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As rumors swirled that Mr. Chen’s employer, Jianlong Group, planned to shed workers, a group of them found the 41-year-old executive and beat him severely, battering his skull. Workers blocked streets near the factory and hurled bricks, preventing police and paramedics from reaching Mr. Chen.

Bet the Teamsters were just red with envy.

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Indeed — God forbid that anybody in Britain might learn self-defense.

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What if China had hobbits?

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Indeed, one can find anything on the Internet.

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A comprehensive and irrefutable counterexample to the Intelligence Design theory.

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California, of course.

Darwin award.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in San Francisco.

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Can you think of anything more silly?

Avoid Florida. They’re crazy down there.

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So I guess there’s no chance of the Miss Political Genocide contest happening. A pity; North Korea would have had a lock on it.

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They ought to change it to “Electron Hut”.

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I don’t know — I’d have thought that $15 million worth of Legos would be bigger than that.

Arnold Kling makes a libertarian cultural reference that not all will catch.

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Willie Sutton, asked why he robbed banks, was alleged to have answered: “that’s where the money is.” Like common bank robbers, progressives don’t really care what effect their money grab has on the rest of the country. They just want more funds for new social experiments and welfare patronage programs. If they have to grab it from the Americans who drove 75 percent of economic growth over the last several decades, then so be it!

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Blue states are rich states; now you know why.

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Blogging from the ER. Darwin Awards drop from the very ceiling tiles.

Tonight I learned yet another helpful life lesson from one of my patients. If you’re on the street corner selling coke and you see the cops coming to bust you don’t eat all your coke. Having been taught this valuable lesson I will now know better than to do this and wind up going to the ER in handcuffs, seizing uncontrollably, aspirating my vomit and doing all of this with a white powder moustache looking like and ad for “Got Coke?”

Never, ever leave flashlights, shampoo bottles, beer bottles or any long, circular object on the floor because someday you will fall on it and it will somehow, work its way up your rectum.

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If this blog blinks out of existence, you’ll know it worked. Personally, I’m betting not.

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And it doesn’t even include any XKCD strips.

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What would we do without scientists?

Immediate counter-example: Helen Thomas.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The article starts with a boring but characteristic story of Jarrett talking a tired and annoyed Obama into wasting time making an appearance at the Pink Ice Ball gala hosted by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, an African-American sorority notorious for its decades of using the brown paper bag test to decide who could pledge. (Michelle Obama wouldn’t have passed; Valerie Jarrett would have with flying colors.)

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Had the whole scenario played out correctly, the Harvard professor would have:

• a wonderful, center-stage part as the offended Negro;
• an opportunity to get attention from The Choir (those credulous journalists who already have a prefabricated meme for White Racism — oops, a redundancy. Only Whitey can be racist);
• a chance to grab President Obama for a “Black Brothers United Against Whitey” photo op;
• more donations for his purported charity “Inkwells”;
• a good basis for a resentful/outraged documentary on race in America (with Gates as the star, naturally);
• a gathering of prominent black Personalities to talk about the eternal evil of whiteness in America;
• and so on — back to the first, second and third motives captured in a Mobius strip of Offended Negro, breathless attention from The Choir, and a tidy profit to be made off the guilty White suckahs.

It almost worked. In fact, his scheme looked real good before the bomb of reality went off in his hands.

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Curiouser and curiouser.

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The EHRC is falling apart because many of the people who run it are not concerned about equality at all, but rather with gaining preferential treatment for their own specific set of clients.

So, whatever their criticisms of Mr Phillips’s leadership style, Kay Hampton also resigned because not enough was being done for ethnic groups. Bert Massie and Jane Campbell insisted that disabled people were being neglected, while Ben Summerskill, also head of the gay rights group Stonewall, protested that the commission was failing to protect millions whose lives were “disfigured by prejudice”. Under the guise of demanding protection against discrimination, each victim group is in reality campaigning for privileges at the expense of everyone else.

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The American Psychiatric Association risks losing sight of that distinction by grimly—and rather inexpertly—debating whether avid shopping should be considered a sign of mental illness. The fifth edition of the association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is expected in 2012. The APA isn’t just deciding the fate of shopaholics; it’s also debating whether overuse of the Internet, “excessive” sexual activity, apathy, and even prolonged bitterness should be viewed, quite seriously, as brain “disorders.” If you spend hours online, have sex more frequently than aging psychiatrists, and moan incessantly that the federal government can’t account for all its TARP funds, take heed: You may soon be classed among the 48 million Americans the APA already considers mentally ill.

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Let’s see: We’re losing customers, so make it impossible for customers to use our service. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Everybody who wants these people in charge of our health care system, raise your hand.

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Girly men aren’t born, they’re made.

