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30 (32) Tips to Stay Married 30 (32) Years #30 The Last Word is Fools Gold

Posted: April 30, 2020 by datechguy in culture
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Captain Kirk: Bones. [starts to collapse.] No, no, I’m all right

Dr. McCoy: If you keep arguing with your kindly family doctor, you’re going to spend your next ten days right here. If you co-operate, you’ll be out in two.

Mr. Spock: Doctor, I’ll return to my station now.

Dr. McCoy: You ARE at your station, Mister Spock.

Captain Kirk: Doctor McCoy, I believe you’re enjoying all this.

Mr. Spock: Indeed, Captain. I’ve never seen him look so happy.

Dr. McCoy: Shut up! (turns to Kirk) Shh. Shh! (turns to camera) Well, what do you know? I finally got the last word.

Star Trek: Journey to Babel 1967

Dr. McCoy’s joy not withstanding there are very few things less valuable in a marriage than the last word in an argument.

Arguments in a marriage are unavoidable and any argument has the potential to cause trouble far beyond the day of the fight. We’ve already talked about having an escape plan and knowing what hill to die on but of the advice on arguments this is likely the hardest to follow.

Whether you are having a small spat or a knock down drag out fight, in the midst of a fight the last word is a temptation greater than any other. In the mind of a combatant it’s the equivalent of holding the field of battle when the guns have stopped, and if the ‘last word’ was actually that you might be able to make that argument, but the reality is quite different.

In a marital argument the ‘last word’ usually generates a response from your spouse who is also looking for a ‘last word’, thus deprived of your prize you immediately come back with your own ‘last word’ and a fight that might have been on it’s last legs becomes like the battle of Verdun which started as a battle of attrition but escalated with both sides kept throwing in men to the slaughter for now real purpose.

Furthermore even if you manage to grab that valuable last word you will find yourself in close quarters with the same spouse the next day who steaming from that last sting might have thought of a few new words that won’t be so plesant.

The last word is fools gold, be a wise prospector and learn to reject it.

The 30 (32) tips so far

I Bet the Press Misses Their Credibility Right Now

Posted: April 29, 2020 by datechguy in elections, politics, primaries
Tags: , , ,

If you’re going to fight and die on a hill be damn sure that hill is worth dying on.

30 Tips to Stay Married 30 Years, Today: #15 Carefully Choose the Hills Worth Dying On

In my 30 tips to stay married 30 years series (expanded to 32 tip 30 will be up later this week) that will eventually be a book I talk about the difference between something worth a fight (Do we move across the country?) and something not (Do you buy Tide or Gain to do the laundry?). Basically this bit of advice is about making sure that if you are going to risk something as valuable as your marriage you’d better be damn well sure that the reward is something critical.

This is advice that the press really could have used in the Trump era when it comes to their credibility.

Don’t get me wrong, for decades the press has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat left, and they have had unofficial rules in place to make sure that stories that favor the left were advanced and stories that favored the right died or were “local” (see Friday’s DaTechGuy’s Laws of Media outrage or that tag on the site for details of said rules).

Even so the media for a while , would still cover the odd Democrat scandal (perhaps mentioning the party in paragraph 8 or “accidentally” referring to the perp as a republican then correcting it later after the story had already played or allow a local subsidiary of a network to critically examine the left or would avoid pushing a narrative past the point of credulity.

This dramatically changed around the time of Barack Obama’s election, in fact one might say it changed dramatically when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

As soon as this happened the media went all in. The thought of a young attractive woman governor on the GOP ticket with a knack for campaigning, speech making and a populist streak was too big a danger to be ignored, particularly when for a short time after that pick McCain managed to pull ahead of Obama. No tactic was too low, no charge too outrageous and no boundary of propriety was left unviolated.

This was at the same time that the Rev Jeremiah Wright was being memory holed.

