FRIDAY short TAKES.

It's St. Patrick's Day, so let's get the drinking right.  "Today’s super-hopped IPAs are close to undrinkable."  On the other hand, with brackets being busted on the first day, maybe headache in a glass is the only way of dealing with the insanity. If equity is so important, why not eliminate varsity sports?  Because it's the time of the season for recruit, redshirt, and develop.  "We have to get it right with high school guys, we've got to develop and we've got to retain."  (And do so in a way that gets results in the regular season and the tournament?)

Three years ago, the St. Patrick's weekend celebrations were our last breath of freedom.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Market tests get results.  "There are people in Hollywood who want to stop making sequels and pandering to Oberlin grads."  The Oberlin grads beg to differ.  "Top Gun is Dangerous Because It Doesn’t Hate America."

2.  Chain readers.  "I keep buying new books faster than I read the old ones."  Yup.

3.  What, me worry?  "[McKinsey Pete] is one of the most prominent in a parade of Biden regime officials who only have their jobs not because of their talents and abilities, but because of their value in demonstrating the regime’s commitment to 'diversity.'"  We've noticed.

4.  Give yourself no powers.  "Those currently in a position to censure and censor others will not be in that position forever and may one day find themselves on the receiving end of the punishments they are now meting out to their ideological opponents."  We need resilient error for truth to exist.

5.  The academic freedom glass is, at best, half full.

6.  Dementia Joe.  "Apparently, 100,000 dead at least deserves from Joe a 'Trump did it' chuckle."

7.  Comparing yourself with the worst.  “Cyclists are not lawless bandits.”

8.  Academia, too, is administratively bloated.

9.  Make that unproductively bloated.  "Our educational system has turned out a generation of coddled, cosseted narcissists who have never been intellectually challenged and are abjectly ill-equipped to deal with such challenges when they come."

10.  Not new, just more vicious.  "The style of the new anti-speech Democrat is clear: define all government critics as lacking standing to criticize, impugn their prior opinions and associations, imply that all their beliefs are conspiracy theory, define their lack of faith in the FBI’s judgment as treasonous, and declare their motivation to be financial."  And unapologetic.  "It is disappointing that congressional Democrats are taking little interest in the weaponization of the federal government against Americans' speech rights; on the contrary, they think the weapon needs sharpening."

11.  Pitchforks, torches, tar, feathers.  "Making a furious public less visible doesn’t make it go away. Moreover, as we saw at the hearing, clamping down on civil liberties makes obnoxious leaders more conspicuous, not less. Democrats used to understand this."

12.  Relentlessly grim.  "Nobody in this story makes me optimistic about America."

13.  Blue-collar South Los Angeles.  "It’s a real world version of the American Dream that should be celebrated by both political parties. The left for its diversity and working class roots, the right for its industry, faith, and family values."

14.  Absolutely a bailout.

15.  Making Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter look moderate?  "You can’t run the most reckless monetary and fiscal experiment in history without the bill eventually coming due."  Now due:  "The Federal Reserve is in the unenviable position of achieving its mandate by crashing the economy."

16.  Famous last words.   "I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system is sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them."

17.  This is what you voted for.  "The president, who campaigned in 2020 as a centrist alternative to his party’s kooky socialists, has governed as their glove puppet. He spent trillions of your dollars to give the cranks everything on their wish list."  Did nobody read the Donks' platform?

18.  Surprise!  "Barney Frank Under Fire for Downplaying Deregulation While Being Paid by Signature Bank."

19.  Wisdom at eighty years.  "The two objectives—avoiding a bank run and raising rates—are in conflict."  Robert Reich is way older than I am, where has he been?

20.  Undermine them with mockery.  "Give no apology, show no guilt, and be brutally hilarious in your response. Radical activists find their true power in the cowardice and compliance of their victims."