If you have not yet heard, Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce. The philanthropic world is a bit worried, as divorces tend to splinter organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The couple jointly signed a statement and posted it on their individual Twitters.
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) May 3, 2021
“Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives,” it read.
“We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in the next phase of our lives.
“We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”
I find the “space and privacy” part interesting, since Gates has made it clear that he feels like you and I have no rights to either.
According to Forbes, when then Bill Gates and Melinda French were wed on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, he booked all available rooms at the then-Manele Bay Hotel and hired all of the helicopters on Maui to prevent unwanted visitors from flying over.
So from early on, Gates has been intent on his privacy. Wealth has its privileges, I guess. But you, mere plebe, have none; particularly if you cannot buy them, as he can.
In case you didn’t know, Gates has been buying up farmland, as the New York Post reported, spotlighting the scoop by Eric O’Keefe of the Land Report:
Sales of more than a thousand acres are “blue-moon events,” O’Keefe noted, so this one stood out. And Eastern Washington has some of the richest, most expensive farmland in the country. But the purchaser of record was a small, obscure company in Louisiana.
“That immediately set off alarm bells,” O’Keefe says.
He assigned his research team to dig a little deeper. Soon they came back with the answer: The Louisiana company was acting on behalf of Cascade Investment LLC, the secretive investment firm that manages most of the huge fortune belonging to Bill Gates.
O’Keefe knew Gates had been acquiring farmland for years, mostly through various Cascade subsidiaries. The mogul’s holdings include large tracts in Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, California, and about a dozen other states. With the Washington state acreage and other recent additions to his portfolio, O’Keefe calculated, Gates now owns at least 242,000 acres of American farmland.
“Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has an alter ego,” O’Keefe wrote: “Farmer Bill, the guy who owns more farmland than anyone else in America.”
There is much speculation on why Gates would need this much land (climate change, building sustainable cities, creating a “smart” community), but Gates maintains his secretive ways for his life because… reasons.
Investment guru Michael Larson, who has worked with Gates since 1994, runs the Washington-based Cascade Investment, as well as supervising the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s nearly $50 billion endowment.
“The arrangement is simple,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in a 2014 profile. “Mr. Larson makes money, and Mr. Gates gives it away.”
Larson and his team are famously tight-lipped. Cascade employees almost never speak to the press. According to the Journal, they are even discouraged from using Facebook and other social-media platforms. (Through a spokesperson, the company declined to comment for this article.)
Of course, they did…
Gates is also quietly funding technology for digital vaccine passports.
Last September, the ID2020 Alliance that provides digital ID, in collaboration with the vaccine alliance Gavi and the Government of Bangladesh, launched a new program combining biometrics and blockchain to provide digital ID with vaccines.
Both ID2020 and Gavi Alliance are supported by Bill Gates through Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the program leverages immunization as an opportunity to establish digital identity, which in this case would track who has received vaccination. According to an analysis published by Pew Research Centre last July, Bangladesh places eighth as the most populous country in the world in 2020, yet still suffers from widespread poverty.
The goal of this public-private partnership is to track undocumented individuals in less developed countries missing identification such as official birth registration or medical records, and thus may lack access to healthcare services and vaccines. However, ID2020 is also active in more developed countries such as the US and has partnered with City of Austin, Texas, to provide a blockchain-enabled digital ID platform for the homeless population, as well as to refugees receiving medical treatment from the International Rescue Committee in Thailand.
Now with the sudden onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this seems to have presented an opportunity to fast track global health into a new era of digital healthcare.
What could go wrong? Well, personal privacy (there’s that word again!), fraud, mass surveillance, and manipulation of information, among other things. But this does not seem to matter to Gates and his wicked schemes for you and your life.
As my colleague Alex Parker wrote:
While speaking with MIT Technology Review, the Microsoft co-founder made it clear: People who live in prosperous parts of the world should transition to eating synthetic beef.
And why? Because it’d help slay climate change.
Cow fart-free air, here we come.
MITTR asked:
“Do you think plant-based and lab-grown meats could be the full solution to the protein problem globally, even in poor nations? Or do you think it’s going to be some fraction because of the things you’re talking about, the cultural love of a hamburger and the way livestock is so central to economies around the world?”
The way Bill sees it, only certain countries should keep beefing up:
“For Africa and other poor countries, we’ll have to use animal genetics to dramatically raise the amount of beef per emissions for them.”
It sounds as if our cows are a bit more polite:
“Weirdly, the US livestock, because they’re so productive, the emissions per pound of beef are dramatically less than emissions per pound in Africa. And as part of the [Bill and Melinda Gates] Foundation’s work, we’re taking the benefit of the African livestock, which means they can survive in heat, and crossing in the monstrous productivity both on the meat side and the milk side of the elite US beef lines.”
If Bill has his way, all you rich folks will be fanging a synth sandwich soon.
Finally, Gates remains a proponent of lockdowns, despite much evidence to the contrary that they did not work then, and they will not work now. As states in the U.S. were reopening, he sat down with every legacy media outlet he could to sound the alarm on the dangers of not following the science. Gates was as dogmatic as Dr. Anthony Fauci in his insistence; the problem is, at least Fauci has an M.D. behind his name. Gates does not. He has no medical experience whatsoever. Gates cannot even create software that doesn’t catch viruses.
.@BillGates on Covid: "Even through 2022” we should be prepared for life to not return to “normal”
Says “sadly" it’s "appropriate” for bars and restaurants to close over the next "four to six months" pic.twitter.com/cmDD8pv3XR
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 13, 2020
In March, in a “TED Connects” talk, Gates offered his insightful insane perspective on how the world needs to continue to respond to the pandemic. Gates presented his usual trove of tricks, along with a few more ideas that need to be thrown in the trash heap. Since Gates enjoys his cloak of secrecy in implementing his schemes, if for nothing but heightening your awareness of these nefarious plots, you should give it a listen.
If you thought Bill Gates was dangerous while buffeted by a wife (who was equally dangerous, frankly), imagine how much more dangerous he’ll become now that he can truly focus on his dreams of global domination.
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