Jacob Levitch parses a Bill Gates and Google discussion of using AI in Health Care


‘Bill Gates talked with Google employees about using A.I. to analyze ultrasound images of unborn children’,
Mar 18 2019, cnbc.com

“Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, says he talked to Google researchers on Monday about the application of artificial-intelligence technology in health care.

The intersection of AI and health care is a longtime area of interest for Google. Researchers there have explored the use of AI algorithms for making predictions based on medical records. And Verily, another subsidiary of Alphabet alongside Google, is solely focused on health care.”

The author praises Microsoft and Google for being such arch-competitors in cloud computing, artificial intelligence research,  and other areas, yet the visit is a great example of how Bill’s broad interest in technology trumps Microsoft’s long history of rivals with other companies.  Ain’t he a peach?

Bill had apparently brought up the visit spontaneously after a person in the audience at the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Symposium at Stanford University in California, held near Google’s Mountain View headquarters, and had asked him about how to ensure that AI will operate ethically.

“Gates talked about the use of AI in weapons systems and autonomous vehicles before arriving at the subject of health care.

In the medical field, you know, we just don’t have doctors. Most people are born and die in Africa without coming near to a doctor,” said Gates, who is co-chair of the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which concerns itself with improving global health among other things.”

wd here: I seriously loved ‘…among other things’.

We’re doing a lot of work with analyzing ultrasound, and we can do things like sex-blind the output, because we’re not having anybody actually see the image. We can tell you what’s going on without revealing the gender, which is, of course — when you do that, it drives gendercide. And yet, we’re doing the analysis, the medical understanding, in a much deeper way, and that’s an example where it’s all done with a lot of machine learning.”

“I was meeting with the guys at Google who are helping us with this this morning, and there’s some incredible promise in that field, where, in the primary health-care system, the amount of sophistication to do diagnosis and understand, for example, ‘Is this a high-risk pregnancy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Let’s escalate that person to go to the hospital level,’ even though you couldn’t afford to do that on a widespread basis. So this stuff is going to be very domain-specific.”

Ah yes, and they quote Bill saying that when he’d started Microsoft, he’d written to his parental units lamenting the fact that he’d miss out on a bunch of breakthroughs in AI, but ‘oh well,’ but as it turned out he hadn’t missed much over those twenty years, but now, a lot of amazing stuff’s going on the field, and his company is large enough that he and Google and others, they can participate in it!

Google apparently hadn’t responded to a request for comment on Gates’ visit.  Too busy spying and directing the choir, I reckon.

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Bill Gates is conferring with Google about using artificial intelligence to provide healthcare in poor countries. This will be used as a pretext for dismantling any primary care programs that are still offered provided by national health systems.”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Pressing AI “healthcare” on the Global South will presumably work much like the pharmaceutical imperialism sponsored by Gates and Big Pharma. National health ministries will be pressured to spend their health budgets on high-tech gadgets instead of doctors.”

@cordeliers  “While it is true that decades of Gates-fuelled medical imperialism have severely harmed the highly effective primary care programs that were once the centerpiece of Global South health programs, Gates is lying when he says that “we just don’t have doctors.”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Africa has 100s of 1000s of healthcare workers. There would be more but for the brutal neoliberal policies imposed on Africa by Western capitalists like Gates. Instead of advocating for increasing the numbers of healthcare workers, he erases them.”

@cordeliers Apr 3 “Gates pretends African doctors don’t exist because he wants to replace them with hi-tech gadgets and systems that will make big money for Google and similar firms.”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “And of course, there’s a hidden agenda – surveillance. The AI envisioned by Gates and Goggle will gather, store, and analyze extremely private medical data for God knows what nefarious purposes.

@cordeliers  “Note that Gates is particularly excited about the ability to decide whether or not poor people will get to see ultrasound results. By selectively concealing medical information, Gates claims he will have the power to prevent “gendercide.”

@cordeliers  “Would you want Google and Gates to know your entire medical history, and to decide whether or not to let you have access to it?”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Would you want an AI to diagnose your condition and prescribe treatment? To decide how much and what type of treatment you deserve? And, inevitably, to create categories of people who won’t get medical care of any kind?

@cordeliers Apr 4  “To clarify, this is about denying women information they need in making decisions about abortion, supposedly on grounds of preventing “gendercide.” The right of any woman to choose abortion should be unquestionable, and her reasons for doing so are no business of Bill Gates.”

