ROGER SIMON: Living Forever: Putin, Xi and Djokovic.

I woke up this morning to this NY Post (the only paper I bother with nowadays) article: “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping ponder unsettling ambitions in rare hot-mic moment: ‘Achieve immortality’”. It tells us:

“The unnerving moment was caught as Putin and Xi walked alongside North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as the trio of tyrants viewed a military parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

“‘Biotechnology is continuously developing,’ Putin’s translator could be heard saying on a livestream broadcast on Chinese state media.

“‘Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’

“‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old,” Xi’s translator responded, adding at another point: “Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 years you are still a child.”

Oh, those dictators—what they chitchat about!

Well, actually. they chitchat about something most people of a “certain age” think about rather frequently, their morality, including yours truly who is about nine years the senior of these despots who are 72.

Nevertheless, the characterization “unnerving” above is arguably an understatement. The idea of Putin and Xi going on for another 80 years is anything but reassuring. Most of us wish they had never been around in the first place or, failing that, would disappear in the next ten minutes.

They’ve got the right idea — as Glenn noted in one of his Subtacks, Harvard aging researcher David Sinclair “doesn’t talk about immortality, but he did opine in a recent interview that the first person who will live to 150 is alive now. And in fact, with good luck, people reading this essay might live that long. More importantly, they might live that long in good health.” But given the events of 2020, who knows to what lengths Vlad and Xi’s scientists will go to achieve such goals?