Bill gates

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter.

bill gates

Sunday

Joseph D'Hippolito 

King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion

The historic meeting October 23 between Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III – the first between a pope and an English monarch since before the Reformation – goes beyond the obvious religious significance. It suggests future cooperation in promoting an entirely different religion, one favored by most of the world's elites. That religion preaches environmental sustainability through draconian measures that demand humanity's submission at the expense of common sense and science. Not for nothing did Leo and Charles meet less than three weeks before the start of COP30, the United Nations' annual conference on climate change. Throughout his public life, Charles positioned himself as Defender of the Environment.

Charles

Monday

Christopher Sandford

Bill Gates’s memoir offers an oddly revealing look into the Microsoft founder’s psyche

In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells. To do this, the company evidently took small samples of living brain tissue, and — so the press release says — “connected them to specialized electrodes to perform computer processing and digital analog conversions to transform neural activity into digital information.” Frankenstein undertones aside, the whole FinalSpark initiative raises the issue of how far a computer can be humanized, made not only to respond with factual accuracy but with something approaching emotional intelligence.

Gates

Thursday

Joel Kotkin

The battle of the oligarchs

Money and power have rarely been strangers; often nations are made to shudder when the ruling elites battle each other. Britain’s late empire was divided between liberal manufacturers and aristocratic interests, whose conflicts hastened the rise of the Labour Party and the end of empire. In the United States, opposition to powerful trusts defined progressive politics for decades, ultimately laying the basis for the New Deal and a greater scope for government. In the West today we are witnessing a similar divide among the uber-rich class — epitomized by Elon Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump — that is already reshaping politics. Until 2016 the US establishment, both Republican and Democratic, embraced similar views on national security, global trade and multilateral institutions.

oligarchs

Friday

Cockburn

Is the publishing world Tuckered out?

Are books about Tucker Carlson not guaranteed bestsellers? That’s the claim of Politico’s Michael Schaffer today, who revealed that Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by the New York Times magazine’s Jason Zengerle has been shelved by Little, Brown & Co. According to Schaffer, “the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer.” Tucker Carlson, publishing house poison?

Thursday

Charles Lipson

The thirty-two-hour work week: another of Bernie’s bad ideas

Bernie Sanders is the bottomless cup of bad ideas. He keeps refilling it. Take his latest venti, a law that says everybody gets to work thirty-two hours for forty hours pay. That’s a magical 25 percent pay increase. His next trick is to pull free steak dinners out of a hat. What do you think would actually happen if such Bernie’s law were passed, enforced and found constitutional? (None of those would actually happen, of course.) The immediate effects would be another 25 percent price increase for labor-intensive products, a huge burden on low-income consumers and an additional incentive to replace more expensive workers with machines and computers.

bernie sanders

Thursday

Cockburn

Bill Gates’s sinister job interviews

Interviews are often tough — but imagine instead of being asked about your hobbies or what you’ll bring to the team, you’re instead quizzed on whether you’ve ever had extramarital affairs, what kind of porn you watch or if you had naked pictures of yourself on your phone. Cockburn would be out of the running, that’s for sure.  These were the questions asked to women that interviewed to work at billionaire Bill Gates’s private office. The extensive screening process included being questioned by a security firm about their sexual past, previous drug use and other personal things in case they were vulnerable to blackmail. That old chestnut!

bill gates interviews

Thursday

Teresa Mull

The last cowboys

This Memorial Day I found myself at a grassy spot along La Prele Creek, resting my horse and having lunch out of the back of a Ford Explorer, with an eclectic group of new friends who had also volunteered to help the Cross family on their annual spring cattle drive. It was day two of the four-day feat, and John Ralph, one of the Crosses’ neighbors, sacrificed his own pressing chores to reinforce the cavalry. “Is this typical, for neighbors to help each other?” I asked the soft-spoken stockman, his blue eyes accentuated by a grizzled beard, bright beneath the brim of his worn hat. “Yes. Used to be a lot more of it,” he said. “Now there’s a lot less neighbors.” The Crosses have lived near Douglas since 1883.

cattle

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The foremost challenge facing Western democracies

A few philosophers since ancient Greece have been wise, scarcely any humble. None at all, to my knowledge, has had the hubris — or maybe courage — to tackle the foremost challenge in political philosophy facing Western democracies today: how to achieve a demotic political system with an elite culture resting on top of the popular one, and the subordinate problem of how to prevent bad culture from driving out good, or making it impossible. Not even Tocqueville addressed the problem, which shows what a wise man the aristocratic Frenchman truly was.

class

Wednesday

John Mac Ghlionn

Will the real Bill Gates please stand up?

Humans are capable of growth. Even the most immoral of individuals have the capacity for change. Your second act can be distinctly different from your first. If in doubt, just ask Bill Gates. When you close your eyes and think of Bill Gates, what images spring to mind? A kindly man in a knitted sweater promising to rid the world of suffering? Gates has become synonymous with words like compassion and care. But what about words like tyrant, megalomania, pettiness, insincerity and greed? Surely not. How could a benevolent philanthropist, a man who exudes kindness, also be cruel and petty? As has been reported ad nauseam, Bill Gates has devoted so much of his life to eradicating illnesses like malaria and addressing issues of poverty in disadvantaged countries.

bill gates interviews

Tuesday

Cockburn

Bill Gates isn’t a creep. He’s a beta

Won’t you spare a thought for poor William Henry Gates III? For most of America, the collapse of a marriage is a private trauma, or at worst publicized in a series of ill-thought Facebook posts. But Mr Gates is worth $120 billion — and it turns out an unfathomably enormous fortune can buy a great deal of unwanted attention when your personal life is disintegrating. Jeff Bezos had an even bigger fortune at stake when he divorced — and his public breakup involved cringeworthy X-rated text messages being leaked to the world via the National Enquirer. Somehow Gates’s divorce has already managed to become more publicly excruciating. First, there were the leaks about Melinda’s $132,000 a night island getaway where she planned to wait out the media storm.

bill gates

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Can Melinda still keep Bill Gates in check?

The end of the 27-year marriage of Bill and Melinda Gates looks tidier, so far, than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s parting from his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, but will no doubt turn into another fee fountain for Seattle’s legal fraternity. Melinda French was a manager at Microsoft, the software giant created and driven by Bill, when the two met in 1987 — and is widely credited with turning him from a hardcore techie and ruthless competitor into a mellower, more admirable human being. The $50 billion charity they created together has become the flagbearer for ‘venture philanthropy’, which is the application of large-scale private funds to address global problems, particularly in healthcare, that governments and market forces fail to solve.

melinda

Friday

Ben Zeisloft

Trump severs ties with World Health Organization

President Trump is cutting all US funding to the World Health Organization as of Friday afternoon.‘China has total control over the World Health Organization despite paying only $40 million per year, compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million per year’, said the President.Trump cited the WHO’s failure to enact recommended reforms and said that the funding will be redirected toward other public health initiatives.The announcement comes after months of skepticism about the WHO’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. In early April, the Trump administration froze funding to the WHO due to their mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis.

who world health organization