What's Happening To Poor Bill Gates?

One of the ways the very rich are different from you and me is that they normally hire publicity firms to keep them out of the news, not in it. So why is Bill Gates such a hot topic now? Jeff Bezos, another guy in his league, went through a divorce in 2019 with hardly a blip on the radar. Even Donald Trump's exes kept quiet about the guy (I assume his lawyers put non-disparagement clauses in the settlements, but that's what smart people do).

Other lizard people, like Warren Buffett, maintain a carefuily manicured public image. Laurene Powell Jobs is normally just invisible. How are we all of a sudden finding out that Gates, whom everyone thought was just a shy, retiring nerd, was a party animal with an Epstein problem? This may in part be due to a basically unkempt nature -- I was at an industry presentation in the 1990s where he gave a speech with his tie coming out the wrong side of his button-down collar -- but this in turn may have been not so much nerdiness as figuring he's so rich he can get away with it.

Just months before the messy divorce hit the news, Gates had already got himself into public hot water:

“I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” Gates told Technology Review. “You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”

Many readers on Twitter aren’t ready to completely give up their burgers and steaks just yet. So this led to Gates’ trending on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon as critics chewed him out.

It's certainly possible that his wife, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's PR firm, had been able to keep the guy quiet for a couple of decades, but with the marriage crumbling, he no longer gave a flip. Now Melinda is saying she doesn't just want a divorce, she wants a Catholic annulment. We may assume that if Newt Gingrich was able to get two of them, Melinda can surely get just one.

Last night, my wife and I were watching a TV show from 2013 about Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. It featured a cleaned-up Bill Gates explaining vaccines to the rest of us and mentioning that the Bill and Melinda foundation was doing many good works in the vaccine field. In fact, there were clips in the show of the duo visiting vaccine centers in the Third World, but based on what we now hear, these must have been carefully staged, with the couple doing all they could not to look like they despised each other.

The Bill Gates of 2013 can't reprise that role in 2021. In fact, if he has his own PR flack at all now, he'd probably be told to keep quiet about the flatulent cows from now on as well.

But Melinda is proving not to be a Laurene Powell Jobs either. I would guess that the stories we've been getting about the nude swimming parties and the weekends with his ex-girlfriend are coming from Melinda, or more accurately Melinda's publicist, or maybe even more accurately, Melinda's publicist working closely with her divorce attorney. There was no pre-nup, there were 27 years of marriage with three kids, and Gates is worth somethiong well north of $100 billion. Compared to that, Laurene Powell Jobs is chump change.

What does this do to Gates's standing as a lizard person, which is to say, one of the people who actually run the planet? It's hard to say. It's possible that if he had an Epstein problem, he wasn't taken as seriously as we may have thought, as this sort of thing would presumably have been known among the more influential lizard people -- and after all, nobody's rushing in to rescue Ghislaine Maxwell at this point. There've been no think pieces in the Atlantic on how we shouldn't rush to judgment on Epstein, either, least of all from Alan Dershowitz.

As a lizard person, Gates is suddenly coming off as a phony and a lightweight. My question is how long this was known to the regulars at Davos, though they're largely phonies and lightweights themselves.

Wait: Who's Calling The Shots?

I'm an Aristotelian, and I look for causes. That Chris Cuomo would visibly press, and even berate, Dr Walensky on CNN over not updatimg the mask guidance Wednesday struck me as important, and I posted about it Thursday. But then, the CDC actually went ahead and revised its mask guidance, saying vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks or observe social distancing indoors. Beyond that, Joe Biden himself endorsed the guidance, announcing,

Let me repeat: If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.

But neither President Biden nor Drs Walensky and Fauci are independent actors. Via the New York Times just yesterday, we learn that Biden dithers for weeks over decisions. Dr Walensky took public health advice from the teachers'union, not The Science:

The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show.

But then, in the wake of the mask relaxation, even the AFT did a 180:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said she is now “pleading” for the full reopening of schools.

