Tag: power

Bill Gates vs. Elon Musk…What Gives? Part 1

Everyday on social media I see hate and love for these two men. The Democrats adore Gates; the Republicans adore Musk; Democrats loath Musk; Republicans loath Musk. There are, of course, other billionaires who interfere with campaign finance like George Soros, but he’s an enigma for another day. Today I want to ponder these two because they are very similar and I wanted to lay out a comparison as unbiasedly as I could to look to see if there is a justification for the criticism each receives from their opponents. I will say upfront that I do not like Bill Gates. I do not trust him to clean my toilet much less give me healthcare advice. I will also say that my opinion of Elon Musk is guarded. I haven’t decided on him yet. I am not a fan or an opponent. I don’t think that I have enough information. Perhaps after researching this blog post I will and I will be able to state definitively my opinion. 
I think it is important to compare the two on equal grounds, to compare their familial backgrounds, their educations, social and community histories, as well as their business endeavors. To only compare their business and political activities would not do either of them or us justice. Because of the wealth of information needed to cover these two men, this post will be done in two parts. This first part will cover Bill Gates.
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. His father was a lawyer and his mother, Mary, sat on the boards of a bank and the United Way. They would divorce later. Bill was small of his age much of his life and he was often bullied by his classmates. Early on he was introduced to computers and programming which he had an affinity for and was fascinated by. He and a few of his fellow students became engaged in programming for their school after getting caught in more elicit computer activities.
“At age 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside Prep School. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of TIC-TAC-TOE that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.” (Wikipedia references Manes, Stephen, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. (1994) Touchstone Pictures. ISBN 0-671-88074-8)

From there we all know how Bill Gates and others created Microsoft and became the billionaire we think we all know today, but I am not sure we really do know the man. At age 69, Mr. Gates has amassed a net worth of 107 billion dollars which ranks as the 15th richest man in the world today. He is a college dropout, having dropped out of Harvard after two years. He is divorced and has three children. He has become known for his “philanthropic” work in Africa and work in environmental and education. For people on the left, he is a hero; for people on the right, he is a bully with questionable intentions.

Bill Gates has founded numerous foundations, investment companies, and businesses. These include Cascade Investments, Branded Entertainment Network, Terrapower, Breakthrough Energy, Gates Ventures, The Gates Foundation, and, of course, Microsoft. We will look at each of these.

1. Cascade Investments LLC oversees the investments of the Gates Foundation and the personal assets of Bill Gates. The funds are managed by Michael Larson. The most interesting aspect of the investment company in my opinion is that it is the single largest owner of farmland in the United States of America owning 269,000 acres of land through a network of shell companies. For those of us interested in maintaining family owned farms, this should be of interest. Why would a single man need to own this much land? In this same vein, Gates has significant interests in a company called Ecolab. “Headquartered in Minnesota, Ecolabs has become one of the world’s leading hygiene and food safety-tech companies. Recently, Cascade bought up another $32 million worth of shares of the company, expanding Gates’ stake from 10.7% in 2012 to over 21% in 2022. He is still the largest shareholder of the company.” (www.andsimple.co/cases/cascade-investment-bill-gates/). This should be particularly interesting given the mood in the US against food additives and toxins and the drive to move away from fake food which is in stark contrast to Gates’ support for the elimination of beef and for plant based and lab created foods. Additionally, Gates is a majority shareholder in Canadian Railways, AutoNation, and John Deere. Are you seeing a pattern yet?

