FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Baltimore harbor bridge is a metaphor for our fraying social fabric.  "Things don't seem to work as well as they used to."  Plus, "Victoria's Secret is now carbohydrates."  Whether it's widebodies crammed into nighties, or runaway container ships, the ominous signs proliferate.  "I believe that moment of clarity is upon us, or at least a bunch of us. And it's happening in several ways."  That's why I keep posting, dear reader.  "I just kept watching it and marveling at how consistently crappy and tragic everything is these days."  Maybe I have to keep others' spirits up.  "We're preconditioned to accept failure."  Don't be silly.  Government is there to help.  "The best time to repeal the Foreign Dredge Act was before the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. The next best time to repeal it is right now."

Even before the ship hit the bridge, everything feels like it's collapsing. "A media people can’t trust anymore, movies people can’t watch anymore, even science and basic biology have flown the coop. It’s all to serve some ideology that is starting to feel more like totalitarianism than democracy."  That might be why we get more Trump.  "The people in power now can’t solve the problem; they ARE the problem."  We need to remember all of their failures.  "The temper tantrums, the lockdowns, the riots. the corruption, the increased crime across America, the blatant and willful bias delivered through the ol’ boob tube daily. We need to remember them all-each and every single one of them-the miserable, disgusting, self-absorbed, egotistical, backbiting, condescending, whiny-a$$ babies that our media has become."

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

1.  Trump did not create this coalition.  It didn't take much persuasion.  "Because he doesn't look on us as the enemy, and the other side does."

2.  Dick Daley the Elder nods.  "The Democratic Party is not here to preserve democracy, it is here to prevent democracy."  We are played as chumps.  "Voters cannot be trusted with something as important as democracy."

3.  Liberating tolerance.  "Those who conquer kingdoms by 'speaking the truth to power' are, once enthroned, often those least likely to allow truth to be spoken to (or even nearby to) them."

4.  Universities, continuing to fail at their mission.  "We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this."

5.  People will accuse you of not caring.  "If you admit that social problems are complex, then you are penalized for doing so, even though you are correct."

6.  Speaking of temper tantrums,  "Those are the Left's rules. If we don't like being called cis, it's a slur."

7.  Woke-and-broke?  "Planet Fitness Is Having Its Bud Light and Drinking It, Too"

8.  Now batting, Emergence, with Reality on deck.  "The new structures may have made sense to the average United Nations employee, but they never had legitimacy in the eyes of the people they were to serve. Rather than dictate what good institutions should look like, [Seth] Kaplan argued, outsiders needed to let these societies build institutions from the ground up on their own terms."

9.  The Democrats' message is too feminine.  "Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you."  Then they raised money at Rockefeller Center.  "Reveling in decadence while a cop family mourns and Americans pinch pennies sure exposes Biden’s true base: trendy liberals in the highest income brackets."

10.  The establishment's Prominent Women didn't earn their prominence.  "If Claudine Gay, Lori Lightfoot and Eric Adams are any indication of the quality of leadership that DEI produces, I dare say Biden will not be the last straight, white male president — not by a long shot. Just the last Democrat one."

11.  Ralph Nader might have a legitimate beef with Democrats.  "Instead of focusing on getting more of the 120 million non-voters to vote for Democratic candidates this year, the Democratic Party is focused on denying the First Amendment rights—free speech, petition, and assembly—of Third Party candidates and their minuscule number of voters."

12.  I repeat, because repeat I must.  "It is impossible to 'protect' Social Security and Medicare by doing nothing."

13.  Barack Obama, false messiah.  "The pathetic puppet he's put in as a placeholder has gone and messed the whole thing up."  I had eight years of fun mocking Hope and Change.  That was the tragedy, these days it's the farce.  "Conrad Black has called Joe Biden 'a pallid effigy unable to utter complete sentences without requesting the approach of the teleprompter,' and a 'wax-works effigy of a president.'"

14.  Do we base policy on absolute poverty, or relative poverty?  "Income inequality is not the sovereign determinant of equity, because income sufficiency matters."  The Obama-Biden-Sanders message of envy isn't the winning hand the Donks think it is.  "Many Americans often regard inequality as evidence of upward mobility. And Americans are more pessimistic than other nations’ populations about government performing efficiently."  Well, yeah, that's what this post's opening paragraphs spelled out, didn't they?

15.  By their fruits shall ye know them.  "The Left looked at the lockdowns of 2020 and loved it. Judge Biden and Democrats accordingly and vote in November."

16.  That feminine message is wearing thin.  "Find a female who has some unrequited fame you-know-what yearnings, and have her be the focal point of a smear campaign."

17.  Rediscovering the Cardinal Virtues.  "It's hard not to see the appeal in a world full of moral equivalence and antiheroes so compromised they'd be called villains in a different era."

18.  El culto del Presidente.  "Javier Milei poses a threat both to Argentina and to the global liberty movement."  You can count on the Drive-Bys pouncing.  "His record so far suggests that he's a typical Latin American populist, and I worry that the failed results of his presidency will become a symbol of a right-wing model and could harm the liberty movement's credibility and progress."

19.  Thomas Friedman, vindicated?  China is now “at risk of growing old before it grows rich.”

20.  It started with Martin Luther.  "Before the internet, democracy, as leftists use the term, was a pleasant fiction keeping power in the hands of the academically credentialed aristocrats and their hangers-on."

21.  Rosa Luxemburg is still dead.  "By now, we’ve all had our fill of encomiums to pampered mediocrities like Kamala Harris, Sonia Sotomayor, and other first this-that-or-the-other-things."  Feminists don't care, unless they can blame a fraternity.

22.  Reality always wins.  "That’s the problem with progressive politics."

23.  There's Original Sin, redeemed at Calvary, which is not the same thing as Secular Sin.  "I decided that I did not want to spend my life sitting in an ecclesiastical re-education camp, confessing to crimes I had never committed and renouncing men I had never met or who had died before I was born. Eventually, I grew tired of trying to convince myself to stay in a church that did not want me."

24.  Wisdom from Wilhelm Steinitz.  “If we engage the queens of our hearts for the queens of our boards, and if we can enlist the interest of our connubial mates for our chessical mates, our intellectual pastime will be immensely benefited and will pass into universal favor.”

25.  One and done.  "A fan base’s patience is wearing thin, leaving [Wisconsin athletics director Chris] McIntosh with plenty to contemplate as he exited an arena into the brisk Brooklyn air early Saturday morning."