Valentine’s Day Follow-Up

For those who didn’t feel sufficient love from the first Valentine’s Day post, let’s look at what it takes to be a successful husband in progressive urban America. “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me” (New York Times, February 4, 2025, by Daniel Oppenheimer).

Marxist-Leninism has been replaced in the U.S. by Transferism, but the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on self-criticism remains:

“I tell myself: ‘I try really hard. I try to be a good person. I try to be thoughtful about Jess and what she needs. Maybe I don’t get to everything, but it’s not because I’m not a good person.’”

“Instead of looking to Jess to top me off with love, I need to take on that responsibility myself.”

Jess was so much more capable — and demanding — of love and intimacy than I was. This was part of the attraction but also the problem. I was an ambivalent fortress, always defending against her siege while secretly hoping she would breach the walls.

Assuming that “Daniel” identifies as a “man”, masculinity today seems to have drifted quite far from what the Stoics had in mind:

The diagnosis comes after I relate the story of a tantrum I threw at my 48th birthday dinner. It involved me storming out of a restaurant, in front of our kids and friends, and coming back only after a solid 15-minute sulk. It’s not a flattering story, and I don’t try to render it so. Jess and I argued beforehand about what restaurant to pick, which left us tense for days. One of the kids was being difficult. Jess wasn’t as affectionate as I wanted her to be. I wasn’t getting the birthday I felt I was owed. I blew my stack.

We’re informed that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness requiring therapy (only surgery), but going through what used to be considered normal day-to-day life does require therapy:

We’ve both been to a lot of therapy before. As a couples therapist, Jess has been guiding people in this kind of work for years.

Therapy is not for those whose attention spans are short:

[The therapist] Real keeps me in that space, eyes closed, talking to my inner child, for about 30 minutes. … At the end, I put my inner child back inside myself and open my eyes. Real tells me I did a good job.

“No pain, no gain” is not just for the gym:

The box of tissues next to me, which Real asked Jess to get before we started the exercise, remains unused. I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.

A reader comments that women will like men better when the men become women:

@Tim Thank you for sharing. I also think you have illustrated the widening gap between Millennial women and men, at least in my own social circle. My female friends and I read self-help books, go to therapy and even talk about how we can break the patterns of our parents through personal enlightenment and self-improvement…whereas the men in our lives are staunchly against the idea, at most willing to placate us women by providing lip service in a passive, surface-y couples therapy session or two.

It’s creating a widening gap between the genders and, in my view, resulting in ever increasing misunderstandings and resentment. I’m hoping that articles like this (thank you Oppenheimer!) and guys like Real can de-stigmatize this emotional work for the men that we love and desire a healthy connection with.

(Is the above comment tainted with hateful gender binarism? If we accept the Science of 74 gender IDs, the correct phrase would be “gap among the genders” not “gap between the genders” (implying just 2).)

Here’s the author of this NYT confession (eating a child’s meal of bread with artisanal jam?):

Very loosely related…

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Melrose High School Class of 1951

I found my mom’s Melrose High School Class of 1951 25th reunion newsletter and scanned it. The high school today is ranked #1,568 in the nation (among public high schools) and #60 in Maskachusetts.

My favorite excerpt from what is presumably a 1976 document is “then I became a baby factory putting out a new model almost every year”:

It looks like nearly everyone who wanted to go to what are today considered elite colleges managed to get in. The former high schoolers talk about graduating from University of California, Cornell, Colby, Bates, Boston University, Tufts, University of Michigan, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Dartmouth, Amherst, etc.

Here’s something interesting… the document is so old that a white male could be hired as head of what we now call “HR”:

(Boston University today rejects 9 out of 10 applicants.)

Here’s a guy who went from Colgate University (rejects 7 out of 8 applicants today; cost to attend approximately $360,000) to selling fish. The daughter went to Bates, which is today similarly selective to Colgate.

