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The incident, which took place in Sargodha, Pakistan, happened when two men, later identified as Ghulam Rasul and Muhammad Sultan, were sitting on street benches.

The pair were having a conversation which quickly turned into an argument and then a fight.

It was during the fight that a bomb one of the men was carrying exploded.

No one else was hurt during the incident on Saturday.

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By now it is evident even to honest liberals that Title IX is an out of control monster that makes old fashioned political correctness and speech codes look like a John Stuart Mill seminar. The Laura Kipness episode at Northwestern University might prove a tipping point, but I doubt it: between the determination of the will-to-power left, the cravenness of most college administrations (including Northwestern’s feckless president Mort Schapiro—I’ve got a file on him, as this isn’t his first epic failure in academic leadership), and the push from the Alinskyites in the Obama Administration, the Title IX campus brownshirts are likely to roll on.

…

The thing to note here is that the Clinton Administration’s “guidance” on Title IX was what is known in the regulatory trade today as an “informal” rule-making: the regulatory regime does not go through the normal Federal Register notice, public comment period, and judicial review that is intended by the Administrative Procedure Act. This is not an accident: activist liberals know that many of the regulations they want to foist in the world wouldn’t survive this formal process. So they rely on “Dear Colleague” letters that say, “If you don’t do what we say, we’ll investigate you for civil rights violations, and possibly cut off your federal funds.” The Obama Administration ran the same drill with a “Dear Colleague” letter demanding that universities set up investigations of harassment and intimidation claims with a lower evidentiary standard—i.e., without proper due process rights.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Pakistani courtroom proceedings were secret. Despite what reporters were previously told this past April (that ten men had been convicted), Pakistani authorities secretly acquitted eight of the men charged with conspiracy and attempted murder in the case of teenager Malala Yousafzai, who was targeted because she wanted girls to receive an education.

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Feminism isn’t about standing up for women, it’s for hating America and destroying American culture.

Realize that, and it all falls into place.

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Whoa. The food must be really bad.

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Well, I sure hope so….

Internet bloggers and Armageddon conspiracists are predicting the “end of days” event to happen between September 22 to 28.

My 15th wedding anniversary is in there. I appreciate the thought, but….

One blogger has worryingly suggested US residents retain their firearms after suggesting that the controversial military operation Jade Helm taking place between July and September in several southern states is in preparation for predicted anarchy that could ensue as the asteroid nears the planet.

It’s not the southern states that will be a problem; they can handle themselves. The coastal cities, however, full of room-temperature slum dwellwers, well….

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I think it’s about reminding the Democrites that their baggage is waiting for them on the platform.

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Maybe Obama golfing is why the economy is so bad.

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Since the new president (Muhammadu Buhari) took over on May 29 ^th there have been a dozen Boko Haram attacks leaving nearly a hundred dead. The Islamic terrorists seem eager to show they have not been eliminated in the northeast. Buhari is depending on the army and police to keep the pressure on Boko Haram while he is also investigating the security forces for corruption, incompetence and a long history of murdering civilians during operations. Because of the participation of so many foreign troops in the recent defeat of Boko Haram it was possible to gather more evidence of civilians killed by soldiers and police who simply shot at every young man in sight or rounded up men and killed many of them when they could not provide any information about Boko Haram, or simply to “avenge” recently killed soldiers or policemen. Boko Haram got its start, in part, because of this murderous behavior by the security forces and general knowledge of this has increased public pressure to force the security forces to change their ways. The new president agrees that it is time, but how do you do that in the middle of a war?

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Muslim loyalty is to the Ummah first and only incidentally to whatever country they happen to be living in.

As widely reported in the media about ten days ago, a special forces commander in Tajikistan named Gulmurod Khalimov recently defected to the Islamic State. Col. Khalimov has now made a propaganda video for ISIS calling on his Tajik co-religionists, especially soldiers, to give up their positions and make hijra to the Caliphate. He makes a special point of targeting his ethnic comrades who are serving in the Russian military.

And this is not just some inconsequential no-account soldier: Gulmurod Khalimov was in a high-level position with the Tajik government before he defected, and had been trained in the United States.

“Experts” say that Col. Khalimov is “likely not an immediate threat to coalition forces.” However, they are overlooking what is actually going on here: the erstwhile OMON commander is aiming his call directly at ethnic Tajiks in both Tajikistan and the Russian military. That is, it is not an invasion by ISIS that is the “immediate threat”, but a sudden explosion of jihad within the ranks of our “staunch ally” Tajikistan — or in the Russian army.

By the way: do you think Gulmurod Khalimov is a “moderate Muslim”? He must have been when he was stationed in Baton Rouge — otherwise we wouldn’t have been training him, would we?

