New Orders

Pause for the personal.

It doesn't feel easy to write now. Not, at least, without feeling a measure of futility. I’ve really struggled to finish off the several articles I’ve drafted in the past few weeks. Somehow, you lovely people keep subscribing, despite (or perhaps because of) the recent scarcity of posting.

I’m trying hard not to get caught up in the inescapable drama of election politics across Europe, the UK and the US now. Watching the slow-motion demise of Joe Biden, as the world around us burns, and radical leftists and Islamo-Fascist caliph-cults tighten their grip in a world that has deemed judgement and discernment themselves as the only cardinal sins, feels like going about your everyday life in the city of Pompeii. We can hear the rumbling. We vaguely know that whatever comes next is probably not going to be good. But we’re not quite sure what, or when, the big event will be.

Will Joe Biden conveniently fall down the stairs before the end of the week? Will Russia invade Latvia, or Iran nuke Israel, just to take advantage of their last little window of hegemonic incompetence before Trump returns in November? Will the Communists in France stop burning down their own cities long enough to realise the power they now wield?

During my adult life, I’ve seen these nation-states betray every citizen, and every value held dear by our culture and our forebears. I don’t think any of them are now magically about to begin fixing things that would involve curtailing their own passionate excesses.

I recently spent 4 weeks in Taiwan. Despite arriving during the recent ‘unprecedented’ show of Naval and Avitation forces, It didn’t feel anything like as chaotic or ‘on the brink’ as it does back home. It seems to me that the game being played there is just your typical Asian Strong Man politics.

I’m not worried about China invading Taiwan before November, or even in the next two years. That’s why I’m keen to stay on that contract and keep working out there whenever I can.

My bold prediction is that China (PRC) is not going to nuke Taiwan (ROC). And it isn’t going to slaughter everyone. This isn’t the materialist 1930s. It’s the 2020s. Now we have superconductors, nano-robotics, and industrial trans-national mind control networks that Hitler could scarcely dream of when he created radio programming.

A country with 1.4 Billion people, doesn’t need to capture a population of 23 million, to add to its tax base. A country with 3 million square miles of territory, ranking 83^rd in population density, doesn’t need any lebensraum, or colonies. It has colonies in Africa, most notably (for Red Sea shipping) in Djibouti. So it doesn’t need to recapture a historic colony that has only 13,000 square miles, and is the 17^th most densely populated area on earth, with more than 50% of the terrain rocky, wild, earthquake-prone, and unfit for agriculture or construction. And they are not fighting for the Communist ideology, because they aren’t Communist any more. They are just plain old national socialists now, much like the rest of us engaging in ‘public-private-partnerships’ price controls of the interest rate, and centralised control of land use.

It isn’t really an ideological war, because almost all governments on earth today are all socialist. It’s just that some are closer to the nationalist end of the scale than the internationalist or supra-nationalist end. It’s just plain old power-worship and competition, as far as I can tell.

What China wants are the microchips. ‘Cause that’s what everybody wants.

Taiwan is the world leader in the production of ultra-high-end microchips. The kind of 3-nanometer chips that power ‘invisible’ 5^th-Gen fighter jets, assassin-scale stealth drones, and missiles that can leave a submerged submarine, fly up into space, back down to earth, turn at ninety degrees around street corners, and hit the front door of any given address so accurately that they can reliably be used to assassinate individuals.

