Please, close your eyes right now, and make a wish.
Go on.
I’ll wait.
I think it’s worth doing from time to time. Whatever your heart really desires right now, can probably reveal to you all that is worthy of gratitude in your life, and what you need to be doing less of.
My sweet little boy turned five recently, in August. The poor little guy suffers from all the typical injustices of the middle child, but he bears them well. He has trouble eating anything that isn’t cheese, very crispy streaky bacon, black pudding, apples or candy, but I’m sure he’ll grow out of that. He doesn’t ask for much aside from the occasional episode of Sonic the Hedgehog on TV, or a walk to the park with a football now and again. So when he lay in bed with a deeply pensive look on his face, and a sincerely heavy tone in his voice, I paid close attention.
‘Daddy’?
‘Yes’
‘Do you remember the, when you, gived me a penny? And there were lots of pennies in the water on the wee bridge’?
‘Oh, you mean the wishing well in Ireland’?
‘Yeeeaaaah’! (Look of worry intensifies). ‘Well, my wish didn’t come true’.
‘Well, what did you wish for’?
[At this point, his expression of suspicion and tight-lipped silence reminded me that every child knows, that if you dare to say your wish aloud, it may not come true].
‘If it hasn’t come true by now, it probably won’t, so why don’t you let me know what you wished for, and I’ll see if I can help it come true’?
‘Well, I wished for, in the morning, every day when it’s time to wake up, a little toad would come and wake me up and say “HELLO”!’
I burst out laughing.
‘Well, son. There are no toads in our house, and I lock the doors at night, so they might have trouble getting in’.
‘But Elliot wished for an ice lolly, and his wish came true the next day’!
[Barely holding back tears of laughter] ‘Well, you see son, we say – be careful what you wish for – I guess that can mean many things.’
I needed the laugh. It has been an emotional week.
I am now qualified to work inside an offshore wind turbine. This week I completed the basic manual handling, working at height, rescue of persons working at height, first aid, sea survival and fire fighting training required by the Global Wind Organisation, whatever that is, to climb their precious towers. Although having viewed the statistics on injuries and fatalities, the training makes a lot of sense now.
Stats from the year 2000 to 2017 show an average of about 20 to 30 fatalities, and around 160 serious injuries per year working on wind turbines. I’m not sure if that is just the UK, or Europe, or worldwide. They didn’t say, but since offshore wind turbines are mainly situated in the North Sea and the Taiwan Strait, and are largely crewed by the same people, it doesn’t seem to matter much. These are injuries only on the turbines once active and do not include incidents on the ships that service or construct them.
Considering that the entire global nuclear industry, including Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island and Fukushima have only managed to produce an average of one fatality every 33 years. So it will take another 660 years of nuclear to equal one year of fatalities on wind turbines.
Never mind about killing the little birdies. I think the human safety record for ‘Green™’ energy is pretty poor.
Our ‘basic first aid’ training went beyond the usual bandages, splints and CPR training for a course at this level, and covered more advanced techniques like the use of tourniquets to arrest catastrophic bleeding. Our instructor was a grizzled veteran. A former Royal Marine battlefield medic with fifteen years of combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, so he speaks with authority in their use.
‘Keep your tourniquets on your person within easy reach at all times, and not in the medical crash bag. If someone is missing a limb, or suffering an extreme impalement, you will not have time to look in a bag or even your pocket. You must apply the tourniquet immediately – We each apply one to our own legs and begin to tighten the ratchet – Twist tightly to stop all arterial bleeding. This should cause extreme pain to your patient if done correctly. In Afghanistan, my patients said the tourniquet was more painful than their bullet wounds that’s when you know it’s working’.
It’s hard to say whether the battlefield medicine is actually required in practice very often, or if the training course has been influenced by the fact that a lot of the early pioneers in the wind industry were ex-armed forces. Upon leaving the military, many of them were given sizeable sums of money for ‘retraining’, and just happened to end up in heavily government-subsidised energy programs. Almost as though the government were trying to ‘make work’ for people they were releasing into civvy life?
I’m sure I’ll figure that out a bit more, as I venture into marine warranty surveys and the offshore client rep contracts I hope to start picking up.
