My first duty this week is to thank my new friend Steven Wilkinson, of the excellent Substack Pitchfork Papers and his company Good and Prosper, for his continued support and encouragement. I’ve been following his work for some time, and his kind words on Friday, when he allowed me to guest post my article ‘Half-Mast’ in his newsletter, were sincerely appreciated.
I’ve had a 25% boost in subscribers to Substack since featuring on Good and Prosper two days ago. I think I owe almost half of my subscribers to Steven promoting my work over the past few months.
I can’t express how much it means to me, to find like minds out there. Especially those who’ve already shown such impeccable good taste and learning as to be a fan of Steven’s.
So, welcome to all the new recruits! Glad to have you aboard. I have to say, it is an emotional thing to find that so many people are actually reading my work and enjoying it. And a special shout out to Christian in Australia, who is evidently now my biggest fan, having ‘binge-substacked’ my entire back catalogue in two days!
He assures me, ‘binge-Substack’ is a thing. 🙂
When I started writing, I thought I was going to write serious articles related to my new business, and the maritime industry. (PS, if any of you are thinking of buying a new boat, let me know and I’ll give you a cracking discount on a condition survey). But when my fingers hit the keyboard, that is not what came to them. Instead, I write about what goes through my mind these days, as I try to navigate life in these upside-down times.
I try to write once per week. Usually on a Sunday night. I don’t cite references for my work because I think academic writing is so dull and lifeless that I have no interest in that. Also, I think the peer review system in social sciences is quite flawed. Citation-counting in qualitative disciplines has the obvious effect of equating consensus with truth, and for the most part, reinforces bias and discourages originality.
I don’t have time to research original stories or follow the news to a greater degree than the others who do a better job at that anyway. As such, I’m left with just enough time to ‘go-with-what-I-know’. Which is my subjective experience of life, as a father, husband, business owner and sea captain.
Although I explore religion in my work, I don’t speak much about that in my day-to-day life. I am a wretch, deep down. And I’m fine with that. I was always more of an arsonist than a bed wetter, and I know there’s a good chance I’ve already condemned myself to hell. I don’t want to come across as one who pontificates or equates his ego with authority. Trust me, I am probably far less holier-than-thou. I curse a lot, and I have exactly the sort of relationship with alcohol that you might imagine for a Scottish sailor. I’m not here to talk about how great I am. I’m here to try to be better.
I explore morality because, in the end, that is all there is.
I’m trying to be better, because the way I see the world now, it’s going to take all of us trying harder for such a thing as conscience to survive. And as one who has travelled far and wide, I know, that when we are facing an ideology, there is nowhere to hide. We cannot flee and run from the enemy that is an idea. We have to stand and face it down, in ourselves, in our homes and in our society.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that so many people like what I’ve written so far. People love the sea. That’s why I ended up where I am.
We’ve been in port sheltering from stormy weather this week, so I went for a walk along the beach today. Winter is definitely on its way. People clutch their woolly hats and puffy jackets tightly to their chests, as they enjoy a bracing Sunday stroll along the sandy coastline. Some with dogs, some with kids, some with grandkids. All with a wee smile, hinting at the never-lost childish joy of looking out to sea.
We stand on the coast as waves crash around us and drown out all man-made noise. The rhythm is literally timeless. The view unchanged for millennia. The feeling the same.
We gaze at the horizon and our hearts wonder, what is there? What if I went that way, and kept going’?
Answering that question – the one we ask ourselves as children – is why I went to sea.
Wonder at potential. The poetry of commitment. Imagination in action.
It’s what made me grow up. And it’s how I’m able to share with you all, something, that is hopefully a perspective with some value. Like the first pages of the bible translated to English that came by sea up the river Ouse and the Cam – you never know what treasure might come in with the next tide.
The life at sea is rich with metaphor and poetry because our chief activity is navigation. The human being is a navigation platform. The act of navigation in all things is our primary functional mode, and our fundamental outlook on life takes the form of a journey. Stories represent those journeys, and we each have our own cardinal points, route maps and landmarks we choose to go by.
So, when I tell you about my week’s work as a navigator, that may be why it resonates?
I took the night shift this week, so my first meal of the day is dinner. I then start the watch with a large coffee and sit in ‘The Chair’ and settle down to watch the sunset. Most evenings are quiet, as we are currently providing emergency stand-by cover to teams of technicians working to bring an offshore wind farm to life.
We laugh daily at the carbon-intensive, taxpayer-subsidised, overpaid idiots, who struggle valiantly against the elements to bring the UK population the most expensive and unreliable energy you could possibly think of. They don’t like it when we do that, but we’re here to make sure they don’t get themselves killed offshore, not to make friends.
From time to time, they need us to push onto a tower, and transfer the technicians back to their ship, or to shore. Other times, we make quick runs back to shore for cargo like stores, scientific instruments, safety gear or toilet paper.
