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Posted
1 hour ago, Jon Letendre said:

Which one, and how do you know?

(1) Not saying,  You could probably figure it out if you went sleuthing.

(2) Was told by one of the organization's top persons.  This was in a conversation at a climate conference in 2010.  The 2011 - and, if it happened, 2012 - contributions hadn't occurred yet, but your source indicates the donor was the same donor.

I'm surprised that Microsoft gave Heartland any money for any reason.

Ellen

Posted
59 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:

Their little cult is a mutual blackmail society, so maybe it is both/and? I am very interested in your thinking on this.

An issue of money.  

Epstein's set up cost a lot of money.  An island, a jet, procurement (of victims) funds, and other expenses.  Where did he get the money?

What I suspect is that he was bankrolled, probably by a "consortium" who basically hired him to provide them with a sex-slave locale, and thus that the money providers held the power over him.  Sure, he could have attempted blackmailing them, but why?  He'd have lost his "business" and rapidly lost his life if he did try to blackmail the money providers.  The blackmailing would have been done with casual guests on whom the providers wanted a hold.

This is just speculation, but it seems to me the plausible way Epstein got going offering his entertainments.  Doesn't seem to me that Bill Gates would have been lured there naively and filmed by hidden camera.  The picture of Gates' activities which is emerging is that of a master planner of much more than his computer business.

Ellen

PS:  I saw some mention of the stuff about Weinstein in a post of yours.  That's all I've seen about it.

  • Like 1
Posted
23 hours ago, Ed Hudgins said:

On Gates, I'd say he rightly understanding that with competing producers of PCs and Moore's law, drop costs, making hardware a commodity and that software would be the value added. He smartly developed Basic, a bunch of other apps and, of course, Windows which he licensed to PC manufacturers and ended up providing over 90% of operating systems by the 1990s. Brilliant! Could anyone ever out-maneuver giant IBM? Sure! All that was Rearden, not Taggart.

But we also had the sanction of the victim. The Clinton admin went after Gates under anti-trust because his Explorer search engine was on the homepage of Windows but it took a couple extra clicks to get to competing search engines, which could be freely run on PCs using Windows. (This was before Google's rise.) A few days after the anti-trust ruling against him, he was in D.C. sitting beside Bill Clinton, the guy who'd just punished him for his success, talking about helping people, blah, blah, blah. 

And, of course, Microsoft missed the smartphone and tablet revolutions because it was too devoted to Windows while Steve Jobs, back at Apple, innovated and tried to get ahead of his own products; the iPods were popular and profitable, but his vision was to bundle that tech into an iPhone with a search engine and emails, making iPods superfluous. Brilliant!

As for the later Gates, he's been bad on a lot of things and, yes, cronyism is a problem across the industry. But you wouldn't have this website and I wouldn't be accessing it or typing these words (on a Windows machine, by the way), without these innovators.

Ed,

I don't want to do a deep dive on Bill Gates, but for the benefit of the OL audience, I do want to give a bit of the other side of this story. And it starts with framing Gates in a manner that anyone can observe if they look instead of presenting a story that frames him as predominantly good or predominantly evil.

I see Gates as one of those weird people who have no middle. He's got a brilliant side that makes him one of the world's greatest benefactors and he's got a dark side that is right up there with the world's greatest villains. To me, he's a figure like Richard Wagner, who wrote some of the world's greatest music, but you would not want to be a Jew around him (unless you were Mendelssohn, and even then... 🙂 ), nor would you ever want to do a financial transaction with him. He was a blatant thief in the most sociopathic way possible. He also wrote Tristan and Isolde while enjoying the hospitality of a man whose wife he was screwing on the side. And on and on.

Gates is like that to me. All extremes, good and bad, and no middle.

The people who tell of his innovations and use the style you did in the quote above, generally leave out his industrial espionage and abuse of the legal system to take out patents of other people's ideas as his own. Yes, even in his early years, he stole ideas and legalized them as his own property. I call that a looter, don't you? 🙂 Granted, he mixed them with his own brilliant insights, but how does that make him not a looter? Just ignoring he was a looter does not make him a man of integrity.

