FRIDAY short TAKES.

Denial of objective truth is one of the signs of a society's downfall.  Authority is granted only to those who are trustworthy.  They betrayed that trust.  "The people would defer to elites as long as they delivered sustained prosperity and steadily improving living standards."  The liberal elite happened to this country.  Let's end the gerontocracy.  We put them there.  "A solution already exists. Vote them out."

 The (mostly) weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Can't we do better?  "Biden and Trump are bad candidates."

2.  Kamala Harris.  "Undistinguished on the one hand and widely disliked on the other."

3.  What's the error range?  "If you don't know the error range, the data are almost useless."

4.  Unhealthy purity tests.  "Nowadays, it seems like ninety-nine percent friends are one-hundred percent enemies."

5.  The Suburban Experiment's Growth Ponzi Scheme.  "Cities that have balanced their budgets and improved their infrastructure on the back of new development are finding their communities crumbling with no way to finance repairs."

6.  Communist poison.  "The economy was booming, then Xi injected communism back into it and it started to die."

7.  Buckwheat will spin all of it as success.  "Biden’s initiatives have succeeded only in the sense of becoming successfully enacted—and therefore nearly destroying the country."

8.  No moms in the dugout.  "Contrary to popular belief, no matter how much boys and men may like looking at female breasts, they prefer it not to be in the context of changing for a middle school PE class."

9.  You have the right to ignore it.  "We’re a country of free speech and anybody can say anything."

10.  The doomsday environmentalists ye shall always have with you.  "Activist scientists and the media are shamefully using emotional language to describe an almost inconsequential mortality event in order to manipulate public sentiment and force influential conservation organizations to accept a scientifically unsound political agenda."

11.  The unseen part of "seen and unseen" expands.  “In the case of battery electric pickups used as work vehicles, permanent loads (such as equipment racks, toolboxes, and equipment trays built into the vehicle) will reduce the range at all times, even without additional cargo.”

12.  The way of technocrats generally.  "Promising a technological solution to a political problem—and then using political will to force their solution on society—is a consistent behavior of the auto-industry."

13.  Amtrak's two specialties.  "Operating a skeleton network on a shoestring budget and producing pretty maps of potential new passenger routes. What it has never done in its 52 years is build a railroad from scratch or develop a true high-speed rail line."  The rent seekers, see point 12 above, are on the highway lobby's payroll.

14.  The high-transaction cost workaround for high transaction costs.  "Corruption provides a vector for market efficiency incentives to be smuggled into socialist systems and 'public' companies that normally are insulated from prices and incentives. Second, though corruption 'works out rather well' for systems with bad institutions, once corruption is established the bad institutions are 'locked in' and are very difficult to get rid of."

15.  If you can't find a county fair, look for a surf shop?  "Surf shop owners are not stupid, they aren’t about to post things on the entry way to their stores that will alienate a large percentage of their potential customer base."

16.  Expose him for who he is.  Oh, Dwarf, you have exposed yourself.

17.  The real debt ceiling.  "foreigners can stop investing in U.S. government debt whenever they please, and that would either drive down the value of the dollar in the foreign exchange market, raise U.S. interest rates, or both."  It's only the incompetence of the Brazil - Russia - whoever currency group that's preventing that.  "It is not easy to replace the established medium of exchange, but it has happened before."  Reality will bat last.  "The fact that we have avoided the 'very unpleasant choices' so far does not mean that those of us who warned early about the issue were crying wolf. It does mean that those choices are going to be more painful than if we had been listened to."

18.  The etymology "senator" shares with "senescent."  "Senators in general have a long history of remaining in office long beyond their prime."

19.  Call it the propaganda it is.  "Progressives have been pushing a distorted view of American history for years, demonizing everything from the National Anthem to the flag to the Constitution."

20.  The Technocratic Conceit dies hard, doesn't it?  "Why do we Americans always seem to believe those who tell us that industrial policy is a surer path to prosperity than economic freedom?"

21.  Famous last words.  "Vice adjudicates the economy of virtue. Never mind if it doesn’t make sense. We meant well."

22.  There are opportunities to undermine the Nanny State with mockery.  "William F. Buckley Jr. joked years ago that liberalism is the impulse to reach in and turn down your shower, but now this is uniform government policy."

23.  Did it slip Dementia Joe's mind?  "Today’s downward revision… continues the recent trend of every single data point in the Biden administration being revised sharply lower in subsequent month(s), in a coordinated propaganda attempt to make the economy look stronger, then quietly revise it away when everyone forgets."