You may remember that once upon a time, Bill’s wife Mellie had lamented those poor, poor, African women, carrying one babby, and dragging a couple more by the hand, all the while balancing a giant basket of goods on the top of her head, and Bill went to making sure that African women could be injected with (hackable) birth control computer chips that they could program with off and on chips at will, as well as other forms of birth control (some questionable as to safety).  Giving women the choice to live in poverty or yanno…not.

From the Billy and Mellie Philantrocapitaist Foundation on Family Planning ‘What we do’:

“our goal:  to bring access to high-quality contraceptive information, and supplies to an additional 120 million women and girls in the poorest countries by 2020 without coercion or discrimination, with the longer-term goal of universal access to voluntary family planning.”

But as we know, Bill Gates; bigoted eugenicism for is quite well known among the less gullible; stick those two terms into a duck-duck or bing search  engine, see what pops.  For instance:

‘The awful truth re: Bill Gates and eugenics’, Mark Crispin Miller at his home website, Jan. 14, 2019  It’s very long, but he opens:

“About a month ago, I noted that, if you search “India polio cases Gates” on DuckDuckGo, you find broad coverage of the Gates’ catastrophic polio vaccine campaign in India,resulting in the deaths or paralysis of 47,500 people; whereas, if you search those same terms on Google, you get two pieces on that “mishap,” buried in the midstof many paeans to the program, most of them from Gates himself or his p.r. machine—”India Records One Year Without Polio Cases” (from the Gates Foundation); “‘Ending polio in India is the world’s greatest health achievement,’ says Bill Gates” (from theTelegraph); “The Secret To Polio Eradication In India” (from Forbes), and on and on and

Since propaganda largely works by telling us what we prefer to hear, the probable effect of that first page of Google search results was to wash away those two discordant headlines, casting them as cranky deviations from the happy (fake) consensus that the Gates campaign was (a) benign and (b) a great humanitarian success. The only readers likely to think otherwise would be those few who know enough already not to swallow that “consensus,” presuming that those two “eccentric” pieces can’t be true.

I called that item, “Google is a propaganda tool for Bill Gates and Big Pharma (among other evils),” which you may find here: https://bit.ly/2Uk9zPq   Thus it was primarily a piece on thought control, and only tacitly about what Gates had really done in India, and why—as to which, a friend has passed along Jean Perior’s new essay in New Eastern Outlook, on the eugenics program that Bill Gates bluntly advocated not so long ago, and that other, larger players have been pursuing aggressively for decades, all over the world.”

Some of you may remember Jacob Levitch’s ‘‘The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation’, March 2018  (café version, c99% version)

His section III on Gates and Big Pharma, “Guinea pigs for the drugmakers” is both illuminating and disgusting, but…

“Behind BMGF’s coordinated interventions in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, population control, and other putatively philanthropic concerns lies a broader agenda. In a recent interview Bill Gates briefly strayed off-message to warn of “huge population growth in places where we don’t want it, like Yemen and Pakistan and parts of Africa.77 His use of the majestic plural here is revealing: in spite of much rhetoric about “empowering poor people,” the Foundation is fundamentally concerned with reshaping societies in the context of ruling-class imperatives.“In a 2010 public lecture, Bill Gates attributed global warming to “overpopulation” and touted zero population growth as a solution achievable “[i]f we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, and reproductive health services.”

The argument is disingenuous: As Gates certainly knows, the poor people who are the targets of his campaigns are responsible for no more than a tiny percentage of the environmental damage that underlies climate change. The economist Utsa Patnaik has demonstrated that when population figures are adjusted to account for actual per capita demand on resources, e.g., fossil fuels and food, the greatest “real population pressure” emanates not from India or Africa, but from the advanced countries.95 The Gates Foundation is well aware of this imbalance and works not to redress it but to preserve it – by blaming poverty not on imperialism but on unrestrained sexual reproduction “in places where we don’t want it.”

From Malthus to the present day, the myth of overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as it appropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth.  As argued in Aspects No. 55, “Malthus’s heirs continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead focus on reducing the number of people.”96 In recent years BMGF’s publicity apparatus, exploiting Western alarm about “climate change,” has helped create a resurgence of the overpopulation hysteria last experienced during the 1970s in the wake of Paul Erlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb.”

