Part 1
It’s been two weeks since our last correspondence. What have we missed?
I got home over a week ago, and despite exhaustion from a four-week trip at sea, I launched into an urgent attempt to pick up some of the load from my wife. I could feel the strain increasing in her voice over the phone, day by day. In response, I’ve tried to be as hands-on with the kids as possible since I got back. I also helped her set up and run a community Easter egg hunt in the park for the primary school on Easter Sunday.
Riding bikes, scooters, a trip to the swimming baths, painting and playing. I sent my wife off to Edinburgh for a day while I looked after the wee ones. I did take a day’s work doing a couple of tiling jobs for a friend in Leith, & some invoicing/VAT, but otherwise, it’s been ‘absent-dad-reparations’ and healing time, just being a family.
You can never know what it is to be another person. I try to help, but I can’t even see the problems she has, from my perspective. Everything changes with your presence anyway, so the problems aren’t even the same. Was Schroedinger married?
It’ll be our 10-year anniversary this year, in October, and I’ll have spent more than 3 full years absent during that time. I think I’ve only been home about 3 weeks since the 01st of January. I’m not sure.
I think I’m noticing that the more I’m away, the harder my wife is on herself.
The plan is to continue this way until September now. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s worth it, but needs must at the moment.
Being a seafarer is a bit like the priesthood. It’s often not something we want to do. Most of us consider it a trap. Even those of us who love the vocation. It’s just something you can’t escape. It’s in your blood, or it isn’t. As they say in Scotland, ‘what’s for you won’t go by you’.
On Friday we all went to the Science Centre attraction in Glasgow, which was pretty fun. However, the planetarium show was hosted by a rather quirky cat lady, who – with a fun but cringeworthy pun-based sense of humour – proceeded to give us a philosophically suspect lecture on cosmology, that nobody asked for. You know the kind of philosophy I’m on about. It’s the one spouted by the overgrown man-babies on shows like The Big Bang Theory, with Attenborough-esque spiritual overtones, quotes from secular saints like Hawkins & Sagan, & a touch of the accidentally-nihilistic yet superficially profound tones of Brian Cox.
‘I don’t want you to feel…’ was the giveaway phrase that indicated the smuggling of ideology into the lecture. She said that several times, in between her condescending teacher-like admonitions for ‘grown-ups to put phones away’.
The sermon on human smallness is highly fashionable now. Similar to the ‘they don’t want us to know’ hidden history stoner talk of Graham Hancock & Joe Rogan. An ostensible attempt to provoke awe & wonder that immediately gives way to its own obvious implication. The despair and emptiness of pure enlightenment materialism. The assertion that human beings are not the centre of the universe is offered gently, to those members of the audience that the speaker imagines will reach for the razor blades as soon as this thorn presses up against their delicate ego bubble.
There was actually no mention of the miraculous big bang, but there was a gleeful desperation to talk about Nasa’s mission to find water on other planets, to once and for all finally prove that life on Earth truly is not special. A strange fascination. I wonder if the attempt is to ‘stick it’ to an imagined straw-man version of Christianity, or a desperate attempt to cure their own ego-centric worldview.
Aliens, AI, the multiverse, the metaverse. Our modern enlightened world offers so much hope for the downtrodden crack addict, the widows and the orphans.
‘I want you to go away from the planetarium today with an appreciation that you are made of starstuff, and you are the universe itself, appreciating itself, in the only place we know of within many lightyears, that offers the comfort of chicken nuggets. Sorry, it’s lunchtime, hahahaha’.
The self-appointed priestly class of ‘The Science’ has become so shallow, it beggars belief. They will quote Galileo’s discovery of the non-heliocentric motion of a moon of Jupiter as proof of nihilistic atheistic pantheism while ignoring the fact that virtually every important physicist in history has been a devoted Christian. Galileo knew that when Abraham was told his descendants would be ‘as the stars’, God meant that the permanence, predictability and immutable truth embodied by the properties of matter are the cosmic attributes that we should seek to reflect in our character. That is why Galileo was willing to submit himself to potential torture, and volunteered himself to the judgement of the church. He trusted that uncovering the truths of the universe would be akin to better knowing the force that created all of this universe.
