Good morning, all. I hope you are well. I certainly am. The kids were off school this week for their October break. For non-Scots, this is a ten-day holiday subtracted from the summer holidays, to allow the children to help with the potato-picking season. And indeed, we did get a very full bucket of potatoes from a neglected planter in my back garden, which nicely accompanied the Sunday roast yesterday.
In order to compensate for my absence at their respective birthdays, I arranged a ‘daddy-daughter day’ with my eldest, and a day out with my son. The girl took me to a giant bouncy castle assault course in a warehouse, called Innoflate, shortly after last week’s illness. Within ten minutes I was coughing my guts out, but after that, it was really fun. These businesses do corporate team building and adults-only days, which I can imagine being utter carnage with a bunch of guys in their 20s and 30s. I can’t help but think they could somehow combine it with paintball or laser tag for the ultimate in comedic value.
The boy, rather sweetly, didn’t need his day with daddy to be exclusive, and wouldn’t go anywhere without his sister. Brucey bonus for her.
We also celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary by taking the kids to the transport museum in Glasgow. We later dropped them off at my mum’s house in East Kilbride and went out for a pint and a sushi dinner in the historic village in the centre of that post-war new town. We did the middle-class, middle-aged thing and drove past several properties for sale, and swiped through their pictures on Rightmove, comparing their internet appeal with their kerbside appeal.
I mused, thinking it would be so funny if I chucked my seagoing career, just to move back to EK and become a plumber. Travel the world, get a degree, two diplomas and a Captain’s license, just to come back to where you grew up and do a job you could have done at age 16. I’m laughing to myself even now as I write this. I can’t believe how appealing it actually is when I think back to my adolescent desperation to escape that small-town life.
The transport museum was brilliant. The building itself is impressive from a distance. Designed by award-winning architect Zaha Hadid, it replaced the much-loved transport museum in the old tram depot at Kelvin Hall, near Glasgow University in 2011. Architecturally stunning from a distance, as a museum, it doesn’t actually function properly. The collection has been drastically reduced, and many fine examples of British cars and motorcycles are almost impossible to view properly, as they’ve been suspended from the ceiling or put on a shelf forty feet in the air, in order to satisfy the city (&/or Hadid’s) desire for a bizarre modern art Instagram interpretation of a museum layout.
However, the celebration of Glasgow’s rich engineering, shipbuilding and cultural heritage wins the day. It is thoroughly devoid of wokeness or politics of any kind. It is safe, and very disabled & child friendly. There is even a shrine to properly functioning capitalism, in the Robert Napier exhibit. Napier, being a marine engineer himself, became a naval architect and shipbuilder on the Clyde in the 1830s and 40s. Back then, £1 of his money, was worth £126 in today’s tender. When Napier was designing steam liners for Cunard, Glasgow was the ‘second city of the empire,’ and Britain’s GDP was almost double that of China or the USA. And all that despite having a national debt of 200% of GDP at the end of the Napoleonic war. Still, the conditions were such that a man with a plan could found a world-famous industrial era, right here in Scotland, from ideas in a notebook.
I doubt he’d get past the EIA or planning permission stage these days.
The small exhibit, upstairs in a sunny southwest corner, within view of the BAE yard, illustrates the genealogy of Clydeside shipbuilders ‘descended’ from Napier’s mentorship. Denny’s, Watson, Thomson, Macgregor & Beardmore. His boys went on to found Harland and Wolff, Henderson’s, Fairfield, and Browns. Photographed unpretentiously with his foremen and their children, the Godfather of Clydeside Shipbuilding was famous for his personability.
Like an early Dale Carnegie, Napier believed that human beings were important. That capitalism is there to serve humanity. He looked after his employees and treated his clients as personal friends. All of his workers were thoroughly mentored and trained, and any bright or original ideas were richly rewarded. And when his employees become masters of their profession, he didn’t stand in their way. They went on to found their own dynasties, with the blessing and encouragement of their mentor and friend
.
I don’t employ anyone else in my company at the moment. I have sub-contracted out some design and editing work, but in these early days, I’m mostly on my own. However, I do aspire to something like Napier’s vision. I think the goal of every employee should be to learn and master a broad enough range of skills, to one day become self-employed. And that the goal of every business should be to build employees up to be capable of leaving whenever they are ready.
My core business at the moment is to do my usual contracting work on a ship, find a way to improve that company’s procedures, documentation, and safety management, and then do it. I have an efficient method that involves:
1. Rewriting a sample of their documentation in plain English
2. Reducing the reading age of their documentation to about 16 or less
3. Identifying gaps, contradictions, and omissions
4. Providing this sample work for free and quoting for my improvement services.
I have a method for this using software and a personalised process, and it may be worth teaching to someone else one day. So far, I’ve had a couple of clients, and I do think prospects for this part of my business will improve, as the economy tightens and people look to squeeze efficiency from, and/or prepare to sell their businesses.