During the Obama years it was again all in, No action of Obama’s was to be critiqued, no scandal to be examined (the idea of it being a “scandal free administration was pretty much that they were free to behave scandalously without fear” It got worse with the rise of the tea party and when our Embassy were hit and our people killed in Benghazi they attacked Mitt Romney the GOP candidate for commenting on it rather than the President who left people to die. More and more the media seemed willing to drop it’s mask of “objectivity”

But even this was paled by their reaction during the 2016 campaign when Clinton was propped up and Trump was 1st uplifted when they thought he would hurt the Republicans and then excoriated when he won the nomination. The media didn’t bother to pretend it didn’t take sides and some journalists openly declared that it was time to do so.

Unfortunately for the Donald Trump comes from the Jacksonian school and rather than play nice publicly and repeatedly called them out it. They were made a laughing stock to the point where trust in the media is about as low as you can get.

Which brings us to the Tara Reade situation.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Tara Reade case isn’t going away and that unlike the false accusations against Judge (now Justice Kavanaugh) the passage of time has produced more corroborating rather then exculpatory evidence.

If the media had the credibility it had in 1970, 1985, 2000 or even 2007, this would be the time when it could save the day for the Democrats. They could have taken apart the Reade story early or dismiss it as overblown. After all this is 27 years ago and they could (rightly) stress what would and would not stand up in a court of law. They could have used their ability to control the narrative to highlight every single exculpatory fact to make sure it was dismissed as a one day or at worst a one week story claiming there was nothing to see here.

Alas for the media and the Democrats, they threw away what was left of their credibility on Russia Hoaxes, Creepy Porn Lawyers and Crazies pounding on the doors of the Supreme Court, and with that credibility went their ability to kill this story.

Many years ago in the days before setup men and closer an elderly Ty Cobb gave a young pitcher advice to save his stuff for key moments of a game rather than pitch himself out when their was no need.

I’ll bet the MSM wished someone had given them that advice three years ago.

I’m not the only one thinking this way about Tara Reade…

Posted: April 28, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Via Hotair my: “CNN thinks he did it” meme is getting support:

A generous and even sensible reading of this call is that it confirms what Reade originally alleged in 2019, that Biden, as we’ve known he’s done for years, creepily touched her neck and generally invaded her personal space, albeit with no obvious intent of personal gratification, sexually or otherwise. Even if you’re the most die-hard Democrat in the media, it makes little sense why you wouldn’t just want to investigate and then exhaust the Reade allegation so it doesn’t hang over his head until Election Day. But after months of the media hedging on the Reade story, the specific Larry King Live episode apparently featuring Reade’s mother has inexplicably gone missing on CNN’s Google Play archives of the show.

All of which raises the question: What does CNN know that we don’t?

Jazz expands on this:

 Even with the addition of the Larry King tidbit, Reade’s most serious claims still generally fail the tests we normally apply to these types of ancient, nearly unprovable, “he said, she said” situations. We lack any sort of physical evidence or even a direct witness to the claimed attack. We would also normally be looking for multiple contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, of which Reade has a few, but far more of her former coworkers in Biden’s Senate office tell very different tales. We would also normally check for a consistent description of events by the victim over the years. Reade fails that test entirely.

With all that in mind, why wouldn’t CNN do precisely what the New York time and other liberal outlets have done? Interview her, along with any available witnesses for both sides and publish their findings. They could state that Biden definitely has a history of invading women’s personal spaces and making them “uncomfortable,” but never in a way signaling that he was seeking sexual gratification. Then simply note Reade’s changing tale over the years, and conclude that she has a right to tell her story, but they simply can’t find enough hard data to conclude that her version of events is accurate. At that point you can simply ignore Reade and if anyone complains about the lack of coverage you can simply point them to your previous investigation and say that there’s nothing new and relevant to add.

Surely the powers that be at CNN are aware of all this. They could have flushed the Reade allegations out of the public debate weeks ago, perhaps briefly revisiting it this weekend after the Larry King material came out. Why didn’t they? Is it conceivable that some of the reporters at CNN know, or at least suspect something that may come to light about the Reade allegations later?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Personally if I was the left and wanted to kill all this I’d pay a woman to make wild accusations that could easily be proven false and then contrast this with Reade and lump them together in coverage.

