04.08.13
Posted in Bill Gates at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Gates’ power grab advances
Summary: A site which criticised Gates and Microsoft — a news outlet called Crosscut — has been taken over by Gates’ staff
The Gates Foundation likes to buy the press and sometimes blogs too, as it helps Gates control information, especially in particular fields where he pillages and plunders. A site called Crosscut had published some hostile pieces about Microsoft and Gates but negative coverage stopped, even erased (see first link in the list below) when Bill Gates paid them. It’s censorship followed by self-censorship. See the following as a reminder:
A report from last year said that the site had been taken over (we missed this report at the time):
“Big coup for us,” Brewster said in an email.
Shaw brings a background in journalism, marketing and philanthropy to his new duties. He has worked since 2004 as part of the senior leadership team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is currently director of grantee partner engagement. He has headed the foundation’s Pacific Northwest Program.
Well played, gagging your critics one at a time. Money talks. And now there is another unofficial mouthpiece for Gates, run by his own staff. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another timely analysis, filled with new links to articles, about where Bill Gates is investing his great wealth which he gained by illegal practices at Microsoft
A lot of press, excluding the corporate press, is covering the criminal behavior of those who stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens. This is what’s causing an economic turmoil and it should be recognised that the world’s richest people are still getting richer at everyone’s expense. They just get better at hiding it. Bill Gates, who has a tax-exempting foundation, is widely lauded for giving away his money, but he actually increased his wealth by about ten percent or more in the past year alone. He makes a lot of money from his investment in monopolies, one of which he co-founded after dropping out of college.
There is a report in the Gates-funded Seattle Times about the PR campaign which seeks to capture the minds of gullible people. Despite a promising opening paragraph, this piece is hogwash as it in no way follows through with a sceptical analysis of Gates’ agenda.
“…it should be recognised that the world’s richest people are still getting richer at everyone’s expense.”Over at at TED, a favoured venue for Gates marketing [1, 2], PR is being seeded yet again, leading to suggestions that Oprah, a routine Gates/Microsoft PR outlet [1, 2], is being replaced in some sense by the less superstitions-unfriendly TED. Well, as put last year by Gates’ boosters at Forbes (which glorifies the world’s richest without exceptions), TED is turned into something like Oprah, i.e. PR in disguise (Oprah is also notorious for promoting superstitions), for those in the business of power, which necessitates dumbing people down.
Gates has been trying to seed ignorance in the minds of the world’s less educated by teaching them to depend on corporations for their basic needs. It’s not gentle capitalism but coerced capitalism. Sadly enough, Imperial College does some PR along those lines (probably begging for grants) passing off the GMO investor and lobbyist as “pro-farming” in pieces like this (marketing photo included).
The world’s poorest people need not more dependence on the super-rich. They need social-economic justice. They need not a ‘handout’ of patents. As put last year in the Indian press:
However, it [Gates Foundation] faces the criticism of aligning with interests of big pharma and agri-business giants such as Monsanto and Cargill. Raikes debunks such criticism.
Of course he does, that’s his job. But as we have shown here before, those critics are exactly those who understand the big agenda. Will Hill quoted the other day an article/book which says:
From The Great American Fraud, 1905 – Why Medicine Should Not be Run Like a Business
“One of the most disgusting and disgraceful features of the patent medicine business is the marketing of letters sent by patients to patent medicine firms Correspondence is solicited by these firms under the seal of sacred confidence. When the concern is unable to do further business with a patient it disposes of the patient’s correspondence to a letter broker who in turn disposes of it to other patent medicine concerns at the rate of half a cent for each letter”
Microsoft ran like this and Bill Gates wants to be in medicine.
http://books.google.com/books?id=tdf8na3fqNUC&lpg=PA163&ots=WX0A8QyTsT&dq=patent%20medicine%20letters%20sold%20by%20the%20lot&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false
A PDF of the book can be downloaded from Google.
Recently we saw Indian patent battles over the sorts of patents which Gates has been promoting in poorer nations in Asia and Africa. See the article “Patent’s Defeat in India Is Key Victory for Generic Drugs“. Gates is investing (for profit) in some of these patents that impede generics and he routinely tells us the lie that without patents effective drugs would no longer be discovered. He actually used this logic to slam Free software and promote software patents in April 2008. On that same occasions he said “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.” In other words, Gates hates genuine sharing, he only pretends to share, when it comes to seeding a patents dependency.
“…Gates and his rich friends are using ‘charity’ to spread patents and conduct clinical trials with no risk of litigation when everything fails very seriously, as sometimes it does.”The reality of the matter is, as we wrote in dozens of articles before (with many supportive citations), Gates and his rich friends are using ‘charity’ to spread patents and conduct clinical trials with no risk of litigation when everything fails very seriously, as sometimes it does. Watch this new article from India Brian Druker is said to have “invented the drug’s molecule,” whatever it means to ‘invent’ a molecule. We need to stop ‘owning’ or monopolising everything. It is good for nobody except the tiny minority which hoards all the patents. At the top of this pyramid, considering where the capital for patents comes from, we have people like Bill Gates and his friend Nathan Myhrvold. Resist them, they’re your biggest enemies. They try to ‘own’ the world. █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A ruthless campaign to privatise what’s public
Summary: Gates-funded sites are trying to demonise protesters against Gates’ corporate agenda at the Department of Education; complaints multiply as people become better informed, or properly educated
There is a massive campaign — a “coup” one might call it — waged by the world’s richest people (i.e. people rich enough to avoid tax) against the system which indoctrinates future generations and has a state monopoly, tax subsidies, and compulsory culture built around it. The public is becoming increasingly aware of it. This is not a difficult thing to show and to explain, despite the occasional decoys and PR.
