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One hundred and eight years ago Joseph Mary Plunket was murdered by imperialist occupation forces in Dublin on the 4th of May 1916.
Much has been written about those days, but few of the love stories that accompanied our struggle have been re-told. The love between Jo Plunket and Grace Gifford, possibly the most poignant.
“Plunkett was one of the original members of the IRB Military Committee that was responsible for planning the Easter Rising, and it was largely his plan that was followed. Shortly before the rising was to begin, Plunkett was hospitalised following a turn for the worse in his health. He had an operation on his neck glands days before Easter and had to struggle out of bed to take part in what was to follow. Still bandaged, he took his place in the General Post Office with several other of the rising’s leaders such as Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke, though his health prevented him from being terribly active. His energetic aide de camp was Michael Collins”.
“Joseph Mary Plunkett (Irish: Seosamh Máire Pluincéid, 21 November 1887 – 4 May 1916) was an Irish nationalist, poet, journalist, and a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising.”
Joseph Mary Plunkett
“Following the surrender Plunkett was held in Kilmainham Gaol, and faced a court martial. Seven hours before his execution by firing squad at the age of 28, he was married in the prison chapel to his sweetheart Grace Gifford, a Protestant convert to Catholicism, whose sister, Muriel, had years before also converted and married his best friend Thomas MacDonagh, who was also executed for his role in the Easter Rising. Grace never married again.” Listen to the embedded song above for yet another poignant love story in the conflict zone.
Ireland divided shall never know peace.
Kilmainham Gaol
Tiocfaidh ár lá
Here’s another love story that was terminated with British high velocity lead.
I sat with Suzanne whilst she told me of the day when her husband Ronnie Bunting and best man at their wedding Noel Little were assassinated and there was no doubt whatsoever in Suzanne’s mind that the assailants were well trained, military hitmen. The Brits smashed their way into the house all dressed in matching black & wearing Balaclava’s, spraying bullets indiscriminately in every direction. After wounding my three IRSP comrades, they systematically went over to Noel and Ronnie’s bodies and added execution shots to ensure they were dead, Suzanne witnessed that. They didn’t do the same to Suzanne because part of her face had been effectively blown off and they assumed she was dead. It was the most brutal story I have ever heard, and I heard it from the only surviving witness, with all the facial reconstruction scars to show the horrors of her injuries.
I think it was a revenge killing ordered by Thatcher after the courageous INLA had blown up the arch bigot and racist Tory MP Airey Neave at the House of Commons in one of the truly great military operations of the war. Neave was a card-carrying fascist! The life and death of British spy turned politician Airey Neave
“The family of a senior INLA member killed in unexplained circumstances have called for a fresh inquest amid claims that the RUC removed a surveillance team before the gun attack.” The removal of the surveillance team shortly before the home invasion is evidence of at least collusion and more likely connivance and complicity!
Suzanne’s love for Ronnie and Noel shone brightly as she told me this chilling story! I was just a young kid from the diaspora, fresh in the war zone, stories like that were “10 a penny”!
I heard one woman ask an adolescent girl what she wanted to do when she left school and without a second’s hesitation she replied, “I want to join the IRA and drive the Brits out of Ireland”, I kid you not: Repression breeds resistance! As we bear witness to the latest genocide in Palestine us Irish know, that the bulk of the survivors will join the resistance.
Claims that RUC were watching house where two INLA men were shot dead
I had a love affair of my own during the war in Occupied West Belfast, for the edited highlights > Adventures of a Member of the Diaspora in Occupied West Belfast
For anyone who knows me from Facadebook they will know that my profile picture is of Mairead Farrell. The comments section is a homage to Mairéad with some spectacular interviews with her, grab a box of tissues before reading or watching the videos of Mairéad being interviewed!
My Maternal Grand Father was a Quartermaster in the Irish Citizen Army. He was caught with weapons, incarcerated in the Free State and did a 23-day hunger strike before it was called off, possibly due to pressure from the Catholic Church!
Seán was shot 18 times. “Farrell, Watson said, “was hit by five bullets to the face and neck and three in the back. Danny McCann was shot twice in the head and twice in the back.” 18 bullets hit IRA man Inquest told.
Executed whilst walking unarmed in a public street, when they could have easily been arrested.
