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The Gates of Hell Hath Seen His Shadow…
…and declared 18 more months of quarantine:
You will be tested, whether you like it or not. You will be vaccinated, with his vaccine, whether you like it or not. You will not be allowed outside until late May at the earliest, and you won’t be allowed to gather in groups for 18 months, because that’s how long the vaccine takes. This is the plan, folks.
I enjoyed the part where he was anointed Emperor Zod, ruler of planet earth without a paper ballot. Where do you want to go today? It doesn’t matter, all yours freedoms belongs to him.
Published in Healthcare
Both, neither. Who are we to define it’s real life experience.
The makeup is pretty remarkable. Most alien chicks in Star Trek were pretty cute. This wasn’t a glamour role. ;)
Bill Gates’ proclamation regarding what we must do in response to COVID-19 is just another reminder of how out-of-touch are billionaires. It does not even seem to occur to him that 99.9% of Americans cannot simply kick back indefinitely in their Seattle mansions until Bill Gates tells it’s okay to come out.
I wonder how many people are going to look at how much money they are saving by eating at home & how much weight they are losing by eating at home and rethink how much they want to eat at restaurants after this is over. My pay has been cut by this, and packing lunches and cooking supper at home are two fairly painless ways to save money.
His suggestion wouldn’t bother me quite so much if he were personally offering generous checks to those who would need it to pay their bills during the lockdown. But as far as I know, he isn’t. (I haven’t watched the clip, so I’m not positive. But I haven’t heard it mentioned anywhere, so I’m assuming he hasn’t.) He seems to just be assuming that the government will step in and help out during the meantime. And that annoys me to no end.
You think it’s reasonable to lock people in their homes for 18 months until a vaccine is available and then force vaccinate on penalty of being locked out of the economy?
Are you kidding me?
If you think that’s reasonable… anyone who thinks that is reasonable… has no business whining about the authoritarian left.
Right. Like corporations and big money don’t exercise undue influence over our politics. What imaginary world do you live in?
I live in an imaginary world where people don’t freak out just because someone with money has an opinion they don’t like.
No, that wouldn’t be reasonable. But I don’t think that’s actually what he said. I was responding to what I heard him say, not what someone might choose to extrapolate from that.
I reached the 18 month quarantine based on his support of complete lock down until a vaccine can be procured and the timetable for such a vaccine.
It doesn’t matter if deaths drop in a month or so, as soon as we are allowed out of our homes, deaths will spike again. His opinion (that appears to carry undue influence for not-an-expert) is that while people are dying, the economy should be shut down.
So why would I not think he’d support an 18 month quarantine?
Oh… 2 week quarantine! 1 week in, its 30 day quarantine and some are as long as 60 days. How long can we keep pushing that back?
And his talk of a digital ID identifying those who have been vaccinated.
I’m sorry, but are you people unaware that Mastercard shut down payment processing for gun manufacturers? Have you seen the influence the left has had on the economy? Do you really think they wouldn’t refuse business to people who don’t check out?
If I thought either of you were that concerned about the cultural effect going on, I’d cut you some slack, but both of you pretend that big business doesn’t throw up entry barriers while engaging in their own social engineering experiments.
I don’t want to go back and listen to the video again. I don’t believe that he said we need an 18 month lockdown; if I remember correctly, he said that people would be uncomfortable assembling in large groups until we have a vaccine, and that that might be 18 months. Words to that effect.
If that’s what he said, I suspect he’s correct. A lot of people are going to be uncomfortable assembling in large groups. Fewer people should do it, until this thing is really eliminated.
Feel free to transcribe bits of it or give me a timestamp of when to start listening. As I said, I listened only to about two thirds of it; maybe he got all totalitarian toward the end. But what I listened to sounded overly cautious for my tastes, but not like someone laying down the law.
(By the way, this is why I don’t like video as a source. It’s hard to reference, hard to fact-check, and a medium ideally suited for firing passions.)
Between travel, tolls, breakfast, lunch I am probably saving about $300+ a month
If I felt confident that he wasn’t using his lobby power to influence the quarantine, I’d agree with you.
But I don’t trust leftist instincts. And yes, I want the original timetable for the quarantine back.
And I don’t know how uncomfortable people would be unless they are being manipulated. I mean, spring break beaches were packed before states and counties shut them down and my grocery store is still packed everytime I go.
Kids are foolish or the risk wasn’t that high?
I had every intention of taking my kids to the beach. Being anti-social, I thought it would be fine because there’s a lot of space at the beach and I avoid people.
My risk assessment is clearly different than yours. So far, in my time here, I haven’t seen you having more or less wisdon than myself. So who are you to say that choice is foolish except by your own standards of risk?
While I can’t prove it without an antibody test, I’m pretty certain this thing already ran through my household in late December, early January which further decreases my risk.
Both might be true. But kids are foolish is the case whether or not the risk was high. And, given that we couldn’t adequately assess the risk at the time most kids were going off to spring break, it was a foolish choice in any case.
But let’s talk about kids for a second. They’re foolish by adult standards for a couple of reasons. First, they lack the experience of adults, and so often lack the context which would inform wise decision making. But beyond that, their brains are wired differently. Their assess risk as children do, not as adults do, and estimate the risk of adverse outcomes as being considerably lower than adults do. That’s compounded by the fact that they tend to experience pleasure to a considerably greater degree than adults do, which makes risky (by adult standards) behavior even more compelling.