I don't know about you, but I am able to admire Gates's creative productive side and despise his evil side in the same breath. It's not easy because one side always tugs at me to favor it in my judgment, then the other depending on the context. But objectivity demands I look at both equally. And from what I've seen, Gates is pretty close to 50-50 on the role model to monster scale

 

I remember well the anti-trust kerfuffle re Windows and the Internet Explorer during the Clinton administration. I am not a fan of antitrust laws. But I believe in looking at the context and all relevant facts before starting in on the bashing.

The context usually left out is that Gates's was up to his neck in government stuff back then, albeit he wasn't as bad as, say Google's is today (where Google and the Obama administration actually swapped thousands of employees to make sure they would stay aligned). As I said, I don't want to go into all that here, but let's do one example (which is not even the most egregious).

Microsoft supplied the government at all levels with its operating system (DOS, then Windows). Once installed, it then wanted to make the continued use of its operating system contingent on using its own browser. Since taxpayer money was involved in all those big fat government purchases of Microsoft products, changing the rules like that would have been basically holding a huge part of the government's digital information systems hostage. That, in fact, pissed off a lot of government people back then. 

So, to me, the use of the anti-trust laws in this case was not just Goliath bullying a little guy, it was a weird form of checks and balances. (Apropos, I think embedding the idea of checks and balances in America's charter documents was one of the greatest achievements of the Founding Fathers--right up there with their focus on individual rights).

I know I'm giving a different frame than the typical Randian one of blasting all anti-trust suits as evil sight unseen. But to overextend that metaphor, in this case I looked and didn't like what I saw. Sight unseen suddenly didn't cut it anymore.

Gates wasn't fighting to own the product of his own mind back then. Nor was he striving to ennoble the human spirit. He was fighting to sink his claws in the government deep enough to practically own it. And not just to get it out of his way, but to use it to control others. That makes it real hard for me to get enthusiastic these days about defending Gates in that antitrust case. (But to repeat, I hate antitrust laws.)

Don't think I speak as an innocent party, either. Back then, I was right there with the other O-Land people. I remember reading about some high-profile Objectivists or other (I can't remember who right now) talking with Gates and telling him how moral he was, etc., and me posting about it online as if I were witness to the Rapture. 🙂 I also remember Gates brushing these Objectivists off in a noncommittal manner, literally appearing confused about the fuss, and this causing me all kinds of cognitive dissonance.

Now I think differently. I don't think Gates had a clue about what they were talking about. And had he had a clue, I believe he would have told them to stay the hell away from him. I don't think he, inside himself, allows his predator side to mix with his creative side. He's half angel, half devil, and ne're the twain shall meet.

In Washington back then, he was in full predator mode, dancing out in the open with his shadow and wheeling and dealing to cut his enemy's throats in the backrooms. If he could have gotten the courts or Congress to force Netscape turn over all their assets, including intellectual property, to Microsoft for a dollar, nay, pay him damages to boot, he would not have had one second of guilty conscience. He would have rejoiced and then gone around talking about how Microsoft owned Internet browsing from the beginning.

Nope. Nothing Galt-like there at all. I was a dork to go along. 🙂 

 

On the Internet, I think the only reason Gates missed the smartphone and tablet innovations in the beginning was the same reason he missed the browser innovation. It wasn't because he was short-sighted. Or even his industrial spies were incompetent. I think he couldn't figure out a way to monopolize the Internet, which, software-wise, is predominantly open source. (Windows Server has only managed to get a small percentage of the server products market with little chance of improving since the free stuff works so well.) If Gates could have gotten his hands on the Internet backbones and cables back then... (shudder... I don't even want to think about that. 🙂 )

Nowadays, Gates is messing around with anti-aging and so forth, which is great, but he's also got an entire continent of human guinea pigs over in Africa (actually, there are more in India, etc.) to experiment on. If you want to read some horror stories, read about the damage to large numbers of those people in taking risks without their knowledge or against their wills that he has overseen re vaccine research. That's just one area.