Dartmouth today rejects 15 out of 16 applicants, but plenty of Melrose High ’51 grads got in:

Here’s a guy who seems to have gotten married just as he was graduating from Tufts (rejects 9 out of 10 applicants) and the wife of 20 years had to follow him first to Michigan and then to North Dakota:

The graduates who were most passionate about dogs had the fewest children:

Here’s a guy who achieved what today would be a moonshot:

My mother’s first cousin Ruben Gittes, another moonshot achiever by today’s standards:

She moved to Orlando and loved it:

My take-aways… people were generally married within 4 years of finishing high school. The divorce rate among this high school class was about 10 percent. These folks were born in the 1930s so they didn’t quite make it into this chart (from “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma”), but it looks as though we’d expect roughly 90 percent to be married at a 25th high school reunion:

A brilliant-by-today’s-standards career was apparently achievable for the Melrose ’51 cohort simply by showing up. Not only did these graduates have no immigrants to compete with, but the pay-to-cost-of-living ratio was sufficiently high that a lot of smart well-educated women withdrew from the labor force, thus leaving the field open to others. Example:

Nobody reports having joined the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. The editor’s introduction does not mention anyone having changed names except for female graduates (a defined term back then) who got married: “We have tried to make an accounting of the entire class. People are arranged alphabetically (girls by maiden name).”

How about my mom’s report?

Zillow still shows the crummy 1953 Cape Cod house in which we grew up (address above) and lists the mansion’s 1,603 square feet of space (we also used the basement, though, and a screen porch that was glassed in and maybe isn’t included). However, it was bulldozed within hours of being sold in 2012 and the Indian immigrants who purchased it built a McMansion in its place.

What were prices like back then? I scanned mom’s 1951 cross-country family trip album. A Chinese dinner for four in San Francisco was $11:

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Will colleges and universities keep their coronapanic principles or abandon them for filthy lucre?

From bestcolleges.com:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Feb. 14 to withhold federal funding from schools — including public colleges and universities — requiring COVID-19 vaccines for attendance.

The article then provides a partial list of the righteous:

I verified at https://www.oberlin.edu/obiesafe:

Oberlin College requires that all students, faculty and staff attending or working at Oberlin receive a full COVID-19 vaccine, unless an individual has an approved medical or religious exemption.

The above list may not be complete. Tufts in Maskachusetts isn’t listed, for example, but it does require medical, dental, PA, etc. students to receive the Sacrament of Fauci plus a Booster of Faucism. (They’re still following the Science as revealed by Dr. Fauci, the CDC, and Prof. Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D. in which the COVID-19 “vaccine” prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2?) Does the Trump executive order come with an exemption for medical/dental schools or will Tufts have to choose between saving lives/its sacred principles and the sweet cash that flows out of Washington, D.C.?

After saying that nothing is more precious than human lives and the COVID-19 vaccine is essential, how does a college or university reverse course and explain that it no longer cares about saving lives? Will they defrost Claudine Gay so that she can explain that it is all about the context?

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Valentine’s Day: Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma

A hedge fund manager pointed out “Human Reproduction as Prisoner’s Dilemma; The decline of marriage in the West.” (Aporia, January 21, 2025):

[the effort required to raise a child to adulthood] makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other options [“cooperate” or “defect”]. In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment. … A [men defect/women defect] society looks like the most primitive parts of sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon rainforest. Women sleep around, while adult men prey on women and children and regularly kill each other for access to women. As men can have multiple wives and wives are not loyal, there is no respite from intrasexual competition; you can always be replaced. Without paternal certainty, men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing or resting rather than working. Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action. In war, they shatter like glass when faced with an enemy that expect chastity and fidelity from women.

What was the U.S. for its first 200 years? A “men cooperate/women cooperate” society in which there was monogamy and “Divorce is difficult: the marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved.”

What has the U.S. been since no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce become available circa 1970?

The shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system, where both men and women made sacrifices to gain the security required for childbearing, to a cooperate/defect one, where men are expected to uphold their end of the bargain in exchange for nothing, has failed. This is the legacy of second wave feminism. Men are dropping out of work or burning things down, and both marriage and children are increasingly relics of the past. We are thereby moving towards a defect/defect system of the kind I described at the start.

Why are there so many females trying to have babies with rich guys?

Polygamy is a natural attractor state for humans, since it satisfies the desires of powerful men to have multiple wives and the desires of women to have elite husbands. Monogamy requires both elite men and many women to sacrifice their desires. … Rather than invest in additional wives, men in monogamous societies invest in their original wife and children, with the result that almost everyone is better off.

Where’s the game theory promised by the article title?