I had to walk over the footpath in Gibraltar where Mairéad, Seán and Dan were machine gunned first and finally executed with shots fired down into their bleeding shredded bodies! The day after the triple execution, council workers arrived with pneumatic jack hammers to chip the lead out of the bullet impacts to the footpath. They destroyed the evidence of bullets fired directly down into the bodies of these three volunteers in a classic British “Shoot to Kill” operation.
I was in Gibraltar delivering yachts around the Mediterranean. I had a fascinating conversation on one delivery with a French F111 Mirage Fighter Jet pilot off the coast of Libya, as you do!
A Conversation Between a French F111 Fighter Jet Pilot, a Kiwi Yacht Skipper and Everything in Between. Interestingly they never boarded my yacht!
Below is a great article on the role that women have played in our struggle.
Cumann na mBan & Women in Irish Republican Paramilitary Organisations, 1969-1986
Gone but never forgotten comrades. Tiocfaidh ár lá
Readers can “Buy me a Coffee” or in reality a beer here: or on PayPal – kevin@iconicproperties.co.nz
“If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it!”
“While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not,” he wrote. “And this is a problem — a big one.”
Scientists Terrified by How the Climate is Falling Apart
The above embedded article elicited the video response below from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson.
I’ve been saying this for over a decade. A lost decade of preparation time, especially for our youth!
Abrupt Climate Change Denial has squandered an opportunity to prepare. The New Climate Denial Position is to deny Abrupt Climate Change.
I have curated a number of articles below showing the orchestrated litany of lies from people pretending to cover the climate and extinction crises.
As always, the technique is to shift the baseline dates so that they can pretend that we’ve had much less anthropogenic warming than we’ve in reality triggered. I covered this issue previously, Baseline Temperature dishonesty at the Edge of Extinction
Sam Carana at the Arctic News Blogspot is one of the few prepared to address the science and be realistic about the severity of our predicament. We’ll start with the truth and then get to the lies.
“It’s time to stop denying how precarious the situation is.”
“Remember the Paris Agreement? In 2015, politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pledged they would try and limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Well, an analysis by Sam Carana shows that it was already more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial when the Paris Agreement was reached.” 2C Crossed
The Rogues Gallery of the Climate Enemy Within
Narrative Control at the Edge of Extinction.
As we circle the drain of collapse and extinction, the corporate media pretend to cover the poly-crises we face but report on the great unravelling as if it’s a future issue, rather that fully underway today, driven by the six-dozen feedback loops I know of, the ones we’ve yet to discover, and the “Black Swans” that we either haven’t thought of or we simply ignore. This muddying of the waters will only get worse as we circle the drain of collapse. “Current Climate Path Will Lead to Collapse of Life on Earth”
Voices From the Doomosphere | Kevin Hester My position in 2018
Above and below are forthright presentations from Dr Sid Smith, Guy and I interviewed Sid on NBL
Dr Sid Smith Rocks the Boat on Nature Bats Last
I’m editing this blog on 12/11/2024 including an analysis of the collapse from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson.
Readers can “Buy me a Coffee” or in reality a beer here: or on PayPal – kevin@iconicproperties.co.nz
The average person is incredulous when I say that Industrial Civilisation can and probably will collapse in the next two or if we’re ‘lucky’ three years. Sixteen ocean passages on small yachts, two years living in war zones and six decades of risk taking, have taught me the value of the “Precautionary Principle” and how your luck can evaporate, in a flash. “The precautionary principle has been adopted universally in different environmental instruments. It states that if there is risk of severe damage to humans and the environment, absence of incontrovertible, conclusive, or definite scientific proof is not a reason for inaction.”
I will be surprised if this set of living arrangements survives more than two more melt seasons in the Arctic.
I’ve been collaborating with Professor Guy McPherson for over a decade now and clearly his overall hypothesis heavily influences my personal views and synopsis. I was a spectacularly reluctant adherent to Guy’s scholarly work. For the first year or two I responded to Guy’s work with every one of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s “Stages of Grief”: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.
Acceptance is key to navigating this, the perfect storm. It does not equate to “Giving Up”. No one would accuse a terminal cancer patient of “Giving Up” and like it or not the diagnosis for the ecosystem is terminal. How we manage Planetary Hospice is up to us. If you’re on Facadebook you can see me ‘Giving Up” at the not-for-profit rewilding project at the Rakino Island Nursery where I volunteer, I’m the “Water Boy”.
