Read it.

Two weeks ago, things went horribly wrong with the execution of Clayton D. Lockett, a 38-year old Oklahoma man convicted of shooting a young woman and burying her alive.

Is he dead? Yes? Then it went absolutely right. The only way to improve it would be to shoot him and bury him alive, as he did to his victim, but of course the murder-deniers wouldn’t stand for that.

After executioners initiated what was meant to be a lethal injection, Lockett began writhing and tried to rise from the table; he died of an apparent heart attack 43 minutes after the procedure began. But we should not be surprised.

Actually, we should be surprised, because murderers are almost always treated better than their victims in these degenerate modern times.

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Man, poor people have it rough in this country.

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The Obama administration’s contribution:

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For white males, checking your privilege has nothing to do with confronting uncomfortable facts. It’s not what you have to confront—it’s about what you’re being forced to ignore. Checking one’s privilege is almost exclusively a process of evading the most plausible reasons for why white males began dominating the world until others were able to start guilt-tripping them and telling them to check their privilege. It involves living in complete denial. Instead of realistically confronting unearned privilege, it involves swallowing unearned guilt.

Pretend it makes sense that it’s currently considered the pinnacle of virtue to eagerly hand over what you have instead of fighting to keep it. Pretend that all other groups aren’t actually fighting loudly and brazenly and openly in their own self-interest. Pretend that it’s only wrong when white males do it.

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The Republican is releasing the list in order to draw attention to one of the defining issues of his political career: pension reform. And, of course, the Democrat he hopes to unseat, Rep. Scott Peters, is on the list.

…

Mr. DeMaio didn’t spare Republicans. Thirty-two of the 102 lawmakers on the list are GOP lawmakers. “I’m not just singling out Democrats here,” Mr. DeMaio said. “This is a bipartisan abuse.”

Good for him.

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The incredible waste of money involved in Obamacare may not be the most important aspect of the wreckage it causes. Its tyrannical heart is surely the most important. Yet the waste is staggering, and this happens to be only one of its visible elements: “$474M for 4 failed Obamacare exchanges” (Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland).

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The Antiplanner has a rule: anytime someone mentions how wonderful a transit-oriented development is or will be, just Google the name of that development with the words “tax-increment financing.” So, when Atlantic Cities writer Rebecca Burns breathlessly praises the Atlanta BeltLine as a “magical TOD,” I immediately looked it up.

It turns out the development is expected to eventually receive a modest $1.7 billion in tax-increment financed (TIF) subsidies. Total subsidies will be even more: of the $337 million in subsidies to date, only $120 million are from TIF. That’s not magic; that’s crony capitalism. If you want magic, go to Disneyland, which only cost $17 million (not billion) to build in 1955, which is less than $150 million in today’s dollars. (Disney World cost about $331 million in 1973 which, converted to today’s dollars, is in the ballpark of $1.7 billion–but it was virtually all privately financed.)

Regular readers know that the Antiplanner is not fond of TIF. Though public officials like to portray it as “free money,” in fact it takes money from schools, fire, and other property-tax-supported services. At best, TIF doesn’t stimulate development of an urban area; it only influences where that development will take place and what it will look like. If the development would have taken place anyway–perhaps in another location and at lower densities–then the taxes earned by the development would have gone to schools, etc. if there had been no TIF. At worst, TIF actually slows the growth of an urban area by increasing the tax burden or reducing the quality of urban services.

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Well, it’s not as if he’s going to give them to somebody who could conceivably vote Republican.

Read it. And watch the video.

Using a mixture of construction waste (a mixture of sand, concrete and glass fiber) and concrete for printing material, a single-story, one-room house can be printed for less than $5,000.

Using a 6.6-meter-tall, 32-meter-long industrial printer a Chinese company is using 3D-printing technology to build cheap housing for modernizing housing conditions in Chinese villages.

Read it.

Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.

That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”

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Nearly eight years ago, DARPA, the US Defense Department’s advanced research agency, set out to find a better solution for amputees than the metal hooks still widely used today. Now, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted its approval to one of the projects that came from that effort: a mind-controlled prosthetic limb called the DEKA Arm. A number of other scientists and engineers around the world are working on similar devices, but this is the first such prosthetic to get FDA approval. The prosthetic device comes from a company founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and it is roughly the size and weight of an adult arm.

Read it.

It’s such a great, simple idea: Young Brazilians want to learn English. Elderly Americans living in retirement homes just want someone to talk to. Why not connect them?

