Saturday, January 24, 2009


If you've been following this blog for any amount of time, you're probably well aware that my normal mode is "cranky". I wonder why. But, once in a while, there's reason to be positive. Let's face it, Obama's inauguration was one of those. Big time. Here's another one. Until I see Steve Jobs doing the kinds of things with his money that Bill Gates does (and, yeah, I know Jobs may be on his way out, and, yeah, maybe he does secret good, but, well, show me), I ain't never buyin' no stinkin' Apple product.

The first I heard of Gates's philanthropy was years ago when he first got interested in malaria (2 million dead kids (mostly) a year, roughly. That's about 13 fully-loaded Boeing 747s going down every day. Or, if you're a Bush fan, about 2 9/11s every day.). He'd been at one of those big-time, rich guy conferences where various speakers give talks on, you guessed it, various topics. Someone gave a talk on malaria. Gates, after the presentation, asked the speaker what was being done by the various governments around the world to address this terrible problem. The speaker told the truth: "Nothing.". Now, this isn't an exact quote, but Bill's response was something along the lines of, "Well, that's just bullshit! Somebody's got to do something." So, he did. And the Gates Foundation was off and running.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home