SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:31 P.M. ET: 

CULINARY DISGRACE – From the New York Post:   Students at an ultra-liberal Ohio college are in an uproar over the fried chicken, sushi and Vietnamese sandwiches served in the school cafeterias, complaining the dishes are “insensitive” and “culturally inappropriate.”  Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin College are filling the school newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials and even the college president.  General Tso’s chicken was made with steamed chicken instead of fried — which is not authentically Chinese, and simply “weird,” one student bellyached in the Oberlin Review.  Forget nuclear proliferation.  Forget ISIS.  This is big!

IT DAWNS ON HAGEL – When Chuck Hagel was made secretary of defense it was clearly because he'd sold out his own Republican Party, opposed the Bush administration, and endorsed Obama in 2008.  None of that mattered.  From The Hill:  Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says White House aides tried to personally "destroy" him.  In an interview with Foreign Policy, Hagel opened up about his tenure in the administration, discussing the uncertainty over Syria strategy and accusing the White House of micromanaging the Pentagon, echoing similar criticisms from predecessors Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.  Tension between Hagel and other officials in President Obama's inner circle surfaced publicly last year, as the then-Defense chief and the White House disagreed over a number of policy initiatives.  Hagel and White House national security adviser Susan Rice "frequently butted heads" over Syria policy and the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, according to the Foreign Policy report.  Hagel, who did not mention Rice by name, told the magazine that even after he agreed to leave the administration, some White House officials continued to anonymously knock him in the press.  The name Susan Rice keeps coming up, as one of the most contentious, argumentative, and deceptive personalities in the Obama White House.  Other than that, she's beloved.

THE MARCH OF PROGRESS – From Bloomberg:  The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.  The glitch?  They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?  They should teach the cars to take the train.

December 18, 2015