“We can and we must reopen schools in the fall for in-person teaching, learning and support. And we must keep them open fully and safely five days a week,” said Weingarten in a speech.

Weingarten’s new advocacy or reopening schools comes just over a week after her teachers union was caught at the center of a scandal for inveigling the Biden CDC in a plot to keep schools closed indefinitely.

It's hard not to think that someone powerful -- someone like, say, Bill Gates -- had his chief gofer make a few calls, to CNN, the White House, the CDC, the AFT -- and justlikethat Biden quit dithering, Walensky saw the light, and everything magically got straightened out with a few public announcements. Well, you might think.

Except Speaker Pelosi said the House will continue to wear masks. The LA County health department, which just the other week had immediately endorsed the prior CDC guidance over wearing masks outdoors, took a very different tack on Thursday:

Masks are still required for anyone entering a business or crowded indoor area in Los Angeles County until further guidance is issued, public health officials said Thursday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eased its mandate.

. . . But in L.A. County, public health officials say everyone must still adhere to distancing and masking requirements at workplaces until the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health changes its guidelines.

“Until Cal/OSHA changes these requirements, the county cannot be less restrictive,” Ferrer said.

The state agency’s board is set to vote on new workplace safety standards next Thursday, May 20. If approved, businesses where all employees are fully vaccinated would be exempt from physical distancing requirements starting July 31.

In other words, Dr Ferrer is going to slow-walk this through the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy won't make up its mind until at least July 31, even though Gov Newsom himself said things in California will loosen June 15.

It's possible to argue that the Biden-CDC "loosening" is just a carefully thought out head fake by the lizard people like Bill Gates, intended to distract attention from inflation, gas lines, Hamas, and whatever else. That in fact could be. But what's become even more abundantly clear in just the past few days is that the whole mask-and-social-distancing regime is nothing but a politically driven charade. If The Science says they aren't needed, then screw The Science, keep the masks.

I'll have thoughts about Bill Gates tomorrow.

Somewhere Between Incompetence And Dereliction

When I worked in IT, I was in and out of both the security and contingency planning areas between the early 1980s and early 2000s. I was in at the start of both fields, and I followed them through the transition from IBM mainfrane to Unix and Windows networking. In light of my experience, I've had some big questions about the story we've been getting about the Colonial Pipeline hack. On one hand, a corporation is prudent to minimize the amount of public information it releases about its internal operations. On the other, based on what I read, I've got to think that at some point, the Colonial board of directors will need to clean house thoroughly. You don't pay $5 million ransom just like that, after all.

The broad outlines of the picture so far are all we've been told: somehow, some freelance Russian hackers were able to disable the company's software that controls its pipeline operations, they demanded a ransom to have the system restored, and the company was forced to operate its pipeline manually until it paid the ransom, reportedly $5 million. In the meantime, gasoline and other product distribution was impacted over much of the US.

Here's the first issue. Pipelines are among the industries that are heavily regulated. This is because they're critical. We've just seen what happens when a pipeline goes down. Banks are the same way. If an ATM network were to go down for several days, it would be even more catastrophic, but the pipeline is clearly bad enough. Bank regulators require that banks have comprehensive plans in place, including physical backup facilities, to recover within hours if any such outage were to happen. A bank can be declared insolvent if regulators don't think its backup measures are adequate, and with good reason.

Since the 1980s, public corporations in particular have had to assess the criticality of their business functions, if only to recognize what an outage for x amount of time will cost them -- this includes not just loss of accounts receivable, but secondary costs in terms of lawsuits, loss of reputation, and political fallout. In general, a business subject to external and internal audit should have long since identified the level of outage that would threaten its existence and have plans and physical backup measures in place to recover from any such outage. This would range, depending on the business, from local power outage to civil unreast to hurricane to anything short of the big asteroid hitting the planet.

These measures can be expensive, but the issue is how much more expensive it would be for a bank or public utility to have its system unavailable for days or weeks. This could threaten a company's ability to remain in business, and its board has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to assure it can continue.

