Expert me no experts

Especially those possessed of no real expertise at all. Like, when it comes to Plandemic v2.0, the loathsome frog-person Bill Gates.

We Must Find a Way to Prevent Bill Gates from Preventing the Next Pandemic
For days now, I’ve been fighting my way through Bill Gates’s disturbing new book on How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, and I’ve found myself wondering about one question above all:

How are we to explain Gates, exactly?

I know that for many of you he is a calculating conspiratorial goon. Pretend for a moment that he’s not, though. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that he’s every inch the obtuse, naïve and self-important former software developer that he seems to be. How did he get this way, what does he even think he is doing, and what can it mean?

Remember that this man has billions of dollars. A whole world of unusual vices stands open to him: He could hire a mercenary army to invade some country and proclaim himself god-emperor for life. He could retire to a tropical island with his favourite mind-altering substances and a harem of nubile young women. He could do both at once, and other things besides. Instead, he has chosen the path of moral vanity, perhaps the least interesting vice of all, founding a ponderous grantmaking foundation and pooping around the globe in manboobs and ill-fitting polo shirts, pronouncing to all and sundry on subjects he hardly understands.

Um…did someone just say “manboobs and ill-fitting polio shirts,” prithee tell? Why yes, I believe someone did. And he was gracious enough (or cruel enough) to provide visual confirmation:

Heh. Also: OUCH. Onwards.

A commenter points me to Jeffrey Tucker, who, as it turns out, has done critical work towards developing a Theory of Gates. At Microsoft, Gates oversaw the development of poorly secured software overrun by computer viruses. Afterwards, Tucker notes, he

… started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes. Also by this point in his career, he was only surrounded by sycophants who would not interrupt his descent into crankiness.

And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I noted that Gates was pushing hard for lockdowns. His foundation was now funding research labs the world over with billions of dollars, plus universities and direct grants to scientists. He was also investing heavily in vaccine companies.

Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views, I watched his TED talks. I began to realise something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic ninth-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology.

Once you understand the simplicity of his core confusions, everything else he says makes sense from his point of view. He seems forever stuck in the fallacy that the human being is a cog in a massive machine called society that cries out for his managerial and technological leadership to improve to the point of operational perfection.

There’s a lot to recommend this view of Gates. It explains specific things, like Gates’s fondness for mRNA vaccines, a genetic equivalent of computer code. More than that, though, it elucidates Gates’s failure to appreciate the essential intractability of many ancient human problems. Gates dreams of saving mankind from disease and poverty – things that are so much a part of what it means to be human, that it seems an error to call them problems in the first place. We are mortal beings; not all of us can be wealthy; we’ll all die of something. Gates the software developer has no experience of problems like that.

The fundamental message of How to Prevent the Next Pandemic is that we can stop future pandemic events by doing all of the things that did not stop the last pandemic event, only more, faster and harder.

And why not? After all, that’s the worldview of all kakistocrats, of which Gates would certainly be a pluperfect example. This next bit I imagine would have to hurt Bill Gates right down to his very marrow, so of course, despising the scumbucket as I have for so many years, I could never resist highlighting it here.

Gates, the retired software engineer who can’t distinguish between digital and biological viruses, is one, specific theory of the man. In reading How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, though, I’ve come to formulate another, more general theory. This is simply that, far from being a conspiratorial and calculating agenda-setter, Gates is a follower. He spends his days chasing down bureaucrats and politicians and scientists, pestering them for meetings, currying favour, asking them what to think and eagerly repeating everything they tell him in childish, oversimplified prose to anybody who will listen.

He loves dropping names. Barely has he started writing, than he’s telling us about his “first call with Anthony Fauci,” a man he’s “lucky to have known…for years…long before he was on the cover of pop-culture magazines”. Gates “wanted to hear what he was thinking”; he “wanted to understand what he was saying publicly…so” he “could help by echoing the same points” (p. 15). You can see Gates now, the strange bespectacled boy at the front of the class, begging teacher for the answer.

Gates-as-follower explains the most obtrusive aspect of How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, namely the total absence from its pages of any original thought. Gates doesn’t know anything except what his small clique of court experts tells him. That masks don’t work, that pandemic modelling has been a laughable failure, that it is the human immune system and not technology that places the ultimate constraints on vaccine potential, that corona and influenza viruses have massive animal reservoirs – he has no idea about any of this. Gates is part of an ominous development, a new breed of low-brow elite who present themselves as leaders, while eagerly following every source of celebrity and authority they know. Thus modern society is increasingly caught in dangerous, self-reinforcing feedback loops, a massive ant-wheel, a world of dogs chasing their tails, with nobody in charge. A Davos-directed conspiracy would be some comfort, but our car is heading for the cliff and absolutely nobody is driving. That’s much, much worse.

A “follower,” a compulsive name-dropper, a “low-brow elite”? OUCH, that smarts, especially for a self-styled Innovative Sooperdoopergenius like Gates. I must beg to differ on that final contention, though, that nobody is driving. No, it’s even worse than the author thinks: people like Bill Gates are at the wheel, and in their gormless, Marianas-deep arrogance, can’t even see any cliff at all.

FUCK Bill Gates, and all who sail in his doughy, baggy ass. His one true moment of innovative spark was not in creating Microsuck and the Winbloze OS, but in perceiving that the best way to force that eternally buggy, bloated, insecure PoS into people’s lives was to cajole its way into American offices and places of business across the blighted plain. Having become forcibly accustomed to using it at work, it only made sense to adopt it at home, if for no other reason to ensure compatibility with their work documents.

That, I will admit, was damned astute of him…and the world has been paying for that unfortunate insight ever since.