01.29.12
Posted in Bill Gates at 12:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In the words of others
How former criminals (or criminal dynasties) acquire
positions of power and worship after reputation laundering
Summary: A couple of recent articles about plutocrat #1 and his pursuit for more and more influence and power
IN AN ARTICLE titled “I am filthy rich,” the press in Zimbabwe writes about Gates and his new friends; they meet and think alike, looting the public while living it up:
So overwhelming was the presence of a team representing mega-rich couple Bill and Melinda Gates that Chombo voluntarily offered an insight into the luxuries surrounding his own life.
The setting was his Makombe Building offices this week, where the Gates Foundation representatives were paying a courtesy call after visiting to assess a housing project for the poor.
Flaunting his flamboyant life, Chombo showed them he is nowhere near the poor that the foundation is targeting.
Bragging about his American car, army of household staff and lighting that can brighten up a whole street, Chombo showed he lives the high life in a sea of poverty.
As the Gates team discussed with the minister on how best the government and local authorities under his control can improve the welfare of the poor, Chombo jumped into his lavish lifestyle, leaving the Gates crew down with sarcastic laughter.
Philanthrocapitalism.net has an article titled “King Bill” in which it states:
Yet it is the Gates Foundation’s influence on the debate about aid and development that worries others most. This was evident last week at the Humanitarian Congress held in Berlin last week, where Michael debated the role of foundations with David McCoy, who has been a major critic of the Gates Foundation’s role in public health because of its focus on tackling communicable diseases, like malaria, through ‘vertical’ interventions like bednets and (hopefully) vaccination, rather than (he claims, somewhat outdatedly) taking on the underlying causes of ill health, like sanitation, and building the capacity of health systems. More fundamentally, Mr McCoy and others at Global Health Watch warn that so much of the global health sector is now dependent on Mr Gates’ money that critical voices are being stifled.
Doctors, as much as lawyers and other professions, will often resist outsiders who want to disrupt and challenge their expert view. But this critique should not be too easily dismissed. Indeed, as we argue in the book, rather than giving the lion’s share of his cash to the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffett might have been better to divide it between two or three foundations to create a bit of competition and diversify his philanthropic portfolio. There are two important issues that are worth debating:
This is an area we shall continue to explore in this Web site because it has a lot to do with patents, not just with Microsoft and to its opposition to sharing of knowledge such as code. Take the time to learn what we wrote about the Gates Foundation over the years and try to educate more people because Bill Gates manipulates the press (at the expense of more than a million US dollars per day, based on last year’s estimate). It’s called reputation laundering and it is dangerous because it gives power to the greatest sociopaths. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 12:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Class warfare radicalised
Summary: After papers and schools are receiving massive bribes from “king of the universe” Bill Gates (to push an agenda) dissenting voices get removed or suppressed
THE GATES Foundation is still occupying and looting the US education system, bringing to it private interests that include but are not exclusive to Microsoft Corporation. We have given many examples here before (see this index).
The US public, back when it occupied Oakland, won the support of a teacher who wrote:
That’s what Race to the Top was all about. It was a big con paid for with our tax dollars and brought to you by Bill Gates and Eli Broad.
Bill has many paid cheerleaders, hired through PR agencies (in addition to a million or more bucks a day in expenditure to control the press). We still become increasingly aware of more institutions that are funded by Gates, sometimes without disclosing it. The Center for Global Development, for instance, turns out to be paid by Gates. According to this, Morduch too is funded by Gates, but “[a]t least he comes clean about most of his work being Gates Foundation funded.”
Valerie Strauss, who previously worked under a leadership with Gates in it (until the scandal), lashes out at Bill Gates again. She writes:
Bill Gates was just in the news again, bemoaning the sorry state of America’s schools, insisting that business leaders like him have a lot to teach us about measuring performance.
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Are our billionaire education reformers interested in any of this information?
We can choose tax structures that underfund our schools, we can believe that we are collectively “broke” while some people stack up the billions, and still need tax breaks. But the data is in. The gulf between rich and poor is obscene. And the schools alone will not fix this. Sending more children to college will not fix this. Only social policies that aim to reverse the concentration of wealth will make a real difference.
Bill Gates can produce the most elaborate teacher evaluation system in the world, but any system built upon the two dimensional data provided by test scores will be trumped by the smell and taste of poverty in our classrooms, and the cold hard data that shows we are failing to provide the most basic level of support for our children to live healthy lives and learn well in school.
Strauss also wrote about “[h]ow Bill Gates throws his money around in education” (her article’s headline). To quote:
What would happen if one of the wealthiest men in the world decided to remake the institution of public education in America? What if that man believed he understood the secrets to success, and sought to align the nation’s schools to his vision and methods? What if he decided to devote all his time and considerable money to this objective? Could he succeed? We are in the process of finding out just how far money and a sharply defined agenda can take you.
[...]
Influence the media: Sponsor coverage of education in the media, including major television news events such as NBC’s Education Nation. Last year’s Education Nation was tied into the release of Waiting for Superman, which had a $2 million publicity effort sponsored by the Gates Foundation.