We spent two days climbing ladders with various types of ropes, harnesses and fall arrest devices. We practised rescuing ourselves and others suspended at height using a MILAN Rescue Device. This involved jumping out of hatches about 20 feet in the air and relying on the gear to get you down safely. You have to put a lot of faith in these little bits of nylon. We practice solo and in pairs.
If someone is rendered unconscious while working at height, they reckon you have fifteen minutes to get to them before ‘suspension trauma’ kicks in. This is something the Romans were a big fan of, as the actual cause of death in crucifixion.
With only five guys on the course we got to know each other quite well, checking each other’s gear, wrapping our legs around each other during descents, or squeezing past each other to get up and down the ladders.
The sea survival was similarly intimate, as we practiced swimming as a group, to present a larger visual target for search and rescue helicopters. This one differs from the course for ships in that you go in a little boat, and practice getting out of it and climbing a small wind turbine ladder. You also practice getting into a helicopter rescue sling and being hoisted up on a winch out of the water – which, inexplicably, is not part of the regular ship’s sea survival course (STCW). I hurt some of my fingers getting into the liferaft, and they’re still throbbing slightly now, four days on.
The final day of training was really quite fun. They set a tank of diesel on fire, and you have to extinguish it with the use of various extinguishers. Then, to simulate a generator fire in a turbine nacelle, they use a forty-foot shipping container filled with smoke. You are blindfolded just to make sure you can’t cheat, and you are required to perform the ‘BA Shuffle’. This comical method of walking blindly through a smoke-filled compartment, while feeling for the structural integrity of the deck and bulkheads with flailing arms and feet, allows you to ‘map out’ an unfamiliar space in total darkness. You perform a search of this smoke-filled space for the MILAN rescue equipment, which you must then rig correctly, while blindfolded, and make yourself ready to bail out the turbine – which in real life may be 100 metres in the air.
I do love this aspect of my job. Renewing my firefighting training every few years is always a highlight of the occupation. But the heavier element of the training is where they make you watch lots of videos of real-life incidents, where people die. Accident reports are then followed by group discussions to prepare us mentally for dealing with similar scenarios.
That part is always sobering. Like the case of a turbine on fire in Germany, where the two technicians had seconds to decide their fate, as the nacelle was quickly engulfed in flames. One jumped twenty metres to his death rather than face the flames. The other ‘was never found’, which means, he was likely overcome by toxic smoke and his body incinerated.
We watched multiple videos of heart attacks and resuscitations. The videos prepare you for the fact that a casualty may not be lying still like the CPR doll but are more likely to be spasming and squirming as you attempt to rescue them from brain death. Rather close to the bone for me, as I was visiting my friend in the hospital every day after class, as he was recovering from his heart transplant.
I was there yesterday for a very happy moment when he had his final tube removed from his chest. This also meant he could begin his first bit of physiotherapy. He was elated.
‘You have no idea man.’
He was able to look out of the window for the first time since waking up in a hospital bed three weeks ago. He no longer has to urinate in a bottle or a bag. He might even be allowed to shower today. the massive scar down the centre of his chest doesn’t put even the slightest dent in his gratitude for being alive.
He has always been incredibly strong and athletic, so it surprised the hospital staff more than it did me when he woke up a record two hours after his heart transplant. The previous record holder was another young man who managed it in nine hours. 24 hours is more normal.
As a vax sceptic, he has been speaking to the ICU staff and cardiologists with great interest.
‘I had to wait three days to get a room in HDU after ICU. They say these wards used to be virtually empty until two years ago. The staff say they’ve never been so busy. Just this week they’ve done my transplant, another one for a teenage girl, and another for a 21-year-old man. My cardiologist told me they have never been so busy. Now it is continuous’.
The pathologist will look at his old ticker, but they have not promised any interesting information. We may never know what caused his heart failure. But everyone knows what has caused the general increase in hospitalisations for blood clots and heart conditions. There are currently 500 excess cardio deaths per week in the UK, and is there any uproar?
What is being done about it?
The longer we pretend – as a society – that nothing bad happened, and that everything is currently fine with our current systems of governance and social institutions, the deeper and more complete our eventual rejection of them will be.
