Conor MacNessa

In pre-Patrick Ireland were a few remarkable kings. Cormac MacArt. Niall of the Nine Hostages. Conor MacNessa. 

Reigning over Ulster during the early part of the first century A.D., Conor MacNessa was a patron of warriors, scholars, and poets.  It is Conor about whom there is told this interesting tale. A brain-ball, fired by Cet MacMagach, a champion from Connaught, sunk into Conor’s skull. The occasion of the conflict was a cattle raid.  Conor died of this infliction, but not for seven years. His physician would not remove the brain-ball, saying that to do so would cause death instantly. Instead, he prescribed a moderate lifestyle for Conor, advising him to avoid all excitement. Conor was to live with a calmness that did not characterize kings of that time.

 Conor succeeded at this pacific existence for seven years until one day the sunlight suddenly turned into darkness accompanied by unusually violent lighting and thunder. Conor asked his druids the meaning of these perplexing events and was told that in the East, in one of the many countries under the rule of Rome, a unique man of more noble character and loftiness of mind and beauty of soul than any man who had ever lived --- a God-man who had lifted the lowly, enlightened the ignorant, and brought hope to the hopeless --- a man of unsurpassed love whose touch healed the blind, the deaf and the lame, and who actually raised the dead --- had been crucified between two thieves by the Romans. 

Conor grabbed his sword and cried “Show me the accursed wretches who did this base deed!” and burst forth from his courtiers and into the storm, through a stand of trees, hacking their branches as he did so, and shouting “Thus would I treat the slayers of that noble man, could I but reach them!”  From this passionate exercise, the brain-ball was expelled from Conor’s head and he immediately died.

Biggest Threat to World Peace?

I don’t know if Americans get that many of us outside of the USA view the United States government as the greatest threat to world peace today. Americans are typically friendly folk. Individually, I like Americans. Yeah, they are sometimes unaware of the wider world, or even their own at times, but they are typically friendly and helpful. Well, there are some places in the northeast on account of which one could be forgiven for thinking I must have fallen onto my head before I made that statement. But I find that even in those places, they are normally friendly when I act as though I expect them to be.

My beef is with the war mentality of successive administrations. Trump has not broken the trend. Several weeks ago, he approved a raid in Yemen, in which more than a dozen civilians were killed, including the 8 year old daughter of an American citizen that had been deliberately killed by an American drone. Execution without trial.

Look, I get that Hillary probably would have led the country into World War III instead of just leaning that way. I mean, she supported almost every war fought by the USA in the past 25 years. A full quarter century of war mongering.  Good practice at being president. Her attitude was typified by her comments regarding Gaddafi after he was tortured and executed: “We came; we saw; he died.”

Trump has issued his travel ban. He doesn’t want people coming from Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen or Somalia. Other countries have terrorists. Interesting that in 2007 General Wesley Clark stated he had seen a memo attesting to war plans against these same seven countries. The travel ban may be part of an overall war plan. Maybe we’ll see the USA provoking these countries soon to create conditions to “justify” going to war.

Recovering From the Cold

I have commented on global warming from time to time … http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/12/climatologys-piltdown-man.html and http://gordon-feil-history-observations.blogspot.ca/2017/01/rising-and-warming-oceans.html. I think it’s important to place and face the issue against the backdrop of climate history. We know that the earth used to be warmer ---- considerably warmer. We know that for most of its history it was warmer. Even the poles were above freezing 365 days of the year. Breadfruit grew at Canada’s Arctic Circle. We seem to be in an ice age right now. Within this ice age are periods of relative warmth and also colder periods.

The earth….at least the areas surrounding the North Atlantic….became much colder in the early 1300s.  We moved into what today is known as The Little Ice Age. And rats moved indoors and brought into people’s homes the Black Death. In Greenland, which actually did have lush vegetation at one time, the Viking colonists struggled for survival. We know that whereas their diet had been about 80% of the land and 20% of the sea, that ratio inverted as the land animals perished. It had gotten so cold that the cows were kept indoors 6 months of the year. When it was finally time to let them graze, they were often so weak that the farmers had to carry them to pasture. As the herds died, fishing became primary, but soon that also became untenable because the waters were covered in ice and some of the fish species left the waters for warmer seas. The Inuit survived…even thrived. They had winter fishing techniques that the Vikings did not deign to learn. The Vikings regarded the Inuit as an inferior people. And in some respects, ALL peoples WERE inferior to the Vikings, that ballsy race who conquered Russia through to the Bosporus, as well as Normandy, Britain, and the coasts of Ireland.

Why did the Little Ice Age come?  The warmth of the previous few hundred years had caused much glacial melt along the North Atlantic. It is thought that the Gulfstream ceased.  The way it works today is that waters flow from the western tropical Atlantic to Iceland where they cool and sink to the bottom of the ocean and then move back south to warm up again. The fresh water pouring in from the melting ice was not salinized and not heavy enough to sink for the trip south, so they blocked the natural flow and the Gulfstream slowed and perhaps even stopped. Further, there apparently was a series of Krakatoa sized volcanos that spewed ash into the atmosphere and hindered sunlight. 

Starting about 1645 and continuing for about 70 years, the already cold weather turned particularly cold as sunspot activity slowed and the sun no longer emitted the same energy that is usually did. Even the canals of Venice froze.

At last, around 1850, average temperatures began to rise and have kept rising. We observe it today and think we have global warming. We do, but it seems to me to be a cyclical recovery from the cold.