Also see John Steppling’s related April piece at Znet: ‘Population Bomb or Bomb the Population?’, April 4, 2019
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution”.

– Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

“Ending Militarism. Militarism in all its forms, from the prison-industrial complex to wars of occupation, is one of the most powerful obstacles to the achievement of reproductive, environmental and climate justice. Ending militarism is a point where our struggles can and should converge, where there are multiple overlaps. The list is long: Military toxins damage the environment and harm reproductive health. Militarism increases violence against women, racism and anti-immigration activities. Militarism robs resources from other social and environmental needs. War destroys ecosystems, livelihoods, and health and sanitation infrastructure. It is the biggest threat of all to sustainable social reproduction.”

– Betsy Hartmann and Elizabeth Barajas-Román, The Population Bomb is Back with a Global Warming Twist

 “Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit”

~ Eli Khamarov

Geli Korzhev, the Triumphators

Bill loves him some genocidaire Paul Kagame, too:

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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Pricknick's picture

As an RN, this strikes me in profound ways. None of them good.
I just don't know where to start.
Thank you wendy for the bummer of the day. I mean that in a nice way as this info needs to go viral.
Disgusting.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

wendy davis's picture

@Pricknick

i need to surrender my Panglossians R Us t-shirt?

but srsly, thanks for saying this info needs to range wide. cool you're an RN as well and that it's punch affects you personally. a few Qs if i may: i) what is a pricknick, and ii) what flower is that?, and iii) could you explain about alligator ed showing up?

thanks for reading it all as well.

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Pricknick's picture

@wendy davis

i) what i a pricknick, and ii) what flower is that?, and iii) could you explain about alligator ed showing up?

i a a pricknick. Old story. Known as a fixer. Known as a prick.
Eastern redbud.
AE be a medical pro or con.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

wendy davis's picture

@Pricknick

term before, seriously. you mean a redbud tree flower? we had them in northern ohio where i grew up; dreamy things.

alligator ed: medical pro or con i don't grasp, but if he shows up...maybe he'll define it for me/us. ; )

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"GENOCIDE GENOCIDE GENOCIDE" arguments against trying to give women outside the wealthy neighbors control over their fertility.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

wendy davis's picture

@UntimelyRippd

taking your meaning, but detractors are welcome; thanks for reading.

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@wendy davis
a. i think that women everywhere are better off if they can control their fertility, and protests that this is condescending colonialist bigotry are weak sauce.
b. hating the policies because you hate the guy funding them is a quintessential ad hominem argument.

furthermore, while it's perfectly true that 10 or 15% of the world's population are largely responsible for current patterns of egregious overconsumption, that doesn't mean the other 85 to 90% of the world's population have a hope in hell of ever living above marginal subsistence. the overconsumption has already happened. we cannot sustain a global population of 8 billion in anything resembling comfort and dignity; with climate disruption in the mix we can already look forward to mass starvation of billions of people.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

wendy davis's picture

@UntimelyRippd

of your expanded thoughts than why you were yelling 'genocide' three times. now gates had used 'gendrecide' (in this case not letting women whose sonograms to see the gender) might result in her terminating a pregnancy of one gender or another, and i assume he/they are thinking: female.

when i'd used the term genocide, as in 'genocidaire paul kagame', i'd thought to refer any of the curious to ann garrison, who's written on the rwanda genocide extensively. how hand it was then for this to come in on the popular resistance newsletter this a.m.: 'Commemorating the Rwandan Genocide: A Senate Resolution in Praise of Blood', Ann Garrison, BAR contributor, 03 Apr 2019

at the bottom of the page are many simpler versions of her analyses and historical narratives.

i can buy that women in general are better off if they have the ability to control their fertility, but it's not up to the Great White Saviors like gates to coerce them into it with darling jungles as above (read his text), nor with unproven devices and products, imo.

now it's possible that in levitch's long versions of his exposés on gates that he uses the word, but as he's a careful writer, i think he just lets the facts speak for themselves. in his 'real agenda of the gates foundation' 2018 i've linked to, you might want to take a gander at more of his section on 'Gates and Big Pharma, “Guinea pigs for the drugmakers”, as end runs to more lengthy safety trials for bigPharma, but all of would be worthy of reading.