Every single analogue is racing away, threatening a Seneca Cliff scenario.
Nonlinearity manifesting in all the graphs we are looking at? Check
The rerise of fascism and CO2 intensive warmongering? Check
The Bare Minimum attempts to reduce emissions. Check
Sea Surface temperatures threatening Canfield Oceans? Check
Sociopathic or psychopathic nuclear armed world leaders? Check
Starvation killing people over much of Africa and now Palestine. Check
A global Ponzi scheme masquerading as a global economy? Check
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation Stalling? Check
Extinction Cascades? Check
A Minimum of Six Dozen Feedback Loops Triggered? Check
Losing a city/region to extreme Wet Bulb Temps? Standby
Let’s start by having a look at it from the perspective of losing the Cryosphere, our planetary thermostat:
“Losing the remaining Arctic Sea Ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion tons emitted since the Industrial Age, according to current and former researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.”
“At current rates, this roughly equates to 25 years of global CO2 emissions.”
Cascading Consequences of the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice.
We are on the cusp of triggering a Blue Ocean Event (BOE) in the Arctic, there are a multitude of consequences that will accelerate our predicament from that event, not the least of them being the destabilising of the methane clathrates, especially vulnerable are those under the shallow East Siberian Arctic Shelf as documented by Dr Natalia Shakhova and her research partner Igor Semiletov and others. “Significant quantities of methane are escaping the East Siberian Shelf as a result of the degradation of submarine permafrost,” says Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. She and her team collected data – at a great cost – to show that vast areas are releasing plumes of methane gas, which is escaping into the atmosphere.” “Arctic storms speed up release of methane plumes” The above hyperlinked article is 11 years old; the destabilisation is accelerating.
“A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature found that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current – of which the Gulf Stream in a part – could collapse around the middle of the century, or even as early as 2025.”
It could shut down in the same length of time it takes for a human to reproduce: IE: 9 months, that’s how precarious our predicament has already become!
“A vital system of ocean currents could collapse within a few decades if the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, scientists are warning – an event that would be catastrophic for global weather and ‘affect every person on the planet.”
No mention of the six dozen “Feedback loops” that we have already triggered nor the ongoing war mongering that ensures that all emissions will continue on the “Hockey Stick Trajectory” That Michael E Mann can no longer see!
We are just one “Black Swan” away from this set of living arrangements unravelling, but the slowing down of the AMOC doesn’t meet the definition of a “Black Swan”, it’s entirely predictable and underway now, not long off in a future we don’t have.
From Professor Guy McPherson’s substack post: Will AMOC Kill Us All?
“More than 12,000 years ago, the rapid melting of glaciers caused the AMOC to shut down. Within a decade, temperature fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere reached 10-15 degrees Celsius, or 18-27 degrees Fahrenheit. The president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the research studies mentioned in this video, said the shutdown of the AMOC “would affect every person on the planet – it’s that big and important.”
One observation I would make is that the changes we are witnessing today are happening at orders of magnitude faster than any previous similar event. Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change
Study Pinpoints Links Between Melting Arctic Ice and Summertime Extreme Weather in Europe
“New research shows how last year’s warming melted ice in Greenland that increased flows of fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic, upsetting ocean currents in ways that lead to atmospheric changes.”
The January 2021 episode of Nature Bats Last featured a discussion with Arctic research scientist and oceanographer Jim Massa. The episode is embedded here:
Jim has also delved into the slowing down of the AMOC, he quotes Professor McPherson’s work on the AME.
“The peer-reviewed paper in Nature Communications echoes the article at MIT News. The Abstract of the peer-reviewed paper includes this important line: “reduced Meridional Overturning Circulation nutrient upwelling decreases biological activity.”
Science Snippets: Ice Melting, North and South
We have destabilised the atmosphere and the ocean currents, we are rapidly spiralling into a completely new paradigm.
Capitalism and Industrial Civilisation is a “Confidence game”, we face multiple threats that could trigger a collapse that another former guest on Nature Bats Last, Arthur Keller labelled “The Only Realistic Scenario”.
I first wrote about “The Best Kept Secret in Climate Science”, in my 2016 article titled: “Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable”. That blog has many more relevant links in the comments section for the inquisitive. The embedded video on “Global Dimming” is a “must watch!”
That article refers to the phenomena of the planet warming after 911 when all the planes were grounded in the USA, with the subsequent decline in aerosols, followed by immediate warming.
