FRIDAY short TAKES.

This is only the start of the pushback.  "America’s normal young men are fed up."  They're done.  "Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women who have been coddled all their lives and think they’re smarter and more important than they really are."  For Miranda Devine's "backlash" substitute "restoring a state of good repair."

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

1.  Academia needs to wake up.  "The radical chic of the decolonisers and the broader politics of repudiation is having profound and terrible effects on the world. Tolerance and mutual respect must be learnt and transmitted anew to each generation through our institutions and broader culture. If we fail to do so, we put our multi-ethnic, multi-racial society in grave peril."

2.  So it always is with epistemic closure.  "The problems we’re seeing are endemic to our institutions of higher education, and the hypocrisy and failed leadership of administrators and university presidents deserve much of the blame."  Please, set your reputation on fire.

3.  That bipartisan buffet.  "Stuffed-pig spending legislation seems to be the rule without exception."

4.  Median voters?  "Trump has a big double-digit advantage on most of the issues that Americans say are most important to them, especially the economy, crime, and the situation at the border."

5.  Those things we do together?  "We assume an ability to sway world events while failing to repair our pot-holed roads."

6.  They weren't hippies.  "The civil rights movement’s roots were in the black Christian church, and its marches were often filled with men in suits and women in their Sunday best."

7.  How's Bidenomics polling?  "Also significant is the erosion of support for Biden among voters ages 30 to 49. This is the cohort most focused on family formation and most likely to become first-time homeowners, suggesting that the surging costs of child care and monthly mortgage payments may be reducing their support for the president."

8.  But, but, Our Children.  "No one benefits more from the destruction of the American family than the Democratic Party."

9.  Release the prisoners, surrender, and disband.  "Hamas is in the same situation as pretty much every party that is losing a war and wants the fighting to stop. There is a clear path to a cease fire: all Hamas needs to do is surrender and put down its arms."  Anything less is futile.  "Any deal that doesn’t return all of the hostages on Day 1 is a non-starter."

10.  Don't be a court intellectual.  "Economists who take economics seriously can only tell policymakers what the latter don’t want to hear given their incentives and their selection."

11.  Don't be ridiculous.  "Many hoped Biden would be like Johnson or Roosevelt, just like the young man I saw. But he never lived up to that."

12.  Don't be a doomsday environmentalist.  "Climate cultists think we should go back to the good times when people starved."

13.  The real popular vote is not voting.  "Voters’ eloquent abstention would say that they will return to the political marketplace when offered something better than a choice between two Edsels."

14.  What's so endearing about dementia?  "Trump’s caustic style makes Biden look like a likable underdog."

15.  Evergreen.  "Education in the United States has lurched from fad to fad for the better part of a century, finding ever-ingenious ways to underperform preceding generations."

16.  Remember Lionel's pink train?  "I know loads of ‘right-on’ parents who bought their son girl toys or their daughter boy toys. The kids simply blew them off."

17.  I always had the feeling that Yoda is secretly German.  Come last the verb does.

18.  That is why they fail.  "The Bears have one of the stingiest ownership groups in sports, always trying to get the local government to pay for everything."