Free Republic

Attention, class: A Common Core mouthpiece wants to rap my knuckles with his Gates Foundation-funded ruler. In response to my column two weeks ago about the marketing overlords pushing the Fed Ed racket, Chad Colby of Achieve Inc. demanded corrections. Let’s go to school. “I wanted to take a moment to highlight two points that were incorrect regarding Achieve,” Colby complained. “Contrary to Ms. Malkin’s assertion, Achieve employs no lobbyists and we never have.” No? Never? Someone didn’t do his homework. Mr. Colby, meet Patricia Sullivan. She’s the founding executive director of Achieve and a career lobbyist who has bounced...

Bill Gates-Backed TerraPower And Toshiba Are Talking TerraPower, a company that develops reactors powered by depleted uranium, is in talks with Toshiba in view of developing a small nuclear reactor. TerraPower is a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding investment firm partially backed by Bill Gates and run out of Bellevue, Wash., by former Microsoft executive, Nathan Myhrvold. Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun first reported the news. In this recent interview with Cnet News Gates discusses his investments in cleantech and in TerraPower. A Toshiba spokesman confirmed the discussions, reports the Wall Street Journal. He said the talks were at...

Attention, class: A Common Core mouthpiece wants to rap my knuckles with his Gates Foundation-funded ruler. In response to my column two weeks ago about the marketing overlords pushing the Fed Ed racket, Chad Colby of Achieve Inc. demanded corrections. Let's go to school. "I wanted to take a moment to highlight two points that were incorrect regarding Achieve," Colby complained. "Contrary to Ms. Malkin's assertion, Achieve employs no lobbyists and we never have." No? Never? Someone didn't do his homework. Mr. Colby, meet Patricia Sullivan. She's the founding executive director of Achieve and a career lobbyist who has bounced...

Statehouses across the country have begun to wake up and see Common Core for what it really is; a nationalized education that hinders education on the local level. Oklahoma has joined the growing number of states who are actively trying to stop federal education to save their schools from the dumbing down and brainwashing of their children. The Oklahoma Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would repeal a controversial set of academic standards known as Common Core. House Bill 3399, by House Speaker Jeff Hickman, R-Fairview, and Sen. Josh Brecheen, R-Coalgate, passed by a vote of 37-10. The House...

When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy? The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated. Given a big commitment, there’s a high chance of success. ~snip~ What fascinates Bill Gates is something else entirely: namely, the variety and incoherence from school to school, city to city, and state to state. It looks so messy and inefficient. And he thinks: a guy with my money and management skills should be able to organize all this disorder, turn...

With the stroke of Gov. Mike Pence's pen, Indiana became the first state to back off implementing a set of national standards for grade-school education. The standards, known as Common Core, had been adopted by 45 states, but have lately unleashed a political fight that blurs party lines. "'I believe our students are best served when decisions about education are made at the state and local level,' said Pence in a release about Senate Bill 91. " 'By signing this legislation, Indiana has taken an important step forward in developing academic standards that are written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers, and...

Even education insiders are beginning to acknowledge that the data mining the federal government is now engaged in under Common Core produces little in the way of education achievement. “The evidence that the collection of data has led to improvements in education, we really don’t have it,” Philip Piely, author of Assessing the Educational Data Movement, said recently at an Educational Policy Forum. Piely, a faculty affiliate at Johns Hopkins, spoke at a forum sponsored by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) on March 14, 2014. “The number of times that data has been collected where it is not to...

American philanthropist Melinda Gates talked about her Roman Catholic faith and funding contraceptives in the global fight against AIDS, noting that many Catholics disagree with official church doctrine on the contraception issue. "Even though I am Catholic I believe in contraceptives, just like the majority of Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back," Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shared at the TED 2014 conference in Vancouver on Tuesday, The Vancouver Sun reported. The Catholic Church teaches against the use of...

College students and others at George Mason University were dumbstruck by the tedious nature of an elementary level Common Core problem during a short series of interviews conducted by Campus Reform last week. The problem, 32-12, was demonstrated to those on campus the traditional way and juxtaposed with the Common Core method.

