Bill Gates Goes Begging

Nobody’s Opinion: It was real tempting to write on Rosie O’Donnell today, and the fact that she hangs herself upside down for her depression, that was an essay in itself.

But, then I saw Bill Gates on C-Span. Yes, Boy Scout Billy was before the Senate committee begging the Congress to allow more highly trained immigrants into the United States. In fact, placing a no-limit immigrations policy on geniuses from other countries would be nice for Bill.

There is a shortage here, and he makes the claim that if they don’t come here, the other countries will get them.

He makes a good point.

The United States, in the fields of math and science, are now at the bottom of the industrialized barrel, and we will be falling far behind almost everybody else in the world in matters of intellectual property, and competition.

And something tells me he’s not so sure about his China shops. In fact, we have all these big U.S companies closing shops here and moving all their brains and research and development to China because of the cheap labor---while taking the BIG risk that one day, in a Chavez move, the Chinese state will not march a few million perfectly high-stepping soldiers into all their factories and tell them all to GET OUT.

The short-term gain will not be worth the long-term loss as Bill Gates would then say.

Bill was putting forth what everyone knows, but not one single Congressman anywhere will do a single thing about, and that’s the problem. They were too busy gushing and giving him Kudos’s for his many achievements.

If I were him I would have said, “So, when are YOU going to do something about this?”

But, that’s why he’s rich and I’m not. He was just stating facts. He pissed them off once before, in 1998 when Clinton went after him.

Our government wants, not an educated generation of American children, but “community servants.” You see, they don’t really believe, no matter what they say, that the plebian masses are capable of being smart.

Which shows you just how really stupid they are.

All you have to do is take one look at Congress to realize that genetically speaking, the bad genes are being kept at the elite top.

Otherwise, why don’t they fix it? Why has it gone on this way for hundreds of years?

Bill Gates is worried, as we all are. Our public schools are run like prisons, and are so outdated, it’s pathetic. The NEA has morphed into a huge, ugly, conglomeration of government jobs, instead of what it should be: the soil for our country’s future survival.

Yes, the teacher’s union is the problem. Tenure insures failure. Teachers that know they can never be fired so they don’t have to teach the kids, and yet, they still get paid, get nice summers off, and get wonderful pensions. They end up fine and dandy, while our kids will be wondering where they will get the next payment on their car, and go into panic when they can’t find a calculator.

Unless they become teachers too.

Not to mention, half of them don’t even know their own subject.

If you have ever read Bill Gates book, “The Road Ahead,” you can see how he naturally sees his inventions being used to do everything in your life. It was in this book that Bill predicted that our phones, televisions, and computers would all be connected.

At the time I read it I thought he was a megalomaniac, but now in 2007, it’s already here.

Of course, he also thought that the computer was going to save a lot of paper, when in fact, it has tripled paper printouts. (One can’t be perfect.)

Bill Gates was sounding the alarm that the failure comes, mostly in our high schools. We have the biggest rate of drop-outs, more than any other nation.

There was another “genius” who tried to bring attention to the horrible high school system in America, and that was Tom Edison.

Thomas Edison had this to say about it:

Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, the average child begins to suffer from this atrophy, (the habit of forgetting) the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble I should judge to lie with the schools, but its precise seat I would not venture to suggest. Perhaps it lies in a flagging interest, which leads quickly to the habit of listening without hearing, of looking without seeing---a habit which once fixed persists without regard to the existence or non-existence of interest. Whatever it is, it is clear to me that our schools and colleges are truing out men who not merely have failed to learn, but have been robbed of the capacity to learn. They fail to learn because the methods of teaching are wrong. The instructions have made them actually dislike knowledge.

They should have listened to the man, but no…socialism was already creeping into our government in his lifetime.

Think about that. He also suggested that maybe the classes should not be co-ed. Maybe due to all the sexual morals broken down in our society now, it would actually be a good idea to separate the boys and girls when they reach seventh grade.

Oh, they would scream about it now, but they might thank us later.

They could still get together for dances. We could ban the cell-phones.

So why isn’t something being done?

If you’ve ever read Steve Farrell’s essays, then you are familiar with the elite’s plan of the dream “service” economy. Allen Toffler’s “third way,” much like the Iraq war, is not exactly a good plan for us on the lower levels of the highway.

The short-term international dream of globalization is the fall of the United States. As we are all witnessing now, the Fortune 500 Companies are raking in billions for the short-term, but in the long term, they sacrifice the United States.

Bill Gates loves free trade. But free trade works only on a level playing field. Why do we let other countries flood our markets and yet, they protect theirs? Why has our government allowed this to happen?

Is a family trip to the Bahamas mean that much to them?

Bill Gates doesn’t have to worry. He’s practically a monopoly. But, if Ford can be brought down, someday so can Microsoft.

We are now a country without a manufacturing base. And if our kids can’t even keep up the American tradition of creative inventions and entrepreneurship that we have always lead the world in, even Bill Gates should be worried.

And it’s clear, he is.

Someday soon, even our movie industry will be outsourced, and we will not longer be the best at that either. It’s just a matter of time.

Bill Gates went to one of the best “preparatory” schools in Seattle. His family was rich. It was there that the schools “mothers” raised enough money to buy an ASR-33 Teletype terminal. Bill got into that computer and the seed was set. Bill stared his first company at fourteen. Harvard probably bored him.

If not for those mothers, I would probably not be typing this right now on Windows XP.

The United States has not only been known for its unique experiment in liberty with the founding fathers, but also because of its individual creative inventors.

And when it comes to inventors, no class holds a monopoly. They can come from anywhere…from the poorest kid, to the richest.

Depriving the poorest of the opportunity to enrich his own country, by not fixing the horrible public educational system, is just plain stupid.

Bill Gates was rich. Tom Edison was not. Tom was called an idiot by his elementary school teachers.

And the sad truth is; if Thomas Edison were going to a school in America today, they would say the very same thing about him.

This nobody thinks that if a dolphin can be taught to flip up in the air, then just about any kid in America could be taught how to be excited about math and science again.

And if our schools aren’t drastically changed within the next five years, we will all be hanging upside down every day along with Rosie O’Donnell.

Nobody’s Perfect: Bill, of course, fails to mention that most of these educated immigrants he wants to bring in will work at half the cost and take an American job away from someone here who is just as capable of doing the work.

Nobody Knows; Just how many teaching jobs in our public school system are held by women as compared to men.

Nobody Cares; I don’t see why they just don’t get rid of the teachers and put in computers and video’s to teach everything. Put back into the schools, music, art, and P.E.
Hire some really good teachers, and get rid of all the bad ones. Even a little nobody like me could come up with a successful way to teach kids.

And if you were lucky enough to have a good education, you have NO idea what you missed. Be thankful.

After all, Rosie O’Donnell went to a public school. Remember that the next time you do nothing.