Retired Master Mariner & Offshore Construction Manager. Rational optimist. Former 1970s member of GreenPeace & FoE. CO2 GHG theory grossly exaggerated.
Lancashire, England
Joined November 2010
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Peter, you seem a well educated sort of chap so I’m guessing you know that the North African Arabs took more Sub Saharan Africans as slaves over 6 more centuries than Europeans did. Those nice fellows also castrated male slaves considered to be in “sensitive” positions. This was often a fatal procedure. They also took >1 million white Europeans as slaves. Most Europeans don’t even know this and after it ended they just got on and built the Europe we know today. They didn’t wear a chip on their shoulder that whites like you encourage blacks to do today whilst wallowing in your white guilt. It’s history. We all need to treat it that way
King Charles is set to discuss UK's role in slavery, as young Britons back dialogue on #reparations
Time for a royal apology. Private royal wealth is partly based on profits from the slave trade. Royals must pay reparations for the suffering they caused
theguardian.com/world/2026/o…
John Stretch retweeted
This is Nagasaki in 2026. Imagine if they spent the past 80 years wallowing in self-pity and blaming the US? It's incredible what you can accomplish when you decide to pick yourself up, move forward, and take responsibility for your own outcomes.
Brilliant
Recently I was talking with a friend about universal geniuses. And something struck me.
Florence, 1480–1510. Same city, same moment: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola. Raphael right behind them. They walked the same streets.
Europe, 1600–1700. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz. In two generations, we got calculus, modern mechanics, probability theory, and the scientific method.
Athens, 470–320 BC. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Thucydides. One century, one city, and the foundations of Western thought were laid.
Europe, 1890–1930. Poincaré, Hilbert, Einstein, Marie Curie, Tesla, Planck, Bohr, then von Neumann.
Always the same pattern. In every great era, the West had 15 to 20 minds of this caliber alive at the same time. People who could touch everything and push the frontier of several fields at once.
Today we have one. Just one. Elon Musk.
And Elon is an anomaly.
Not in the sense that he shouldn't exist. In the sense that the world we built is designed so that someone like him never emerges. Statistically, he shouldn't be here.
Because what forged Elon was an absolutely insane move.
October 2002. eBay buys PayPal. Elon walks away with roughly $180M. Anyone else buys an island and never works another day.
He puts $100M into SpaceX, $70M into Tesla, $10M into SolarCity. Almost everything. On rockets and electric cars, two industries no sane person wanted to touch.
2006–2008. The first three Falcon 1 launches fail. Tesla is burning cash, the financial crisis hits, investors run. He has enough left for one last launch. Just one. He borrows money from friends to pay his rent.
September 28, 2008. The fourth launch reaches orbit.
December 23, 2008. NASA awards SpaceX a $1.6B contract.
December 24, 2008. The Tesla round closes at the last possible hour. A few more days and everything collapses.
That's what a genius is. Not just IQ. The ability to put everything on the table when the entire world tells you it's impossible, and be right.
Now the real question: why do we only have one?
Because a genius needs three things. The freedom to try. The right to get massively rich if it works. The right to fail without being destroyed.
And that's exactly what the collectivist left and the technocrats have torn down across the West for the past 50 years.
They turned success into suspicion. Making a lot of money became a moral failing. Taking risks became irresponsible. Rising above the crowd became an insult to equality.
They stacked up norms, committees, permits, regulations written in Brussels by people who have never built anything in their lives. In Europe, Elon would never have been allowed to blow up three rockets. He'd have been stopped at the first form.
They want to tax capital before it even exists, cap fortunes, redistribute what others created by risking everything.
They replaced excellence with conformity. Our schools produce docile people, not dangerous ones. And a genius, by definition, is someone who disrupts. Their entire system is built to neutralize the people who disrupt.
The result: where we should have 15 to 20 universal geniuses alive at the same time, we have one.
Just one.
And you want to put him in prison.
You summon him before judges, you raid his offices, you insult him morning, noon and night, you dream of breaking up his companies. The man who lands rockets vertically and wants to take humanity to Mars.
You're disgusting.
History won't remember your names. It remembers Galileo, not the inquisitors who tried to silence him.
John Stretch retweeted
I don’t want to post the video. You’ve all seen it. But I do want to write a love letter…
Dear everyone in Britain, ( even you illegals)
Just so you understand. The poppy is for the boys who never got to grow old. For the boys who were still somebody’s baby, brother, uncle or father. More than 600,000 of them.
It doesn’t matter if you support war, hate your country, think you are a woman (even though you are a man). It doesn’t matter which God you pray to, or if you pray to none at all.
It doesn’t matter who you vote for, what climate narrative you believe, or whether you believe Israel should exist or not!
The poppy isn’t for you!
It’s for those who came before. Those who fought for your right to be weird, annoying or even foreign.
The poppy is how we say thank you. Thank you for giving us time, peace and choice.
And attempting to ban our poppy by declaring it politically divisive isn’t a move towards freedom. It is an act of suppression. Understand that.
The poppy is about love and loss. For you!
So stick your rainbow flags and every other flag where the sun doesn’t shine and just wear your poppy. Those boys did not die as symbols. They died for you!
Did you know that poppies grew across the battlefields where so many fell? As though even the land refused to forget the blood once given to defend it.
So the poppy is for them. For those who came before us and paid in youth, in hope, in breath, in blood, so that we might have the freedom to be arseholes.