FCB Brazil did just that with its “Speaking Exchange” project for CNA language schools. As seen in the touching case study below, the young Brazilians and older Americans connect via Web chats, and they not only begin to share a language—they develop relationships that enrich both sides culturally and emotionally.

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You hear the word “poverty” tossed around a lot. There’s been a “war” on it for some 50 years, and I am hardly the first person to notice that either poverty is a tough opponent, or the goalposts keep moving on what constitutes “poverty.” Or both.

…

Follow these 6 simple rules and you may struggle, but you will never be in poverty:

1. Stay in school and actually pay attention. Do your homework, graduate.

2. Do not do drugs at all or drink alcohol to excess.

3. WORK. At anything. Currently, 20 percent of families have nobody working.

4. GET MARRIED. Marriage is the single-best anti-poverty tool there is. If you have a spouse, remember that two crap jobs are equal to one fairly-decent one.

5. Do not have a baby you have no intention of supporting. Do not have a baby without a lawfully wedded spouse, preferably your own.

6. Do NOT be a criminal. It is evil and hurtful to others, but most importantly, the habits and attitudes you will develop are the worst thing you can do to yourself. When you believe that you are entitled to take, by stealth or violence, something someone else has earned, then you are close to a lost cause as a human being.

Not one of these rules calls for a government program. But if every American followed them, poverty would end overnight.

 

Read it.

A new study—conducted by Mueller and Oppenheimer—finds that people remember lectures better when they’ve taken handwritten notes, rather than typed ones.

What’s more, knowing how and why typed notes can be bad doesn’t seem to improve their quality. Even if you warn laptop-notetakers ahead of time, it doesn’t make a difference. For some tasks, it seems, handwriting’s just better.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

At T-Mobile and legions of other companies, Web-based tests have become a key gateway to landing a job, a potent screening tool that can effectively bump a résumé to the top or bottom of a manager’s pile.

…

Providers say the tests hold the promise of leveling the playing field for job applicants by removing the chance of bias that comes with a traditional résumé screening. The tests can’t distinguish, for example, if a candidate didn’t attend a top-tier college, is currently unemployed or is a woman or minority.

Theodore Dalrymple exposes the latest fad in economic ressentiment as the zombie that it is.

Resentment is the one emotion that can last a lifetime and will never let you down. All other emotions are fleeting and unreliable by comparison. I have tried hating someone for years, but found it impossible: hatred fades like the colors of pressed flowers. But resentment! It is the perfect solution to one’s failure in life. And we are all of us failures in some sense or other, thank God, for no one would be as intolerable and the cause of so much resentment as the complete success.

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Thus, the Jones Act and the crude oil export ban – each implemented decades ago – together inflate U.S. gasoline prices by as much as 0.22 per gallon – or about 6% of the current price at your local gas station. Not everyone in the United States, however, is harmed. In the case of the Jones Act, the American shipping unions and shipbuilders that benefit from the law have long opposed any type of reforms, regardless of the pains imposed on the American economy and U.S. consumers. The crude oil export restrictions, on the other hand, have found new support from a small group of U.S. refiners who profit handsomely from depressed domestic crude prices and the lack of any legal limits on their exports. As is always the case with protectionism, these groups win and U.S. consumers lose.

The Other McCain reminds us of an inconvenient truth.

If the news of the Boko Haram abductions was shocking, it was because the American media have been so busy promoting the Obama administration’s narrative that, since the death of Osama bin Laden, the threat of Islamic terrorism has essentially ended. This narrative is politically convenient for Democrats, but as with most such narratives, it’s a gigantic lie. There are still many millions of Muslims in the world who hate us and want us all dead, and many of them are willing to take up arms to accomplish that goal.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology in the guise of a religion, with which no co-existence is possible. You can cry ‘Peace! Peace!’ but if one side wants war, it’s war.

Suzanne Goldenberg, a Voice of the Crust for the British Guardian, asks a question to which only a feminist ‘progressive’ would care about the answer.

Climate change affects minorities and women, the elderly and the poor. But the leadership of the environmental movement is pale and male. That doesn’t look like progress.

But it certainly looks ‘progressive’. Indeed, it might be the best characterization of the ‘progressive’ movement I’ve heard in years.

Unfortunately, the non-pale and non-male don’t have a great track record when it comes to leadership.