Houthi terrorists may be attacking shipping and Israeli civilians with Iranian drones and guided weapons, but the chips that make them work are Western tech. But we don’t make anything in the West anymore because we want to save 3 cents per microchip and stop Tony Soprano’s union reps from having any clout. So, the entirety of NATO, the success of the Phoenician style globalist commercial project, underwritten by the behemoth that is current US military hegemony, is now entirely, vulnerably, dependent on the fate of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

The four ‘Western’ economically advanced market economy nations in Asia are the four tigers (or ‘little dragons’ to the Chinese) – Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Where Hong Kong and Singapore remained British-influenced financial hubs, Korea and Taiwan didn’t engage in industrial wizardry for their wealth. They actually build stuff. Their wealth comes from unbelievable manufacturing prowess. We’re now in a world where the sorcery of fiat spending is beginning to look like the part in Fantasia where Mickey Mouse chops up all of the little demon-possessed brooms, only to find that they grow arms and legs of their own. In a world where the iron law of unintended consequences produces phantom spirits in the economy that have a life of their own, the ability to actually make stuff counts.

The Taiwanese know it. They call the TSMC factory their ‘Silicone Shield’. Nobody is going to nuke a $40Bn factory and slaughter all of its skilled workers if they can just buy the chips from them. They want to capture it, not destroy it.

China can’t launch a hot war, and expect the Taiwan Semiconductor Company, its factories and the knowledge of its skilled workforce to remain intact or valuable. Any whiff of it falling into Chinese hands would likely result in it being nuked by the West anyway.

What I think they’re going to do is keep posturing and acting like the second strongest guy on the block, until the West is bankrupt or distracted. Then they’ll use posturing to take over in a ‘litle-green-man’ style coup, when the time is right.

That’s what Tik Tok, and foreign investment in left-wing causes like transgender ‘rights’, anti-natalism, and ‘climate’ activism are for. That’s why the Chinese are flooding the Darien gap with drug dealers bound for the US.

China has a long memory, the patience of Siddhartha Gautama, and a lot of gold. They remember when Britain had the technological advantage in the Opium wars, and they’re going to play multi-generational chess until that advantage belongs to the Chinese, once again.

You often can’t explain these things to a post-enlightenment, post-puritan, post-modern Western person. We are raised to believe that tradition itself is an oppressive tyranny. That history is only ‘his story’. A narrative crafted by ‘the man’, to keep you down. A fundamental split that we can see in the divergence between David Hume and Adam Smith, or between the French and the American revolutions. We have become The Accuser. We worship the rebel, regardless of the cause.

The seeds of this split were sown when Luther modelled rebellion against the excesses and failings of the Catholic Church. But instead of taking that opportunity to marry back to the body of the kirk that we now call Eastern Orthodox Tradition, he created a pattern of infinitely splintering, solo-scriptura speculation, where truth is a social construct, and anything goes. The parallels with the modern obsessions with the multiverse, the simulation, reincarnation and the postmodern idea of ‘my truth’, are clear.

I’m trying to stay on point, I promise. People who criticise my writing always make the same complaints. Why do you write about religion!? Don’t write such long articles. You’re overcomplicating things out of paranoia.

Well, I’m probably not going to change, because:

1.      Religion is literally what binds us. All of us. And it matters what that binding consists of. Think of it as culture, and you’ll see that there is no such thing as atheism, because there is no way to live outside of culture, as a human being. It is inextricable.

2.      If you can’t concentrate for long enough to read 4000-10000 words from time to time, I don’t want you reading my work. Sadly, you’re not one of my people. I’m quite happy to discourage these impatient types. It filters out the more base critics, who don’t even have the stamina to find out what I’m actually trying to say. This gives me the freedom that most writers cannot enjoy because they are too scared of readers finding out what they truly believe.

3.      It isn’t paranoia. It’s threat detection. Everyone agrees that corruption exists and is universal in human institutions. They all agree that every human institution has committed acts of evil in the past. Yet today, it is considered a sign of mental illness to suggest that our neo-fascist political overlords are acting out of anything other than compassion and steadfast adherence to the scientific method. I think that’s stupid.

But, what qualifies me to have an opinion that’s worth listening to? A lowly boat skipper, who used to write in the margins of marine atlases for a living.

Well, I believe that wisdom lies in learning from other people’s mistakes before you make them yourself. And that is something I am proud to say that I have been a part of improving in the maritime industry, for the past twenty years. As many responsible officers have.

