Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Grant Griffiths; Anyone who thinks Prince Charles and Prince Harry are the only royal climate hardliners needs to take a closer look at Prince William.
Prince William criticises billionaire space race after William Shatner’s Blue Origin flight
The Duke of Cambridge says the focus should be on repairing the Earth, not trying to find “the next place to live”.
By Alexa Phillips, news reporter
Thursday 14 October 2021 19:18, UKThe Duke of Cambridge has criticised the space race, saying it detracts focus from addressing climate change here on Earth.
His comments were made after Star Trek actor William Shatner became the oldest person to reach space and called his trip “the most profound experience”.
The 90-year-old blasted off from Texas on a Blue Origin rocket – the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
…
In an interview ahead of his inaugural Earthshot Prize, the Duke of Cambridge told the BBC: “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.“
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Read more: https://news.sky.com/story/prince-william-criticises-billionaire-space-race-after-william-shatners-blue-origin-flight-12433302
In many ways I’m not a fan of Bezos. I don’t like that he gives billions of dollars to climate activists, who in my opinion use that money to exacerbate the misery of millions of people already suffering fuel poverty, by pushing for more high cost green energy. And we all know about the workplace complaints staff employed by Bezos have raised.
However, most people would agree Jeff Bezos’ space achievements are incontrovertibly awesome. So the timing of Prince William’s comments are, at the very least, stunningly out of touch with what most people feel about our childhood hero Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise finally making it to space for real.
I have repeatedly read or heard people wishing Prince Charles would step aside for Prince William, on the grounds that they think Prince William is somehow more sensible than his dad.
I believe Prince William optimists are painting their hopes on a blank page. Prince William in my opinion is even worse than his dad. The few occasions Prince William has slipped his minders have in my opinion revealed someone who combines Prince Charles’ eco-whackery with an utterly graceless, mean spirited lack of empathy.
There will be no relief when Prince Charles finally steps aside for the next in line for the British throne.
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Not a fan, but if it makes him happy, it’s fine with me, and there’s no good reason to rain on Shatner’s parade. I watched Space Patrol as a kid, read SciFi, made small rockets, watched rocket engine tests in Santa Susana pass, then worked on much bigger ones IRL. I applaud the entrepreneurship involved. It’s not about space; it’s about stretching the human envelope in a positive way, instead of confining us to old limitations, telling us we can’t do new things because some numpty makes up a story about global warming. FJB. Over and out.
To think an actor is smarter than this useless tit of a royal. It boggles my mind at least.
Another thing that boggles my mind is why does superman have such a great physique? Even if he had the appearance of a skinny whimp, he could still knock asteroids out of orbit with his super powers. How did he build the muscles? Going to the gym??
The “Superman” TV-series and subsequent string of movies never stated this (although it is strongly hinted in the TV presentations . . . and confirmed in several movies) that Superman built up his physique so as to increase his odds of bedding the lovely, air-head reporter of the Daily Planet, Miss Lois Lane.
Green hysteric cannibalism. Bon appetit. Leave some for Greta.
I think William wants to baldly go where no man has gone before
This reminds me of people in the 60’s that complained that the USA was spending all that money in space rather than here on Earth. What did they think — that there was a 7-11 up there? The money WAS spent on Earth, to American companies employing American workers (except Werner Von Braun, I suppose).
Quite a bit of NASA money also went to foreign nations during those times . . . to pay for sighting tracking stations on land and stationing tracking/emergency recovery vessels in their seaports, as well as for paying for food and lodging needed by US personnel in those countries over years of training and actual operations.
Start the repairs close to home: Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Shatner played a heroic character, but the true hero ran Engineering. Jimmy Doohan (“Scotty”) was born in Vancouver, Canada, and his family moved to my small city of Sarnia Ontario when he was an infant. He was on the rifle team with my late dad at our oldest High School. And, later they both served in the local militia regiment the 26th Field Battery of the Royal Canadian Artillery. Both were yanked away by their collars very fast after the Declaration of War in 1939. Both were commissioned as officers in different regiments, at different times whilst in England. Jimmy, was severely wounded on D-Day by an errant Bren gun burst. He survived thanks to a cigarette case in his breast pocket that deflected the bullet headed for his heart. He returned to service as an artillery spotter then pilot. My dad went in just after the Caen-Falaise battles, in France. Dad was later wounded in the Liberation of Holland three weeks before the wars end. I was honoured to meet James (Jimmy) Doohan in person at our old high schools 75th reunion in 1996. He was a true gentleman.
