FRIDAY short TAKES.

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

1.  Reality bats last.  "When you deny what is self-evident, you are at war with reality, and that never ends well."

2.  Vote as though reality bats last.  "Many politicians offer a simplified view of the world—one in which government interventions are all benefits and no costs."

3.  That's fine, it's neither critical nor theory.  "Critical Race Theory is not a hard science. It’s not even a soft science."  They grouse, we mock.  "Let them pursue the thankless path of total critique, while we teach, build, construct, and sustain a civilized order worthy of human beings."

4.  Excellence is, by definition, scarce.

5.  There are limits to agglomeration.  "Urban centers are being hollowed out while their peripheries are booming."

6.  The incoherence is hazardous to your health.  “Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”

7.  Stuff your good intentions.  "It’s no good to say that racial discrimination is fine if your motives are benevolent. Tell that to the Asian and other students who are rejected."

8.  You go first.  "It’s time to get fossil fuel money out of politics and leave the oil in the ground."

9.  Progressives:  "Simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune."

10.  Hotty toddy.  “It should come as no surprise that majoring in computer science at, say, the University of Mississippi will result in a higher-paying job than majoring in gender studies at, say, Harvard. Yet too many high school seniors continue to buy into the myth about the value of marquee-name colleges.”

11.  Indeed.  "Lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times."

12.  People know their own needs best.

13.  Technocracy is a rent-seeker's paradise.  To Democrats, "more government is the answer, regardless of how stifling."

14.  Greed is the natural condition of the capitalist.  "If companies could raise prices on a whim, they’d have done so long before the pandemic."

15.  Emergence, and enumerated power, for the win.  "The political system may get bent by the depredations of the federal nomenklatura or the iconoclastic impulses of the Left, but the courts, Congress, and public opinion usually work to restrain the the worst excesses of would-be authoritarians."

16.  Do it in the name of Heaven, you can justify it in the end.  "This is authoritarianism versus democracy, and democracy must win, well, democracy has to have all the tools possible to make it possible."

17.  The best medicine on campus.  "The one sound the Devil cannot stand is laughter, and these kids know how to laugh."

18.  Let's help drain China's brains.

19.  Unless you're in a People's Democratic Republic, or on a hothouse campus, that is.  "Suppressing speech with the best of intentions is still antithetical to democracy."

20.  At least thirty years of mediocrities?  "Our presidential selection system has given us John Kennedy, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, two Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden."

21.  William Nordhaus, meet Hank Rearden.  “Only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.”

22.  We're broke, and we know it.  Let's share in the misery.  "If the goal of the Biden administration is to drive down profits, the endgame will be to make everyone poorer and poorer over time."

23.  Since when was that the point?  "Jackson will need to up her game considerably if she wants to be taken seriously as a Supreme Court justice."

24.  The left is where you find useful idiots.  "People on the left need to take off their rose-colored glass and stop pretending we have Mr. Rogers as president—when what we have is a short-tempered, grumpy old man."

25.  Show me what Democracy looks like!  "Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it." Why? "My kid, my money, you work for me. And if you don’t, I’ll organize all these other women, tell them what’s going on, and kick you out of office, because that’s democracy, right?"

26.  I believe I will.  "Conservatives have won titanic unimaginable victories. It’s time to go have a beer."