Wednesday roundup

How advanced is the civilizational rot? Capitulating to a petition circulated among the snot-nosed, ingrate, West-hating cretins enrolled in it, Yale's English department will no longer require its students to study Shakespeare and John Donne.

This is of a piece with a trend noticed and well-articulated by a couple of the actual scholars remaining at post-America's playpens campuses:

Last year, students at Stanford shot down peers who petitioned to have a Western history survey class reinstated as a basic requirement. The petitioning students cited a Stanford law professor who reported his so-called “best students in the country” are basically know-nothings:

I have taught law students for more than thirty years. In recent years I have noticed that many students have little or no familiarity with the political, intellectual and cultural history that shaped the American legal tradition. I’ve encountered students who have never heard of Hobbes and Locke, do not know the causes of the American Revolution, are unfamiliar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates, haven’t a clue about Progressivism or the New Deal, don’t know what separates Protestants and Catholics, and have only the vaguest sense what race relations were like before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Recently, Camille Paglia, no conservative nor traditionalist, reported the same about her students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, noting that this kind of brain rot has trickled down into K-12 schools courtesy of teachers’ university mal-educations:

What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind. No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on, and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization, etc. So they now are being taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!

NFL knee-taking has hurt Papa John's pizza sales. 

Another filmmaker, Brett Ratner, is accused by six women of sexual harassment. And another guy from the journalism world. Michael Oreskes, NPR senior Vice President for news, and formerly of AP and the New York Times. And apparently Ratner's thing was, like it was for Weinstein, having a captive audience when wanking.

Three Dem Senators did the right thing:

This morning, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Notre Dame Law professor Amy Barrett as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Seventh Circuit. The vote was 55-43. 

Three Democrats — Sen. Joe Donnelly, Sen. Tim Kaine, and Sen. Joe Manchin — broke ranks and voted to confirm Barrett. They thus rejected the suggestion by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others on the Senate Judiciary Committee that Barrett is too Catholic to be an appellate judge. 

You'll recall that, at Barrett's hearing, Feinstein told the professor that she sensed that "the dogma lives loudly within you." Is that anything like witnessing to your faith?

Talk about being ate up with jihad fervor: Sayfullo Saipov, the New York bike-path van driver, bragged to police from his hospital bed that he was pleased with what he'd done.