Peacocks in the Jungle

Sex Re-Education Campaigns, Pride, Harm, Norms and Sailors.

It’s hard to know where the time goes. I’ve been home for 1.5 weeks. Five days were spent doing ‘ultra-parenting’, taking the kids away from the wife to compensate her for my absence. This week I’ve been enjoying the greatly enhanced energy that comes with a combination of Vitamin B3 Nicotinamide, Tongkat Ali, caffeine, and a ticking clock. I’ve ripped my bathroom out, back to the studs, and now I have to renovate it before I head back to sea in a couple of weeks. It’s exciting.

Professionally I’ve been in a weird place. A few different companies have approached me. Some like me as I am. I am really excited about an idea to partner with a tall ship charity of some maritime education. Others want me to get my next ticket up to complete the set before doing anything. And, I’ve signed an NDA about cool maritime A.I. projects.

One former mentor and teacher, who is a fairly wealthy crypto guy and former captain, said; ‘Who cares what all ships you are driving and heroics you are doing? Nobody can see you. You are a peacock dancing in the jungle. You need to be in the city with me talking to Kings and Prime Ministers. To f*cking Bill Gates’.

I don’t know. I like the jungle.

As seductive as flattery is, it doesn’t ever sit right with me. Appealing to my pride and ego works, but it always makes me feel like I’m being manipulated. I know it’s verboten to say this in June, but Pride is a sin.

Seneca didn’t know what he was on about. The human being is a fundamentally religious creature. The occult symbolism visible at the top should serve to underline this. One thing I learned through the Covid times was that there is not one person on this earth who doesn’t live within a story. Regardless of how reductionist, materialist or syllogistically rational they may appear, nobody is exempt from their story.

For example, while it may be true that most traditional vaccines reduce the numbers of deaths from the disease they are said to prevent, it is also true that none of them has ever been tested against a placebo, or against all cause mortality. Only single-factor analysis is ever done. In fact, the studies that do compare against totally unvaccinated populations in Africa have suggested that we may save 1 million children per year by removing the DTaP vaccines from the schedule. But this goes against the story.

Most people in the middle and working classes in the US and UK generally value the works of the intellect over those of the body. From being patted on the head approvingly as a child, up to postgrad degrees and state honours, many of us allow our self-worth and identity to become tied up entirely in the approval of others. And if the sources of those warm fuzzy feelings of approval ever tell us not to think or say a certain thing, most people can’t muster the courage to disagree. For that would be like bringing bad news to your elderly grandmother on her last day on earth in the care home. You simply wouldn’t do that, now would you?

But what would you say to Bill Gates in person?

I think I’d start with, why do you think it’s acceptable for you to own an actual mosquito factory that pumps out mutant death gnats into Africa? And segway from there into getting the full history of how the eugenicists have enjoyed total regulatory capture in the US, UK and Europe for 150 years.

Stories matter. I’d at least hear him out. Love your enemy and all that.

How do we get through this life? We interact with nature and society. We extrapolate and we interpolate. We draw general conclusions. If any of those conclusions or claims can be articulated well enough in language to be predictive and stable across space and time, we accept those claims ad facts. If conclusions are inherently logical, self-definitive, or internally coherent of their own accord, we call those principles.

Reality simply is.

The problem with eugenicists is that they believe they are ‘selecting’ for general strength in nature. In truth, all they select for is the ability to fly below the radar in human society. Ultimately, they are breeding us to be more suspicious, sowing the seeds of doom for authoritarianism in the process.

Describing, naming and articulating specific details of reality is secondary. Living in an objective world, we have only a relative viewpoint and subjective tools with which to participate in reality.

Religio therefore enters into the equation as the human activity of bringing together all of the elements of observation and focusing them into a point of attention.

AI still has no will of its own. It is simply the acceleration of algorithms and aggregation of human inputs. It still requires human beings to direct it’s attention. While y’all are being bombarded by marketeers telling you how revolutionary their Chat-GPT plugins are, and various get-rich-quick schemes clutter your Linked In feed, have you ever actually watched an AI-generated video? Creepy and soulless, right?

