FRIDAY short TAKES.

That's sports.  "Putting yourself in position only counts for so much."  What is the sour mood of Bear fans, Aaron?  "Do you know what’s not quite as upbeat and peppy as a camera shot of Taylor Swift dancing and singing in a suite during a playoff game?"  A “rebuilding” year turned into a postseason run.  This team is built to last.  This still seems like the beginning of something significant.

Then there's the Jarrett regency.  "Mayorkas’ superpower is the sin of omission. In this he is rather like an Ottoman eunuch hatched by Barack Obama."  Buckle in.  "The haughtiness of Washington grandees is just like that of the French nobles before the Revolution.  I hope Americans can see this, can’t they?"

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

1.  Claudine Gay:  "Hired, groomed, and promoted by Harvard not because of her scholarship, which would hardly qualify for tenure at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople."

2.  Undermine them with mockery.  "Joe Biden has no brain cells left to rub together to fire off a neuron, and he’s just as likely to try and sniff Nikki Haley as he is to debate her."

3.  You choose Biden and you choose dead Americans.

4.  Nobody?  "Who buys the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition to see men pretending to be women? Old women? Obese women?"

5.  The trans movement is literally the patriarchy.

6.  Bitching works.  "And that’s good, because decline is a choice. If you don’t choose decline then make sure that you heap scorn on people and organizations that look like that’s what they’re choosing."

7.  Stop acting white!  "All the immigrants' kids in this country have such opportunity, the sky is the limit, but somehow these kids don't strive or don't work hard or take things for granted."

8.  Pull up the drawbridge!  "The rich and powerful often are more interested in preserving their wealth than they are in policies that enable the creation of new wealth."

9.  The academy self-selects for the risk averse.  "The entire purpose of tenure was to protect faculty from mobbish fads, and what we're seeing today is faculty being left unprotected by a mobbish fad. Completely defeats the purpose."

10.  Leftover food is a public health challenge.  “Would you risk being accountable when a homeless man gets food poisoning and comes after you?”

11.  Enjoy the incoherence.  "What use is a dictionary’s definition that would render 'not female' someone who menstruates, needs annual pap smears, must be concerned with avoiding pregnancy, is vulnerable to rape, has XX chromosomes, and is in fact an adult woman?"

12.  Speaking of haughty grandees and French aristocrats:  "Opposition to car-oriented suburban development, notes historian Robert Bruegmann, reminded him of the Duke of Wellington’s complaint that trains would 'only encourage the common people to move around needlessly.'"  Which left His Grace mightily chuffed when William Huskisson neglected the General Notice.

13.  Seen and unseen.  "People honestly think that prohibiting child labor will improve the welfare of children."

14.  Proportional cruelty?  "Had the US and Western Allies observed Fareed Zakaria’s Marquis of Queensberry notion of war, World War 2 would have looked a little different."

15.  Why politicians fail.  "To stop inflation, you must stop printing money and fix the budget at the same time."

16.  Yes.  Next question?  "Won’t the people who Biden is trying to protect simply wind up unbanked?"

17.  We would do much better without experts.  "Much to the dismay of the credentialed class, Americans’ tolerance of this system began to wane about four years ago, when it became apparent to many that a) the experts don’t always know what they’re doing, and b) they don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart."  When it comes to policy, these people are crazy.

18.  It was those Taliban Flying Falcons.  "This is the same president who wants everybody to believe the U.S. government was almost overthrown on January 6th by an unarmed mob led by a vegan shaman in a buffalo hat. But now you'll need an F-16 to be any real threat."

19.  Watch yourself, Gorsuch!  "When you feed the alligator, I'm not sure you deserve much sympathy when it bites your arm off."

20.  Dispassionate Professionals with decades of experience?  Finish the sentence!  "Many of whom have decades of experience putting government power above American sovereignty."

21.  Buckle in.  "All our enemies are right now calculating how best to use their gift of the next 12 months from a non-compos-mentis president and his neo-socialist team that either believes the U.S. is at fault for much of the world’s pathologies or is too terrified to do anything about them."

22.  I refer to the Jarrett regency, and voters get it.  "Obama is Biden’s puppet master"

23.  Getting scrod in Boston.  "The people you vote for did things, changed things, right in front of you and you just kept reelecting them or people just like them. That has consequences. And they suck."

24.  Polarization.  "Through it all, it's been impossible to escape the feeling that DeSantis' notion of freedom extended only as far as the preferences of his political tribe."

25.  Keep winning, and the little kids will keep coming.  “Whenever the national anthem started, I saw some little girls in the corner, and I had to take a moment to realize this is so much bigger than me.”