NC Renegades

I have all of the curves: confirmed Covid-19 cases in America, mortality rate, ratio of active to confirmed cases, currently active cases, recovered cases, etc., etc.

None of it means anything.  At all.

MIT Study.

Just one section of Massachusetts could have more than 100,000 coronavirus cases — many times more than the entire state has identified at this point, according to an MIT-associated study of local sewage.

Biobot Analytics, which is a lab associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published research this week that an analysis of sewage from a treatment facility in “a large metropolitan area in the state of Massachusetts” suggested that many more people potentially have the highly contagious disease than tests have confirmed.

“On March 25, the area represented by the sample had approximately 446 confirmed cases of Covid-19,” Biobot researchers wrote Wednesday in a post about their research. “Based on our sewage analysis, we estimate that up to 115,000 people are infected and shedding the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

Biobot, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, didn’t specify where in the state the samples came from.

MIT.  Large metropolitan area.  Probably Boston.

USC Study.

While Los Angeles County has reported a total of 13,816 coronavirus cases, early results from an antibody study conducted with the University of Southern California shows that hundreds of thousands more could have had COVID-19 in the past, officials announced Monday.

So far, 863 L.A. County residents have been tested between April 10 and 14 as part of the study.

The study estimates a prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies in the county to be 4.1%, with a range that could be as low as 2.8% and as high as 5.6%, when you factor in the reliability of the tests.

An estimated 221,000 adults to 442,000 adults at the high end may have been infected at some point before April 9 with COVID-19, suggesting that the number of total people in the county with a past or current infection is 28 to 55 times higher than the number of reported positive cases, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, L.A. County’s public health director said Monday.

“Although I report every day that we have thousands of thousands of people that have tested positive, the serology testing lets us know that we have hundreds of thousands of people that have already developed antibodies to the virus because at some point in time over the last couple of months, they have in fact been infected with COVID-19,” Ferrer said.

Everything you’re being told by the FedGov and StateGov and CountyGov is crap.  I’m a registered professional engineer.  I’ve done science, engineering and mathematical modeling for 40 years.  If I did my work like this my license would have been stripped and I would be in jail.

Bill Buppert at ZeroGov says this.

You won’t find me parsing the nonsensical and shamanesque grotesqueries of Comrades Birx or Fauci or any of the other “government health” frauds at the hilariously contranymic Center for Disease Control; when not chasing the phantoms of gun violence (is hanging rope violence?) or racism or salt, the CDC is yet another government clown posse who couldn’t predict a sunset much less the verities of viral outbreaks.

Me neither.  I’ve said it before.  It has all become a FedGov jobs program for incompetent people who can’t otherwise do real work anywhere else, all controlled by wicked rulers who want to convert America into nanny state socialism with moronic sheeple begging for more and more control over their daily lives.

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Authored by David Denning via LewRockwell.com,

The shutdown of the American economy should end as soon as possible. We have reached the point where fear and panic have precluded logic and facts. The damage from our overreaction to the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to prove greater than the death toll from the disease itself. The virus is not containable, and our attempt to achieve the unachievable grows more costly every day.

Covid-19 is not proving as deadly as first imagined. Last March 16, a group of researchers at Imperial College in London predicted 510,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US. Within ten days, these early estimates were revised downward by more than an order of magnitude. As I write, the best estimate of ultimate deaths from Covid-19 in the US is about 60,000, the same as the 61,000 people who died from influenza during the winter of 2017-2018. Yet we continue to suffer from a shutdown whose imposition was justified by a fallacious model prediction.

The spread of the coronavirus is both inevitable and necessary. It is necessary because, in the absence of a vaccine, the only way to counteract the disease is to build immunity in the population. A person who contracts the infection and recovers is immune. They can no longer become ill or spread the disease. Infection and recovery is the most effective vaccination possible.

