ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Moved by plight of Christians, modern-day defenders of the faith head to Iraq to fight ISIS.

In a smoky living room in a makeshift military headquarters in this northern Iraqi city, Brett, a former U.S serviceman with tattoos of Jesus etched on his forearms, explains how he hopes to help to keep the church bells of Iraq ringing.

“Jesus tells us what you do unto the least of them, you do unto me,” said the 28-year-old from Detroit, who served an extended tour in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 and asked for his surname not to be published to protect his family at home. “I couldn’t sit back and watch what was happening, women being raped and sold wholesale.”

So in December he travelled to northern Iraq, where he joined a growing band of foreigners leaving their lives in the West behind to fight with newly formed Christian militias. The leaders of those militias say they’ve been swamped with hundreds of requests from veterans and volunteers from around the world who want to join them. . . .

Brett and others say they receive dozens of emails a day from potential recruits.

“This place will be flooded,” he said. “From Australia, Asia, literally everywhere. It’s overwhelming, it’s awesome.”

Interesting. You know, we’re always told that killing terrorists just creates more of them. Perhaps killing by terrorists will just create more terrorist opponents. . . .

SPEAKING OUT FOR DUE PROCESS: Members of civil rights commission oppose ‘disregard for rule of law’ over campus sexual assault rules.

Two members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have written a letter to Congress opposing the budget increase to the Department of Education for sexual assault enforcement they say disregards the rule of law.

Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, and attorney Peter Kirsanow sent the letter last Thursday outlining the dangers of allowing the Department’s Office for Civil Rights to continue adjudicating sexual assaults without providing due process rights to the students involved.

“[W]e have noticed a disturbing pattern of disregard for the rule of law at OCR,” the Heriot and Kirsanow wrote. “That office has all-too-often been willing to define perfectly legal conduct as unlawful.”

“Though OCR may claim to be under-funded, its resources are stretched thin largely because it has so often chosen to address violations it has made up out of thin air,” the letter added. “Increasing OCR’s budget would in effect reward the agency for frequently over-stepping the law. It also would provide OCR with additional resources to undertake more ill-considered initiatives for which it lacks authority.”

One example the letter gave of such an overreach is of sexual assault enforcement at colleges and universities.

The letter states that the now-infamous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which sparked the current issues with how sexual assault is handled on campus, required universities to lower the burden of proof used in disciplinary hearings from the “clear and convincing” evidence standard to the “preponderance of the evidence” standard. The lower standard requires administrators to be just 50.01 percent sure the accuser is telling the truth over the accused, which in today’s society where there is immense federal pressure to expel accused students (whether there is even any evidence) makes it all the more dangerous.

The letter stated that nowhere in the text of Title IX, which has been used to justify the school’s need to adjudicate outside the justice system, or in earlier Office for Civil Rights regulations does it state such a low burden be used.

OCR should be defunded. And Congress should have hearings in which university presidents are grilled about the many cases in which falsely accused students were abused.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: State Department Walks Back Claim On Clinton Foundation Review. “The State Department is stepping back from a spokeswoman’s comment last week suggesting that the agency’s ethics lawyers signed off on donations to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.”

Plus: Hillary Clinton’s Use of Private Email at State Department Raises Flags. ” Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”

It’s like they were hiding something.

UPDATE: Hacked emails indicate that Hillary Clinton used a domain registered the day of her Senate hearings. “Examining the registry information for ‘clintonemail.com’ reveals that the domain was first created on January 13, 2009 — one week before President Obama was sworn into office, and the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.”

Sure seems like a deliberate attempt to evade federal law.

A DECISIVE PRO-ISRAEL SHIFT IN THE HILLARY AGE DEMO: “Americans in all age groups have grown more partial to Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past 15 years, but adults aged 50 and older have grown particularly likely to sympathize with the Jewish state.”

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: I Underestimated Carly Fiorina. Here’s How.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Leftists Outraged University Won’t Regulate What Students Wear Off Campus.

Liberals are upset that the University of Texas–Austin is refusing to punish students for wearing politically incorrect clothing to an off-campus party. On February 7, members of Phi Gamma Delta threw an off-campus party that fraternity president Andrew Campbell said was supposed to be “western” themed. Some of the guests, however, had apparently heard it was a “border patrol” themed party, and showed up in “culturally insensitive” attire such as construction gear and sombreros, according to an article in the Daily Texan, the school’s official student newspaper. School administrators decided that although they would work to educate the frat members about cultural sensitivity, they could not punish anyone formally because the party was off-campus. After all, a university can hardly dictate to students what to wear everywhere they go. To me, this decision seems obvious. But some of UT’s social-justice, pro-diversity warriors are disgusted that the school will not police clothing choices for the sake of of political correctness.

I remember when clothing choice was a matter of personal freedom, and anyone who objected was a hopeless fuddy-duddy. Hey, wait, that’s still true!

SOME GOOD NEWS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW. My Dean, Doug Blaze, emails the faculty: “Just an update – an amazing one. Nationally applicants are down 5% and applications down 7.5%. But our applications are up 79%. In-state are up 51% and out-of-state 96%.” He adds: “BTW, the quality of the pool despite the increase in size is as good as last year.”

