Author: philg

Progressives in Maine want U.S. to admit more low-skill migrants…

by philg

…. who will live somewhere other than in Maine. “Maine’s open door for refugees meets a housing shortage” (Christian Science Monitor):

Yet the city [Portland, Maine] that has been one of the most benevolent in America toward outsiders now finds itself with 1,200 newcomers, most from Africa and the Caribbean. They have come to Portland because they heard it had received fellow travelers humanely. Most speak no English; they have no money, no relatives or friends to house them; and they are not allowed to work for a living as their appeals for asylum slowly crawl through the system.

Its shelter filled, the city has put them up in motels while COVID-19 and winter created vacancies. But now the innkeepers want their rooms back for tourists, and Portland has no place to put them.

And still they keep coming.

Portland’s city health director took the extraordinary step in May of emailing agencies working on the southern U.S. border, telling them that immigrants “are no longer guaranteed shelter upon their arrival” in the city. The adjoining municipality of South Portland sent a similar message, and 79 local aid organizations followed with letters to the state of Maine and the federal government saying they were stretched too thin.

Judging by real estate prices, Portland has never been wealthier. Apartments and single-family houses have been bid up to a median price of over $500,000 (Zillow). What stops people rich enough to pay $500,000 for an apartment from paying up to house their refugee brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters?

… most pushback is framed in terms of the cost of services to newcomers at a time of inflation and rising expenses, says Ms. West, the city manager. “When you increase taxes, that’s really difficult for a lot of people in Portland to handle,” she says.

Aha! As with California Progressives, housing is a human right, but so is a Progressive’s right to save Mother Earth by buying a new Tesla rather than funding housing for the unhoused (whose right to housing remains undiminished by their lack of housing).

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Americans still prefer not to work, but that preference varies from state to state

by philg

While celebrating the fact that the U.S. economy has added back some jobs to pre-coronapanic levels, not bothering to adjust for the millions of additional folks who now occupy the United States, e.g., via immigration, the New York Times is forced to add the following:

In a substantial asterisk for the report’s broad strength, however, high demand has done little to expand the ranks of available workers by bringing people off the sidelines of the labor market.

And an accompanying chart shows that the trend of Americans sitting at home playing Xbox (back in stock!) is actually accelerating:

Does it make sense to look at these statistics on a nationwide basis? The level of coronapanic varied widely from state to state. The attractiveness of relaxing at home on welfare, compared to the spending power afforded by working full time at the median wage, also varies widely from state to state (CATO; see Table 4).

Let’s have a look at New York, where CATO found (2013) that the welfare lifestyle yielded 110 percent of the spending power of a median worker (St. Louis Fed):

Still down a full percentage point compared to pre-coronapanic. With perhaps some exceptions for young attractive women, Science-following Governor Andrew Cuomo made it illegal for New Yorkers to work and they followed his instructions. What about in Florida, where relaxing on welfare was worth only 41 percent of the spending power of a median worker and where the tyrant Ron DeSantis allowed people to continue working? (source)

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Is the CDC running a bathhouse?

by philg

Everything that the CDC says or does is, by definition, scientific. Science requires that hypotheses be tested and data gathered. The CDC is now offering scientific advice on how to have sex in group settings without contracting monkeypox. Ergo, the CDC must either be running its own bathhouse or gathering data in a bathhouse run by others. Let’s look at “Safer Sex, Social Gatherings, and Monkeypox” (CDC, August 5):

Spaces like back rooms, saunas, sex clubs, or private and public sex parties where intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners occurs—are more likely to spread monkeypox.

Unless the CDC is running a bathhouse, how has it determined, scientifically, that the bathhouse lifestyle is more likely to spread monkeypox than some other lifestyle?

Condoms (latex or polyurethane) may protect your anus (butthole), mouth, penis, or vagina from exposure to monkeypox. However, condoms alone may not prevent all exposures to monkeypox, since the rash can occur on other parts of the body.

Where is the CDC doing its scientific testing with condoms?

Consider having sex with your clothes on or covering areas where rash is present, reducing as much skin-to-skin contact as possible. Leather or latex gear also provides a barrier to skin-to-skin contact; just be sure to change or clean clothes/gear between partners and after use.

Has the CDC tested washed versus unwashed leather and latex gear to determine, scientifically, if the suggested cleaning makes a difference? Where has the CDC done the experiments of a leather party versus a non-leather party and a clothes-on versus a clothes-off party in order to have a scientific basis for the above statements?

A rave, party, or club where there is minimal clothing and where there is direct, personal, often skin-to-skin contact has some risk. Avoid any rash you see on others and consider minimizing skin-to-skin contact.

