Drones, Icons, and the limits of post-postmodernism.
Alright, chaps and chapettes?
It’s been a while.
I have been busy slamming up and down the North Sea this year. I’m sitting here in 8-foot waves at the moment, with weather building up to 27-foot waves this Sunday. So, there isn’t much work to do. Thought I owed you all an update, and an article.
I have failed to keep my writing promises, as well as many other promises, over the past months. For that, I’m sorry. I guess it’s time to stop taking money from you all. Please find all previous articles available here: https://yankeejock.com/
I have truly been suffering from writer’s block, in a way. A sort of inability to commit to any particular line of argument. I’ve just been absorbing and thinking a lot about where things are.
I think it really started back at ARC. I didn’t attend this year, because the previous one was too interesting. But it was too much. The deluge of information and ideas has probably taken until now to digest properly. So, I decided not to go this year. I’m just getting my own thoughts back, after having had my personal bucket of ideas filled to overflowing, by the ideas of others.
It’s not worth doing that.
I also got pretty sick of Substack. My feed changed. Suddenly, I think back, last spring maybe? It felt locked-down somehow. Not like it was before. As if, they switched on the Algo-electric fence. Now it feels like posh-Facebook. Like a sort of oscillation between Fox News, Christian apologetics, and Pinterest ‘vibe’ escapist fantasy pics.
I am just allergic to it all now.
I barely look at the app anymore. For that, I can only apologise to those of you who’ve become my online friends through this platform. I know I promised something else.
I’ve updated my own website, which is, again, available here, at YankeeJock.com
But I will start up again. I just think things are going to be a little weird for a while longer.
Another factor is, that I’ve been too happy to write. Since last year, I have sincerely increased my prayer life, and the scope of my efforts in prayer have expanded. I sincerely do pray for my extended family, acquaintances, ships I’m sailing on, their crews and their objectives.
I ask for forgiveness. I pray for my adversaries to know God. I pray for God to use me to do his will.
I also prayed to receive Holy Communion, which is something I had never done before, despite that being a fairly big deal in the Bible. (That was always a ‘Catholic thing’, growing up in Scotland, and as a ‘Proddy’, whenever I attended RC services, there was never an offer to partake. I was definitely on the outside, to them).
I did receive this, finally, in South Carolina, at Easter. I also received some ‘Lazarus bread’, on Lazarus Saturday, at (an internet famous) Orthodox church.
I was also kindly invited to convert to Judaism around that time, by one of my in-laws. The request was well-meaning, but I did decline.
Since then, it seems, that God has given me some surprisingly less dramatic things to do. Rather than writing daily devotionals against globalism, or my observations on the cultural tensions living as a present-day Scotsman with an American wife and family, I’ve been repairing broken appliances for people, getting my mother ready for hospital, and listening to stories of people I knew growing up from the old council estate. On top of husband and child-care duties.
Two of my childhood friends died this summer. One, it seems, from hard living and fighting. Details are sketchy, but his death came around the time of a specific football match, just for all you Americans who’ve been newly introduce to the world cup this year, and haven’t yet been disabused of the notion of this marvel of supposed human unity, that is a substitute for tribal warfare.
I still remember Callum [Names changed throughout to protect the identity of survivors] as a kind 7-year-old boy, who was my first friend on our street when we moved in. He therefore became my first friend in primary school, after I changed schools in primary 3.
I have this memory of a hot summer’s day, where we sneaked over the fence to the formerly adjacent Catholic school to play in the ashes and ruins. The school had been burned to the ground by arsonists the year before (I believe). The crime scene tape was gone by then, but the melted panels and rubble had not been fully cleared away at that time.
16 schools were burned down in our area, that year alone. According to the oracle of AI, nobody was ever convicted of that crime.
Callum’s parents divorced, as everyone’s did on the estate in the 90s. (That too seems to have been a crimewave, that nobody has yet been held accountable for.) Henry Hazzlitt, Stefan Molyneux and Thomas Sowell may have given language to my inherent libertarian-leanings, but looking back, government-subsidised encouragement of divorce has shaped my resentment towards the welfare state more viscerally than anything.
Callum got harder as we grew up. He moved away from the street, and we separated in high school, but he was always ‘sound’. Which meant, he never failed to acknowledge me or vouch for me on the street. I’m sure his memory of our early childhood friendship saved me from a couple of beatings over the years.
Rab was different.
I started hanging out with Rab and Andy a couple of years later. They were really best friends together, and they had honestly been picking on me. We had a couple of scraps, but after a while, I think we’d spent enough time just alongside each other to become kind of friends. Even if it was an unkind and unhealthy friendship.
We would go to each other’s houses and play soldiers in the woods and stuff. Things 8 to 10-year-old boys used to do before society glued them onto screens with built-in paedo chatrooms.
I always remember my uncle Derek chastising Rab for saying he hated someone. Derek stopped him and instructed him not to speak that way. “Don’t ever say ‘I hate that person’. Instead, say, ‘I hate when this person does X’.”
Hate the sin, not the sinner.
As we left my house to go back to his place, Rab turned to me, made full eye contact, and said, ‘Your uncle is a f*cking arsehole’.
(I did laugh out loud, remembering this).
Around that time, he stole some things from my house that had been given to me as a gift. I was very upset and kept it secret from my mother. We didn’t have much money, so any gift at all was precious. So, I didn’t want her to know the little hoodlums I was hanging around with had stolen something she’d just given me.
I prayed hard that night, and, miraculously to me, Rab came by before school the next day and returned them to me.
All miracles may seem minor to an outsider looking in. But to me, at that age, this was a big one.
We drifted apart. He fell in with rougher and rougher crowds. Although, unlike Callumm, he never once pretended to have known me or been a friend.
