Plus: “The only thing preventing all of this from being thought of as a scaled-up version of Watergate is the continued refusal of institutional America to own up to the comparison. Dick Nixon’s low-rent escapades like the ‘Canuck letter,’ distributing fliers offering free ‘balloons for the kiddies’ on behalf of Hubert Humphrey in black neighborhoods, or sending masses of pizzas to Ed Muskie’s hotel, all paled in comparison to the massive, ongoing campaign of fake news stories — political sabotage — planted by Clinton campaign figures in 2016 and beyond. The fact that the accompanying program of illegal surveillance was effected by lying to obtain FISA authority instead of a “third-rate burglary” and a bug doesn’t improve the situation. If the target had been anyone but Donald Trump, no one would bother even trying to deny how corrupt all this was, and continues to be.”
That insiders of both parties united to destroy an outsider who had somehow managed to be elected President says all you need to know about the corrupt uniparty that rules America today.
After years of resistance, San Francisco is finally jumping onto the trend of sheltering homeless people in tiny homes, with plans to install them on two parking lots about nine blocks away from City Hall.
The lots at 33 Gough St., between Market and Mission streets, have been used since December as a city-sanctioned “safe sleeping village,” holding 44 tents for unhoused people while they get counseling aimed at routing them into permanent homes. Those tents will be replaced by late fall with 70 tiny homes, dubbed cabins, similar to those already in use for years in Oakland, the Peninsula and San Jose.
Each 64-square-foot cabin will have a steel frame, 2-inch-thick walls, heat, a desk, a bed and a window. The revamped village will get improved bathrooms, storage spaces and a dining area.
The cost of up to $1.7 million for building and installing the cabins, along with the dining and other facilities, will be paid for by the nonprofits DignityMoves and Tipping Point Community. The cabins will remain for 18 months, when the lease the city signed for using the parking lots as outdoor shelter spaces runs out.
What links all these troubled populations is a desperate need for treatment. There was a time not long ago when we understood this — and every state maintained an extensive network of residential psychiatric hospitals to provide care, or at least try to do so.
Now tent encampments (and jails and prisons) have replaced those inpatient facilities. The Treatment Advocacy Center reports that 20 percent of those in jails and 15 percent of those in prisons are estimated to suffer from serious mental illness: “Los Angeles County Jail, Chicago’s Cook County Jail and New York’s Riker’s Island Jail each hold more mentally ill inmates than any remaining psychiatric hospital in the United States.”
The total behind bars: as many as 383,000.
These are unfortunate souls who could be helped by treatment — but who lack the financial means to get private care or a practical publicly supported alternative. In other cases, their disease itself prevents them from realizing they need help, and the autonomy-obsessed, libertarian approach pushed by activists bars governments from offering involuntary inpatient treatment.
Exit quote: “We don’t leave those suffering from most ailments to forage for food from garbage cans, as many homeless must. We provide treatment, including through Medicare and Medicaid. Yet we pretend that the mentally ill, addicted souls on our streets just need more government housing. They are being cruelly used by subsidized-housing advocates, the activists who first started applying the very term homeless to them and who believe that government-provided housing is the universal substitute for a flawed private housing market.”
The View co-host Joy Behar callously dismissed the women who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault and rape as “so-called victims,” on Wednesday’s show. She went on to passionately argue that Hillary Clinton was “the real victim,” and America, for losing such a worthy would-be president.
The hosts were discussing whether or not Monica Lewinsky should be considered a victim of Bill Clinton and whether he faced any consequences. Talking about his impeachment, Ana Navarro claimed that Democrats would’ve impeached him today, because they “tend to hold themselves and their own accountable and to a higher standard.”
“And I want to know in the first place, who is paying these cowboys to do this work? They got to be gotten rid of! They got to be stopped! It cannot go on!” she continued.
Waters had previously pushed the false accusation that the Border Patrol agents had used whips on the migrants.
For her Wednesday media briefing, she instead said that they had used their reins to whip the migrants away.
She also called for the children at the Del Rio encampment that want to come to the U.S. be allowed in immediately.
“Let people know that they trying to take us back to slavery days! And worse than that!” she yelled.
But funny thing, on top of all that, is Waters saying that it is “worse than what WE witnessed in slavery.” I know that Waters is bordering on ancient, right up there with the rest of the over-80 Democratic crew like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), but I didn’t know that she was actually so old that she had witnessed slavery which hasn’t been around since 1865. Tell me more, please, Maxine? And she didn’t “witness” what happened in Del Rio either. Because had she “witnessed” it, she would have known there were no whips and no one was whipped.
Trump was willing to use sticks, and not just carrots, to ensure cooperation from Mexico and Northern Triangle countries.
