How to turn a bad relationship into a click-baity article

Hurt my feelings, why don’t you. Tell me about how awful men are. That’s the entirety of this muddled mess titled Masculinity Is Dead: Why Weak Little Boys Have Replaced Real Men. Gosh, it’s harsh.

Once upon a time, the vast majority of men were really proud to be men. They went to work, provided for their families, and actually behaved chivalrously towards women. They were good fathers, protectors of those they cared about, and actually tackled problems assertively. Of course, those times are long dead.

Once upon a time, men were men, but now they’re not. It’s not a substantial premise. But the way she keeps hammering at it makes me start taking it personally.

Everywhere I look, I see women lamenting the loss of actual manly men.

I hear girls bemoan the fact that guys are now too frightened to get into a committed relationship with a woman. I hear single moms talk about how men bailed on them after they became pregnant. I hear single women of all ages talk about how their last relationship dissolved because the guy they were with never actually brought anything to the table.

OK, I begin to see the basis of her definition of what makes a manly man: they commit to a relationship. That’s not a bad argument, I agree that commitment is what makes a person a strong partner. One could build on that idea to write a good article, but no, she’s just mad.

Make no mistake about it, there is absolutely, positively, nothing manly about most men in my generation.

“Most”? Is this a quantitative argument? Or did your last couple of dates go badly?

We’re now populated by whiny, insecure, entitled, lazy little children that are looking for a second mommy more than a wife and partner.

Ouch.

For the Millennial generation, old-school masculinity is as dead as a parrot in a Monty Python sketch. F-boys, Nice Guys, and Mama’s Boys are symptomatic of the problem.

The older I get, the more I realize how totally screwed up Millennial men’s attitudes on sex, relationships, and women really are. In this sense, many modern male dating stereotypes really are true.

So far, I’m seeing stereotypes all right, but no evidence that they’re true.

I’m going to skip over a whole lot of sweeping generalizations to what I think is a kernel of a good point: media mischaracterizations, which the author has swallowed wholesale.

A large part of the problem is that media tends to warp what we see as masculine. Music and media glorifies men who “pump and dump.” Media constantly talks about why men shouldn’t date gold diggers, or why Nice Guys™ should always get the girl.

Guys are told, constantly, that they aren’t sh*t unless they’re banging a million women. In many cases, the media makes women to be the enemy, regardless of what happened. From what I’ve seen, men are all too happy to find someone to blame for their shortcomings.

Andrew Tate is not “all men,” I assure you. He’s one spectacularly garish example. It is true, however, that a certain kind of loud, loutish, entitled man has become a symbol of one side of modern masculinity, and it is one that is popular among naive teenage boys, but unless the author has been dating MRAs or 15 year olds, it’s not generally representative. Don’t mistake media stereotypes for reality.

This is not a new problem. Back, way back, in the 70s and 80s, the caricature we young men had to deal with was the endless, annoying movies that portrayed us as callous horndogs on a constant quest to lose our virginity — think Porky’s or those Nerds movies. Nobody I knew was as obsessed with virginity as those movies made it all seem, and while we might have been a bit obsessed with sex, the media idolatry of virginity was just sick, warped purity culture.

This is not reality.

It’s a stupid meme. Don’t write articles that pretend it is accurate.

Another Supreme Court justice bought & paid for

We have the receipts: Neil Gorsuch has a great big conflict of interest.

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.

On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records.

It’s not as if this was an attempt to curry favor with a judge presiding over big cases…

Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court

Oh.

I guess when the process for appointing him was corrupt, you can’t expect a mere Supreme Court justice to behave ethically.

The sheep look up

I teach. I’ve been at this university for 23 years, and I try to avoid the management side of things — I stay away from the administration building, I don’t even care who is the university president as long as they leave me alone. This may have been a very bad idea.

I got a notice from the administration that they are accepting applications for interim president of the university, because the last one is abandoning us after a short 5 years of employment (that’s not surprising, U presidents seem to flit hither and yon, another reason to ignore them.) But it meant I had to take a minute to figure out what’s going on.

Our outgoing president, Joan Gabel, is paid over $700,000/year. I don’t know that she is worth that much. Now I learn that she’s being offered an additional $260,000 if she stays through June. All right, that’s a pretty sweet deal she’s had. What is she being offered by the University of Pittsburgh?