I found out later that his older brother had been stabbed to death. I never found out the circumstances, but in those days, I just knew to stay out of it. The local convenience store was a five-minute walk out of our street and across a bridge. The bridge and the area in front of the shop was a hive of activity from about 3 in the afternoon most days, until they stopped serving alcohol at 10 pm. Fridays and Saturdays would culminate in a crescendo of drink, drugs, and fighting, well into the wee hours of the morning.
We’re at about 54° North there at my mum’s house, so the sun doesn’t set until midnight in the summer. And it begins to rise again about 3 am, so that it never really gets dark through June and July. So those were particularly wild months. Especially through the 7 to 8 weeks of summer holiday when schools were off, and the wild kids roamed, unencumbered.
When I was very young, I remember hating my mother for making me come inside the house at 7 pm, even in summer. Although, as I grew up, I came to recognise her wisdom in just keeping us out of it.
I’ve been a bit of a loner ever since, but never more so than in those formative years.
Sometimes I would have to run the gauntlet and walk through the crowds of rough kids to get to the shop. I always remember just hoping that nobody would notice me as I walked through them. I was a chubby kid, and poorer dressed than any of them, so I was always ripe for picking on.
‘Scott-the-pot, the big-fat-pot’, was a particular favourite of mine when we were little.
‘Fat-c*nt’ came later, as the neighbourhood matured.
By the time I was 13 or 14, I had done a bit of the boy’s brigade, scouts, and joined the Army Cadet Force. I had grown up a bit and wasn’t feeling so feeble as perhaps I used to when I was 10. I was still pasty and soft from indoor living, but less so.
Shooting, and fishing had brought something out in me. And by then, my best friend Mark and I had figured out that it was much more fun to hang out by a campfire in the woods of an evening.
Junkies needed streetlights to shoot up and do their deals, you see. No streetlights in the forest, meant no junkies or gangs to bother us.
I would still have to go to the shop, of course. Which meant passing through the perma-gang of kids on the bridge. Rab had long-since taken to blanking me. He’d left me alone, which was tolerable.
This day he didn’t.
‘Shrek’, he called at me quietly, just as I passed by. Perfectly calibrated to irritate me, just as I passed him.
‘Whit did you say’!?!, came from my mouth, as I instinctively turned to defend my self against this petty provocation.
As I turned, and before I knew it, Rab was inside my personal space, thrusting a bucky bottle at my face. These are large, heavy-bottom, green glass wine bottles, in case you are unfamiliar. I’ve been hit with them a coupd of times since, and can confirm, they a certain mass to them.
With hindsight, he was ready and willing for exactly this. He had been feeding on these moments for along time already. A man possessed.
I got pushed back. I managed to get off the bridge and through his crowd, but he kept his forehead pushed fully into mine and never let go of my chest as he pushed me back, and back, and back.
We must have gotten 20 metres or so across the square before he had me pushed back into a post. Off balance, with a glass bottle pushed into my temple, and Rab’s fury clearly coming from a depth that was hitherto unknown to me, I relented, capitulated, and apologised to him for daring to stand up to his austere, considered, and fair judgment of my appearance and physique.
I went to the shop. I came back across the bridge, through the same crowd again.
Nothing was said.
My status in the dominance hierarchy had been established, as JBP might say. And so, it was ,for a long time. Or at least, for so long as such things mattered.
Years later, I met him on a bus. We spoke as if nothing had happened.
Another time, I was with my future wife, and the bus driver was doing something stupid, and taking a long time about something, stopped only two stops away from home. It became clear we should just get off and walk. Rab was also on the same bus.
He, rather intensely, gave the bus driver a few choice words of advice, before getting off with us. He made some extraverted but friendly remarks to me and my (now) wife, who probably did not understand a word of the broadly Glasgow-shire dialect.
He looked physically very different to me. Almost unrecognisable. He had that look of hardness that probably came after a fair amount of time in prison. I’d just assumed that he’d done some time, based on that. Although, he was wearing workmans boots.
Callum had also been in and out of jail by then, come to think of it. I think he enjoyed some aspects of it.
I can’t judge.
When I was in my twenties, after I’d finished a degree in marine science, and then started college again for the Merchant Navy, I too started getting in fights all the time. But, this time, I had been around enough to start wining them.
I was terrible at times.
I had learned about brinksmanship, and mad dogging from Rab. It came through me later on. Being fit and strong enough to start winning fights, was a terrible thrill. Reinstating those status points felt good, even though it wasn’t good.
‘A pint and a fight is a great British night’, I used to say.
For a while, it was all a jape. Rough and tumble play for young men, finding themselves. A £50 fine for breach, and you’re on your way. Everyone has a good chuckle about it in the mess room on Monday. Like a sport.
I am sorry I did those things. Looking back though, I should really be grateful for being put in my place by Rab when I was younger.
I was not cut out for the level of darkness and violence that he was already living in, back then.
Sometimes losing, and knowing your place, can really keep you out of trouble.
Winning is when you get yourself into real danger. Like Callum.
Winning, can trick you into feeling stronger than you are. Losing reminds you, that there is always someone out there with less to lose than you. Best to learn that early on, before the consequences are too severe.
Three weeks ago, before I joined this ship, I was speaking to another mutual friend from the old neighbourhood, who stayed and moved into his mum’s old house. He was fixing his van, so I went over to see if he needed a hand.
‘Two years sober mate.’
Good for you.
‘Aye, it was getting out of hand. But, you mind Rab?’
‘Aye’, says I.
‘It was him that took me to AA.’
‘Oh, no way’.
‘Aye. No, he did. We were always running about together. We were workin’ on jobs, daein allsorts together like f*cking idiots. Daein roofin’. Up roofs absolutely coked out wur tits mate’.