As far as I can see, Colonial Pipeline had no such plans in place, or if it did, it didn't have anyone who could implement them. For instance, if the issue was that hackers had locked the system software, there should have been a clean backup copy offsite, and if necessary, a place with a backup system available to download and run the backup software to control the pipeline remotely.

The question isn't just whether the company's managers were incompetent or derelict, the question would be whether the company auditors, both inside and outside, and its regulators were also derelict. Remember that a major impact of the Enron scandal was to destroy the Arthur Andersen audit firm, whose dereliction allowed the scandal.

A secondary question is how the hackers were able to gain access to the computer system that controlled this critical infrastructure. All I can surmise from the information that's been made public is that the hackers were somehow able to lock or disable the operating copy of the system software, but could then either unlock it or provide a clean copy on payment of the ransom.

Someone who wsnts to do this needs both physical and electronic access to the company's computers. Controlling this has been IT Management 101 since the 1970s. The various root or superuser IDs that can change system software are normally carefully controlled and limited. I've read speculation that this was an inside job. Could certainly be, and there should normally be just a few people who'd be the ones to ask. If it were more than a few, the IT director and most of his chain of command should already be on their way out.

Another issue, especially if it were an inside job, is whether drug testing is being done. Pipelines are regulated by the US Department of Transportation, which requires drug testing for employees involved in operations. I've always thought, given my experience in the work environment, that drug testing and alcohol screening would go a long way to solve corporate dysfunction, but maybe because that's the case, it isn't done much, even when it clearly should be.

There really ought to be congressional hearings on this. But then, congress is also stalled somewhere between incompetence and dereliction.

Dragged Kicking And Screaming

Drs Walensky and Fauci have been taking heat in recent days over the lack of updates to CDC guidelines due to the rapid improvement in COVID statistics.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was forced to defend her agency's guidance and even its integrity on Tuesday as Senate Republicans grilled her over CDC messaging on masks and other restrictions, arguing it's frustrating and unreasonable as more Americans get vaccinated.

While the pressure in the Senate came from Republicans, it's more significant that pressure came from Chris Cuomo on CNN yesterday. He rather sharply accused the CDC of "causing delays" and "doing the job too well, playing it too safe" in approving vaccines and updating guidance. Well, when you've lost Chris Cuomo, you've lost the lizard people.

A bigger question is how Fauci managed to wangle things so his boss had to take that interview. The screen shot above shows how well Dr Rachel liked it. The CNN editors who made the screen shot for the promo were doing what they were told as well, we may feel certain.

It's also significant that California Gov Newsom is telegraphing that he'll back off a continuing indoor mask mandate after June 15.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Fox 11 Los Angeles that California's mask mandate may end on June 15 when the governor plans to reopen the state economy.

"Are we looking at masks after June 15?" asked Fox anchor Elex Michaelson Tuesday.

"No, only in those settings that are indoor... Only in those massively large settings where people from around the world, not just around the country, are convening and where people are mixing in real dense spaces," Newsom said. "Otherwise we'll make guidance, recommendations but no mandates."

Interestingly, Gov Newsom, faced with a recall, is starting to show some level of awareness that people are impatient with continued controls of all sorts. The problem is now that the unelected expert class has been dragging its feet. The people who run the planet, though, seem to be changing their policy, and the CDC will likely be brought to heel. "Very soon," as Dr Fauci keeps putting it.

The "Continuing" Shell Game

Intrigued by the news of a "trraditionalist" Methodist denominaion breaking away from the UMC, I couldn't help but revisit the experience Anglicans had with the Anglican Church in America, which initially endorsed the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus but in practice actively discouraged parishes that wanted to enter the Catholic Church, and in at least one case, it sued to prevent the exit. What puzzled me was why anyone would accept the promises of an in-group in charge that those who wished to leave the denomination would be given safe passage under some sort of plan yet to be finalized or approved.

