FRIDAY short TAKES.

As I work through the backlog of links, it occurs to me to recommend reading Reason and Power Line on a regular basis, to get an idea of what structures my thinking.  I read outside my world view as a calibration check.  If I see something on the likes of Common Dreams or Inside Higher Ed that makes me think, that's fine.

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

1.  Degeneracy.  "Letting dangerous people deteriorate on the streets and in our schools is not a policy."

2.  Rainbow tape.  "Dear Lord, it’s such vacuous virtue signaling."

3.  We cannot concede reality.  "Activists are determined to have something to be furious about, regardless of how many of their demands are met by an exhausted public who just wants the screaming to stop."

4.  Our humorless leftists.  "One particularly pernicious culprit in violence is jokes and memes."  Can you hate-f** 'em if they can't take a joke?

5.  Low expectations, indeed.  "The real shame is that accreditors, faculty and other stakeholders fail to insist that underperforming schools function at least as well as their institutional peers."

6.  We owe it to ourselves.  "Russia is trying to starve Ukraine of fossil fuels and destroy its agriculture. That is also what the Democrats are trying to do to the United States."

7.  The Anointed have trouble being humble.  "Principled support for free speech is rooted in the idea that all human beings are fallible."

8.  Evergreen.  "Robert Reich is wrong."

9.  The way to demonstrate the folly of presidential decrees.  “A work-to-rule campaign would push all of our membership to do exactly what they’re supposed to do [on the job], no cutting corners. The railroads almost entice you to cut corners on safety issues because it benefits them.”

10.  So easy to call yourself a sanctuary city, until the refugees show up.  "It appears the arrival of 40,000 illegal border-crossers has done some serious damage to those deeply held principles. Reality can do that sometimes."

11.  “Challenge accepted. The Illinois State Rifle Association will see the State of Illinois in court.”

12.  Soylent Green is Davos People.  "Since poverty has been shown not to be inevitable, our cultural betters are trying to will it into reality."

13.  Those New Rules.  "In Washington, no one squeals louder than a Democrat held to his or her own standards."

14.  Quintessentially stupid about being smart.  "The letter is a remarkably compact expression of an entire worldview. In just a few paragraphs, it combines fake erudition, dismissiveness, factual error, disingenuous self-deprecation, smugness and self-righteousness; it reads like a meaner-spirited version of Sam the Eagle from the Muppets."

15.  Liberty:  "A legal limit on democratic power."  Preferably enumerated and divided.

16.  Of wokies and fundies.  "There are still groups today whose agenda is converting and persecuting, hating and perhaps even murdering those of other faiths, denominations, or of no faith at all to save them from themselves and the fiery furnace to come."

17.  Wise Experts ... aren't.  "We’ve quite literally outsourced the definition of reality to a small group of technocrats in non-descript offices whose names we’ll never know and who self selected for issue advocacy and whose interests likely diverge severely from those of we the people."

18.  Indeed.  "Parents have to see [the deconstruction of] merit as part and parcel of the left’s push to impose its ridiculous concepts on our kids."

19.  Been there.  "For decades, excellent SAT scores got students into colleges that they wouldn’t ordinarily get into, creating opportunities to find diamonds in the rough who had perhaps never found their footing in school."

20.  Agglomeration economies exist.  "If that matchmaking of capital and labor could happen on the scale of a neighborhood, there'd be no need for cities at all."

21.  Substance deconstructs symbolism.  "A busload or two of illegal immigrants and 'sanctuary' turns into 'NIMBY.'"

22.  Why that debt-ceiling-is-about-past-obligations is nonsense.  "Where was the indignation over irresponsible members of Congress keeping the government financed with awful omnibus bills or continuing resolutions?"  Let alone neglecting regular order.

23.  Pray that this is so.  "In the end, J.B. Pritzker does not look like a wise and capable statesman destined for higher office. Instead, he looks more like a feckless blow-hard surrounded by incompetents."  Unfortunately, Illinoisans keep returning the blow-hard and the incompetents to office.

24.  Deepfakes in service of The Narrative.  "The Times analysis is so confused that it only leaves the reader more in the dark about electricity price increases."

25.  Let's go for a train ride.  "Paddington was for holidays."