FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

1.  Paul Mirengoff recognizes that "Footie is popular with eight-year-old girls in the United States, and adolescent males all over the Third World."  Some of those eight-year-old girls, not so much.  "American men must compete with the best of these boys when they become men. Nothing comparable exists for women."  Unfortunately, neither Megan Rapinoe nor Joe Biden seem to understand that everybody who is likely to be guilt-tripped into watching women's sports is already watching, and a different value proposition might better attract a broader audience.

2.  Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has half of the U.S. News problem in higher education identified.  "The solution to the college scramble is on the supply side. If we had consistently excellent, affordable, well-funded public institutions large enough and numerous enough to handle demand, much of the scramble would go away. The U.S. did that, decades ago -- the mad scramble didn’t start in earnest until the 1980s -- and I’m told Canada still does."  His focus might be -- his salary depends on it -- on the missing public funding that might have made the public universities more affordable.  Without the shift of focus from excellence to diversity and inclusion, the scramble might have been less necessary, and people who could pay full freight at the public universities might have done so, rather than load up on Harvard Prep Day Care and all the rest.

3.  Speaking of the deleterious effects of diversity and inclusion, the most deleterious might be in the exemption that mind-set enloys from ordinary academic skepticism.  "I have learned that anything protected from critique cannot itself stand up to scrutiny. And since scrutiny of the assumptions and assertions of [the woke ethos] and anti-racism are not allowed and do not occur, a one-party orthodoxy is the result—an equity totalitarianism."  Like any other Established Church, it will face dissidents, whether the archdeacons like it or not.

4.  Better late than never.  "Experts could demand to know why politicians are closing playgrounds or banning outdoor dining, particularly when these interventions were reinstituted months after we knew better."

5.  Sometimes the only intellectual argument is "sod off."  "It is past time to 'disregard' COVID rules that prevent students from enjoying their college experience."

6.  The regressive tax called coronavirus mitigation.  "A year or so into the pandemic, the world is a poorer place filled with poorer people than was the case before COVID-19 appeared. Part of this was the inevitable result of people voluntarily pulling in their horns to avoid infection, but much of it resulted from government-imposed lockdown orders as public health experts engaged in a panic-stricken effort to stop the virus's spread through the force of law."  Unfortunately, ruling classes, including technocrats in lab coats, are unlikely to give up their powers voluntarily.  "Capitalism can only make us prosperous in a world that allows the freedom to enjoy its benefits."