Davis Guggenheim, director of the ill-fated agitprop anti-public school, anti-union film “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” has directed a paean to the genius of billionaire Bill Gates called “Inside Bill Gates’ Brain,” a frightening thought when you think about it. The last place I would want to be trapped is inside the brain of a guy who thinks he is as smart as he is rich. Yech!
Steven Singer didn’t like the experience either. He reviews the premise of the show, which will appear on Netflix, the personal cable network of billionaire Reed Hastings.
Singer writes:
Once upon a time, the world was run by rich men.
And all was good.
But then the world was conquered by other rich men.
And that is something the first group of rich men could not allow.
That is the reason behind Netflix’s new film “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates.”
The three-part documentary goes live on Sept. 20. But the film’s aims are clear from the trailer.
It’s a vanity project about Bill Gates, the second richest man in the world.
By examining his mind and motivations, director and executive producer Davis Guggenheim will show us how Gates deserves his billionaire status and that we should allow him to use his philanthrocapitalist ventures to rule the world.
After all, shouldn’t the best and richest among us make all the decisions?
It’s a cry for oligarchy in an age of idiocracy, a love letter to neoliberalism in a time of neofascism.
The pity is that Donald Trump and the “Make America Great Again” crowd have goose stepped all over their new world order.
But instead of showing the world why we need to return to democratic principles, strengthen the common good and empower the people to govern themselves, some would rather continue the same plutocracy just with a different set of plutocrats at the wheel.
Bill Gates has the extraordinary brain that has concocted one harebrained scheme after another in his quest to reinvent American education. He may have been impaired by the simple fact that he knew nothing at all about American education, having never been a student, a teacher, or anything else in an American public school. But being very very very rich means you don’t have to know much in order to proclaim yourself ready to redesign American education. It has been a playground for billionaires for at least the past 20 years, though none with as much hubris as Bill Gates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m pretty sure Davis Guggenheim just has no principles at all and makes the film he’s paid to make. “An Inconvenient Truth” came from a different place than this latest creation and and than “Waiting for ‘Superman.’ ” Clearly he learned that there’s a lot more funding coming from the right.
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Clearly, Guggenheim is a “fee for service” type of person than an genuine ideologue. Singer understands Gates better. Gates is known as a mean spirited, ego driven, control freak. The term “hubris” suits him very well.
Gates said in 2014,”“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade,” Teachers, students and parents already know that this “education stuff” has failed. Test and punish has been another waste of money. Public schools are tired of being a lab rat for Gates’ academic experiments.
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You beat me to it. Was going to say it might take 10 years before we know if this is a worthwhile production or not.
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lab rats for Gates’ academic experiments, and mindbogglingly stupid patsies for his endless need to glean profit
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“I’m pretty sure Davis Guggenheim just has no principles at all and makes the film he’s paid to make.”
Wow, you really nailed Davis Guggenheim.
He is no different than most of the people receiving overly generous salaries for running ed reform think tanks.
I feel quite certain that if Bill Gates and other billionaires decided to stop supporting charters and started publicly saying that charters were not working, the people running those ed reform think tanks would suddenly “see the light” too.
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Bird of a feather …. EVIL.
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Bill Gates may be far more mundane than people think and that may be the essence of his cruelty. In order to deny that the 99% are people, he’s about taking away the things that give joy to ordinary people e.g. the communities’ school ball games, the bands, the music and art classes, etc. John Arnold and Charles Koch’s cruel attacks against public pensions (Gates also spoke against pensions) share an intent with the Gates’ plunder of common goods and destruction of democracy.
This preceding observation was reworked from James McAuley’s history of a Jewish, French hero, Georges Mandel. The research examined the cause of Nazi plunder.
We may be lucky and Gates’ P.R movie will tip the scales. The public will make a parallel with Hitler’s propaganda films.
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A Jewish, French hero, Georges Mandel doggedly resisted fascism. His memorial reads, “And when he was falling in the dust, the hands of of victory closed his eyelids.”
Some of the fiercest fighters for public education and against billionaires may not live long enough to deservedly cheer the 99%’s victory. But, we can be assured that a nation that saved so many European immigrants from starvation in the 1800’s and so many from violet deaths at the hands of Nazi’s in the 1900’s will thwart current day colonialists by all means necessary.
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If Bill Gates’ brain is so incredible, I suggest we turn him over to scientists to study. Since he retired and no longer has a job, he is of no use except for scientific purposes. Just think about it: what we learn about his brain might one day save the planet and our species.
First, they will tie him down inside one of those donut-shaped scanners that monitors a brain’s activity … for a year or so. For that entire year or so, he will not be removed from the scanner to even take a walk. They can feed him and remove his bodily waste through small and big tubes.
Then they drill holes in his skull and insert wires to see what happens when they zap different areas of his brain with electric shocks.
Third, they cut off the top of his skull and remove his brain to study it slice by slice to discover what makes it is unique and valuable to the rest of us.
And if they sequence his DNA and discover he has the warrior gene, well, that probably explains everything.
“The warrior gene is back. And he’s brought along a buddy. This new research on a gene long associated with aggressive behavior raises an old question: What can–or should–be done about genetic predispositions that lead to grim social consequences in only some of the people with the predisposing genes?”
Maybe those scientists can do some gene editing to improve Bill Gates so he will not be a menace to the planet and society.
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The investigative process requires more than one oligarch brain for study. Has David Koch been cremated?