I started going to sea in 2003. At that time, around 200 vessels were ‘lost’ from the global fleet every year. By the time I was a chief officer, that figure had come down by half, to only 100 vessels a year. Allianz this year reported that 2023 has seen this downward trend in losses continue to a record low of only 23 ships completely lost.  In my sector, we’ve gone from about 75 deaths annually to about 6.

How has the maritime sector achieved this miracle of safety management improvements?

CULTURE.

All British Merchant Navy officers have been trained in building a ‘Just’ safety culture, since the early 2000s. Something that has made us slightly unpopular among certain international employers. We actually believe – for the most part – in things like the sanctity of human life, consent, and justice. Even though few secularists would acknowledge it, even today, we in the West have been brought up swimming in the waters of traditional Judeo-Christian values. I would argue the same thing that the radical Jihadists would argue on that front – That if you are a Westerner, you are a Christian, by definition. If you say you don’t believe in God, or the Bible, that simply makes you an unfaithful one.

And please don’t get me wrong. I am painfully aware of how unfaithful and non-practicing and hypocritical I am as a person. I know that I am a hypocrite. You don’t need to point that out.

I think that self-awareness is part of the deal. A painful but essential part.

For example, I was recently contacted by a charity called DKMS. I registered with them a number of years ago, when I came ashore. You give them a blood sample, and they keep you on record. Last week, while I was on holiday with my wife in Amsterdam (Grandparents are a wonderful thing – put them to good use!), DKMS contacted me to advise me that I am a *very* rare match with a person who has some kind of blood cancer. They have asked me to donate Stem Cells.

In principle, I fully support this charity and its wonderful ideals. I really believe it is important that adults contribute and voluntarily give stem cells, to prevent the destruction of viable embryos and discourage other undesirable methods of harvesting stem cells. The use of prisoners as ‘involuntary organ donors’ in the illustrious People’s Republic, has been well covered by alt-media journalists. I believe that voluntarism is the only way out of this hellish world we’ve constructed.

But there are 2 methods of extraction. One involves going under general anaesthetic to extract from pelvic bone marrow, and the other does not.

Going under general is technically and statistically safer than ‘crossing the road’, with a death rate of 1 in 100,000. People have reassured me that that there is virtually nothing to worry about. It is ‘safe’.

I’m sorry to say it, but my trust in the medical profession as a whole, is at an extreme low point, since the scam-demic. I’m not even sure there aren’t better ways to just treat blood cancer with a bit of intra-venous Vitman A or some other inexplicably banned alternative treatment. I’m even quite partial to apricot seeds.

But the charity has lots of videos of donors online, warmly hugging the 17 year old kid whose life they saved, with a mere month or two of moderate pain and inconvenience. And I did have a friend who died of terrible stomach cancer shortly after high school. My dad has also survived cancer twice. So, I can sympathise.

I’ve already saved some people’s lives at sea, so I don’t feel like I need to go out of my way for that particular bragging right. And I rather suspect anyone who matches with me is probably just another blood type O, pseudo teuchter of mainly Celtic ancestry. If they are my age and my demographic, the present, let alone the future, isn’t looking so great on paper. They might not even thank me if I saved their life, the way things are going. And with my line of work, 1 in 100,000 risk of death on top of probably 20 to 30 offshore transfers a year, entering dangerous confined spaces on regular ship inspections, and generally being exposed to the hazards of international shipping, is enough to make me say, ‘No’.

I have a wife and 3 young kids. I’m self-employed, with a couple of subbies occasionally working for me. Even taking 2 days off to give blood is a big ask, on my current schedule. The risk of being bedridden for several weeks is something I am unwilling to do.

I have offered to donate, but only by the method where they harvest your stem cells using a sort of blood transfusion machine. Hopefully, that’s enough to help. I’m currently going through the motions to find out if I can actually help this poor person, by a method that doesn’t render me unconscious.