as far as this contention of yours: "b. hating the policies because you hate the guy funding them is a quintessential ad hominem argument.", i call call bullshit. my particular loathing of the man is absolutely tied to his 'policies' ans his 'investments' that have fucked up the planet's biosphere, surface, and people's health immeasurably, say in terms of his help biowrecking african agriculture by GMO seeds, requiring pesticides and herbicides, etc. as long ago as 2012.

i'm pretty sure that cordeliers had noted earlier that since gates began his philanthropic foundation in 2006...his fortune has trebled in size, now at over $100 billion (i just bingled for it). what does that say to you?

as to your final paragraph, that would require a book of an answer, but the short one is that eco-socialists posit that there is actually plenty of food on the planet, it's just that some get more of it than others, i.e., by rule of capital. potable water now? that's a whole 'nother issue.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

Bill & Mel are. They’re more dangerous than any right-wing social engineeing wannabe ever was. And his ‘reputation’ for being such an innovator has always been particularly galling. What Bill does is steal someone else’s ideas and hires people to improve on them. Now he’s only trying to use AI to more efficiently weed out the ‘useless eaters’. And he’s got tons of talent working on it. All he’s doing is automating the process. The idea has been around since forever.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

wendy davis's picture

@Amanda Matthews

kleptocrat, i agree. isn't the legend that he'd appropriated apple-dude's GUI (graphic user interface)? ah: Jobs.

but he's such a brilliant con man that he has his own section at the guardian, although you have to look harder lately to discover who funds it:

"This website is funded by support provided, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The journalism and other content is editorially independent and its purpose is to focus on global development" which is the name of the tab, usually six or eight stories at a time. let's see, two of today's are:

UN urged to declare full-scale crisis in Venezuela as health system 'collapses', Researchers warn of rise in infectious diseases amid spike in levels of malnutrition and infant and maternal mortality

'Paul Kagame orders release of women and girls jailed over abortion in Rwanda; Women’s rights activists welcome presidential pardon of 367 female prisoners as evidence of progress'

good golly miss molly! but yes, the gates foundation's war on the fertility of sub-saharan africans, east indians, maybe chinese is abominable.

sleep well tonight, amanda.

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wendy davis's picture

for the night; day for me starts before first light. i know a lot of us are thinking of julian's danger, and chelsea's as well. the live stream in from of the embassy has been showing that all the signs, tents, and 'no expulsion' lights have been removed. the metro police have an apt. across the street from the front door, and the media are gone.

telesur english has a few extra bits in this: 'UN Torture Expert Urges Ecuador Not to Expel Assange'

so as i had last night, i'll send this to both of them with love...from all of us. g'nght.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbZzAw7Q2ww]

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Big Al's picture

Eugenics. Like this one.

Snopes addresses the issue of whether the Gates' and others are using vaccines to depopulate the world. Snopes claims it's false and includes this from them:

Melinda: Saving children’s lives is the goal that launched our global work. It’s an end in itself. But then we learned it has all these other benefits as well. If parents believe their children will survive—and if they have the power to time and space their pregnancies—they choose to have fewer children.

Bill: When a mother can choose how many children to have, her children are healthier, they’re better nourished, their mental capacities are higher—and parents have more time and money to spend on each child’s health and schooling. That’s how families and countries get out of poverty. This link between saving lives, a lower birthrate, and ending poverty was the most important early lesson Melinda and I learned about global health.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-gates-vaccinations-depopulation/

So apparently they believe that the poor people in Africa have more children because they feel they need to account for some of them dying off and if they can prevent children from dying off then the poor people in Africa would have less children because they wouldn't have to account for some of their kids dying off.

It's hard for me to believe someone could be that fucking evil, i.e., to say their goal is to save children but in reality it's to kill them. But, and considering Gates' father and the surreal existence they're ensconced in as among the very richest people that ever lived, it's not unreasonable to believe they're whacked out people.

To simply say distrusting their agenda just because one doesn't like them is an ad hominem is like saying the same thing about Trump. They're all fucking billionaires and I think history has shown us that the very rich, with few exceptions, cannot be trusted with the well being of the masses. Distrust should be the first reaction and maintained until proven otherwise.

Thanks for the essay wd.

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wendy davis's picture

@Big Al

the links; a lot of those items were in john steppling's essay, and i'll bring a snatch or two after his long narratives on population bombers and white supremacy:

"And as Murray Bookchin pointed out (The Population Myth, 2010) …

'The importance of viewing demography in social terms becomes even more apparent when we ask: would the grow-or-die economy called capitalism really cease to plunder the planet even if the world’s population were reduced to a tenth of its present numbers? Would lumber companies, mining concerns, oil cartels, and agribusiness render redwood and Douglas fir forests safer for grizzly bears if — given capitalism’s need to accumulate and produce for their own sake — California’s population were reduced to one million people?