2. Branded Entertainment Network, also known as BenLabs, is a product placement, influencer marketing, and licensing company created by Gates in 1989 as Interactive Home Systems and later rebranded as Corbis. “Originally…its mission was to research multimedia systems that would combine visual images, audio, motion video, and animation, all in digital form.” (https://www.theartnewspaper.com/1996/06/01/how-fares-the-digital-revolution-a-look-at-the-corbis-corporation) In 1997, Corbis changed its model again to licensing the images and footage it had in its inventory. In those early days, they had no competition because they had the largest inventory with “half a million images relating to all areas of human endeavour from fine and applied arts (less than 10%) to architecture, travel and geography, famous people, history, popular culture, science and technology ‘to a depth satisfactory for secondary school or undergraduate university curricula.’ Corbis offered museums and artistic outlets like the Ansel Adams Trust expanded markets and they did all the work for them at little to no cost. But, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Copyright issues presented problems for Corbis in the beginning, but the Clinton Administration aided with a working group on intellectual property and revised intellectual property rights into the digital age. And then in 2016, Gates sold the key collections to China’s Unity Glory International. So much for patriotism, huh? Corbis’ key competitor today, Getty Images, took over the role of licensing of images within North America. What happened? According to Eric Cohen, who once worked in sales for Corbis, they promised a lot, failed to deliver, wanted to control too much, issues with photographers, legal issues, and the internet. The internet’s easy access to digital photos has dramatically reduced the need for pricey licensed photographs when a photograph can be purchased for almost nothing on a site like Shutterstock. And finally, Corbis never made a profit. This was not a shining day for Gates.

3. Terrapower is a nuclear power design and development engineering company which is developing a class of nuclear reactors called traveling wave reactors. The company was founded in 2006 by Bill Gates and Chris Levesque (CEO), and is partially funded by the Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bill Gates’ investment in the power plant comes by virtue of Cascade Investments LLC. Terrapower is located in Kemmerer, Wyoming as the site for a 345 MWe Natrium reactor using a molten salt energy storage system. The site broke ground in June 2024 beginning preparation for the as-yet unapproved reactor. It is estimated to cost $4 billion, with the DOE supplying half of that cost, and Gates contributing $1 billion of his money via Cascade. So what are “traveling wave reactors”? The idea of a traveling wave reactor is that they convert typically non-fissile fertile nuclides into fissile nuclides in-situ and shift power production from the “burned” region to the “bred” region. The belief is this would allow for the benefit of a closed fuel cycle without the expense and proliferation-risk of enrichment/reprocessing plants. Moreover, they say the reactor could be installed underground and could operate for 100 years. Again, this has yet to be proven. There also seems to be some involvement in this program by Warren Buffet and his company PacifiCorp. Nuclear power is clean energy and is renewable. People have been weary of it since the Three Mile Island spill, but it is unwarranted because that has been the only one since that time of that magnitude.

4. Breakthrough Energy founded in 2015 with the purpose of accelerating innovation in sustainable energy and technologies that reduce greenhouse gases. BE consists of several organizations which invests in a variety of startup companies that are attempting to commercialize new concepts such as nuclear fusion, large-capacity batteries, and microbe-generated biofuels. Some of the members of the group include Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Meg Whitman, Mark Zuckerberg, and the University of California (Why is a public university using tax dollars to join a private group?). Some of their projects include:

A. Verdox—carbon capture. On February 2, 2022, Breakthrough Energy agreed to join an investors syndicate providing $80 million in capital to Verdox, Inc.

B. Methanol fuel cells (August 2022)—conversion of methanol to electricity.

C. Data Blanket—Wildfire drone technology start-up.

5. Gates Ventures is a personal service company of Bill Gates. It is comprised of his personal staff, a think tank, and a technology investment portfolio. The think tank is centered on issues of health and global development. Dr. Niranjan Bose is the director of the company. Dr. Bose has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Dartmouth, an MS in biological sciences and a BS in pharmaceutical sciences from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He has been working with Bill Gates since 2007 on various health related issues, especially Alzheimer’s and Gastroenterological disorders.

