FRIDAY short TAKES

Cold Spring Shops can go on holiday, but the beat goes on, both with pithy good points and well-distilled jackassery.

1.  Excelling at failing up.

2.  Some people are terminally clueless.  "After nearly five years of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent—a depiction that squandered vast quantities of messaging without electoral benefits—most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers human survival."

3.  You are the system.

4.  The worst get on top. "[N]ormal people would rather grill than protest"

5. She isn't leaving the Democrats, the Democrats are leaving her.  "One discouraging thing about Critical Social Justice Theory is that it is now playing out in scenarios that challenge the success of Asians, not just white people, in the push to limit the number of Asian students at competitive public high schools."

6.  Mugged by reality.  "Chicago appears to be a laboratory over the last three decades for the extremist left, an experiment to see just how much damage progressives can do to the criminal justice system."

7.  That aggregation problem in democracy, again.  "Disappointed Americans sometimes wonder why the United States does not enjoy the levels of consensus or solidarity that seem possible in, say, Denmark. Part of the answer is that the population of Denmark is comparable to that of metropolitan Phoenix."  That's comparable in numbers, you'd be hard pressed to find a quorum for an Althing in Phoenix.

8.  Thanks, feminists.  "[B]efore women start asking where all the good men have gone, perhaps they should look at themselves first."  If only someone had told them.

9.  Shopping for accommodations.  "[L]earning disabilities have become a bonus rather than a burden."  It's been going on for some time.

10.  Policy gridlock.  "[M]ost cities remain trapped in a regulatory environment that makes such innovation and adaptation extremely costly."

11.  Unintended consequences are real.  "Democrats should not take advantage of being in the majority by passing legislation that a future Republican majority could overturn."

12.  Eventually, they all lose.  "Henry Kissinger once quipped of two other odious regimes at war, but only Nazi Germany lost in the 1940s. The world would have to wait another 46 years for the Communist USSR to lose, but on Christmas Day, 1991, they finally did."

13.   Thomas Sowell at Harvard. "[S]mug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic."

14.  More Democrat wisdom.  "[California congressman Ro] Khanna said, "I don't think people look at what's going on in this country and say, 'You know what we really ought to do is punish people at the pumps and and punish the working class.'""  Even if you spin that gas tax as a carbon tax?

15.  It pays to increase your word power.  "Metadehumanization" is not a Ficus brain-fart.  "We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance."  Sometimes it's good to have the commonsense notions validated by peer review.

16.  That monopoly on violence.  "Politicians, then, must be comfortable with the fact that any rules they pass will at some point be maintained via force, and, yes, violence."

17.  A curious case against school choice?  "Wealthy families pay for their children to attend high schools that receive preferential treatment in the admissions process at highly rejective colleges."

18.  John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane takes stock.  "Maybe City College [of New York] moved to an equally important role of providing remedial education to people ill-served by the city's disastrous public high schools. Maybe City College fed meritocratic middle managers, and left to Chicago the business of producing Nobel Prize winners. Really, that City College failed in this new role is the more trenchant criticism. But the decline of meritocracy in favor of other goals is indeed the post 1968 trend of modern universities."  Twenty years of Cold Spring Shops in a nutshell: that trend was not for the better.

19.  Woke Catechism.  "There is something confining, deterministic, in a premise that judges a white person incapable of a certain understanding or fairness just because that person is white. It’s a bit like Calvinistic dogma that if you’re not among the chosen ones, your soul is doomed no matter what you do."

20.  The point is to get the heavy trucks past the town so they're not generating safety and health risks for local shoppers.

21.  Be careful what you ask for. 'You'll Never Beat The Government With Just Guns,' Says Party That Also Believes Government Was Almost Toppled By Unarmed Mob On January 6.

22.  I was there forty years ago.  Prosperity should be a great American goal.  But "Biden may well prove a 'transformative' president — by bringing America back to 1970s stagflation."

23.  Hail to the ficus!  "Joe Biden, 78, looked out of it."  But he's keeping the boodle coming.  "Democrats have enticed the votes of urban residents by promising money without regard to social consequences."  Until a serious opposition contests those votes, it will continue.

24.  Soft on communism, soft on crime.  "Republicans did not summon into existence voters’ increasing discomfort with progressive governance. They merely noticed it."

25.  Peer review is useful.  "It would save the rest of us having to read undergraduate poppycock in the pages of the Washington Post and provide these academics with useful criticism. It is shameful how academically bankrupt these disciplines have allowed themselves to become through complacency and the competition to out-progressive one another. The upside, if we can call it that, is the public will have the opportunity to mock them for years to come until they self-correct."

26.  Schadenfreudelicious!  "I've long made fun of universities for taking such a broad view of what counts as offensive language, but the fact that trigger warning—a concept designed to prevent offense—has itself landed on such a list is fairly amusing."