“Gates now thinks scientific innovation will curb any threats — real and perceived — to the planet’s climate and it’s instead time for a “strategic pivot” away from focusing on limiting rising temperatures to fighting poverty and preventing disease.”
To paraphrase Willie Sutton – disease is where the money is.
Bill Gates, chair of the Gates Foundation, during the Bloomberg Philanthropies 2025 Global Business Forum in New York, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. The forum will bring together heads of state, CEOs, and global leaders to chart what comes next for global cooperation and how to deliver real-world impact. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
Why are people panicking about the weather? Climate doomer Bill Gates thinks everyone should just calm down. He believes “climate change” is a serious problem but it won’t be the end of humanity as we know it, a 17-page memo released Tuesday by the billionaire reveals.
Gates now thinks scientific innovation will curb any threats — real and perceived — to the planet’s climate and it’s instead time for a “strategic pivot” away from focusing on limiting rising temperatures to fighting poverty and preventing disease.
The 70-year-old said in the memo the world’s primary goal should now work to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions in the world’s poorest countries.
AP reports if given a choice between eradicating malaria and a tenth of a degree increase in warming, Gates told reporters, “I’ll let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria. People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.”
The Microsoft co-founder wrote his 17-page memo – as seen by AP – hoping to have an impact on next month’s U.N. climate change conference in Brazil.
He’s urging world leaders to ask whether the little money designated for climate is being spent on the “right things,” AP notes, in an apparent back flip from all his past warnings on the future of the planet.
“They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data.
“That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model…something as inconceivable complex as…a national economy, a weather system.
Ever since I was young, I have enjoyed reading science fiction. Some of its attraction is the escapism it offers, but also the artistry of those who can envision a world where some things are very different but which seem to make enough internal sense to suspend disbelief and care about the characters. It also sometimes connects to or echoes recent “real world” circumstances (see my “The Road Back from Interstellar Serfdom,” for example). Another example involves the novel Variable Star (2006) by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson.
After previous enjoyment of Robert Heinlein’s work, another work—compiled after Heinlein was dead—caught my attention. It had come from incomplete notes for a book that were found in Heinlein’s papers, which his estate commissioned Spider Robinson to complete and turn into a book. A certain passage (pp. 194-195) seems to describe a good deal of the green movement in recent years. And, just as in the situation in the book, it can lead to results far better to avoid than to experience:
The characteristic flaw…[was] the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed… Over and over…they developed the imbecilic idea that they understood nearly everything.
[Unfortunately] the explanations kept falling apart at the first hard-data-push…yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.
They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data.
That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model…something as inconceivable complex as…a national economy, a weather system.
They made solemn announcements…on the basis of computer models which they had produced…[but] they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. (emphasis added)
Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge and couldn’t deliver. The disaster those errors led to in the book reminded me of the importance of correcting such missteps before disasters strike. It also reminded me of the extensive work The Heartland Institute has done in rebutting many fallacies, flaws, and misinterpretations that have been visited on the public by those promoting the green agenda.
Heartland’s contributions to straightening out the many things that have been twisted in environmental discussions are far beyond the scope of this short article, but one can get a very good idea of their extent from merely scanning the titles of their Climate Change Weekly (CCW) articles. It is worth reading the articles because, as in Variable Star, being wrong in this area can have very severe consequences. To avoid such harms, we must remember the well-worn adage that in making policy, “good intentions do not guarantee good results,” because false premises and faulty logic can often undermine—and even override—desired results.
Consider just the following titles from some CCW articles from roughly a year. It is far from complete, but it strongly reflects Variable Star’s conclusion that “they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were”:
As the General Assembly continues work on the 2025-26 state budget, should we increase taxpayer funding for Penn State?
The Penn State Board of Trustees recently voted to give the president a $450,000 raise this year, which will increase her pay from $950,000 to $1.4 million a year. It also agreed to give her a 3.5% raise every year until 2032.