She’s had a few scandals — the biggest being that she took a position on the board of Securian, a financial company that does a lot of money management for the university. This was a serious conflict of interest, not to mention that she’s getting paid a buttload of money to be the U president, and should be devoting full time to her job. The Board of Regents said it was OK, though, although our governor said it was not. She resigned eventually. Maybe she’s mad at us because we wouldn’t let her rake in more money with a side gig?

And then, the Board of Regents…every time I hear about them, the less impressed I am. These are a bunch of politicians and business people who don’t understand the purpose of an educational system. I’ve mentioned Sviggum before — the bozo who thought UMM was “too diverse”. Now I learn that the chair of the board, Ken Powell, was the disgustingly rich CEO of General Mills who made $24 million in the year before he retired. He is, supposedly, retired, but is now appointed to the chair of the Board of Regents — he’s the guy who thought is was no problem for her to work with Securian, who approved her exorbitant salary. The Regents main purpose seems to be to dip into the university till and give money to each other.

All I can say is that if I got paid tens of millions in my last year here, I would definitely definitively absolutely retire. I’d be done. I’d go relax with my grandchildren, and wouldn’t come back to plague my university for years to come, and I certainly wouldn’t be working hard to transfer money from hardworking faculty and staff salaries to serve the leeches appointed to administrative positions.

There’s no hope that I’ll get paid that much — that’s like more than my lifetime income — but here’s the deal. Appoint me to the interim presidency, pay me like a half million for my services, and I’ll try to keep the money going to the people who really deserve it, and then quietly disappear when my term is done. You can trust me on that. I was such a good boy when the regents visited my university in March, not confronting them at all and turning around and walking away when I saw them coming. I promise to ignore all of their blandishments in the future, as well.

The most punchable face in America is back!

And he’s giving us even more reason to punch him!

Infamous “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli announced his newest venture yesterday, and it’s about as awful as you’d expect. In a Substack post and on Twitter, he unveiled DrGupta.ai, a “virtual healthcare assistant” that (predictably) Shkreli believes will disrupt medicine—in spite of some very real and worrying legal and ethical gray areas.

“My central thesis is: Healthcare is more expensive than we’d like mostly because of the artificially constrained supply of healthcare professionals,” he wrote on Substack. “I envision a future where our children ask what physicians were like and why society ever needed them.”

“Dr. Gupta” is just Shkreli’s latest health venture since being released from prison last May. Last year, he founded Druglike, a drug discovery software platform being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is looking into whether Shkreli is violating a court-ordered lifetime ban on working in the pharmaceutical industry by running Druglike.

Madness. If you replace all the healthcare professionals who generate the data that is leeched off by a glorified chatbot with said chatbot, where is the information that they parrot going to come from? All you’re going to have left is a feedback loop that is disconnected from any reality checks, it’s going to get progressively worse, and we’re not going to get any new medical knowledge.

It’s quite rich that he’s blaming the high expenses of medical care on scarce skilled medical labor and knowledge, when he’s the guy who artificially elevated the cost of life-saving drugs. Blame the greedy pharmaceutical executives instead.

Hey, people like Shkreli are the ones who could be replaced by a mindless software program!

I know what kind of houseplant I want to get this summer

Back in the long gone days of my youth, when I was working long hours as a nurseryman at a wholesale nursery in Kent, Washington, there were certain plants I admired greatly. This place had a small greenhouse just for bonsai that the owners tended carefully just about every day (mere laborers like me couldn’t touch those.) They sold lace maples, which were probably my favorite tree at that time — I bought one for my parents. But by far the most beautiful plants in the whole place were these big, gloriously bushy, vividly green plants raised out back, secretly, by a couple of the workers. These were the healthiest plants I’ve ever seen, lovingly tended by the crew on breaks, initially raised illicitly under the benches in a hothouse and then transplanted to a sunny spot in an empty field.

You can guess what kind of plant they were. Unfortunately, just as they were reaching peak growth, the owner discovered them and took a machete to them.

There will be no machetes in Minnesota this summer!

Minnesota’s foray into legal marijuana reached the first major decision point as the state House considered a bill Monday that establishes a seed-to-sale program and streamlines a process for clearing prior criminal offenses off records.

