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Get Off My Land, Peasant
There has been rampant speculation as to why some of the world’s richest guys are suddenly buying huge tracts of farmland. Bill Gates is now acquiring a big chunk of North Dakota in addition to other holdings. Jeff Bezos already has hundreds of thousands of acres of land.
Is there some insidious conspiracy to control the world’s food supplies? An investment in agribusinesses likely to boom when the Davos braintrust creates global food shortages that will make Sri Lanka and Holland look like practice runs? Or do they have so much cash there is nothing left to buy other than the planet’s surface?
Will this lead to the final revenge of Margaret Sanger and Paul Ehrlich to rid the plant of its parasitic human masses?
One consolation is that despite the wealth, these guys are not the sharpest knives in the drawer outside of their core income-generating activities. Bill Gates has achieved a C+ undergraduate grasp of a number of issues (and that’s in an era where nobody gets less than a B unless they’re openly conservative) and Jeff Bezos has managed to turn the august Washington Post into one of America’s top two or three student newspapers. At least Lex Luthor and the string of villains that 007 took down were actually good at their craft.
When the evil (or just dumb) master plan is unveiled, all we know for sure is that the worse it is, the more likely that Bill Kristol and Jen Rubin will applaud it faster than Kent Brockman welcomed our new insect overlords.
My personal fear is that this land grab might be linked with Jeff Zuckerberg’s Create the Vote efforts. We need some oversight as to what the supervillains are growing. Just sayin’.
Published in General
No, I just don’t play pointless word games people. I could give you a couple of google cues but you’re capable.
It was a TED talk. I don’t know why you can’t look it up. I’d settle on the first video that plays the clip, but that ostensibly won’t do for you. Since you are so good at looking things up, you can find a source that’s good enough for you.
When I point out distinctions that need to be made, such as the difference between what President Trump said and what the media say he said, that is not a word game. It is, however, a word game to refer to making those distinctions as “playing word games” and is not worthy of Ricochet.
And if you make the claim that Gates said something, it is incumbent on you to explain how you know that, unless it is information that you are not authorized to release, in which case if you have a reputation for truth telling people will probably accept that. Just saying “video” is playing word games.
I have linked that video before. Why should I do so again? Why must I repeatedly link to sources people never read? I am not writing formal research papers here. When you post claims, I only ask for sources if you have details I could not verify in my own searches. I go and look things up for myself.
Because ostensibly, I distrust some of your sources as much as you distrust some of mine.
Did you link to that video in this post’s comment section? Then a reference to the comment number would be adequate. People often handle it that way, and it has never been a problem.
Formal research papers have nothing to do it. We’re just talking about basic human interactions.
Is this the video?
And if so, do I really have to watch 30 minutes of Bill Gates in order to find where he said the purpose of vaccines is to reduce the human population?
Cruel and unusual punishment.
I think the offending statement was that there was no point in vaccination efforts to save kids with the inference that if other health threats are not addressed, vaccines will not have much life-extending benefit.
To his credit, Gates did eschew Malthusian assumptions about birth rates. If babies often die and if there is no social or economic structure outside of family, clan and tribe, then the incentive to make more babies is vastly higher. Reducing infant mortality and helping to stabilize economic life reduces birth rates more effectively than shiploads of condoms and birth control pamphlets.
As a Davos man, Gates almost certainly believes that lots of (non-wealthy) humans are bad for Gaia and that population growth is a net negative but I doubt he has ever expressly endorsed any form of accelerated removal of living people. That is the kind of thing the supervillains would discuss only under the cone of silence.
Unless they believe that nobody can stop them anyway.
If I provide a clip where people are discussing the pertinent part and you think it was taken out of context and so dismiss my source I provide, are you going to watch the original to verify or are you going to wave it off?
And I’m not convinced that doing research for others is normal human interaction. If I doubt what someone says, I look it up. I may ask “where’d you hear that?” But still, the answer will require some leg work on my part if I am really that interested. That’s normal interaction.
Its frequently a problem when people mock or discredit your sources and so discard the information.
Those kinds of statements require honesty with self. I don’t think they would ever think they are trying to kill people. Or maybe he is a supervillain and would then only confess in secret to someone he’s about to destroy.
Bottom line, I never expect the bad guys to say bluntly “I’m out to kill people.” I expect them to say things like “The well-being of the earth is the most important thing” coupled with “People are destroying the earth” and “the population is too high”. It’s far enough removed to deceive self and others. Like the anti-racism goal of erasing racial distinctions. That’s a good thing! Let’s do it! And then, because genetics, an anomaly is born that doesn’t fit and it is shunned… because human nature. And it has no group to protect it because they were erased.
There are always worse things. But people are easily deceived.
I expect food access will be tightly controlled with concentration of ownership. That’s what I expect.
Why not just tell me approximately where in the video it is, and then I can find the context for myself? I would rather see it raw than have someone else’s interpretation, at least for starters. That way I can do my own thinking. Which is not to say that somebody else wouldn’t have additional context that should be taken into consideration.