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Adding another voice to the political turmoil surrounding the arrest last week of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a black police officer who was on the scene said he supported the arresting officer 100%, the Associated Press reports.

Pretty bad when even the black cops are racist. Oh, wait….

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal gets around to asking the question that many of us have been asking for decades.

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security “everything’s on the table,” which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t.”

This isn’t a flip-flop. It’s a sex-change operation.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Granted, Gates is, as we’ve seen in recent days, a race hustler. It’s completely in character for Gates to try to make money off his unfortunate temper tantrum by whipping it into a PBS documentary. Yet, for most of his long career he’s been the classiest race hustler in the racket.

But, my goodness, does he ever hustle.

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It’s so hard to get good help these days.

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Lindsey Graham has announced, as expected, that he will vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor. When he defends terrorists’ rights, Graham is fond of saying that “it’s not about them, it’s about us.” Similarly, as I argued here and here, Graham’s decision in this instance isn’t about Sotomayor; it’s about Graham.

RINO rides again. Perhaps he can be persuaded to switch to the Democrats, as Specter did.

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Well, most people find money pretty motivational.

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Not really news but a useful reminder.

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Yeah, that’s “art”, all right.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in San Francisco.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Let’s have a punch-in where cancer patients beat on anti-nuclear hippies for a while. I’d pay to watch that.

Kindling the new censorship.

Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else. Steve Jobs has confirmed that every iPhone routinely checks back with Apple to make sure the apps you’ve purchased are still kosher; Apple reserves the right to kill any app at any time for any reason. But why stop there? If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you’ve bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I’ve predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too.

BMI under the microscope.

Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet devised the equation in 1832 in his quest to define the “normal man” in terms of everything from his average arm strength to the age at which he marries. This project had nothing to do with obesity-related diseases, nor even with obesity itself. Rather, Quetelet used the equation to describe the standard proportions of the human build—the ratio of weight to height in the average adult. Using data collected from several hundred countrymen, he found that weight varied not in direct proportion to height (such that, say, people 10 percent taller than average were 10 percent heavier, too) but in proportion to the square of height. (People 10 percent taller than average tended to be about 21 percent heavier.)

Mark Helprin is on the case.

As you well know, the previous American president was held in check by his underestimation of the time and forces required by his policies in the Middle East. The current president’s most war-like virtue is the ability to apologize to people who should be apologizing to us—an extraordinary skill no doubt, but questionable. You might worry a bit more about Messrs. Sarkozy and Berlusconi, either one of whom could drive you out of business, but as for the rest, though the quivers are full, no arrows are likely to be loosed in the near future.

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Where do they think they are, Albany?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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One by one, President Obama’s health-care promises are being exposed by the details of the actual legislation: Costs will explode, not fall; taxes will have to soar to pay for it; and now we are learning that you won’t be able to “keep your health-care plan” either.

The House bill says that after a five-year grace period all Erisa insurance offerings will have to win government approval—both by the Department of Labor and a new “health choices commissioner” who will set federal standards for what is an acceptable health plan. This commissar—er, commissioner—can fine employers that don’t comply and even has “suspension of enrollment” powers for plans that he or she has vetoed, until “satisfied that the basis for such determination has been corrected and is not likely to recur.”

The new Erisa regime will be especially difficult to meet for businesses that operate with very slim profit margins or have large numbers of part-time or seasonal workers. They may simply “cash out” and surrender 8% of their payroll under the employer-mandate tax. A new analysis by the Lewin Group, prepared for the Heritage Foundation, finds that some 88.1 million people will be shifted out of private employer health insurance under the House bill. If those people preferred their prior plan, well, too bad again.

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It took eight years from the time John Kennedy declared we would go to the moon to the day an American landed on it, 40 years ago this week. It was also eight years ago this September that terrorists struck the World Trade Center, the site of which continues to be a hole in the ground and a national disgrace.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Germans were always over-achievers.

Waiting for the you-ought-not-to-go-faster-than-a-horse people to drag this out in favor of tighter speed limits….

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Surely there’s a government program for that.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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To further burden the urban infill developer, right now a new form of regulation is entering the scene, that of the so-called smartcode which regulates the last untouched part of the exterior of a structure: its overall form. With rigid codes and design staffs, cities can now create for themselves a vision, supplemented with pretty pictures, of the imagined future, where building patterns need to be just-so. An urban infill developer must now adhere to someone else’s opinion of where his front door is, and whether he has a front porch.

So, in reality, these urban parcels sit abandoned and income-free, with the biggest real estate growth market being in “for sale” signs, as owners try to unload these properties on a greater fool ready to do battle for the cause of urban infill. It is a no-win scenario for cities.

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Why didn’t we think of that?