The answer to these questions is a categorical no. Vast bison herds were exterminated on the westem plains long before the plains were settled by farmers or used extensively by ranchers — indeed, when the American population barely exceeded some sixty million people. These great herds were not crowded out by human settlements, least of all by excessive population. We have yet to answer what constitutes the “carrying capacity” of the planet, just as we lack any certainty, given the present predatory economy, of what constitutes a strictly numerical balance between reduced human numbers and a given ecological area.'

"One of the problems today, when one tries to argue with the advocates of the Green New Deal, or with other population bombers (Chris Hedges is one, David Attenbourgh is one, and so is Bono) is that for Western whites, especially for citizens of the U.S., there is an almost uncanny pull in these draconian race purity proposals- and maybe that is the Puritan legacy, or maybe Manifest Destiny. But the U.S. has been waging war against the third world for sixty years or eighty, depending on how you count. Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Rwanda, Uganda, Zaire, and on and on and on. Of course there were at least two white nations destroyed, the former Yugoslavia, and more recently Ukraine. But the drive is both anti communist AND racist. It is colonial and in part its useful to see how Israel is the perfect reflection of American values, only without as much pretense. Most US politicians would love to be able to say what Israeli politicians do. Admiration for fascism, suggestions for genocide and ethnic cleansing. Israel is the American ruling class with the mask torn off.

'Viewed from a distance of two decades later, the predictions made by many neo-Malthusians seem almost insanely ridiculous. We were warned, often in the mass media, that by the 1980s, for example, artificial islands in the oceans would be needed to accommodate the growing population densities on the continents. Our oil supplies, we were told with supreme certainty, would be completely depleted by the end of the century. Wars between starving peoples would ravage the planet, each nation seeking to plunder the hidden food stores of the others. By the late seventies, this “debate” took a welcome breather — but it has returned again in full bloom in the biological verbiage of ecology. Given the hysteria and the exaggerated “predictions” of earlier such “debates,” the tone today is a little calmer. But in some respects it is even more sinister.{ } But the most sinister feature about neo-Malthusianism is the extent to which it actively deflects us from dealing with the social origins of our ecological problems — indeed, the extent to which it places the blame for them on the victims of hunger rather than those who victimize them.”

– Murray Bookchin, The Population Myth, 2010

i'd thought he'd included the prevailing notion that dark people imply can't have enough sex, or close to that.

but still, i looked at jacob's gates exposé and the one at the bottom about gates in india, and it was 2 long 2 read just now, what i did remember was the horrors of his vaccination program in india. i looked and found this, but iirc, there was even more to the story: 'India Holds Bill Gates Accountable For His Vaccine Crimes', 2014, vactruth.com

"As Bill Gates faces a lawsuit for the illegal testing of tribal children in India, it appears that his crimes against humanity have finally caught up with him.

A recent report published by Health Impact News has reported that the Gates Foundation has found itself facing a pending lawsuit, due to an investigation that is being carried out by the Supreme Courts of India." [snip]

Young Tribal Girls Tested With HPV Vaccines

The Economic Times India published their report August 2014. They stated that in 2009, tests had been carried out on 16,000 tribal school children in Andhra Pradesh, India, using the human papiloma virus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil.

According to the report written by KP Narayana Kumar, within a month of receiving the vaccine, many of the children fell ill and by 2010, five of them had died. A further two children were reported to have died in Vadodara, Gujarat, where an estimated 14,000 tribal children were vaccinated with another brand of the HPV vaccine, Cervarix, manufactured by GlaxoSmitheKline (GSK)." and so on.

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I disagree with Detroit. If you hate the man, his proposals are usually worthy of hate too. If people like Bill Gates paid their fair share of taxes, they wouldn't have all this money to buy influence into things they know absolutely nothing about.

