FRIDAY short TAKES.

We're approaching three years into fifteen days to slow the spread.  Hubris has set back the cause of science.  The experts were wrong, perhaps maliciously so.  "Again and again, claims to expertise turn out to have been cloaks for politicized misbehavior."  The end of expert tyranny might be at hand?  "Lawsuits and legislation have stripped public health officials of their powers in three years."  I view that as a positive development, even if that's not what the palace guard media believe.  It still isn't normal now.  "Most of the abnormality was ... government-inflicted."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  See the authoritarianism implicit in the progressivism.  "Democrats keep pushing the boundaries as they silently dare Republicans to do something about it."

2.  What, me worry?  "You think Tucker Carlson knows the difference between a T.J. Maxx and a Kohl's?"

3.  Free riding on the "toxicity" of others: "The problem with capons like Emhoff and Capehart is that having led lives of pampered luxury (lawyer, journalist), the idea of an existential struggle is utterly alien to them."

4.  P. J. O'Rourke's bon mot about public toilets comes to mind.  "Public stewards are not always as responsive as we might like."

5.  We are moving closer to tyranny.  "Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe."

6.  Break out the smelling salts?  "The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus."

7.  Brace yourselves to your duties.  "None of the standard threats that the doomers wring their hands and wail about is as dire as they would have us believe."  That's an opportunity to get to work on stuff that can be fixed.

8.  Patronizing progressivism at Macalester?  "This would be very clear to liberals if we swapped fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist Islam."

9.  Chaos waits where logos dies.

10.  Equity punishes our best students.

11.  Opportunity costs everywhere.  "I don’t regret not having kids. You’re reading my work because I didn’t."

12.  What would we ever do without studies?  "Historic decline in IQ could stem from poor education, study shows."

13.  Fauxahontas, scalped.  "You are punishing people if they are successful, you overtax them, you hit them with a super tax."

14.  Dementia Joe doesn't mind restricting freedom.  "Freedom can only survive if we are able to spend our money on things government officials don't like."

15.  Management fads ye shall always have.  "If every management seminar and publication pushes lean manufacturing, how hard will it be for a corporation to push back and say, this does not work for our product? And even if the engineering and manufacturing teams say that, how much can they influence upper management, who all buy into the latest craze?"

16.  Deconstruction, self-destructs.  "We’ve spent decades ironizing the trappings of both middle-class respectability and white-collar success, representing the former as boring and conformist and the latter as exploitative and selfish."

17.  Broadly shared penury.  "Amazing how that Communist conservation works!"

18.  Punch back twice as hard.  "I don’t think it is possible to pursue the point of media stupidity and bad faith to excess."

19.  Not the end of the world.  "To the extent that the media–Democrat critique is that Carlson is an opinion journalist who is apt to present a skewed picture, this is the price they must have known they’d have to pay for the January 6 committee."

20.  It's hard to get off the gravy train.  "What does it say about America that so much of its senior leadership is senior in all senses of the word?"

21.  Move some of the administrative offices out too.  "It's time for the federal government to finally put an end to any notion of DC statehood and take back full constitutional control of the District of Columbia."

22.  The fruits of denying coherent beliefs.  "Sometime around the millennium, they felt their genius could change human nature and bring an end to history—if only they had enough power to force hoi polloi to follow their abstract and bankrupt theories that they had no intention of abiding by themselves."

23.  The first things bought and sold are the legislators.  "Political capitalism punishes those who aren't elite or can't organize to extract favors from politicians."