Then, this past weekend, Penn State fired the head football coach, but he is getting almost $50 million on the way out due to his irresponsible contract that apparently pays the same for good and bad performance. This golden parachute could be reduced if he gets a new job. On a related note, PSU recently decided to close several branch campuses stating if it didn’t the university would have to come up with the $50 million those campuses lose each year.
In addition, Penn State is currently spending $700 million to renovate its football stadium.
Penn State tells us every year that it is financially struggling and needs an increase in state funding.
Should we help PSU pay for all of this by increasing the amount of taxpayer funding it gets?
“When it comes to destroying your brand, Norwegian Nobel Committee is the Bud Lite of peace prizes. After all, back in 2009 they gave the Peace Prize to a President Barack Obama who then went on to bomb at least seven countries, set the Middle East on fire, and even conducted drone strikes on American citizens!“
The new owner of Paramount, David Ellison, participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, leaked emails show. Originally dubbed “12 Tribes,” a reference to the dozen Jewish billionaires solicited to underwrite the operation, the scheme sought out American faces to fund surveillance firms run by Israeli intelligence veterans on behalf of Tel Aviv, as it targeted American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
After 36 years serving Erie’s west side, Pony Express could shut its doors by the end of year — not because of poor business, but because the U.S. Postal Service has pulled the plug.
On Oct. 1, USPS officials removed all postal equipment and signage from the store at 1903 W. Eighth St., ending a decades-long contract that allowed the locally owned shop to operate as an official USPS location. The move followed a termination notice issued in late May, giving owners David and Terry Grab 120 days to wind down its USPS services.
Grab said the USPS provided a written statement clarifying that the contract termination was not due to performance. Rather, USPS determined that nearby postal facilities could fully absorb the community’s needs without Pony Express…
This is an interesting talk on ancient civilizations we heard about in school but ended up not knowing anything about.
There are a number of suspected causes for the collapse of these Mediterranean/Middle East civilizations, two of which are climate change and “Sea People” invaders.
Climate change was temperature REDUCTION back then!
The author states all the suspected causes for Mediterranean/Middle East collapse are present today. The Sea People today, he says, may be ISIS and their brethren. Can you think of another sea people candidate that causes mischief?
The author states we would not be where we are if these collapses had not occurred and spurred change. This ties in neatly with Thomas Sowell’s “Conquests and Cultures: An International History”. Conquest often eventually results in advancement for the conquered.
I’ve been running a little experiment the past 10 days. I carried two phones everywhere: my Google Fi device and my GrapheneOS device.
Every night, here’s how the batteries compared: • Google Fi: about 5% left • GrapheneOS: about 50–75% left
What’s going on here? Am I really using the Google Fi phone 2–4x more?
Actually it’s the opposite. My GrapheneOS phone is my daily driver. That’s where I use Signal, Brave, podcasts, audiobooks, email, camera, notes, calendar, my language app, and other things.
Meanwhile, on my Google Fi phone, I’ve installed exactly two apps: Signal and Google Maps, and I also use it as an internet hotspot. I deleted as many preinstalled apps as I could without breaking the phone, but there are countless ones I can’t remove.
At first glance you might think the hotspot is what’s draining the battery. That’s certainly a factor, but for context I turn the device to airplane mode (and shutting off the hotspot) whenever I’m not using it.
Even with “aggressive battery saver” enabled and hours in airplane mode, the Google phone churned through its battery like crazy.
The fact that the Google phone’s battery still dies so quickly is revealing. Battery drain can actually be a useful indicator of how private your device is. Some of this comes down to deliberate privacy choices, and some of it comes from the inherent design of each operating system.
Why Battery Drain Is a Privacy Clue
Battery life is a rough but useful proxy for what’s happening under the hood. If your phone is dead by dinnertime even when you barely use it, something else is doing the work. And “something else” usually means: • Background services constantly phoning home • Analytics trackers collecting usage data • System-level apps pinging servers even when you think they’re off • Push notification frameworks that keep connections alive 24/7
That invisible activity not only kills your battery, it shows how much your phone is reporting back without your consent.
MCViewPoint 