FRIDAY short TAKES.

The limitations that trammel inquiry are within the universities.  "Universities claim to support free speech and academic freedom only when those are used to advance a given narrative. When someone uses them to attack the narrative, they get hammered."  Expedience is their most important product.  "College administrators have been weaponizing the First Amendment when it suits them, and blatantly disregarding it when it doesn’t."  And the worst get on top, starting at Harvard.  "Claudine Gay was chosen for a different set of credentials—her race, gender, political views, and religious devotion to DEI—and she is delivering on her promise to rededicate the university to identity politics."  In an academy full of careerist cowards, truth is the first casualty.  "We must also convince scientists to use those freedoms to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth even when doing so seems to conflict with other priorities." That article also includes an instructive note. "Work ignored upon publication has not been censored."

Hanukkah has ended, with a modern meditation. "Back then, the Jews of Judea were ruled by the Hellenist King, Antiochus IV. He declared Jews could no longer practice their religion -- on pain of death. Today, a new group of people, known as Hamas, have declared the same. Our Jewish forefathers in Judea had an answer for Antiochus. Today our brothers and sisters in Israel have the same answer for Hamas."

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

1.  The Lord's our shepherd, says the psalm, but just in case:  "Self-defense, including the defense of one's community, is not only a right but an obligation of all civilized people, who must not countenance giving in to savagery."

2.  I say contrarian, you say jerk.  "A teaspoon of leavening that kept social pressure from compressing the range of acceptable thought into an intellectual pancake: flat, uniform and not very interesting."

3.  Discovering evolutionary advantage.  "'Can cousins marry?' may seem like a rare and irrelevant question, but there are anthropologists who think Christian Europe and the rest of the world diverged economically and morally because the former answered it in the negative."

4.  Affirmative action for nuts.  "The FAA is seeking people suffering from 'severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities' to be air traffic controllers."  And I thought Kurt Schlichter's Kelly Turnbull series was satire.

5.  The epistemic closure will bite them in the butt again.  "The reality is that [New York's] Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist."

6.  Weather isn't climate except when it is.  "Media are quick to report record highs but hesitant to report record lows."  There's been an early December warm spell after the Thanksgiving weekend snow melted, and the "climate change" references will likely come out if there's no White Christmas on the plains.

7.  Why the sociologists and historians rage.  "Any system that rewards entrepreneurship instead of good grades and helping the teacher clean the erasers after class is obviously unfair."  That liberatory praxis?  "The intellectuals are rounded up and shot."  Hands behind your backs there!

8.  Too much sex makes you nearsighted.  "There was a 2014 study conducted by McAfee that said or showed that 90 percent of millennial women have taken nude photos at some point."

9.  Those pathetic little squares!  "Whoever cut that pizza should be arrested."

10.  Draft and develop.  "What we are all witnessing is the patience in Green Bay that is now starting to pay off."  But stay patient.  "Every phase of the game 'wasn’t good enough.'"