6. Gates Foundation, formerly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is the 3rd largest charitable foundation in the world (has a TON of power!) with an endowment of $75.2 BILLION as of December 2023. Since its founding, the foundation has endowed and supported a broad range of social, health, and education developments, including the establishment of the Gates Cambridge Scholarships at Cambridge University.That’s Cambridge in ENGLAND, NOT the USA, FOLKS. Considering he dropped out of Harvard after 2 years, should we be surprised he doesn’t support US education or US students? Coincidentally (or not) in October 2019, the BMGF partnered with the WEF to host the tabletop exercise called Event 201 in NYC. What was Event 201, you ask? According to Wikipedia, “the exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe PANDEMIC in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences". Guess what virus they “simulated” in their illustration? THE CORONAVIRUS! Now, isn’t that crazy. One year prior to an actual outbreak of a severe pandemic of an actual coronavirus. Wow. The fact that he was already talking about a pandemic killing millions back in 2014 ought to have us concerned. We ought to also be concerned about his continued investments in Monsanto and the lack of substantial improvement in outcomes for African farmers and hunger deepening. Gates Foundation interference in Africa has not improved outcomes for families according to research. According to U.S. Right to Know, “Evidence suggests that the green revolution has failed to improve health or reduce poverty and has created many problems. These include hooking farmers in a debt cycle with expensive inputs, growing pesticide use, environmental degradation, worsening soil quality, reduced diversity of food crops, and increased corporate control over food systems.” (www.usrtk.org/bill-gates/critiques-of-gates-foundation/) Critics say that the Gates Foundation and others like them are making power plays to increase their control over global agriculture policies at the United Nations. I will say it here, though I am not the first to say it, CONTROL THE FOOD AND YOU CONTROL THE PEOPLE. If someone has this kind of need for control, I call that evil.

Bill also has some moral issues. Of course, we know that he had a long term affair while married to Melinda. That was the ultimate cause of their divorce. There was also an investigation of some inappropriate conduct with an employee, but he stepped down before the investigation was complete and there’s those pesky allegations of connections to Jeffrey Epstein, too. I also take offense to his having meetings with the reprehensible dictator Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman in his home. This man is no friend of the United States or anyone in the West. He may pretend to be. He may buy our warplanes. He may invite us to his country and lavish us with his gifts, but make no mistake, his hatred for the United States runs deep and he has no problems killing us. To think otherwise is simply foolish. The only people who should be allowed in his company should be seasoned diplomats and our leaders who know how to handle him and have accountability if something were to go wrong. An unelected, non-governmental employee has no business meeting with a world leader in his home like this. If you have not watched the movie The Dissident, I would encourage you to do so. You’ll understand what I am saying about the Saudi prince once you do.

Here’s the thing folks. Bill Gates, and others like him, are unelected power players with far too much money and influence. He is part of the problem, not the solution. These people are like the crickets in a Bug’s Life. There are few of them, but they are way too full of themselves. They feel entitled because of their money. Bill Gates doesn’t even have a college degree and he thinks we should bend down and take his healthcare and food advice? Hell no. I knew from day one coronavirus was a scam and was biowarfare. I had enough experience in the Army to see that right away. He’s not dictating anything to me. And let’s not forget his influence with Common Core. Oh yes, the Gates Foundation put that little piece of excrement together too. There are things I can agree on with him. Nuclear power is a good idea, but that’s about where I stop.

So, I will end my research on Bill Gates here. Stand by for my blog post on Elon Musk to follow.

The Power of a Biblical Woman: Trust and Independence

For many people what I am going to blog about today will be considered highly controversial. There was a time in my life when I would have believed this to be so. When I was younger and before I became the mature Christian woman that I now am, I would have become angry and, perhaps, confrontational with someone of my age who spoke to me on this idea. I get it now, so I thought that I would write about now and put it into terms that the younger me would have understood better and might have considered before completely dismissing it.

I was not raised in a home to be this type of woman—a submissive woman. I was raised in the church to be a Christian, but in the churches that my family attended, I do not recall ever studying about the Biblical woman or the Biblical wife. Because of being adopted at the age of five, I already had an immense sense of independence. I did not like being told how to act or how to think by anyone other than my parents, and even with them I was skeptical.

My first five years was not a pleasant time. I did not trust people to have my interest in mind. It took me a considerable amount of time to trust my adoptive parents. I trusted my father first. He was easier because of his outgoing and loving personality. He spent time with me, reading to me, playing games, and riding bikes. My mother took more time. She was the disciplinarian and was not as affectionate. I was an adult before I realized that she was that way because she came from people who were that way, even though my grandparents were amazing people who I adored. But as is with many mothers and daughters, we butted heads a lot. My mother did not spend as much time with me doing things with me, so I did not feel a connection to her. She was always cleaning, cooking, or doing something that seemed to be more important than me (at least it seemed to me in my child mind).

