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

Posted: April 30, 2020 by datechguy in culture
Tags: , ,

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.

Covid-19 and the nursing home ‘death pits’

Posted: April 28, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

Covid-19 has uncovered an incredible dirty secret that nursing home and long-term care facilities are killers.

Not only have roughly 20 percent of the 50,000-plus deaths occurred in these facilities, but the virus has also shown an industry that thrives on death, allowing nearly 400,000 to die each year—often from diseases they get in the homes.

Moreover, many hospitals rejected virus victims during the crisis after they become ill because those in nursing homes are among the most vulnerable because of their age and underlying conditions.

In New Jersey, 17 bodies were piled up in a nursing home morgue, and more than a quarter of a Virginia home’s residents died. At least 24 people at a facility in Maryland have died; more than 100 residents and workers have been infected at another in Kansas; and people have died in centers for military veterans in Florida, Nevada, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington. In the Philadelphia suburbs, a top-rated facility, the Southeastern Veterans’ Center has had nearly 30 people die and expects to see more.

New York officials disclosed the names of 72 long-term care facilities that have had five or more deaths, including the Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn where 55 people died. At least 14 nursing homes in New York City and its suburbs recorded more than 25 coronavirus-related deaths. In New Jersey, officials revealed that infections have broken out in 394 long-term facilities — almost two-thirds of the state’s homes — and that more than 1,500 deaths were tied to nursing facilities, DaTimes reported. See more at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html

“They’re sitting ducks, the veterans,” said one family member told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “They are dying alone, that makes me utterly mad. It’s inhumane. And they’re withholding information about how dire it is.” For more, see https://www.inquirer.com/news/southeastern-veterans-center-coronavirus-chester-county-covid-20200425.html

The center is one of the best in the State of Pennsylvania, with a long waiting list. 

All told, there are about 15,000 nursing homes in the United States, which house about 1.3 million people. 

In Pennsylvania, about 126,000 people live in these facilities. Nearly half of Pennsylvania’s known coronavirus-related deaths have been residents of long-term-care facilities. 

Because one of the first outbreaks of Covid-19 occurred in a Washington nursing home, most facilities were put on notice about the problems. 

But the underlying issues left many facilities unprepared. These problems include a lack of personal protective equipment, the inability to maintain social distancing among residents, inadequate staff, and the failure to act quickly enough when residents exhibited symptoms of the disease.

Many of the staff are paid at the minimum wage and often job at a facility for a short period. 

Moreover, many state agencies fail to enforce local and federal standards on how the facilities should function. 

As the pandemic slows down, investigators should turn their attention to the severe problems that exist in nursing homes and long-term care facilities to protect those who are most likely to die and have no other place to go.

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.

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