We work long days at sea, and Sunday is no exception. 12-hour shifts are my current minimum each day, with occasional overtime required. We got a hurried order to leave port this morning, while I was halfway through doing an inventory of the medical locker in my cabin. Despite the warm sunshine, it was quite windy, and so we took a few good waves on the beam when coming out to the offshore wind farm, and manoeuvring between the dozen or so ships and the offshore turbines to our work site for the day. No chance to go ashore.
(Yes, I hate renewable energy. Every wind farm in the UK is a taxpayer exercise in nibyism, that is later sold to foreign private investors. If they produce too much leccy, they shut down or pay a fine. Too little, we provide them diesel generators to keep them spinning. They are all about preserving the central controlled grid, and avoiding private micro-generation at all costs. The distance the electricity has to run means additional wastage in transmission, and at least when I was drilling for oil, I was helping produce something that people were actually willing to pay for, without conversion and brow-beating. But my job is to keep these ‘true-believers’ alive at sea, not to allocate capital in an ethical way.)
There is an ’oh no’ moment that is familiar to all seafarers who work in the North Sea. When you retire to your cabin after a long shift, to find all of your possessions – and because of my earlier chore, several tubes of expired Anusol and funnels for the rectal application of diazepam – scattered and rolling around your cabin floor. My books, diary, some logbooks and paperwork, were thrown around like confetti by my own ship handling.
A birthday card for my son lies in a dark corner. Sadly, unsent.
However, I remain grateful. I have a good crew, and that is all that matters when you’re on a small ship.
When I arrived down in the mess room for dinner, I wasn’t expecting much. We’ve been run off our feet this trip, and with a crew of only five, we do not carry a full-time chef. Instead, we take turns to cook and get our own provisions.
So you can imagine my delight and surprise to find that one of my deckhands had stayed after everyone had finished dinner, and served me a beautiful plate of pork fillet, mustard mash, steamed sugar snap peas and a freshly sautéed onion, mushroom and red wine sauce.
It absolutely made my night.
Food is one of those earthly pleasures that can make life worth living. And when you have little else in the way of stimulation, it can become central to a happy trip at sea. When there is no TV or internet, and you’ve read all your books and exhausted all conversation, there is usually a little sugar or protein to get you through the lonely nights away.
I had been apprehensive about sailing without a professional cook, as it does entail more planning and effort to live without a specialist attending to such things. However, compared to some of the ships’ cooks I’ve had, we’re winning.
In fact, we did recently employ a cook who was so bad, the lads threatened to throw him overboard. He was a filthy man, who would leave paw prints from his unwashed hands all over the galley. You didn’t want to wash your hands in the same sink after this man had been there, let alone eat what he’d been touching.
And the funny thing was, he never stayed to talk during meals. He’d cook the food at about 2 pm, then leave it in the oven to desiccate until 6.30 pm, before slopping it on trays and disappearing from sight. Steaks like shoe leather. Burnt kebabs. Disappointing and random combinations, barely fit for pigs.
That man never ate his own cooking.
And he never sat around long enough to hear the complaints about his food either. He’d sneak off immediately, as dinner was served, and hide in the smoking area until we cleared out.
I could regale you for hours with tales of terrible cooks. Losing weight, running out of food at sea and biting into unknown body parts, eyeballs and blood soup. But the point of the story is simple.
If your cook won’t eat his own cooking, you’re better off without him.
And when the communist terrorist from Ethiopia, Dr Tedros of the WHO, wouldn’t take his own ‘vaccine’ until it had been going into poor people’s arms for 6 months, you knew it was time that his services were no longer required. Somehow, I’ll think we’d be fine without him.
We had one crew member, triple vaxxed, return to us this week after having had Covid. He won’t be getting a fourth jab. As the stories of some of the vaccine-injured surface on Twitter and mainstream TV this week (OK, well, GB News), he did ask me ‘what’s a vaccine injury’?
Each of the guys has had their own individual cost-benefit risk profile, and have either avoided the jab, or had several. Although each one is now resigned to the fact that Covid is finished, and what’s happening in China now is pure insanity and tyranny. There is anger at some of the ships out here continuing to test, for a disease that most of us are resigned to live with. We’ve all had it now. jabbed or not. None of us died.
We are sailors though. So perhaps we are just a little more callous and matter of fact about facing our mortality. Indeed, we had a couple of incidents this week that would cause lesser mortals to flinch.
The lad who cooked my delicious pork dinner tonight was nearly taken out by a dropped object a few days ago. A 300-400 gram steel pin was dropped from an offshore platform 22 metres above him. The pin hit the deck at around 45 miles per hour, with a bang so loud it was heard throughout the ship. Missing him by two feet. Had he looked up, or taken a step to the side, his life may have been ended. Or at least altered irreparably. Had it hit his jaw, he might have needed one of my aforementioned funnels.