The vote – along with one set for Friday in the Senate – won’t end the debate. Differences in the two versions would have to be reconciled before anything reaches Gov. Tim Walz, who supports permitting adults over 21 to buy, possess and use cannabis.

But if a bill passes before May 22, Minnesota’s marijuana landscape would change starting this summer.

“Cannabis will be no longer illegal this summer,” said the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids. “The regulation, rulemaking and licensing process will take many more months. Beyond that you will of course also be able to home grow starting this summer so it will be a while before Minnesotans can expect to see a dispensary open up.”

I should mention my least favorite plant: kinnikinik. They had acres of that potted stuff that I had to shuffle around and weed and load on trucks — it’s a popular, low growing ground cover that may have been the bread and butter of the nursery, but I just found it boring.

Tucker Carlson is OUT

Well, I’m surprised. As an aftershock of the Dominion lawsuit and the embarrassment of Fox News, Tucker Carlson is out on his ass.

In a shocking announcement, Fox News announced Monday that its controversial yet top-rated prime-time host Tucker Carlson is leaving the network.

“Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the network said in a statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

The apparently hasty parting — Carlson gave no indication he was leaving in his last nightly appearance Friday, and the network was still running promos for his show Monday morning — came less than a week after Fox settled a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which had sued the network for false claims about the 2020 election. Carlson was among several on-air personalities expected to testify.

You might be wondering…was it because of his racism? Because of his lies? Because of his lack of qualifications? No, of course not. Those things are prerequisites for working at Fox News.

It was because he told the truth and chewed out Fox management for promoting lies about the election.

But it was Carlson’s comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told The Post.

“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson wrote to a colleague in a message a day after Fox, like other media outlets, called the election for Joe Biden. It was a sentiment echoed by others at Fox in the fall of 2020, as even network officials who disbelieved Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories fretted that countering them strongly would alienate their conservative viewers.

In another message, Carlson referred to management with an expletive: “Those f—–s are destroying our credibility.” He later wrote: “A combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down is what’s happening.”

This termination is sending a message to all the other “journalists” at Fox News: you can lie all you want, be as biased as you want, as long as you are supporting the particular lies and bigotry of Rupert Murdoch and other executives.

It must be scary being a highly paid apparatchik at a propaganda organ, but he’ll get no sympathy for me. Maybe he can land a new job with a North Korean news agency?

Why aren’t you moving to Minnesota?

You know we’re one of the good states, right? Look at us, being all sane and wholesome and supportive of all of our citizens.

That’s a rally for LGBTQ+ rights at our state capitol. It’s not that big, but that’s only because those rights aren’t as threatened here. In fact, our legislature just passed an important set of bills.

The Minnesota Senate Friday passed a trio of proposals aimed at legally safeguarding people who come to Minnesota for abortion and gender-affirming care and outlawing what’s called conversion therapy for minors.

The moves come as states around the country have banned or seriously limited access to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and after 12 states – including Minnesota’s neighbors Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota – have banned gender-affirming care for minors.

We want more people to live freely right here, so come on up!

Supporters said the bill showed Minnesota would treat all people with respect and love.

“I wish that other legislatures across this country shared our values. They don’t. But guess what? If you need gender affirming care — and that is life-saving care, it’s medically necessary care. If you need it, you can come to Minnesota,” said Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten, DFL-St. Paul, one of the bill’s cosponsors. “If you’re scared, or you’re looking for a new place to build your family, we want you here in Minnesota. We want you to take refuge here.”

We also have a budget surplus — we went woke, and we’re thriving here.

In the first State of the State address of his second term, Gov. Tim Walz detailed his vision for how a new Democratic trifecta in charge of Minnesota government would leverage a historic budget surplus for a new “Minnesota Miracle.”

Speaking to a joint session of the Minnesota Legislature on Wednesday night, Walz highlighted many of Democrats’ priorities, including billions more in spending for schools, families and the state’s most vulnerable. The more than $17 billion in new spending Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party members have planned aims to cut child poverty by roughly 25 percent and make the state the “best place to raise a family.”

