FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's time to stop taking their nonsense.  "Leftists are similar to the youngest sister of the family. Bratty, entitled, and seemingly un-punchable, they get away with nonsense that the rest of us wouldn’t consider doing in the first place."

The week's harvest of pithy summations of familiar Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1. Judicial and legislative review matter.  "The final nail in the pandemic coffin must be the institution of legal limits on public-health authority, else our returned freedoms will only remain as long as those who hold the bureaucratic levers are unable to find a new crisis to extort."  Step out of line and disappear, Giftzwerg.  "Imagine thinking that a government bureaucracy should operate as an all-powerful entity completely unbeholden to the court system and voters."

2.  No apologies for getting a few things right.  "[A] counter-offensive must be undertaken for our fellow citizens’ hearts and minds. It should be grounded in the reform of our educational system so that our schools and universities teach rather than besmirch Western civilization."

3.  The institutions ought to be the servants.  "Populism of all ideological flavors tends to treat not just government but constitutional principles as instruments, to be used bluntly against ideological opponents."

4.  A whiff?  "Maybe there's some experience and wisdom that benefits the country, but the tradeoff is a whiff of gerontocracy to the whole enterprise, a sense that the country is run by and for a group of people who (however well-intentioned) don't necessarily have much stake in its long-term future."

5.  They have pushed us around long enough.  "I and most other passengers would just as soon never have to be on a plane with these sanctimonious, insipid whack-jobs who think they are entitled to impose their neuroses on everyone else. "

6.  Reality bats last.  "The arc of history, it turns out, doesn't bend in just one direction."

7.  The silent stakeholders, silent no more?  "Has corporate America started to get the message that it is no longer a cost-free move to always side with the exotic flora of the extreme left?"

8.  Let your freak flag fly!  "Libs of TikTok has done a very good job in highlighting the consequences of today’s nuttier pseudo-left ideologies."  By ... wait for it ... reposting what the freaks let fly.  "What the public witnessed was exactly what the LGBT activist in question chose to present to the world."

9.  Whatever.  "Everything was invented sooner or later by others who did not become billionaires or suffer from that terrible psychosocial pathology."

10.  California, senescent?  "Younger people, by contrast, show nothing but ingratitude for [the gerontocracy's] largesse, choosing to leave California (85% of departures are among those 25 to 64), or failing to move here in the first place."

11.  President Butter Beans.  Something is wrong with President Joe Biden.

12.  Groomers.  "By the left’s own definitions of performative speech, teaching radical sexual content to children is a form of sexual violence."

13.  We're liberated, and we're miserable.

14.  Shouldn't a Wise Expert welcome public comment on his ukases?  "Notice and comment requirements, it should be emphasized, are more than a mere technicality. They allow people affected by regulations to have some voice, and to influence the government to mitigate their burdens."  Untrammelled authority is tyranny.  "There comes a time when white coat supremacy must end if liberty is to endure."

15.  None dare call it grooming.  "[Parents] can’t understand why their schools seem so eager to rob children of their childhood." The deviance is the point.

16.  Nonsense, those are mostly peaceful weekends.  "A rise in temperatures typically coincides with a rise in violence in Chicago."

17.  Why should this century be any different from any other century?  "In the 21st century, too much government is the great destroyer of social and economic progress."

18.  Skol!  "I am tempted to write a 'Modest Proposal' for Russia and Ukraine to be unified under… Swedish rule. I mean, if Putin is so big on historical precedents…"  Given my ancestry, I'd make a perfect regent.

19.  Fortunately, reality bats last.  "The Left conducts experiments against reality while we live by the reality principle."

20.  I've got to put more beer in the cooler.  "[T]he Progressive Caucus appears to be operating like much of official Washington does—as an incumbent protection racket."  Let the fratricide continue!  "The ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular."

21.  The end of "neoliberalism" comes with a sting in the tail.  "[W]e'll all pay a high price in lives, liberty, wealth, and lost opportunities as we are dragged away from an all-too-brief interlude of relative peace and prosperity."

22.  You can't stop a respiratory virus.

23.  Stop the scorn.  "My crowd in San Francisco scorns such institutions and stresses instead its 'sophistication,' a.k.a. the way elites display their cultural capital to others in the elite class through artisanal spiritualities and teeny, tiny portions of labor-intensive food."  Is there a simple explanation for the crabbed personalities of metrofexuals, namely, they're perpetually hungry?

24.  Squirrel!  "Not the shape of the U.S. economy, the direction of the pandemic, or whether President Joe Biden's ill-considered policies have created an opening for the former president…but Twitter."

25.  A Mere 772 Days to Slow the Spread.  (And counting.)