Our bodies and minds form a ziggurat. A pyramid with a wide base of lifetime observations, escalating in levels, up to an apex focal point of attention to the principle that governs the base. The power of AI is to harness the human beings’ nature. The demonstrations of holiness, creativity, destruction, and attention that make the world exist are divine and human.

Like Henry Reed joining the army, every inductee to a new ship is immediately guided through the naming of parts. For total beginners, this takes a long time. The pointy bit at the front is the ‘bow’. (Bow like Bauhaus, not bow like a rainbow). When you face the bow, the right-hand side is starboard, and the left-hand side is port. When you face the stern (the back end, opposite the bow), port remains port, even though it is on your right-hand side now. Moving side to side across the deck is called going ‘athwartships’. When you stand on deck, you are on board, because you’re standing on the boards, which are now steel plates but used to be called boards. Mouse holes, monkey islands, back-scratchers, yard arms, hawsers, cables (which are chains, but historically used to be ropes, so we still call them cables), shackles, shots, coamings, hatches, ports, scuttles, scuppers, galley, heads, cabin, bridge (which used to be a platform like a bridge on land, raised over the paddles of paddle steamers, to allow one to view their free movement, but is now an enclosed compartment, also called the wheelhouse, because that’s where the wheel is controlled from). Etc.

The naming of parts induction gets quicker the saltier you are, and so parts go unnamed. Only a five-minute description of the following locations are required: 1. Cabin, 2. Muster station. 3. Liferafts 4. Emergency gear. 5. Food. 6. Laundry 7. Toilets.

This is like culture and society. Our bodies corporate and public have many parts, and much of modern university education is geared toward teaching initiates the identity and location of the ever-multiplying plethora of the parts of the ship of state that – if prodded and caressed with the right language – may spew forth funding or policy that is favourable to the initiate. How to operate the apparatus of society is now the primary aim of most degree programs. The byzantification and explosion of our regulatory landscape serves itself, as young people are taught that regulatory control and expansion is the moral and good purpose of their lives and society. In truth, this is the welfare of the middle and upper classes. Inventing and reinventing regulations that are ever churning and are tortuous to navigate, provides the lawyers and the accountants and the political connected with ever-increasing avenues for monopoly and income.

Regulatory capture is not just for the billionaire elites. It is the hallmark of our time and the real purpose behind much public policy.

It doesn’t matter if policy A, B or C achieves any of its stated aims. Like Rishi Sunak’s scheme to create food shortages with price controls, for example. (Another win for the conspiracy theorists btw). It only matters that the never-ending game is played in the right courts, with the right ball, and the right person gets to be the referee.

Activism is an industry.

Pride Month – which is both industrial activism and corporate camouflage at scale – has served as an illustrative backdrop to what has been going on in my world for the past couple of weeks since we spoke last.

I don’t know why or how it entered into the international calendar of the new religious world order of mandatory secular communism that we should ‘celebrate’ the deadliest sin. But it is interesting that people, particularly my American brothers and sisters, now treat this commie smug-fest as if it were a tradition of such permanence and pedigree, as to be held on a par with Thanksgiving or mothers’ day. And I don’t know if it is derived from the stolen valour of memorial day, and Armed Forces Day in June, or if it was a conscious attempt to subvert those other forms of pride?

Pride as a form of gratitude for the sacrifices of others is one thing. Pride in your actions is another. But pride in your sexual preference, which is something you ‘are’ immutably born with if you are homosexual, but something that can change at a moment’s notice if you are at the Ts, Qs, Plus section of the scale, is something else.

I have gay and bisexual friends in the UK, and they are normal and honourable people. Gay people I’ve met in the US though, have a different vibe. There is a genuine fearfulness and paranoia among the sort of New York musical theatre-type homosexuals that my wife was friends with, is palpable. They speak of ‘their anxiety’, with possessive angst. They are convinced that the only group of people in existence with the creed ‘love your enemy’, are secretly plotting to massacre every last one of them. They think that the existence of traditional marriage is a threat to their existence, by way of statistical aggregation. Despite, presumably, all having biological parents themselves.