The scientific revolution was anti-revolutionary. It was a sincere attempt to know God better, by studying His creation. Precisely the opposite of the vomit-inducing narcissism that is the hallmark of our time.
The human heart remains as much the factory of false idols as it ever was. And the prideful flare in our nature that seeks to elevate ourselves to the caricature position of control-freak deity, is the revolutionary impulse that we all need to be wary of.
We are supposed to embody the spirit of the creator, by building and caring for creation. We gain nothing by attempts at radical reductionism, which desperately attempts to destroy itself by removing all meaning. Real scientists are increasingly postulating that consciousness itself is required for quantum events to coalesce, and for reality to exist. This pop culture attempt to paint science and religion as enemies is a nonsense expression of the ego and nihilism of people possessed by the Jacobin spirit of resentment.
The cruelty of materialist modernity is that it tells us that all ills in our lives are self-imposed failures of will. That nothing exists without cause and effect. That we are the universe, and that purity of thought is only one affirmation or short-online seminar away.
Wokeness & socialism are misguided attempts to answer that worldview with violent revolution, and erasure of the individual & the family. They won’t work either, because they are based on a prideful rejection of real-world limitations.
We have seen the limits of the production line, the printing press, and the reductionist argument. We now know that we are all both the centre and the edge of the world, at all times. Old incantations are coming back, recognised as simply ‘true’. ‘Fasting is good for you’. ‘No-fap semen retention’ is back in the men’s movement. ‘People have an immutable inner identity’.
The ‘great re-learning’ of old values, the meaning of life, and the relationship between the self, the society and the cosmos are underway now. The results of these 20th-century arguments are in, and they’re not good. It’s time to go back along the trail and find out where we took a wrong turn. (More on this in Part 2)
In other news, while you slept last week, we slipped into a new world order, with multiple countries ditching the dollar standard and the BRICS nations looking boldly toward a post-Bretton-Woods world. China again threatens a rare-earth minerals export ban, which would scupper all talk of Net-Zero permanently (please pull the trigger, Uncle Xi, I’m sick of renewables clients). The US has set a dangerous precedent for the Epstein client list by prosecuting President Donald Trump for his poll-boosting hush-money scandal (Cough, cough, Clinton, Cough, oh excuse me). Nicola Sturgeon’s home was raided by police as she handed over the Scottish Executive (not a government without an army, sorry love), to Humza – I didn’t pay my car tax when I was transport secretary – Yousaf. Scotland, England, the City of London, and Ireland are all now governed by Asian men, dedicated to hardcore progressive politics.
Sunak did mention that the UK is supposed to be a nation based on Christian values this Easter. However, Yousaf, along with Khan, & Varadkar have been more blatant than Sunak in their paradoxically revolutionary attempt to make race a divisive and primary issue, in nations that their parents chose to settle in precisely because they were better (and famously more tolerant) than the ones they came from.
They know deep down that they cannot solve ‘racism’ in general. That is not within the power of the state. So, what are they up to? Why are they actively using the marginal cases of racial minority, intersex people & migrants to divide and undermine the central society that supports and protects them?
Revolution, resentment, or revenge?
Humza has been fairly explicit over the years. He’s upset at some silly Scottish teenage boys who deigned to ask him terribly racist questions like ‘why do muslims hate Amercia’ after 9/11. That’s why he wants to erase Scottish culture and make us ‘the most diverse nation on earth’. In other words, not Scotland any more.
In my recent discussion on Vampires, and Zombies, I forgot to mention the other monster that is characteristic of our unique times. The Grinch. Cynicism, resentment and envy, personified. Much of the blistering envy that drives our suicidal warfare/welfare politics and fascist model ESG stakeholder meddling, is borne out of the same narcissistic pride that refuses to accept limitation or error.