I'm especially puzzled given the apparent timeline of Methodist events: in 2019, the UMC appears to have followed established canons whereby its overall governing body voted to retain its traditional definitions of marriage and sexuality. But by 2020, a body, or group of bodies, not constituting the governing body, somehow determined that this was unsatisfactory, and a new plan was proposed whereby those who had foolishly supported the 2019 vote would be allowed to leave the denomination with their parish property if they so chose. (If someone can make this clearer to me, I'll be grateful.)

So the majority somehow became "dissidents", who would nevertheless be treated with generosity once the new normal came to a vote in 2022. Or not, of course. How 2021. I sent for a free brochure from a law firm, Dalton Tomich, advising Methodist parishes on what they need to do to plan for all eventualities, given the likelihood that the next General Conference would make unpredictable moves in 2022 that would likely hurt parishes whatever option they chose.

The law firm's basic advice amounted to saying that that those in control had annouced a new set of policies and procedures that nevertheless wouldn't be enacted or approved until 2022, and certainly with no assurance that what emerged would be anything like what was being promised -- but meanwhile, any expectation that those in control would follow established canons was effectively suspended.

Their advice was basically to hire this law firm to negotiate a set of conditions now that would allow a parish to continue under the circumstances it wished whatever the outcome in 2022. The problem as I see this is that those in control now are pretty clearly not dealing in good faith, and presuming they'll stay in control as of 2022, they won't deal in good faith then, either.

So a parish that chooses this course will pay Dalton Tomich big bucks to negotiate a contract, which those running the UMC will reject in any case, and then they'll get to pay Dalton Tomich or some other law firm even bigger bucks when the situation deteriorates into litigation, which trust me it will.

And even Dalton Tomich recognizes that UMC bishops can move preemptively to close parishes that seem likely to cause trouble. Their advice, as far as I can piece it out, is to try to negotiate a contract that keeps the bishop from doing this before the bishop can shut them down. Yeah, that'll work.

Dalton Tomich suggests the current situation, even before a final plan is announced in 2022, is chaos, because the old order is effectively suspended, but nobody knows what to expect next, while the bishops, whom nobody trusts, are in control. According to the brochure, this has already happened among the Presbyterians, who used a similar process to purge traditionalists from the denomination.

Having seen a variation of all this among "continuing" Anglicans, I think this is simply a symptom of being Protestant during the final collapse of Protestantism. The only Protestant solution to the problem, which Dalton Tomich suggests at least as an option in its brochure, is to become an "independent" parish, or for that matter for individuals in a former parish to give up on affiliation except as attendees at "non-denominational" churches.

None of these is a good option for any number of reasons. So far, Catholic evangelism doesn't seem to have recognized this approach. Somebody should.

United Methodist Church To Disunite

Over the past several weeks I've run into occasional references to something called the Global Methodist Church, which Christianity Today recently explained is the object of a proposal now scheduled to be taken up by the United Methodist Church's General Conference in 2022,

Delegates are expected to take up a proposal to split the denomination called the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation.

The proposal, negotiated by 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders from across theological divides, would create a new conservative “traditionalist” Methodist denomination—that’s the Global Methodist Church—that would receive $25 million over the next four years. Individual churches and annual conferences could choose to join the new entity; otherwise, they’ll remain in the existing denomination by default.

As might be expected, the potential split reflects differences over marriage and sexuality. The Britannica site says:

In 2019, at a special session of the General Conference, leaders voted to affirm the traditional stance against homosexuality, and a proposal to allow individual churches autonomy in decisions regarding gay clergy and same-sex marriage was voted down. As a result of the significant division within the denomination following this vote, in early 2020 church leaders proposed splitting the church to resolve the debate.