This is what I mean when I say that I view original sin as a kind of ‘opportunity cost’.

I could be better. I could sacrifice more. I could risk more. I could take more action and will a better world into being.

But I’m not going to give my all. Not on this occasion, anyway. And now I know another way in which I am deficient.

As my Jewish wife and I carefully skirted around the pro-Nazi (ahem, sorry, Hamas) ‘protestors’ in Amsterdam town square, I pondered this, and several other elements of our culture that we take for granted. The 2% of DNA that we do not share is precisely what makes us different from the apes. Even finer subtleties – evidently imperceptible to science – are what define our cultural divisions.

At sea, it used to be a full-on Blame Culture. Absolute responsibility, and vicious abuse and retribution even for minor infringements of apparently arbitrary rules and customs. Sometimes enforced by malevolent sadists. The Master Mariner as slave master, loves this culture. Hierarchy rules supreme, regardless of costs. Except, accidents become frequent because root cause analysis is never objectively pursued, the truth is always covered up, no lessons are ever learned from near misses, and whistleblowers are punished and excluded. Lots more people used to die when these kinds of sub-cultures were carelessly allowed on ships.

Blame culture is the natural state that most toddlers, and some seafarers eventually grow out of. Only for those in middle and upper management to revert after they reach a rank where external supervision is removed. This is the Taliban model of management. I literally sailed with skippers who told me they wished would still be allowed to hang people to death on ships for minor infringements of discipline, so I know this spirit lurks pretty close to the surface in many of us.

Then they tried ‘No Blame’ culture for a while. That didn’t help, because it failed to address negative behaviour and neglect. Poor performers are given infinite ‘second chances’, and HR interferes with objective competency assessments. There are zero ways for hazardous people to be removed because all blame is externalised on ‘systems’, or ‘culture’, or ‘the situation’, or ‘miscommunication’. This culture is ripe for abuse by malingerers, race baiters, cowards, and lazy buggers of every stripe. Profitability suffers, and people continue to die, but for different reasons. ‘Guilt’ is non-existent, and ‘shame’ is prohibited. The idea had merit, in that witch-hunts were avoided, and self-reporting did improve, with ‘near-miss’ reports becoming a powerful tool for organisational improvement.

‘No blame’ culture appears to be what the Labour Party under Sir Kier Starmer is attempting to institute in our immigration and criminal court system in the UK.

Now we attempt to foster a ‘Just Culture’. Confessions are documented anonymously, and treated with appreciation and respect. Incidents should be investigated to identify management, procedural, situational, personal and extrinsic causes. Being ‘set up to fail’ by management, commercial pressures, unrealistic expectations, or unforeseen design issues are recognised as legitimate causes of incidents. Repentance comes in the form of ‘lessons learnt’ reports and updated risk assessments and procedures. Communion is in the safety meeting; toolbox talks and debriefs.

In short, the Merchant Navy’s wild successes in recent decades of safety improvement – aside from technical and engineering improvements – have come about by realising that discernment and judgement are essential parts of our culture.

Most high-performers in these just cultures have a very flat and understated hierarchy. Recruitment is careful. Criticism is done in private. Praise is given in public. But the hierarchy is still there. And when it is needed, it can become precipitously vertical, in an instant.

Imagine if our culture was such that our business leaders, politicians and bureaucrats all instinctively knew how to behave that way. Hate speech laws would be used to remove terrorists instead of the people pointing out terror activity. Crime would be policed predictably and proportionately, regardless of ‘protected’ characteristics. Fraud (already illegal) would be indefensible, instead of standard public policy.

I think that’s why I’ve been finding it so difficult to finish a post recently.

Substack and the online world have become a depository of the many flavours of complainy-pants posting. Pointless rhetorical moaning about politics, culture, wokeism, Jihadi-rape gangs, ghoulish anti-natalism, the fractional reservist neo-corporate feudalism, the negative aspects of globalism, fake climate doomsayers, and other equally legitimate threats to our sanity, survival, and wellbeing.

