The chaos in my life is subsiding this week. My friend and I have completed all of the joinery in my bathroom project, and 99% of the plumbing. My best friend has successfully completed his heart transplant operation and is currently sleeping it off. I finished the ECDIS navigation training course ahead of time. I’ve booked a nice hotel in Charleston for the wife and I to enjoy a couple of days’ break from the kids as our ten-year anniversary treat. I’ve quit the seafaring side of my business for now until the new year in order to refocus on my other projects and be of more use to my wife until the youngest starts nursery in January. I may have landed a marine advisory role for a major marine risk assessment project for a UK harbour authority. I’ve got a trip to Southampton in October that I’m looking forward to now, and I can feel enough breathing space now to start getting back to my reading schedule.
I’m starting David Hume this week. I’ve never read Hume, but I’m going to read and respond to his essays over the next couple of years. Having been raised largely in the household of a single mother who rejected Catholicism – for dramatic and understandable reasons – I’ve always instinctively and unconsciously understood the argument against Catholicism. Their liturgical routine always felt superstitious to my instinctive cultural Calvinism. The celibate clergy unnatural. Understanding that the church John Knox, Calvin and Luther rebelled so heartily against was largely an illiterate cartel of corrupt thugs, that had not much to do with scripture, allows you to forgive some of their crueller and more autistic interpretations. However, I feel that Scotland is long overdue for a revival of the reformation and enlightenment. Hopefully without the bloodshed – although Uncle Enoch reckoned that this was in the pipeline anyway. But given my now deeper understanding of Orthodox Christianity, knowing how much closer we once were to second-temple Judaism, and knowing that Scotland’s Muslim population is about as conservative as most Christians were 60 years ago, I think it’s time to start a bit of this ‘integration’ our politicians have been pumping their gums about all these years.
Modern ideas of the nation-state and progressivism have their roots in this troubled time in Scottish history. It seems worth a new reading as we face our current troubles. I believe we have already witnessed the end of the concept of the nation-state. With supranational corporations like the WHO and WEF bypassing democracy and dictatorship alike, it’s time to face facts and realise that the next technological priority is not unicorn propulsion systems that run on fairy farts, but technology that allows the individual to defend themselves from the nation-state and its superiors.
That’s what Bitcoin alleged itself to be. That’s what 3D-printed guns were meant to support. That’s what humanity craves.
The practical step I am taking towards this new reality, that will come after this carnival of carnage reaches its conclusion, is to consciously avoid treating any government-issued regulation, treaty or statutory instrument as the reason for doing something. When I write technical guidance in my consulting work, I am making the effort to explain why we do things from first principles, without any reference to the state or the UN. Not easy in the most heavily regulated industry on earth.
In the coming five days, I will be doing basic safety training for the offshore wind industry. To obtain this qualification in sucking eggs, I will spend two days learning to climb a ladder offshore (I’ve been skipper on a CTV for a year doing these transfers, and have climbed a bunch of Pilot ladders offshore), a day of manual handling (lift with your back, not your knees, right?), a day of basic first aid (I’m qualified in medical care, to the level of an amateur nurse, as Master), and a day of basic firefighting (all sailors of my rank complete Advanced firefighting training every five years, and I’ve been in three fires at sea). The only day that won’t be dull is the sea survival training day, which is usually a day of jumping into the pool and inflating life rafts and such. My chest infection is gone now, and I haven’t been swimming without a toddler throttling my neck for a while, so I will enjoy that element. Although I do resent paying £1000 just because the Global Wind Organisation (Yes, an entirely made-up entity) doesn’t recognise seafarer’s qualifications.
Hopefully, I learn something new about High Voltage, etc., but I doubt it.
That’s how all this works. So much of our industry and innovation is hampered by this huge draining effect of bottleneck institutions, granted monopoly status by idiots, and turning our most basic of professions into closely guarded medieval guilds. Except, that they’re building cathedrals to Gaia, offshore, that crumble into the sea after twenty years.
This is why I’m ultimately hopeful that the globalist project will soon be toppled. People who actually do things in real life know that just because you have a plan, doesn’t mean you’ll get your way. Not a single thing I’ve ever achieved, went exactly as I’d planned it. Not one.