Last March 3, the World Health Organization estimated the mortality rate from Covid-19 to be 3.4 percent. We now know that this early estimate was much too high because testing was limited to individuals exhibiting severe symptoms. Subsequently, more extensive testing has found that half the infected population is entirely asymptomatic, and that the corresponding mortality rate is in the neighborhood of 0.1 percent. Thus 99.9 percent of the people who get the disease further the goal of building immunity in the population. Although this is an inconvenience for those who are affected, these infections accomplish an ultimate good.

The whole idea behind shutdowns and quarantines is not to reduce cumulative mortality, but to “flatten the curve” so that our health care facilities are not overwhelmed. Individuals who need intensive care may be saved by this strategy but the net mortality reduction is likely to be small. Shutdowns and quarantines will prolong the course of the pandemic. When social distancing ends, as it must eventually, the disease will simply resume its inevitable course through the population. Flattening the curve does not reduce the area under the curve.

Where did we get the idea that some businesses and occupations are “non-essential?”

In a market economy, every job is essential. And every job is certainly essential to the person who depends on it for their livelihood. In the midst of a pandemic it’s sensible to ban mass gatherings of hundreds and thousands of people. But local governments are now imposing restrictions that make little sense. Parks and golf courses have been closed. The imposition of evening curfews is baffling. Every government official with totalitarian instincts now has the moral justification to impose arbitrary and senseless curtailments on freedom of movement and association.

Ironically, in the midst of a supposed epidemic, hospitals all over the nation are closing down for a lack of patients. Why? Because government officials ordered them to cancel all elective medical procedures so they could be prepared to receive a crush of Covid-19 patients that never arrived. In the last four weeks, we’ve lost 22 million jobs. In our panic over the Covid-19 pandemic, we seem to have forgotten that a robust economy supports health care, education, fire and police protection, and the construction and maintenance of critical infrastructure that maintains human civilization. The toll from the artificial induction of poverty may ultimately exceed lives lost to the disease.

In 2011, researchers at Columbia University found that poverty contributes to 133,000 premature deaths annually in the US. Our stop-gap solution, massive government spending, is no panacea. Prosperity comes from production, not spending, borrowing, and taxing. If we don’t reverse course in a matter of days, we’re on our way to national suicide.

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Have you read the recent studies claiming that many more people have or have recovered from the coronavirus than are counted officially? So have we. It’s great news, right? It suggests that the fatality rate is MUCH lower than currently calculated and we’re making progress towards national herd immunity, right?

Not so fast, warns Chris. He pulls up the actual research studies behind the headlines and show how shaky both its methodology and conclusions are. They’re so bad that other scientists within the research community are calling for an apology.

As much as we wish the hype were true, now is a critical time to ensure we’re dealing with accurate data. Bad data = bad decisions. Bad decisions = bad outcomes.

Meanwhile, Chris also notes the absolute carnage going on in the oil markets, with near-term oil contracts now trading at negative prices. This is historic and will have MASSIVE implications for the economy and the financial markets going forward.

You’ll be hearing more from us on that soon. So stay tuned.

A prominent Harvard Law School professor is calling for a ban on homeschooling stating that it is dangerous for children to be left with their parents 24/7 and to have authoritarian control over them.

In an article by Erin O’Donnell titled The Risks of Homeschooling, O’Donnell outlines Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program at Harvard’s take on how dangerous it is to allow parents to educate their own children. Bartholet not only insists that homeschooling deprives children of their right to a “meaningful education,” but that it also violates their “right to be protected from potential child abuse” and keeps them from “contributing positively to a democratic society.”

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Price of oil at the close.

David DeGerolamo

Front-Month WTI Crude Crashes Below Zero For First Time Ever

And there it is… May WTI just traded below zero for the first time ever (trading -$7.50 per barrel)…

Why the historic plunge in the front-end? Simple: it shows the real demand and how much storage capacity there is for actual physical oil (virtually none), as opposed to speculating on future oil prices and hopes for a recovery, which however with every passing month will get dragged to the catastrophic spot (current-month) price. As such, where the May contract – which matures tomorrow – prices will show what the market for physical delivery looks like but as Adam Button notes, “the June contract is also increasingly ugly as it approaches the cycle low” adding that “so far retail keeps buying the dip but I think there’s a rising chance they puke it in the days ahead.”

