The College Fix has some more bad news for Yale alumni:

A year and a half after a petition circulated calling for Yale to “decolonize the English department,” the first students are enrolled in a new course created by the department to increase the breadth of the curriculum and combat claims of departmental racism.

What’s more, new requirements are in place to ensure a more “diversified” slate of courses.

Previous requirements for the major included two courses in “Major English Poets,” including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and Eliot, among others. But that two-course series petitioners had deemed actively harmful due to its focus on white male poets. The series is no longer a graduation requirement for Yale’s English majors.

The petition, a Google document which has since been made private, critiqued the perceived whiteness of the English department requirements: “A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity.”

“It’s time for the English major to decolonize — not diversify — its course offerings,” the petition added. “A 21st century education is a diverse education: we write to you today inspired by student activism across the university, and to make sure that you know that the English department is not immune from the collective call to action.”

Nearly a year after the petition, around seven months ago, Yale’s English faculty voted to “diversity” the curriculum. At the time of the vote, the director of the department’s undergraduate studies, Jessica Brantley, told The Yale Daily News: “We’ve constructed a curriculum that has inclusion as its goal, embedded in the structures of its requirements, and I’m very excited to implement and develop that curriculum further.”

The reconfiguring of the English department’s required courses did not directly address the demands of the petition to do away with the Major English Poets sequences altogether; the courses still exist. The reconfiguration also did not refocus the program’s pre-1800 and pre-1900 literature requirement to address issues of race, gender, and sexuality as demanded by the petition.

Instead, the English department now allows students to fill three required prerequisites from a choice of four different courses: Readings in English Poetry 1, Readings in English Poetry 2, Readings in American Literature, and a newly created course, Readings in Comparative World English Literature.

Because Chaucer and Shakespeare are both studied in English Poetry 1, these expanded options mean that a student could graduate from the program without ever reading either of these authors.

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Mental Floss:

A ball of furry fury, a rat king occurs when the tails of rodents become twisted, wrapped, and warped into a knot so impossible that not even the world’s most loyal Boy Scout could untangle it. Rat kings have been reported since the mid-16th century (almost entirely within Germany), and everything about them—from their name, to their cause, to their very existence—remains suspended in mystery.

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Science20:

There is a different kind of 1 percent, and it isn’t people who can afford to buy organic food. It’s Americans who carry a handgun on a daily basis.

It’s not a surprise, given American history and horrific events like a psychopath in Las Vegas wounding or killing 500 people while police waited 70 minutes to attack him. A nearby hotel guest with a gun could have ended that more quickly.

Up to 7 million have concealed carry permits while up to 9 million might carry a handgun on a monthly basis (not all states require a license for a concealed weapon). That is alarming to Northeastern epidemiologist Professor Matthew Miller and colleagues, who published their survey results, funded by two anti-gun groups, and extrapolated figures for the country, in American Journal of Public Health. “We’re talking about several million adult handgun owners carrying a loaded firearm on their person every day,” Miller said. “That’s a sizable number of Americans.”

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Bozeman Daily Chronicle, October 24:

A man shot a grizzly bear on his front porch near West Yellowstone last weekend after it broke into his garage to get a hanging elk carcass.

Andrea Jones, a spokeswoman for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said the incident happened on Sunday evening south of U.S. Highway 287 and near the Grayling Arm of Hebgen Lake. She said an agency investigation determined that the man shot the bear in self-defense.

“We have a pretty clear case of self-defense here,” Jones said.

Jones said the bear was a sow grizzly likely more than 15 years old. It broke through a metal door to get into a garage where an elk carcass was hanging.

The homeowner heard noise coming from the garage. He grabbed a gun and went onto the front porch to see what was going on.

“There was a bear not 10 paces from him on his porch,” Jones said.

Jones said the man told FWP investigators that the bear turned and began to approach him. He shot the bear dead.

Jones said investigators saw bloody paw prints around the property, including within 10 feet of the front door. They also saw paw prints on the home’s living room window.

The bear had been trapped by Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team researchers once before, but it didn’t have a history of run-ins with people.

Jones said it appeared that the garage was secured properly and that there was nothing the homeowner could have done differently.

She added that it’s important for people to recognize that both grizzly and black bears are still wandering around and trying to fatten up for the winter.

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I hope the black bear raiding my bird feeders reads this one.

Daily Signal:

The phrase “pregnant woman” needs to be more inclusive and termed “pregnant people” in a U.N. treaty, the British government announced on Monday.

The British government’s suggestion on proposed amendments to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights claims the wording excludes pregnant transgender people. The treaty says “pregnant women” are protected and not subject to the death penalty, reported The Times.

The current terminology excludes transgender people who have given birth, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office claims.

“We requested that the U.N. Human Rights Committee made it clear that the same right extends to pregnant transgender people,” Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials told The Times.

There are two transgender men on record in the U.K. who have given birth after having a sex change. The biological women kept their womb and ovaries during the change, according to the Sunday report.

Some feminists are not happy about the terminology.

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HT: The Passive Voice via Karen L. Myers.

25 October 1415, Battle of Agincourt.

Karen’s photos from yesterday.