Now take a look at the top executives at eight of the top 10 groups devoted to fighting that fight:

Sierra Club? White male.

Nature Conservancy? White male.

League of Conservation Voters? White male.

World Wildlife Fund? White male.

Environmental Defense Fund? White male.

Friends of the Earth? White male.

National Audubon Society? White male.

Nature Conservancy? White male.

The very top of “Big Green” is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up. It doesn’t look like change. It doesn’t even look like America. So is it any wonder environmental groups are having trouble connecting with the public on climate change? Corporate and conservative funding of climate denial is one thing, but it’s beyond past time for the leaders of this movement to look at how their choice in leadership is affecting their strategy and messaging.

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

Mark Steyn is not optimistic.

Islamic law is a bitch to live under because it has a complete lack of proportion, an inability to tolerate any dissent from orthodoxy, and a disinclination to recognize the concept of private space. On the other hand, in a western world in which a man can be fined $2.5 million for expressing the view in a private conversation in his own home that he’d rather his mistress didn’t go around with black men, who are we to judge?

Either way, it’s all a bit arbitrary. In Islam, a woman must be submissive. In America, you’re not supposed to call a woman “bossy”, and the expression “Man up!” is about to be banned. These days, we’re all living under apostasy regimes. My bet is that Islam’s will prove more durable.

Golden Goose device.

Hugelkultur.

Bookshelf chair.

Hubless spokeless bike.

SaddleBaby.

Drinkable book purifies water.

Mellow foolproof sous-vide machine.

Distance bug vacuum.

Magic Tank.

Chamberlain MyQ garage door opener.

Read it.

Just lucky, I guess.

President Barack Obama’s fundraising pilgrimage to California included all the liberal stations: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and La Jolla.

Two patterns stood out: first, that Obama continues to be heckled even by friendly audiences; and second, that America’s richest political donors not only tolerate attacks on wealth but enjoy them, nodding and murmuring their approval when the president tells them they are the nation’s enemies.

What do they know that you don’t? Hmmm?

Read it.

And these are just the good things….

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• Democrat governors have enacted over $58 billion in higher taxes since 2011.

• This stands in stark contrast to Republican governors, who have signed over $36 billion in tax cuts into law since 2011.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Republicans and Democrats.

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And that tells you everything you need to know about the ‘minimum wage’.

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Democrats and their media enablers openly giggle at the word “Benghazi” now. So funny, isn’t it? Those provincial simpletons at Fox News are still droning on about dead Americans in Benghazi as if anybody but their drooling rubes care about it, ha-ha… If the Democrats are right about that, it doesn’t speak well for the American people. Those four Americans died serving the United States – not Obama, not Clinton, but their fellow Americans. And they’re owed not the mawkish, hollow, self-serving eulogies written by hack staffers for the President and the Secretary of State to read over the coffins, but the truth about how and why they died. It’s odd, even for the insular Obama cultists, that so many people find that a laughing matter.

Read it.

I’ve held Los Lernier in contempt for a long time; it’s good to know that the House is finally catching up.

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As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fought against placing al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on the State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011, the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reports.

After all, who expects Africans to behave like civilized folks? Not somebody from Arkansas, certainly.

Read it.

It all started with beavers. When Alex Pentland was three years into his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, in 1973, he worked part-time as a computer programmer for NASA’s Environmental Research Institute. One of his first tasks — part of a larger environmental-monitoring project — was to develop a method for counting Canadian beavers from outer space. There was just one problem: existing satellites were crude, and beavers are small. “What beavers do is they create ponds,” he recalls of his eventual solution, “and you can count the number of beavers by the number of ponds. You’re watching the lifestyle, and you get an indirect measure.”

Read it.

At which, no doubt, Republcans and ‘the 1%’ will be ritually denounced.

Angelo Codevilla continues to document our descent into Liberal Fascism.

Confirming ordinary experience, the polls leave no doubt that the majority of Americans now regard the U.S. government as more a threat than a protector, acting beyond law or popular control. How government in America became “them” rather than “us,” what government’s loss of legitimacy means for this country, and whether lost confidence and legitimacy may be reclaimed any more than virginity, are questions we must ponder.