It probably won’t be long before the publisher gets bribed and this voice of reason gets silenced. We saw that happening before. Here is part of an interesting comment we found in a blog of teachers who protest against Gates in Seattle:
Several PTA members asked questions about their connection to Stand for Children, they insisted that Stand was just one member of the coalition and did not drive policy, but also admitted that their platform had been chosen from a list of items suggested in a report created by Stand (and a consulting firm employed by Stand.) They also admitted that their funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but said that nobody influenced what they wrote in their grant application.
Gates’ aggressive war on teachers, going as far as retaliating (by proxy) against opposition, is shown in this article:
A veteran teacher was suspended Thursday for rejecting the evaluator chosen for him under a Gates-funded initiative that is revolutionizing the way the Hillsborough County School District assesses its teachers.
School and union officials believe this is the first such act of defiance under Empowering Effective Teachers, a complex system of mentoring and evaluation funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The district’s action comes just one day after the couple themselves, Bill and Melinda Gates, toured Jefferson High School, where the computer mogul hailed the program as a national model and called its success “phenomenal.”
[...]
The Gates system, funded in part by a $100 million grant from the foundation, replaces the old method of evaluating teachers, a somewhat informal process in which the principal or assistant principal filled out a checklist.
The same sort of thing tends to happen to journalists who report truthfully about the Gates agenda. We’ll try to highlight more such examples (we covered several before). To those who are new to all this, take the time to learn what the press is paid not to cover. No single person (perhaps except Rupert Murdoch) controls the press like Bill Gates does. █
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Posted in Patents at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Miscellaneous news picks about soft patents
THE patent culture is growing unpopular among the public, but those who make money from this wasteful culture continue to promote it.
According to this new bit, algorithms that can reduce energy usage get patented now:
Its patent-pending modlet® (for “modern outlet”) features intelligent engineering and algorithms to provide a simple, low-cost and easy-to-use solution for saving money and energy on electronic appliances.
Here is another patent on software that we found in a press release:
TRA Inc., a leading media marketing and analytics software company and Experian Automotive, a leader in providing information services and market intelligence to the automotive industry, today announced the launch of TRA’s “Media TRAnalytics(R) TV Auto Ratings”, a patented software solution enabling advertisers to accurately target the networks and programs that best reach desired consumers by automatically matching automotive registration data with television tuning data at the household level.
Why should such abstract ideas be granted a monopoly on them? Over in the Thai press, patents on business methods are now being discussed:
Patents: With recent developments in the US and the UK on business method patents, protection could possibly be extended to a range of financial services in many jurisdictions such as the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and China, to name a few. These include hardware, software, data manipulation and output processes for credit risk and credit management, fraud prevention, identity and personal data security technologies, and of course mobile and online banking. Financial transactions are increasingly electronic and global in nature, so industry players are looking to those jurisdictions where patents might be available in order to exploit their inventions in those countries _ or to avoid countries where they might infringe or be subject to an injunction order.
For business methods, the argument against patentability is that the method itself does not produce any protectable product nor any process that results in such. It is therefore little more than a theory or an abstract idea, neither of which is actually patentable. Computer programs are also protectable under copyright law, and so if the program is nothing more than a source code, there is an argument against patentability. A recent US judgement popularly referred to as the Bilski case states that, while it is not the only test, to be patentable business methods should transform an article to a different state or thing and have a useful, tangible and concrete result.
The Bilski case did not help revolutionise (e.g. eliminate) the process of evaluating software patents although it aided the destruction of a few. █
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Posted in Site News at 12:48 am by Guest Editorial Team
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After six years of hard work Iron Sky will premiere at one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. We couldn’t be happier!
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Hardware
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Google’s study which focused on smartphone and feature phone ownership took a sample set from the United States, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. The study found that 78 percent of internet users in the U.S. accessed the internet via their phone. 68% of of internet users say they used a desktop or laptop …
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The Lumia handsets, which went on sale in Europe in November, probably sold 1.3 million units globally to operators and retailers by the end of last year, according to the average estimate of 22 analysts compiled by Bloomberg … Nokia’s fourth-quarter results will also include the N9, a Lumia 800 lookalike running Nokia smartphone software called MeeGo, which began shipping in September at prices from 480 euros. The N9 may have sold 1.4 million units last quarter, Pareto Oehman analyst Helena Nordman-Knutson said.
It is probably worse than Bloomberg’s Microsoft friendly estimate and sales to retailers are not sales to people.
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The NYT repeats a lot of excuses but the bottom line is that Apple is free to treat foreigners like animals in factories where conditions are terrible. Their slavery degrades us all.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Killing our enemies abroad is just state-sponsored terror – whatever euphemism western leaders like to use
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It is a shame that companies were not required to prove their materials safe before they were allowed to sell them. See prior demands by reputable scientists
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They got sick and are still sick.
