I don't know why I made this. Read the rest

Dallas, the prime-time soap opera that ran from 1978-1991 and 2012-2014, is as famous for its catchy theme tune as for J.R. Ewing's machinations. In France, I today learned, that theme tune was modified so that it could include lyrics.

Dallas, ton univers impitoyable dallas, glorifie la loi du plus fort dallas, et sous ton soleil implacable dallas, tu ne redoutes que la mort

Dallas, patrie du dollar du pétrole dallas, tu ne connais pas la pitié dallas, le revolver est ton idole dallas, tu te raccroches à ton passé

Dallas, malheur à celui qui n’a pas compris dallas, un jour il y perdra la vie dallas, ton univers impitoyable dallas, glorifie la loi du plus fort

Dallas, malheur à celui qui n’a pas compris dallas, un jour il y perdra la vie dallas, ton univers impitoyable dallas, glorifie la loi du plus fort

Dallas, malheur à celui qui n’a pas compris dallas, un jour il y perdra la vie dallas, ton univers impitoyable

Below, see it being "performed".

Paula Bosse translates and offers context.

Dallas, your ruthless world, Dallas, where might is right, Dallas, and under your relentless sun, Dallas, only death is feared.

Dallas, home of the oil dollar, Dallas, you do not know pity; Dallas, the revolver is your idol, Dallas, you cling to the past.

Dallas, woe to him who does not understand, Dallas, one day he will lose his life. Dallas, your ruthless world, Dallas, where might is right.

BONUS: Below, enjoy the disco remix of the original and correct Dallas theme. Read the rest

After listening to tons of racist and ignorant horseshit from NRA conference attendees, the owner of Dallas-area eatery Ellen's decided to donate a portion of this weeks proceeds to groups pursuing reasonable gun legislation. The NRA asked its members to eat elsewhere.

Everyone wins except the people dead of gun violence.

Via Share Blue:

Ellen’s, a restaurant in downtown Dallas where the NRA is holding its annual convention, had a message printed on its customer receipts: “Thanks for visiting Ellen’s! A portion of this week’s proceeds will be donated to organizations dedicated to implementing reasonable and effective gun regulation.”

Most Americans consider that a sensible message — especially following the mass shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Parkland and the daily murders all around the country. But it angered the NRA.

The group tweeted an image of an Ellen’s receipt. “Attn @AnnualMeetings attendees. Steer clear of Ellen’s in downtown Dallas! Why go there when there are so many other great choices.”

Joe Groves, the owner of Ellen’s, said he added the message because of what he heard from NRA convention attendees. “I’m making a list of the vile, racist, moronic conversations overheard from NRA attendees eating at the restaurant,” he wrote on Facebook. “They don’t even speak softly.”

He told the website Eater that the attendees have insulted his wait staff with racial epithets. One person reportedly asked a Latino staff member, “Your illegals are kept in the kitchen, right?”

Another NRA fan reportedly told black employees they “don’t sound black” and asked if they were from India.

Et tu, American Airlines?

Just weeks after a shocking video surfaced of a United Airlines passenger being violently dragged off a flight for refusing to give up his seat, a new video shows an intense confrontation between American Airlines employees and passengers, including a woman holding a baby stroller.

Surain Adyanthaya is credited with capturing the video, and says it happened on American Airlines flight 591 from San Francisco to Dallas.

The video was posted to r/dallas, and started to go viral even before the flight landed at DFW.

The original Reddit poster says he was told it started over how a flight attendant dealt with a young mother who was trying to store a stroller in an overhead bin.

American Airlines is investigating after a video shows an altercation between a flight attendant and passengers. https://t.co/VORWX5Ike1 pic.twitter.com/HB3lfoIgyU

— Jim Dalrymple II (@JimDalrympleII) April 22, 2017

@Breaking911 @united : watch us knock a guy out@AmericanAir : hold my beer while I knock out a baby

— Elvis (@ScumbagElvis) April 22, 2017

Jalopnik watched it, so you don't have to:

The video starts with the woman already crying at the front of the airplane, holding a child in her arms and asking for her stroller back. You can hear another upset passenger say he’s “not going to sit here and watch this...” before making his way to the front of the plane to confront the flight attendants and ask for the name of the employee that allegedly hit the crying woman.