I laughed, not knowingly, but knowing.
‘Anyway, he’s taken his ain life a couple of months ago. Left two weans. He came up here for a cup of tea. Had nice chat. Next day we goat a phone call, that he’d taken his ain life. … I think that was that. Anyway, […long pause…] he’s the one that was encouraging me to get aff the drink, and goin tae AA. So that’s me now, for the rest of my life. Apart fae smoking, I’m aff everything. That’ll be the last thing tae go’.
It turned out that before his brother had been murdered, Rab’s father had also taken his own life.
I could only now imagine and pray for his two children.
I hadn’t thought about Rab in a very long time. It took me an uncomfortable couple of weeks to think about this and muster a prayer for him.
That poor man had clearly lived in hell, for most of his life.
If I look back honestly, I am grateful to him that he didn’t shred my face open with a broken bottle that day, as people often did in Glesgae-shire at that time.
I am certain that not everyone received such mercy and restraint from him.
And he did bring back the things he took from me.
He honestly could have been a lot worse.
I don’t know what other things he did in his life, but I pray that God will have mercy on his soul, knowing the kind of hell he was living in. I pray that the effort to take his friends to AA was a sign that he was repenting, in whatever way he could.
I prayed that his sons are spared the same hell.
Back to my own apology.
I stopped writing for most of this year partly because I have changed as a person. My internal self is no longer the self that started out on this writing journey, in 2022.
I needed time to recalibrate.
Also, to ask, why write? I don’t think it helps my temptations to egoism. I’m scared all this sometimes comes across as moaning, or bragging.
I don’t mean it all that way.
At first, I started blogging because I had been working in publishing and didn’t want my daily writing habit to perish just because I had gone back to sea full time. Then, also, to maybe separate my personality from my circumstances, and put myself in context.
It was never for your generous paid subscriptions, or to be known. It was more to think, and to serve in dialogue.
Now, I don’t know any more.
I have asked people what they like about my writing. I haven’t really understood any of their answers. I don’t want to reduce my life to entertainment. Over-sharing for clicks clearly leads to a diminishing return.
This summer, I’ve been doing a lot of towing, and positioning of self-propelled jack up barges. Not for drilling, but as construction platforms for subsea and offshore construction. Netherlands, Germany, UK and Denmark, as per.
I was in Esbjerg, immediately after the Brave Tern incident, on a similar type of vessel. Ours was shinier, and newer, but with experienced specialists in that field. So, we got the inside gossip on that incident. I saw the damage in the port first hand and witnessed the cleanup.
During a four-week trip on that ship, we had five incidents requiring medical treatment. Three of which resulted in medical evacuation by helicopter. One guy had a part of his finger removed after being crushed while installing a 15 kg bolt. It looked like a zombie had taken a bite out of him, leaving a bloody but perfectly curved chunk out of his finger.
Another vessel I was on had long delays due to defects after an ‘upgrade’ to their dynamic positioning system. Thruster failure offshore required the team of engineers to rebuild a converter bank on the fly, while sailing in the Dogger Bank area.
Some of these older jack ups are pretty rough-and-ready.
They are not like the shiny new spaceship style vessels, with coffee lounges, and gymnasiums, and Star Link internet, and all the things that many northern Europeans have grown used to over the past few years.
Rather, they are more like the greasy, grungy, dirty old rust buckets you might expect to see in a James Bond, or Jason Bourne movie. With bathroom facilities akin to the house in Fight Club.
To be honest though, I kind of like it. I’m quite at home on an old Lithuanian barge, or an old pizza-box made of steel. At least they’ve been tried and tested. And they are already dirty, so nobody gives a toss if I wear my safety boots in the mess room or put a piece of plastic in the general waste bin.
When you go to sleep, you know that they’ve already had a fire before. They’ve been in bad weather. They know what to do.
One German master told me that they had had 4 fatalities on that vessel, over the past few years. Mostly from crushing injuries, after the collapse of steelwork during offshore construction.
One man was clipped into a boat-landing ladder that hangs over the side. The harness and slider are designed normally to ‘arrest his fall’ in case he slips from the steps.
Instead, the steelwork itself failed, and the entire frame ripped out of the deck, and fell into the sea. Of course, the main remained attached by his ‘safety’ equipment.
It’s hard to say whether crushing injuries, cold water shock, hypothermia or drowning would get you in that circumstance. When all occur simultaneously, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
That captain had attended funerals for his men, all over the world.
He doesn’t want to write about it.
One Ukrainian man that I became friendly with, came up to me just before I disembarked by helicopter. His voice stammering slightly, despite our established minor friendship, as he asked me if I knew of any way possible for him to obtain residency in the UK.
He was a second officer, DPO. He spoke English, with a great sense of humour that compensated for his heavy accent. I really liked him, because he was hard working, and clearly intelligent enough to know when to follow rules, and when to break or bend them.
He had not been home to Ukraine for several years now. His age making him subject to conscription. Between trips at sea, which some may argue carries danger enough for a young fellow, he’d been taking his leave with friends in neighbouring countries like Moldova, Bulgaria, etc.
I said it’s much better he avoids the front.
If he emails me, I can try to help with advice. I know we have plenty of Ukrainians in Scotland now.
So far, he hasn’t emailed me.
If he does, my intention is to visit the Ukrainian Orthodox church in Scotland and ask around there.
It’s no good to say he is a simple draft-dodger. I really can’t blame him.
It’s not like this is a traditional war.
The CIA said recently that the average survival time for a Russian soldier arriving fresh on the Ukrainian front line is presently 20 to 30 minutes. This is because AI powered drones are so effective, that as soon as you pop your head up, you’re dead.
Critics say this is a bar-bell shaped figure. That if you manage to dig in in the first 30 minutes (and don’t look up), you can last much longer. Even two hours.