…

When some 200 paramilitary agents of the Bureau of Land Management dealt with a Nevada rancher using armored cars, took his herd of some 400 cattle, shot his bull, and tasered his son supposedly to collect a million dollars in unpaid grazing fees, few imagined that those cattle had eaten a million dollars’ worth of grass. Everyone who receives a bill from a government agency knows that the agency quickly multiplies that bill with interest and penalties, and that at best, ordinary citizens can argue before a judge (not a jury) only whether the agency followed its own procedures—not whether its judgments were just. Also, the American people’s near-universal experience is that merely pointing out a mistake to the IRS—or to any other agency—likely leads to its finding pretexts for imposing other, even heavier costs on you.

Moreover, no one was surprised to learn that the family of Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader and senior senator from Nevada, stood to benefit from the rancher’s dispossession. Rory Reed, Harry Reid’s son, is brokering the construction of large scale solar energy farms in the area. Some of the land where they are being built contains wildlife which is to be transferred to the land on which the rancher’s cattle have been grazing. The Bureau of Land Management, which decided to clear this particular land of cattle so that the transfer of said wildlife could proceed, is headed by one Neal Kornze, whose career consists exclusively of service to Senator Reed.

Americans are learning the hard way that the modern administrative state serves the powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens. That is why, the peculiarities of the rancher’s dispute notwithstanding, the American people reacted with something like “That, but for the grace of God, could be me.”

Read it.

Unlike the public, they know something about the subject and aren’t fooled by government lies.

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Last November, when the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) proposed moderating years of escalating mandates by reducing the amount of ethanol that must be mixed into gasoline, a top ethanol lobbyist seemed perplexed. “We’re all just sort of scratching our heads here today and wondering why this administration is telling us to burn less of a clean-burning American fuel,” Bob Dineen, head of the Renewable Fuels Association, told The New York Times.

Here are a few possible reasons why: America’s ethanol requirement destroys the environment, damages car engines, increases gas prices, and contributes to the starvation of the global poor. It’s an unmitigated disaster on nearly every level.

Read it.

Concentrations of wealth and power are what keep liberals awake at night, but just once I’d like to hear a liberal notice, even glancingly, that the biggest unchecked concentration of wealth and power is the government.  Except the government doesn’t directly create much wealth itself (sell off federal assets—go ahead, make my day—and see how little of the total national debt it would actually retire), and increasingly it grabs power by means intended to skirt the consent of the governed, which it then usually uses to confiscate more wealth for itself, or prevent new wealth from being generated.

As mentioned here once before, about 15 years back I recall reading an article in Barron’s about when the FAX machine was first being brought to market, the U.S. Postal Service argued to the FCC that since FAX machines would be used to transmit the equivalent of first class mail, the legal monopoly of the Postal Service to deliver first class mail meant therefore that FAX machines could only be located and operated in Post Offices (for a fee in addition to phone charges, of course). In other words, to send and receive fax, you’d have had to go to a Post Office.  Oh goody.  Fortunately the FCC was not amused at the idea.

Read it.

Even a Voice of the Crust such as the Washington Post admits that bureaucracy feeds on itself in cycles of make-work.

Read it.

Father Seraphim Aldea is so committed to building the first Orthodox monastery in the Scottish isles in more than a millennium that he did something no monk searching for solitude would ever, ever do.

“I learned how to use that dreadful Facebook thing,” he said. The Romanian monk has already been handed an abandoned Church of Scotland sanctuary on Mull Island. While Kilninian was built in 1755, it appears in 1561 records as a site associated with the great Monastery of St. Columba on Iona. Thus, this property may have been linked to monasticism as early as the seventh century.

Read it. And watch the video.

This Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka understands Islam better than anyone in the State Department or on the European Commission:

Read it.

What better day than Star Wars Day to start planning your next Star Wars-themed getaway? The vacation rental site HomeAway.com has selected several properties that they think serve as earthbound stand-ins for famous Star Wars sites.

Steve Sailer writes one of the best explanations of ‘race’ I’ve ever read.

Q. What’s race all about?

A. Relatedness.

Race is about who is related to whom.

Q. Do you mean a race is a family?

A. Yes, an extended family. (To be precise, a particular type of extended family, one that’s more coherent over time than the norm, a distinction I’ll explain below.)

Q. Race means family? I’ve never heard of such a thing!

A. It’s remarkable how seldom this concept essential to understanding how the world works is mentioned in the press. Yet, in my Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, the first definition of “race” is:

“1. A group of persons related by common descent or heredity.”