And while retail keeps hoping that the Fed will somehow start buying crude next, Button is absolutely correct.

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The evolution of Americans panic hoarding during the COVID-19 pandemic has ultimately led to the stocking up on guns and ammo. 

Gun shop owners report while there are no weapon shortages yet, a run on ammo has undoubtedly been seen across the country. 

We first documented the run on guns and ammo in mid-March, identifying shops across many states with long lines of patrons, waiting to get their hands on AR-15s, shotguns, and handguns, along with the ammo for each respective weapon. 

Then we noted in early April how social unrest was developing in several states, as Americans were panic searching “buy ammo” to a degree never before seen on the internet. 

In this piece, we’re going to focus on 9mm ammo specifically, and judging by internet search trends, Americans in every state are panic searching “9mm ammo” because local gun stores have limited supplies. Notice the interest over time, hitting a record high last month. 

But why focus on 9mm? Well, because gun experts will say, besides a shotgun, a handgun chambering a 9mm round is an excellent self-defense round to defend your family and or yourself in emergencies. 

This leads us to several ammo websites that are showing specific types of 9mm rounds are “sold out” or “on backorder:” 

A crashed economy, tens of millions of Americans out of work, quarantines still in effect, massive food bank lines, health care systems overwhelmed, and social unrest unfolding across the country – many people are loading up on weapons and ammo because the country is descending into chaos. 

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There is no longer a question of what communists like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have in mind for the United States of America. The Green New Deal called for the restraint of the economy on a scale now being suffered by the people of the United States in the current lockdowns imposed by governors nationwide. These shut-ins are not a machination of the federal government, but by states. The businesses, via the commerce clause, can be forcibly reopened by the federal government who will suffer untold deficits of tax dollars once this all shakes out. 

However, the main point here is if you like life under the lockdown, you will love the Green New Deal proposed by AOC and supported in one form or another by all Democrat presidential candidates. This is communism and they love it. In both the Pandemic and the Green New Deal, they seek to order businesses shut down as a means of achieving a political goal, such as the reduction of CO2, something that has tenuous ties (at best) with global warming that has itself been understood as a scam, even by their proponents who changed the criteria from “global warming” to “climate change” to cover for the inability of nature to follow their collectivist dictates and warm to a sufficient degree to cause panic among the people. 

The key elements of both the Green New Deal and the Lockdown are reduced economic activity to stave off some crisis that is both unsubstantiated and unverifiable. It is the invisible threat that is relied upon to force people into economic devastation, thus relying heavily on government for their lives and when that cannot be accomplished (and they truly don’t see the irony of it at all) a certain amount of people will have to die to save the rest. People are not ecologically sustainable in their model. 

But, then, communists love the irrational and ridiculous. They revel in the confusion rational people encounter when trying to find logic in their dictates or even some sense of coherence. The conclusion one is supposed to come to, when they can find no logic to follow that satisfies the rational mind, is that “well, they said so, so I guess I gotta do it.” That is how the battle is won by the communist. It is why they fear, more than anything else, a principled capitalist who will not succumb to that conclusion, but fight them for a rational explanation.

If you visit this link and scroll down you will see that everything they claim is  necessary to save the planet, we are doing right now to survive the pandemic of Covid 19. This is the world they prescribe as a solution to climate change. No airplanes, no traffic with internal combustion vehicles, only as much electricity as renewable energy can produce and how are they going to enforce that? The police, with drones and the same means with which they currently enforce the non-congregation of people today, the recording of license plates, in fact license plates would not be issued to internal combustion vehicles in their green world, or should I say watermelon world (green on the outside, communist red on the inside). 

It is good that we have endured this period in our lives to get a good fix on what it is that they propose for the future. This is their PLAN, not a consequence of a pandemic. The most important part of all of this is, had we voted on the Green New Deal from the comfortable prosperity before the Covid 19 pandemic, it might have gone smoother for them that it will now. God works in mysterious ways.