Complaining is not an answer. It’s pathetic.

These past couple of weeks since I got back from Taiwan, I’ve been trying to address the things that really matter. Paying attention to my wife. Playing with my children. Making sure my son’s football gear is clean, and he gets to training on time. Helping my dad and step mum renovate the house they’ve bought to retire in. Lending people my tools, and (limited) expertise. Catching up on messages with friends. Taking the kids to the park after dinner, or playing with the neighbourhood kids.

After 2 weeks at home, I’ve noticed my own particular temptations creeping in again. Alcohol, laziness, and ill-temper are ever-present hazards for me. Not physical laziness, per se. But a laziness of priorities. Spiritual laziness. Neglect of my own health and fitness in favour of the panicky ‘must do better at work’ feeling that creeps in whenever I sit down sober.

A lot of what we are doing here on the internet is masturbatory. Riddled with demonic envy, pride, anger, lust, ignorance, power-worship and a sort of pathologically autistic automation.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

The old way of thinking about indulging in the passions is useful to think about. Whenever we give in to our worldly urges, we really are giving body to demons. That is, allowing spirits that disregulate, de-unify, and disintegrate, to own us. We think indulging our urges is what makes us ‘happy’. We can excuse our indulgences as well earned, or as a ‘trickle-down’ benefit to the economic circle of life, but the truth is, that the demons we feed are only made stronger with each meal.

Sitting in your backyard, sipping whisky, moaning about inheritance tax, and Labour reducing custodial sentences in the UK by 50% doesn’t clothe the poor or feed the hungry. And it doesn’t even make you feel better.

Making space to reflect on things is too painful. Excessive busyness is the index-linked demon that is the silent partner in the modern Western world. How much unproductive business do we engage in purely because of inflation? How much of our woe is the result of the unexamined life?

I can understand why people get absolutely battered drunk the moment they get to the weekend or manage to take a couple of weeks off during the summer break. I really do. It’s always a temptation when I get off the boat.

Without that automatic reaching for the liquid aid to unconsciousness, I instantly start listing the ways I’m not living up to my many obligations and responsibilities.

But then, that’s what a responsible officer needs to do.

So, new standing orders this week:

1.      Delete TikTok, Instagram, Facebook/Meta, and X/Twitter from your phone. Just the app, not the account. Leave it off for at least a week before you reconsider allowing these life-sucking portals to hell back into your life. If you need to keep in touch with your friends, get their phone number, or even better, go see them in person.

2.      Listening to podcasters, signing petitions, voting, hitting like, buying a coffee or hitting subscribe are not ‘changing the world’ or ‘awakening a global consciousness’. That’s just your ego. You can do those things, but be honest with yourself about what you're achieving (which is the square root of eff-all).  Instead, do something personal. Look the homeless guy in the eye. Play with a child for 15 minutes. Go change that lightbulb that your mother can’t reach any more. Take your neighbour’s trash to the curb.

3.      Try to stop yourself from complaining at least once this week. Catch it before it comes out of your mouth, and ask yourself a papa’s question: ‘Does it need to be said? Do I need to be the one to say it? Does it need to be said right now?’  The chances are, probably not. Stop feeding the demon.

The only cure for politics is to live our lives in such a way that we don’t need politics. Where we can look after each other, and correct and help each other well enough so that we give no quarter to parasites and psychopaths. Where we know who is in need, and go help them directly before a bureaucrat gets in between us. Where our communities are strong enough to resist calls to fund both sides of a misunderstood and far-flung military conflict. Where pirates are seen for who they truly are because we live our lives in such obvious contrast, that their true nature is visible to all.

Let me know how y’all get on in the comments, Yankee-Jockers. We’re in this together.

Good luck! :)

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