My mother was fiercely independent. She did what she wanted when she wanted and how she wanted. Now that doesn’t mean that she took advantage of my dad because she didn’t really. He got upset with her when she spent too much money. Boy, when they fought over money, it was bad. They fought like a foxes in a hen house.  Where that became a problem for me was when they would bring me into their arguments. That has a way of destroying a child’s trust in their parents. Children should be able to confide in their parents and not have their words used against them or against one parent or the other. It shows immaturity in the parents. Other than this, though, my parents had a nice, respectful relationship; though, I rarely saw them be affectionate with one another.

Although it took me time to trust my mother, I came to admire her for her independence, intelligence, and tenacity. My mother went to work full time when I was in junior high school, working as the manager of a retail store. Before that time, she had always worked part-time when my father needed her in his store during inventory, moonlight madness sales and other times when he needed her and she worked for a brief period of time at our church. I watched her open that store on day one and make it successful. She knew how to design the displays and arrange the merchandise to be pleasing and fit everything in the space. She understood the mathematics and accounting, the technology, the Human Resources, the customer service needs, the shipping and receiving requirements, and then she would come home and cook dinner for us. I was astounded and awed by her. I wanted to be just like her. (But not in retail!)

My father was a staunch supporter of a college education. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in economics. Both of his sisters had college degrees and were teachers. When I was about eleven, he began going to the public library and checking out books on various careers and bringing them home to me. At first I was not so keen on this. I wasn’t against it because I didn’t want to have to read the books, but because of the careers he kept bringing home—teachers, nurses, secretary. They were all careers that were generally thought of as “girl” jobs. At the time I was all about Nancy Drew. I wanted to be Nancy Drew and I was not interested in hearing about nurses and teachers. He would frequently say to me, “Deanne, no daughter of mine is going to have to depend on a man to take care of her. You need to be able to take care yourself because you never know what could happen.” I did not understand why he would say that at the time. Of course, I do now after having gone through a divorce, but also because I have had several friends who have lost husbands to unexpected deaths. He was right to prepare me for this, but he also should have prepared me to be a Biblical wife.

When I went to college, I was determined that I was going into International Business. I wanted to be a diplomat. I was going to major in Business with a minor in French and then I was going to graduate school of some kind. It was great until I took my first accounting class. I hated it. I couldn’t imagine a more boring class in my life. Then I took economics. It was worse. I had the most horrid professor. I was lucky to get out the class with a D. I had never made a D in my life. That same semester I had Calculus for business majors. I was not strong in math. At mid-term I went to my dad and told him that I was not doing great and that I was concerned about my grade. On the day of the final, I started the exam and looked it over. I couldn’t do it and I started crying. The prof came over and rubbed my back. She told me the find the first one I knew how to do. She said, “others will start to come back to you. Just keep doing the ones you know. The rest will come back to you.” She was right. I finished the course with a C. It was the worst semester of my whole college career. So, I had to sit down with myself and regroup. I changed my major from Business to Political Science. I still had the same goal, just a different way to get there.

It wasn’t long after this that I reconnected with the young man who would become my husband. I only wish that we had been better prepared for marriage. If we had, maybe we might not have done it, or maybe we might have done better and not made the mistakes we made and not have destroyed our relationship. At any rate, it did not last because neither of he was an abusive alcoholic and I made the choice to raise our child away from that environment.

When we married, we believed that the key to a good relationship was to make everything 50/50. That sounds good, right? That means both of you put in your opinion 50/50. However, this is not the way God established marriage to be. Although God took the rib from Adam’s side, God did not make Eve to at the side of Adam; he established Eve to under the protection of Adam in the same way the church is under the authority of Christ. “Wives submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” (Ephesians 5:22-24 NIV) This doesn’t mean that men can dismiss the opinions of their wives, or that they get to abuse their wives; this not what it means to submit. The word “submission” is a misunderstood word and often abused word by feminists as a means to harass men. The following verses on Ephesians men are instructed to love their wives as Christ loves his church and as he loves himself. If a man loves himself, then that means he’s not going to yell at himself; he’s not going to slap himself around; and he’s not going to bully himself. This not what it means to be a Biblical husband.