If there is no repentance, then there will be a repeat.
Joe Biden, ice cream aficionado in chief, has reportedly approved experimental mRNA vaccines in advance for the next unknown variant – and given blanket approval for all age groups, despite an official 1 in 35 vaccine injury rate for existing mRNA jabs. And that’s just what they’ll admit to! They were always painfully obviously dodgy, but how can he possibly approve something for variants that don’t yet exist!? Who the hell is falling for this?
This late empire crap feels like a darkly grim version of the 2008 bailouts. A sacrifice of the population, in order to save investment fund managers and the civil service from having to face the fact that there is no money for pensions, that Western governments are broke, and that the house of cards is about to come tumbling down on someone’s head.
Shipping pundits are looking at inflation, and rubbing their hands pre-emptively celebrating forecast increases in bulk commodity prices. It’s so utterly macabre.
I can’t be alone in thinking that the COVID-19 response is just a ‘so what’ story now.
For me, it’s so much bigger than that. I just see the covid scandal as the one that broke societal credulity on the camel’s back.
The fundamental lie in our culture is that our government exists to serve us. If that were the case, why would deflation ever be a bad thing? Why would the owners of the Bank of England’s names be a state secret? Why would our prisons contain more Albanians than the entire state of Albania? Why, and how, could ‘too big to fail’ ever have come to be an acceptable outcome for the GFC?
I spent half an hour with my friend’s wife listening to her frustrations of family and work, and the response of people to her husband’s heart attack. Family is a tough thing generally, but the stress and time pressures of the modern world can compound mere niggles into miserable agonies. I vow to spend more time with him when he gets out. I’m glad to have helped at all.
After watching half a dozen heart attacks during the day and spending the afternoon and evening with my mate and his wife, it was all I could do to hold back the tears on my way out of the hospital. I stood in the car park and called my wife to tell her I loved her, and that I’m grateful for her.
When we speak of the injustice of monetary inflation, we really need to be conscious of what we are actually talking about. It’s people’s lives. Their blood, sweat, tears, toil, misery, abandoned hopes and crushed dreams.
Our supposedly benevolent welfare/warfare state is predicated on the idea that someone is keeping score. That people get out more than they pay in, because of some collectivist magic. That it’ll all balance out in the end.
Quite frankly, my son has more chance of a talking toad waking him up every morning with gleeful greetings, than we have of getting justice for the past 110 years of the theft by monetary inflation that has financed every war and destructive social program we’ve endured in that time.
I view sin as an opportunity cost. That sounds banal, but consider the staggering depth of the ways in which we fall short as individuals and as a people. Think of all the ways you have failed your friends and relatives in their hours of need, as you deprived them of companionship in the name of putting in hours at the office, or at work, or offshore because – we could use the money right now?
Now think how different that would be if your home only cost 3 years’ salary, and your money gained value just by sitting in the bank.
Now multiply that over every working person in the country. Or the continent.
Now think how many people grow up nihilistic and substance dependent because their mother couldn’t afford to care for them during childhood, and had to go out to work? Or how many people are in therapy, or now sell their bath water on Only Fans, because Daddy was never around to hug them? Think how much energy and ingenuity is wasted, as the best and brightest minds of generations are put to purposes of socialised make work schemes, war and destruction, or on solving problems of regulatory uncertainty and capital preservation, instead of improving products, services and technology? Or how much better employment conditions could be, if our energies weren’t spent on deciphering lies, threats and betrayals by those with ‘power’ over us?
How high is the cost?!
I think you can guess what I might wish for.
We were not born to live in fear of judgment of the thought police, or the threat of the tax man. We were born for greatness and redemption.
As the BRICS gain traction (and reach for the naval power they’ll ultimately need, but don’t currently have), and the dollar collapse brings about the demise (&/or stagnation) of financial assets, and monetary inflation wreaks havoc on our welfare-dependent societies in the coming months and years, remember, the parasite class have never been on our side.
Yes, we’re not supposed to cast the first stone. But the other part of that deal was, that they need to ‘go forth, and sin no more’.
I wish for a public that demands the truth, and a political movement big enough to accept it. And I also want my hamster to turn pink!
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