I'm not fond of going all Hitler on someone, but since the Nazis did experiment on people against their wills in the concentration camps, the parallels are too close to ignore. So is the phrase, Hitler built great roads.

I hope Gates will not get to that level, but he is well on his way by trying to make farm animal-like branding of human beings mandatory after they get their mandatory vaccines. And don't forget the mandatory nano-particles they will be putting in the mandatory vaccines right over the horizon. This, to me, is the reason to mention Galts's dark side and not gloss it over. Gates is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide, he's Hank Rearden and James Taggart in one, he's sweet poison or bitter-tasting cure depending on the situation, he's a walking talking duality of extreme good and extreme evil.

Bill Gates is not John Galt.

What's worse, he's larger than life as both angel and devil. He makes things happen in a gigantic way. He makes me stand in awe and, at the same time, he scares the shit out of me.

 

On another issue (and this is the penultimate one, I promise 🙂 ), I want to introduce you to Polly. 

I saw you are not friendly to conspiracy theories, but I want to make a small case for the ones coming up from different parts of the grass roots.

After all, we have had a three year conspiracy theory hysterically bombarded on everyone in the mainstream culture about how the Russians elected President Trump. And the people in think tanks (meaning the territories you travel in) still hobnob with mainstream journalists and pundits as if nothing happened.

But if one is truly interested in ideas, I believe it is more than fair to look at ideas coming from other places than these people who prostituted themselves and their professions out in the open and lied to everyone at a scale I have never seen in my life.

I'm not trying to convince you to reject all mainstream news and only look at alt media, although it would be great if you did some of it. But I am mentioning it to highlight that this is exactly the way large swaths of normal Americans think right now.

And I have the proof to back it up. Here's one small indication. When I first started writing this post, the video below by Polly had about 100,000 views and it was posted yesterday. Right now, it has over 113,000 views. That's 13,000 views in only a couple of hours.

People are tuning in. These people vote.

In Polly's case, let me make a small case. Her research is of the highest quality and she presents her sources. She's very careful to say what her speculations are as opposed to what she knows for sure.

On the not-so-good side, she has some alt media downsides, which means her production values, especially in her B-Roll footage, are not very good. She goes for immediate effect without worrying about a consistent style and this gives the video at times a flavor of the small-audience-of-tin-foil-hat people.

Due to the high quality of her research and many of the dots she connects, I would give her a hearing if I were you. If nothing else, just to see what future voters are thinking. (It's up to you though. I know you look down on the conspiracy theory world as a whole.)

 

I don't agree with all of Polly's conclusions, but I can't ignore words stated--in context--coming out of the mouths of the people she shows talking. If you give this video a try, I would be interested in what you think. 

This stuff ain't going away. On the contrary, it's growing. You yourself are now complaining you can't go anywhere without running into conspiracy theories. If you happen to become interested, I will give you some thoughts on what I have learned about conspiracy theories, the history, how they work, why they work, what they actually accomplish, what their epistemological function is, etc. 

Leave it to say, right now, that I believe you hold me in just as high regard as I hold you. So think about this. People like me take Polly seriously. I take her seriously. Based on that, you might want to look and try to think about why. I think you should take her seriously, too, but that's your choice. (Not just her, either.)

I have a slew of reasons, but I don't know if you are receptive.

 

The last point is your article on President Trump. I like it. 🙂 In your day-to-day, I get the impression you breathe among some of the same airs as Republican never-Trumpers. (I'm happy to be wrong if I am, though. 🙂 )

So within that context, I won't even go into the few points where I disagree with you. I'm glad you are in the mindset to write something like that re Trump. As time goes along and you stack up words against deeds, and you look at the same on the other side, I have little doubt your opinion of President Trump will steadily improve.