Joe Biden showed up in Northern Ireland to posture as a peace lover, while aggressively extending his unwinnable and controversial proxy war with Russia through Ukraine. All while the leaked documents from the Pentagon were confirming what we all knew already, US special forces on the ground in a proxy war, and Zelensky ordering hits on Russian soil. Sources in the Whitehouse have leaked that Biden wants the war in Ukraine to make him look tough and competent ahead of the 2024 race, to compensate for the Afghan withdrawal debacle. What’s next?
If Hunter quietly shows up as a non-exec on the board of Tayto crisps this week, expect a war with the Guinness lovers in short order.
Annheuser-Busch, a corporate member of the WEF with an ex-CIA agent on its board (yes, actually), got rinsed this week. They thought promoting a cross-dresser who LARPS as a hyper-sexualised 12-year-old girl on TikTok on their cans of Bud Light would be good marketing. Turns out, when all your customers are blue-collar guys and rednecks, that ain’t gonna fly. Their sales absolutely plummeted, and entire chains stopped purchasing Annheuser-Busch products, like Budweiser. Can you imagine America without Budweiser?! 🙂
I love the apocalypse. It’s so funny.
It shows you how absolutely egotistical the woke corporate classes are when they think they can ram anything down our throats without fear of reprisal. What the WEF membership doesn’t understand is that the working man is used to rolling his eyes at management, laughing at whatever the ‘good ideas club’ has come up with now, and forgetting about it later over a pint. But they had to go and put a picture of a man who not only insults women but promotes the sexualisation of minors (and isn’t even a real trans person) on their beer.
It has been reported that if conspiracy theories keep coming true at this rate, they will become extinct as a concept by 2030.
Oh, and the Dalai Lama is probably a Paedo!
I have to say, I called it with the Dalai Lama. I was banned from his Facebook comments over ten years ago when I started getting annoyed with his CIA-funded nonsense and calling him out on his idiotic posturing. I mean, what other world leader can go around telling ‘his people’ that their crippling poverty is a virtue and a blessing to be embraced? I know all Western leaders will soon be forced to say something similar, but he had a real cheek to be saying that while swanning around with celebrities, living in LA, fully funded by the US taxpayer.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all united in one thing. Charity.
Poverty is not virtue, and wealth in itself is not sin. If charity is required of you, then clearly poverty is not commanded of you. Quite the opposite.
You can’t fit a camel through the eye of a needle without a really good blender, sure. But I think our modern attitude to cause and effect muddies the water around the issue of wealth. Social status is so tied to the recognition of our moral character by others that it can be easy to confuse one with the other. For the average person, saying what you will do, and then doing what you said, is so fundamentally required in our everyday interactions that we hardly even notice it. And every minor deviation from that norm is immediately detected and amplified, as an early warning system that alerts us to the hazard of a potential oath-breaker in our lives. For there is no greater threat.
As social animals, our nervous systems are hard-wired to detect the slightest signs of an untrustworthy person. When you listen to young children playing, the most common complaint you will hear is ‘that’s not fair’.
Trustworthy behaviour is so fundamentally ingrained in Western culture, that it has become the water we swim in. For most of us from birth, and through most of our lives, we live by the golden rule. And for most of us, getting ahead in our studies and in the workplace depends so much on virtuous behaviour that we naturally assume that is the only way to get ahead.
And in modern, materialist times, it is often the case that the ‘great and the good’ among us really are that. The most frugal, intelligent, philanthropic, and hardest working.
The problem with a rule of thumb like that, though, is the blind spot it produces. When outward signs of wealth and social status are used as camouflage by people who are up to no good. Or when the material successes of life insulate you from reality, and (purposely or not) purchase ‘yes-man’ compliance, then we get into trouble.
It is too easy for people who are close to the source of wealth, capital, or finance to disregard the basic rules of reciprocity, respect for consent and honesty. Particularly in our late empire, fiat-fuelled world of technocratic cartels, ESG commies, accompanied by shrieking social-media virtue signalling to reinforce unearned virtue-status.
Our current society is based on fraud, and so much of the authority our elites and institutions enjoy is historic. They are running on fumes and resting on the laurels of champions long gone. The luxury opinions of the wokerati, licensed professionals, and subsidised people of every stripe will quickly disappear when folk have to pay their own way and face the full force of the storm that is coming.
