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Melinda Gates Pledges $560 Million For Contraception
theodp writes "Melinda Gates has pledged $560 million as part of a campaign to expand access to contraception for women. From the article: 'The funding commitment was unveiled on Wednesday at the London Summit on Family Planning alongside pledges totaling $4.3 billion from the British government and leaders from African nations wrestling with the health and social problems brought on by high rates of unplanned pregnancy.'"
Kidding aside.
She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism. For those that assume that wealth necessarily leads to avarice, it's delightful to me to see the Gates Foundation making that case more difficult to prove.
To hear her explain the contraception issue:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/415947/june-27-2012/melinda-gates
This just shows the Gates family commitment to helping the world. Great job Melinda, slashdot appreciates your efforts!
she is not so good person after all... son of b...!!
Gotta hand it to her, that's pretty cool.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
I still won't have sex with her. It's STILL not enough protection.
idk how she didn't get the microsoft eye candy upgrades like everything else....
... breaking down the religious monopoly on this discussion? Abstinence has been shown to not work, yet it plays to the religious agenda
She is not a good person after all.
Her solution for the problems of the world: kill humans. It's terrible, because there is people asking job and food, and she worry about kill humans before they have rights.
That is not charity and it's not ethical!
Many may well consider such acts of philanthropy completely altruistic. Whether you agree with the cause or not, only the most cynical of people would view it as 'marketing' or 'self promotion', and even if it actually is that; so what? The people who will benefit from it wont care - it doesn't matter what the motivation for doing it is, the end result is what is important.
Personally, I think the motivation is truly altruistic and comes from a genuine desire to do good in the world. The point I would make is; anyone 'richer than God' is going to acquire the same philosophy. Why are mega rich people altruistic? Because they can be. When every conceivable want and desire is met, what is left but to be generous to your fellow man?
I for one would welcome the opportunity to do exactly that myself. If only I had some software I could sell to IBM.
Not a lot of f*cking money, just a lot of f*cking
Do you really "all" believe that this is philanthropy?
Holocaust. Everyone knows life begins 2 weeks before conception.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
" Abstinence has been shown to not work"
Actually abstinence has been shown to work 100%. There is no instance of a woman not having sex getting pregnant.
And the Pope has a lot more money than she does !! And at least I've seen the Pope !! And he's got a better army !! Let the warring begin !!
Please note the absence of Bill Gates' name from this project.
I'm no fan of abortion for controlling overpopulation, so birth control is the lesser of two evils. To their credit, the Gate's are being pro-human with their fortune, and I wonder what I would do in their position. Do I build bridges, dig wells, hand out laptops? Money/food/supplies sent to poor countries never seems to get to the people in need, getting stolen by corrupt local officials somewhere along the distribution line. So, if you were in the Gate's position, how would YOU spend your money for the common good?
Fine, any money is good. But this doesn't "give capitalism a heart" or "human face" as some people seem to suggest. Often these types of donations are done to avoid taxes or act as leverage when investing in other regional markets /commodities.
We are talking about capitalists here, self interest is king.
I heard the religious right was a really strong force in the US, but really, having to pay $560 million just to get some contraception seems to me to be a bit exaggerated, no?
Anyway, anything which prevents the Gates' genes from spreading further is a good cause. Glad to see they're still keeping up the good work!
I'd like to suggest "The Selfish Gene" as a possible explanation to this altruistic behaviour and to other gates foundation endeavors.
I can type more than that for my comment.
The greatest theologian of the Catholic Church, Hans Kung, is barred from teaching doctrine by the same Ratzinger. In effect, Catholic thought has been hijacked by a relatively small clique of backward authority figures. You could say the same thing about the British Conservative Party and the Church of England. Comment on the USA would be superfluous, as HuffPost does a rather thorough job. Eventually, Popes die.
The point is that Melinda Gates is more typical of Catholics than is the Pope, and Hans Kung articulates the beliefs of educated Catholics far better than Ratzinger's entire hierarchy. It is the Pope that needs to go into unearned retirement.
And, for information, I'm a kind of atheist. I just think that clear thinking about what goes on in religions is much better than simple name calling.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The pill doesn't stop STDs, does it?
Why are the MEN not wearing condoms, then? Why are women sleeping with men who don't care about them enough to even wear a condom?
Why are MOST women attracted to violent, uncaring men?
If MOST women were attracted to caring, kind men, then that's exactly what most men would become, overnight...
Okay I'm sorry. In my EWD (excessive waffle delirium) I thought it would be a good idea to watch FoxNews for a laugh.