Wait. What? There are some people who actually listen to this family of inbreds whose only purpose in life is to cut ribbons at museum openings and the like?
Well, on this point I agree with Bill Windsor. It is rather obscene to spend billions on joyrides for the super rich and their friends while millions of people are starved of clean air, clean water, and adequate nutrition, and the survival of the human species is far from secure from extinction due to any of a host of possible catastrophies.
Interplanetary travel is a paranoid pipe dream of the super rich and the powerful. Throwing huge amounts of money and intellectual resources into this project does nothing to improve the lot of the vast majority of people, and detracts from serious endeavours to create a better world.
Prince William lives a life of extraordinary affluence, and that lifestyle no doubt has an enormous carbon footprint.
If he was completely sincere about climate change, he would repudiate the monarchy and live a quiet and modest life without servants or travel.
Oh, you mean like the whining Muppets of California, Harry and Me-gain? Compared to those two narcissistic morons, William appears a model of restraint.
Just what Britain needs, another royal dunderhead. Bite me, prince boy.
Let’s go William!
No, seriously. Go!
How quaint western society has become.
You are so much taken in by advertising, news stories and myth that you have almost lost touch with reality.
William Shatner can look back on his life to answer his grandkids’ questions like “What did you do to help the World” and reply “I spent many years pretending to be a mythical character doing impossible feats.” And what help has that been to society?
Aged about 90, he then is involved in a huge expenditure of money because of his history of pretending, to spend a few minutes getting closer to the scenes of his mythical misadventures. Was this money well spent? Probably not, because it was taken from a large number of ordinary folk for the dubious pleasure of seeing Shatner and special effects at work(?), a type of ongoing-for-life expenditure in front of the TV, with no return in any concrete way. Shatner took some of your money, accumulated it and spent it in a way that did not seek your permission. Exhausted into the wind.
If ordinary folk had not had their minds infiltrated and distorted by hour after hour of mindless, pointless, synthetic television, they would realize that there is no gain from that exercise, only taking from them. One widespread form of taking comes via advertising. People today march like zombies, cash in hand, to buy cosmetics made from powdered mud for a huge price. They spend gazillions on “magic” potions from the alternative medicine set and still more for unproven pseudo-medical treatments like acupuncture, aromatherapy, homeopathy and the like, that have no firm basis in science. More gazillions on fads like organic gardening using a potion made from cow droppings in a cow horn buried for months by phases of the moon. More fads like global warming, which has yet to establish the values of the mathematical link between CO2 and air temperature, a fundamental requirement that is missing from a lovely, fantastical theory. The list of expenditures induced by advertising is very long and so insidious that many people do not even think they have been sucked in by experts.
Now that I am an elderly scientist, I have a long term of experience, observation and deduction about humans in their present bewildered mass deception and I feel very sad about the prospects for my children and theirs.
Life is an adventure. There are no medals for being a compliant conformist. The real joy comes from working out the best you can about what is truthful and what is artificial, and demolishing the latter.
The latter includes the childish play acting exemplified by Shatner’s career, with its millions of followers mouthing “That’s nice, dear.”
Geoff S
You might want to try eating a few prunes Mr. S
I’d give him a lot more time if he got stuck into his Grand Mummah about her getting her highland estates exempted from carbon cutting initiatives.
Its those damnable little people doing stuff which they have been told to stop doing which really irks one.
He is pushing his new venture, The Bill and Dave Show, aka, “Earthshot”. I think it’s a DIY theme, How to Repair the Planet.
https://royalfoundation.com
Initially somewhat sceptical of the sense of a nonagenarian taking a trip to the edge of space, with all the bodily stresses that might entail, I was persuaded by Prince William’s piping up however, if it can knock William Windsor off his lofty perch by revealing his true colours on climate then it has already achieved more than any man has done before. 😄
Dunce Prince William just confirmed he is out of touch!
Harry’s crack about space and one assumes astronomy studies, the topics or storylines rarely speculate about finding other worlds.
Star Trek, old, new generation or revisited old are fantasies. Even so, those fantasies rarely discuss “finding new places to live”.
Making Prince William’s statement delusional to the point that Prince Harry does not have a clue what the real world does day in and day out.
Leaving the only relatively sane family member, Queen Elizabeth. Long Live the Queen!
he has yet again proved that royals are past
we should have a british revolution
off with his head