Glamorous work for sure, and 90% of the time we get thrown around like an empty tin can because our little 100 Gross Ton ship is designed to go quickly. It is therefore made of aluminium and does not have the weight to it that you might like when working in the North Sea.
When I worked on the big ships out here, we were called ‘The North Sea Tigers’, because of the solitude, rough weather, short wavelengths, and sudden storms endured in the Northern North Sea. An epithet derived from mackerel fishermen in the days of sail.
On my ship now, a force 3 feels like a force 8 would on a big ship. She is affectionately known to us as the vomit comet, and I have never been so seasick in 19 years of seafaring as I sometimes get on this boat.
Her stiffness and instability aside, she is actually really exciting to drive. She has the latest in marine radar and navigation systems, and a million-pound superyacht propulsion system. Additionally, the big boats have to go around being scared and careful not to hit anything, ever. Whereas we get to perform controlled collisions all day and night. Which can be exhilarating.
Please take 2.5 minutes to view this short YouTube video of me at work a few days ago.
You will note that when there is no moonlight and no artificial light, I am driving my ship around in complete and total darkness. In the last 25 seconds of the video, you will see from the radar and ECDIS navigation screen that I am surrounded by unlit steel towers. Many of them are not yet charted on the map but are showing on the radar. Many of the targets on the radar are also false echoes, caused by multipath error when passing near large structures that are close together.
You may also note from the vectors on screen that, although I couldn’t visually detect any of these unlit towers, even at a 200 m distance, I was still proceeding at full speed.
If I am too confident, and incorrectly assess a radar target as a false echo, simply because it isn’t on my map, then I might hit it. The result of hitting a tower at sea speed can be seen here. That poor skipper was probably just innocently updating his Substack when ‘boom’, broken limbs and jaws everywhere.
The solution? Simple.
Apply the precautionary principle, and don’t hit any radar echoes. False, or not.
I decided that it was worth the risk to proceed at full speed, despite the darkness, because the weather was worsening, and we had a tide to catch to get into port. In trying to avoid the worst case in any one of three hazardous situations we’d face that night, I picked the least bad option.
Admittedly, I thrashed my engines to within an inch of their life to get back in time, and I may have been slightly deficient in my paperwork that evening. But by midnight, with the danger of weather damage well behind us, and the boat safely moored, it felt good to turn those engines off and relax.
In the weather days alongside, I’ve had a chance to catch up on the news, both from the legacy and the alternative media.
I almost don’t want to bring any of it up.
I know from walking around Montrose that people are still mourning the loss of our Queen, HM Elizabeth II. It almost seems rude to point out that worse things are happening, as we take time out to reflect on the loss of a great monarch. And I would like to point out the sincere respect shown by the small business owners, already thrashed by two years of lockdown, who are closing their shops tomorrow, voluntarily, out of respect.
We are still a nation of individuals, who do not need to be coerced. Our people will do the right thing if it is right.
The antics of football fans, like the Celtic FC fans who chanted ‘If you hate the Royal Family, clap your hands…’ as the players and officials clapped for the Queen, also reveal as much as do the gestures of respect.
The fact that our country today is a product of the English Civil War, the Reformation and the Restoration, remains so fresh, real, and relevant today that it can hardly be understated. Why are all the football teams involved in these gestures of disrespect, traditionally catholic supported teams?
Why are Wallace, Bruce, and the Black Douglas still names that fire the blood of every Scotsman?
Why do the people of Montrose still lovingly care for the statue of James Graham, the Great Montrose? Probably the only other recipient of a State Funeral that the coastal folk of Angus would be aware of.
All of the things we care about today, are the same things people have always cared about. And the arguments are the same because they are timeless. Morality, particularly in Christian thinking, is framed as eternal. Unchanging.
These arguments are not settled. All victories are temporary. If history rhymes, it does so in tune with the psalms.
We can all sense this now. As we look at our new kingdom, with our new monarch, and the path of debt, control, civil unrest, and recession that we now seem irrevocably set upon. Do our leaders follow higher principles? Or will they be brought to ruin by truth?
When we see the sickening devil worship of the BBC at the Commonwealth Games, or Olympic opening ceremonies, or the shrines to paedophilia paid for by the British taxpayer. When we hear Yuval Noah Harari betray his Hebrew ancestors and speak of ‘Useless people’. When we see people around us demonise the unvaccinated and dismiss the unnecessary deaths of innocent children as a necessary evil.
When we encounter this terrifying lack of light in the people around us that we once thought of as reasonable people, we can see nothing but the darkness of the human soul.
The evil that says ‘I know enough’ to play God. That the sixth day of our works is sufficient, and that we can ignore ‘the rest’ that is the seventh. The hazard is the human propensity to equate group identity with moral superiority. The collision waiting to happen, with those who see that there is no such thing as a greater good if it requires evil to get there.
Navigating human darkness can be as stomach-churning as any voyage at sea.
When navigating both the social world and the real world, we need to be clear about what hazards we are avoiding, how and why. With attempts to avoid a virus, will we steer back toward the greatest cause of death in the 20th century – democide and warfare?