Public estimates say Russia has lost 42,000 casualties this past August 2026. Ukraine’s figures are a tightly held state secret, but CIA estimates would equate to about 6,000 casualties in the same month. The ‘golden hour’ for evacuation soldiers enjoyed in Iraq no longer applies. 70% of casualties may be fatalities.
I gave up watching the drone kill videos on Telegram about 3 years ago. They were too sickening.
They say if you can hear the whirr of an FPV drone above you, it’s too late.
They say the effect of all this, has been to freeze the frontline, and focus attacks on supply lines and civilian infrastructure. So, commercial shipping looks set to become increasingly fair game, once again.
I remeber being told that ‘Total War’ was a thing of the past.
Workplace Fatalities in offshore work doubled last year, in my area. We went from 4 to 9, despite very sophisticated industrial safety programs.
Worldwide, the IIMS have estimated 675 fatalities on merchant ships generally, so far in 2026. Although that figure is largely inflated by poorly operated passenger ships being overloaded and capsizing in, let’s say, ‘developing’ countries.
Although, it’s hard to use the ‘developing’ euphemism much longer, when we’re talking about oil rich nations that have had contact with the west since almost the beginning of the industrial revolution and now have the internet.
But, since their ‘safety culture’ remains undeveloped, let’s go with that.
The strait of Hormuz escalation in recent weeks has seen a return to a time where western nation states feel justified in sinking civilian merchant ships. Something that has not happened for a very long time.
With the propaganda network working overtime, you may have missed one minor detail, which I find interesting. For years now, we’ve heard about that cowardly and naughty axis of evil running a ‘dark fleet’ of ‘shadow tankers’, for evil Putin and Xi.
Now, our brave heroes of the US Navy are also running ‘Shadow’ convoys of western-allied ships, out of the Strait of Hormuz, with AIS trackers off, and in radio silence.
I would say, ‘and her allies’, but I’m not aware of what the UK is doing to help precisely. Although, I hope to find out more when I’m in London over the next couple of weeks.
It does seem to be effective, mind you. Traffic is up to 90 odd tankers coming out last week. Not a revival by any means, but it may be the beginning of the trickle that tests the dam. It’s nothing like the triumph Ben Shapiro presented 3 weeks ago. But it’s also nothing like a full blockade against the west.
FYI, while I do love AIS transponders, they were forced on the world as a post 9/11 security measure. And Russia made the point back then, with the MV Arctic Sea hijacking, that she didn’t think much of the globalist surveillance of shipping.
Chatham house now estimates that 20% of all tanker tonnage worldwide is now sanctioned ‘shadow fleet’ vessel. 1300+ ships. And it may be more. I’ve heard over 1600 tankers elsewhere.
I’ve heard that the refineries in the middle east, or ‘modern near east’ as I think of it, have reduced production to 40% of their pre-conflict output.
20,000 civilian seafarers remain stranded on vessel trapped in the Gulf, since the start of the Iran<>US conflict of 2026.
Iran has attacked 36 civilian merchant ships, captured 2 more, and detained another. The USA has attacked 10 and detained 5. The numbers of those killed don’t really add up. At least 12 have been killed by Iran and reported online, but many ship’s casualty figures are either not reported, or have crew members listed as ‘missing’.
When a missile explodes in the engine room of a chemical tanker in the middle of a hostile Gulf, filled with venomous sea snakes, the three missing people are most probably not living it up on a beach sipping cocktails.
They are most probably sitting up there with the big man in the sky, my friends. Or down below with Nemo, Flipper, and Squidward, depending on your point of view.
The US confirm they have killed three civilian sailors in these attacks. Although for many of the ships they’ve attacked, there is no information.
‘Missing’, or ‘No Information’.
The fate of many a good sailor.
I do remember my grandfather, who sailed as a Royal Navy gunner through world war 2, laughing about this. An English woman described to me as the sassenach, and resident evangelical-atheist in the village, had said to him that she didn’t agree with ‘The Church’, but would like a “Christian Burial”.
My grandfather retorted, ‘What about all those men buried at sea! Won’t the Lord find them!?’ He laughed heartily, and without hint of reservation at the very thought that there could be any procedural limitation or label placed on the divine plan for the resurrection.
If there are no atheists in foxholes, it may be worth noting that every ship is always the frontline in a war. The largely unarmed Merchant Mariners had the highest casualty rate of any branch of the services during both wars. I don’t think the next one will be much different. Particularly since the Geneva Conventions, the International Maritime Organisation, San Remo rules, UNCLOS and the general global consensus of nations states remains that Merchant Navy ships should generally remain unarmed.
I don’t know. I see the argument for dual-use targets. I see the argument for arming Merchant ships, and I see the argument against.
We are allowed to carry private military contractors through high-risk areas like the Red Sea. Indeed, that is what largely solved the piracy crisis that plagued us in 2008-9. But as yet, defensive weapons against drone swarms haven’t really developed as a rental service. Electro magnetic pulse weapons haven’t really been packaged for offshore use as far as I’m aware yet, and there aren’t really any contractors offering this as a service.
I expect it will be soon, though.
Cargo ships are already moving through the black sea with large mesh nets around their superstructure, to withstand a couple of strikes from aerial drones. Although there is no known defence for a 360° drone swarm attack, or any real known defence for merchant ships against underwater drones. Grain exports there are down 75%.
Although, something deeply concerning has happened in tankerland.
Day rates for VLCC tankers willing to operate through Hormuz at this time, are on hire for $1Million per day. Generally, worldwide, tankers are reportedly benefiting from rates at 6 to 20 times their daily break even. Even far away from any military action.
It is a boom time for tankermen, worldwide, at historic rates across all sectors and tanker sizes.