Well, maybe I do have one quibble. You mentioned the fortunes of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon. I have no problem with that, but I do want to point out that there is a lot of crony corporatism James Taggart money in those companies along with their earned revenues. I think this needs to be mentioned often. If not, it grows. Now that they are all dealing with mass weapons of biology, I hold it's a good idea to keep their monkeyshines out in the open along with praising them for the good things they do.

 

I know I said that was the final point. But I have a personal note. I told Kat I was writing this post to you right now and she smiled. "That's my friend," she said. "Tell him I said hi. I like Ed." 

🙂 

I do, too. 🙂 

You often get criticized for not being radical in your writing, but there is one thing you have always presented that I admire greatly. It's in the picture below:

image.png

What's the thing?

Family.

You don't talk much about it, but you live it. I want you to know there are some of us out here who see you.

(I'm big on looking at what people do, not just what they say.)

After making a holy mess out of several families, I value family enormously. I have such gratitude that I was able to fix this before getting so old and bitter it would have been too late.

Here is what I see when I look at a picture like yours above. You wear your love and commitment to your family openly--with pride. When I look at that, I feel great pleasure, great resonance. I think we need more of this in O-Land.

Rand did plenty idea-wise. She was not a good role-model for family life, though, and I believe it's unfair to make her one. (We all have our own paths.) Worse. It's a recipe for disaster to imitate her on this. I know. I did. Several times. I paid an unnecessary painful price, too.

You are a great role model for family. At least I think so.

Today, I look at you with your family and it makes me smile.

🙂 

Michael

Posted

Gates did a summer internship in D.C. at the recommendation of family friend and politician Brock Adams. Adams quit his US Senatorial re-election campaign after credible rape accusations.

Posted

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you. Just because most conspiracy theories are bunk doesn't mean this one is.

In regard to what is going on today I dunno except it's obvious the inmates have taken over the asylum. I'm talking about the left, now that its intellectual leaders are dead and gone. The political leaders too. Albeit it was always a madhouse though sublimated. The left in media and academia exist on feelings and inertia. The great universities are now a joke only capable of turning out "great" journalists who inhabit great MSN asking stupid and pejorative questions out of the moral hubris of being right as America and Americans are led to the guillotine for the crime of intolerable opposition.

--Brant

Posted
1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you. Just because most conspiracy theories are bunk doesn't mean this one is.

In regard to what is going on today I dunno except it's obvious the inmates have taken over the asylum. I'm talking about the left, now that its intellectual leaders are dead and gone. The political leaders too. Albeit it was always a madhouse though sublimated. The left in media and academia exist on feelings and inertia. The great universities are now a joke only capable of turning out "great" journalists who inhabit great MSN asking stupid and pejorative questions out of the moral hubris of being right as America and Americans are led to the guillotine for the crime of intolerable opposition.

--Brant

So many factors go into the "death equation." Obese? Male? Diabetes? Taking an ACE inhibitor for blood pressure? Underlying conditions? Just don't get infected. Once again we had an instacart delivery from ACME of groceries today for about 12 bucks plus tip. I had a salad with new greens, Catalina dressing, cranberry pieces, bacon pieces,  and it was sooo good. Then a home made hamburger. Burp. 

Posted
22 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Bill Gates is not John Galt.

If I were to pick a Rand character as a comparison piece for Bill Gates - which I wouldn't have thought of doing except for this thread - I'd pick Toohey.  Only I don't think that Gates is out to "collect souls."  I think that he's after a technocrat's paradise in behavioral terms, with him and confreres running the operating system, so to speak.  And that he wouldn't favor longevity for any of us.  We'd be in the "eliminate 'em" category.

Ellen

Posted
3 hours ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

If I were to pick a Rand character as a comparison piece for Bill Gates - which I wouldn't have thought of doing except for this thread - I'd pick Toohey.  Only I don't think that Gates is out to "collect souls."  I think that he's after a technocrat's paradise in behavioral terms, with him and confreres running the operating system, so to speak.  And that he wouldn't favor longevity for any of us.  We'd be in the "eliminate 'em" category.

