FRIDAY short TAKES.

This post captures three weeks of the madness.  "If the Biden administration were actually purposely trying to destroy the country, what would they be doing differently?"  They want you to suffer.  They're succeeding.  "The result is a feeling of rudderlessness, that things are spinning out of control. This is not what people voted for in 2020." Senility is intelligence.  Joe, you suck. The new normal is failure.  We're led by a muppet.  This is sure to end worse than not well.

A collection of summary reinforcements of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  We all know what unseriousness looks like.

2.  Forward, together forward.  "Enemy of academic freedom watch: Old Dominion University President Brian Hemphill." That post continues, "Note that President Hemphill's PhD is not in a real scholarly field, but in 'higher education administration.'"

3.  His successor will be worse.  "Trump was always a symptom, a reaction to certain types of Leftist overreach."

4.  It never did make sense.  "Now, it doesn’t even make that much sense to come to Harvard if you want to go into education."

5.  Sooner or later we'll miss bourgeois norms.  "Repairing the corrupt state incentives that have led to our high divorce and single-motherhood rates would be another idea."

6.  Compare and contrast.  "Whereas Detroit was murdered by a perfect storm of crotch-kicks from the auto industry and a racist, corrupt mayor, Portland was killed by its own citizens and the Democratic Party."

7.  Hurry up, November.  "If families can’t feed their babies under the Biden administration, voters of political persuasions will find an administration that can."

8.  Sugarcoating delusions.  “Non-consensus realities”?  Put another way, it's I'm OK, all of you are crazy!

9.  Think I'm being insufficiently appreciative of your reality?  "A unique spectacle of fetish brotherhood."

10.  Experience is a harsh teacher.  "I’ve long suspected that the widespread desire for a government small enough to drown in the bathtub reflects the negative experience many Americans have with utterly Byzantine state and private sector bureaucracies plus associated general uselessness."

11.  Droning and soporific?  "It reflects their conceits; the traditional 'NPR Voice', the ofay upper-middle-class accent of the Oberlin poli-sci graduate, is being supplanted by very audibly African-American and, how shall we say this, accents of males with alternate lifestyles – the sort of stuff things that upper-middle-class white progressives demand from their entertainment."  Oh, soy-poisoned.

12.  Dispatches from Weimar America.  "Let us be clear: this committee would not order the leather community to wear polyester at the parade."

13.  Otay, Spanky.  "The White House needed to send the message that they’d hired someone competent to backstop [press secretary Buckwheat] Jean-Pierre without actually admitting they had to hire someone competent to backstop Jean-Pierre."

14.  Buckwheat has to read the material the Jarrett regency provides her.  "The underlying problem is the line peddled by the White House (tweet below) and the senescent dolt trying to deflect blame for the mess he has created."

15.  Rules are rules.  "Federal bureaucrats have made it more difficult for mothers and fathers to buy food that they need for their babies because, well, the government can't let the labels be wrong."

16.  The pathetic "Doomsday Clock."  "The clock stays set at 100 seconds to midnight—the same place Trump left it by not going to war."

17.  Undermine them with mockery.  "Liberals often make it abundantly clear that they — not you — should be the ones to decide what you do and do not 'need.'"

18.  The only thing we have to fear?  “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.”

19.  A farrago of fail.  "[T]he administrative geniuses mis-calculated. They are just coming to the horrified realization that all their planned little nudges are spinning wildly out of control."

20.  Their incompetence is their diversity.  "We don't know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up running the government, only that they are here and the American people are suffering from their presence."

21.  The corona tyranny, summarized.  "Sweden had zero excess deaths. The United States had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida."

22.  Bet on emergence.  "By its very nature, innovation is creative; it can neither be planned nor predicted."

23.  Zugzwang. "Putin can’t admit he’s lost, and Ukraine believes it can win."

24.  The electoral aggregation problem, a bundle problem?  "[E]lectoral feedback is at best a very noisy signal about voters’ approval or disapproval of particular policies or actions."

25.  Separate school and state?  "These differences cannot be resolved by the government, and certainly not by schoolteachers. Yet they play out as a seemingly unending, unresolvable fight over who controls the public school curriculum."  The differences cited this time involve the sexual underground, they could involve anomalies in the evolutionary paradigm, or political economy, or even the methods of teaching math.