I also had a little incident this week. While training the other captain on a departure manoeuvre, I failed to advise him correctly, and we ended up having a bit of a bump. We were at a really tight berth and experiencing strong winds and currents against us. As I told my mate to apply more power ahead, it was too late. The current seized our stern and bounced it right off the bow fender of an ice-breaker. She didn’t have a scratch. We did!
Whoopsie.
Despite not being the one with my hands on the controls, it was my responsibility. Being the captain means reporting on your own shortcomings, and taking responsibility for the failures of everyone else. I was the one who put them in the position they found themselves in. This results in a kind of, very public, highly judgemental, catholic confession ritual where your own incident report is broadcast far and wide throughout the fleet for everyone to delight in.
No matter. Take ownership. Learn lessons, share them, and move on.
This brings us to the Tory leadership ‘contest’.
Politics is supposed to be subordinate to the culture in a democracy. These past thirty years or so have instead seen politics rise from sub-culture to cult.
One of the key differences between Abrahamic religion, and a cult, is the concept of forgiveness. Having attended a Yom Kippur ritual of atonement at an Orthodox Jewish Temple in Glasgow, last winter lockdown, I came to appreciate this ritual for what it was first-hand. Not a superstitious incantation of magic words to an invisible best friend, but a protocol. A societal procedure, that forces one to recognise fallibility. A check for accountability.
Our politics, by contrast, uses magic words to bring about our current woes but never takes pause to reflect on the failures or shortcomings of their actions. Never complain, never explain has morphed into something pathologically more deranged than the laconic leadership of old.
I am informed that the grammar in the Hebrew bible consistently refers to ‘if’ or ‘whether’ a person sins, but refers always says ‘when’ a leader or ruler sins.
The inevitability of the failure of rulers is a Hebrew concept. One that is the cornerstone of what we consider to be a Western tradition of the ability and the duty of citizens to criticise their governments.
This concept has a parallel in the notion that a ‘Captain should go down with his ship’.
The idea being that, particularly in times of war, if a Captain requires his crew to face mortal danger, he must also share in the fate of even the least among the crew. This is why Schettino was so reviled for his lifeboat-leadership strategy.
What sailor would ever again trust a captain who abandoned his crew to their fate? How can we trust our political class ever again, after the last two years?
That conservative party members and leadership candidates are not picking up on this theme is revealing. After the visceral disgust of the hypocrisy of the partygate scandal brought down Boris Johnson, you’d think a little more contrition and humility would be in order? Personally, I’d like to have seen a lot more soul-searching about the Sarah Everard killing as well.
Those of us who were concerned about the over-reaches of state power setting a dark precedent with lockdowns were called insane conspiracy theorists. And then when a policeman, whose specialism was working in the halls of government with politicians, considered himself above the law enough to sexually assault and murder a young woman who was out ‘breaking curfew’, did our society stop and reflect on how our culture may have just handed over the reins of power to the worst among us? No. There was no atonement. Not from our political class. Not from the media. Not from the leftist populist movement that demanded draconian authoritarian lockdowns a second time, despite clear evidence of their failures, and the permanent altering of the relationship between the state and the individual.
Where there is no atonement, no acknowledgement of responsibility, fallibility, or apology, what is there?
There is a promise.
A terrible promise, that this will happen again.
The cult of power is at work in our politics now. The mirrors of Westminster are not used for reflection. Might is right, and the bankrupt defence corporation that is our ‘nation-state’ is kept alive by a ‘too-big-to-fail’ attitude, that guarantees it will fail.
They live on lies. They call themselves ‘Keynesian’, but even he advocated cutting-back spending when times were good. They could be called Trotskyists if it weren’t for a love of bureaucracy that would collapse the library of Alexandria. You might even think they were Greenies if their ‘environmental’ policies weren’t all so bad for the environment.
When Liz Truss’s speech was interrupted by ‘Green’ protestors, demanding cheap housing, low inflation and ‘Good Green Jobs’ this week, what was the response?
Did Liz point out that ‘green’ policies and centrally controlled land use permissions have caused the housing shortage? Or that every government intervention paid for by currency manipulation distorts the housing market and causes this inflation? Or make any attempt at appealing to supposedly conservative principles?
No. She said she would ban protests, and strikes.
The Dutch farmers’ protest continues, the Dutch government continues to threaten food supplies for the entire world, Bill Gates turns farmland fallow, and Sri Lankans now face starvation. In the face of this, our legacy media simply informs us that we should start eating bugs or human flesh to reduce our carbon scores. We have to ask a few more questions. Like, how intentional is this mess?