So let me get this straight. In 2019, the UMC as a body voted to support the traditional stance on sexuality and refused autonomy on the decision. But in 2020, UMC leaders who apparently disagreed proposed allowing those who supported the 2019 UMC tion to leave the UMC. So that the actual proposal is that as of 2022, maybe, the UMC will support LGBTQ in contradiction to its 2019 position, but it will allow those who supported the 2019 position to leave. Or do I have this wrong? It positively reeks of doublespeak.

The new GMC website says of itself,

Methodists in Africa, Europe, Eurasia, the Philippines, and the United States have warmly embraced the name. It simultaneously states who we are and who we aspire to be: faithful Christians in the Methodist tradition dedicated to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with people all around the world.

Well, I spent almost ten years on the old blog looking at proposals like this. It's something like Anglicanorum coetibus meets the Traditional Anglican Communion meets the Anglican Church in North America, and I think it's likely to be just as successful.

The UMC is a result of a series of Methodist mergers, especially a 1939 reunioni of the Southern Methodists with the northerners to resolve a split dating from before the US Civil War. An additional merger resulted in the current UMC in 1968. However, it appears that the UMC is now in the process of unmerging, which of course is unscriptural and unproductive, but it's baked into Protestantism.

This is just a continuation of main line Protestantism's collapse. Protestants in general abandoned the field of marriage and sexuality in the 1960s, attempting to retain prestige by substituting vocal advocacy of leftist and pacifist programs. But the UMC itself knows it has a problem:

That’s according to projections from the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration — based on the continuing decline in U.S. membership as much as growth in Africa.

According to the agency’s forecast, total membership in the central conferences — church regions in Africa, the Philippines and Europe — will exceed that of the U.S. jurisdictions in 2020.

“Based on trends that have occurred over the last several years, we are annually averaging a decline of 2.0% overall for the jurisdictional membership,” Kevin Dunn, the agency’s director of data services, told the GCFA board at its November meeting.

“We may fall below 6 million (U.S.) members by 2025.”

But even that estimate doesn't take into consideration the potential loss from the new GMC.

Bill Maher, Moral Panic, And The Problem Of Agnostic Collapse

The late-night comedian Bill Maher the other day made one of his routine critiques of politicall;y-correct society:

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher lamented that “woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist,” and the left has become “the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.”

. . . After listing some examples of people on the right being more permissive on sex and drugs, and other examples of the right being morally strict, Maher stated, “We need to restore the natural order of things. I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us.

I don't normally follow Maher, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out that Maher was raised Catholic, but "Owing to his disagreement with the Catholic Church's doctrine about birth control, Maher's father stopped taking Maher and his sister to Catholic church services when Maher was thirteen." Since Maher was born in 1956, he would have been 13 in 1969, when the collap;se of unexamined or agnostic religious faith was well under way.

The incongruous thing about Maher's regular attacks on political correctness is that he's generally aligned with all the elites' received causes. He's been on the board of PETA since 1987, for instance, and he supports legalizing marijuana. In many ways, he's a kind of secular Protestant, substituting private judgment over individual points of liberal doctrine, an agnostic's agnostic. He's decided certain aspects of current cancel culture are moral panic, but he doesn't want to try to tease out the full extent of the panic, or its underlying causes.

So his program is basically a wink and a smirk, which means he's nobody's friend. The underlying reason for the moral panic in polite society, it seems to me, is fear of the plebs, its actual cultural influence as reflected in the popular cable shows, and its growing power at the ballot box -- they ousted Trump in 2020, but they're terrified he'll return in 2024. Maher is clearly just as terrified of this as anyone else in his social stratum.

But this reflects a bigger problem: nain line Protestantism and other mainstream agnostic religious outlooks -- Reform Judaism or Kennedy Catholicsm, for instance -- collapsed beginning in the postwar period. The result has been moral ambiguity and increasing social chaos. These are things that Catholic thinkers from Frederick Kinsman to Paul VI anticipated.

The challenge is to rebuild the social and cultural consensus on a Catholic basis, which hasn't been tried in the modern period. I think this is the project Bp Barron recognizes needs to be undertaken.