“Mark Naison refuses to call this building The #us #department of #education,” says one person about the building “to be known from now on (until we reclaim it for the people) as The Gates-Pearson Building!”
Yes, there is another protest and Gates is under fire. Watch this photo (reproduced above).
As we showed before, a lot of the teachers’ press is already bribed by Gates and therefore eager to push his propaganda. Some of it is demonising these protesters. Way to go, eh? ‘Education’. By bribed press. Here is a new puff piece for Gates. Not all publications relating to education have been subverted by Gates. Michelle McNeil of EdWeek noted multiple Gates employees filling the Department of Education and there is occasional warning alarm there over Gates agenda [1, 2].
The Gates Foundation, a backer of groups like ALEC (it stopped after public backlash), uses astroturf tactics and keeps buying of the press for consent, but blogs do complain that Gates is manufacturing “data” for consent from politicians and there is a new complaint from EdWeek, albeit only in a blog:
Bill Gates, who is more responsible than anyone for the absurd evaluations by which teachers are now being held accountable, had the gall to write this week in a tone of exasperation about the results of his own advocacy for these very practices.
Yesterday I asked when Mr. Gates, the great enthusiast for accountability for others, might hold himself accountable for his own handiwork.
As wealth has concentrated in the accounts of individuals such as the Gates, Walton and Broad families, they have used this to wield unprecedented power over the lives of those of us without access to such resources. They pay for research that creates the very “facts” upon which public debate is based. They pay for their own media outlets, and heavily subsidize others. Their money redirects existing grassroots groups, and underwrites new ones. They work with ALEC to write legislation, and funnel money through PACs to buy off politicians to move it forward across the country. They are utterly insulated from any sort of accountability. They do not face voters in any election. Nobody “evaluates” them. They cannot be fired. They may on occasion choose to engage in a dialogue, but they are not obliged to respond to the substance of the criticisms raised. As my question indicated, this accountability they demand from teachers is a street that goes one way only.
But let’s imagine we could turn the tables on Mr. Gates and evaluate his performance as a philanthropist. Might we establish some goals to which we could hold our billionaires accountable? We do not have any measurable indicators such as test scores to use, but since I do not find these to be of great value in any case, I will offer a more qualitative metric, based on my knowledge of the subject’s work. Since he has spoken glowingly of the salutary effect of feedback on teachers, surely he will welcome this feedback, even though it is unsolicited.
Having bribed some schools, people like Zuckerberg and Gates are trying to pass themselves off as “for education” (Facebook is partly owned by Microsoft) and the PR is evident, just like press complicity. The ultimate goal is to control US education and thus US youth. They are planning to do the same thing here in the UK and last year a report was published which drops some numbers:
“We’re now the biggest recipient of Gates Foundation money in the UK by quite a margin,” she said.
Gates has also established some institutional proxies in the UK to help him privatise (for profit) public education. We covered this several times before. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The newspeak against GNU/Linux and other FOSS or FOSS-derived operating systems
Companies that are crazy about control wish to own everything from software down to hardware. Apple could not tolerate BSD code without closing it and Microsoft just couldn’t stand the idea of companies creating their own Windows shells — a subject of antitrust litigation almost two decades ago.
“Due to the old tricks of newspeak, propaganda, spin and FUD we have become accustomed to hearing words like ‘fragmentation’ wherever FOSS goes.”Linux, as a kernel with a lot of development activity, has become the Swiss army knife for many who wish to rapidly create operating systems. Android is probably the most ubiquitous among those, depending on the assessed criteria. GNU is the Swiss army knife further up in the software stack and Apache is extremely popular in page-serving devices. All of those are Free/Open Source software (FOSS).
The flexibility of this software is hard to compete with. Corporations and/or large communities surround those projects. Due to the old tricks of newspeak, propaganda, spin and FUD we have become accustomed to hearing words like ‘fragmentation’ wherever FOSS goes. Recently, a lot of this has been said about Android. The other day a notable Linux advocate, SJVN, addressed the Android “fragmentation” FUD by writing a tongue-in-cheek report about Windows:
The transition from XP to Vista, to Windows 7 and most recently, both iterations of the newest version of Windows, 8 and RT, as well as all patch iterations and dot versions in between, has left a scattered landscape of PCs in various states of OS upgrade version malaise. (Cough)
This has created problems for Windows developers when coding applications, and when they test against different versions of the OS and different target devices. (Oh my!)
The introduction of multiple versions of PCs, as well as Windows virtual machines and emulators running in Mac OS X and Linux, has further complicated this situation by creating additional “forks” of Windows, which have their own unique application issues that developers need to address. (The horror! The horror!)
This puts in perspective one aspect of the FUD’s shortcomings. Because Windows also supports nearly as much hardware as Linux does, the ‘fragmentation’ may relate to hardware too. Let’s face it. A power which is diversity — something that Apple actively discourages — should not be portrayed as a weakness. Linux and GNU are very compatible with UNIX owing to POSIX. GTK applications are quite compatible with applications that use Qt, and vice versa (narrowed down to two options just for the sake of concision). This took a while to achieve, but we are there now. Diversity is secured in the compatibility/standards sense, owing in part to compartmentalisation. People who chastise GNU/Linux over ‘fragmentation’ are either dishonest or have not kept up with GNU/Linux for nearly a decade. To say that GNU/Linux is ‘hard’ because it facilitates advanced features is also to overlook the progress made in the past half a decade in KDE and GNOME. But that’s a subject for another day… █
Originally posted in Linux Advocates
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