FRIDAY short TAKES.

Who cares about the plebs?  "Washington technocrats are imposing their will on working-class people. If it took cat memes to do it, then thank God for cat memes."  There are a lot more at the link, and even more introducing "If they ignore it, it thrives and they look scared, but if they try to refute it, they just add fuel to the fire and keep the conversation on a topic on which they cannot win."

Our Intellectual Betters assure us that all is well.  "Our government and our media are mostly seeing the country from the vantage point of the gated communities while ignoring the plight of ordinary Americans struggling to make ends meet."

That story was displaced by news of a Trump hunter in his deer stand.  "Just because they compare him to Hitler and Mussolini doesn’t mean they actually want him dead."  No, not at all.  "They do not want an America that is more free. They want an America that is safer, and by that, they mean to silence dissent, to shut people up, to censor information."  It puts a price on Trump's head.

This being election season in 2024, a new set of memes had to drop.  "In Hezbollah’s macho culture, the psychological blow of their warriors and officials getting their genitalia blown up is acute, and so is the signal sent to Iran, that no communications devices are safe."  Nor can some of the martyrs enjoy their virgins.

Life, in its maddening and edifying forms alike, went on.  The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  The substance matters.  "Regardless of the veracity of tales of eating cats, the saga has galvanized American resentment of the Jarrett regency's open borders policy."

2.  Indeed.  "Science that avoids research or discussing possible lines of inquiry based on the social consequences of breaking a taboo has already abandoned objective truth."

3.  Come see the peasants starving.  “Why do we need a World Heritage Site on our ancestral land? It never gives the community any benefits. It just takes things away from us.”

4.  Technocracy: abolish the people.  "Because of the dysfunctions and mismanagement of our healthcare system, ordinary people must have their choices curtailed. We must go without some of life’s great pleasures."

5.  Freedom is tax slavery.  "Big Left’s greatest achievement may have been convincing a plurality of Americans that 'freedom' means satiety and freedom from material want in exchange for, y’know, freedom."

6.  Turf them out.  "The parlous state of the Democratic Party is largely due to their inability to see what they’re up against, or to imagine that they can defeat it by dismissively mocking it."

7.  On the lighter side.  "Harris kept turning away from it to make goo-goo eyes at Trump. He never looked at her, playing hard to get."

8.  Let's rediscover coherent beliefs.  "Other conflict entrepreneurs, when asked to provide evidence, sound like a radical deconstructionist in a 1990s faculty lounge, appealing to the 'larger reality' of immigrant crime that is so true that the facts of the particular case, even if shown to be untrue, are beside the point."

9.  Bang on!  "For an ideology that is rooted in a desire to return to the 8th century, hasn’t Israel helped them take one big step there by causing Hezbollah to abandon electronics?"

10.  We now have stability.  "The war in Ukraine is very stabilizing, and the war in Gaza, and the rockets fired from Lebanon at Israel, and the ships being attacked in the Red Sea. Trump was chaos, but now we have stability and peace."

11.  Facts are so last century.  "If you do not say anything, there are no facts to check."  Shout hurrah, clap your hands, embrace the joy.

12.  Chortle.  "Democrats remain the party of protecting the system and making it work — the small-c conservative party of the liberal but comfortable coasts and other economic hubs."

13.  A bullseye for emergence.  "Through innovation and defiance, libertarianism is getting a boost around the world."

14.  You will love Big Brother.  "The logic of censorship leads directly to one place, for there is only one way to permanently silence a human being: put a bullet in his brain."

15.  Tariffs weren't the cause of American prosperity.

16.  Ideas have consequences.  "No one thinks Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, was the cause of World War I by himself."

17.  Organizational survival crowds out the mission.  "Many poverty nonprofits today act as conduits for government money rather than bottom-up associations funded by voluntary donations. They excel in federal grant applications more than in aiding the poor."

18.  You want more Trump?  "The Biden/Harris administration has pretty much legalized illegal immigration."

19.  Buckle in.  "The story within the story is that the 'best economy ever' needs to be goosed."

20.  Bill McKibben may not be interested in emergence, but emergence exists.  "All this rooftop solar is happening without any help from governments, and except for South Africa without financing from banks, who haven’t yet learned how to evaluate the credit risk."

21.  Par for the Trump National course.  "Progressives adamantly refuse to credibly address the topic."

22.  Childhood is a luxury good.  "Yet while we view child labor as unethical, we have to remember that our society is rich enough that we can afford to hold that belief."

23.  We definitely need more people playing offense like this.