Ellen

I'd personally say Robert Stadler, for being a once-admired scientist/ entrepreneur (Dagny once admired Stadler the way many Objectivists admired Gates), but who turned to the dark side...

Posted
4 hours ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

If I were to pick a Rand character as a comparison piece for Bill Gates - which I wouldn't have thought of doing except for this thread - I'd pick Toohey.  Only I don't think that Gates is out to "collect souls."  I think that he's after a technocrat's paradise in behavioral terms, with him and confreres running the operating system, so to speak.  And that he wouldn't favor longevity for any of us.  We'd be in the "eliminate 'em" category.

Ellen

Floyd Ferris?

--Brant

a vague memory

 

Posted
4 hours ago, jts said:

Can someone provide a list of dirty deeds Bill Gates did that qualifies him as a bad guy?

 

Jerry,

I will have to look. Obviously, the search engines are almost worthless since Gates is a darling to the owners. But stuff is out there. (Search for Robert F. Kennedy and Gates or India and Gates for easy lists if you can find something that makes sense in the search results.)

But we can start by Gates being a major funder of the WHO. From what I read or heard online somewhere, first place donor to WHO is the US. Second place is Gates. This is out of the whole world.

I'll see if I can dig up a few credible sources with articles or reports.

Michael

Posted
1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jerry,

I will have to look. Obviously, the search engines are almost worthless since Gates is a darling to the owners. But stuff is out there. (Search for Robert F. Kennedy and Gates or India and Gates for easy lists if you can find something that makes sense in the search results.)

But we can start by Gates being a major funder of the WHO. From what I read or heard online somewhere, first place donor to WHO is the US. Second place is Gates. This is out of the whole world.

I'll see if I can dig up a few credible sources with articles or reports.

Michael

This may be a start of the list.

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.en.html

 

Posted
On April 25, 2020 at 1:35 PM, ThatGuy said:

I'd personally say Robert Stadler, for being a once-admired scientist/ entrepreneur (Dagny once admired Stadler the way many Objectivists admired Gates), but who turned to the dark side...

Stadler was looking the other way from the Institute's doings.  He compromised both scientific and moral standards to be left alone to pursue his research.

Gates was devising Microsoft's business practices.  No "looking the other way" there.

19 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I don't recall Rand ever creating a villain based on the narcissistic moonmaniacal mad scientist archetype, but that, to me, is Bill Gates.

Lex Luther anyone?

Agreed, Rand doesn't offer the mad scientist archetype.  Which is why I said "If I were to pick a Rand character as a comparison piece for Bill Gates - which I wouldn't have thought of doing except for this thread [...]."  The mad scientist archetype is the obvious choice, but it isn't available as a pick from Rand's character list.

21 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Floyd Ferris?

--Brant

a vague memory

 

Ferris compares in some respects.  He was an administrator, and very skilled at getting government favoritism.  Another, and significant, parallel I'll get to in a minute.  First the negative side of a Gates/Ferris comparison:  Ferris was a scientific hack himself, no genius for science.  He was not an innovator.

Now the significant comparison - the lethal project.  Ferris oversaw the clandestine Project X.

I think that Gates was instrumental, both as monetary and planning contributor, in what I'll call "Project Disease X," by which I mean the development of a virus to do some population thinning (especially of the elderly) and produce world-wide havoc. 

My belief is that the COVID-19 virus was deliberately bred - not "made in a lab," as in spliced (virologists who I'm pretty sure are honest have firmly negatived the idea that the virus was "made" by splicing), but deliberately sought after nonetheless via "virus breeding" (like animal breeding to get certain desired results).

Yes, Gates is in favor of universal vaccines, and, yes, he talks of age extension.  But he's also keen on population reduction, and I think that the Chinese government and WHO and he were seeking a coronavirus that would have the results that COVID-19 has been having.