But he’s working for ISIS now. Does that make him an “extremist”? If so, how was he radicalized? On the Internet, right?

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This thesis examines several organised examples of live role-play: Southron Gaard, a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism based in Christchurch, New Zealand; larping, as represented by two documentary films, Darkon and Monster Camp, that document the activities of larping organisations in the USA; and ‘Lord of the Rings Tour’, a tourism trip from Christchurch to ‘Edoras’, a fictional location from Middle-earth, the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Novels and Peter Jackson’s filmic adaptations thereof. These organised leisure activities provide platforms for the pursuit of active, physical involvement with the images and ideas of medieval fantasy. In them, participants find ways to bring these fantastic images and ideas onto their bodies in reality and, perhaps as a result, closer to their everyday lives in ways that have more significant social implications than may at first be apparent.

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Counterfactual history is a risky endeavor. But the events that followed America’s entry into World War I strongly suggest that had President Woodrow Wilson permanently “kept us out of war,” as his 1916 presidential campaign slogan boasted, the conditions that produced World War II would not have been sown.

The Great War began in August 1914. America did not enter the war until April 1917. By that time both sides were exhausted from years of grinding warfare. There is ample reason to believe that had nothing new been added to the equation, the belligerents would have agreed to a negotiated settlement. No victors, no vindictiveness.

…

Thus, the first likely consequence of U.S. prolongation of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution (and the Cold War). Communism — its threat of worldwide revolution and its wholesale slaughter — was a key factor in the rise of the European despotism that sparked World War II. (Had the Bolsheviks come to power anyway and Germany had won the war, Germany would have thrown the communists out.)

…

The second likely consequence, then, of U.S. prolongation of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany.

Steve Sailer looks back in wonder.

One difference between Weiner and myself is that he’s obsessed with the past, while I’ve always been highly cognizant of which way current trends are likely to take the future.

…

A lot of people don’t believe me about how much of what you see on TV today is driven by great-grandpa not getting into Los Angeles Country Club and therefore having to found Hillcrest Country Club, but listen to the creator of Mad Men instead and he’ll say the same thing.

High schools and country clubs — they’re a big part of how people feel about life.

…

It finally occurs to me that I’d be more driven and successful if I hadn’t had such a nice time in high school. The greatest motor of ambition in modern America appears to be resentments left over from high school, and I just don’t have enough.

Neither do I. That’s why I’m not Bill Gates rich; it’s my native indolence betraying me.

Jim Goad shares his puzzlement with us.

A very common sexist stereotype is that women are absurdly hypersensitive. Funny enough, these days that stereotype persists mostly due to the absurdly hypersensitive real-life behavior of feminists. Supposedly it’s feminists’ job to defeat anti-female stereotypes rather than validate them, right? Perchance they changed the rules when I wasn’t looking.

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Before Betsy Chao, a senior here at Rutgers University, could take midterm exams in her online courses this semester, her instructors sent emails directing students to download Proctortrack, a new anti-cheating technology.

“You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,” Ms. Chao said recently, explaining how the program uses webcams to scan students’ features and verify their identities before the test.

Once her exam started, Ms. Chao said, a red warning band appeared on the computer screen indicating that Proctortrack was monitoring her computer and recording video of her. To constantly remind her that she was being watched, the program also showed a live image of her in miniature on her screen.

Even for an undergraduate raised in a culture of selfies and Skype, Ms. Chao found the system intrusive. “I felt it was sort of excessive,” she said.

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Liquids are great at absorbing bullets’ energy. Fired underwater, an AK-47 can only send a bullet a few feet forwards, while in the air the same bullets would easily fly over 1,000 feet. This is great news for secret agents looking to avoid henchmen by swimming underwater, but it’s impractical advice for anyone else unless they want to carry six-foot-thick tanks of water around themselves at all times. Fortunately, researchers have found liquids that work even better than water at stopping bullets. The latest, developed by Poland’s Military Institute of Armament Technology in Warsaw, is a new non-Newtonian Shear Thickening Fluid, and it might replace Kevlar in body armor of the future.

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This is a war between Sunni and Shia forces over the ruins of the regional order. It is a war which is unlikely to end in the wholesale victory of one or another of the sides. Rather, it will end when the two forces exhaust themselves. What the region will look like when this storm passes is anyone’s guess.

When Muslims are killing other Muslims rather than killing us, my dominant emotion is relief.

In the Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Qods Force, the Iranians possess an instrument perfectly designed for the current moment in the region. This force is a gathering of professional revolutionaries whose specific trade is the mobilizing and direction of proxy political-military organizations.