But unilateral divorce doesn’t just destabilize marriage. It also changes the power dynamics within marriage from favoring the more committed partner to favouring the less committed partner. Hence, “under unilateral divorce, the distribution of resources within marriage favors the spouse who wished to divorce” (Reynoso 2024). In addition to destabilizing marriage, unilateral divorce incentivizes poor behavior within it, since the threat of ending the marriage on unfavorable terms for the undutiful partner no longer exists. This “weakens the bargaining power of dutiful partners who wish their marriage to continue or who wish to end their marriage because of serious mistreatment by the other partner” (Rowthorn 1999).

Unilateral divorce is sometimes portrayed as an advance in human freedom, but this is a mistake. By removing the ability to credibly commit to a long-term relationship, unilateral divorce prevents couples from reaching a mutually-beneficial bargain that greatly assists in the raising of children. Without forced marriage, which has never been part of the Western tradition, unilateral divorce actually removes an important choice.

The fact that individuals can now exit easily, and unilaterally, from a relationship makes it difficult for couples to make credible commitments to each other. They can promise anything they want, but most of these promises are no longer legally enforceable, and many are undermined by social policies which reward those who break their promises.

Because it no longer guarantees security (or anything else), marriage is much less useful and therefore less appealing.

What about marrying the government?

Rather than merely supporting their own wife and children, men are expected to support women to whom they have no relation, and from whom they can claim nothing in return. Not only is this much less motivating, but it also removes a major incentive for women to marry in the first place. The state can simply extract a potential husband’s wealth and transfer it to her, no marriage required.

How long will it take for family law to turn the U.S. into a richer version of the poorest African countries?

It takes generations to see these effects in full. Not only are we the product of millennia of selection for marriageability; social norms are sticky. At first, men see that their fathers worked hard to get married and that their older acquaintances are doing the same, and imitate them. Women aspire to marry as their mothers did. Even when the law has changed, the norms do not immediately disappear. But they get weaker every generation. People see that marriage no longer offers stability. They see their peers and parents ruined by divorce. They see that they can get the economic and sexual benefits of marriage without giving up options. And the old norms erode.

Why are prime-age men disappearing from the labor force (Obama White House)?

The post-60s settlement attempts to force men to transfer resources to women via the welfare state and child support. But as the Soviets discovered, it’s very difficult to get men to work to the best of their abilities through coercion alone. Without marriage, the state loses its taxpayers and society loses the men who make it work.

What about the baby bust that Elon Musk, whose first wife and mother of his children suggested divorce, decries?

By providing a solution to the prisoner’s dilemma of human reproduction, marriage greatly boosts fertility, even today. It’s not surprising that the shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system to a cooperate/defect one, and the attendant devastation of the institution itself, corresponds precisely to the end of the Baby Boom.

Happy Valentine’s Day, therefore, to those who celebrate, those who are married, and those who are married to the government!

(Bad news for those who are married: The article notes that, despite the ease of exiting unhappy marriages provided by no-fault divorce, marriages today are less happy than in the (good/bad) old days.)

Male readers: What percentage of your time is spent doing tasks that you wouldn’t have to do but for the fact that you’re part of a family with children? My personal number is about 80 percent. This includes house-related tasks (if it were just me and Mindy the Crippler I could live comfortably in an apartment or condo). It includes all work for wages (I have enough money from previous work for everything that I might reasonably want to buy between now and age 100+; a big motivation for me to work is that I don’t want the kids to see me idle).

Since it is Valentine’s Day, let’s have some flowers… (front-yard orchids; tie them to a tree in the shade and walk away):

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The WordPress dumb-as-a-brick AI Assistant

I accepted the offer of AI assistance from the WordPress admin page here. Here are some of the insights it had on a recent post

A Silicon Valley AI isn’t familiar with a favorite drug of Silicon Valley?

A San Francisco Bay Area AI isn’t familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area?

The California Righteous want to help those without horses (so long as it doesn’t cost them any money via higher taxes?):

AI from San Francisco hasn’t heard of San Francisco’s principal airport:

Maybe a conservative got into the woodpile? The AI isn’t aware of the most dramatic event in American history:

An AI from a state where schools were closed for 18 months doesn’t know about the virus that is so very deadly to those of K-12 age:

“Therefore” is too big a word for a society in which average IQ is falling:

A California AI is ignorant of the Rainbow Flag Religion:

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The current inflation rate of 6 percent is characterized as a rate of 3 percent

“Inflation Heated Up in January, Freezing the Fed” (Wall Street Journal, today):

Consumer prices rose 3%, as fight against inflation continues to face headwinds

So prices are going up 0.247 percent per month, the rate that compounds to 3 percent after 12 cycles?