If I'm right, this makes Gates a really poor choice of "admirable" counter-foil to  Ezekiel Emanuel

Ellen

Posted
5 minutes ago, Ellen Stuttle said:
On 4/25/2020 at 1:35 PM, ThatGuy said:

I'd personally say Robert Stadler, for being a once-admired scientist/ entrepreneur (Dagny once admired Stadler the way many Objectivists admired Gates), but who turned to the dark side...

Stadler was looking the other way from the Institute's doings.  He compromised both scientific and moral standards to be left alone to pursue his research.

Gates was devising Microsoft's business practices.  No "looking the other way" there.

Well, if you want to be >technical< about it, sure...😋
(I was making a broad generalization limited to comparing Dagny's admiration to the O'ist admiration for Gates , but yours is a good point, too.)

"History doesn't repeat, but it does often rhyme..."

Posted
7 minutes ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

Now the significant comparison - the lethal project.  Ferris oversaw the clandestine Project X.

I think that Gates was instrumental, both as monetary and planning contributor, in what I'll call "Project Disease X," by which I mean the development of a virus to do some population thinning (especially of the elderly) and produce world-wide havoc. 

Ferris would have been my second choice; good call.

Posted
On 4/25/2020 at 5:59 PM, jts said:

Can someone provide a list of dirty deeds Bill Gates did that qualifies him as a bad guy?

Jerry,

How about this one?

The idiots are trying to put that gasoline back in the pump, but it whooshed all over everything. Including people who are smoking.

The Internet is going crazy right now, but I didn't see anyone criticize the following yet.

Take a look at the vocal emphasis Gates put on the following words:

Quote

... get that vaccine...

It's almost like he was selling Windows back in the early days.

But big-picture-wise, Bill Gates just basically told the whole world to sit down and shut up until he can get his vaccine in place. If you want to talk about his vaccine, OK. But if you want to talk about anything else, especially if you want to say negative things about China, then sit down and shut up. You're too stupid to talk.

He didn't say anything about money and power, but that's his focus. As for us, hell, we're his livestock and lab rats. That's why he's in bed with authoritarians. To keep us unruly human suckers in line. He doesn't talk about his money and power with livestock and lab rats.

That's what I just heard Bill Gates say. That's what the entire world just heard.

So now, apologists for the elitists. Try and fix that if you can.

You can't.

This one is not like a rock thrown into a pond with the ripples going on and on. This one is like an under-the-ocean earthquake that will prompt a tidal wave of shit on the heads of the elitists.

For people like me, this is going to get fun.

🙂 

Michael

  • Like 1
  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

Poor thing is so upset that he can't whine about me without me answering. It's just so, so unfair to the delicate little creature.

You never did take me up on this. I looked and couldn't find any but I still want to give you a chance -- have you ever posted anything whatsoever that could even remotely be described as intellectual or even about ideas?

Posted
1 hour ago, Jon Letendre said:

Poor thing is so upset that he can't whine about me without me answering. It's just so, so unfair to the delicate little creature.

You never did take me up on this. I looked and couldn't find any but I still want to give you a chance -- have you ever posted anything whatsoever that could even remotely be described as intellectual or even about ideas?

Let’s just agree to disagree, and yes I have if you dig a little deeper over at RoR.

Posted

You have, over at some other website. I see.

You have never made any contribution here whatsoever, even before I was posting regularly. You haven't because you can't. Losers like you always look for something else to blame.

Posted

Well if you would like to talk about why a superimposed technique is a preferred method of radiographic inspection than an elliptical technique I’m game.  Or perhaps the merits of using a smaller focal size diagonal to achieve better IQI sensitivity at closer source to film distances and why certain finer grain films won’t actually give you the sensitivity and latitude you may desire..well I’ll be all ears.

Ooh wait.  By your own standard of judgement you would disqualify yourself as being a loser...

Nice try.

If you actually post something worth discussing to me, and actually talk without biting heads off I may be interested.  
  You can’t even have a conversation with Ed without slamming him so why would I?

Ed is a good man.  I enjoy reading his articles.

I messed up by evennnn saying anything here I guess.  Sorry Michael, sorry Ed.

Back to the dunce corner I go.

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