Now that he's fucked over Ed., off Gates goes to fuck over health care. Breaking up and taxing monopolies like Google, FB, MS, and other bloodsucking vultures is a good reason to support Warren.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

wendy davis's picture

@dkmich

gates funded 'low-cost private education' in india, too. hazy memory as always, but it may have been via 'no classrooms', i.e. technology learning. i'm too lazy to even look it up, nor does it matter by now, but yes to: 'Waiting for Superman'.

i dunno if gates is a tax scofflaw or not, although if not (perhaps by way of ther fundation and its 'philanthropic' endeavors), it hardly matters. capitalism exists to make more capital, and in most cases, a huuuuge fortune reproduces itself like magic with partner orgs, 'investments', power to create any meme it likes to create organizations based on its credo like 'global health care', etc.

we read people not what some epic billionaires like gates or bezos could do with their ungawdly fortunes, but let's pretend for a minute he's down with this proverb:

Give a man a fish, feed him today. But teach a man to fish...he can feed himself forevermore.'

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wendy davis's picture

Untimely Ripped that i'd give gates credit where credit due for constructing the svalbard doomsday seed vault in norway , and then chuckle as william engdahl had, as in: 'ah, what to gates, monsanto and cargill know that the most of rest of the world, and had quoted kissingers 'he who controls that food supply...", etc.

but when i looked into my own scant coverage of it, i ran into ‘Vandana Shiva: The Great Seed Piracy’ by Vandana Shiva, 21 June 2016 9a few outtakes):

"A great seed and biodiversity piracy is underway and it must be stopped. The privateers of today include not just the corporations — which are becoming fewer and larger through mergers — but also individuals like Bill Gates, the “richest man in the world”.

When the Green Revolution was pushed in India and Mexico, farmers’ seeds were “rounded-up” and locked in international institutions, which used these seeds to breed green revolution varieties which responded to chemical inputs. The first two institutions were the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico. These institutes took diversity from farmers’ fields and replaced the diversity with chemical monocultures of rice, wheat and corn."

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the new World Bank when it comes to using finances to influence policies in agriculture. The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system — and through its funding, it is accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through intellectual property laws and seed regulations. Control over the seeds of the world for “one agriculture” is Mr Gates’ target!

Since 2003, CGIAR centres have received more than $720 million from Mr Gates.

Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Mr Gates (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the “doomsday vault”.

Mr Gates is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks. DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity."

"Mr Gates is also investing in a one-year-old experimental genetic engineering tool for gene editing, CRISPR-Cas9, through a new front corporation EditasMedicine. While the technology itself is immature and inaccurate, it is a gold rush for new patents. The language of “gene editing” and “educated guesses” is creeping into scientific discourse. Piracy of common genomic data of millions of plants bred by peasants is termed “big data”. But big data is not knowledge, it is not even information. It is data, privateered.

Seeds are not just germ plasm. They are living. They are intelligent. They are beings and subjects of evolution, history, culture and relationships."

well, there's a lot more of course, but Pfffft on Mr. Monsanto Gates.

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@wendy davis
Collecting seed samples and banking them does not constitute "taking control" of them from farmers or anybody else.

CGIAR's mission and stated policy explicitly aims to limit exclusive restraints on IP developed through their research institutions. Maybe that's fraudulent and a smokescreen, but it's going to take a lot more to convince me than just angry accusations of people getting their hate on for anything that somebody white and/or rich might be trying to do.

DivSeek doesn't "take patents on" seed collections, via genomic mapping or anything else. DivSeek is an organization that is trying to create, and facilitate the promulgation of, standards and systems that allow researchers everywhere to share their agricultural data. That's it -- the whole story.

BTW, while there are still some pretty ridiculous DNA-related patents being issued, it's effectively impossible to patent the DNA of any particular organism unless you engineered it yourself. Nobody will own the rights to some particular already-extant seed -- though what they quite likely will own (and I do NOT approve) is the right to insert some particular gene into some other genome, especially for some particular purpose. Even those patents are becoming more difficult to write and justify, though.

Gates is a techno-twit: He believes all of humanity's problems can be solved by the cunning application of technology. So he spends his money trying to solve humanity's problems by applying technology. That doesn't make him a nefarious colonialist, though it does, in my view, make him a bit of a dumbass. Your earlier response asserts that eco-socialists claim there's enough food to go around. Well, there isn't, not in the long run -- and the only reason there's been enough so far is because of techno-twits spreading their solutions far and wide across the globe. You're going to have to choose one or the other: Either embrace techno-twittery to produce lots more food, or embrace techno-twittery to reduce the long-term population reduction, because there is no other route to avoid starvation of billions and the complete resource depletion of the planet. Gates appears to be embracing both. That doesn't make him my hero -- I've never liked him -- but it also doesn't make him Satan incarnate, determined to enslave and dominate everybody everywhere.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

wendy davis's picture

@wendy davis .come to such a conclusion, i can't help you out, so 'scuse me while i kiss the sky...