Consumer prices rose briskly in January, extending a recent pattern of price increases at the start of the year that likely derails the prospect for Federal Reserve rate cuts anytime soon.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that prices rose last month 0.5% from December on a seasonally adjusted basis.

0.5 percent per month works out to 6.17 percent annually.

So… the current inflation rate is 6 percent and we are told that it is 3 percent.

Related:

If you’re looking for a Valentine’s Day present that won’t break the bank, a piston-powered Cirrus SR22 for $1.2 million:

(Don’t forget state income tax on top of this unless you live in one of the states that sensibly doesn’t tax aircraft purchases (Maskachusetts being a surprising example!).)

If we specified pre-Biden delivery terms of 4 months, the price would be higher. Cirrus currently has 1.5-2-year waiting list.

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Moveflation of 23 percent per year

As part of my mother’s moving from independent living to assisted living (February 2024) and then onward from assisted living into the next realm (January 2025) we have needed some assistance from a local moving company.

The February 2024 quote: “Charge is 2men $150 per hour 3h minimum, 1h travel time, $50 fuel plus materials (if we use any), $500 minimum.”

The January 2025 quote: “Hourly rate $185 2men 3h minimum 1h travel plus materials and fuel – starting $655 minimum.”

That’s a real-world annual inflation rate of 23 percent ($185/$150).

The latest official government inflation number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was supposed to come out today. How does the BLS fantasy compare to our lived experience?

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The organization that advocates for Black and Brown Americans couldn’t find a Black or Brown leader

“As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces” (New York Times, February 3, 2025):

“His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive, said during a call with civil rights leaders after Mr. Trump’s remarks. “But the message is the same, that women, ​Black and brown communities are inherently less capable, and if they hold positions of power or authority in government or business, it must be because the standards were lowered.​”

Let’s check out the person whose official job is saying that our Black and Brown brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters are amply qualified for any job…

My mother is white; my father is Chinese American

source: “Florida should respect all children, not repeat the tragedies of our past” (SPLC; Florida is to progressives as Carthage was to Romans? Maybe Democrats in Congress should start every morning with a group chant of Florida delenda est?)

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Should the U.S. military get some Robinson R44s to enable Black Hawk pilots to build time and experience?

One aspect of the DCA Black Hawk-CRJ tragedy that is notable to a civilian pilot is the low reported number of hours of both the pilot and instructor on board, i.e., 500 and 1,000. A civilian helicopter pilot won’t get anywhere near a turbine-powered helicopter until beyond the 1,000-hour mark and that turbine-powered helicopter will be a used single-engine sightseeing machine, not a $20 million Black Hawk in more-challenging air taxi service. The pilot-in-command with 500 hours had been a military aviator for 6 years, which meant that she was flying fewer than 100 hours per year, less than a lot of hobbyists.

The U.S. military seems to start with a “cost is no object” philosophy when it comes to aircraft, e.g., training new pilots in a $6 million (pre-Biden price) twin-engine Eurocopter rather than in a $400,000 (post-Biden price) single-engine Robinson. Once the magnificent machines are delivered, however, the military then seems to decide that they’re too expensive to fly casually. Why not a fleet of Robinson R44s or, if Avgas is too complicated to keep in inventory, turbine-powered Robinson R66s, that would enable Army helicopter pilots to get significant real experience flying helicopters? (Order the Robinsons without the optional SAS/Autopilot so that the Black Hawk pilots get comfortable flying without the crutch of stability augmentation. Don’t subject our military heroes to the challenge of keeping a Robinson R22 under control, though!)

On second thought, when the government operates aircraft it usually manages to spend vastly more than what civilian operators spend. So perhaps it would make more sense to give the military pilots a stipend to use at local flight schools where the retail rental price would be much lower than the military’s cost. Reuters points out that sending migrants via military planes costs perhaps 10X what it would cost to purchase economy-class tickets (even when the military operates the exact same type as an airline, the cost is vastly higher).