About 21,000 days too late, by my reckoning.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You don't make any sense but I don't know what ADN means. So I looked it up. It didn't help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADN
ADN is a three-letter acronym that may refer to:
Adobe Digital Negative (file format), a raw image format designed by Adobe Systems
Application Delivery Network, a suite of technologies for improved delivery of applications across the Internet
Autodesk Developer Network, a program for developers working with Autodesk software
Aircraft Data Network, a proposed specification for data networking standards for commercial aircraft installations
Advanced Digital Network, a leased 56k digital phone line used commonly with mainframe terminal multiplexers
Auditory Disability with Normal hearing, a term for King-Kopetzky syndrome
Ammonium dinitramide, a rocket propellant
Acción Democrática Nacionalista (Nationalist Democratic Action), a political party of Bolivia
Alleanza Democratica Nazionale (National Democratic Alliance (Italy)), a former political party of Italy
Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst, the state news agency of East Germany
Anchorage Daily News, an Alaskan newspaper
ADN (newspaper), a Spanish free daily newspaper
Associate Degree in Nursing, similar to Associate of Science in Nursing
Assistant Director of Nursing
Abbreviated dialing number
ADN, IATA airport code for Andes Airport in Andes, Antioquia, Colombia
ADN, National Rail code for Ardrossan Town railway station, United Kingdom
"Any Day Now", as abbreviated in text messaging
Ashley, Drew and Northern Railway, a defunct railroad in Arkansas
Making new kinds of rocket fuel every time I have a kid seems fun though.
Rubbers looking soft? Pharma on a downer? Announce half a billion of tax-free "donations", attract many billions more in taxpayer "partnerships", and watch those share prices surge and thrust rampantly upwards again.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Hard to say. The optimistic thing to do would set up a trust to use the money I already have to acquire more than the rate of inflation and give away the excess in a wide variety of services in hopes of guaranteeing some good is done for a very long time.
Alternatively I would create businesses in Africa, akin to China and India, except be exceedingly good to the workers. Free education and healthcare for their families, local infrastructure and the like. This would stretch the investment further in hopes of gaining local momentum. If you win the hearts and minds of the populous then the corrupt people and warlords will have less power to spoil the project.
Funny that the best ideas for humanity I can come up with sound so similar to the ideas of people, as a Republican, I am supposed to hate.
I do not normally respond to ACs, but on this occasion I will break my rule. Go away and learn some sociology of religion. There isn't exactly a shortage of publications on the subject. The Catholic Church itself, even, has done research into the area. I haven't got time to enlighten you, but until you get out of the basement and see what actually happens in the real world, you won't begin to appreciate why writing "Wrong." is not an argument.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
> If (as is actually the case) the majority of individual Catholics ignore the Pope on a range of issues
That does not work like that. The Catholic Church is strictly organized as Lord Jesus modeled it on the roman imperial military. Being a catholic is being is communion with the Bishop of Rome, because he is the heir of Simon Peter, whom Jesus Christ granted the keys of Heaven. The Catholic Church teaches that the Pope is infallible when making a solemn ex-cathedra declaration in matters of faith and eternal morals. These statements make it very difficult to claim to be a catholic and neglige the Pope at the same time.
I think Mrs. Melinda Gates may be denied access to the eucharistic wafer if her pro-contraceptives case becomes a scandal. The Father (YHWH) very clearly ordered mankind in the Genesis to multiply and populate all the lands. The church cannot abandon that command and making up a scandal versus the Church's causes is taken very seriously by Catholicism. Even the divorced people cannot partake in the transubstantiated wafer, even though their separation is just a private scandal.
... very clearly ordered mankind in the Genesis to multiply and populate all the lands.
We've done that. He didn't say "multiply and over-populate all the lands". Can we please put the "contraception is evil" one to rest?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
See, it's this sort of thing that makes me wonder if Microsoft was worth it after all.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
kill the earth make more babies, that's the christian sollution....
let's kill other by gassing them to death with 9 billion people and 10 billion cows.. (can Christians please GO THE FUCK BACK TO FUCKING SCHOOL!)
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/07/03/melinda-gates-admits-stop-peoples-lives-from-existing/
Cited here:
http://www.dailypaul.com/243131/eugenicist-melinda-gates-stop-the-poor-from-reproducing
Or:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/melinda_gates_talks_eugenics.html
"Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin's Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to "assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit." Marie Stopes lobbied for "the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.""Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin's Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to "assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit." Marie Stopes lobbied for "the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.""
