FRIDAY short TAKES.

We, the people, have had enough of Our Progressive Betters.  "They ignored citizens who were fed up with being overrun by "immigrants," run over by inflation, beaten up by skyrocketing energy costs, pursuing "Green" policies that delivered the opposite result promised, suffering while waiting for a boiling frog Climate Apocalypse that never arrives but never ends and watching their national identities and standard of living being stripped away before their very eyes."  After a century of those Wise Experts being anything but, it's time to turf them out.  "As we, as a society, continue to destroy any sense of community, any sense of autonomy, any sense of personal responsibility, and liberty, as we continue to invest more and more power in people and institutions far removed from our lives and our interests, we also continue to make elections and elected officials more and more important in the operation of those lives. We continue to give people who are not especially smart, especially talented or even especially competent greater and greater control over us." Put succinctly, "People are annoyed by so much bureaucracy from Brussels."  They applied a corrective.  "Voters went to the polls and delivered a well-deserved and long-overdue thrashing of the malignant Left in voting for the European Parliament."  Why?  "Voters simply don’t trust mainstream parties to control immigration."  (Or much of anything else!)  No doubt there are latter-day Peter Jennings types scolding voters for having a temper tantrum.  Tango Sierra.

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

1.  Destroy Hamas?  "Israeli leaders continue to have no good options."  Hamas, playing stupid games?  "The sensible and very easy way to avoid exposing your civilian population to potential harm during hostage rescues is not to take hostages in the first place, and, failing that, not to secrete hostages among civilians."  Let Israel win.

2.  Ignore Chicken Little?  "The weather we observe today is really no different than it was 30, 50 or 100-years ago and the coupled, non-linear ocean-atmosphere system is far more complex than many scientists make it out to be."

3.  Fix higher education?  "Get rid of all the people who don't belong."

4.  I'll take "Fourth Turning" for $400.  Elite corruption and popular revolt.  "What happens when institutions wheeze on long after their rationales have collapsed?"

5.  That's the way the infrastructure crumbles.  "It’s the unquestioned free rein given to 'experts' and 'leaders,' even when their recommendations fly in the face of our collective values."

6.  By their fruits.  "Leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both."

7.  It's called emergence, augmented by reality.  "Progress occurs not as marching toward a known goal but as a decentralized process of trial and error with feedback provided through competition and criticism."

8.  Bob McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, what could go wrong?  "The Ford Foundation’s often bewilderingly destructive actions result from its complete faith in the superiority of liberal technocratic expertise to engineer a more perfect society from the top down."  Ford money also underwrites the only founding NFL team not to have participated in a Super Bowl.

9.  Just like that, the establishmentarians will Venerate the Institutions.  "The result could easily be Trump winning the popular vote, but Biden eking out a narrow 270-268 Electoral Vote victory."

10.  We are in a period of soft stagflation.

11.  That political aggregation problem.  “Any political decision that, by invoking the common good, overrides the will and wishes of some to satisfy others, is the execution of a value judgment about individual wills and wishes.”

12.  Support the troops.  Deploy them carefully.  "If fewer people are available to fight the nation's wars, then maybe lawmakers will be less inclined to start them."

13.  "It’s time for Biden to take a page from the Trump playbook."

14.  "Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis, whereas transgenderism is an ideology."

15.  Enjoy the buzzwords, and the breakaway layups.  “We’re encouraged by growing engagement across all our verticals, especially as we welcome new and diverse audiences into our fandom. The WNBA continues to experience sustained growth as our league embraces this heightened momentum.”