The CDC has done experiments with laypeople and discovered that they are able to recognize rashes in dimly lit clubs? If it doesn’t run its own bathhouse, how can the CDC know that “see and avoid” is an effective means of avoiding monkeypox?

Separately, what would the CDC’s bathhouse be called? All of the people on the “Meet the Staff” page appear to identify as “women”. Would it make sense to have a bathhouse for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ named after a woman?

I already suggested that “Karen’s” be the name of a restaurant chain in which masks and vaccine papers are required. So the CDC bathhouse can’t be named after those who would seek to keep others on the path of righteousness. The CDC is headquartered in Atlanta and is run by the Feds. Combining that fact fact with the above text, how about “Sherman‘s House of Latex”?

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Current prices at CVS and Walgreens

by philg

Our AirBnB didn’t come with shampoo or soap, so we hit the Walgreens in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. All of the travel items that I expected to cost $0.99 were $2.99 or more. Inflation? It then occurred to me that I had seen these prices back around 2018. The current Walgreens/CVS prices for stuff are the same as one would have paid in a resort hotel’s lobby boutique in 2018.

Given that nearly every drugstore seems to be either a Walgreens or a CVS, and there has also been a fair amount of consolidation among manufacturers/brands, could lack of competition also be a factor in why toothpaste, shampoo, and other basics are costly? (Walmart’s store brand equivalents are only about half the price compared to the name brands at CVS/Walgreens, right? That tells us it isn’t about the materials cost or the dreaded “supply chain”.)

Loosely related, a Rite Aid in downtown San Diego (June 2022). The precious deodorant is locked down and alarmed.

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Welcoming migrants in our nation’s capital

by philg

“G.O.P. Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to East Coast” (New York Times, yesterday):

Lever Alejos arrived in the nation’s capital last week on a bus with dozens of fellow Venezuelans who had journeyed more than 1,300 miles from their broken country to the United States. Most had braved poisonous plants and thugs as they trudged through dense jungle on the Colombian border and waded in water up to their chins to cross the Rio Grande into Texas, some clutching babies.

After being processed by U.S. border authorities, the undocumented migrants were released into South Texas, free to go where they wanted. Mr. Alejos, 28, said he was offered two options: a $50 bus ride to San Antonio or a free bus ride to Washington, D.C., paid for by the State of Texas. “I wanted San Antonio, but I had run out of money,” said Mr. Alejos, who has no family in the United States. “I boarded the bus to Washington.”

With no money and no family to receive them, the migrants are overwhelming immigrant nonprofits and other volunteer groups, with many ending up in homeless shelters or on park benches. Five buses arrived on a recent day, spilling young men and families with nowhere to go into the streets near the Capitol.

Since April, Texas has delivered more than 6,200 migrants to the nation’s capital, with Arizona dispatching an additional 1,000 since May. The influx has prompted Muriel E. Bowser, Washington’s Democratic mayor, to ask the Defense Department to send the National Guard in. The request has infuriated organizations that have been assisting the migrants without any city support.

“The infrastructure in New York is not built for this,” she said. “We are not on the border.”

The situation has become acute in recent weeks with the arrival of so many Venezuelans, who cannot be expelled under Title 42 because Mexico will not take them and their own government does not have an agreement with the United States to accept deportation flights. And unlike most migrants from Mexico and Central America who have family and friends in the United States, Venezuelans often arrive with no money and nowhere to go.

The “migrants welcome” lawn signs all over Northwest D.C. were not sufficient, apparently, to handle even 1 percent of the undocumented migrants who come to the U.S. (compare the 7,200 migrants mentioned above to the roughly 22 million who lived in the U.S. as of 2018 (Yale)).

From April 2022 in D.C., No Human Being is Illegal:

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Cost of luxury high-rise construction in Florida

by philg

A neighbor is a refugee from the Land of Lockdown (Illinois) and is a partner in a real estate development company. “We decided to stop doing projects in Chicago because so many people were leaving,” he explained. He’s finishing a sold-out project of $4 million Florida beachfront condos that will be ready for occupancy early in 2023. It is on the site of a former hotel. What does construction cost right now for a luxury concrete high-rise? “It is $450 per square foot,” he responded. Three years ago? “Mid-$200s.”

Here’s a new one near us, which was planned starting at $4 million per unit, announced at $6-10 million, and has apparently been selling for up to $18 million for a 5,000-square-foot unit ($3,600 per square foot): SeaGlass, Jupiter Island (it is not in Jupiter, but in the next town up: Tequesta).

