FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Constitution belongs to the people, not to sophists.  Establishment Republican leaders lost control of their party because they failed to serve their base.  Politicians work for the people.  "Today’s popular leaders like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen are not the people’s last chance. They are the globalist’s last chance."  It's probable that the ban on Marine La Pen running for office will backfire.

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

1.  An organization grows rules the way an oyster grows pearls.

2.  It shouldn't be news that federal money comes with strings.

3.  Emergence cannot be mandated.  "The obvious problem with luxury beliefs is when they quickly zoom from experimental to mandatory."

4.  Without falsifiable propositions, theory is as if faith.  "This was not just a theory presented for discussion; it was a worldview imposed as truth."

5.  Orange bottom story of the week?  "Hooters also plans to use fresher ingredients in the kitchen and provide faster service."

6.  Democracies do not selectively subsidize media outlets.

7.  Sixties leftovers at Michigan Tesla protests.  "Crowds in Ann Arbor and Troy were primarily people over the age of 65, white, and retired from jobs that depended on public funding as teachers, professors at local universities, and social workers."

8.  Their grandchildren are worse.  "That 1960s hippies-infused Democratic hierarchy grew up to become professional agitators."

9.  Governments, generating rents and dissipating them.  "Initiatives pertaining to economic integration and development have done more to embolden the positions of political elites, rather than empower producers and consumers in the marketplace."

10.  Pravda-on-the-Hudson, covering for the nomenklatura.  "How different would the world be if Americans were fully informed of the situation and risks we were running in Ukraine? Would Joe Biden be allowed to remain as president? Would he even be in the White House in the first place? That the virus that upended the world and killed millions came from American-supported experiments recklessly conducted in a Chinese lab?"

11.  Democrats.  "Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California!"

12.  Food stamps now are a leading cause of childhood obesity.

13.  Psychology and psychiatry were captured by ideologues before developing a core paradigm.  "The total failure of science to establish any causes of a devastating, swiftly worsening neurological disease endemic is a tragedy worse than any stolen election or politicized bureaucracy."

14.  Theory as faith in the locker room.  ”Gender identity, gender expression, sexual identity, etc., are simply nice terms to hide behind when a man decides to wear a skirt into the ladies’ room and lie about what he is or to push people with psychological issues into harmful behaviors.”  Ideology crowds out safety.  "Inclusion of transgender athletes has, in practice, led to the exclusion of female athletes."

15.  You go first, doomsday environmentalist.  "The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less."

16.  Museums have lost the plot.

17.  Wishful thinking dies hard.  "Big majorities also want party leadership to be diverse in race and gender, and to prioritize funding for programs addressing issues such as healthcare and housing, even if it increases the national deficit."

18.  Universities, literally in bed with Democrats.  "A former CNN White House correspondent, whose husband was Obama’s press secretary, is now the Interim President of Columbia."

19.  It's been over thirty years in coming.  "Of higher education, it is fair to ask: Has so much prestige ever been squandered so quickly?  Universities issuing solemn pronouncements about political events have appeared childishly self-absorbed.  Intellectuals, often the last to understand things, are discovering the obvious: When universities adopt stances that are adversarial and disdainful toward the (they say: systemically racist, social-justice-deprived) society that sustains them, the sustaining wanes."

20.  Chuckle.  "Think of the E.U., in fact, as the global equivalent of Trump's worst nightmare, a giant liberal arts campus."

21.  America did not deindustrialize.

22.  DEI north of 29.  "This person chairs an English department is as much of a news story as the fact that he’s violent with students."

23.  It couldn't be worse.  "If we want trade reciprocity, the government should get out of the way and let businesses and consumers engage in voluntary exchanges with each other and overseas partners as they please."

24.  Bourgeois norms work.  "'Personal responsibility' was racist, for awhile, but common sense is making a comeback."

25.  Don't just do something, stand there!  "all of the people saying this is insanity seem to be clinging to a status quo that everyone with eyes could see is headed towards disaster – they have no better answers."

26.  The students are not what they used to be.