This is definitely a DMARC problem, the bounces say so.

Yes, I spent time last week cleaning up after this. It made me want to punch someone in the nose. I'm going to put that punch away for now, but if I ever meet a system administrator who implemented DMARC in a way that breaks mailing lists, I will be happy to pull it out of storage. Don't let that happen. Just say no to DMARC.

Some 12 step groups hew less closely to the specifics of the steps than to a general attitude of social support. But at the root of it, 12 step groups are based on a religious ideology rather than scientific evidence. Bill Wilson even wrote, "At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God." Yet our legal system still forces people into these religious programs. And the addiction treatment industry is making a lot of money off of them, while not helping people. One might say they are making a killing, in both senses of the word.

AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates (Alternet)

AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.

Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober. In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism. This group reached the same conclusion about professional AA-oriented treatment (12-step facilitation therapy, or TSF), which is the core of virtually every alcoholism-rehabilitation program in the country.

Oh, the irony...

Unmarked Baltimore City Police Car Stolen in Catonsville (Catonsville Patch)

An unmarked Baltimore City police cruiser was reportedly stolen from the 300 block of Orley Road in Catonsville overnight.

...

Inside were a Taser, police radio, SWAT vest, 28 rounds of ammunition, mace and other police gear, according to ABC 2 News, which said neither weapons nor explosives was in the vehicle.

How dare he run away from a man with a knife? Obviously undertrained and underqualifed cops would view that as threatening behavior.

Deputies' accidental killing of aspiring TV producer 'very tragic' (latimes.com)

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department acknowledged Thursday that its deputies mistakenly shot and killed an aspiring TV producer earlier this week while responding to a stabbing and hostage standoff in West Hollywood.

Sheriff’s officials said deputies believed John Winkler, 30, was the attacker when they encountered him at a Palm Avenue apartment complex Monday night.

In fact, he was one of three hostages being held inside an apartment by a man with a knife.

More and more it seems like calling 911 to deal with violent crime is likely to make a situation worse. Too many cops are simply incompetent or ill-intentioned, and too many police forces have a culture of corruption and silence, with no intention to improve the situation.

One of bits of evidence I offer for the fact that I have great parents is that my mom not only introduced me to the work of Tom Lehrer, she gifted me with the Tom Lehrer songbook. (Written for piano, it's hard to play his stuff on guitar, but one of these days I'm going to figure out an arrangement for "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park".)

I sort of figured that Lehrer had passed away, I'm glad to learn he's alive and well. His apathy about his stellar musical career strikes me as sort of a Taoist wu wei, effortless action, though the change in political context also is interesting

Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius (BuzzFeed)

The New Left agreed with Lehrer on Vietnam. His last public performance, in fact, was on a fundraising tour for George McGovern in 1972. But the singer — who saw himself as “a liberal, one of the last” — felt less at home in the new Democratic Party. In the end, Stevenson’s party, and Lehrer’s, lost — and with it, at least to Lehrer’s mind, a prevailing sense of humor. “Things I once thought were funny are scary now,” he told People magazine in 1982. “I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

”The liberal consensus, which was the audience for this in my day, has splintered and fragmented in such a way that it’s hard to find an issue that would be comparable to, say, lynching,” he also told the New York Times in Purdum’s 2000 article, which was part of his last round of interviews to promote an anthology of his work. ”Everybody knows that lynching is bad. But affirmative action vs. quotas, feminism vs. pornography, Israel vs. the Arabs? I don’t know which side I’m on anymore. And you can’t write a funny song that uses, ‘On the other hand.”’