So, Net Zero?
Give me a break.
Did you know that you cannot become an electrician in Scotland by going to an adult training centre like you can for most trades? I’ve heard estimates that we need an extra 10,000 electricians a year in Scotland as boomers retire and die if the green revolution and EV technology are going to succeed. But to train, you need to spend 12 months as an adult apprentice, to learn what could be taught in one month in England. The most electricians Scotland has ever trained in a year is 700. Purely because our training regulators and schools are cartels that profit from holding human beings hostage, and exploiting them for cheap labour.
Shipping and maritime education also work on this form of indentured servitude given the respectable veneer of ‘safety’. Credentials lead to labour shortages, which is inexcusable in an information age.
Education is broken. Industry is broken. Labour relations are broken. Government is broken. The currency is most definitely broken.
I’m very curious to see how broken America is when we go back over in a few weeks. I have been absent so long; I think I have to surrender my Green Card when I get to the border. We last visited about 4 years ago, before Covid. The day we flew back to live in the UK was the day Donald Trump won the GOP nomination for the state of New York.
It looks like we’ll be arriving just in time for the lockdown measures planned for the ElectionYearicron variant of COVID. I’ve had my climate change booster, so I think I’m immune.
History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, said someone, once. I know the pattern of US politics now. Give it six months, and we’ll have some poor dead black person’s face all over our screens again. Trump will continue the gaffe parade but gain traction as the most meme-able man in history. The pantomime will continue. If Trump wins, the permanent political class will instigate a military incident in the South China Sea, or with Russia, so that Trump can’t stop the war machine when in office. They want a Business Republican in office when the ship sinks anyway, so they can point the blame on crony crapitalism, and overtly abandon the republic in the aftermath.
I know how Bidenomics is going. The kids on TikTok are calling it ‘The Silent Recession’. The fact that inflation-adjusted average salaries and purchasing power today is way lower for Zoomers than it was for people in 1930, but that zero media coverage is given to this reality. It is torturing a youth who are supposed to care so deeply about every little thing. The poor kids couldn’t even afford to go to a speakeasy now!
I’m very sure that a lot of what appears to be eco-credentialing, like veganism and tiny homes, and ‘glamping’, is simply an ex post facto justification for the poverty of youth being compounded by currency inflation. The exponential rise in gym-bros spending their money on muscle-enhancing protein powders and fancy gym memberships is a sort of protest, as the capital of health is about the only capital investment the youth have left. Plus, it’s probably an epigenetic phenomenon whereby the youth can sense war on the horizon, and subconsciously adapt to be the next warrior class.
The corporate media cretins aren’t ignoring it because they are devious. They don’t employ real journalists and haven’t done for a while. They are merely professional cherry pickers and an extension of the rhetorical apparatus of the political parties.
The upcoming news cycle of cortisol-inducing catastrophism is entirely about manipulation. The shootings are happening all the time, but legal gun ownership mostly saves the day, according to UN & FBI statistics. Racially motivated violence vastly goes against white, Hispanic and Asians, rather than toward African Americans. However, the American national story of racial tension could not be maintained if statistics were explained properly. Campaign groups that promote Guns for Gays and Guns for Blacks are not mentioned, despite their strong historical importance in the Civil Rights struggle. And so, cherry-picking the data becomes an effective tool for narrative control.
You see it all the time in shipping. For example, how many of you were aware of the highly dangerous collision between a 295 m long LNG carrier (aka a floating bomb), and a product tanker (aka another floating bomb) on the Suez Canal this week?
What? No? Nobody heard about that? You mean it wasn’t on the front page of every newspaper and media outlet, as an existential threat to humanity, that some ships might have to go the long way round for a bit!?!
But you probably remember all kinds of speculation back during the Ever Given grounding that blocked the canal in 2021? Russian or Chinese hackers? Act of economic warfare, sabotage, etc.?
The fact is, Suez is a hotspot for incidents because it is notoriously corrupt in its management and has multiple times the number of incidents of comparable canals at Kiel and Panama. I think they have three or four grounds a year that you never hear about because it doesn’t coincide with the panicky Western news cycle.