And that, my friends, is why merchant shipping always ends up going where the danger is, despite the danger. We’ve had 6 and a half months of the beginning of a ‘2-week’ disruption, and we now see the highest rates in tanker history. With winter on the way, and no end in sight for the underlying conflict.
There is profit in peace. And war is never a general good for society or innovation, despite persistent myths. But, for specific interests, it sometimes is.
I have heard it said this week that ‘the greatest threat to global shipping, is a breakout of world peace’.
So, in short, none of this is going away.
‘I will not go to their war’ says my Lithuanian friend on this cable lay vessel.
He is a cable engineer by trade and is on board to oversee the splicing of high voltage and fibre optics cables on a subsea export cable repair job. He studied early AI and programmed his own AI back in his final year of university. That was for modelling the behaviour of children trapped in a burning school building.
‘I’m pretty sure all of these video games with a drone warfare element are being taken directly to program real life drones. So, for years, all these children technically have blood on their hands after training these AI kill bots. Nobody asked for this’.
The conversation of tends towards the dystopian, when speaking to any European male on board.
‘What are we supposed to do? Go off and die in a war, while we pay for millions of migrants to sit in government housing? Alone with our wives and daughters?’ – is a commonly felt sentiment.
1914, it is not.
Although, that’s sort of the problem with conscription and world wars.
You don’t really get a choice. And there really isn’t anywhere else to go.
I do believe the Lindsay Clancy trial-spectacle is a psyop.
Not that she didn’t brutally (and probably ritually) murder her three children. But that the promotion of the ‘debate’ online and in the media is carefully designed programming.
I’m always suspicious when something shows up in my wife’s social media feed before my own. They always target women first with any narrative-shaping trend, because that is where social pressure comes from. The desire to please the women in your life, or at least to stop them shrieking at you.
‘Are you seeing this trial’?
‘No’, says I. ‘What’s the story’
‘Well, this woman is up for murdering her three children, BUT the husband went out and claims … [blah, blah, blah] …AND he gets remarried and has another kid, straight away. These people are all saying like the husband totally did it, and I’m like getting all these little bits of information every day’
OK.
It sounded like total clickbait BS from the start to me.
So, when I started to get counter-facts showing up in podcast news, maybe two weeks later, I asked my wife what she was seeing.
Now that it was clear that:
· Clancy admitted the murders, confessed to them, and never contested that confession.
· The husband divorced Lindsay, and moved to New York
· Patrick Clancy remarried, but he married a woman he met in New York, after the divorce, 3 years after the murder.
· The defence never once suggested they had any evidence at all that the husband was ever a suspect.
· She went for a diagnosis of post-partum, but the doctors all said she didn’t have the symptoms for it.
· The defence claimed she had psychosis, but no expert witness or psychiatrist agreed.
· Etc.
‘No, you know, my feed went all quiet on that. I didn’t hear anything like that’.
No. You wouldn’t. Algo wouldn’t want you to see any of that stuff.
Being a New York theatre kid, her feed was all back to gay musical theatre stuff again, like normal.
My first instinct was that all of these mental feminista protestors – who went 1000 times farther than her own sleazebag defence lawyer – were all paid for by Big Pharma.
Apparently normal nurse taking a heavy cocktail of anti-psychotics for mildly presenting symptoms of depression, then suddenly kills all three of her children in an afternoon, despite no serious history of mental illness, and no symptoms of psychosis.
In any normal world, that would cause the general population to think, ‘hmmm? Are we over-medicating ourselves, because our economy is an inflation-fuelled hellscape of pointless busyness’?
Nope. Can’t have that. Whip up a fake protest.
‘Make it about women’s rights or some sh*t. I don’t care. Just anything to not make it about the 45% of American people who say they’ve taken psychiatric drugs at some point, or the 24% of adults who use them daily, and might now realise that there may be an inherent danger in guzzling random cocktails of opiates whenever they feel mildly under-fulfilled for half a second’.
Now, I think it’s more complex and potentially sinister than that. And runs to a far deeper argument coursing through our societies now.
Yes, it’s that old showdown between the French and the American revolutions, again. (You knew it, didn’t you?).
If Lindsay Clancy is held accountable for her objective material actions, despite her intangible and subjective mental state, then it means that physical reality still holds priority over subjective narrative.
That’s what is at stake here for the radical feminist left.
They need her to go unpunished, at least narratively.
They live in a world where material things do not matter. Only the narrative matters.
So, if society suddenly turns around and says, ‘Sorry, we actually have a limit. And we’re going to enforce it, regardless of your immaterial, intangible mental state’, then everything unravels for them.
Welfarism. Romantic idealism. Post-modern critical theory. Gender critical theory. Etc.
Postmodernism itself is finding its limit, right now.
We can all feel it.
What does it all mean?
What is happening right now? Why now? What do I believe? What does society believe, in contrast to me, and my beliefs?
Where is the threat?
What is a belief, anyway?
Why did I visit that American Orthodox Church, between Passover and Easter? Why did I feel the need to attend a Lazarus Saturday’s Holy Liturgy?
If you are remotely Christian adjacent, you know the story. Covid lockdowns destroyed much more than our economies, and our children’s well-being.
If you hadn’t already noticed before then, it became very clear from our lockdown bunkers.
All civilian air traffic ceased, as it did on 9/11. No holiday makers flew over my house, to and from Edinburgh. Only military aircraft did.
They were telling us that the nation state is above us.
They were telling us, that their body is above our bodies. That their religion of control, was in control. And that whether we liked it, or not, our way of life would cease to be. At least for the next two years.
That whole period, from 2020 to 2022, was so full of narrative competition. But none of it mattered. The restrictions did their damage.