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJunCsrhJjg]

hope he lets you have some seeds in the vault...after the apocalypse. ; )

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@wendy davis
without any actual supporting evidence.

so i went off and investigated those two organizations. for at least one of them, one of the accusations turned out to be straight up nonsense -- actually, to be blunt, a lie: DivSeek isn't "taking patents", or doing any kind of genomic research of any kind. any/all other accusations about the nefarious intents of the actors were in direct contradiction to what the organizations claim about both their abstract missions, their somewhat less abstract goals, and the specifics of their activities. yes, maybe they're just lying, but i'm not going to assume that's true based on the say-so of some random rhetorical bomb-thrower.

beyond all of which, my biggest problem is this: I don't think there is anything that Bill Gates could do with his money that you wouldn't object to by constructing a maleficent motivation for. efforts to give african women control of their fertility transform in to efforts to steal their fertility from them -- which, BTW, is what motivated the "GENOCIDE GENOCIDE GENOCIDE" bit in my original comment: For decades now, right wing douchebags have recruited firebrand african american activists to oppose programs like Planned Parenthood by referring (with the usual suite of lies and distortions) all the way back to Sanger herself, insisting that contraception (and especially abortion) are really just a holocaust carried out by white so-called liberals against african americans, in an explicit plot to exterminate them. As if such a thing could ever happen. This is the sort of inane leftish goofery that informs and inspires the excesses of the SJW movements. Neither African Africans nor African Americans nor any other African diasporants are ever going to be exterminated by programs offering fertility control (or anything else that doesn't exterminate pretty much everybody else as well), and only the lowest-wattage of bulbs could somehow cognize that anybody with any significant amount of power and money is going to squander either in pursuit of such an obviously impossible objective.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

wendy davis's picture

a giggle antidote to all of this, i hope this works for you (h/t mr. wd via RT.com):

"“Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to as AOC, spoke to the New York civil rights group National Action Network at its convention on Friday. Her speech focused on issues facing the working class, wealth inequality, looming climate-change disaster – things that could be expected from the firebrand social democrat freshman.” ('I'm just a bartender', lol.)

i sure do remember obomba puttin' on his black preacher voice depending on his audience, do you?

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Big Al's picture

@wendy davis with their thumbs sticking up? I saw a photo of AOC early on in her celebrity politician stint and immediately thought how well she had been trained/rehearsed for her role.

AOC.png

clinton with .png

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wendy davis's picture

@Big Al

was the author of that move, wasn't he? wouldn't he then stick one thumb between his lips and be 'moved' emotionally? but wait! there's more! mark your calendars for her starring in a new Netflix! and did you know she's responsible for getting chelsea manning out of solitary? all it took was one tweet, according to the WaPo. hell, why wait for 2024? she should take the crown as interim president NoW!

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Big Al's picture

@wendy davis you the award winning propaganda documentary, "White Helmets", and soon to bring special propaganda from the Obama's direct to your TV, is proud to announce a propaganda documentary about the democratic party, the progressives and their new heroine, AOC!"

But, but, Biden, man.

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wendy davis's picture

@Big Al

'winter on fire: ukraine's fight for freedom!'

comrade x over yonder at the café had a great comment on this diary:

"It seems to me, comrade, that the reason sociopaths talk of ethically educating their automatons is because a) the automatons’ need is worse than their own, and b) their failure to so educate will justify their own ethical deficiency/liberation.

The revolutionary overlords are damned to these contradictions which they “solve” by suppressing the diction opposed by their victims.

The Gates Foundation’s eugenicide of the little humans for their own good and the good of humanity is the overlords’ curse and obsession. “[T]he myth of overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as it appropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth” but now AI is the germ of revolutionary myth: overlords can divorce their wealth from the human herd. Thus they can eat the earth and have it too.

This won’t be their final revolution even if it’s the last the herd will see."

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wendy davis's picture

tonight's closing song is from self-identified commie hip-hop rapper boots riley and the coup (dorothy's played by 'pam the funkstress', how great is that?) g' night.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acT_PSAZ7BQ]

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