William Shatner and Jeff Bezos’ Flights of Fancy
By Ron Hart
William Shatner and Jeff Bezos’ Flights of Fancy
by Ron Hart
Environmental icon Jeff Bezos blasted his buddy William Shatner into space last week on Bezos’ rocket ship, “Blue Origins.” They used tons of fuel and discharged the huge metal rocket that held the fuel back onto Earth. Since it was from Amazon’s founder, the package discharged from this journey landed broken and on the wrong person’s porch.
The 65-mile “space” trip lasted ten minutes — not long enough to have a glass of Tang. This set the record for Democrats spending the most money for a ten-minute, self-indulgent thrill ride, surpassing Bill Clinton and Bill Gates’ visit to Jeffrey Epstein Island.
Bezos, described by both himself and the toy newspaper he bought, The Washington ComPost, as an “environmentalist,” is the same guy who built Amazon. You know, the company that puts the batteries you order in a box the size of a dorm room refrigerator and delivers it to your neighbor’s house in Amazon trucks that billow diesel smoke all through your neighborhood. Yet we have somehow been gaslighted into believing that this lefty is a “champion” of the environment.
Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Richard Branson and now Jeff Bezos, mid-life crisis billionaire nerds, feel compelled to fly themselves for the world to see in phallic-symbol big rockets the distance of a Delta Commuter jet ride from Augusta to Atlanta. Just how bad has Earth gotten when the United States’ richest men want to get the heck out of here?
All these billionaires are spending their money to one-up each other 65 miles above Earth. Remember when buying an NFL team or doing cocaine was a sign you were making too much money?
Anyone watching these “Blue” rockets cannot help but think of a Viagra ad. There is something Freudian at play here. The week after watching the rocket rumble into space, women all over the world were ordering the Bezos “Blue Origins” model for themselves. I had no idea so many women were suddenly interested in outer space.
Even the left criticized the race by billionaires to monkey around in space. Prince Harry, now in California to flee the racism of England, said that “repairing the Planet Earth should come before such personal space trips.” For their part, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markel, made that statement in their 50,000th interview with paying TV hosts to say how much they just want their privacy.
To be fair, I do like that the private sector is spending money to explore space instead of the bloated dopes in our federal space agency, NASA. Bezos says he has over $100 million booked in space travel by rich men for his company, which is a good way to fund research. The only rich old white guy who is more often in outer space than these Bezos and Musk is Joe Biden.
One of my favorites, William Shatner (who was celebrating his 90th birthday), was on this latest Bezos rocket trip. Bezos was on the ground to welcome Shatner back to Earth, and to wish him a happy 90th and his hair a happy 50th. We have spent trillions of dollars on space exploration and we have Tang and Velcro to show for them. On this trip, scientists set out to determine the strength of Velcro in zero-gravity by gauging its ability to keep Shatner’s toupee in place.
West Texas, a zero-income tax state into which these tax-and-spend liberals like Bezos and Musk seem to want to put their income, had high winds the day of launch. I trust they were talking about the 25 mph west winds and not Shatner’s.
People in California do admire William Shatner. The Kardashians have a wood- paneled library in their 8,000-square-foot home with a complete collection of the entire works of William Shatner.
I do like William Shatner. He has made a lot of money in Priceline stock, for which company he was the early spokesman. Ever the businessman, Shatner learned in his space travel about the science of incontinence. His next big venture is a diaper sewn into pants for the aging U.S. adult population. The slogan could be “Americans can then boldly go where no man has gone before.” He will also have a special line of these slacks designed just for women. I think he will call that line “Shatner Pants.”
Ron Hart is a syndicated op-ed humorist, award-winning author, and TV/radio commentator; you can reach him at Ron@RonaldHart.com or Twitter @RonaldHart.
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.