My problem with conspiracy realists these past few years has not been the factual or logical components of their claims. Aside from the Birds aren’t real, Flat Earth, & Australia isn’t real conspiracies, most of them have an element of plausibility about them.
My problem is the failure to acknowledge the complicity that the average person brings to the problem. The Zombie & the Grinch are characters that we all embody to some degree, at some time or another, and these elements of our character are what support the predatory elements of our society – the Vampires.
It’s all very well blaming evil Davosian lizard people for circumventing democratic processes and enforcing one-world governance by the stealth of international treaty. But if people lose their minds every time one iota of currency-inflating spending is reduced, like the French burning down a 200-year-old town hall because their pension age has crept up 2 years, then we collectively share as much blame as the out-of-touch technocrats.
We need to curb the revolutionary spirit before it turns into civil war. And nothing in our current narrative seems to be trying to do that or reinstate any kind of unity. The Ukraine & Rainbow Nazi flags flying on British and American street corners are already drawing battle lines, and disintegrating the centres that bound previous generations.
The externalisation of blame is too simplistic and materialistic. It entices us to destruction by implying that ‘those people’ are the bad guys, and we just need to get rid of them or subjugate them, and then utopia will ensue.
That doesn’t aid truth. It doesn’t touch on all the levels of life, or society, or on the complexity of the world.
Excessive abstraction is the scourge of modern thought.
Reconnecting with the experience of reality is what we need to think about most urgently. Knowing what is real through its contrast will lead us back from the brink. Revolutionaries serve to affirm the very bedrock of reality that they are rejecting when it’s their own turn for the Guillotine.
In governance, as in management, and in life, ego is the enemy.
Having a mythological framework for how to exist in the world is an absolute necessity if we are to have proper hierarchies in our life, work and society. And that must include something above our managerial class, lest we become prisoners of the arbitrary.
Cross- shaped communication has become the biggest part of my work recently, and it helps with this problem. That is, to proceed from left to right, we need to communicate from sea level, up to the top of the hierarchy, over and over, at every step, to get things done.
The ship I’ve just returned from was really pretty great. Good food, comfortable living situation, great crew, etc. But the last two weeks of my 4-week hitch were really quite difficult. Of the final 14 days, I only spent far less than half that time at sea or engaged in productive work. The bulk of the time was spent in audits, meetings, meetings about meetings, on phone calls, trials and facing down commercial pressures from multiple client reps and project managers who did not know the first thing about the technical side of what we do at sea.
One client had us running around the boat doing fire drills, diver rescue drills, and MOB drills, filling out checklists and jumping through endless hoops before they would sign the on-hire certificate. Then they complained that we were running behind schedule. Their observations and complaints were garbage. The HSE inspector was not a seaman, and so had little of use to say. A good thing though, as we actually did perform about 8 minor violations while he was on board, of which he was oblivious.
These guys were absolutely desperate to sabotage their own project, by trying to make as many safety observations as possible. One guy actually got hit in the head by a piece of project cargo suspended from a crane. The blow knocked his hard hat from his head, which luckily did its job and prevented injury. But the hard hat fell into the sea.
No concern was expressed for the well-being of the crew member. The safety power rangers were concerned only with the fact that for five minutes after the incident, he was on deck without adequate PPE! Also, they wanted to write up a plastics pollution incident for the helmet going overboard. Fortunately, we recovered the helmet and put it back on his head before too much paperwork could be generated.
The project manager & client rep acted as if we’d murdered a toddler when he saw a deckhand climb a six-foot ladder ‘without a harness’. In harbour, in flat calm, level trim condition, without a lick of wind.
We all had to sit through hours of PowerPoint presentations and sign ominous-looking documents to promise that we wouldn’t rive the boat over any seabirds, and if we saw any dead fish or birds to report them immediately to marine traffic control, and the ministry. Neil Ferguson’s calculator reckons one in five of us will die from bird flu this year, so I took that one really seriously.
During one of the audits, one crew member reported feeling poorly. One of the poor Pavlovian officers immediately gave him a covid lateral flow test, of which, many were still kept on board. He tested positive for Covid, while we had 20 divers and HSE visitors on board.
