Copycat Effect Again

4/24/18 CNN:

(CNN)Alek Minassian, the man accused of steering a white rental van down a packed Toronto street killing 10 people and leaving 15 others injured, appears to have praised the killer in a 2014 attack near the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Just before the deadly incident Monday, Minassian wrote on his Facebook page: "All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"

That was what he called himself to explain why he could not get a girlfriend.  This is a longstanding problem with "assault media," glorifying mass murderers.

Does Anyone Have a List of Valid Email Domains?

The response from my ISP's support is:

(1) The message was sent from a mail server which is listed as a verified spam source on major real time blacklists (RBLs)
or
(2) The message was sent from a mail server which doesn't have a valid forward confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS) record
While all properly configured mail servers have reverse DNS records which check out backward and forward (the mail server's IP points to a valid host name, and that host name is likewise pointed to the same IP) and there is no way to disable that check if you wish to make sure that all other mail is delivered to your Inbox it is possible to request that one or all of your domains be added to a special "skip RBL check" list.
If we do this no incoming mail will be bounced due to it coming from a verified spam source/blacklisted mail server. While this would help guarantee that all wanted incoming mail reaches you please note that this change may (and likely will) cause an increase in unwanted spam to your domain's inboxes. 

It appears that I need to whitelist every conceivably valid mail server.  Can you all provide a list of your email domains?  (One on each line, in comments.)  It is hard to imagine so many misconfigured mail servers.

More Evidence That Snowflakes Reflect the College Administrators

4/18/18 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

A backpacking trip in the Rothrock State Forest and day hikes in the Laurel Highlands and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia were among the Penn State Outing Club’s 2018 spring-term events.

After this weekend, though, the 98-year-old organization has nothing on its calendar, and unless things change, it won’t.

The Outing Club isn’t allowed to go outside anymore. 

According to an announcement posted by the club on its website last week, the university will not allow the club to organize and run outdoor, student-led trips starting next semester.

“This is a result,” the announcement said, “of an assessment of risk management by the university that determined that the types of activities in which PSOC engages are above the university’s threshold of acceptable risk for recognized student organizations.”...

Ms. Powers responded, saying the university conducted a “proactive risk assessment,” that was not based on any previous participant injuries. She said PSOC activities were rated high risk because they take place in remote environments with poor cell phone service, and sometimes far from emergency services. 

I don't know.  Is it riskier than taking a shower with the Penn State football coach?

Kill That Tank: When Hollywood Still Loved America

Yes Walt Disney Made This Training Film



And this one:

You Broke into the Wrong Rec Room

The funniest scene in movie history:

and the real life equivalent.  4/17/18 News 5 Jacksonville:

GLEN ST. MARY, Fla - Three men say they were asleep inside a mobile home in Glen St. Mary about 4 a.m. Sunday when they heard a voice outside yell “Sheriff’s Office!” before the front door burst open. 

In stormed a masked gunman who fired off a single round before two of the men inside, one armed with an AR-15 rifle and the other with a handgun, emerged from two bedrooms and opened fire.

More Evidence We Have a Mental Illness Problem, Not a Gun Problem

4/23/18 Fox News:

The man suspected of gunning down four people at a Waffle House restaurant in Tennessee during an early-morning, half-naked rampage has a history of run-ins with police -- including once telling cops that music star Taylor Swift was stalking him.

Authorities in Tazewell County, Ill. revealed Sunday that police encountered Travis Reinking, 29, in a CVS parking lot on May 27, 2016 during an apparent "mental health crisis," according to a police report obtained by Fox News.

At the time, deputies said Reinking believed Swift was stalking him, hacked his phone and had climbed a building to chase him. He also threatened to kill himself, according to the sheriff's report....

Last July, Reinking was arrested by the U.S. Secret Service after he crossed into a restricted area near the White House and refused to leave, saying he wanted to meet President Trump.

The suicide threat alone should have been a sign that he needed hospitalization.  And being stalked by Taylor Swift?  She force herself on him, and such resistance would also be a sign of mental illness.  The rest of the story shows clear mental illness:

A little over a year later, the Tremont Police Department found Reinking swimming in a public pool in his underwear and reportedly exposing himself. In that June 16, 2017 incident, Reinking was wearing a pink woman's coat over his underwear at the time, and a concerned citizen contacted authorities because they believed he had an AR-15 rifle in his possession, the report said.

Best of all, he would have passed a background check until his arrest by Secret Service:

Reinking was not armed at the time, but at the FBI's request, Illinois state police revoked Reinking's state firearms card and seized four of his guns, authorities said. The AR-15 used in the shootings on Sunday was among the firearms seized. 

Be Careful What You Wish For

4/20/18 Reason:

Many people who support gun control are angry that the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are not legally allowed to use money from Congress to do research whose purpose is "to advocate or promote gun control." (This is not the same as doing no research into gun violence, though it seems to discourage many potential recipients of CDC money.)

But in the 1990s, the CDC itself did look into one of the more controversial questions in gun social science: How often do innocent Americans use guns in self-defense, and how does that compare to the harms guns can cause in the hands of violent criminals?

Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck conducted the most thorough previously known survey data on the question in the 1990s. His study, which has been harshly disputed in pro-gun-control quarters, indicated that there were more than 2.2 million such defensive uses of guns (DGUs) in America a year.

Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck's results. But Kleck didn't know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.

Kleck's new paper—"What Do CDC's Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?"—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.

Those polls, Kleck writes,

are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).

Shock of shocks, they gave similar numbers to the oft-criticized Kleck survey numbers.  Probably why they were not published.