Categories
Update

Bill Gates Weathers the Trump Transition

“Ever since billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump won his second presidential election, tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and of course Elon Musk have made no bones about shedding their progressive skin and embracing the new administration,” explains Joe Wilkins at Futurism. “Gates, too, is cozying up to the returning president. In early January, the Microsoft founder spent three hours dining with his fellow billionaire, telling the Wall Street Journal he was ‘frankly impressed’ by Trump’s grasp on the issues dear to him.”

The Futurism article is entitled “Bill Gates Gives Up on Climate Change” and is blurbed “That’s enough of that.”

A major chapter in climate giving has ended,” is how Heatmap puts it. “Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C.…”

Courtesy of GeekWire, we learn of the New York Times’s coverage:

The Seattle-​based organization has scrapped its U.S. climate policy team, its European team and employees working in partnership with other climate groups, said the Times, citing an internal memo issued Tuesday and unnamed sources.

“Bill Gates remains as committed as ever to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” according to a statement provided to GeekWire by a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson.

“His work in this area will continue and is focused on helping drive reliable, affordable, clean energy solutions that will enable people everywhere to thrive,” she added.

Lisa Stiffler, “Report: Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy cuts climate policy team and partnership support,” Geek Wire (March 12, 2025).

“Gates, who is worth $106.5 billion,” GeekWire further explains, “donated $50 million to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, according to earlier reports from the Times.” The article goes on to explain just how many billions Gates has invested in this cause, and how many more billions have been gathered up from other sources. Many, many billions: $2 billion raised in two rounds; an $839 million fund; and $4 billion from Gates himself.

Categories
Today

Belated Confirmation

On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.

James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.

Categories
Thought

Jimmy Dore

People who want to police “hate speech” hate speech.

Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).
Categories
Update

Extraordinary Misconduct

Michael Mann, climate, global warming

Climate scientist Michael Mann has appeared in these pages before, the subject of some criticism for his less-​than-​honest science and public pronouncements. So a recent news story is worth sharing, even if we leave the commentary to you. Quoting from Roger Pielke, Jr.:

The DC Court that heard the defamation case brought by climate scientist Michael Mann against two bloggers has ruled today that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” during the case, by presenting false claims on multiple occasions related to Mann’s grant funding:

Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Dr. Mann, through [his lawyers] Mr. Fontaine and Mr. Williams, acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding… The Court does not reach this decision lightly.

This ruling follows closely on the heels of the same court reducing the punitive damages awarded to Mann against one of the defedents from $1,000,000 to $5,000. That reduction follows the Court’s order that Mann pay $530,820.21 of legal expenses that his lawsuit resulted in for National Review — which Mann had also sued, but whose case was dismissed.

Roger Pielke, Jr., “In Bad Faith” (March 12, 2025).

The judge was none too pleased with Mann and his lawyers:

They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.

As those who have followed Michael Mann’s sorry career pushing Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) may remember, Mann has been caught conspiring to keep hidden in his data and graphs the reality of the Medieval Warming Period. As a public figure and one of the main faces of the AGW “climate change” hysteria, he has helped diminish the public’s confidence in scientists in general.

So maybe we should thank him? After he pays off the damages and court costs, of course.

“The irony here is deep,” concludes Mr. Pielke. “The lawsuit Mann brought on the basis that he was intemperately accused of misconduct winds up revealing that Mann engaged in misconduct that was ‘extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent.’ It’ll be interesting to see what the climate science community does now.”

Categories
Thought

Thomas Jefferson

We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-​four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-​sufferers. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval (June 12, 1816). The Latin phrase bellum omnium in omnia means “war of all things against all things,” and is Jefferson’s play upon bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning “the war of all against all,” which is the formulation that Thomas Hobbes gave to human existence in the state of nature in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). Jefferson is certainly tipping his hat to his friend C.-F. Volney’s concept of this sort of war carried on within modern states, as discussed in The Ruins (1802), the bulk of which Jefferson himself translated from the French.
Categories
Today

Julius & George

March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.

On the same date in AD 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful: the threatened coup d’état never took place.