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Friction is all around us, working against the motion of tires on pavement, the scrawl of a pen across paper, and even the flow of proteins through the bloodstream. Whenever two surfaces come in contact, there is friction, except in very special cases where friction essentially vanishes — a phenomenon, known as “superlubricity,” in which surfaces simply slide over each other without resistance.

Now physicists at MIT have developed an experimental technique to simulate friction at the nanoscale. Using their technique, the researchers are able to directly observe individual atoms at the interface of two surfaces and manipulate their arrangement, tuning the amount of friction between the surfaces. By changing the spacing of atoms on one surface, they observed a point at which friction disappears.

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An artificial intelligence system has for the first time reverse-engineered the regeneration mechanism of planaria—the small worms whose extraordinary power to regrow body parts has made them a research model in human regenerative medicine. – See more at: http://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/planarian-regeneration-model-discovered-artificial-intelligence#sthash.vx4oaN4F.dpuf

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So what? Bet you money they can get some from the North Koreans, especially since the Saudis have oil and the North Koreans probably don’t.

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Dating from 1250, The Black Book of Carmarthen at the National Library of Wales is the earliest surviving medieval manuscript written solely in Welsh, and contains some of the earliest references to King Arthur and Merlin.

Despite its importance and decades of scholarly research, the work of a PhD student from the University of Cambridge has revealed tantalising new glimpses of verse, and some images, from the 750-year-old book.

Myriah Williams and her supervisor Professor Paul Russell from Cambridge’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, believe that a 16th century owner of the book, probably a man named Jaspar Gryffyth of Ruthin, summarily erased centuries’ worth of additional verse, doodles and marginalia which had been added to the manuscript as it changed hands throughout the years.

However, using a combination of ultraviolet light and photo editing software, the 16th century owner’s penchant for erasure has been partly reversed to reveal snatches of poetry which are previously unrecorded in the canon of Welsh verse. Currently, the texts are very fragmentary and in need of much more analysis, although they seem to be the continuation of a poem on the preceding page with a new poem added at the foot of the page.

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This Hospitaller sword is shrouded in mystery, but it is well known and it is, in any case, still in Malta. Information about its origins is very scarce and it merits attention  because of its strong tradition in local collective memory. It is the presumed personal  battle-sword of de Valette donated to the chapel of Our Lady of Damascus in Birgu (Vittoriosa) at the end of the siege of 1565.

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But the overarching theme is that urban planning and zoning are best viewed as a form of economic warfare by the upper and middle classes against the working and lower classes. While that might not have been the original intent, to judge by the smug attitudes of the beneficiaries of such planning and zoning, they are perfectly happy with the results.

…

Long-time Antiplanner readers will know what I have to say next: those surging housing prices only happen in certain regions, specifically those that use planning and zoning to increase urban densities. This includes most of Europe, Australia, much of New Zealand, most coastal states in the United States, and a few Canadian cities including Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, and Montreal.

Housing is also a factor in many developing nations where most land is still owned by the government, or held in trust by the government on behalf of local villages. This includes most of Africa, much of South America, and part of Asia. In such places, the only people who can enjoy the benefits of “surging housing prices” are the few who own their own land, and since land ownership opportunities are limited due to widespread state control, everyone else stays poor. (In the United States, the closest analogues are Nevada, where 90 percent of the land is owned by the government, and Hawai’i, where more than 90 percent of the land is owned by a handful of corporations and trusts that might be willing to sell it for housing, but the state governent won’t let them.)

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Victimologists are busy expanding the catalogue of officially certified categories of victims; multiculturalists are people who never disliked a culture, however bizarre. Yet policies inspired by these ideologies are frequently initiated by morally admirable individuals. What decent person could possibly object to a law against sex trafficking, or to educational programs that protect the rights of religious minorities? Well, sometimes things get a bit more complicated. A sociologist may remember Max Weber’s concept of unanticipated consequences; the Irish sage who formulated “Murphy’s Law” had the same idea in mind (“What can go wrong, will go wrong”). But there is a more ancient wisdom that can serve as a lesson here: Confucius’ “Doctrine of the Mean”—the middle way that avoids all excessive zeal, in private as well as public life. Murphy might have said: “Virtue carried to excess leads to vice”. This is what Anglicans have called their “via media”, a calm attitude in the face of both Catholic and Protestant zeal. The comparison with Confucians may indicate a deep affinity. The Mandarins of imperial China shared with the elite of the British Empire the conviction that they were morally superior to anyone else on earth; that conviction was instilled by an education that involved the acquisition of perfectly useless achievements, such as calligraphy or cricket. But I must not digress….

