FRIDAY short TAKES.

We need the expertise of our faculty.  "Contemporary assessment is a tyrannical regime and a scourge of the college professor."  Professors, exercise your stewardship.

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

1.  Even leftist faculty used to have standards.  "Why couldn’t ethnic and gender studies be integrated into existing departments of history, sociology, English, American Studies, and the like when they first emerged in the 1960s? Why did they have to be carved out as separate disciplines?"  Today:  "Does it seem like they're trying to brand everything admirable as 'white supremacy'?"

2.  "Twenty terms in Congress is enough."  When it's commie-on-commie sororicide, is there enough popcorn?

3.  Revise your priors.  "Arctic warming linked to colder winters."  Anomalies are research opportunities.  "Record January warmth puzzles climate scientists."

4.  Policy follies.  "One wildfire year obliterated decades of costly, painstaking efforts to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions."  So it is with luxury beliefs.  "Democratic policies on water and climate have created what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls a “green Jim Crow” — where working-class minorities face increasing headwinds in terms of jobs and housing."  As if the rent gradient isn't challenge enough.

5.  Ignore median voters at your own risk.  "Democrats have collapsed in places they used to carry comfortably."

6.  East Palestine.  "Trump has had our back from Day One."

7.  The art of the deal?  "If this is great negotiating, I’d hate to see what poor negotiating looks like."

8.  Too crazy to govern.  "It’s hard to believe that the Democrats became so crazy that they made Trump seem like the normal one, the only person who could bring calm back into our lives."

9.  How abnormal can Trump get?  "Since I enjoy mayhem, I’m imagining what sort of chaos would result from Musk’s team really looking into all those invisible line items in the Defense budget."

10.  Stop being insane.  "You were asked to swallow one fabulous absurdity after another — lockdowns, vaccines that don’t prevent illness, mostly-peaceful arson, US soldiers in puppy masks, pronoun police, shoplifting-is-reparations, the wide-open border — an epic acting-out of manifold mental illness in living color. The climax was drag-queens in the primary schools."

11.  America is liberating itself.  "Everyone with a moral conscience — or just a high school class — knows it is nuts to let men box women and sprint against women and even use women’s changing rooms. Yet all of that happened in the holy name of transgenderism. Born males punched women, stole their gold medals and swanned about in their changing rooms, and we were all expected to say: 'Yay! Trans rights!'"

12.  The threat of suicide is emotional blackmail.

13.  You could fly a kite with a key on the string.  "Offshore wind might be the stupidest and most environmentally destructive way of generating minimal amounts of electricity, intermittently, ever devised."

14.  Vanguards never learn.  "There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind.  The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn't afraid to speak his."

15.  Congestion pricing is the only way out.

16.  Assimilation is a big word, and a fraught one.

17.  Advance auctions of stolen goods.  "The Left uses other people’s money to buy votes with spending, and the Right uses the money of unborn generations to buy votes with tax cuts."

18.  Bingo.  "There exists no objective definition of 'misinformation,' other than speech with which one disagrees."

19.  It's worse than problematic, it's just plain wrong.  "I believe in women's rights, and I think that it's deeply problematic for men to be claiming the ability to define and determine who's a member of the class of women."

20.  Respect the anomalies.  "[Science is] an attitude and a method. The attitude is that the world should be understood through observation and evidence, interpreted via hard thinking."

21.  Orwell cringes.  "In a healthy democracy, we would be investing enough in our public-media system that it wouldn't need to seek any corporate underwriting."

22.  Paging DOGE?  "The European Commission should go back to the drawing board and create a plan that shrinks the size of government, reduces regulations, and increases economic freedom."

23.  Take that, Joe Stiglitz.  "The market certainly is imperfect, yet it doesn’t follow that the government should intervene. Government intervention is plagued by its own deep imperfections, the most prominent of which are the knowledge problem and the incentive problem."

24.  Implied consent?  "Congress could step in to prevent Musk and DOGE from interfering with federal agencies, though both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate are controlled by Republican majorities."

25.  Mediocrity is a choice.  "We were not really good in any facet of the game today."