I am just shocked at how most slashdotters have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the overpopulation myth.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
As Julian Simon suggests, more people means more imagination, which can mean more wealth for everyone:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
And in any case, the world is suffering more from a demographic pea
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
While many say that there are great famines in Africa, they still have the fastest growing population among the continents. The biggest problem of Africa is overpopulation.
"... $560 million... to contraception for women..."
That is A LOT of sex going on right there... A LOT!
More than Monica and Clinton could ever imagine...
The Catholic Church is strictly organized as Lord Jesus modeled it on the roman imperial military.
Jesus didn't model it on the Roman imperial military. Neither did Peter. Paul might have, since he's the one who actually created the Catholic Church. But if so, it's not a useful structure in today's world.
There isn't one major problem the world has that will not be helped by a stabilized global population. Kudos to the Gates family!
You appear to be confusing contraception with abortion. While abortion is an issue still much debated, the ethics of contraception are more-or-less settled now for everyone except the Catholic church and a few other religious groups, and even they don't equate it with murder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kJHQpvgB8
Sing with me boys and girls!
Bill: "But, Honey, we already have three kids and we can afford as many more as we'd like."
Melinda: "It's the masses. They're clogging up the roads."
Bill: "But, we have helicopters."
Melinda: "They're breeding like locusts. Soon, there will be nothing left of the planet."
Bill: "Then, we'll have it all to ourselves."
Melinda: "No one will be left to by Microsoft products."
Bill: "Here's 590 Million."
*** Don't be dull.***
Question: How many Georgetown Law School students would this $560M cover?
Answer: At an estimated $3,000/year it would cover about 187,000 Georgetown Law School students.
Ken
There are thousands of people doing everything from volunteering to help at the local soup kitchen to working for change on massive human rights abuses to defending the wrongly accused.
Charity is a field with far more available in the way of hands than in the way of money. Could it use more hands? Sure. But there still isn't enough money to fund all the people that want to do the work, even at the low salaries most people who work in the related fields accept because that's what they want to be doing.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/the_gates_foundations_leverage.html
Essentially, the foundation makes donations to organizations both it and the Gates personally own stock in or have other investments with.
If you think that the B&MGF makes donations purely out of the goodness of their hearts, then you a)are naive and b)have no idea what 95% of most celebrity/rich-people foundations are for. Celebrities do it for personal marketing and tax shelters. Sports players do it to employ relatives and tax shelters. Rich people do it for social status and essentially write off the cost of their parties, aka tax shelters.
Tax-writeoffs for charities need to end - you shouldn't get to short the government on infrastructure and stuff that benefits everyone, just to benefit your personal cause. Why should a bunch of rich white asshole golf players get to make a donation to a charity in their hometown where the median income is the highest in the entire state, which goes to benefit waterfowl...and then not pay that money to their state, which paves their roads and pays for the homeless shelters and healthcare services for the poor?
Please help metamoderate.
Bill Gates can give away 99% of his wealth, and he'd still be richer than Mitt Romney. So, yes, he's a good example among the filthy rich. He can afford to be more charitable than ordinary people who'd miss out on simple middle-class essentials like housing or education if they so much as part with half their money.
The Roman Catholic Church (as distinct from the early Church) came into being because of the process of incorporation by which the Roman Empire "adopted" foreign religions when it seemed expedient. In essence, the old Pagan system of the Flamen Dialis and the Vestals and all the rest of it re-emerged as Imperial Christianity, with the Vestals as nuns and the Flamen Dialis as the Pope. Celibacy was a takeover of the priesthood of Cybele. In many places the process was far from complete, as anyone who has ever visited a few Dark Ages sites knows. Although it is a very old book now, it is all darkly alluded to in The Golden Bough, a 19th century work of religious anthropology by James Frazer.
Anyone who remembers Vatican II will remember it as the high water of the Church facing up to its past and trying to identify a role for the future. Unfortunately the *homo erectus wing of the Vatican got control again.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
At some point along the road, Bill realized that population control is a *Good Idea* and that overpopulation is scary and must be stopped at Any Cost!
Problem is that included in the "Any Cost" category is the willful destruction of our food supply by introducing Monsanto-style GMOs into the environment, by controlling who is able to grow food, and what sort of food that will be, and who gets to live and who doesn't.
Bill Gates is not an idiot. He knows that this is a devastating tactic which will result in mass-starvation and millions of sick and poorly nourished people, (all of which will be under elitist control).
Promoting on one hand GMOs while investing in a seed vault with the other indicates their awareness.