In the maritime world, as in any other industry involving capital, people, complex regulations and machinery, every plus has a minus, and every minus a plus. Everything is always broken or breaking to some degree. Nothing is ever perfect or finished. Knowing what is good enough to move forward takes thought, effort, experience, and the courage to press on. Hence, my new logo.
Not ‘Ninja Sailor’ as my wife put it. But rather, the balance and pragmatism of the Tao, modified with a propeller. Balance, harmony, and unity are fine concepts, but should never come at the expense of forward progress.
Anyway, the crowning exhibit of the museum is the former tea clipper, SV Glenlee, moored on the river adjacent to the museum. I’ve been on it many times with my two older children, and myself as a boy. It is a fine testament to the age when ships were made of wood, and men were made of steel. But on this occasion, burdened as we were with a double-wide pram, and two toddlers in our party, we gave it a miss and restricted ourselves to studying the many fine ship models on display.
The week went on and politics continued its ghoulish zombie march toward Halloween. As WEF member Jeremy Hunt takes the helm as Chancellor, all of Liz Truss’s economic teasing has been reversed. All tax, corporate and otherwise is set to rise, and all hope is removed. The answer to that burning question now seems clear. Inflationary collapse it shall be.
I find it strangely reassuring that the WEF has explicitly worked to occupy senior positions in our government, civil service, corporations, and NGOs. It shows that these positions actually do matter. Even if the enemy currently entirely occupies them.
I would have preferred a deflationary collapse, personally. But the asset-owning classes who hold undue influence on our power structures were never going to go for that, were they? As such, I’ve got my winter crop of potatoes out in the garden, and I’ve ordered my paraffin lamp.
The political narrative is directing people’s focus now, away from the catastrophic and evil failures of coronatarianism at the moment, as the Pfizer executive laughing under interrogation that ‘no, we didn’t test for our vaccine stopping the spread,’ goes viral even on mainstream media. Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war is stretching credulity at this point as well, as winter begins to bite the electorate in northwest Europe. Talk of President Xi’s imminent demise in China is another genius element of propaganda, designed to give freedom lovers false hope that communism inevitably collapses, and that we don’t have to do anything to fight it. The force of nature argument for freedom has not stopped Australia’s plans to launch its own communist social credit system next year. Biden has revealed his alignment with the axis of evil (the Iranian regime) so blatantly that even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sees him as enough of a threat to grass on him to the public and confirm that he attempted to sway OPEC+ policy for his own personal gain. You remember, the precise thing that Trump was impeached then acquitted for?
The lies are clear and abundant. Censorship is still rife. Hate speech laws and attacks on freedom of speech are rampant and expanding. Leftists are being allowed to destroy pints of milk, SUV tyres, and priceless works of art with soup. Heroes like Glasgow taxi drivers are making the most effective protest against the leftist attacks on cognition in Queen Nicola’s WEF-tist regime, by paying for mobile billboards calling out the dangers of her Gender recognition and Sex Education bills, which will require children to inform the government of their gender and sexual preferences at regular intervals. Her political agenda in promoting trans rights – at the expense of property rights, gay rights, women’s rights and children’s rights – is clearly intended to make cognitive paralysis a common thing, and create an unsolvable multigenerational problem that needs vast government intervention to mediate, while attacking the commy-resistant family structure that built our civilisation.
Yet the solution is clear. Fraud is already illegal. So are vandalism, criminal neglect, manslaughter, and murder. We need to politely but firmly remind our police that government ministers are actually subject to the law. So could they kindly please stop dancing at pride marches, rub the rainbows off their Twitter patrol vehicles, and get back to cracking some f***ing skulls like they’re supposed to. And not just those of pregnant women who don’t want to be asphyxiated by masks this time. (Watch and share this documentary – Fluvid-19).
We need to deprogram ourselves and others from accepting that people have authority due to their rank, as opposed to their competence. We need to call out corruption and speak without fear. They want to control speech because making fun of these pro-paedophilia control freaks is actually the greatest threat to their power base.
I’m preparing for a trip to the Netherlands and Germany tomorrow. I’m to take a little 21 m long ship from a port in the Netherlands I’ve never been to before, to several ports in Germany I’ve never been to before, through the Kiel canal, which I’ve never transited before. All vaccine restrictions and covid testing have been abandoned and will not be a factor in m trip. Aside from the fact that the Germans are clinging to making on public transport, in a disturbingly orderly and superstitious fashion. It should be a little adventure though, and I’m hoping for a decent memoir out of it.
Between now, and packing for my trip, I’m also scheduled for a chat with Tim Price on his excellent podcast ‘State of the Markets’ this afternoon. Be sure to check it out. I’m not quite sure why so many financial traders follow my blog with interest. I suspect it’s because we share an understanding of risk assessment that requires an ability to see through the fog of war that is broadcast in most media. At any rate, they’ve got some crackers in their back catalogue, so I hope not to disappoint.