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

VICTORY – FROM FOX:   Hampshire College in Massachusetts raised the American flag back to full staff Friday after outraged veterans protested the school's decision to stop flying all flags across campus.  The college in Amherst had lowered the U.S. flag to half-staff after Election Day. The flag was found burned on Veterans Day, and the school chose to stop flying it – and any other flags – a week later.  "We understand that many who hold the flag as a powerful symbol of national ideals and their highest aspirations for the country -- including members of our own community -- felt hurt by our decisions, and that we deeply regret," the college's president, Jonathan Lash, stated Friday. He added, "We did not lower the flag to make a political statement. ... We acted solely to facilitate much-needed dialogue on our campus about how to dismantle the bigotry that is prevalent in our society."  Yeah, right.  You ban the flag to fight bigotry.  Sure, that makes sense.

LOWER EDUCATION – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Many professors try to tell students what to think and give them only one side of the story inside the classroom. But then there’s scholars who go above and beyond in their attempts to indoctrinate students.  Young America’s Foundation has pulled together a list of examples, calling it “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses of 2016-2017.”  “The sad truth is that many of America’s greatest minds are spending four formative years and tens of thousands of dollars sitting in classes such as ‘Ecofeminism,’ and ‘Queering God,’ which clearly do little to equip them to face the real and complex problems our country desperately needs them to solve,” the foundation stated in releasing its list.  The list of classes named by YAF as the most egregious this year are:

1. Diversity and Design, University of Arkansas
2. Black Hair Politics, University of Florida
3. Gender and Food Politics, University of Florida
4. Ecofeminism, University of South Carolina
5. Transgender Cultural Production, Yale University
6. Hand to Mouth: Writing, Eating, and the Construction of Gender, Dartmouth University
7. Racial Capitalism, Williams College
8. Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology, Swarthmore College
9. Environmental Justice, University of Missouri
10. White People, Middlebury College
11. Transgender Latina Immigration: Politics of Belonging and Labor in the United States, Bowdoin College
12. Saints and Sexuality, University of Mississippi

I'd like to meet some of the students who would choose stuff like that.

A GREAT CULINARY LOSS – FROM TAIWAN NEWS:   Chef Peng Chang-kuei (???), the founder of the famous Hunan-style restaurant chain Peng's Garden Hunan Restaurant (?????) and inventor of the world famous Chinese dish General Tso's Chicken, died on Nov. 30 at the age of 98 from Pneumonia.  A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, Peng began training at the age of 13 under the tutelage of the famous Hunan chef Cao Jing-chen (???), who was the family chef of Tan Yan-kai (???), the prime minister of the Nationalist government from 1926 to 1928. After WWII, he was put in charge of running Nationalist government banquets, and in 1949 he fled to Taiwan after the Kuomintang's forces were defeated by the communists in the Chinese Civil War.  According to an interview with the China Times, Peng says that his most famous dish was created in 1952 during a four-day visit by U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Arthur W. Radford. After three days, he had served the guests most of his repertoire of dishes, so to try and mix things up a bit, he decided to chop some chicken into big chunks, fry it to a golden hue and then added a different combination of sauce and seasoning to create a new dish.  The admiral was so impressed with the dish that he asked Peng what it was called, he thought quickly on his feet and said "General Tso's Chicken" (????).  I noticed that the flag on our local Stop and Shop was flying at half staff.

December 2, 2016