Planned Parenthood, with which he and his wife have long and old ties, began as a deliberate Eugenics program.
Not all beauty is so immediately apparent, and in fact I've come to believe that superficial beauty tends to actively interfere with the more durable kinds (not always, but often). Even on the purely physical level models tend to be more sexually titillating than beautiful.
Plus the criteria for "cohort" and "mother of my children" are both quite a bit more demanding than for "playmate", especially when you're filthy rich and "won't off me in my sleep and run off with my fortune and the pool boy" is a real consideration.
Besides, what sort of insecure third-rate asshole marries a model attracted to his money? Even a second-rate asshole knows you take them as a mistress, after all those looks won't last and trading up is much more expensive when you've married them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They just want less of us 'useless eaters' around. No philanthropy here, just pure self-serving business-as-usual.
I think this is what "Saturn's Race" was about, forced sterility of the undeveloped/devloping nations.
Way to go, Mrs. Gates.
Aid to Africa is only about $10 per person. Aid to Israel is about $400 per person - and that doesn't include the $700 per person for Gaza and the West Bank, which under international law Israel is responsible for as an occupying state. So our taxes pay $400 every year to every Israeli, and $700 to every person in their Occupied Territories. Yay!
Which pharma companies are going to profit from this initiative to put their drugs into the hands of poor women? I have a sneaking suspicion it will be the companies partnered with the Gates Foundation, companies in which the Foundation just so happens to own stock.
sadly, the human race is one disease we'll never wipe out in our lifetime
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
There were people who actually sat in chairs and listened to this person give a speech. Then they all went and wrote stories about this and published them. Then slashdot noticed it. Then I commented on it. Wow what a historical event.
The Catholic Church teaches that the Pope is infallible
The Doctrine of Papal Infallibility was only introduced in the First Vatican Council, a.k.a. Vatican I, just before the start of the 20th Century. Prior to that the pope was only a man, although a very powerful one. Prior to that there frequently were slime like the Borgia popes in charge, and most sane people would resist the notion that they were infallible mouthpieces of god.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
It's not charity, it's a tax-shelter with additional benefits of limiting foreign governments from setting up their own generic medicine factories or establishing a framework for sustainable development free of western poison-pill capitalism.
There isn't a rubber thick or strong enough to make Melinda want to funnel Billy boy's hog! It makes $560M look like a bargain.
The Catholic Church is strictly organized as Lord Jesus modeled it on the roman imperial military.
Jesus didn't model it on the Roman imperial military. Neither did Peter. Paul might have, since he's the one who actually created the Catholic Church. But if so, it's not a useful structure in today's world.
More like Constantine the Great. Before then, individual "bishops" (claiming lineage from the apostles) acted like mini-popes, interpreting religious texts and and exerting control over a town, municipality, or region. It's a very muddy period of Christian history that we don't know a whole lot about, but it wasn't centrally planned and orchestrated like a military.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
How 'bout this: Abstinence. Don't have sex, and you most likely won't get pregnant. It works 100% of the time and it costs absolutely nothing! That's something the "Planned Parenthood" eugenicists don't want you to find out!
The use of oral contraceptives changes the choices the female makes in a mate. Instead of selecting a mate with a different immune system to pass on to their progeny (two immune systems), the female picks a male whose immune system is similar to hers, just as she would do if she were pregnant, which the pill mimics to her body. If this behavior were the norm, our species would not be able to evolve to counter the pathogens which are evolving to overwhelm our immune system. To counter this, nature makes a small percentage of the progeny of such misbehavior effectively sterile, i.e. homosexual, protecting our species.
PROFIT
As a contraceptive, a picture of Gates above the bed should do the trick.
I pledge $560 Million to stop Melinda Gates.
Look I'm not against rich people helping poor people.
I'm just still waiting to see it happen.
Why is birth control evil? I'm not joking, I honestly don't understand what make it "the lesser of two evils".
I'd prefer she spend the money of getting approval for RISUG in the US and proliferating it in other countries instead of the conventional commercial stuff.
Somehow, I sense this has racist overtones.
i'll bet she bought stock in rubber companies
i always see this. everyone thinks bill gates is a good guy because he donates, well
they seem to forget, everyone else would donate too if they had over 60 billion dollars.
hes buying his way into a imagine for the public, and everyone falls for it
this overcrowded smoked out dump of a world can use all the contraception it can get. too bad it's the ones least likely to adapt that keep breeding the most. Something tells me this is bound for disaster in the long run anyway
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?