If you've ever witnessed an emergency siren test, you know how terrifying these things are: engineered to be bowel-looseningly urgent, to pierce through any sense that it's probably just a misfire, to motivate you to drop everything and rush for the emergency shelters, equally useful for tornadoes and incoming ICBMs. Read the rest

Actor Judge Reinhold was flying out of Dallas Love Field on Thursday and his bag set off an "alarm" on a TSA scanner, so security personnel demanded to pat Reinhold down; Reinhold objected that he'd already passed through the naked scanner and didn't believe he should have to get a government-mandated genital massage as well. Police were called and he was arrested. Read the rest

Farai Chideya -- a reporter and journalism professor at NYU -- describes the lessons she's learned in reporting from the "Heart of Whiteness" (Klansmen; Sheriff Joe Arpaio's plans for a war with Mexico; a white church that wanted to "disinter the body of a dead mixed-race infant"), and how the media has failed to learn those lessons -- to report on the systemic racism in American life -- for decades. Read the rest

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING. Reports broke at roughly 10pm ET tonight that shots were fired at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Dallas, where people gathered to protest the recent police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Multiple police officers and peaceful protesters were shot from "elevated positions," with series of controlled bursts, 6 shots at a time, audible on footage. Dallas police report that 2 snipers opened fire and shot 11 officers. Five officers are reported to have died from their injuries. At least one person who was not a police officer is said to have been injured.

Two sniper suspects have been apprehended, Dallas Police reported around 1AM ET. There may be more suspects.

The Dallas Police Chief says some of officers were shot in the back, and that the suspects "intended to injure and kill as many law officers as they could." Police say the suspects threatened to place a bomb in downtown Dallas.

Update: pic.twitter.com/qBJe3q0EtN

— Dallas Police Depart (@DallasPD) July 8, 2016

WATCH: Dallas Police chief believes suspects may have planted a bomb in the downtown area: https://t.co/VKQPFEQwU7 https://t.co/3rGbTdq9eh

— Good Morning America (@GMA) July 8, 2016

At the time of this post, no confirmed information on identity or motive of shooters. Early reports on mass shootings tend to include errors, inaccuracies, bias, and speculation.

Here are early tweets about the mass shooting, including raw video that contains graphic content. Read the rest

Ahmed Mohamed is a gifted, driven maker-kid who's in the ninth grade at MacArthur High in Irving, Texas. When he showed the homemade clock he soldered and pieced together to his engineering teacher, he was told to keep it in his bag. But when the alarm went off in English class, his teacher accused him of bringing a bomb to school.

He told the teacher, and then the principal, and then the police offers who'd been summoned, that it was a digital clock he'd made and brought to school to show as evidence of the kinds of things he was making. He'd loved robotics club in middle school and was hoping to connect to a similar peer group in his new high school.

He was arrested, handcuffed, and paraded through the school with an officer on each arm, wearing his NASA shirt.

When he was brought before the school police, the officer who arrested him looked at him and said, "Yup. That’s who I thought it was." Ahmed Mohamed and his family (and the Council on Islamic American Relations) believe that the officer was referring to the color of his skin and his name.

Police spokesman James McLellan admits that Mohamed always maintained that the device was a clock, not a bomb, "but there was no broader explanation." When the Dallas Morning News asked him what "broader explanation" he was looking for, McLellan said, “It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. Read the rest

Isabel writes, "Makarios Community School is the project of what is already a very successful and enthusiastic learning co-op of twenty homeschooling families in the Dallas Fort Worth area with thirty students ready to enroll." Read the rest

On my way to Dallas-Fort Worth airport today, I snapped this picture of the sticker on the inside of the back-seat passenger-side window of my taxi. It warns "The method used to authenticate credit card transactions for approval is not secure and personal information is subject to being intercepted by unauthorized personnel." There's some history there, I'm guessing. Consumer warnings are very nice, but I'm left wondering why they don't just update the firmware on the credit-card box with some decent crypto (unless this is because they use a CB radio to call in card numbers, which is pretty danged foolish). Read the rest

I'm giving a free talk tonight at UT Arlington engineering, 7PM at the Lonestar Auditorium, entitled: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Internet Regulation." Tell your friends! Read the rest