A study released by the Gates Foundation is promoting a system that would track the careers of college graduates long after they receive their degrees, attacking the National Association for Independent Colleges and Universities for promoting laws that prevent up-close surveillance of students by the government.

  Bill Gates' Dream for a Nuclear-Powered Future Is Almost Here By Maxx Chatsko | More Articles | Save For Later March 4, 2014 | Comments (1) Is this the future of clean energy? Source: TerraPower.Things may be different today, but in its heyday, Microsoft was a game-changing company that forever altered the way the world interacted with computers. The creative genius and foresight of Bill Gates has paid off in a significant way: He's the wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $76 billion, according to Forbes. While Gates still advises Microsoft, he has turned much of his...

Speaking on stage yesterday at the TED 2014 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Bill and Melinda Gates gave a revealing answer to a question about how they're raising their kids with respect to money, reports Wired. The couple has enough money to make each of their three children billionaires if they should want to do so, but as they answered, that's not the plan at all. "We want to strike a balance so they have the freedom to do anything, but not sort of a lot of money showered on them so that they can go out and do nothing,"...

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, revealed in a recent interview that his family goes to a Catholic church and that religious morality inspires a lot of his charity work. He also shared his personal thoughts on God and the biggest issues facing the world today. "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's...

It is funny–in both the ha-ha and ironical senses–that those who often scream most loudly against the “death panel” meme often follow, sotto voce, ”But we need death panels.” The fact is that most of those in the technocratic classes want to medically discriminate against those who are seen as health care “takers” or perceived to have a lower quality of life. They’re just not sure how to get from “here” to “there,” and retain popular support. (Hint: They can’t.) billgatesNow in a Rolling Stone interview, Bill Gates joins the chorus. He says–like bioethicist Daniel Callahan–that we have to be...

The SAT college entrance exam will no longer require a written essay or penalize students for wrong answers, part of a major overhaul announced Wednesday.

UPDATE: Nazi scientists worked on ways to use malaria-carrying mosquitoes as a weapon, according to researchers. Until now, experts have disputed whether Germany was working on biological warfare during World War II. Dr Klaus Reinhardt, who led the study, told The Local that he came across documents at Dachau's Entomology Institute which suggested that “biological weapons [using mosquitoes] could have been developed as an offensive, not defensive, weapon”. Until now, it had been generally thought by experts that the Nazis only intended ever to use biological weapons defensively. By 1944 the institute had decided on a specific breed of mosquito...

The Washington Post recently published a quixotic editorial maintaining that the left has no deep-pocketed financiers like the right does in the much written about and thoroughly maligned Koch brothers. In its editorial, the paper laments that Democrat groups have no one like the Kochs. For the Post, Reid Wilson wrote that for "Democratic professionals who actually run campaigns, the thing that frustrates them most about the Koch brothers network is that there’s no real equivalent on their side."

Microsoft is an insanely profitable company standing on the edge of disaster. It desperately needs new thinking. With word that 22-year Microsoft veteran Satya Nadella is likely the new CEO, attention turns to the leadership of the company's board of directors. It will have two former CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. So new thinking is unlikely to come from them. In fact, Gates has a track record of huge strategic errors that have cost the company years of progress in market share. Here's why he should be the one to go: 1. Gates' world was: Go slow. Microsoft needs...

Al Gore pops his head up at Davos…say, how’d he get there? A fossil fueled flight?…to make a racist pronouncement (via Climate Depot). Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming. Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates (how did Gates get to Davos? Anyone think he flew commercial?) said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world. “Depressing the rate of child mortality,...

arguing that "secular" businesses should not be exempt from the mandate. The 19 senators planned to file a brief before the court, which is still weeks away from considering the closely watched case. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who planned to make her case on the Senate floor, adamantly defended the Obama administration's side. "What's at stake in this case before the Supreme Court is whether a CEO's personal beliefs can trump a woman's right to access free or low-cost contraception under the Affordable Care Act," she said in prepared remarks.