Of course, I’m treating adults as the responsible ones here, and suggesting that it’s the kids, and not the adults, who are choosing unwisely. But I think we can find ample evidence that, while we all fall short of perfect wisdom, kids excel at it.
“Taking my kids to the beach” and “spring break beaches were packed” describes two different scenarios. I think taking your kids to the beach is a wonderful thing to do (despite an article I read today that claims that the ocean is potentially contaminated and should be avoided; I think everyone just wants to get in on the act), assuming the beach isn’t “packed.” But going to a packed beach during spring break? No, I think that was just a dumb choice, if spring break happened after college closings, etc., began.
Kids make dumb choices all the time. That’s measured against adult choices, of course. In particular, young men make dumb choices all the time, because their brains aren’t yet wired like adult brains.
I suspect that’s true of a lot of people. I think we’re probably overreacting as a nation.
I so wish there were a way to dislike this comment. So unnecessary, so needlessly snarky, especially given the circumstances and especially given Randy’s title as “moderator.” As if people are annoyed by some off-the-cuff quote Gates made to a reporter on something that will have absolutely no impact on anyone. One of the great frustrations of this situation is knowing that people like Gates will become even more influential than he already is mostly because he’s rich and has the capability of living in the absurd world he describes.
Not to indicate that this COVID-19 enemy is not deadly real and scary due to all the unknowns, but to provide context on how much death we accept in regular circumstances, here’s this: “So far this season, there have been 45 million flu illnesses, at least 300,000 hospitalizations, and up to 46,000 deaths from flu, of which more than 100 are pediatric–a higher total at this point of the year than any season in the past decade,” https://www.rochesterregional.org/news/2020/01/flu-season-2020.
The great frustration is that he’s financially positioned to benefit from the Model, The Diagnosis, The Cure and The Aftermath of not just this Pantomime Pandemic but Global Warming.
What a coincidence. If we could only destroy the economy, we could save it. Artificial Meat! Yum, yum.
So, just hypothetically, imagine this. Suppose Bill Gates were simply a man who got filthy stinking rich because he worked hard and made some good calls in the early days of the PC boom and then managed his company well. He then decided that he wanted to be remembered as a great philanthropist, rather than just a rich computer nerd. Being an unusually bright but not particularly socially adept fellow, he figured his computer savvy was proof that he was smarter than most people at everything, not just making money in the software business. So he and his wife poured a few billion dollars into a foundation and decided that fighting disease and crushing poverty in the world’s poorest communities would be its mission. Now he shares his bright ideas as if the world were eager to hear them, as people with lots of money will tend to do, and some of them are pretty good and some of them are the kind of busybody nostrums you’d expect from a guy who probably hasn’t thought much about political ideas or values.
If, just hypothetically, that were the case, how would he look or sound different than he appears here?
There are sinister people out there. I just haven’t seen evidence that Bill Gates is one of them.
You mean a billionaire who suddenly reinvents himself as a philanthropist like the Carnegies and Rockefellers before him and his dad just happened to have been head of Planned Parenthood? What could possibly go wrong?
https://vimeo.com/147695523
Clippy?
I don’t doubt that he’s a pretty typical liberal. Most people who don’t think a lot about politics are.
I just resist demonizing people without a lot of evidence and, again, I don’t see it in his case. I’ve paid a fair amount of attention to Bill Gates for the past 30+ years, and I just never picked up the whiff of brimstone.
Now Steve Jobs, there was a guy to keep an eye on….
Damn.
I take it all back.
So here’s the thing.
My comment about the anti-christ was hyperbolic. While it went in the same direction as my actual opinion on his little escapades (that uses africans as test subjects for vaccines), it was a hyperbolic comment.
Randy had to go and take it literally and mock me for it. While others poked fun at my comment, he went into mockery mode.
So I get to defend my opinion of gates not being a man I’m willing to give benefit of doubt to.
And FYI, Racette, your batting average on public figure character assessment is abysmally low. I can at least say I thought Trump would make at least a status quo president, if not better. I thought Mueller was suspicious from the start and Comey was a prima donna.
What have you? So I’ll trust my own discernment on this, thank you very much.
I actually wrote a bunch of unkind things about Comey when I first joined Ricochet. I think I was kind of ahead of the curve on that one. And I wear my Trump2020 hat every day. I wish he were a better man, but I like the job he’s done and I desperately want him to get re-elected.
But let’s not get all ad hominem-y here. My miserable track record evaluating my fellow creatures shouldn’t reflect badly on Mr. Gates. He should stand or fall on his own merits.
Yes, but I have not earned any reason to distrust my instincts in favor of yours.
That’s a very reasonable position to take, frankly. I would tend to think less of anyone who didn’t trust his or her own judgment more than that of some cantankerous old pedant on the internet.
However, I’m not willing to say anything seriously condemnatory of Bill Gates based on anyone’s instincts, mine included. I just need a reason to be that unfavorably disposed toward someone, and he’s never given me one.
;)
As a man, Gates has few to no merits. He was a brutally nasty manager, and he ran Microsoft without any hint of ethics.
Microsoft was famously ruthless, I’ll grant you that. And Bill Gates was, by all accounts, the caricature of an obnoxious brainy nerd.
But he’s also given tens of billions of dollars of his own money to efforts to lift the poorest people in the world out of poverty and illness. Assuming that he isn’t in fact an evil villain bent on an expensively misdirected program of global eugenics or genocide (and I have no reason to believe that he is), spending tens of billions of dollars of his own money to help desperate people should, I think, count at least a little in his favor.