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I see it now:
Davis Guggenheim explores David Koch’s brain.
What a show!
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Ha!
Once David G is exploring David Koch’s brain, we can all “pray” that he will get lost in that darkness and never find his way out.
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Has DK been cremated? Do extremist Catholics that hate the current pope allow cremation?
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American Prospect has an excellent summary that describes the segment of American Catholics who reconcile their beliefs with and who glom onto the views of the richest 0.1%. (10-14-2016)
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Lloyd,
Adding-
60% of Catholics who voted in 2016 appear to support the “extremist” view.
I suppose some of them may merely oppose women in leadership roles but, otherwise be good people..ha ha..
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I saw just the title, “Inside Bill Gates’ Brain” and nearly fell out of my chair laughing. What’s in Bill Gates’ brain? Dropout Bill Gates? Privileged numbskull Bill Gates? A fusty nut with no kernel.
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Mr. Gates made himself the wealthiest man in the world by cunningly leveraging a monopoly.
He ran a company with a policy of stack ranking its employees. Hey, I’ve got a management plan for you: let’s make everything into a cutthroat competition for survival. It’s nature’s way.
He paid for the Common [sic] Core [sic], a single bullet list of standards to key computerized standardized tests and depersonalized education software to, which just happens to be a boon for those who sell computers and computer software and operating systems. (Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain!) That travesty, absurdly referred to be Education Deformers as “higher standards,” has led to a vast devolution and dumbing down of ELA curricula and pedagogy in the United States, which is ironic given the PR that Gates generates by publishing his annual reading list. Our Thought Leader. So cultured. So wise. Perhaps reading is only for the oligarchical class. Perhaps the children of Proles are not supposed to be reading novels and plays and holding discussions and writing essays–all those things we used to do in English classes–but are to be taught, instead, to sit down, shut up, and do inane multiple-choice, on-screen exercises on applying “standards” from the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list to random, isolated snippets of text in preparation for growing up to be obedient, servile members of the gig and service economy. Do this and win a gold star!!! Go to the next level!! Leave the losers behind you!!! Move up the Data Wall!!! Will you be taking that latte on the veranda, Mistuh Gates?
His foundation funded a study at the US Department of Education on using retinal scanners, wristbands that measured galvanic skin response, and other devices to do real-time surveillance of student and worker emotional states and attention to task. Orwell’s Ministry of Love had only telescreens and spy networks and helicopters.
He tried and failed to create an dystopian nationwide database, a total information system, that would follow people cradle to grave and be continuously added to and include everything from disciplinary records to grades to evaluations, in K-12, in college, and in the workplace–an eerily prescient version of the Social Credit database system just instituted by the Chinese. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Find an astroturf organization pretending to be made up of teachers and parents but serving, instead, the purposes of Ed Deform, find a Vichy academic collaborator in Deform, scratch a bit, and you will smell the Gates money.
He has always been the man with a plan–Mr. Command and Control. In my book, he is a very scary person, but his kind of money buys a LOT of public relations and a lot of court singers. And Americans love their Gatsbys, don’t they?
“[M]eet it is I set it down. That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” –Hamlet
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I recently read a book about a local entrepreneur who founded a business in the 1920 in a local town. The author goes so some effort to place him within the American small town acceptance of the idea that competition within the Herbert Spencer vision of society.
Commissioned by his descendants, this book still paints a picture of a man determined to make a business go. He used vertical integration, from hide to sales (he made leather goods), and he attempted to innovate both in product and in production model. Oddly enough, the book makes the point that charitable donations were not something he believed in, and often what he did give helped launch some new aspect of his business. Remember, this book was paid for by his family.
I was struck that his philanthropy, such as it was, had a motive related to the development of his business. Sounds somewhat familiar.
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Wow, Diane. This is why I read your posts every day.
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BELOW is the scene from the movie, THE PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY, where Apple founder and leader Steve Jobs rightly accuses Microsoft founder and leader Bill Gates of “stealing from us!” — i.e. going behind Jobs’ back and taking all the features of Jobs’ / Apple’s MacIntosh computer and, without compensation or attribution, incorporating that software into the Gates’ Microsoft Corporation’s Windows software.
Since Gates’ and Microsoft’s Windows was designed to be used in non-Apple-Macintosh computers, — i.e. Apple’s competitors — this indeed enabled Gates to “steal” billions (trillions?) from Jobs and Apple in the long run.
However, as the Narrator tells us, Gates then spends “hours” successfully manipulating Jobs, in a private one-on-one meeting, into thinking the opposite, finishing with the obsequious, kissing-up compliment:
“The Macintosh is the only computer that I’d want to buy my mom.”
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Bill Gates won’t be happy. DFER’s politician, Congresswoman Susan Davis of California, isn’t seeking re-election. Cory Booker should take a hint.
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I want Corey Booker’s mouth severed from his brain so he cannot stay in politics, maybe, since the current illegitimate president of the U.S. is almost brain dead.
That’s why I want all elected reps that think like Corey Booker to have massive strokes.
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Given the charter school movement’s dependence on secretive but “philanthropic” billionaires, shouldn’t it have been called “Waiting for Batman”?
“Waiting for (the superhero formerly known as) Captain Marvel Jr.” would work too since Freddy Freeman counts as a special needs student but the accommodations involved are cheap.
Clark Kent’s a journalist… “Waiting for Superman’s 5000-Word Charter School Expose In Tomorrow’s Daily Planet”?
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