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I pay as little attention to Michael Moore as humanly possible. But when his latest documentary opened on Earth Day to attacks from fellow leftists, including calls for censorship, it got my attention. After all, one of my favorite scenes in “Lord of the Rings” is watching the orcs fight among themselves. So I grabbed a bowl of popcorn and sat down to watch “Planet of the Humans.” Director Moore’s latest documentary starts with electric cars, the vehicle of choice for the environmentally conscious. As GM proudly unveils its battery-powered Volt, his narrator innocently asks the executive in charge where the electricity to recharge it comes from. Power plants, comes the answer. Coal-burning power plants. Memo from Moore to those who think they are driving green: You may indulge your illusions if you prefer. But all you’ve really done is transfer your emissions from the tailpipe of your car to the smokestack of the local power plant. Maybe you think solar power is the answer? Moore treats you to a visit to a showy solar array that covers an entire football field. The power-company executive present admits that it can only power ten homes, and then only when the sun shines. Enlarge Image Moore’s new documentary has led to calls for censorship from the eco-warriors on the left. Right now, you can only see it on YouTube. Powering the nearby city of Lansing, Mich., he says with a grin, would require 15 square miles of panels. You want to talk about “footprints?” We follow local environmentalists as they hike up a mountain where a site has been clear-cut for 21 mega wind turbines. They deplore the destruction of the natural beauty of the landscape and the scattering of the wildlife it once supported. The engineer in charge ticks off the hundreds of tons of concrete, steel, aluminum, carbon and other products that go into the construction of each and every mega wind turbine. Industry requires huge inputs of energy to produce such things, a total energy deficit that the spinning blades of the wind turbine will not begin to pay back over its projected lifetime. Moore ends the segment with a shot of broken and rusted wind turbines littering the landscape. We visit plants that generate electricity by burning “biomass” rather than fossil fuel. But as we see one diesel-powered machine after another felling, hauling and chipping logs for burning, the absurdity of the entire enterprise comes into focus. In the final scene we see a clear-cut forest and learn that we would need to burn every tree in America to power the country for just one year. By the midpoint of the movie, Moore has already revealed that each and every form of green energy is a fraud, surviving on popular naivete, government subsidies and the products of industrial civilization. Enlarge Image Moore argues that many green energy solutions rely heavily on coal-burning power plants to function. If he were to have stopped there, his sins against his fellow eco-leftists might one day be forgiven. But he doesn’t, instead going on to argue that the fraud extends to the very top of the green-energy movement itself. He begins his takedown by taking us to a green concert, where the organizer has just announced to cheers from the crowd that it is powered by “solar energy.” Going backstage, however, we learn that the tiny solar array is only for show. The actual power for the lights, amplifiers and electric guitars comes from a portable diesel generator. Then he moves on to the big boys. He exposes the massive funding that the Sierra Club, 350 and other environmental groups receive from the energy industry, and exposes the connections between leading environmentalists like Al Gore and Wall Street financiers. Moore’s sometime friends in the eco-left movement are not amused and apparently have already convinced the distributor of his film to take it down. For now, you can still watch Moore’s epic take-down of “green energy” on YouTube, but you’d better move fast. There’s a campaign underway to remove it from that service as well. If you do tune in, bear in mind that Moore is no friend of free markets or individual liberty. His “solution” to reducing humanity’s use of energy is a throwback to twentieth-century population control. I don’t know about you, but any time anyone tells me we need to reduce the world’s population my answer is always the same: “You first.” But you can fast forward through that part. Otherwise, it’s a joy to watch Moore skewer one “renewable energy” fantasy after another. After all, as a movement insider, he knows where the carbon is buried. https://nypost.com/2020/05/02/why-eco-leftists-are-suddenly-turning-on-michael-moore/?fbclid=IwAR1p2FgaU77JGGVJ9P1Q4H_W6TUExuHYz9EbtwLiIJ_mEYKXugip_Pev2SE

