FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

It's been an interesting week for people making observations in the service of longer arguments.  Here are the passages that caught my attention.  Follow the links for the elaborations.

1.  Undersubscribed universities, such as Farleigh Dickinson, benefit from partial athletic scholarships? "The roster spots also represent tuition dollars from non-scholarship or partial-scholarship athletes who would not otherwise be attending the school."  It's hard to get away from opportunity costs here: but for the partial scholarships, would those universities, including many of the mid-majors, be otherwise dealing with declining enrollment?   Think about an airline releasing unsold seats for a few bucks, just before the gate closes.  It's a little late in the senior paper season for sports-economics-minded students to engage the argument, but it's likely to continue.

2.  A veteran sports scribe finds a fun second act in suburban Peoria.  "The girls' game is horizontal. They have to master the fundamentals. So it's much more fun to watch them. And plus, they don't pout. They don't bitch."  It doesn't hurt that the team he follows acquit themselves pretty well in state tournaments, when there are state tournaments.

3.  Jim Naureckas discovers fake news.  "It's an article of faith in US establishment media that they represent an independent watchdog press, whereas China's news outlets propagandize the official positions of the state. Articles like this one make you wonder what they're talking about."  Libertarian populists aren't the only careful readers of the palace guard press.

4.  There are no bad dogs, only bad owners.  "Aggressive behavior in dogs tends to be very closely associated with authoritarian impulses in humans." Sometimes satire, even offered in advance of April Fools Day, bites close to the bone.

5.  The Newspaper of Record wouldn't racialize coverage of spring breakers running amok, would it?

This patronizing attitude is today's real racism, and it guarantees that the bourgeois behavior gap — the cause of lingering socioeconomic disparities — will continue. No one in a position of elite authority is sending the message that society expects blacks to live by the same standards as other groups. Instead, we are unwinding every objective standard of conduct and achievement — whether it's the criminal code or academic proficiency requirements for school and employment — if enforcing that standard has a disparate impact on blacks.

If my transgressivity is not desirable, neither should be yours.

6.  Maybe the Neanderthals got it right.

7.  Thomas "Listen, Liberal" Frank continues to be contrarian.  "Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it."  The time came when the Sons of Liberty got tired of George III bossing them around and said, "we're out of here."  He fears it will not end well for his like-minded comrades.

8.  Victory Girl Lisa Carr opens up a can on the public health tyrants.  "Forgive me if I am a bit cynical at this point and not too optimistic about anything the CDC has to say."

9.  A different take on the victory dividend.

Politicians courted their votes because there were more boomers than anybody else.

So anybody trying to sell something or make something popular catered to the boomers’ every whim. That naturally led the baby boomers to be narcissistic and to think that they were the center of the universe. And unfortunately, this coincided with a period of uncharacteristic prosperity in the United States and the rest of the western world. And so the boomers also came to believe that wealth and stability were the natural order of things.

That’s what made the boomers so careless and also so lazy. They really thought that revolution could be a matter of saying the right words. They had no sense that no good thing comes without sacrifice. That’s what made them hippies in the first place, and that’s what made them such ineffective revolutionaries in the ultimate sense.

It fell to people a few years younger to see the wreckage, and take corrective action.

10.  The pandemic has made fools of many forecasters.

11.  Roads should be priced. Parking should be priced.

12.  Public education is a failure in every city across the entire country.

13.  The corona tyranny is unlikely to turn out well for the tyrants.  "Eventually, even serfs rebel and the tipping point of this no longer being adequately credible even to those untroubled by facts, I suspect is coming."  Lots of support for that proposition at the link.

14.  Dominic Green says the quiet part out loud.  "I have a recurring feeling that we’re governed by fools."

15.  Angelo Codevilla posts a job description.  "Whoever would lead America’s deplorables must head up a national effort to discredit and stop the oligarchy’s growing totalitarianism."

16.  Kind words for the vicars of vacillation.

17.  An admonition from Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson. “All change is not progress, all movement is not forward.”

18.  Jonah Goldberg sees an instability in maximum political differentiation.

If the Democratic base really wanted to break the GOP in two, they’d let Biden pursue popular, albeit more moderate, policies on immigration, infrastructure and the like. Such a strategy would annoy the Democratic base, but their protests would only make Bidenism more attractive to centrist Republicans.

Instead, the Democrats are moving forward on policies that enrage and unify the opposition, easing the path for the Republicans to return to power, and perpetuating this paradoxical pattern all over again.

Perhaps so, although it's unlikely any Democrat is going to advocate for the voting reform bill because an independent district-drawing commission might create fewer one-party Congressional districts.

19.  Angelo Codevilla also has scorn for the scolding, supervising, technocratic style.  "Ruling people by insulting and harming them is problematic, and not reversible."  The corona shutdowns might have heightened the contradictions.

20.  Were all the corona mitigations an excuse for house arrest and social and economic disenfranchisement?