Some friends in northeast Florida will be moving into their new 3BR house soon. They bought it 18 months ago, which is when the developer began work on design and construction (theirs is a tweak to a standard design within the development). It will cost just under $1 million and is a 20-minute drive to the beach. The developer complains that, due to inflation, this particular house will actually be unprofitable.

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  • City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion, from 2019, in which I describe an affordable apartment construction project in Boston. Even with free real estate, the construction cost of each unit ($555,555 per) rendered them unaffordable, without taxpayer subsidies, to a dual-income couple in which both of the partners (who will, one hopes, come in a rainbow of gender IDs) worked full time at the median Maskachusetts wage. Presumably that construction cost has now also doubled, but the median wage won’t have followed.
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Should we not pay rent due to the COVID-19 public health emergency…

by philg

… or should we instead not pay rent due to “Biden administration declares the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency” (CNN):

The declaration follows the World Health Organization announcement last month that monkeypox is a public health emergency of international concern. WHO defines a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC, as “an extraordinary event” that constitutes a “public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease” and “to potentially require a coordinated international response.”

Some cities and states, including New York City, San Francisco, California, Illinois and New York, have already declared monkeypox an emergency, allowing them to free up funding and resources for their responses to the outbreak.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden named Robert Fenton as the White House’s national monkeypox response coordinator. Fenton — a regional Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator who oversees Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada — will coordinate the federal government’s response to the outbreak.

Monkeypox can infect anyone, but the majority of cases in the US outbreak have been among men who have sex with men, including gay and bisexual men and people who identify as transgender. Close contact with an infected individual is required for the spread of the monkeypox virus, experts say.

Concentrating on that last paragraph, now that Science has declared an emergency, should we start wearing protective cloth masks on visits to the local bathhouse?

Separately, one of my most COVID-concerned Facebook friends has been posting images of himself and his wife, fully masked, at a 70,000-person indoor board game convention. Apparently, there was a one-hour process for scrutinizing vaccine papers (Science says that there is no way to transmit a SARS-CoV-2 infection if a person has been injected with proven-by-Science COVID-19 “vaccines”). The same guy posted some rage against convention attendees who did not Follow Science by attending a 70,000-person indoor event while wearing a mask of some sort:

This guy and similar are endlessly fascinating to me. He is concerned enough about COVID-19 to wear a mask and post about others’ mask-wearing. But he is not concerned enough about an aerosol respiratory virus to refrain from attending a 70,000-person indoor event that attracts diseased individuals from all around the world.

Finally, when will the CDC announce a hangar rent moratorium? That’s the kind of COVID-19/monkeypox relief that I feel would be most beneficial.

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Could Novak Djokovic get into the U.S. by saying that he is going to visit a bathhouse?

by philg

“Djokovic likely to miss U.S. Open over COVID-19 vaccine status” (Reuters):

U.S. Open organisers also said that while they do not have a vaccination mandate in place for players, they will respect the U.S. government’s position regarding travel into the country for unvaccinated non-U.S. citizens.

Another post with the same hashtag brought up U.S. President Joe Biden, who is fully vaccinated and twice boosted but tested positive on Saturday just three days after having emerged from isolation after testing positive for the first time on July 21.

“Quadruple-vaxxed Biden tested positive for Covid again. But unvaccinated Covid-recovered Djokovic can’t play in U.S. Open. He is apparently too big a risk to the U.S. healthcare system,” the tweet read.

Monkeypox is a global health emergency. But bathhouses are “essential” from a public health point of view and won’t be shut down despite the potential for monkeypox to thrive in our bathhouses.

Combining the above, could Novak Djokovic be admitted to the U.S. if he says that his reason for travel is to visit a bathhouse?

From today’s Pravda, “We Can Fight Monkeypox Without Hysteria or Homophobia”:

Any successful response to an outbreak needs to be grounded in facts, and the facts are clear. Out of the cases recently reported to the W.H.O., data on sex is available for about three-quarters. Of these, about 99 percent are male. Data on sexual orientation is available for only about 7,500 cases, but of these, 97.5 percent are men who have sex with men.

A two-page leaflet by German health authorities to inform the public about monkeypox does make clear that spread is happening in places like sex clubs. But it does not mention the words “gay” or “men who have sex with men” once.

Even within my own community, some have argued that stating that the disease was mostly affecting men who have sex with men was homophobic. Others were simply afraid of worsening the stigma many gay men already face. On the other end of the spectrum, social media accounts that have gained huge numbers of followers during the coronavirus pandemic are spreading the false information that monkeypox is transmitting widely through handshakes, the food we eat and the air we breathe. The result has been confusion, with some people wrongly thinking they are at high risk and others not knowing about their very real risk or how to lower it.