Don’t be surprised if this happens next.

Opinion: I think CNN Believes Tara Reade’s Charges vs Biden are True

Posted: April 27, 2020 by datechguy in elections, News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , ,

I have to give the MSM in general and CNN in particular credit. Every time I think they are incapable of surprising me in terms of how low they will go they manage to surprise me.

To wit:

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This is actually even worse than the whole: “Beware of the Leopard “ business that MSNBC played with their Morning Joe Jeffrey Epstein clip during Election 2016. You could find it if you jumped through hoops, these guys have removed this clip from a public archive where it has been presumably for decades.

The embarrassment of this clip being uncovered by the MRC from their own archives actually forced CNN to cover the story on air for the very 1st time this weekend. That was telling but the removal of this clip without comment is more so.

If they thought that this clip was no big deal, if they thought that the evidence in it was at best circumstantial, which it might be considered, then they would have left it be.

But they took the proactive stance to have it removed from Googleplay, and yes I said proactive because unlike Hotair I’m not going to give them the benefit of the doubt here:

I originally had reservations about the episode because the caller isn’t identified by name and she doesn’t specifically mention which “prominent senator” her daughter worked for or what her “problems” were that prompted her to leave that job. But it’s since been confirmed that Jeanette Altimus did indeed live in San Luis Obispo at that time. It was also the exact period when Tara Reade was leaving Washington. That’s a few too many coincidences to write this off, and Reade has confirmed that it’s her mother’s voice we’re hearing and that she knew her mom had called King’s show.

The real question here is how the show wound up not being listed in the Google Play directory, assuming this isn’t just some bizarre technical glitch. (I have an account and checked myself. It’s not there.)

I suppose, just to be fair, we should at least mention the possibility that either the episodes are mislabeled or the original was never loaded. But the dates of the shows all line up until August 10th, episode 154. And the next entry is dated August 12th, but it’s labeled as episode 155. Again, we’re asking the word “coincidence” to do a lot of heavy lifting to sweep this away as some sort of glitch.

Or to put it another way, if there had been a clip of Christie Blassey Ford’s mom talking calling into a Fox show about her daughter getting assaulted at a party from two decades ago and Fox removed it from their online archive the entire Corona Virus story would disappear from CNN’s airwaves, smothered by their coverage and every single GOP senator would be asked about it.

Of course in fairness every Democrat Senator has been asked about this, but their offices won’t even acknowledge the questions:

Every Democrat in the Senate has refused to acknowledge the sexual assault allegations against 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden that were brought forward by a former staffer, even after new evidence lends credibility to the alleged assault.

The Daily Caller contacted every Democrat in the Senate, asking them if they would even consider the allegations by Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade, who has accused the then-senator of kissing her, touching her and penetrating her with his fingers without her consent in 1993. Each Senate office was given 24 hours to respond but not one did.

Given the proactive move by CNN and the unanimity of the silence of Senate Democrats I am forced to conclude that this is not because they believe Ms. Reade’s accusations to be false, but because they believe them to be true.

Fyi here is the video via The other mccain

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Who comments:

This is far more solid corroboration for Reade’s claim against Biden than there was for any of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, yet the media devoted round-the-clock coverage to the Kavanaugh accusations. Scott Whitlock at the Media Research Center asks:

Journalists have largely buried this story. ABC, NBC and CNN have not reported on it AT ALL. CBS, PBS and MSNBC have offered very minimal coverage. How long will journalists keep covering up this explosive story?

How long, indeed?

This is why I no longer give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here.

Update: CNN is denying it did anything with the Larry King stuff, here is my response

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After all after “Hands up Don’t shoot”, the Covington Kids and their regularly featuring the creepy porn lawyer why on earth would I presume their denial is true?

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