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Sweden was, perhaps still is, in the vanguard of progressive causes. When I first visited there around 1970, a group of feminists seriously proposed that public urinals should be prohibited, because they were discriminatory—the men should be forced to sit down. I don’t know what happened to this project.

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But as Silicon Valley bursts at its suburban seams, one tech company after another has been buying up properties throughout the region and embarking on ambitious development projects. Apple occupies 60 percent of Cupertino’s commercial space. Google dominates Mountain View, and Facebook is spreading its tentacles throughout Menlo Park.

…

Company towns of this era had a barely-hidden paternalistic agenda. Wealthy businessmen saw their workers as family, sort of, and they wanted to provide their wards with safe, modern housing. But many were strict fathers, dictating the minutiae of their grown employees’ lives, from picking the books in the library to restricting the availability of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine Facebook going that far, though the company does try to subtly influence its employees lives by offering such healthy freebies as on-site gyms, bike repair, and walking desks. It’s a strategy that mimics what happened with some later company towns, which employed paternalism to better the company, not just employees’ lives. “Company welfare was seen as an important strategy to promote company loyalty and peaceful relations,” Borges says.

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Aircraft are an interesting set of examples because they’re so well studied and corrected. We don’t spend time correcting hospital mistakes with nearly the speed and detail we do aircraft accidents, for example.

…

We invented the checklist. That alone probably fixed 80% of fatalities in aircraft. We’ve been hammering away at the remaining 20% for 50 years or so by creating more and more rules.

We’ve reached the end of the useful life of that strategy and have hit severely diminishing returns. As illustration, we created rules to make sure people can’t get in to cockpits to kill the pilots and fly the plane in to buildings. That looked like a good rule. But, it’s created the downside that pilots can now lock out their colleagues and fly it in to a mountain instead.

…

To paraphrase Peter Thiel, new technology is probably so fertile and productive simply because there are so few rules. It’s essentially illegal for you to build anything physical these days from a toothbrush (FDA regulates that) to a skyscraper, but there’s zero restriction on creating a website. Hence, that’s where all the value is today.

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Providence regularly lands on the lists of top hipster cities and top hipster colleges for its cool factor, having earned plaudits from Travel and Leisure to Buzzfeed for live music, coffee shops, and hip culture.

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“There are not enough “hipsters” to plausibly resurrect the urban economies of America,” said Renn. “If you’re in downtown Providence, in the proximity to its center, you can live an eminently hipster lifestyle, and ask yourself, ‘Where would Providence be without it?’ And it would probably not be as great.”

“Is that the solution to the jobs issue on the south side of Providence?  No.  [The hipster economy] has its positives, but it’s something that’s happening more now everywhere,” said Renn.  “I was just in Indianapolis.  There were plenty of beards, plaid shirts, and locally sourced food there.”

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Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist most famous for his 1995 article “Bowling Alone” about the decline of social capital, is the liberal Charles Murray.

Putnam has long benefited from being the slightly dull but ideologically respectable alternative to Murray. It helped Putnam’s career that his “Bowling Alone” article came out the year after The Bell Curve. Although less interesting or impressive than Herrnstein and Murray’s magnum opus, it was popular with Clintonian moderate liberals because it was a sort of Bell Curve Lite: a tiny bit politically incorrect, but careful not to push the envelope of acceptability too hard.

…

Putnam is notoriously torn between his decent skills as a quantitative social scientist and his desire to avoid trouble with anti-science progressives who vehemently denounced Murray for co-authoring The Bell Curve. In a comic 2006 episode, Putnam admitted to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that he had socked away for a half decade the results of his huge survey of American communities while he tried to figure out how to spin its finding that ethnic diversity was disastrous.

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Generates incredible amounts of academic study (hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know) and tons of consequent opinion journalism.

No apparent effect on young brains, though.

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For the first time, experts recreate one of the 28 timber machines that hoisted wild animals into the Colosseum, where they were pitted against gladiators and each other

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I wouldn’t be surprised.

Earlier this year, military translator Sakhidad Afghan, age 26, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by Taliban militants. Afghan had been waiting for years for the U.S. government to make due on its promise to issue him a visa to the United States.

Read it. And watch the video.

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MC’s latest essay looks beyond the Holocaust to consider the other programs of mass murder during the 20th century, and the general tendency of socialism to engineer slaughter on an industrial scale.

Others forget — Google, which puts up a special ‘doodle’ for every fly-by-night whim of the Left Coast, is plain today – but we remember.

Pantelligent.

Giant Wooden Dog House.

Three-Person Water Balloon Launcher.

Buzzwords-as-a-Service.

‘Room in a Box’ Cardboard Furniture Set.

