FRIDAY short TAKES.

Take the win!  "The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. 'We must have legislation to secure the border.' But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president."  Those "friends?"  "This is the Democratic Party: Its older generation is exhausted; its younger generation is incompetent. These are the wages of a party ideology that prizes diversity, equity and inclusion before merit: Democrats with actual skill sets are now few and far between. The Democrats seem like a leaderless bunch of grasping boobs because they are a leaderless bunch of grasping boobs."

Official Washington.  "The media narrative is all but entirely divorced from what the majority of Americans think."  Facts?  Who cares?  "The headlines and lede paragraphs from the major print outlets (which were frustratingly hard to find; the front pages of the sites are littered with opinion pieces)."  Meet our wanker media.  "By 'world opinion', Mr Astor means not China, India, South Africa, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, but the Prime Minister of Luxembourg"  The drive-bys will never learn.  "What especially undermined their credibility was their willingness to turn a blind eye to Biden’s growing mental incapacity during his four years in the White House."

Countries have permanent interests.  "Zelensky has no claim on our aid if he is pursuing a policy that diverges from ours. There is no compelling American interest in keeping the war going."  We get that.  "Our Deep State neocon perpetual war machine under both Obama and Biden — excuse the redundancy — were perfectly happy to fight Putin to the last Ukrainian, much as Arabs are happy to fight Israel to the last Palestinian."

Pro tip: you beat an ad populum argument with facts and logic.  Advantage, Adam Smith?  "The idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary."  Instead?  Rage, contempt, sanctimony: the "three major facets of the progressive mind."  For all the good it does.  "What happens when the normal people stop caring about your insults and jibes?"  Calling them a clown show is an insult to clowns.  Exactly.

We saw all three on display at Our President's speech.  "Seriously, if this is ‘the Resistance’, the world’s tyrants can rest easy.  These congresswomen sign the death warrant of female sports one day and then swan around in pink the next to show what feminist bravehearts they are.  These are incalculable levels of cant."  And losing skippers blame the wind.  "To Democrats, led by their media voices, the problem is the people, not the Democrats. The people are stupid, duped, racists, bigots, Nazis, desirous of whiteness or otherwise bad. The only virtuous Americans are those who agree with the progressive left"

Yes.  Next question?  "Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense?"

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

1.  Exactly.  "Anyone who has ever had the experience of waiting in line at a DMV knows that the government doesn’t work the way it ought to."

2.  Transgen???  "When HHS, just like any government program, already has plenty of silly and wasteful line items ripe for cutting, there's no need to just make up new ones."

3.  The vapidity of crying "racism."  "The ‘everything I don’t like is racist’ schtick is over."  Sorry, Jasmine Crockett.  "She dialed up the ghetto trashy to 11, and you could just see her daring people to point out her ghetto trashiness so she could cry racism. Well, she’s ghetto trashy, and since she already thinks you’re racist, you can say so without worrying."

4.  Modern Feminism Makes Women Miserable.

5.  Solve for the equilibrium.  "If conservatives want to reform higher education, they need a smarter approach."

6.  Not a joke.  “Imagine a civilization of the richest and most privileged people in the world thinking they’re under threat of fascism?  And having no idea what that even means."

7.  Bourgeois norms reflect evolutionary advantage.  "Healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended."  Ignore that at your peril.  "Winding up your opponents won’t improve your voters’ lives."

8.  Wokespeak.  "It’s almost like they’re trying to make human communication impossible, or reduce language down to the bare minimum needed to express compliance."

9.  Analysis: true.  "Chicago’s government appears determined to become the municipal equivalent of a failed state."

10.  Harsh, but fair.  "The richest European countries are poorer than Mississippi, though they all look down on Mississippi."  Our President won't tolerate the attitude.  "[European governments] have chosen to hide behind the skirts of America while screaming obscenities and insulting us."

11.  A republic, not an empire.  "The think tanks also advised introducing measures to rein in overcharging by defense contractors, who are known to charge the government as much as 3,800% above the fair and reasonable price, as one did for a spare part in a recent case; and cut excess basing infrastructure around the world, saving as much as $5 billion each year."

12.  The Fallacy of Authority.  "It Must Be True, the Lancet Published It."  No, that's a call for a conversation.  “There isn’t a thing called ‘the science.’ There are multiple sciences with active disagreements with each other. Science isn’t static.”

13.  So it is with pro wrestling.  "Brennan and her ilk are irrelevant liars."

14.  Count me out.  "Why would anyone think that governors who are overseeing drastic shrinkage in their own states would be good leaders of our country?"

15.  Truth will out, in unusual places.  "It would have been better for Ukraine—and the world—if Biden had pursued diplomacy much earlier. But the Blob and the Democratic centrists shut down even any whisper of diplomacy."

16.  A republic, if you can keep it.  "Both parties like the imperial presidency. But that approach is dumb, shortsighted, and, in this case, obviously illegal under a plain reading of the Constitution.  The actions of Donald Trump (and, to a much lesser extent, Joe Biden) ought to prompt Congress to take back the power it has been granted. In a system such as ours, it is utterly bizarre that president enjoys this quasi-monarchical authority."

17.  Bureaucracy at work.  "The Social Security Administration can't acknowledge reality—that is, they can't officially say everyone who was born before 1900 is now dead—without a new regulation telling them to do so."  Nor can the bureaucrats make up reality.  "If the information about those 18 million people doesn't exist and can't be sourced, those bureaucrats would be quite literally filling in fraudulent death information."

18.  All Democrats had to do was be barely normal, and they couldn't.  "The American people rejected Democrats and chose Trump despite four or even nine straight years of exactly this kind of attack on him."

19.  Economists have two hands to juggle: cut waste and fix entitlements.  "Both perspectives are half right and half dangerously wrong."

20.  To everything turn, turn, turn.  "Clinging to 1945 won’t cut it. The future’s here – we need to work with it."