You may have seen this  story, which I found on the Drudge site. Bill Gates, who clearly wants to make his audience feel guilty for not being their brothers’ keeper, unleashed a cloud of mosquitoes upon them:Â
‘Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,’ Gates said while opening a jar on stage at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in Monterey, California — a gathering known to attract technology kings, politicians, and Hollywood stars.
‘I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.’
This is like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Why wasn’t he arrested? After a minute, he informed the audience that the mosquitoes were not malaria carriers. What good would that have done, if there had been a stampede to the exits in which people got crushed, before his belated admission?
Mr. Gates, instead of dumping a jar of mosquitos on a crowd of wealthy people, how about dumping a jar of DDT on the mosquitos?
Darn it, Chuck! I was going to blog this story myself!
My take is that he’s performing a stunt to promote his foundation’s work to come up with a vaccine to cure malaria. I don’t know if there’s any environmentalist overtones at work here, but it seems like an easier way to eradicate malaria would be to eliminate mosquitoes from problem areas. There’s ample precedent during the days of DDT.
I guess a parasite isn’t as cute and cuddly as a mosquito.
Yeah – if it hadn’t been for his fellow Leftist buddies outlawing DDT malaria wouldn’t be something poor people would have to worry about.
Every time I hear a Leftist talk about poor people – well, it gets under my skin. Leftists don’t care squat about actual poor people. They are more than willing for them to suffer under the totalitarian regimes that they apologize for. In this country, they look down on them and condescend to them and expect them to “know and keep their place.” Locally, Leftists try to pass laws outlawing things such as small houses and industrial districts so that the peasants are kept out of sight from the eyes of the precious Leftist elite “beautiful people.” The only poor people that are any good to Leftists are those who have sores that they can somehow exploit in their quest for power and the sense of superiority that is the foundation of their Peter Keating-esqe pretense at self esteem.
As for Bill Gates – well, I certainly would like to believe that he is somehow better than the typical Leftist. Perhaps he has been nagged down and beaten down into total guilt. Or perhaps he IS a typical Leftist who just so happened to be a genius and highly productive in one particular area. Certainly his pursuit of his selfish interests have benefited far more poor people than has all the money he has given away and certainly more than an entire army of Leftists who, in fact, work to KEEP them poor.
Unfortunately, Gates has also unleashed that evil program known as Vista which has caused me ALL SORTS of grief ever since I bought a new computer in late 2007. Vista is like a swarm of nasty biting bugs – an endless stream of little nuisances that have to be constantly swatted back. Until I “upgraded” to Vista, I hadn’t seen the “blue screen of death” in years. When I broadcast live, I have to pull out my OLD computer because it has XP and I have confidence it will not suddenly crash on my like my Vista computer does every so often. Perhaps Vista is like the mosquitos. Perhaps Gates thinks it is unfair that poor people in the Third World have to use clunky computers with Windows 98 operating systems that crash every so often – so he introduced Vista so that evil people like us will know what it is like and can share the misery.
I’m not an expert on the DDT/malaria controversy. I have read that mosquitoes develop a resistance to DDT after a few years. That’s why I didn’t weigh in on that part of the story. I certainly agree that no world body like the UN should have the authority to issue a worldwide ban on DDT.
Gates no doubt did intend this as a publicity stunt for his foundation. It doesn’t alter the fact that he inflicted terror upon his audience in a way that could easily have resulted in panic and casualties in an enclosed room.
How is this different than sending an envvelope of white powder to, say, a news organization, implying that it is deadly contagious substance, then later saying it was all a gag?
Just kidding fellas! It was all in good fun!
Sorry, my take (in my conceived blog entry) was that it was a stunt. Your comparison to shouting fire is apt and one that I had missed.
If I were in the audience, I would be angry and disgusted at Gates’ stunt.
(Regarding DDT, I would suspect that diminished effectiveness would have resulted in an altered insecticide to account for it.)
“How is this different than sending an envvelope of white powder to, say, a news organization, implying that it is deadly contagious substance, then later saying it was all a gag?
Just kidding fellas! It was all in good fun!”
Even that would probably be okay in the circles of the Politically Correct Beautiful People if the powder were sent to an organization such as Fox News or the Washington Times which Nancy Pelosi was overheard last night by a Washington Post reporter as saying that she wishes to “pee on.”
I wonder what would have happened if a Republican speaker of the House was overheard saying that he would like to pee on the New York Times? Cries of censorship, no doubt.
Were I in the audience, I’d have tried out my accuracy at shoe flinging, as it seems to be all the rage these days…
Were I in the audience, I’d have tried out my accuracy at shoe flinging, as it seems to be all the rage these days…
Ahahaha, lol.
It’s too bad though. Someone with his exposure and success would’ve made an exceptional spokesperson for freedom and reason.
“There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”
Actually, there IS a reason. He knows it, you know it, we all know it: the reason is that the leaders of the countries that are most severely affected by mosquito-borne diseases do not apply REASON to the problems facing their countries and people.
Too many of the leaders of such countries are bound by tradition, tribalism, and/or or corruption to make the changes necessary to bring about real change and prosperity for their people.
As far as Gates’ stunt: just that, a stunt, designed to attract attention and publicity. Well intentioned, likely, but he “cheapened” the experience by tossing out the “only poor people” line.
David, you are right about why “only poor people” get infected. Although, such infections can come to the richer countries, too, with the advent of environmentalism in the West.
However, I don’t agree that Gates’ “stunt” was well intentioned, unless you consider altruism benevolent, which I don’t. His intention was to advocate altruism. And his method was, quite simply, terrorism. The ends, which were bad to begin with, do not justify the means.
Are we all missing that Gates released insects that bite people? Whether or not the insects also carry a parasite and whether or not he inspires a stampede, he still blatantly physically attacked everyone there, the same as if he had released a rabid dog on them. He’s a common thug, as far as I’m concerned.
I just realized the rabid bit might be confusing, since that would imply a dog with a disease, and the mosquitoes were disease-free. So substitute “tiger” or “bad tempered emu” or something for “rabid dog.”
In 1972, when DDT was banned the World Wide mortality rate due to malaria was ~50 people. It is now 1.5 million people annually, the greater portion of which is children.
I was in a biology program at the University of Guelph in Ontario. We studied the mechanism by which break down products of DDT (DDE & DDD) caused egg shell thinning. It all seemed very convincing, except it was entirely done in laboratories, with know good knowledge of the amount of DDE & DDD that birds were exposed to in the wild.
Some researchers examined the time it took for DDT and Dieldrin in the great outdoors to break down into harmless compounds. Common agreement put it at 15 to 20 years. It was therefore considered gospel that effected bird populations (mainly raptors – hawks, falcons, eagles etc.) would continue to decline until 1987.
Well, those populations that were being studied rebounded by 1980!! The obvious conclusion, discussed in ornithological literature, was that some other factor was reducing the populations, even though egg shell breakage was still occurring. Perhaps it had been occurring all along, but no one had measured it until the lab experiments tested DDT.
Rachel Carson, of course, began the scare about this and other insecticides. That chemophobia she generated, coupled with the religious convictions of Environmentalism, has resulted in a genocide that exceeds that of Hitler’s prison camps in WW2.
DDT should be reinstated NOW, in defense of those lives. Let the Environmentalists contribute their own money to fund research toward saving malaria victims’ lives. Then less DDT would be needed, since it does effect many other arthropods (insects etc,) and may have some negative food chain consequences.
Lets save 1.5 million human lives a year, now, then worry about the arthropod and higher animals’ food chain.