There had been some rumours this year that divers were a special case, because a diver had covid-ear (I swear, people actually say this with a straight face), and it caused him to go deaf while working under pressure at depth.
In truth, all restrictions have been lifted, even for divers. The only regulation or procedure for them that I could find still in place, was a rule that allows them more time off than other people before coming back to work diving after illness with Covid.
But would people listen?
The sailors didn’t give a toss, for the most part. And the divers weren’t bothered at all. But the bloody landlubbers!
These clipboard cretins were falling over themselves to make a big show of ‘compassion’ and ‘carefulness’. Each trying to out-careful the other.
Some people should never have been taught the phrase ‘duty of care’.
They confined the sailor to his cabin until all the shore guys and divers went ashore to their hotel in the evening. Then the sailor was sent ashore to a hotel for 4 days, so we sailed short-handed to do an anchor handling job, with only one deckhand (but we don’t have an MCA Safe Manning Doc, so we got away with it). They wanted to fumigate the entire ship with a machine that produces a cloud of hand sanitiser to sterilise every surface. I pointed out this was pointless because the entire crew and all the divers etc had already spent 12 hours working in close proximity with the infected chap, including two meals together, sitting around a crowded mess room table.
Two officers offered to scrub the entire ship anyway, at which point I had to explain to them the pointlessness, and basic concepts like ‘minimum effective dose’ of a viral load.
Several of the crew didn’t believe covid was ever a threat to begin with (correct), and the remainder had stopped taking their booster shots a long time ago, due to suspected vax injuries.
Bear in mind that Vax injuries are supposed to be rarer than lightning strikes, three out of our 8 man crew reported serious side effects within hours of having a dose of mRNA. One bled uncontrollably from his nose for almost 18 hours, filling the Pyrex mixing bowl he took to the hospital waiting room before they saw him. Another guy stopped ashore for his booster before sailing to Shetland. By the time they got him off in Lerwick, the doctor said he was lucky he came in just in time to prevent permanent blindness, as the blood clot in his neck was so severe. One of my officers had also suffered serious clotting and passed out immediately after taking his first dose of AstraZeneca. He was still persuaded to have a Pfizer & a Moderna (collecting all three NHS Pokémon cards). He stopped at three and is now on blood thinners for the rest of his life.
So we lost a crewman due to Covid, which nobody on board cared about. Unlike covid, anchor handling short-handed is actually dangerous. But the engineers helped out on the deck, and we got the anchor spread laid ready for the job, per the client’s spec.
Upon arrival back at Whitby, all hell broke loose, as the naval architecture firm – who had our mooring plan for months – decided the mooring analysis was unsafe. On return to the location, we’d have to undo & replace all the work we had just done.
The quarantined crewman tested negative and returned to us before sailing again. Firstly, the weather forecast was wrong, and the wave heights were out of limits, although no client would accept our word for it, so we were pressured into sailing prematurely into rough weather. I was legitimately scared I’d hit the piers coming out of Whitby, given the NE swell, but I put the hammers down and gunned her out before we could hit. Interestingly, the client & project manager declined to join us on this part of the job. As the Hebrews say – On your ass, the beating doesn’t hurt me). Of course, when we went out, someone else got sick and tested positive for covid.
I told him he didn’t have to test, but people have actually been conditioned to believe it is really important to still worry about this disease.
The entire premise for covid being dangerous was that it was a completely ‘novel’ virus, for which no immunity existed. The fact that it was called Version 2 of SARS, or that Covid-19 indicates this virus is four years old already, doesn’t seem to have removed the novelty for some people.
The fact that it officially killed people with an average age of 83, with an average of 6 co-morbidities, also doesn’t seem to have been processed in some people’s tiny minds. I’ve lived in neighbourhoods in Glasgow where the life expectancy for a man was 58. Seafaring itself has a far higher mortality rate than Covid, especially for a bunch of super-fit Scuba divers, and healthy guys in their 20s-40s.
The F*cking safety cretins wouldn’t let it go.