In my second marriage, I have a traditional, Biblical marriage. I submit to my husband. What does this mean? All it really means is that if he wants me to do something, I generally do it unless there is some good reason for me not to and then I am going to explain that to him and he is going to consider whether I should or shouldn’t do it. Upon that consideration of my reasoning, he decides and I proceed accordingly. Because I love and respect him, I will do as he says. Someone who might not understand submission might ask, “But what if your reasoning was sound? Why should you do as he says?” To them I would respond, “A family cannot have 2 bosses. He is our ultimate boss in the same way a business has one manager. I am the assistant manager. The manager says ‘no, I need you to do it this way, then you’re going to do it how the manager says.’ It’s no different. Ultimately, if the decision doesn’t work out, then he’s responsible. He takes that on as the head of the family. That is how God intended it to be.” For me, this second time around, I have so much less stress. I’m not constantly worried about situations and I know I can trust him. I have absolutely no reason not to trust my husband to make the right decisions for our family.

There’s also the Proverbs 31 element of being a Biblical woman which many “modern” women protest, but it is a misunderstood chapter. It was written by the mother of King Lemuel. The first 9 verses are said to be advice she gave him about how to rule as a just king.  It is the rest of the chapter that gives many women heartburn because so often it is presented as a list of qualities of Biblical womanhood. However, this part of the chapter wasn’t written for women; it was written to the king and to men. The purpose is to underscore the preeminent nature of man’s responsibility to act wisely in establishing a foundation for women of noble character to arise—man empowers woman to become the person that the Lord designed her to be. If we only see Proverbs 31 as a list of characteristics or actions, then it is a list of works by which we cannot be saved, which would be a false gospel. (See https://saltandlight.sg/devotional/hear-the-sober-truth-proverbs-31-was-not-written-to-women-it-was-written-to-a-man/)

I have to agree that when men love their wives, love the Lord, and live as the Lord has willed them to live, it makes it so much easier for everyone else around them to do the same. That does not mean that life is perfect. We still live in a fallen world and there will be times when things go wrong. There will be disagreements, but when the Lord is at the center of everything you do, you do not have to worry about the types of behaviors you see on the evening news. I would never want to go back to the kind of marriage I had the first time. You cannot have two bosses; someone has to make the final decision. There has to be trust between both partners.

There’s nothing wrong with a division of labor. Each one doing what they are good at and that does not necessarily mean girl things and boy things. If the husband likes to cook, let him cook. If the wife likes yard work, let her do the yard work. Those do not have to be areas of contention, but they have to be agreed upon. However in regard to child rearing, most often mothers are best equipped for this task because God created us for it. Everything about women was created for the purpose of birthing and raising children. There may be some exceptions, but those are rare. Some women fail to understand what this power really is. I recall a time in graduate school when I was in a course called Peace Paradigms. We were given an assignment to do a project on a life altering time in our life. Of course mine was my adoption. I remember some of the projects were really crazy, but one that stood out what a girl who talked about how women were oppressed by being forced to be wives and mothers and forced to do cook and clean for the husbands and children (and I didn’t know how that related to her and any change in her life), I just put my face in hands and rolled my eyes. In my opinion, women can potentially have more power than men if they recognize that potential and take steps to use it. Let me explain, because we have children in our care for approximately eighteen years, we have direct influence over their worldview, beliefs, and behavior for those years. Of course, you want that influence to be positive and uplifting and not that of a cult leader, but a mother, with the right tools, love, and passion can influence a child to become the next president, a surgeon, a missionary, or whatever she believes her child is capable of being and that is exceptionally powerful. I think of mothers like Sonya Carson who raised son Ben to become one of the preeminent neurosurgeons of our time. She could not read, but she made Ben write essays on books he read from the library each week. She is one of millions of mothers who worked hard to provide for her family and to make sure that her children succeeded in school so that they wouldn’t have to worry about their future like she did.

Finally, once I heard a minister say that, in a marriage, if you can prioritize each other as WE, YOU, THOU, you can head off many conflicts—first, think of how the situation affects you as a family; then, how does it affect the others; and last, how does it affect you. I have always thought those were wise words and I think of them often.

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