The great unhinging has begun

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black death.jpg

A frequent commenter on this site has posted an attack on local agents who are renting out homes to “bottom feeders” and “leeches” (at up to $45,000 per month, these are some bottom feeders!) for short-term — 6 months or less — periods. Apparently, he expects homeowners sitting on vacant properties to leave them empty rather than permit out-of-towners from entering our sacred land.

I’d say he was uniquely bizarre and frightened, but Portland Maine has just passed a city ordinance banning all short-term rentals and ordering anyone in such a lease to leave town by next week,

That restriction broadens the city’s stay-at-home order. City Manager Jon Jennings announced that order last week, and the City Council voted Monday night to extend it until April 27.

People who are currently in a short-term rental in Portland have until April 6 to leave. But the order means that no new bookings can take place until the city’s emergency order expires. The city reported more than 800 registered short-term rentals at one point last year.

“We can’t necessarily count on every single person who is operating them, or every single person who is visiting to abide by social distancing guidance,” Councilor Belinda Ray said.

Portland Maine is just Portland Oregon east, filled with the woke, and its denizens have an irresistible urge to regulate and ban everything that the properly-woke can’t control; they’ve been after the airbnb business for years, as well as Lyft and Uber and, for that matter, any economic activity that might provide income not sanctioned and approved by them. So this is not too-unexpected a development, but casting out strangers from their midst brings to mind images of frightened townspeople during the time of the Black Death, who attacked and murdered anyone who trespassed into their village.

This madness is getting serious, and it will only grow worse.

UPDATE: Cape Codders want to close the bridges to vacation home owners and visitors, towns in the Berkshires want to ban Airbnb and vacation rentals, Rhode Island’s unleashed its National Guard to ferret out, house-to-house, “outsiders”. I saw a brief video of Trump yesterday where he was, patiently for him, trying to explain to reporters why he was trying to keep the country calm. “You want me to scare them? Believe me, I can tell them projections that are aa hundred times worse”. The press, who lives to breed panic and who are as much of the panicked mob as the most ignorant among them, was having none of it.

This is curious

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Now you got no excuse for dawdling, damn it!

Now you got no excuse for dawdling, damn it!

Because Abbott Lab’s new quick testing tool for coronavirus is made in Scarborough, Maine, the Portland Press Herald has published an article on it. It’s interesting, and the availability of quick determination of infection will free up medical resources, but what struck me were these two figures.

According to the article, approximately 850,000 Coronavirus tests have been conducted, with 140,000 positive results. That’s an infection rate of 0.165 among people showing symptoms of the disease.

But in Maine, the paper says that 6,000 tests have been performed, with 275 positives: 0.045%

6,000 is obviously a lot smaller simple size than 850,000, but tests here are only available upon a doctor’s recommendation, and the doctors are limiting such recommendations only to the sickest of their patients. So 6,000 isn’t that unreasonable a number from which to draw conclusions. So why would Maine have an infection rate about just a quarter of the national average? Using the national rate, Maine should have 990 cases, rather than just 275. Conversely, using Maine’s rate, the US would have just 38,250 cases, not 140,000.

Are the hotspots for the flu, like NYC, skewing the average because it’s so much more prevalent there? If so, are the computer models accounting for the difference between major cities and more rural states?

Or this is just an aberration that will be smoothed out once more testing is done? Who knows? But it’s interesting.

Thus ensuring they'll soon stay there themselves

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Hoping for an insider’s view

Hoping for an insider’s view

New Yorkers ignore social distancing guidelines as they gather to watch the arrival of Navy’s hospital ship.

UPDATE: We can only hope that that horrible, terrible skunk of a person Rachael Maddow was rubbing shoulders with these people. Cough cough

● Shot: “In terms of the happy talk we’ve had on this front from the federal government, there is no sign that the Navy hospital ships that the president made such a big deal of, the Comfort and the Mercy, there’s no sign that they`ll be anywhere on-site helping out anywhere in the country for weeks yet. The president said when he announced that those ships would be put into action against the COVID-19 epidemic. He said one of those ships would be operational in New York harbor by next week. That`s nonsense. It will not be there next week.”

—MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, March 20th.

● Chaser: “The Mercy arrived in L.A. on Friday, March 27, just one week after Maddow said the ship will take weeks to arrive. The USNS Comfort arrived in New York City’s harbor on Monday, March 30.”

—“Rachel Maddow Calls The Timely Arrival Of Navy Hospital Ships ‘Nonsense,’” the Federalist today.