I think it is this paranoia that fuels the true danger of ‘pride month’. The activist types are convinced that any idea of a ‘norm’ – any norm – is a harmful and existential threat to them. That is why they have moved from seeking legal equality to aggressive politicisation. Normative standards themselves must be subverted. This is not because these are people taking action to right historical injustices, but because they are living in fear.

‘Happy Pride’ is a phrase I heard this year but have not ever heard uttered before.

My daughter is only eight years old. She has just stopped holding my hand in the school playground recently, but will still hold it when we go for a walk elsewhere. She is not yet pubescent. And yet I was informed by West Lothian Council this week that they will begin her ‘health education’ this term. Starting with sex education, the role of parents, similarity, sexuality, and other thinly veiled political agenda items. The letter is standard across Scotland and does not request a signature or parental consent. The onus is on the parent to object directly to her teacher, who is a cow. So that’s the world we live in now.

At least the UK has banned secret gender-affirming surgery for minors now.

I’m going to be 38 soon, but I already feel like the old man in Orwell’s 1984, who sits at the back of the pub and dimly remembers the before time.

This last trip at sea was a bit like going back to the before time. In many ways, this was one of the most relaxed trips at sea of my career. In some other ways, one of the least pleasant.

After two weeks sitting alongside in Aberdeen, I was afforded many opportunities to walk down memory lane – Old Aberdeen High Street – and to meet old friends, and make new acquaintances. I visited the maritime museum and all of my old haunts. I had some fun shifting around the harbour and played with the ship in ways I haven’t had the opportunity to in tighter ports. I also received an intuition that I had come full circle in my career development.

That insight was further underlined in the final week of the trip when our Shetland project was cancelled, and I was asked to bring the vessel down to Hull. While underway, I received news that I wouldn’t be going to the King George Dock as previously thought, but the Alexandra Dock. And right inside the extension, which meant bringing a 15 m wide ship through an 18 m wide gap.

The Humber is no joke. Not only do you face tidal streams of up to 4 knots on the beam – which is a really big deal in a 499 GT ship with a 1000 T displacement, that can only do 7 knots max at the best of times – but the traffic is about as busy as it gets in the UK. And you are being watched all the time by a Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) with the regulatory teeth to actually give you orders.

I slowed-steamed down at 5.5 knots, instead of 7 knots. Despite the desperate sense of urgency from the company superintendent, I knew there was no rush to get down here because we are not going to go ‘on-hire’ until Tuesday. Because increasing speed means an exponential rise in fuel consumption, by taking 48 hours to make the transit instead of 39 hours, I cut our fuel consumption in half. I burned seven tons of diesel instead of the sixteen tons that I ‘should have’ if I’d listened to instruction.

[You see kids, disobeying orders is good for the environment, and the balance sheet! 😉 ]

An additional benefit was arriving at 10 am instead of 1 am and being able to manoeuvre in daylight instead of darkness, with full rest instead of sleep deprivation, and at high water slack neaps, instead of fighting a raging four-knot cross-current.

It was rather poetic to pull up to the exact same berth where I took my first command over a year ago, but on a much larger ship, doing the tightest manoeuvre it’s possible to do in this port. Last year I was struggling to remember how to steer down a buoyed channel, after five years ashore. This year I’m doing things that I would have panicked over, not so long ago.

We powered through our jobs on the Friday, cleaned the ship, and got ready for the survey equipment that was due to be installed over the weekend. I started a new medical inventory spreadsheet on Excel and did ship stability calculations to ascertain exactly how much cargo we’ll be able to load on Tuesday before going over our plimsoll lines.

The Saturday was forecast to be 24°C, which was the warmest day of the year any of us would have experienced so far in 2023. Nestled tightly between several large sheds and warehouses in this slightly dilapidated fishing port, turned Siemens-Gamesa renewables hub, it would feel even warmer with no exposure to wind or waves.