That time period made manifest and plain a reality that had already been growing since the 1960s. As high modernity gave way to post-war, post-modernity. As the International Maritime Consultative Organisation dropped the ‘Consulting’ part and just became ‘The Organisation’. As international governance came not to mean ‘between consenting governments’, but somehow, ‘above governments. As out post-enlightenment societies oscillated wildly between materialism and anti-materialism. Between humanism, and trans-humanism. Between collectivism, and radical isolated individualism. Something changed.
A society that values knowledge above virtue, took the idea of using the printing press and radically decentralising the gospel. Because it valued knowledge and a direct link between the individual and God, above all else, it created the internet.
But knowledge is power. And power corrupts.
So, won’t absolute knowledge, corrupt us all, absolutely?
Yes.
But that’s what ‘they’, want.
(I do find a lot of conspiracy chat about who the ‘they’ is rather distracting. Like, it isn’t news to the world that wars are started by warmongers, or that the corruption business has within it, businessmen.)
The silicon valley tycoons want to upload us into the algorithm. They want us to be stored as information in a permanent state, without a body. They want to upload you to the cloud, as you are, forever.
Sure, that means that you can be uploaded to go drive a rover on Mars for Elon Musk for the rest of eternity, and live like Wall-E. That might be fun. But it also means you can’t change. You can’t grow. You cannot change. Meaning you cannot repent. And you cannot die.
Therefore, you are no longer human.
But you’re not transhuman, either.
You are a demon.
Of course, that’s what they want. They’re Americans. Right?
The country founded by Freemasons, deists and alchemists. The empty Frontierland built by slave traders, drug dealers, tobacco farmers, rum-runners, and wacky preachers making up new gospels and prophecies wherever they go. Now it’s vapes, weed, opiates, sugar, porn, and screens.
Why wouldn’t they? That’s what they’re like.
Their whole story is moaning about religious persecution in Europe. Well, maybe some of that persecution wasn’t entirely unfounded? Did you watch that movie about Ann Lee? Watch that and tell me that these people weren’t serious troublemakers back in the ol’ country’.
This is the country that invented the serial killer. And insists on maintaining his mythos.
Of course they want to control us all, because they were founded by esotericists, Scottish enlightenment Templars, Masons and capital ‘G’ Gnostics.
Peterson leads to Pageau, because knowledge isn’t enough. It cannot be what is at the top.
To what end is knowledge applied?
To divide and rule? To control?
In the 2024 movie Heretic, Hugh Grant plays a serial killer with a theological bent, who tortures a couple of pretty young Mormon missionary girls. He makes a glib and superficial argument, with which, all those of us who live through the years of Grunge, Cobian-style nihilism, and the New Atheist movement are very familiar with.
‘They just want to control you, man’.
Well, I don’t know about you. But I could sure use some more self-control, from time to time.
All I can say is, if it’s a massive 2026-year conspiracy, entirely falsified, just to get me to stick £5 on a plate once a month (or less), and occasionally nag me for having a wank now and then, they’re not really aiming high enough.
But here’s what’s happening now.
Because the 2008 crash taught us that their monetary system was all fake. Because Covid lockdowns taught us that all the nation-state values is control. Because the entertainment industry is morally bankrupt. Because the international system allows the US to give the terrorists, we’re supposed to hate $7Bn of hardware, and then turn around and conscript us to fight in a war against our own hardware. Because China can supposedly kill 10 million people by sending a lab engineered (probably fake) virus overseas, with impunity (That is the official narrative as it stands now, btw, boys and girls). Because mass migration has taught us, that there is no loyalty between citizen and state, and that welfarism has no correlation between pay-in and pay-out.
Because of all that, we intuitively know the following:
Nation states are limited liability military corporations. I light of their status, they franchise-out the right to have limited liability to private corporations. They also extend that right to international bodies, which are limited (or no) liability corporations that are detached from all democratic accountability.
That is the world that we all know we live in.
And it exists, because of postmodernist cosmology, written by disgraced pederast Michel Foucault, who asserted that nothing matters, ever.
That’s literally it. That’s the basis of our society now.
Compare this to the Christian cosmology, and you’ll notice the crime of it all.
God called the biblical nation of Israel into existence from a mixed-race ‘mass multitude’, found in Egypt. He made them a covenant of transcendent values, and a set of practices to share and unite them. They became a people group through trial and celebration. The rough and the smooth come together.
The deal was, that our actions here, determine all of eternity.
Jesus Christ did the same but extended that pattern of a nation to include all His people.
The deal is the same. You get adopted into the body of Christ. You are incorporated, into the ultimate, Unlimited Liability Corporation.
As the biblical Israel set the pattern for all pre-modern nations, so the Christian way set the pattern for the idea of Kingdoms, and post-Westphalia, the corporate Nation-State.
If you want to understand what a stark contrast these innovations were, when compared to the ancient municipal religions, I highly recommend reading The Ancient City, Religion, Laws & Institutions of Greece & Rome, by Numa Denis Fustal de Coulanges. It was recommended somewhen back by Paul Van DerKlay, and I concur, it is extremely informative and valuable. Although, I must say, the narration on the Audible audiobook is a little over the top.
SO, I am by no means sharing original ideas here, when I say that I believe we have lived through what is being called the Meta-modern transformation. Post-postmodernism characterised by the social media revolution.
In some ways, it seems to be making the printing-press-fuelled reformation seem like a mere foreshadowing of the real thing.
I mean, Sola Scriptura may potentially give the power the people, in theory. But it was still concentrated. John Knox, and King James. Calvin, Luther, Zwingli and Tyndale. They may not have been Popes or saints on paper, but they were, and certainly remain, deeply venerated authorities on doctrine.
Literacy, capacity and interpretation remain natural bottlenecks that gave the Protestant world its’ particular shape and flavour.