You haven’t directly answered my question as to whether this is the video where Gates said the purpose of the vaccines is to reduce the human population, but from your response I’m assuming the answer is “yes.”
One of the oldest dodges on the internet is for someone to make a statement of fact and when asked where that information came from, to say, “I’m not going to do your research for you.” That’s not honest conversation.
Yes, they do. Sometimes deservedly so, and sometimes not. Working through that is part of the conversation.
So did Gates say the purpose of the vaccines is to reduce the human population, or did he not say that? The question here is whether Gates actually said that. See #22.
Also, take a moment to really ponder why anyone who knows any science at all would want to reduce CO2 to 0.
Ret, if you discard this, I’m never giving you a source ever again.
I’m not sure, either, but there must have been some context that preceded this that explains what he has in mind, whether or not it is a good idea. If he means eliminating all CO2 emissions on the planet, that would be silly.
However, the original question was about the purpose of vaccines, and there is not a word in this clip about vaccines.
Yes he did…
paraphrase of the last sentence of clip:
”Take People in the equation: new vaccines, health services, and reproductive health services can help reduce it by 10-15%”
I’ve already listened to it twice, but I admit I do have an ability to tune out some things. I’ll try again.
Try with closed captioning. Sometimes I miss words and I turn it on to help catch everything.
You’re right! He did say that. This time I did a LOL when I heard it.
Whether it matters to anything is another question, but I appreciate a good laugh at Gates’ expense. Thank you!
Good idea. I sometimes do that, too, but in this case I finally caught it. Sorry for causing you to have to go to extra work so I could catch it.
I’m one of those pro-population growth folk who think human beings are an asset and a doubling of the world population wouldn’t be bad. Earth has some carrying capacity limit, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close to it.
When child mortality decreases, parents have fewer children. There are other drivers of reduced fecundity, but this is one of the good ones: if you can reasonably expect most or all of your children to reach adulthood in decent health, you don’t have to have eight of them secure your lineage.
In that sense I suppose improved vaccination, and better public health and hygiene (e.g., hand soap, clean drinking water, reduced biomass energy), might contribute to a lower rate of population growth, depending on how you measure it and how skewed it is toward young populations — as is common in developing countries. That might be a non-sinister interpretation of the suggestion that improved vaccination (and prosperity in general) could contribute to a smaller population.
The thought that anyone who saw vaccination as a way of surreptitiously sterilizing or killing people would say so out loud in a public forum seems a bit farfetched.
And yet, it has been done before with other medical procedures.
Prosperity in general tends to lead to smaller families, because childhood mortality is less common in prosperous countries so you don’t need top have a herd of kids to ensure that some will grow to adulthood.
Yes, forced sterilization and abortion, clandestine experimentation, eugenics of every sort have been practiced in various places and times.
But I think the implication here is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with pharmaceutical companies to secretly distribute “vaccines” that are intended to sterilize or kill people — and that Bill essentially admitted it during a public speech.
I would look for a more plausible explanation before accepting that.
I don’t know if that’s the implication, but I certainly don’t think there is any basis for thinking that Bill Gates is doing that.
He said what he said, and I attribute it to what happens when one thinks in cliches. I could be wrong, of course. I don’t like Gates so would have to overcome considerable revulsion to know more about his speaking patterns.
Well, perhaps it wasn’t implied in so many words….
Oh. Well, yes. I guess it was.
I can only speak of my personal experience.
I have myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease, that is rare so there isn’t a lot of research or active drug development. The immune system attacks the muscles in your body and if left untreated results in not being able to breathe.
I was part of a research study funded by the Gates Foundation with a new drug. My experience was entirely positive. I felt so much better as a result of being on the research drug and since the end of the trials, it has been downhill. What ended the trial which got to only stage 2 on the approval process was the pandemic. And has not restarted.
The thing is that better health care, under those circumstances, doesn’t reduce population. It just reduces birth rates so that fewer pregnancies are needed to maintain population or increase it. No longer need 8 pregnancies to achieve 2 living children that make it to adulthood. Still 2 kids to adults, but no deaths needed to get there.
I could see technology suppressing population via fewer people needed to feed and prosper people… but the byproduct of that has also been population booms.
In context, he’s talking about reducing one of the numbers as close to zero as possible. Either he is completely unorganized in his thinking or he was not well prepared, but he states getting close to zero and begins with people.
Getting birth rates lower still does not reduce population close to zero unless you ARE sterilizing. It only takes 2 kids for replacement if these services are about reducing infant mortality. You don’t need many. But he’s not talking about saving babies, young children, and moms so they can grow the population. And every conservative knows what reproductive health services are on the Left – abortion services.
There is no way you get to a 10-15% reduction in population without a one child policy, abortion, or sterilization or some combination of them.
Planned promiscuity, narcissism, prolonged adolescence and an overall culture of death seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.