The fundamental miscalculation of the Green New Deal is the idea that current economic situations exist during a massive economic downturn caused by the very policies enacted through the legislation. In other words, currently, we collect somewhere between 3.5 and 4 trillion dollars a year in taxes. We currently have a debt of 24 trillion dollars, two of which was just incurred by the stimulus bill. When the economic cost of the lockdown is calculated, the tax receipts for 2020 might be on the order of 1.5 to 2 trillion dollars and would be similar during the enactment of the Green New Deal. At the same time we would be heaping another 90-120 trillion dollars of debt on top of what we already have to enact the legislation. This is by design. It is intended to crash the economy and if you read some of their literature, it is designed to open the path to a new economic system with “(social) Justice and Equality in mind. It is designed to crash the capitalist economy and institute a communist economy. 

As we have seen from the economics of the pandemic, i.e., piling debt onto a stunted economy caused by executive action on the state level, it is a pathway to deflation and the cratering of the dollar. When one puts trillions of dollars of debt onto an economy that is going to yield 1/3 of tax revenues that it normally would, the ability to repay that debt becomes suspect at best. We will see some of those effects when they start tabulating the costs to the GDP in future quarters. This cost to the GDP will not come roaring back to “fix it later” as some project, because many of the businesses that were shuttered by the lockdown, will not be coming back. On top of that, there is not much incentive in taking a chance on starting a new business in their place, because if the economy can be shut down by a virus, it can be shut down again when and if future outbreaks of the coronovirus warrant it. The only thing the lockdowns have ensured is economic uncertainty. 

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At the very beginning of this outbreak, while I didn’t dismiss the threat of the Coronavirus, I stated to several friends online, and to family and extended family, that we haven’t yet heard the whole story on this.  It’s buried, and if anyone knows it all, he isn’t talking, or if he does, he’ll probably not be talking for long.  He’ll disappear.

I was perhaps the first out of the gate saying that this was an engineered virus.  My background is engineering and mathematical model development, and so the lack of background with microbiology caused most people to ignore my statements.  But to me, the facts that this virus hasn’t learned to live among the population without killing its host, is the perfect admixture of SARs, Bat-SARs and HIV to cause problems with humans, and came from near a weapons lab, along with the Chinese doctrine of unrestricted warfare, pointed to something much more sinister than a wet market.  I would also mention my views on the second law of thermodynamics and increasing entropy, and the virtual perfection in development of this pathogen versus the stochastic diminution that would occur in nature.

Then along came Paul Cotrell’s video (he has many more since then) followed by the Epoch Times research, in which the microbiology studies were supplemented by the paper trail, and it suddenly became a little more difficult to dismiss my assertions.

Next up, this post addresses this same issue in at least as comprehensive a fashion as Dr. Cotrell’s analysis, and it is must reading if you really want to understand the origin of this virus.

The bureaucracy is now arguing that this virus came from the deepest part of China in a bat cave somewhere (note that this is a modification of the paradigm they gave earlier, which is that it came from the wet market near Wuhan, an argument that fell flat when it became wider knowledge that many of the very early and original Coronavirus patients had no connection whatsoever to the wet market and never went there).  Google “patient 31.”  This is an actual person with a number, meaning that they know about patients 0 – 30, and exactly where they were and weren’t, and more than likely how they got the virus.

There model then was wrong, and their model now is wrong (or better, a lie).  Furthermore, they continue to argue that Hydroxychloroquine isn’t an effective therapeutic and are trying to do their very best to prove it (I have multiple documents in my possession to the N.C. hospital system concerning this very subject).  They want Remdesivir to be in wide use, being a patented drug, and able to make a lot of money for big Pharma.

Their epidemiological models were wrong from the beginning, and are still wrong today.  The CDC has been fighting gun violence, obesity, and racism, so anything to do with biology and analytical statistics is rather too difficult for them.  Apparently, the CDC has become a FedGov jobs program for people who can’t otherwise do real work.

You can Read the Whole Article Here…