But now.
Look at Podcastistan. Look at TikTok and Facebook tribes. Look at UFO cults, and Cosmo magazine promoting The Satanic Temple’s abortion rituals online, and tell me we aren’t firmly back in the pre-classical ancient world, where every man keeps his own religion.
We have valued ‘knowledge’, and ‘liberty’ and ‘nature’ and ‘deconstruction’ for so long, that we’re now back in the book of Judges.
Go read that book of the Bible now, if you haven’t. I’ll wait. Go on, you’ll love it. It’s where Judge Dredd and Mad Max got all their inspo.
When you come back, I hope you’ll recognise the predicament we are in.
The nation state was a limited liability corporation.
International, globalist technocracy, is a zero-liability corporation.
That’s why Epstein, and Lindsay Clancy matter so much right now.
And that’s why people are turning to the Orthodox Church in America. It espouses a Complete Liability Corporation.
And you know, that’s what you need. For there is no life, without others. There is no liberty, without self-control. And there is no hope, without trust.
I am not Orthodox.
Kissing an icon gives me the ick. I don’t know that I will ever be able to do that.
However, I am consciously aware of my bias. And on my post-Covid, come-to-Jesus journey, I have reflected very deeply on what an absolute dickhead John Knox must have been to everyone around him.
I mean, what an absolute liability the man must have been, when I can walk around Saint Andrew’s ad Perth today, and still see the battle scars and damage his iconoclasms did to our tradition, and our nation.
Last week I completed the Lord of Spirits podcast, and almost 75% of Orthodox Church of America, Father Stephen de Young’s bible study series, the Whole Counsel of God. Which I really enjoy, because his background as a scholar and as former Dutch Calvinist, really gives an acerbic and belligerent animus to his critiques of Calvinism, that I find really challenging and worthwhile. He is definitely not an Ecumenist, or a Judaizer, or sympathetic to Evangelicalism in America, so stand by, and be warned. However, his arguments are compelling, and I find his exposition of the Pharisaic tradition in Paul and Peter to really help me connect with my Jewish wife’s tradition. His gamekeeper turned poacher knowledge of Calvinism helps illuminate things that I have grown up accepting without question, because they were simply the water I swam in.
But before all of that, and before the internet fame of these American Orthodox celebrities, like Jonathan Pageau, Fr Stephen Freeman, Fr Josiah Trenham, Fr Damick, et al., I had not heard many good things about Orthodoxy.
I spent much of my early career sailing with officers who grew up in the former Soviet Union and were very hostile to Orthodoxy. I’ve written about the questionable morals of those guys in the past, so I won’t recount their criminal brutality here. Only to say that they painted a picture of utter contempt. They found it to be ‘the absolute worst form of ritualism, mindless routine and superstition’. Chanting, roaming around, clutching beads, muttering and wailing. The Soviet types didn’t think much of the kissing of icons, either.
So, I wanted to witness what they were doing in an Orthodox church.
How could the Puritan, low church, four white walls and sermon, Yankee fundamentalists now be coming over to all the bells and the smells?
It couldn’t be tradition. They have none.
Everyone knows that old joke, ‘What’s the difference between an American, and a Yoghurt? The yoghurt has culture’!
Right?
I could understand my eastern European friends becoming Orthodox. At least, they had both a tradition of Orthodoxy, and the helpful resentment of being religiously suppressed by both the Ottomans and the Soviets, over the years.
Nothing like an appeal to antiquity combined with recent political persecution to stir up some tribal loyalty to the religion of one’s ancestors, eh? Just ask the rabbinic Jews who are turning away from their reformed and secular traditions now.
The first positive thing I’d ever heard about Orthodoxy was from a Latvian electro-technical officer we had on a ship. Back when I was a lowly second officer, I had to enter his cabin to test the smoke detectors or some such. I noticed he had an icon by his bedside.
I was not practicing in any way at the time, but I was curious.
‘What is that for’?
‘My father gave it to me’.
‘I mean, do you believe in that way of prayer, and stuff?’
‘I just…I trust my father.’
I thought about his answer. A lot. For many years, before this internet reformation brought it all to the forefront.
I have met three kinds of people who lived through the Soviet union. Thos who did well out of it all and really miss it. (Absolute arseholes, every one of them). Those who are neutral, can regale the positives and negatives, and sit firmly on the fence, explaining positive and negative similarities about their present condition of semi-market capitalism and international globalism. (There are many similarities). And those like that ETO, who clearly still feel the wounds of Soviet life. But survived it.
That’s the thing. You don’t ever get to meet the 62 million civilians murdered by the Soviet regime or it’s democidal policies in the twentieth century. Or the 80+ million Chinese killed by their own government in peace time. We just have to infer the injustice, from their absent voices.
Anyway.
I had to go see for myself.
I guess, I was scanning to see if the negative things I’d heard were more accurate than the positive things I’d heard over the years.
But I also had a sneaking suspicion that these damn Yankees just wanted the kitsch of something olde-worldey. They just needed an excuse to buy icons and beads and junk, coz they’re Yanks, you know? They just like buying sh*t. And they probably feel so good after a service, because they have to stand up and walk around and stuff. They’re just getting high from the exercise they’re not used to getting.
Right?
I had a strong intuition that I did need some of whatever it was these guys were doing, in the anachronistically entitled, American Orthodox Revival, as it were.
In fact, it couldn’t have come at a better time for me. After attending Passover dinner at the nearby Chabad, I needed a good dose of my own tradition to regain my internal balance.
‘Turn that Jesus up to 11’!
They did.
What I saw in their church, really blew me away.
Say what you like about Puritans. They may not believe in works, but, Gosh dang, do they know how to work.