Morgan cites the importance of Trump’s “commitment that if Mexico didn’t step up he was going to take very specific actions on tariffs. The same thing with the Northern Triangle countries where relief and assistance was temporarily removed until they stood up and did what they needed to do to address this as a regional crisis.”
By last year, the former administration official says, “the relationship we had with Mexico was in a very solid place.” The Mexicans had initially been skeptical of the Trump approach but changed their view when it began to show results. “They saw,” he adds, “that suddenly their border towns weren’t overwhelmed. Suddenly their immigration services weren’t overwhelmed.” So the Trump team and its Mexican counterparts had, he continues, “this professional understanding that a little bit of preventative work today would prevent a much bigger problem tomorrow.”
Morgan points out that caravans that gathered to our south in 2020 didn’t go through. The Mexicans, Morgan says, “increased their southern border enforcement between them and Guatemala. So, Guatemala stepped up. A lot of the caravans were stopped in Guatemala before they even reached the Guatemala–Mexico border. And those that got through Guatemala, Mexican officials stopped.”
I must have been about 16 when I got my first Portastudio. The compact home recording unit had first been introduced by Japanese electronics firm Teac in 1979, offering unprecedented multitrack dubbing to the bed-bound amateur musician. For a little less than $1,000, you could record four separate tracks of instrumentation — as much as the Beatles had when making Sgt. Pepper — on an ordinary cassette tape. By the time I got my teenage hands on a four-track machine of my own, that price had come down by an order of magnitude. It was a chunky little unit in pigeon blue with just two microphone sockets and a small handful of mixing dials for volume control and stereo panning. Anything you fed into it would be squashed and smudged into its limited dynamic range and smeared all over with a waterfall of tape hiss. But to me that little box was magic.
Recording music myself in the comfort of my bedroom made sound into something plastic. It gave me a sense of agency and allowed me to think in a different, more holistic, but also more experimental way. At that time, most of the songs in the charts and on the radio seemed to be made in big, expensive studios with mixing boards that looked as though they could launch a space shuttle, by highly paid producers wielding microphones that cost, individually, more than everything I owned put together. My friends and I were grabbing beats from the presets on toy Casio keyboards, plugging our guitars directly into the Portastudio jack inputs, then turning the tape over so the sound would play backwards, looping the signal from a daisy chain of cheap effects boxes until it fed back a sound that fooled my friend Marc’s older brother into thinking we had a Moog synthesizer. We bought records by artists with an aesthetic (almost) as scrappy as our own, poring over the badly photocopied sleeves of short-run CDs issued by micro-labels in Nottingham, Wetherby and Olympia, Washington. Never would I have imagined that scarcely more than two decades later, some of the biggest pop stars on the planet would be embracing lo-fi aesthetics and making records in their bedrooms just like us.
To be fair, people are making records on laptops in their bedrooms these days, because digital audio workstation (DAW) software is ubiquitous, and as such, it’s done much to kill the traditional recording studio. Also, it’s much cheaper for an artist to rent a real studio to bring the band in to record the drum tracks, and then everything else can be edited and overdubbed at home, in a small project studio, or a bedroom with some decent acoustic treatment on the walls.
And the notion that “For a little less than $1,000, you could record four separate tracks of instrumentation — as much as the Beatles had when making Sgt. Pepper — on an ordinary cassette tape,” isn’t quite true. I’m surprised that Fostex never got sued for false claims for this mid-’80s ad:
Sure you can make the next Sgt. Pepper — you just need John, Paul, George, Ringo, George Martin, and engineer Geoff Emerick, and plonk them down into one of the best equipped recording studios in the world. And hire plenty of sidemen to play the exotic instruments that the Fab Four couldn’t. And an orchestra for the finale. Oh, and ditch the hissy cassette four-track which jams all those tracks onto a 1/8th” wide audio cassette, and invest in a few Studer J-37 reel-to-reel machines, which spreads the four tracks over one-inch-wide tape for infinitely greater fidelity. And noticed I said “a few.” Martin and his engineers used two J-37s synced together to record the massive orchestral overdubs on Pepper’s closing track, “A Day in the Life.” There was also an additional reel-to-reel recorder that ran when mixing to create the Beatles’ famous Artificial Double-Tracking (ADT) effect on many of their lead vocals. But hey, other all of that, you’re good to go with a portable Fostex X-15 cassette recorder!
To be fair though, the impact of the cassette four-tracks of the 1980s was long-lasting: it democratized music recording and songwriting; and it’s not a coincidence that several of us early bloggers had our roots tinkering in that earlier DIY-era.
Speaking of which, classical reference in headline:
IRON DOME FLAP PUTS DEMS’ ANTI-SEMITISM ON FRONT BURNER: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid has the full story on how and why it happened — in a word, bigotry — and why there remains hope that $1 billion in Iron Dome funding for Israel will yet be approved by Congress.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