Costin Alamariu thinks most Third World dictators have more real “merit” than today’s elite representatives of the alleged meritocracy.

The dim, grey technocrats who have taken hold of America and much of the West for the last few decades are feeling cornered and exposed. Their PR men are coming up with new and weird excuses. David Brooks in The New York Times argued recently that for all its faults, America has a “meritocratic elite.” According to Brooks, this group is opposed mainly because of white working class cultural resentment. He believes that America’s ruling class today is at least superior to the postwar WASPs who ran the country in the 1950s and 1960s.

But America’s Protestant establishment ran the country before World War II, as well. They won that war. They built the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Empire State building in less than two years at the height of the Depression. After the war, they took the country to the moon. It’s hard to see how websites like Google—or other “innovations” like collateralized loan obligations—can compare, glorious though these may be in their own way. Our current ruling class, with all its computing power, human resources “synergies,” and vibrant diversity, took seven years to build an on-ramp to that same Golden Gate Bridge. …

The purpose of meritocracy was to prevent occasional and unfortunate discrimination against men like Richard Feynman. Instead, we get Sonya Sotomayor and Neil deGrasse Tyson. In politics, we get sorority creatures Marie Harf and Barack Obama, a man apparently assisted by affirmative action at every stage of his life.

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Schools like Yale have been blowing smoke for generations about how this year’s freshman class is the brightest, most competitive, most marvelous ever to come down the pike. And Ivy-League-ers of the present uncritically accept all the compliments and think themselves to represent the absolute apex of human evolution.

The current generation of Yale undergraduates fondly imagines that entering classes of my day were overwhelmingly comprised of Cadwalladers, Wickershams, and Tafts who all had millionaire fathers, who all graduated from St. Grottlesex, and who spent their time at Yale sipping Mint Juleps at the Fence Club between polo matches.

In reality, the majority of my entering class was made up of graduates of public high schools. A large percentage of us were on scholarship and were the first representatives of our families to attend college. And, in fact, we had it soft.

In still older times, Yale was really unequal. Student rooms varied in quality depending on your means, guys working their way through college worked full-time jobs, roomed in slums, and lived on beans. The Catholic, Jewish, or merely impecunious Yale student never even got into Mory’s.

But it was precisely those kind of guys who built giant corporations, erected the wonders of the 20th Century, and won America’s wars back in the days when we made a policy of actually winning wars.

When I read of one of those aggrieved snowflake demonstrations at Yale demanding some outrageous and offensive concession to the amour propre of today’s spoiled, ignorant, and immature poseurs, I often wish that I could wave my hand and bring back one of the all-male classes of the first few decades of the last century to demonstrate their opinion of the conduct of the classes of today. How about the Class of 1930, whose football team was unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon? What do you suppose they’d say if they were told they could not wear certain Halloween costumes because certain people might be offended?

George W. Bush attacks Trump for promoting “bigotry and falsehoods.”

Kurt Schlichter responds to the GWB speech of four days ago, in which the former president broke his long political silence… to attack a Republican Administration.

All human institutions are essentially a reboot of high school, and within the political scene the Never Trumpers are convinced that they are the cool kids despite being the chess club of American politics. No, they aren’t the cool kids. They’re geeks, they haven’t won a tournament in years and, more importantly, they’re the freaking chess club.

In contrast, we normals are just that, the members of the student body who have lives and after-school jobs and girlfriends and who don’t care about the dorks padding their resume with student body presidencies or, in this case, jobs at the Eagle Liberty Council for Freedom. Except now we normals have been forced to pay attention because the would-be in-crowd has so totally screwed things up that there’s no real choice but get involved in campus activities and burn down the whole damn schoolhouse. …

What have these guys achieved? The clowns they support in Congress can’t even repeal Obamacare. …

We normals are sick of being looked down upon and exploited by a bunch of people who, if this was a movie, would be played by James Spader – except trainwreck 2017 James Spader, not louche/suave 1986 James Spader. I guess that makes Bill Kristol the Nepo-Con Duckie, if Duckie was a less-cool, backstabbing deep-state-loving weasel trying to sell Molly Ringwald a cabin on one of his crappy cruises.

In place of trying to earn respect by demonstrating competence, they’ve chosen to try to diss us into submission. George W. Bush decided to go all Mean Girls in a speech that insulted his (former) supporters while delighting the left, and therefore the Never Trumpers. Now, if you read W’s speech on paper, every word of it about bigotry being bad is true. But you give speeches in context, and here the context is decades of leftists and their media poodles falsely accusing the normals of racism and bigotry. So when W adopted that language, he also knowingly or negligently adopted that narrative; the former newspaper and current brochure known as the L.A. Times crowed: “In stunning attack, George W. Bush rebukes Trump, suggesting he promotes falsehoods and prejudice.”

And so, of course, the supporters of this Trump guy are therefore…. Well, you get the picture. That is, if you’re not being willfully obtuse, like the Fredocons, who were delighted that Bush decided to break his 16 years of super-principled silence in the face of liberal attacks to slander the very people who had voted for him and defended him. If being “principled” means letting liberals use you like a slit trench then trashing the people who had your back to please the people using you like a slit trench, you can keep your damned principles.

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Scathing, but deserved.