Jeff Bezos now owns a new mansion on an artificial barrier island in South Florida. He paid $79 million for it. He already had a mansion next door. I guess he felt it was too confining.
The last I checked he had three Lake Washington mansions in Medina, including one that was apparently a guest mansion. The article from which I learned about the Florida purchase described some of his other homes but didn’t even mention the Medina hovels. It just mentioned homes in DC, Maui and Beverly Hills, the last of which he paid $169 million for.
The new house has a pool, a theater, a library and a wine cellar, of course, as any decent mansion would. Bezos is far too rich to have a house with no pool or wine cellar. The island is called Indian Creek — which is utterly stupid — and comes with another 40 residences, occupied by such as Tom Brady, Julio Iglesias, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. There’s also an island police department to protect all the rich residents from the Bond villains liable to descend upon them. With them and the island country club, Bezos shouldn’t be lonely. Just imagine the sitcom — Sheriff Andy meets the world's third richest man and Jared Kushner.
I can’t get over the fact that the artificial island was named Indian Creek. Did Indians build it? Is there really a creek? Is that fake, too? Is it saltwater or freshwater? I hope it’s fresh water, and the residents have to pay to keep it going. It would serve the rich ninnies right!
It looks like Medina has to step its game up. Maybe a cool name change would help.
In other southern U.S. news, Trump says Hamas terrorists are invading us over our southern border, where the wall — the one he was going to get Mexico to build — isn’t. Of course, they aren’t invading where the wall is because it’s such a fine wall. The most excellent wall. As opposed to the inferior wall Biden is about to start building.
The claim that Hamas was pouring into the U.S. through the gaps in our southern border wall was not just called false by fact-checkers, it was labeled “pants on fire.” It’s on the level of Jewish space lasers. What is Hamas doing on our border? Did they fly motorized parachutes across the Atlantic? Why not skip the southern border, then, in preference for the Atlantic coast?
One of the things that has always fascinated me about Gaza is that it has nearly the same area as Seattle proper, but more than twice the population. To bring Seattle’s population up to Gaza’s population you’d need to pack all the single family homes with an extra two families each. I learned this from reading about geography in Wikipedia.
I’m thinking about such things as I contemplate Israel’s instructions to residents of Gaza to evacuate toward the south of the strip. I feel like I’m missing a crucial part of the picture? Now that the towns in Israel bordering Gaza have largely emptied out, it seems ill-advised to suggest that Gazans should seek safety in other locations.
That 1.1 million people should shrug and say, “OK, we'll just have to fill our cars with gasoline we don’t have and drive south then,” strikes me as hugely unrealistic, given that “south” is a synonym for desert in this context. I think the U.N. agrees with me on this point.
If there’s any compliance at all to the order, it could result in an invasion of Egypt by refugees, which could throw everything into disarray.
But I suppose I’m missing the brilliant Israeli strategic idea behind ordering two million people to do something impossible. Could it be that the plan is that they don’t do it? And find out what the implied “or else” is all about?
It occurs to me that this sort of thing begs for a distinction between proper micro-social behavior and its reverse. I’m sure that I should never make impossible demands on my neighbors with implied threats of doing them harm. Or at least if I tell them to go away, I should simultaneously open a door.
But now it looks like there are new macro-social standards in place. Countries can act in completely different ways, according to new “macro-” rules.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the Oct. 18-24, 2023 issue.