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Bill Gates Told that His Charity Pledge is ‘Worthless’

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Bill Gates is the richest person in the world — but one retired New York hedge-fund mogul thought the software pioneer’s Giving Pledge was “practically worthless.”

Robert W. Wilson, a well-known philanthropist who had given away $600 million of his fortune as of 2013, abruptly turned aside Gate’s 2010 request that he sign the Giving Pledge.

The pledge pushes billionaires to give away a bulk of their fortune while they are alive, or in their will.

Wilson found especially problematic the pledge’s loophole that allowed signers to gift their wealth to a family-controlled foundation.

“And these foundations become, more often than not, bureaucracy-ridden sluggards,” Wilson wrote to Gates in a June 2010 e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by the website BuzzFeed.

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Bill Gates Backing Gun Control Measure

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Photo Credit: Brian Ach/Getty Images for The Lasker FoundationKPLU reported Wednesday that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda have contributed $25,000 apiece to the Initiative 594 campaign, joining a growing list of wealthy Seattle-area supporters of the 15-page gun control measure, as confirmed by Public Disclosure Commission documents obtained yesterday by Examiner and The GunMag.com.

Gates and his wife made the donations Oct. 29, according to filings with the PDC.

The PDC documents reveal a curious array of contributions from people who list their occupations as “retired” or “not employed” along with others whose occupations range from “venture capitalist” to “volunteer,” with attorneys, doctors, investors and other professionals, along with housewives and homemakers. Their contributions range upwards to the $165,000 donated by Nick Hanauer and the $50,000 from Lenore Hanauer. Many of the contributions were for $1,000 or more.

The overwhelming majority of contributors list their addresses in Seattle, with a smattering located in Medina, Woodinvile, Mercer Island, Sammamish, Kirkland, Shoreline, Bellevue, Normandy Park, Lake Forest Park and Issaquah.

KPLU said the donor list, which stretches to about 135 pages, “reads like a who’s who list.”

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‘Artificial Egg’ Made from Plants Backed by Bill Gates Set to Revolutionize Cooking Goes on Sale at Whole Foods

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Photo Credit: Cody Pickens

Photo Credit: Cody Pickens

A radical ‘artificial egg’ backed by Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel and Bill Gates goes on sale in US supermarkets for the first time today.

Made from plants, it can replace eggs in everything from cakes to mayonnaise – without a chicken ever coming close to the production process.

The team today started selling their ‘plant egg’, called Beyond Eggs, in Whole Foods in California – and say it could soon be available in supermarkets worldwide.

‘We want to take animals out of the equation,’ said Josh Tetrick, the firm’s founder. ‘The food industry is begging for innovation, especially where animals are involved – it is a broken industry.’

Tetrick’s idea was to find a mix of easy-to-grow plants that, when mixed together in the right way, replicate the taste, nutritional values and cooking properties of an egg.

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Senator Seeks to Defund Bill Gates' Common Core Initiative

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Photo Credit: Christian Post

Sen. Charles “Chuck” Grassley (R-Iowa) is asking his colleagues to eliminate U.S. Department of Education funding used to develop or implement the Common Core State Standards Initiative…

“We ask that the Fiscal Year 2014 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill include language to restore state decision-making and accountability with respect to state academic content standards,” Grassley began.

The Common Core is a set of standards for K-12 education that has been adopted by most states. It has been advertised as a “state-led” intitiative, but that is far from true. The Common Core was developed by the National Governor’s Association, a private organization, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. States were encouraged to adopt the standards through Race to the Top education funds. States that competed for the Race to the Top funds had to agree to adopt the standards even before they knew what the standards would be.

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Bill Gates’ $100 Million Database to Track Students, Give Their Confidential Information to Corporations

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Photo Credit: WND

Over the past 18 months, a massive $100 million public-school database spearheaded by the $36.4 billion-strong Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been in the making that freely shares student information with private companies.

The system has been in operation for several months and already contains millions of K-12 students’ personal identification ‒ ranging from name, address, Social Security number, attendance, test scores, homework completion, career goals, learning disabilities, and even hobbies and attitudes about school.

Claiming that the national database will enhance education, the main funder of the project, the Gates Foundation, entered the joint venture with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from a number of states. After Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify Education (a division of News Corp) spent more than a year developing the system’s infrastructure, the Gates Foundation delivered it to inBloom ‒ a nonprofit corporation recently established to run the database.

School officials and private companies doing business with districts might have plenty to be happy about with this information-sharing system, but ParentalRights.org President Michael P. Farris says parents have plenty to worry about when it comes to inBloom’s national database.

“The greatest immediate threat to children is the threat to their privacy,” Farris told WND in an exclusive interview. “The Supreme Court has recognized a sphere of privacy within the family, but this project would take personal information about each child, apart from any considerations of parental consent, and put it into a database being managed and monitored solely by the government agencies and private corporations that use it.”

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Another elitist donates millions to destroy traditional marriage

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Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announced a gift Friday of $2.5 million to the campaign to defend Washington’s same-sex marriage law.

With the gift, Washington United for Marriage has raised more than $5 million for the Referendum 74 campaign. Last month Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and co-founder Bill Gates each donated $100,000 to support the law. [Publisher’s note: executives from Nike and Starbucks also donated to the effort]

Referendum 74 was certified for the November ballot in May after gay marriage opponents in the group Preserve Marriage Washington turned in more than 240,000 signatures. It seeks to overturn the gay-marriage law signed in February by Gov. Chris Gregoire.

The law was supposed to take effect June 7 but has been put on hold.

A “yes” vote on the referendum upholds the law, and a “no” vote overturns it.

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Bill Gates gives $100k to support gay marriage in Washington State

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Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer and co-founder Bill Gates have each donated $100,000 to the campaign supporting the state’s new gay marriage law, which faces a referendum vote in November.

Zach Silk, campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, said Monday that the checks were cut Friday and are being reported to the state Public Disclosure Commission on Monday afternoon.

“It’s going to make a tremendous difference,” Silk said. “It’s very important for us to have that broad support from business leaders and companies themselves.”

Microsoft is just one of several prominent Pacific Northwest businesses that have expressed their support for same-sex marriage, including Starbucks Corp. and Nike Inc.

Referendum 74 was certified for the ballot last month after gay marriage opponents turned in more than 240,000 signatures, far more than the minimum of 120,577 valid voter signatures required.

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Photo credit: World Economic Forum