A damning dossier leaked from the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance claims that China lied to the world about human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, made whistleblowers disappear and refused to hand over virus samples so the West could make a vaccine. The bombshell 15-page research document also indicated that some of the five intelligence agencies believe that the virus may have been leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a claim initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory because Chinese officials insisted the virus came from the local wet markets, according to the Australian Daily Telegraph. At the same time, a senior intelligence source told Fox News that while most intelligence agencies believe COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab, “it was thought to have been released accidentally.” SEE ALSO Inside the inhumane animal markets behind pandemics like coronavirus The report from the intelligence-sharing alliance of the five leading English-speaking countries — the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — called China’s shady handling of the virus “an assault on international transparency.” The paper described how China downplayed the outbreak around the world while wildly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease at home, including bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of asymptomatic carriers of the virus and stonewalling other countries’ requests for samples. Beijing started censoring search engines as early as December to stop internet surfing related to the virus, according to the report. The World Health Organization went along with China’s claims and also denied human-to-human transmission of the virus despite concern from neighboring countries. RELATED VIDEO Video length 1 minute 44 seconds1:44 Trump claims he has seen evidence linking coronavirus to Wuhan lab Trump claims he has seen evidence linking coronavirus to Wuhan lab Intelligence showed that China had “evidence of human-human transmission from early December,” but continued to deny it could spread that way until Jan. 20, according to the dossier. The document pointed out that China imposed travel bans on people throughout the nation, but continued to tell the rest of the world travel bans were unnecessary. https://nypost.com/2020/05/02/intelligence-report-says-china-lied-about-origin-of-coronavirus/?utm_source=NYPFacebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&sr_share=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2q3RazkH8AN_9mMUDVnAU5gOf2EyJM2ExiVdxFXRwPDoqJV3OxU4TpCM4

A paper published on 30 January in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about the first four people in Germany infected with a novel coronavirus made many headlines because it seemed to confirm what public health experts feared: that someone who has no symptoms from infection with the virus, named 2019-nCoV, can still transmit it to others. That might make controlling the virus much harder. Chinese researchers had previously suggested asymptomatic people might transmit the virus but had not presented clear-cut evidence. “There’s no doubt after reading [the NEJM] paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told journalists. “This study lays the question to rest.” But now, it turns out that information was wrong. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government’s public health agency, has written a letter to NEJM to set the record straight, even though it was not involved in the paper. The letter in NEJM described a cluster of infections that began after a businesswoman from Shanghai visited a company near Munich on 20 and 21 January, where she had a meeting with the first of four people who later fell ill. Crucially, she wasn’t sick at the time: “During her stay, she had been well with no sign or symptoms of infection but had become ill on her flight back to China,” the authors wrote. “The fact that asymptomatic persons are potential sources of 2019-nCoV infection may warrant a reassessment of transmission dynamics of the current outbreak.” But the researchers didn’t actually speak to the woman before they published the paper. The last author, Michael Hoelscher of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Medical Center, says the paper relied on information from the four other patients: “They told us that the patient from China did not appear to have any symptoms.” Afterward, however, RKI and the Health and Food Safety Authority of the state of Bavaria did talk to the Shanghai patient on the phone, and it turned out she did have symptoms while in Germany. According to people familiar with the call, she felt tired, suffered from muscle pain, and took paracetamol, a fever-lowering medication. (An RKI spokesperson would only confirm to Science that the woman had symptoms.) Hoelscher was not on the call, he says. “I asked the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority whether the information from that phone conversation called for a correction and I was told that is not the case,” he says. (The Bavarian ministry of health, of which the agency is part, has not responded to a request for information from ScienceInsider.) But RKI disagreed. The agency’s spokesperson confirms that a letter about the error has been submitted to NEJM. RKI also informed the World Health Organization (WHO) and European partner agencies about the new information. “I feel bad about how this went, but I don’t think anybody is at fault here,” says virologist Christian Drosten of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, who did the lab work for the study and is one of its authors. “Apparently the woman could not be reached at first and people felt this had to be communicated quickly.” Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says calling a case asymptomatic without talking to the person is problematic. “In retrospect, it sounds like this was a poor choice,” he says. However, “In an emergency setting, it’s often not possible to talk to all the people,” he adds. “I’m assuming that this was an overstretched group trying to get out their best idea of what the truth was quickly rather than somebody trying to be careless.” The Public Health Agency of Sweden reacted less charitably. “The sources that claimed that the coronavirus would infect during the incubation period lack scientific support for this analysis in their articles,” says a document with frequently asked questions the agency posted on its website yesterday. “This applies, among other things, to an article in [NEJM] that has subsequently proven to contain major flaws and errors.” Even if the patient’s symptoms were unspecific, it wasn’t an asymptomatic infection, says Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto. “Asymptomatic means no symptoms, zero. It means you feel fine. We have to be careful with our words.” Hoelscher agrees that the paper should have been clearer about the origin of the information about the woman’s health. “If I was writing this today, I would phrase that differently,” he says. The need to share information as fast as possible, along with NEJM’s push to publish early, created a lot of pressure, he says. Given how fast data are coming out amid the growing global crisis, it’s good to read even peer-reviewed papers with some extra caution at the moment, Lipsitch says: “I think peer review is lighter in the middle of an epidemic than it is at normal speed, and also the quality of the data going into the papers is necessarily more uncertain.” The fact that the paper got it wrong doesn’t mean transmission from asymptomatic people doesn’t occur. Fauci, for one, still believes it does. "This evening I telephoned one of my colleagues in China who is a highly respected infectious diseases scientist and health official," he says. "He said that he is convinced that there is asymptomatic infection and that some asymptomatic people are transmitting infection." But even if they do, asymptomatic transmission likely plays a minor role in the epidemic overall, WHO says. People who cough or sneeze are more likely to spread the virus, the agency wrote in a situation report on Saturday. “More data may come out soon. We will just have to wait,” Lipsitch says. The German cluster does reveal another interesting aspect about the new virus, Drosten says. So far most attention has gone to patients who get seriously ill, but all four cases in Germany had a very mild infection. That may be true for many more patients, Drosten says, which may help the virus spread. “There is increasingly the sense that patients may just experience mild cold symptoms, while already shedding the virus,” he says. “Those are not symptoms that lead people to stay at home.” https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomatic-patient-transmitting-coronavirus-wrong?fbclid=IwAR1G8-lKhw-AxTmgwe2IE03oi_wdq40OHhTeXkwQ7i_8EOvFM2nR1DWxb1E

