Billionaires Meet in Secret to Discuss Population Reduction Strategies – “Don’t Want to be Seen as a Global Cabal”

May 25th, 2009

I wonder if Bill Gates released any of his pet flying syringes into the room? (See him practicing his antics at TED.)

Via: Times Online:

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion,” Gates said then.

Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

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9 Responses to “Billionaires Meet in Secret to Discuss Population Reduction Strategies – “Don’t Want to be Seen as a Global Cabal””

  1. shoe2one says:

    I dozed off and forgot that 88% of http://www.bloomberg.com/ is owned by Michael Bloomberg.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.

    Makes me wonder about how reliable the information is.

  2. Kevin says:

    While you’re at it, try to figure out what B Gates is really doing on that Windows XP box that you’re using.

    * sigh *

    (I use XP too, by the way.)

  3. realitydesign says:

    ahh yes, good old population control…on their terms.

    (rolls eyes)

  4. ltcolonelnemo says:

    Hello, I’m commenting from Kubuntu my partition…

    : )

    Ever wonder if open source is a proprietary plot to obtain free R & D; i.e. IE7 copied a bunch of Firefox features. However, it’s still a piece of garbage.

    I definitely recommend Ubuntu / Kubuntu. It’s still not completely idiot-proof, but nothing is. It has improved leaps and bounds since previous incarnations. You can do pretty much most of what you can do with Windows XP, and you can run Windows XP programs in virtualization tool called Wine.

    You also have access to much free software that does most of what people need to do.

    But you guys probably already know this.

    There are hundreds of Linux distributions. In fact, if you are a hardcore nerd, you can take one, and then develop it towards your own ends.

  5. Kevin says:

    I’m a lifetime nerd, and spent my working years in the “real world” as a paid nerd, so, “you guys probably already know this,” is just about the understatement of the year in my case.

    Server side, linux is the way to go. Client side, no, not for me. I use trading software that’s Windows only. I also require Photoshop. Gimp sucks and the Photoshop-works-pretty-well-on-Wine lie is as old as the hills. Been there done that. Video editing on linux is a joke…

    In my opinion, all of it sucks. Windows, Mac OS and Windows. But XP gets in my way the least. It’s very fast. It never crashes. But, yes, the B Gates special sauce is a worry.

    I have a buddy who’s got three propellers in his beanie cap. He’s a software engineer and linux admin for a large corporation. HE DOESN’T USE LINUX ON THE CLIENT SIDE! He uses a Mac because he’s fed up with the death-by-papercuts experience of getting (non server related) things done on Linux.

    It’s a matter of pick your poison, I guess.

  6. ltcolonelnemo says:

    Yeah, I’ve heard that about the video-editing and I’ve heard GIMP is no photoshop . . . yet.

    I think OpenOffice is more than adequate, Thunderbird and Firefox are adequate, the package installation system works fine.

    They do have quite aways to go, but think back to much it sucked back in 2003. I installed Mandrake and it destroyed one of my disc drives. I then tried SuSe. It sucked. I waited a few years and tried Suse or OpenSuse; I was pleased to find it had vastly improved on the previous incarnation. However, it still sucked at a number of things; it wouldn’t autodetect devices plugged into it, it wouldn’t interact with the wireless chip, etc.

    The latest incarnation of Ubuntu/Kubuntu solves a lot of these problems.

    Now, contrast this consistent progress with the consistent decline of Microsoft. You pay more, you get less, and you keep giving up control, incrementally, you’re feeding a proprietary system that fuels greedy billionaires. They keep selling you the same versions of the same programs with features that you don’t want, every few years, whether you like it or not.

    Of course, we’ve heard it all before. I think if Linux keeps making the progress it has been making at the rate it has been making, it will surpass Windows.

    What are XP users going to do when Microsoft stops supporting XP, and then killer XP viruses and trojans start appearing?

    I suppose they’ll do what all the businesses who still run Windows 95, 98, 2000 do; hire IT to people to occasionally patch problems and run the system until it becomes unprofitable.

    I think Microsoft made Windows 2K/XP good enough that most people would never voluntarily “upgrade” unless forced to. I could see Bill Gates one day going “Fuck it!” and hitting the red switch the uploads the update that crashes all the XP machines for good.

  7. zeke says:

    All of which accords with the large group of *nix nerds I’ve worked with who use macs on the desktop. The one I know who is still a windows die-hard essentially uses it as a fancy smart terminal to his unix-emacs environment on the server side.

    The “death-by-papercuts” descripton of the linux desktop experience is pretty accurate. It’s like the joke about cars where if you don’t want to be a mechanic, don’t buy an X (where X is whatever brand/model you consider unreliable). if you want to use an OS and not be confronted with the workings of the internals regularly, don’t go for linux. Most of the graphical tools only manage to obfuscate how what is going on under the hood really operates, which, when they fail to work perfectly – which is often – leaves you scrambling to figure out how to fix stuff.

    Having said all that….I’m still ok with the linux ‘desktop’ because I don’t use much besides command-line tools and a web browser. Yes, my brain is stuck in the Jurassic. Fvwm2 FTW. And yeah, I love the availability of the pool of free software – even if it’s not perfect. And yes, I like software where the source is available and documented. But I’m not going to delude myself that the desktop experience is what most people want.

  8. Kevin says:

    My guess is that if you asked Microsoft what’s the bigger threat, linux or OpenOffice, they’d be more worried about OpenOffice. The profit margin on MS Office vs the Windows OS per seat must be a lot higher. Since most of the computers out there are running some version of Windows, MS stands to lose big if people get smart about OpenOffice.

    I’ve been using OpenOffice for about five years, and it just keeps getting better. Of all the people I’ve switched to OO, I never heard of any of them paying for a copy of MS Office again.

    I also rely on Firefox and Thunderbird.

    Re: XP: MS is going to provide critical updates until 2014 and the upcoming Windows 7 is going to be able to run XP under VM. In other words, XP could easily outlive civilization as we know it. HAHA

    Will people upgrade their XP boxes to Windows 7 to then run XP as a VM? I sure as hell won’t, but a lot of organizations will. This way, all of their crappy in house junk won’t be bricked by the new OS. Having that 100% XP compatible mode might convince corporations to adopt it, instead of banning it from their organizations at all cost, like they did with Vista. What could be so compelling about Windows 7, besides the fact it will be able to run XP??? I can’t imagine what. (Being able to run DirectX 10 games?) I’m just glad that this nonsense isn’t my problem anymore! ha

  9. gbell says:

    Geez, can anybody ever suggest population reduction without the politically correct masses painting them with the Hitler Part 2 brush?

    Seems to me that when the only people who have a chance at solving The Biggest Problem meet, we shouldn’t shut them down.

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