The warming spike was directly linked to the decrease of aerosols, additional to our crack like addiction to emitting CO2, CH4, the most prolific greenhouse gas H2O and other greenhouse gases.
Lion Simons mentioned in the video below that a warmer climate holds 7% more water vapour for every 1C we broil the planet. In mountainous regions it can be as much as 15%! Each 1 Degree C We Warm the Planet adds an additional 7% Increase in Moisture into the Atmosphere.
“On this episode, Nate is joined by climate researcher Leon Simons to unpack recent trends in global heating during 2023 and potential explanations and subsequent projections for the coming year. While the connection between human emitted greenhouse gasses and global warming is scientifically agreed upon, the other complexities and feedbacks of our climate system are still just beginning to be understood. Today, Leon theorizes on the intensity of aerosol masking from particulates such as sulfur, based on the connection between recent changes in marine fuel sulfur requirements and corresponding climate data. How will the global trend towards aerosol reductions affect near and long term global heating? What does this catch-22 mean for potential future climate action and policy? How should we be thinking about creating a more simplified global system in response to the unknown unknowns of our potential future climate?”
“MORE than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as this year and continuing to 2028. In a recent report, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation – an international regulatory authority – projected that a majority of regions in the US and Canada will have insufficient electricity supply to reliably meet demand during extreme weather conditions. A few may even see interruptions under normal weather conditions.”
“Let’s return to that first sentence: “MORE than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as this year and continuing to 2028.” Wait, what? Electricity shortages will stop after 2028? How? Naturally, there is no mention of aerosol masking, the best-kept secret in climate science. Professor James E. Hansen has said and written many times that the aerosols will fall out of the atmosphere in about five days. According to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper published on 15 June 2021, the loss of aerosol masking will lead to a substantial increase in planetary warming: 55% globally, and 133% over land. Most of us live on land. As I have indicated previously in this space, we passed the 2 C Rubicon several months ago, according to governmental bodies representing a few countries. These governmental bodies were catching up to Andrew Y. Glikson, who wrote that Earth had surpassed the 2 C mark in his 9 October 2020 book, The Event Horizon. Furthermore, as nearly as I can tell, additional heating of Earth is a one-way street. Once the planet warms, cooling it is a rather challenging task.”
“According to a member of a think tank in Washington, D.C. as published in the paper by United Press International: The report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation found that North America’s peak demand – the highest amount of electricity needed in a given period – is rising faster than at any time in the past five years. The sharp increase also represents a reversal of a decades-long trend involving falling or flat growth in demand.”
All of the above written, slightly edited, and spoken work, is from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson. Subscribers to Guy’s Sub stack posts can comment directly and read the whole embedded script at the following link: Science Snippets: Much of North America Faces Electricity Shortages this Year
After being intrigued by this latest analysis, the electrician in me decided to dive in deeper and have a closer look at the threat.
For the record, I had full electrical registration in Aotearoa NZ and have a High Voltage Switching and Protection Qualification from the London Electricity Board. I worked at the Sun Alliance Computer Centre located at Lennox Wood, West Sussex in 1987, only after working there for 6 months did, I find out the computer centre, one of Britian’s first “Intelligent Buildings”, what an oxymoron, was a backup computer installation for the British Ministry of Defence. All of the Group 4 security guards were supposedly ‘ex’ military but over beers, after long runs together, I realised I was working in the belly of the beast. The entire property was surrounded by a moat, and we had the same electronic gate system that was installed at the US Embassy in Beirut.
One day my pager bleeped, and a message came up saying: “Blocker discharge”. I made my way to the security gate and found a small car with its rear axle and suspension ripped off and hanging form the blade of the ‘blocker’ that was built into the road, anyone following a pre-approved car into the complex without swipe access discharged the blocker and ‘bam’. The poor young woman who was running late for work just had her car ripped in two.
As a result of obtaining that HV qualification, I worked on high voltage substations when rehabilitating the port of Beira in Mozambique in support of the front-line states resisting the Apartheid State to the south.
The point of all of the above Is I have some expertise in this field and feel reasonably qualified to comment.
Delving into the story I discovered:
“Musk also indicates that the growth of generative AI in computing in the form of chatbots has been rapid, allowing users to generate content and images within a moment’s notice. He added that the adoption and rapid growth of the technology in computing is increasing by a factor of ten every six months. “I’ve never seen any technology advance faster than this,” says Musk.”