You may well have heard about ‘unprecedented delays’ on the Panama Canal this week. That ships face ten months of restrictions and backlog due to a climate-change-induced shortage of water in the Panama Canal!!! Aaaargh! Panic! Doom!
Well, I happen to know a lot about the Panama Canal. These things happen from time to time. In La Nina years of late, we haven’t had this shortage of water because they’ve been lucky with rainfall. The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) website has made clear in its regulations for decades that these types of draught restrictions and delays may occur when water levels are low.
When I met the head of the ACP in January 2020 – before the world went bananas – he quipped that ‘all this shipping stuff is easy. In truth, we are running the largest water management company on earth’.
For the record, the shipping stuff isn’t easy. The ACP is by far the most professional and competent organisation I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. Despite their imperfections, operating at the crossroads of the world puts them at an epicentre of geopolitical pressure and commercial pressure that few could fathom. They handle it as well as they can in a number of remarkable ways.
Firstly, since Reagan announced the handover of the canal from US control to local control, the governance of the canal has been kept entirely separate from the governance of the country. By all accounts, the Maritime Authority for Panama (AMP) is far more subject to the South American style of politics than the ACP. The AMP will suffer a full crew change at every new election, whereas ACP appoints board members for a minimum term of 15 years at a time.
In short, they have to live with the consequences of their decisions. For a very long time.
I’ve written of the training and professionalism of the ACP Pilots elsewhere, which is driven by a serious national pride that wants to prove to the USA that they, the Panamanians, can run the canal better than anyone on earth. Including Uncle Same. And they largely do, with the best safety record of any major sea route.
They achieve this excellent record by strict enforcement of safety rules, without exception. And by – very wisely – keeping all of their incident reports off of the internet.
As an example, when they built the Neopanamax Locks, the expansion project that ran from 2007 to 2016, the project excavated the same volume of aggregates from the ground as the entire original canal project. The original canal, built by the French and then the Americans, had an average of over 300 worker fatalities per kilometre of the canal. The expansion had only a handful of deaths during construction, instead of 30,000. A testimony both to the advances of engineering technology and the improved management practices in Panama.
Water management, however, falls into a more difficult grey area. This where the closed and professional ACP’s jurisdiction merges with the wider politics of the country.
While the canal is the primary source of revenue for the country, few understand it’s civil engineering importance as the freshwater reservoir for the nearly 2 million residents in the greater Panama City area.
Each time ships pass through the canal; a little water is lost. Water-saving basins have eased the problem after the expansion project, but it remains a fact of the nature of canals. Sea water cannot be pumped back up to fill the canal because it is a freshwater habitat and an important nature reserve. The drinking water treatment plant is also not designed to handle seawater.
The solution at present is to pump fresh water from the equally artificial Lake Alajuela, into Gatun Lake and the canal. The water suction pipe from this lake, was, however, built by the Yanks back in nineteen canteen. It only extends a few metres into Laka Alajuela and can only reach the top quarter of the water there.
It has been known for decades – so I’m told – that the solution to Panama’s water shortage would be to extend the suction pipe from Lake Alajuela into deeper waters at the centre of the lake, thereby allowing the use of its entire contents.
The democratically elected governments of socialist stripe in Panama the country have not quite grasped this practical engineering solution, that would require an investment beyond their short years of tenure in office. Therefore, the problem remains unsolved, providing convenient alarmist talking points for Western journalists who suddenly care about global trade.
Of far more importance is the entirely planned economic disaster from the lockdown responses worldwide, that we are all now suffering. The classic problem with shipping is the oversupply of merchant tonnage to respond to boom times (like the massive boom in container shipping caused by American overspending and furlough money being conjured out of nowhere to bribe people to stay at home and shop online for 3 years), drives excess shipbuilding, which causes freight rates to drop catastrophically when the boom dries up.
Donald Trump saved the Panama Canal in 2016, just as the expanded locks opened, by overturning a forty-year ban on US Crude and LNG exports. The 2008 GFC boom and bust in container shipping nearly bankrupted the canal and the entire nation of Panama. Only the LNG trade saved the day. The trouble is, I don’t know what is left that Trump could actually do?
End the Fed, maybe?
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