Are we really supposed to forget that the express goal of the Frankfurt school was to infiltrate the institutions and structures of the west and deliberately cause them to fail?
When Klaus Schwab states that 1.2 Billion people will starve to death before 2025, is that a prediction or a policy?
I have no special insight into these matters, but I do have a pair of eyes. And when looking at the past 100+ years of our history, it is fairly clear that the number one cause of early death on this planet during the 20th century was the actions of one’s own government. Between war, and democide, hundreds upon hundreds of people were killed or starved by their own governments. Wouldn’t it be naïve to assume the 21st century would be less dangerous?
Part of my pandemic experience was discovering the value of Christianity. When I looked out of my window and saw people who I thought were decent, hardworking and intelligent, banging their fucking pots and pans and shouting at the sky, I was shocked. They were participating in a cult ritual to appease the secular deities of the NHS and the State.
I learned two things from that:
- Human beings are not capable, as an organism, of governing themselves rationally. We need programming, and our current programming is corrupt and devoid of morality or depth.
- I’d rather believe in a magic man, who came back to life after three days, than swallow another drop of this poison.
The State has become a religion for many of my countrymen, and it scares the life out of me. They shun liberal values and universal ethics, for nihilism, relativism and expediency. We are told it is our own fault there are too few homes, fuel is expensive and there isn’t enough water for gardening, while monopolies are auctioned off by a State that is in debt. We are told ‘the world is burning’, and that there are invisible problems in the sky that will cause our doom unless we support drastically radical watermelon policies. We are told that our ‘sacrifices’ are insufficient and that mother Gaia is displeased, so we need to pay the plastic bag tax, and endure soggy cardboard straws in our mouths while drinking from plastic cups because somehow that will reduce the PACIFIC OCEAN garbage patch.
Then I instinctively started to read the bible again, with fresh eyes, and recognise it for what it was. A container of the sum of the greatest collection of human wisdom gathered through millennia.
Artificial or not, this ‘coded’ text contains the programming required to recognise evil, at any time or any place. And it has the cheat codes to survive it and resist it with your soul intact.
So whether it is historically ‘true’ or not, is irrelevant to me now. Just because my radar on my ship is ‘artificial’ or abstractly-representative, doesn’t mean I’m not going to use it as a collision avoidance tool.
So when looking at the world today, with the guidance of a sense of history and universal morality, why should I be surprised at the state of affairs we see today?
The concerns we face are not new.
A ‘social credit score’ is not so different from a credit score that penalises people who’ve never indulged in consumer debt. Big tech censorship is scary because AI is new, but is nowhere near as stifling as the outright state-licensed monopolisation of technologies like TV and radio. The BBC was established as an arm of the state in the 1920s and 30s for heaven’s sake! It is a 1930s propaganda agency that the Nazis credited as being key to British victory in the war. Land use is already controlled by the town and country planning system that can regulate your use of property to a degree that King John would have been embarrassed to attempt. And what to say of eugenics, healthcare rationing and the NHS? Liverpool care pathway, anyone?
Never forget that the human default is ‘might is right’. Modern nation-states evolved from the Pareto-derived dominance of the warrior class. There is a direct link between ‘warlords’ and the ‘house of lords’ for this reason.
The warrior class tend to grow complacent in their monopolies, and in the case of the UK, may remain unchallenged for centuries at a time. With a monopoly on violence, it is difficult for a government to be held accountable by external agents, like citizens. As such, they tend to grant themselves exemptions from the rules that govern the rest of us. The fact that putting on a uniform makes a ‘killing’ legal, and therefore not murder, for example.
The origins of corporate fascism come from this separation of ‘the government,’ from the individuals that actually perform actions in the name of a government. This reification is the business model in a nutshell. Franchise out the ability to be exempt from liabilities to privateers, Hudson Bay/East India Companies, etc, and watch the royalties flow in. The limited liability corporation is said to be the economic miracle of the modern age, allowing risk-taking that would never otherwise occur.
The recent compliance of businesses with destructive diktats of the state only makes sense when you consider that LLCs exist at the pleasure of the state. And nobody bites the hand that feeds them or protects them from personal liability.
It’s what Shakespeare wrote about. It’s what the bible is about. And it is what we are all facing now, and for the next 10 years as energy prices skyrocket, inflation destroys lives and social mobility, and people are either starved or led to the slaughter.
How are we to endure the predations of power? What will be our relationship to truth? Will the cook eat his own cooking?
I doubt it.
When we reform and resurrect our society, after the inevitable upcoming collapse of the next 7 – 10 years, we need to do one major thing differently. We need a protocol for atonement. We need our leaders to face the consequences of their actions, immediately, and without exception. Just like the rest of us.