Can anyone else spot the exponential function here?
“Elon Musk says we’re on the verge of the biggest technology revolution with AI, but there won’t be enough power by 2025.
To my knowledge the energy required to power AI has not been fully incorporated into the paper above that Guy quotes so, as always, it’s worse than previously thought.
Elon Musk Predicts AGI, Self-driving, Unlimited Energy, Robots Coming SOON
Readers of this blog will know I have a long-standing involvement in the anti-nuclear movement. On that note, I’d like to specifically address this aspect of Guy’s blog piece: “As if those challenges are not bad enough, there is also the issue of nuclear facilities as one means of generating electricity. Nuclear power plants require grid-tied electricity to operate. What happens when the grid fails, even locally?”
“Vulnerability to extended power outages stemming from grid collapse triggered by terrorism, technological accident, cyber attack or geomagnetic storms is understood to mean the widest possible spectrum of immediate and downstream consequences for our nations critical infrastructure. Regrettably few realistic plans are in place for dealing with this risk especially as it pertains to three primary energy systems of strategic significance to the United States – nuclear power, chemical manufacturing and natural gas supplies. The author argues that greater sustained attention is needed to upgrade the resilience of these systems, foster greater sharing of remedies among them to offset the worst effects of grid collapse which exceeds 15 consecutive calendar days and build collective avenues of enhanced risk mitigation against such scenarios.”
From the ResearchGate paper: Grid Collapse Security, Stability and Vulnerability Issues: Impactful Issues Affecting Nuclear Power Plants, Chemical Plants and Natural Gas Supply Systems
Feel free to add your comments below and as always, I will update the comments section with additional information as it comes in, until the lights go out, pardon the pun.
Abrupt Climate Change Alberta Arctic News Blog Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation-AMOC Atmospheric CO2 Brush Fire climate climate-change CounterPunch Dahr Jamail Dr. Guy McPherson Dr. James E Hansen El Nino environment Feedback loops First Blue-Ocean Event in Arctic global-warming Great Barrier Reef IPCC Michael E Mann Mike Sliwa Nafeez Ahmed Nature Bats Last November Speaking Tour with Guy McPherson Overdevelopment-Overpopulation-Overshoot Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum–PETM Pauline Panagiotou Schneider permafrost PM John Key Podcast Politics PRN Professor Paul Beckwith RobertScribbler Robin Westenra Runaway Abrupt Climate Change Russia Sam Carana science Subsea Methane Sustainability The Collapse of Industrial Civilisation Thom Hartmann Truthout Updates
Clearly neither the 1.5C nor the 2C Rubicon’s of anthropogenic warming were ever safe. Nor was 350ppm of CO2 in the Atmosphere for that matter. How did we get ourselves into this nightmare?
Nobel Laurate William Nordhaus is quite possibly the single most deadly human to have ever lived.
Nordhaus, an economist at Yale was the first corporate shrill to suggest that 2C was both achievable and safe. It was neither but we were collectively sold the lie.
The Myth of 2C Being Safe and Achievable
“We know quite a bit more about climate science than we did in 1977. And real scientists knew, even way back then, that economists were not to be treated as scientists. It’s small wonder Nordhaus shared the politically motivated Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he been given the Nobel Peace Prize, thus joining fellow partners-in-crime specialists-in-genocide Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.”
From the essay “Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored”
“We have known for decades that the 2 C number set in stone by economist William Nordhaus and his cohorts at the corporate established and driven IPCC is dangerous. We were ”running out of time” to deal with greenhouse gases in 1965, according to the chief of the American Petroleum Institute.
Fourteen years later, it was Edward Teller informing Big Oil they needed to change.
Exxon accurately predicted where we were headed in 1982, and not only failed to heed the warnings, but kicked the warnings and the future of humanity to the curb.
Al Gore and Carl Sagan testified to Congress in 1985 that we must act now on climate change.
In 1989 the UN posted an analysis that concluded that we had a 10-year window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change. We have emitted twice as much carbon since that warning was issued and we’ve triggered 6 dozen feedback loops that we know of.
The UN is still saying the same thing today, 34yrs later.
In late June 1989 Noel Brown, the director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program, indicated we had only until 2000 to avoid catastrophic climate change.”
All of the above data from Science Update: Shifting the Baseline
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Kevin Hester 