They wanted everyone to test every day, and for us to burn £15K per day, sitting doing nothing, and delaying the project, as a quarantined plague boat.
Teams call after teams call.
In the end, I told them, ‘There is no legal requirement for this. You cannot make people test, and you cannot make people quarantine. I’m self-employed. There is not a chance in hell I’m taking a test and allowing you to confine me to my cabin for a week when I’m supposed to be going home in 2 days. I’ve told the divers, and if they want to come to work, it’s their choice. They’re big boys. But I’m not testing, and I will not ask anyone to test for this stupid disease’.
They let it go.
But to be fair they had bigger problems.
They spent £1 million on a crew transfer vessel to get the divers out to join us on location each morning, and it didn’t work. They’d designed a weird gangway contraption, and come up with a completely novel design for their transfer arrangement.
Whenever the CTV tried to come alongside us for transfers, the size differential between the two vessels meant they were rolling at a different rate. This seemingly innocuous issue produced a motion so violent, that we ripped steel bollards off the CTV (again), tore strips off her fender work, and smashed up her hull.
The power rangers, and an incredulous owner, insisted that we ‘try again’. They were certain that their idea ‘should work’.
I forget exactly how many times we tried, but at least 12 or 15 attempts were made before I just had to shout them down.
‘You’ve had 12 stop-the-job incidents doing this. You want me to keep trying things we’ve already tried!? The CTV is now damaged, and unprotected where we ripped her fenders off. We have already tried every heading and way of doing this. It doesn’t work. You guys are all about safety, safety, safety inshore when people are looking, but as soon as you send us offshore and starting spending money, all of that goes out the f*cking window, doesn’t it!? Does the client & the owner know how many times we’ve stopped the job on this? I’m only doing it again when I have an updated risk assessment & acknowledgement of these incidents in writing, and I know the site manager is aware of what you’re asking me to do’.
Radio silence for a couple of hours.
Then a Teams meeting, with the owner of the CTV, who could not accept that his 31 million investment in a novel idea, had been a complete waste.
Too bad.
We found a local tug boat to do the transfers instead.
It wouldn’t hurt so much to be right all the time, but the idiots I’m shooting down on these jobs are on double my day rate!
We had to do our own crew transfer by skiff, as the ship was too big to fit into the nearest harbour. I signed off in Bridlington and spent the long train ride home liquidating my stress and catching up on my reading.
I’ve been reading the book of Judges recently. It’s historically tied to the total anarchy of the Bronze Age collapse, and it is a terrifying account of warlords and corruption. Mad Max and Judge Dredd have their roots in this biblical account, but they have nothing on it. You could lose your mind if you read it out of context.
One thing that always caused me a kind of thought-paralysis was the old-world assertion that the fear of God was the beginning of wisdom. That God-fearing people were virtuous.
This idea seemed entirely paradoxical. Self-contradictory enough to be considered proof of the emptiness of religion, and sufficient evidence for disregarding the lot of it.
How can they insist that God is love & truth, but at the same time be feared?
However, I think I get it now.
We live in our own little bubbles of BS. We need to fear the judgement of reality itself. Fear of falling short of the demands of truth and love is really something to fear.
This touches on the objections some of my best and most learned friends have with religion. How can you know which God is worthy of worship over another? Isn’t it all the same? Just a bunch of idiots getting together and singing to their imaginary friend once a week? That’s how we ended up with Covid panic. Everyone is stupid [insert the always implied but never stated caveat] – except me!
Fear of the wrong kind produces so many of our failures. Pride stops us from seeing, hearing, and feeling the problems of our own making.
The client reps and the project managers feared that their past 4 years of sacrifice were pointless. Their pride wouldn’t let them acknowledge the new reality that even the state has given up on Covidiocy. Their pride wouldn’t let them see that they were pushing unsafe working practices, and endangering human life, purely because they wouldn’t admit to their £1 Million mistake.
The proper antidote to pride is to have enough humility to listen to those lower than you in your hierarchy, and relate sense data and feedback to higher principles you know to be true.
That is something we need to practice in ourselves, our work, and in our society, if things are going to get better.
Part 2 coming soon…