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Tom Brady goes to Heaven

A Berkeley-based Effective Altruist invested in Sam Bankman-Fried‘s FTX after seeing a promotion for it by Tom Brady. He/she/ze/they becomes angry and lets loose a 15′ alligator inside Brady’s Miami mansion. Brady, unfortunately, cannot be extracted from the beast’s stomach in time.

On arrival in Heaven, God gives Tom Brady a welcome tour and shows him to an already-furnished 2500-square-foot house with white picket fence. There are weather-faded Tampa Bay and New England Patriots flags on either side of the front walk. “Because of your distinguished career,” God says, “you won’t spend eternity in the high-rise apartment blocks like our standard live-gooders. After your third Super Bowl win in 2005 we prepared this single-family home just for you and the hottest subset of your ladyfriends who ultimately arrive. I made sure that Gisele Bündchen’s future home here is all the way on the other side of town.” As they walk around to the back of the house, Brady sees a Jeff Bezos-style mansion two blocks away. Brady and God move toward it. The sidewalks all around the mansion are painted in eternal red and gold. There is a 75′ car dealer-style flagpole in the front yard with a 20×30′ Chiefs flag flapping in a constant 10 mph local wind. The arrowhead-shaped pool has “KC” in red tile on the bottom.

A 7′-high Mahomes #15 jersey hangs above the front porch:

There’s a 15′-high solid gold sculpture of a football in the front yard with a KC logo on the side. There’s a car in the driveway whose body is shaped like a Chiefs helmet (they use Grok in Heaven because ChatGPT did a terrible job):

Every window on the second floor is filled with the display of a jersey of a player on the 2024-25 Kansas City Chiefs team. There’s a private 100-yard regulation football field behind the mansion with the KC logo in the middle and the lushest greenest grass Brady has ever seen. Assisted by cheerleaders, two retrievers who look just like goldens structurally are running around the field. One retriever’s fur is Pantone PMS 186 C to match Chiefs red and the other is Pantone PMS 1235 C to match Chiefs gold. Here’s the best that ChatGPT could do with the vision:

A motor yacht is docked on one side of the house, which has direct access to the Heavenly Lake:

Tom Brady looks back at his own modest house and says, “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I won 7 Super Bowls. Patrick Mahomes won only 3. Why will he get this mansion while I will spend eternity in a regular house?” God laughs and says “Sorry for the confusion, Tom, but that’s not Patrick Mahomes’s mansion. It’s my house.”

Readers: Are you watching the Super Bowl this evening? The 6:30 pm Eastern start time is relatively kid-friendly. The half time entertainer is Kendrick Lamar. Here are some excerpts from “Backseat Freestyle”, one of his big hits:

Uh, Martin had a dream
Martin had a dream
Kendrick have a dream
All my life I want money and power
Respect my mind or die from lead shower
I pray my dick get big as the Eiffel Tower
So I can f*ck the world for seventy-two hours
Goddamn I feel amazing, damn I’m in the matrix
My mind is living on cloud nine and this nine is never on vacation
Start up that Maserati and VROOM VROOM! I’m racing
Poppin’ pills in the lobby and I pray they don’t find her naked
And I pray you niggas is hatin’, shooters go after Judas
Jesus Christ if I live life on my knees, ain’t no need to do this
Park it in front of Lueders, next to that Church’s Chicken
All you pussies is losers, all my niggas is winners, screaming

Damn I got bitches, damn I got bitches
Damn I got bitches, wifey, girlfriend and mistress
All my life I want money and power
Respect my mind or nigga

I wonder if the Palm Beach County Public Schools would have any issues with our third grader coming in and singing the song that he learned during the Super Bowl…

Related:

  • a West Coast/Davos perspective on how to reverse Climate Change… “Bill Gates says he will never downsize from his mega-mansion with 24 bathrooms — despite being a single empty-nester” (New York Post)
  • “America Is Abandoning DEI. The NFL Remains All-In.” (Wall Street Journal, Feb 6, 2025): Everyone from the federal government to Fortune 500 companies is dialing back their diversity efforts. But America’s most popular sport is standing its ground. … “We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we’re going to continue to do those efforts,” Goodell said. “We’re not in this because it’s a trend to get into it or a trend to get out of it.” … Yet the NFL is also facing a fresh bout of skepticism about the effectiveness of its own diversity efforts, including the Rooney Rule, a policy established in 2003 that now requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for important jobs such as coach. [Ed: Who defines “minority”?]
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