Q. If races exist, then, pray tell, precisely how many there are?

A. How many neighborhoods are there in the place where you live?

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Planned Parenthood abortion clinics have come under fire countless times over the years for not reporting cases of statutory rape to authorities as required by state law. Now, in Arizona, officials says the abortion giant failed again to provide the proper report to authorities about a victim of a young man who is a serial rapist.

Not only did Planned Parenthood intentionally fail to report the rape but, in so doing, it allowed the rapist to rape as many as 18 or more teenage girls, authorities say, making it so the abortion company is partially responsible for victimizing them as well.

Science fiction writer Sarah Hoyt discusses gender roles.

And that’s where we start. You see, it wasn’t that women didn’t believe men were smart or good at stuff. They did. They would actually brag about their husbands. Qualities such as ingeniousness, ability to climb the job ladder (such as it was. In the village most people were self-employed craftsmen and small time farmers) and to make money, ability to hold their own in a discussion, etc. all of these were highly valued. Women also valued men as protectors (they ARE bigger) and as influences in the kids’ lives.

What they didn’t think – and forgive me, I’m just reporting what I see – was that men were competent to run families or groups, or, frankly themselves, at least in some regards. For instance, if a guy appeared in public in utter disarray (or drunk) it was considered a grave fault on his wife’s part. Unless his wife was beaten and abused, in which case it was considered a REALLY grave fault on HIS part and often something the village women decided to do something about. (Meeting a bunch of very upset women in a dark alley at midnight cured some of them – if not all.)

Read it.

Alice Gilbert can vividly recall her first day of class last fall in a black studies course called “The Obama Phenomenon” offered by Professor Otis Madison at UC Santa Barbara.

That’s because before his introductory lecture was over, the scholar “warned Ted Cruz-supporting ‘teabaggers’ to get the hell out of his classroom before he sent them home to their mother in a body bag,” Gilbert said in an email interview with The College Fix.

“The comment is from memory, however there were other students with me in the class who can attest to them,” Gilbert said. “When Professor Madison made his comments in the very first lecture, I was taken aback and offended.”

Hm. I don’t know — if you’re trying to learn How To Be Black (and what else could ‘black studies’ be about?), it seems like an effective approach.

Read it.

Yeah, for somebody who works there. God help some poor kid who wanders in off the street.

A story on Letts from ThinkProgress focuses on her insistence on how pain-free and safe the procedure was – for her.

Of course, it wasn’t so pain-free and safe for the baby, but there is no mention of the baby in the entire article – or, for that matter, his or her father.

Read it. And watch the video.

Most people aren’t aware that Robin Hood didn’t ‘rob from the rich and give to the poor’, he robbed from government officials the tax money that they had squeezed from common people and returned it to them.

Steve Sailer dishes the dirt.

Harvard U. is full of people who clawed their way into Harvard, so it’s not surprising that they often can’t stand each other. Fortunately, 21st Century Harvard students have a vocabulary of whom to blame for any and all frustrations they feel.

It wasn’t this bad at Yale in the ’70s, but it was still pretty bad.

Freedom of expression, open debate, and the clash of intellects are all very fine, but they are hardly appropriate values at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Harvard.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

I got yer alternative energy, right here….

Read it.

In traditional wheelchair designs up to 30 percent of expended energy is lost because they lack suspension, leaving only 70-80 percent of the energy put into the chair for propulsion. This creates uncomfortable rides and fatigued drivers. “Most of the time, the user is driving a rigid wheel with no suspension and it breaks your back and shakes your filings loose,” says SoftWheel CEO Daniel Barel.

Read it.

Well, socialism will do that to you. As Lady Thatcher famously said, the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then; so it is with The Nation.

At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been called to “give voice to those opposing privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing.”

As the questioner pointed out, those disproportionately affected by these developments are poor and minority communities. Chicago, for example, a city that is one-third white, has a public school system in which 90 percent of the students are children of color and 87 percent come from low-income families. When the city schools shut down last year, 88 percent of the children affected were black; when Philadelphia did the same, the figure was 81 percent.

You’d think black people might have something to contribute to a discussion about that process and how it might be resisted. Yet on this exclusively white panel at this predominantly white conference, they had no voice.

…

This ought to be a civil conversation among friends. Those born white and wealthy should not be slammed for developing a social conscience, becoming activists and trying to make the world a better place. But neither should the nature of their involvement be above critique. When their aim is to fight alongside low-income people and people of color as brothers and sisters, real advances are possible. But when they look down on these people as younger stepbrothers and stepsisters to be brought along for the ride, precious few gains are made.