The first time I came to Hull I thought it was a very unpleasant and run-down place. But after spending so much time on the east coast, I now appreciate these former industrial centres for what they are. Strangely beautiful concrete memorials of intergenerational productivity. Rough, rusty, but ready shelters from tide, river flow and weather. Quiet. Still. Solid, but penetrated by giant red poppies, daisies, and other assorted long grasses and wildflowers that burst forth between the mature cracks in the neglected constructions of North-East England’s crumbling infrastructure.

It may not be obviously beautiful, but it is a place that felt peaceful in the sun. A place that brings protection and profit at the same time.

We were far from the town, and there were no pubs within 45 minute’s walk of the port, so I put in some cash and started a whip-round, so we could get some beer and wine together for a barbeque on the main deck. Cookie put on a fantastic spread (he worked in Australia for years, so he knows how to do a proper sausage sizzle), and we had chicken shish kebabs, ribs, burgers, sausages, salads, steaks, the works. With the ship alongside for several days ‘mobbing up’, we were safe to enjoy this bank holiday weekend in peace.

The energy industry generally operates with a zero tolerance for alcohol, but we were off duty for the next several days, and out of sight of anyone.

It was absolutely brilliant. I haven’t had a barbeque on a ship since probably 2006. And it was a great morale booster to have the whole crew sitting in the sun for hours together and having a rare time of it.

That’s what being at sea was all about years ago. The camaraderie of utilitarian friendship is a real and valuable thing. Something that energy companies have steadily been eradicating, in the name of safety, for many years.

The trouble with that is that safety leadership requires trust. And without bonding, there can be no trust (or very little). And without trust, or the opportunity to demonstrate care for each other, then there is no coherence to the body that is meant to serve the enterprise.

Somewhere along the way, the human element became the enemy, and this type of social event went by the wayside.

I was very happy to resurrect the tradition.

Tommy, our monkey-hanger bosun with a skipper’s ticket and near sixty years of sea time, said – ‘F*ckin’ ‘ell. I ‘aven’t felt this relaxed on the f*ckin boat in f*ckin’ years, and, an’, an’ f*ckin’ years’.

I took that as a compliment.

Tommy is a diamond. Every boat needs a Tommy. He’s the kind of old timer that makes your life as skipper an absolute dream. Do we need a rope or a chain for this lift? What about that hydraulic release? Does the daughter craft have enough horsepower to assist in hauling that anchor? How the heck are we going to change that lightbulb on the end of the yard arm? In any and every case, if you listen to Tommy, you’ll be fine.

Tommy started out fishing on boats that had no toilets on board. Apprentices in those days were made to hold up the nets while the more experienced hands repaired them. If the youngster’s grip loosened or their elevation wavered, their knuckles were whipped roughly with the sharp end of the needle. After two decades of fishing, his marriage was on the rocks due to his heavy drinking during the ‘feast’ phases, of the feast and famine lifestyle. But called back ashore urgently one day, his marriage found a new purpose and another twenty years of life when his daughter gave birth to a girl with Down Syndrome. Tommy turned his life around, became deck foreman on cable layers making £110K a year nearly tax free, and took care of everyone around him financially. He loves his granddaughter, and although he is now newly divorced in his sixties, he has no hard feelings. He spends every moment of his life ashore helping his daughter and granddaughter. He lives for others.

He’s an ugly, rough old b*stard. But he’s a real seaman, and you cannot tell me he isn’t doing the lord’s work here on earth.

It was Tommy’s seasoned eye that immediately caught the signs that would predict the next morning’s incident.

Two of the older guys on the boat lived locally, and because I knew we weren’t sailing, I permitted them leave to go home and visit their wives. I also allowed a couple of guys off during the day to go shopping and visit the museum nearby.

Despite not sailing, you still need to keep a minimum number on board from each department, in case of any machinery alarms or fire, etc, that might require skilled intervention. So, this meant that I’d be stuck on board. But that was fine, I was happy to do it.