“We have the resources. We have the shared vision. And for the first time in half a century, we have the political will to get this done,” Walz said at the conclusion of his roughly 30-minute speech. “So let’s not waste this opportunity. Let’s get to work building a state we’re proud to raise our kids in.”

We also have Republicans. Every news story has to leaven the good news by bringing on some dour Republican ass who whines about how we’re not torturing trans kids enough, and how we ought to give more tax breaks instead of providing services to everyone, and praying for a Ron Desantis to come along and flay the Democrats, but ignore them. They’re in the minority.

Are you packing up yet? We want you here, every one of you. We definitely need more people to populate our universities, but everyone is welcome.

The downsides: well, it does get a little chilly up here, but probably the worst thing about Minnesota is we might get a little smug about our superiority to our benighted neighbors. When you’re One Of Us, though, that’s not so much of a problem. One of Us, One of Us, One of Us!

Tough times for education

The universities in Minnesota are divided into multiple teams. My university is part of the University of Minnesota system, which has 5 campuses — it’s the smaller subsystem, but it’s also older and wealthier, founded before Minnesota had statehood, and it’s a little bit more independent for that reason. The real giant in this state is MnSCU, the Minnesota State College and University system, which is made up of 30 colleges and 7 universities. These campuses were explicitly set up by the state to provide educational opportunities to all of its citizens. Then there are all the private colleges, about which I’ll say no more.

They’re all good institutions, operating in parallel. My oldest son attended a MnSCU college, St Cloud State University (SCSU), the middle child went to school in Wisconsin, and my youngest went to a UM school right here at UMM, so we aren’t snobs about which system is better. Unfortunately, they’re all suffering right now, with painful declines in enrollment. SCSU has been hit hard.

The student headcount at St. Cloud State has dropped from more than 18,000 in 2010 to about 10,000 last fall. But not only are the numbers dropping, the students are changing: Nearly 50% of students are part-time, about 25% are under 18 and enrolled in postsecondary classes, and about 10% are 35 and older.

There are also fewer traditional students — recent high school graduates looking for a four-year degree — than in previous decades because of declining birthrates beginning in the 1990s, changes in perception around the importance of undergraduate degrees, and more education options such as for-profit and online colleges.

Yikes. SCSU is about 10 times the size of UMM, and while we’ve suffered substantial enrollment declines, I think that SCSU has been proportionally hit even harder. Their solution: put major programs on the chopping block.

St. Cloud State University will phase out six majors and cut three dozen jobs in the wake of a looming $18.3 million deficit projected for the upcoming school year, according to leaders at the central Minnesota school.

The majors to be phased out are philosophy, theater, nuclear medicine technology, real estate and insurance at the undergraduate level, as well as marriage and family therapy at the graduate level.

23 faculty and 14 staff are being laid off! I’m feeling the pain from here, a hundred miles away. My U hasn’t done anything quite that drastic, at least not yet, but we have been letting natural attrition of faculty take its course and avoiding some important replacement hires, but that has still caused serious difficulties. We haven’t been firing people or killing majors programs, but when staffing withers away and your department has one professor left, you’ve de facto closed off a major. You’re also going to exhaust that one overworked professor, who is going to be looking for jobs elsewhere.

These are terrifying times in academia. Enrollment dropping, the pandemic was a major strike, and then, of course, Republicans whining about ‘woke’ colleges. One of the things that has made Minnesota a great place to live is an outstanding educational system — let’s not throw that away.

Araneus gemmoides left us a present last year

For the last few years, we’ve been graced with regular summertime visits by cat-faced spiders, Araneus gemmoides. They’re great big orbweavers, usually no trouble at all, although last year one of them took over our deck, stringing webs over the doors. We let her. When you’re that beautiful, you can get away with anything.

One of the reasons they’re no trouble is that they just lurk, and then when winter arrives, they die. Last year’s visitor crept up above our back door and left an egg sac in a dark corner. Here it is!

We got a step ladder to get closer, and I poked a lens right in there. The sac was partially torn open on one side (predation?), so I got a good view of the eggs inside.

Those are definitely spider eggs, but they aren’t very far along in development. It’s been chilly and snowy for the last few weeks, so it’s not surprising that they haven’t matured much. Maybe Minnesota will be kind and bring us a real spring soon?

I’ll keep you informed about this developing subject!