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I have to confess, that sort of care is pretty affordable, at least for the insurees. The taxpayers? Not so much.

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Hint: The Muslim lied. (I know: what a shock.)

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Activists and would-be revellers are angry that the right-wing party has been granted an official place in the London Pride Parade 2015 despite alleged incidents of homophobia.

“Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, clearly does not support the values of acceptance that Pride promotes, and UKIP is an inherently homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic political party,” the petitioners argued.

I swear, sometimes you can’t tell the crazies without a scorecard.

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Ironically, as the PR campaigners put out posters telling the world that Turkey was “Home of Christianity,” crowds of Islamic religious “imam school” graduates gathered in Istanbul and issued a press statement demanding that the historic Hagia Sophia Church function as a mosque:

The Hagia Sophia, for us, is not just a prayer house; it symbolizes, together with the Conqueror’s (Sultan Mehmed II) heritage, our independence… Without it being opened to (Muslims) prayers, there is no way we, the Turkish nation, can be fully independent.

The story of Hagia Sophia is a sad one. Its Christian builders could never imagine that the country that would host it centuries later would never feel “independent” unless it was converted into a mosque.

Richard Fernandez isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

Yahoo says a petition in change.org asking the International Olympic Committee to take back the gold medal Caitlyn Jenner won in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games has raised the issue of “how to differentiate men and women”.  The petition reads:

It has recently come to light that gold medalist Bruce Jenner is in fact transgender, and therefore, identifies as a woman. We congratulate Ms. Jenner on these new developments and wish her the best. However, this creates somewhat of a problem as Ms. Jenner (as talented as she is) claims that she has always believed herself to be truly female, and therefore, was in violation of committee rules regarding women competing in men’s sports and vice versa. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that we must ask whether or not it is proper that Ms. Jenner should retain her olympic records in light of this, as we must now either claim that Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner are two entirely different people (which we know is not true), or that Bruce Jenner was, in fact, a woman participating in a men’s event.

But it’s worse than that.  The problem it raises is whether we can draw a correspondence between what a person is and the body he/she/it inhabits.  Now it used to be worrisome when one found oneself in earnest discussion with group pretending to consist of Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. To join in was itself a sign that you had lost a few marbles recently.  But assuming that both the Yahoo article and petition were written in sober seriousness, then society is now seriously talking on Jenner’s terms.  After all, Jenner’s on the the cover of Vanity Fair and on the headlines of all the major news outlets so it must be serious.

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No doubt just a misunderstanding.

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Well, that’s a good start, but it doesn’t appear to be getting the job done.

Freeberg, as usual, has the definitive treatment.

Actually, I’m a bit on the fence about this issue. On the one hand, of course I’d like to slap silly the next feminist who whines away about it when she doesn’t spend any time on the subway, and it’s completely obvious that any space a man occupies, regardless of how small, is going to be too much for her. As well as for a lot of other people in our modern culture of “all problems are due to men having too much, and all solutions come from threatening or revoking the status of men.” But, that’s not a a man-abuse thing, that’s a thing with people pretending to solve problems who wouldn’t know a real problem, or a real solution, if it walked up and kicked ‘em square in the ass. Very common occurrence these days.

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“Pathological altruism” (PA) is a relatively new concept; the term entered the scientific literature only in 1984. There has been very little written about it, partly because altruism is so highly regarded in the West that few scientists dare criticize it. This book makes it clear that PA is a problem well worth studying.

And it ain’t pretty.

PA is generally defined as a sincere attempt to help others that instead harms others or oneself, and is “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs.” Several of the contributors offer tantalizing definitions: PA is likely when people “falsely believe that they caused the other’s problems, or falsely believe that they have the means to relieve the person of suffering.” Or, it is “the false belief that one’s own success, happiness, or well-being is a source of unhappiness for others.” PA “often involves self-righteousness,” and can result in “impulsive and ineffective efforts to equalize or level the playing field.”

In other words, the core of the modern ‘progressive’ viewpoint, as it has developed.

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Research published in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology showed that the results from the app tests were as reliable as those from standard paper-based charts and illuminated vision boxes in an eye clinic.

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The latest liberal hoax exposed is a happy face mirror image of the U. of Virginia rape fraud: a massively publicized paper in Science, the most prominent American peer-reviewed academic journal, about how to market gay marriage to minority voters that turned out to be a complete swindle, another exercise in catfishing made-up people into electronic existence.

And yet the most interesting point about this ignominious affair is that even if the paper had been utterly legitimate, it still wouldn’t have been “science” in the sense that most people understand the word: as a search for relatively permanent truths. Instead, it would have just been marketing research.