FRIDAY short TAKES.

We are governed by a senile idiot.  Dementia Joe's mind is applesauce.  And yet!  "Imagine Biden calling anyone else braindead."  The world is on fire.  Democrats lit the match.  

Dementia Joe's replacement is worse.  "Kamala Harris had a prime opportunity to step up as a decisive leader during a moment of international crisis. Instead, she appeared out of her depth."  The establishment keeps screwing up.  By their fruits:  "Their malignant legacy is the current Middle East disaster."

And all they can do is attempt to shut us up.

Convincing people that there is an exception to freedom of speech called “hate speech” has been one of the greatest marketing successes of the anti-free speech movement. I've been fighting it on campuses for almost 24 years now and it's a justification used all the time to target… https://t.co/ioHUdDng6Z

— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) October 2, 2024

Donald Trump came after the Tea Party, and what might come next won't be amusing.  "Democracy can only be protected from itself so far. And then the people who are being disenfranchised by those who have taken it upon themselves to do the "protecting" without so much as a by-your-leave often find themselves needing protection.  They might want to throttle back a bit."

There might still be time to turf the professional-managerial classes out.  "I can remember the general feeling of fatigue with what seemed like the ongoing collapse of the world that prompted so many people my age to vote for Ronald Reagan when we were in our 20s.  I can’t imagine the world doesn’t look a whole lot worse right now." 

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

1.  Setting national priorities?  "Ukraine and Illegal Immigrants First, Hurricane Helene Victims Last."

2.  Who is leading the regency's response to Helene?  "The most honest answer to your question is: I don't know."  There will be an accounting.

3.  Deconstruct bourgeois norms at your peril.  "Guns being what they are in America, this country can no longer afford to assign school leadership positions to feel-gooders who are on their way to enabling the shooting deaths of students and teachers."

4.  Reflection, healing, and Candy Land.  "Nothing so surely signifies that higher education has become day-care for infants than this."

5.  Crisis-mongering keeps the current rulers in charge.  "I think that the word 'crisis' gets tossed around too promiscuously nowadays."  Plus:  "We should not always trust credentialed experts."

6.  From the river to the common room.  "Higher education is facing a public relations crisis."

7.  Indeed.  "When you project weakness, as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have, and you suggest to your enemies that they can push you around and walk all over you, you get the kind of conflicts we see in Europe and that we see in Israel, and you get the chaos we see at our southern border."

8.  Indeed.  "When politicians say 'invest,' it’s almost always a euphemism for spending more money via taxes and federal debt."

9.  Indeed.  "Nothing has been a greater turn-off to voters than contemporary progressive activism."

10.  Indeed.  "Yet while we view child labor as unethical, we have to remember that our society is rich enough that we can afford to hold that belief."

11.  Resolve matters.  "Biden emboldens our enemies by signaling that he fears escalation; Trump makes our enemies fear escalation, which causes them to back down."

12.  Didn't earn it.  "She's invoking a distinct privilege: the slack you cut someone from a disadvantaged group."

13.  Government reallocates resources.  "If no distribution occurs in a market economy, then no redistribution is possible."

14.  Fallaciously justifying liberating tolerance, er, censorship.  "The real problem with the 'fire in a crowded theater' discourse is that it too often is used as a placeholder justification for regulating any speech that someone believes is harmful or objectionable."

15.  Have your people call my people.  "Kamala Harris wants to be president, but doesn't want the work of being the president."

16.  Progress of a quarter century?  "About 46% of the world’s population, meanwhile, lives on less than the local equivalent of $6.85 per day."  Recall when it was over half getting by at a buck a day?

17.  Fourth Turning wars.  "It’s taken Israel — in extremis — to show the spineless west that sometimes you have to make war to prevent a worse war; that in a war, you only win if the enemy is totally defeated, otherwise the enemy wins; and that you can only win if you fight with that aim in mind."

18.  Voters are not wrong.  "Democrats have overplayed their hand about Trump’s danger to democracy, however, and some voters actually see Democrats as more of a threat to our country."  All the same, Donald Trump is his own worst enemy.

19.  Let us brace ourselves to our duties.  "We used to say proudly this is a free country. It can be that again."

20.  Chortle.  "No wonder Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala, they have the same sort of luck when picking men."

21.  Imagine if they were aggressively communist.  "This is Biden’s Team of Slackers. They went 11 months without a Cabinet meeting. Given the condition of our country, it shows."

22.  Truth exists independently of power relationships.  "This is like the physics department inviting a flat-earther."

23.  President Carter at 100.  "No matter his politics, he absolutely deserves his dignity and this isn't it."