They’re so serious, they don’t even know how to half-ass a job. When they do something, they do it right. Including becoming Orthodox.
Because that’s the thing about Americans. Like the Scottish Enlightenment that spawned them, they contain everything. They are each idea, and it’s opposite.
Like the Orthodox textual criticism, historical accounts, linguistic scholarship, and online apologetics. Not very traditional, to be honest. But very American.
The architecture, the art, and the liturgy – Byzantine. The scholarship, the people, and the coffee-hour – American Presbyterian. The sincerity, attention to detail, and kindness -Puritan, in the sense that it was real, and heartfelt, and without a trace of irony or LARPing.
I travel the world for a living, so I’m rarely in my own home church. I’m sort of a CEO Christian there. Christmas and Easter Only, you know? My son plays football on a Sunday, and I think it’s more important to spend time with him when I can, than take him out of his sport and make him sit and sing some songs with a bunch of old people when I’m home.
But our church is beautiful, in a way. It is essentially a Normal church, that was destroyed in the reformation, but rebuilt thereafter, in that white-box Church of Scotland kind of way. But, over the past couple of years, I’ve visited and prayed in Berlin Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, York Minster Cathedral, Norwich Cathedral, Sint Jacob’s Kerk in the Netherlands, and visited many other fine churches like Saint Cuthbert’s, Lindisfarne, and Whitby Abbey, etc.
What struck me with the Orthodox liturgy, was that Norwich cathedral suddenly made sense. I had wondered how so much graffiti and wear and tear could have been etched into the walls there. You could never get away with that, sitting in Protestant Pews, where whitewashed walls are maintained to prohibit distraction. But, in an Orthodox liturgical service, where people are free to mill and walk around, and touch the Green Man, and use the memory palace to revisit their stories during a service, I could now see how the original life of the building made sense.
It also connected me to my wife’s tradition, as the free movement of people in and out of the temple was something I first encountered in a Jewish Reformed Temple in Long Island.
It was weird and unfamiliar then. But now, it made the living stones cry out, as PVK would say.
I make my living as a marine consultant. I go from ship to ship, company to company, helping multinational groups of people come together as a body on whatever project we are working on. Being good at my job requires me to be able to assess a corporate culture, and a safety culture, quickly and accurately, from the moment I walk up the gangway. All so that I can prevent accidents and problems before they arise. And my clients say I’m pretty good at that.
In fact, I was audited recently by Lloyds, and they think I’m pretty good at that as well. So, there.
Two of the main things I ‘scan’ for are sincerity and completeness. Sincerity, because people who cover up or deny problems can never solve them. And completeness, because the devil is always in the details.
Watching that American Orthodox congregation at work. I really recognised their sincerity, and completeness. It didn’t look like “mindless” chanting, automatic ritual or superstition. It was abundantly clear to me that everything happening in that church was conscious, and deliberate.
What I saw was something that made sense. As a Scotsman, as a pseudo-half American, as a philo-semite, as a Christian, but most importantly, as someone who is trying.
What I witnessed gave me cause to trust these people.
Reflecting upon it, it makes sense for America, as well.
Mormonism, shakers, quakers, and Jehovas’ witnesses are all in for a hard time right now, as every person in America is now able to listen to the harshest possible critiques of their faith, from the comfort of an armchair. Not just from tired and cynical Hollywood perversions, but from top tier scholars on YouTube.
Schisms may have made sense at some point. And I think everyone did sincerely try their best with what they had available to them at the time. But now, we live in a different world.
Now, in a post covid, post mass-migration world, it is clear that our nation states have given over to internationalist thinking completely. They view the spatial element of a society as trivial or non-material. You are not a citizen; you are a taxpayer. Culture doesn’t matter, it is simply a component that can be changed, or a software program to be recoded or upgraded.
The natural reaction is to cling to something other.
Often that is the appeal to antiquity.
Islam does it. Rabbinic Judaism does it. Christians do it. Even secular atheist materialists, and post-modern anti-materialist do it.
They all want to present their way, as being, ‘natural’, ‘ancient’, or ‘real’.
Prosperity gospel, both in American Evangelicalism and Rabbinic Judaism, says that material success comes from obedience or belief in God. In other words, material blessings are an indication of virtue. Dispensationalism lends itself to this idea, by categorising people groups, and epochs. This pattern of thought shares and architecture with materialist evolution theory, technocracy, and ultimately, eugenics. It is also, correct, in the appeal to antiquity. It is absolutely the baseline natural human tendency to assume that might is right, and material prosperity reflects interior superiority.
Part of what had happened with the online reformation, is that we are each in our silos, yes. But, that silo-ing has gotten so selective and extreme with personalised algorithms, that we are in a silo of 1.
That is the natural end point of the process triggered by a value system that places the value of ‘knowledge’, above the value of ‘life’.
America has oscillated on both sides of that value, from its foundation. The American left is ‘awake’ in an anti-materialist sense. The right is ‘awake’ in a materialist sense. Neither is interested in serving the other. Now, they are facing a drastically materialist incursion from its Islamic citizens, at the same time it is trying to survive deeply anti-materialist attack from its radical post-modernist ‘Woke 2.0’ left. And while the radical feministas are in their death throes, like a childless, delusional, thrashing serpent of demoralisation, the materialist Islamists are replacing their ranks with their own vision for the future.
So, while it is not traditional to North America, it would sense for the Trad-Con US population to move to Orthodoxy.
For a society that is basically a collection of fractured city states, riven with paganism, esotericism, and mysticism, it has truly inherited the mantle of Rome and Greece, as its founders envisioned.
Perhaps, like Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, it is time to unite under a faith where the highest value is life, the cause of life, and the sustainer of life? Where both belief and works are important? Where there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, and norms and hierarchies?
That’s how Rome survived for 1400 years.