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The South bears a disproportionate burden of dioxin pollution, with 25 of the 30 worst dioxin polluters located in Southern states. There are six major dioxin-emitting facilities in Alabama, five in Louisiana, four in Texas and three in North Carolina.
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More than three years after a disaster at a Tennessee power plant, the Obama administration still has not issued promised protections from coal ash hazards. Environmental groups plan to sue to spur action.
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the federal government has known for at least three years that the wood piles were contaminated with an unknown level of asbestos, even as Libby residents hauled truckload after truckload of the material away from the site and placed it in yards, in city parks, outside schools and at the local cemetery. The Environmental Protection Agency did not stop the removal of the material until the AP began investigating in early March. … The sprawling piles came from a now-defunct timber mill that took thousands of trees from a forest tainted with asbestos from a nearby mine. … the forests around Libby are tainted with asbestos at least eight miles from the mine. The barbed asbestos fibers lodge themselves in cracks and crevices in the bark until they are released when disturbed or burned. … The EPA has spent more than $370 million over the past 11 years cleaning up Libby. Contractors in moon suits carting off tainted materials have become a constant reminder of the severity of the contamination.
Libby was the site of a now infamous W.R. Grace mine that lied to employees about what they were mining. The company kept up operations until 1990 and largely avoided responsiblity for their actions, including criminal charges [2]. The company made a few out of court settlements and lost several civil suits but most of the cost was passed onto the public. Clean up started in 2000, and another emergency was declared in 2009.
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Anti-Trust
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship – ACTA
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To all Members of the EU Parliament: As concerned global citizens, we call on you to stand for a free and open Internet and reject the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which would destroy it. The Internet is a crucial tool for people around the world to exchange ideas and promote democracy. We urge you to show true global leadership and protect our rights.
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They told Anonymous that blackmail would not work but had ignored NGOs for three years, then ignored people protesting in the streets. NGOs recommend signing the Avaaz petition above.
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The extremist position of ACTA will make the Internet fraught with danger for ordinary users. For example, if a blogger innocently links to another website, and that website, without their knowledge, infringes copyright in some way, they may well face criminal charges and prison time for “aiding and abetting” copyright infringement. … The provisions on Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) are so extreme as to be laughable. ACTA continues to demand that attempts to circumvent DRM be criminal offences, meaning that blind people could face jail time for attempting to read e-books using text-to-speech … merely renaming a file could become illegal.
Here’s another brief list of what’s wrong with ACTA
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Hundreds of people waged a street protest in Warsaw on Tuesday to protest the government’s plan to sign an international copyright treaty, while several popular websites also shut down for an hour over the issue. … Prime Minister Donald Tusk insisted Tuesday that his government will not give in to the protesters.
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the anti-SOPA/PIPA crowd seemed to have just discovered ACTA … to be in compliance with this agreement, the US needs to retain certain parts of copyright law that many reformers believe should be changed. At the very least, it ties Congress’ hands, if we want to be in compliance with our “international obligations.” … there are a few parts of ACTA that are so vague that you can definitely see how they could be interpreted to require changes to US law.
Most of the arguments against ACTA were about how it was made by publishers in secret because no one could say anything useful about it while it was a secret and there was little time to do anything between publication and signature. It’s still so vague that people can’t say anything useful about it other than it has a lot of harmful requirements and this so called “executive agreement” is an anti-democratic and unconstitutional sham the US should never have signed and only signed by claiming that it was not binding. The EU can still and should not sign because they know that the US considers it non binding.
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“I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly. … a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.” …The legally binding action happens in votes in parliaments; the national parliaments across Europe, and notably the European Parliament. … If parliament says no, any parliament, then no it is.
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the signatures of the EU member states and the EU itself will count for nothing unless the European Parliament gives its approval to ACTA in June, and digital activists have urged citizens to lobby their MEPs against voting yes.
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Another government shows it’s contempt for it’s people.
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There will be no consultation with the public, and he even wants to pass this without presenting it to the Dail [House of Representatives] Sean Sherlock is attempting to pass this law which will give the keys of regulation over to private industries and lobbying groups. These groups will then be able to pressure ISP’s into shutting down any website they want.
Here’s another description which claims the legislation is not subject to debate and will be passed by the end of the month. Context from Stop Sopa.
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This was a fight on a platform we’re not at this point comfortable with, and we were going up against an opponent that controls that platform.
Translation: they don’t have enough cenosrship power over the internet and will have to redouble their astroturf efforts.
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Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote. … Police have tried to pressure them into shutting down the doll protests, organisers said. “They tried to tell us our event was illegal – they even said that to put toys in the snow, we had to rent it from the city authorities,” Alexandrova said.
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Privacy
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Copyrights
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Researchers, please sign The Cost of Knowledge and tell Elsevier you will no longer cooperate with bad publishing policies.
For many years, academics have protested against the business practices of Elsevier. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below.
The list now has 312 people who have refused various cooperation such as publishing, refereeing and editorial work.
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This story has more details but you only have to see the two pictures to know the ruling is insane.
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