My radar has different modes. Switching between North Up, and Head Up displays allows me to quickly match the screen view to the absolute perspective on my map, or to my relative perspective looking out of the window. Switching between relative vectors, and true vectors, allows me to see where hazardous targets will pass by me, and then where they will be on the map.
Having this ‘modal’ awareness helped me when discussing my ‘unvaccinated’ status with employers who might have me on their ship. As someone who got an antibody test, and a T-Cell (by T-Spot) test after natural recovery from Covid, I could objectively prove that I had immunity from the disease. However, some would not employ me, because I didn’t have a piece of paper saying I’d had the jab.
Note that when I had vaccinations for other diseases as a seafarer – yellow fever, Hepatitis, etc – sometimes they would follow up with an antibody test to see if the jab had been effective at conferring immunity. No such follow-up with covid jabs. Those vax certificates only say you had a jab, never that you were immune.
In real objective terms, I clearly had a market advantage over sailors without recovery immunity. I was unafraid of a disease that I was clearly now more immune to than others. (Logically, recovery immunity must always be at least as strong as jab immunity if the jab is meant to be simulating a mild infection. No immune response = no vaccine efficacy either. Claims to the contrary never made sense.)
In relative social terms, many viewed me as commercially worthless because I was unable to travel to jurisdictions that only accepted a vax certificate for entry – not a recovery immunity certificate. Regulatory restrictions/administrative burdens made me less employable. Not any actual risk of a health problem, but a bureaucratic hassle.
Of course, there is now a thriving black market in QR codes and vax certs. In true soviet fashion, liberty will always find a way, and the government program is entirely pointless.
(It’s funny, my personal supply of Ivermectin has now run out, after several multi-jabbed people I know caught covid. Suddenly they weren’t laughing at my dark-web self-medication when they realised the mighty NHS still simply advises ‘take paracetamol and lie down’ for this supposedly killer disease).
Allegorically speaking, your personal experience and instincts are your God-given radar. You are an empirical sensor extraordinaire. Principles, religion, or philosophy are your collision avoidance software, overlaid on your personal radar screen.
Some of you have better threat detection software than others, and you will be able to move more quickly and confidently through the darkness.
I don’t think it any coincidence that the God of Abraham – the one who defies pharaohs and grows as nation after nation crumbles – is the one who warns us of the evils of arbitrary authority, census gatherers and tax collectors.
When I was returning to port, the weather did increase. As happens sometimes, I heard a very loud bang during the night watch.
It was a bang so loud, and violent; the whole ship shook as if we had hit something hard.
Every watchkeeper knows that moment. When your heart stops, and you imagine that you have hit and destroyed some poor, errant yacht sailor or sea-kayaker in the night.
‘Have I killed someone’?
You think for a second. You might even swing the searchlight around and look for debris or a person in distress. Then you realise, no. Nobody except us would be stupid enough to be this far out, in this weather. It was just the power of the 7th, 7th, 7th wave. Or a big rogue wave that struck us at an odd angle.
And you steam on.
And you never look back, into the darkness.
Tomorrow, the Queen will be buried. It will be time to move forward. But as hard as it might be, we must not neglect to look back at the past two-three years and see, with clarity and focus, the calculated evil things that have been done in the shadows.
We, as normal people, do not have the time to conduct peer reviews and perform detailed statistical analyses in areas we have no expertise. And yes, there may be some wild, unprovable conspiracy theories on the internet, explaining who is doing bad things and why. And we have no way to prove or disprove either one.
Know that, when we wish to persuade people to our side, we will never get them to see the objective picture as we see it, because they are using a different map, and looking at their radar from a different location to you.
Don’t try to persuade them round to your theory of who built that tower offshore and why. It is not a convincing argument.
Instead, teach them to zoom out, and see the wider set of threats in our society now. Centralised control. Censorship. Democide. Propaganda. Fascism. The policies our governments are now enacting are seriously hazardous. More hazardous than any virus.
Remind them, that whether it is a false echo or not, you don’t want to collide with it.
Better to be safe, than sorry.
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With that in mind, do not watch the following video link, unless you are ready to witness something disturbing.
As Denmark bans the vaccination of under 50s, and the UK suspends the vaccination of 5-11 year olds after a 22% increase in non-covid deaths among vaccinated children, think back to when Dominic Raab said ‘we think the benefits outweigh the risks’.
Thanks to the Lioness of Judah …
Exposing The Darkness
End Times headline news. Research and analysis of world events in light of Bible prophecy.
… for her informative, accurate, and fearless gazing into the face of the evil in our neo-fascist world, over at ‘Exposing the Darkness’ on Substack. https://rumble.com/v1hpxdh-warning-graphic-images-global-depopulation-in-full-swing-as-adult-death-syn.html
The greatest man who ever lived was already sacrificed for our sins. Think then, how damned are the people who continue to sacrifice children in the name of politics and scientism.