Well, we’ve made a lot of national lists of bargain-priced quality legal education so I guess word is spreading.

ED DRISCOLL: Obama: The Provincial President. “I miss the days when America was led by a grownup who had faith in his country and its people. I hope we have that experience once again.” To be fair, America and its people elected Obama twice.

NO THANK YOU: How To Enjoy The Cold: Advice From An Arctic SCUBA Diver. I dove (on Cayman) with a fire chief from Calgary and his lovely wife a few years back, and they were extolling the virtues of ice diving. They cut a hole in the ice on a lake, and put a bunch of lanterns around it so you can find it on the way up, and then dive. I’m sure it’s lovely, but I’m more a tropical type. My regulator is certified for Arctic temperatures, but I very much doubt I’ll ever put that to the test.

On the other hand, I used to have a Russian friend who said that the problem is never that it’s too cold — it’s that you aren’t dressed warmly enough. I embrace that.

JUSTICE: Jury sentences Hasan to death for ’09 Fort Hood massacre. “Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist convicted in the November 2009 shooting rampage that left 13 dead and 31 wounded, was sentenced to death Wednesday by a military jury. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, saying Hasan’s murderous rampage at the sprawling military base here left tragic and devastating loss for victims and loved ones.” Justice, but justice delayed.

FASTER, PLEASE: Lockheed Martin’s new Compact Fusion Reactor might change humanity forever. “

PHOTO OF THE DAY: Caption This: John Kerry And Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Share The Warmth.

DR. HELEN: The Evils of the (Straight) Male Gaze.

COL. KURT SCHLICHTER FINDS THE SCHWERPUNKT IN THE CULTURE WARS: Let’s Destroy Liberal Academia. “Understand that the purpose of modern American ‘education’ is not to educate students. It is primarily to provide cushy, subsidized sinecures for liberal administrators and faculty while, secondarily, providing a forum to indoctrinate soft young minds in the liberal fetishes du jour. Actually educating students is hard, and a meaningful education is anathema to liberalism. In the liberals’ ideal world, the universities would simply fester with leftist nonsense and not even bother with trying to teach their charges anything at all. And today, it’s pretty close to being the liberals’ ideal world.”

SPACE: Spacex successfully launches two satellites in one rocket launch.

WALTER HUDSON: Atheists Can Be Moral Too.

If you’re interested in the question of whether morality can exist without God, you might enjoy Arthur Allen Leff’s discussion in Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law. Or, in shorter and more pungent form, his treatment in Memorandum From The Devil. Also, these — especially the latter — are two of the best-written law review articles ever.

THIS PIECE ON GERRYMANDERING IN THE WASHINGTON POST, is okay as far as it goes, but note the casual partisanship: The “abstract” red-and-blue example features gerrymandering by the red, and the real-world focus features Republican gerrymandering. With regard to California, we’re told: “California’s districts are drawn by an independent commission, not by the parties.” This is formally true, but the California Democrats famously outfoxed the state’s hapless GOP and took over that commission, something anyone writing about politics should know.

Anyway, back when Dems dominated state legislatures, gerrymandering was all in good fun, just part of the rough-and-tumble of politics. Now that the GOP has historically high levels of state control, gerrymandering will become The Great Political Evil Of Our Time.

AT AMAZON, take 25% off luggage. As I’ve mentioned here before, I arrived late to the realization that good luggage makes traveling much easier. But it does!

Plus, big savings in the Spring Sportsmen’s Event. An “event” is like a sale, only more . . . eventful!

IT’S ALMOST AS IF THEY’RE NOT REALLY FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, JUST WAGING LAWFARE FOR THE OTHER SIDE: Human rights lawyers accused of misleading a five-year war crimes inquiry by claiming British soldiers tortured innocent Iraqis.

This is interesting, though: “Now the government is gearing up to sue law firms for millions of pounds in legal costs and calling for the PIL’s chief lawyer, Phil Shiner, to be struck off.”

AT PRAGER UNIVERSITY, DENNIS PRAGER EXPLORES THE PHENOMENON OF MEN LOOKING AT PRETTY WOMEN.

JOEL KOTKIN: Misunderstanding Millennials.

STUN GUNS NOT PROTECTED BY THE SECOND AMENDMENT: A somewhat questionable opinion from Massachusetts.

“INSANELY DANGEROUS?” WELL, IT’S TRUE THAT I PREFER SCUBA. The Insanely Dangerous, Weirdly Meditative Sport of Freediving. I don’t think it’s really insanely dangerous.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.

And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. I’m happy to have my generator.

A NEW METHOD FOR GROWING BRAIN CELLS. “Before it grows in one of Lancaster’s dishes, a brain organoid begins as a single skin cell taken from an adult. With the right biochemical prodding, that cell can be turned into an induced pluripotent stem cell (the kind that can mature into one of several types of cells) and then into a neuron. This makes it possible to do things that were impossible before. Now scientists can directly see how networks of living human brain cells develop and function, and how they’re affected by various drug compounds or genetic modifications. And because these mini-brains can be grown from a specific person’s cells, organoids could serve as unprecedentedly accurate models for a wide range of diseases. What goes wrong, for example, in neurons derived directly from someone with Alzheimer’s disease?”