(When will Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York City close the public schools to protect children from this disease?)

From the Amana Colonies, the passionate Christianity of the 19th and 20th centuries is now passion for 2SLGBTQQIA+ love plus commonsense gun safety laws:

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Are there Ukrainian refugees in your neighborhood?

by philg

Our Florida neighborhood, which has no “immigrants welcome” signs, is now home to at least two groups of Ukrainian refugees (mother-child in both cases). That’s out of a sample of about 200 houses and apartments.

Our former neighborhood, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has more than 2,000 homes and perhaps 4,000 “migrants welcome” signs (squeezed in among the rainbow flags, BLM banners, In This House We Believe… laundry lists, and #StopAsianHate memes). The Ukrainian refugee count there? According to friends who still live in Lincoln… zero.

Readers: What’s the story in your own neighborhoods? Have you met any displaced Ukrainians or does the war remain an abstraction for you?

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  • If you’re looking for a way to help Ukrainians and don’t want to copy me by giving money to displaced Ukrainians and/or their hosts (part of my overall offer to pay for food to anyone who says that he/she/ze/they support expanded immigration and are willing to host migrants in their own homes), you can look at The Bond of Sports Foundation (disclosure: I am actually a board member of this 501c3 corporation, the first of whose core values is “empathy” so you know that I am a huge contributor in non-monetary ways)
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The flying-to-Oshkosh part of flying to Oshkosh

by philg

I am back from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) in the Cirrus SR20. It took only 4 days to get from Wisconsin to South Florida by air, a trip that would have taken 22 hours by minivan. The route as mapped by SkyVector:

With forecast winds, this should be 16 hours of round-trip flight time according to SkyVector. How long did it actually take? 18.3 hours in the air, according to the meter in the plane.

Amazingly, the 2.5-week trip was done entirely VFR and proceeded almost precisely on the originally planned schedule. A student pilot could have flown all of the legs that we did and been challenged only by a 25-knot crosswind landing at Appleton, Wisconsin (simultaneous landings on two intersecting runways for maximum capacity) and a 25-knot crosswind landing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (no runway there is oriented into the wind that we encountered). We delayed our departure from Indianapolis up to Appleton (one airport north of actual Oshkosh (KOSH)) due to a line of thunderstorms, but our friend who came in via Southwest to Chicago was delayed over 3 hours due to the same weather. Our family had a good time at the Indiana State Museum while hoping to avoid a long detour around the cells (we ended up adding about 20 minutes of meandering). Instrument flying skills would have been unhelpful to us, just as they were to Southwest, because flying through a thunderstorm isn’t a practical transportation strategy.

Most of the trip happened between 7,500′ and 11,500′ due to trying to stay over the bumpy cumulus clouds and avoid roasting to death in the unairconditioned Cirrus.

KDNL in Augusta, Georgia is a great stop due to the Morris Museum of Southern art. If you follow Science and are from Massachusetts or California, you’ll like KMWA in Illinois. According to the FBO, the on-field marijuana shop was open every day that the Chicago Public Schools were closed.

I had a 10:30 am brisket breakfast at Rob’s Pit BBQ, which was superb.

The stops that are not self-explanatory are KPDC (Effigy Mounds National Monument; an afternoon hike accessed via the crew car) and KCID (the Amana Colonies; two nights and one full day to tour).

I’ll write more about Indianapolis. There are a lot of great museums, especially for kids. We spent two nights there.

Pilot friends will appreciate that the cheapest fuel purchased was from Signature(!) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where leaded dinosaur blood was dispensed at $6.90 per gallon with the “Oshkosh discount”. On the third hand, though I had reserved a “car” at Cedar Rapids, Hertz delivered a Ford Expedition Max:

What I saved on 100LL I paid out at the local BP station to feed this uncomfortably bumpy monster.

Thanks to all of the jet charter companies having their best years ever (they and their clients all standing under a shower of federal cash), the level of staffing and service at FBOs is high anywhere that a Gulfstream might land. Air Traffic Control was operating smoothly and provided VFR advisories for the entire trip except for the last 40 miles into the Oshkosh area. The rental car crisis seems to have abated as long as you’re willing to pay 100 Bidies per day for a car that used to be $50 per day. Ubers, too, were plentiful (Indianapolis and Chattanooga).

The view out the front approaching our home airport of Stuart, Florida:

Best views on the trip: Mississippi River climbing out of KPDC; crossing the Appalachian Mountains; approaching to land at Chattanooga; the marshes around Amelia Island, Florida (KFHB).

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