FRIDAY short TAKES.

The continuing demonstrations of Smart People Doing Dumb Things continues.

Pithy elaborations on familiar Cold Spring Shops points follow.  There are fewer this week than in the previous few weeks.

1.  Our governance is neither dignified nor efficient.  "Written in invisible ink are the words: 'fill in this passage, director' or 'think of something suitable here, judge.'"

2.  The real news from Lake Wobegon.  "My generation was badly affected by the antiwar movement of the Sixties and the purity of the counterculture of dulcimers and organic granola and we got too good for our own good and lost touch with our people."

3.  Reality casts a vote.  "Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse."

4.  Ineffective altruists.  "Soft hearts and soft heads go together."

5.  When the nonsense is no longer wonderful.  "[C]rises are times when we recall that we’ve forgotten the obvious."

6.  The ad popularum fallacy, deconstructed.  "The work of heroes and heroines is more difficult, the more that others seek to stay in the comfortable shadows, and eventually, when it is safe, ride out on the wave of change that was painfully generated by those out front."

7.  Sometimes, you have to defy consensus.  "One man courageously standing his ground and a people braving the odds have overturned the consensus of a smug, continental elite and have alerted them to confront real dangers."

8.  Turf them out.  "[W]e have a president who is more beholden to a Swedish teenager than the suffering of Americans."  The suffering was preventable.  "There are a number of viable right ways to renew American leadership on clean energy and green technology. Unfortunately, the Biden administration doesn’t seem interested in any of them. Instead, it is catering to the eco-activist wing of the Democratic Party — and pinning its policy failures on a war that kicked off many months after American gas prices actually started to climb."

9.  You cannot deconstruct what you do not understand.  "A true liberal education equips students with the tools to think critically about how ancient Rome still communicates a cultural heritage that does not solely belong to one group or nation."

10.  Put your money on the bobtailed nag.  "Our current crop of justices is made up of what Dahlia Lithwick calls 'judicial thoroughbreds,' and that is an apt metaphor as thoroughbreds, though they tend to be good-looking horses, are produced via a good deal of inbreeding."

11.  Amateur hour among The Best and The Brightest.  "Putin is now delighting in Biden’s self-made predicament: Incredibly, the U.S. president has put himself in the position of needing not one but three banes of U.S. security."

12.  Just call it road socialism.  "[Matthew Turner] compares America’s road building to how the Soviet Union distributed bread. If bakeries are free, when they open their doors people start queuing. As a consequence, there are always lines for bread and some people who really need it don’t get it." The people who "really need it" get on line earlier, but that produces inefficiencies of its own.  "[Y]ou have eight hours of level of service F."  But the crashes are generally at slower speeds.

13.  Time to go Galt.  "Congratulations, toxic males – you made the West safe for the woke, and they repay you with contempt and abuse."

14.  Ukraine: "Where even lady therapists are building [M]olotov cocktails in their down time."

15.  Otherwise, we're going to party like it's 1622.  "In the end, the West needs leaders who recognize the need to expand production capacity as quickly and widely as possible — not so-called environmentalists who think the planet’s future is better with less energy and food production."

16.  The small platoons will prevail.  "A school board in a rural state being forced to stop teaching anti-American racism or a group of parent activists forcing gender-sanity in girls’ sports may not seem to rise to the level of global and international affairs, but it most certainly does. As the supports of globalist empire erode, every day the entire structure becomes more unstable, closer to the ultimate collapse."

17.  Put not your faith in uncalibrated extrapolations.  "[Epidemiology and climatology] both use hallucinatory models of imminent catastrophe that fail to conform to reality to generate scare stories and emergencies as a pretext for collectivist and globalist action and mandate."

18.  Buy into those immigrants from places that suck.  "In previous years there was a tremendous brain drain from Russia — the most creative and talented scientists and engineers emigrated, and nowadays we see a cultural exodus, which will inevitably throw the country into the intellectual Stone Age, from which there is no easy return. Russia loses and the West gains, but the idiots of culture throw sand in the wheels of this inexorable historical process."

19.  Unhappily, they haven't.  "Davos Man in the 1990s hoped that elections and privatizations in Russia and trade and technology in China would make those nations liberal societies."