FRIDAY short TAKES.

Oktoberfest season is upon us, and a Schnitzelbank that sends up assorted mountebanks and poseurs is surely in order.  The list of expert failures is a long one, after all.

Stick your "progress" where the sun don't shine!

The weekly roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Reality generally wins, austerity Oktoberfest version.  "As angry as normals will be when their lights don’t go on or they can’t heat their homes, they might be even more irate if they find that 'environmentalists' have disabled their SUVs."

2.  Telling Stalin what he wanted to hear also backfired.  "Elite experts and degreed professionals massaged and warped their knowledge to serve ideological masters, rather than the truth."

3.  Complex adaptive systems will do what complex adaptive systems do.  "When one by one, these imperative ‘scientific’ measures were withdrawn or modified as their shortcomings became apparent in the public experience, the aura of infallibility was shattered."

4.  Show your work.  "In the economy, central planners face a well-known calculation problem. Even when they are sure that the market is getting things wrong, they usually lack a way to measure the degree of correction needed."

5.  The predictable consequence of denying coherent beliefs.  "The left truly thinks it can define its way out of the reality of people’s daily lives with words. Perhaps they think that all reality is subjective and that there is no truth except how we define it, and that only people’s pesky and stubborn perceptions sometimes stand in the way of the leftist-intellectual-defined reality."

6.  What have I been telling you about a value proposition?  "If it wants to attract the kind of people who actually enjoy watching sport, women’s football must stop being a grievance-filled political movement for the morally virtuous."  Caution: that's one of the more temperate assertions in that post.

7.  Just once, I'd like choices for national office younger than me.  "[D]oes anyone else get the feeling that what we really have is just two old men yelling at clouds right now?"

8.  Buckwheat  "might check all the diversity boxes, but she checks no competency boxes."

9.  Were the people conned by the elites in the early twentieth century?  "When the people wanted the Constitution amended, it was amended. When the elites wanted the Constitution amended, but the people did not, that is called democracy."

10.  Too many noble lies?  "It’s the absolute refusal [of People In Charge] to admit the truth when it’s staring you in the face."

11.  One truth: the return of malaise is not pleasant.  "I’m seeing it change back in a long, slow, masochistic drip drip drip."

12.  Sic semper tyrannis!  "Democrats just think any argument their side does not win is a de facto threat to American democracy."

13.  The ad popularum threat to the Living Constitution?  "[Buckwheat] likely does, unless, of course, 'public sentiment' tends in a rightward direction, in which case she would certainly argue, if the Court decision leaned to the Left, that the Court had to adhere to the legal principle and not bow to popular opinion."

14.  Compensating differentials ride the rails.  “The railroads are not offering sufficient rewards – a combination of quality of life and compensation – to keep people there. There’s a price at which people will stay.”