So that we might even have the freedom to fight over the ridiculous, the inconsequential and the insane.
Revere it, celebrate it and wear it. The very least you can do is that.
Best
The ordinary people.
John Stretch retweeted
Extreme cold related deaths are responsible for 1.1M deaths in tropical (warm) Africa. Heat related deaths stand at just 36k.
Extreme heat/cold is not the culprit. It's moderate most of the times. Nevertheless, cold is more dangerous than heat- 9 times globally.
Extreme heat is putting pregnant women, newborns and children at growing risk.
New UN guidance will help countries track these risks, strengthen preparedness and take action to protect those most vulnerable to heat.
Details from @WHO: who.int/news/item/21-10-2026…
In 1900 Brits could go to live and work in most of Europe without a Visa or a Passport without the need to join a Club. UK & Ireland has had even more freedoms between their countries for > 100 years. The Visa requirement is just unnecessary punishment because we have been bad boys to leave their sclerotic over regulated Club
The Trans Saharan Slave Trade that began 6 centuries before white Christians took more Sub Saharans and castrated many males. They also took > 1 million of those white Christians. Are you completely ignorant of history or are you deliberately just focussing on what makes you feel more victimised?
John Stretch retweeted
🇯🇵🇬🇧 What's happening to the UK is really sad.
I can't believe that such an ancient country is being lost to people who hate everything about it.
We Japanese stand with you and hope you can win it back before it's too late.
John Stretch retweeted
The daughter of one of the founding leaders of Hamas left Islam and converted to Christianity.
She explains how they are all raised to kill Jews and Christians.
They even have a different version of Jesus, where he will come back and ‘break the cross’, and help Muslims kill all Christians.
It really is a cult of death.
Maybe that’s because Israel is not a theocratic regime numpty. It has >20% Arab population of which >80% are Muslim. You know this of course but prefer not to acknowledge it
FFS Andy stop trying to be Father Christmas. Some people don’t care and just fill up locally. Others know to the fraction of a penny which are cheapest. Neither need your help except to junk the crazy NetZero, open up NS and WoS drilling and start onshore fracking.
I know people are worried about fuel prices. And I get it. You get to the pump, watch the numbers climb, and wonder why it's costing so much more than it used to.
The reality is that global events are pushing up costs, and families here at home are feeling the impact.
But I won't accept that there's nothing I can do to help.
That's why from today, you'll be able to see petrol and diesel prices on Google Maps, compare nearby stations and find the cheapest option before you fill up.
It's a small change, but if there's a practical way to help people keep more money in their pocket, I'll do it.
John Stretch retweeted
I want to do a simple survey...
Do you think Brexit has been a success?
I'll publish the result on Friday.
31%Yes
69%No
30,285 votes • Final results John Stretch retweeted
When a Flydubai flight FZ1073 suddenly plunged into a violent, steep dive - sending passengers flying and screaming in terror - most people would have frozen. Yaniv Hayun ran straight toward the danger.
With the aircraft hurtling downward, Yaniv managed to breach the cockpit with a crew member's help thanks to the Captain opening the door. Inside, chaos unfolded. Realizing a physical threat was actively compromising the flight, Yaniv did what had to be done: he fought the co-pilot, locked him in a chokehold, and dragged him out of the cockpit.
With nobody at the controls and seconds ticking away, Yaniv went back in and grabbed the yoke and pulled back to help level the aircraft.
His professional aviation experience? Zero. His qualifications? "I had seen Air Crash Investigation on TV."
Another qualified off duty pilot eventually stepped in to bring the aircraft down safely, but Yaniv's split-second bravery and iron-willed intervention stopped a catastrophe.
A husband. A father. An everyday passenger who faced the ultimate nightmare and chose courage.
Say his name so the whole world knows it: Yaniv Hayun.
John Stretch retweeted
Zack Polanski has repeatedly said that his family "fled the Nazis", but it's now emerged that all four of his grandparents were born in Britain, long before the war. dailysceptic.org/2026/10/02/…
Started in UK? Halfwit. The North African Arabs, Corsairs, Barbary Pirates started 600 years before Europeans taking sub Saharan Africans as slaves, took more and castrated (often fatally) males considered in sensitive positions. They also took >1 million Europeans as slaves. You are spectacularly ill informed
John Stretch retweeted
Activist: "Beef is the least vegan thing on the planet."
Farmer: "What did he eat?"
Activist: "Who?"
Farmer: "The bullock. What's been in him for two years."
Activist: "Grass."
Farmer: "Grass, clover, a bit of hedge when he can reach it. Two years of nothing but plants. He's the strictest vegan on this farm and he's never once mentioned it."
Activist: "That's not the point."
Farmer: "It's the only point. You eat a plant and keep a tenth of what's in it. He's got four stomachs and a tank of bacteria that strips the lot and hands it back as fat and marbling. He's a plant with the hard work done."
Activist: "You're twisting it."
Farmer: "Your lunch was a bean that got boiled, a leaf that got washed and a tablet to replace what neither of them had. His was a hillside. One of you got the nutrition out of the plants, and it wasn't the one with the lanyard."
Activist: "Eating him isn't vegan."
Farmer: "It's the most vegan thing you'll ever do. A steak is six tonnes of grass with the roughage taken out. You've been eating the roughage and calling it the principle."