Lots of people and organizations have been posting BS from the beginning of this. That was my point.

Yep. There has been lots of bad info coming from almost every direction.

Yep.

Did we know the CV was an issue in late Feb? Of course we did.

None of those countries have had immigration policies similar to Sweden. The majority of deaths in Sweden are very old people and immigrants.

WHO Lauds Lockdown-Ignoring Sweden As a 'Model' For Countries Going Forward The World Health Organization lauded Sweden as a "model" for battling the coronavirus as countries lift lockdowns -- after the nation controversially refused restrictions. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, said Wednesday there are "lessons to be learned" from the Scandinavian nation, which has largely relied on citizens to self-regulate. "I think there's a perception out that Sweden has not put in control measures and just has allowed the disease to spread," Ryan told reporters. "Nothing can be further from the truth." Ryan noted that instead of lockdowns, the country has "put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting people in long-term care facilities." "What it has done differently is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate," Ryan said. "In that sense, they have implemented public policy through that partnership with the population." He said the country also ramped up testing and had adequate capacity in hospitals to handle any outbreaks. "I think if we are to reach a new normal, Sweden represents a model if we wish to get back to a society in which we don't have lockdowns," Ryan said.Last month, more than 2,300 Swedish researchers penned a letter demandin https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/05/01/0456226/who-lauds-lockdown-ignoring-sweden-as-a-model-for-countries-going-forward

Yep. Another great example of socialized medicine at work........

Remember when Trump was called a racist for restricting flights from part of China?

Lets head down to Chinatown for some wanton soup.

Just reaffirms that lockdowns aren't working. The good news is, hospitals are not overwhelmed and our HC system is not on the brink of collapse.

Austria isn't the only other country in Europe. Compare Sweden to France, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, etc. Sweden is doing better than all of those countries and they didn't shutdown their country and cripple their economy in the process.

Hahahahaha

Those are janitor wages at FoMoCo.

How are things in SD Joel? Is your Governor making the right choices for South Dakota IYO?