Super-rich boys get to have their toys.
Sadly, I’m not super-rich but if I was I’d like something from the world of personal jets, a.k.a. microjets, something like this Maverick SmartJet, which only costs about $900K would be on my list.
The Eclipse 500 also looks hot and the company has more orders than it can fill. Bill Gates is an investor in the company.
Dreamhost, which has been pretty stable in recent months, had some serious network problems the past couple of days. My site has been down most of the past 18 hours.
But it’s back up for now!
When DreamHost crashes, it’s always a BIG event.
I stumbled upon this article about how different cultures have cared, or not cared, for their elderly. It is interesting given that we headed into a time when so many baby-boomers are headed into their senior years.
It is said that you can judge a country or a tribe by the way it treats its elderly. In ancient Greece this was very simple. It was the sacred duty of the children to look after the elderly. Greek law laid down severe penalties for those who failed to discharge their obligations. In Delphi, for instance, anyone who failed to look after his parents was liable to be put in jail.
Was it the elders writing the laws?
The Greek way is indirect contrast to the way many other countries treated their elderly. Among Eskimo families in Alaska when a person becomes old and not able to care for himself one night he simply goes out at night and freezes to death and afterwards the family buries him in the snow.
In New Guinea when a person becomes elderly and helpless, he’s put to sleep wrapped in a cloth and sent down a waterfall which reaches the sea.
The most bizarre custom for the treatment of the elderly, which I have witnessed, is on the Amazon. Here was a cannibalistic tribe not far from Manaus. Two missionaries lost their lives trying to reform this cannibalistic tribe. Their custom was when a person became too old and helpless he was put to sleep with a drug the cannibals developed and then prepared for a feast. The heart was given to the family. The chief took the brain, but I just could not bring myself to eat anything, though everything smelt good and I was really hungry.
It’s impossible to talk about how people treat the elderly without talking about how they treat the young. For example, if the Greeks required the elderly to be cared for by law, then it was the young who were required to do it. If you can judge a culture by how it treats its elderly, you can also judge it by how it treats its young.
The fact is you can judge a culture anyway you want and that often says more about the person making the judgment than it does about the culture.
It’s quite ridiculous to think that individuals deserve care simply because they are old. That would imply that the older an individual gets, the more care they deserve, simply because of their advanced years. A criminal of 100 years would deserve more care than a brilliant scientist of 80 who had discovered the cure for cancer. An invalid of 90 would deserve more care than a newly-born infant with his entire life ahead of him.
By the same token, does it make sense to care for an infant born with terminal birth defects instead of an elderly person who is still for the most part healthy?
Care in senior years is something that must be earned, like everything else in life. As an entitlement, it is an involuntary, irrational burden placed on others.
The Greek way seems based on guilt more than anything else. It’s designed to make younger people feel guilty, just for being young and healthier.
This list has some well-known presidential affairs on it but many I didn’t know about.
1. George Washington (1789-97)
The original “philanderer-in-chief.” Among the women with whom Washington was known or suspected to have had adulterous relationships were Kitty Greene, Lucy Flucker Knox, Elizabeth Gates, Theodosia Prevost Burr, Kitty Duer, Phoebe Fraunces, Eliza Powell, Mrs. William Bingham, and Mrs. Perez Morton. Officially, Washington died of a chill that he caught riding his horse in the snow. According to a more likely interpretation, he caught his death when he jumped out of a window trouserless after an assignation with an employee’s wife at Mount Vernon.
[…]
2. Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)
He lectured his fellow men on the dangers of associating with women and “the depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue,” but the effect was slightly undermined by the fact that he slept with slave girls. Jefferson had a 20-year sexual relationship with a slave called Sally Hemmings who was thirty years his junior. She bore him six children who were also kept as slaves. Jefferson also had adulterous affairs with Elizabeth Walker while her husband, General John Walker, was away fighting in one of the Indian Wars, and with Maria Cosway, wife of the famous English painter of miniatures Richard Cosway.
The hypocrisy of Jefferson keeping is own children as slaves while writing so eloquently of the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is mind-boggling.