The chief engineer also lived locally, twenty minutes away, in fact. And since the new second engineer had joined a week ago in his hometown of Aberdeen and stayed at home every single night with his wife and daughter before sailing, I assumed he’d be keenly and gratefully returning the favour to the chief engineer by being ‘on the bells’ (on call) every night, to allow the chief home.

So when he said ‘I’m just going to town to meet a friend’, we didn’t think much of it.

But as he waddled up the gangway ashore, Tommy said, ‘where the ‘ell’s he going with that big bloody backpack on? Timbuktu? Dirty b*stard’s goin for a whoore’.

Sure enough, the next day, the engineer was AWOL.

He didn’t arrive back to the vessel until 10.30 am the next day, so I had to give him a warning. Because the ship was not due to sail, and no financial harm had come to the operation due to his absence, I was limited in what I could do.

I held the disciplinary on the bridge with his supervisor, and he gave us some BS story about how he had gone to Doncaster (1 to 2 hrs away, depending on the train) to meet his friend. He claimed he’d told the chief engineer, but he hadn’t. He showed me something that seemed to suggest his return train was cancelled. He said that’s why he stayed at his friend’s house to get the return train in the morning.

I told him I didn’t believe a word he said. I told him he didn’t ask us permission because he knew it was unreasonable to go so far away from the ship as to be unreachable, and he lied because he knew we’d say no. I told him I saw his bag was very full when he left, and I suspected it was full with his overnight gear.

I gave him an informal warning but informed the on-signing master and the company of the transgression. I gave him a copy of section 70 of the Merchant Shipping Act, and section 5 of the Merchant Navy Code of Conduct and told him to get out of my sight.

I hate conflict. But what I hate more is lies and liars. Especially idiots who think they ‘got away with it’.

That man almost certainly went out and spent the night with either a prostitute or a Tinder date. In either case, nobody would have bothered, if he’d just owned it, but made sure he got back for duty on time. Instead, he lied.

But he has a wife and a young kid at home. So that’s probably why he lied.

Sailors are used to sexual immorality. Most of the guys who use prostitutes, it’s because they have been outside of society for so long that they are unable or unwilling to put in the time it takes to have an actual relationship. Most of us have already completed Porn Hub by the second trip, and 100% of the hard drive collection on board by the third trip. For many, sex quickly just becomes a transaction.

‘I must discharge’ is something I’ve heard many an engineer say, on their way up the gangway to a whore house. As if they were performing maintenance on the bilge water tank.

Others take a ‘sea wife’. Although, with only 2% females at sea, and most of those only on passenger ships, you can imagine the true meaning of ‘sea wife’. I had plenty of Filipino colleagues on the cruise ships who were ‘gay while underway’ but didn’t consider themselves gay because they were married and Catholic back home.

Identity versus action.

Homosexuality wasn’t an identity for those people or something they were. It was something they did from time to time. Particularly when the internet was slow.

That’s what makes woke corporatism so tedious in the maritime sector. These cretins are going around as if they’ve discovered some great new and noble cause under which to unite and suffer.

In truth, on my ship, in society, and in among our elected and corporate overlords, nothing is new under the sun. AI and the loss of anonymity brought about by the internet can be used for control and tyranny, but it will work both ways.

Do the people who visited Epstein Island really think that AI and a rules-based order will continue to leave them exempt?

In the early church, confessions were not made privately behind closed doors, veils or screens. They were made in public, in front of everyone. I predict a return of this phenomenon in the immediate future.

The man who cheats on his wife and child is one thing. But the one who lies about it, even when caught, to protect his pride and ego is another. He is the one who will never admit fault. He will never develop. He will never be trusted. He will never reach the next level. He is a prisoner of pride.

The same goes for our colleagues, business partners, governments, friends, families and institutions.

Those who do not repent or admit fault will never be trusted again. One day, the rules will apply to everyone. If Klaus Schwab wants a world without privacy, he’ll get it. Good and hard.

You are never ‘good’ because of who you are. Only what you do, matters.

PS, rock bags as promised. 4T each, but not as protective as you might think. Large spans of these pipelines apparently remain exposed, as the seabed scours away around the bags and cement coverings: