Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Electricity shortage event “plausible” in next 5 years

Ireland’s energy regulator has warned that a national electricity shortage is a “plausible” scenario within the next five years if peak demand reaches currently projected levels.

The assessment was published by the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) as part of its Risk Preparedness Plan (RPP). The report, a legal requirement for all EU member states every four years, examines potential disaster scenarios to assess their hypothetical severity and likelihood.

“CRISIS-TYPE SCENARIOS”

Working in “close collaboration” with grid operator EirGrid, the CRU examined “crisis-type scenarios” that could “lead to significant national-scale impacts on the electricity system” and the general public.

The findings were based on the All-Island Resource Adequacy Assessment 2025–2034 (AIRAA), a joint report by EirGrid and SONI which forecasts how supply and demand will align over the coming decade.

“If the maximum demand forecast trajectory described in the AIRAA materialised, it is plausible that there could be an electricity shortage event within the next 2 to 5 year period,” the CRU stated, noting that “as such mitigation plans to address this must be put in place.”

“REASONABLE WORST-CASE SCENARIOS”, NOT “PREDICTIONS”

However, the regulator stressed that the findings should be viewed as “reasonable worst-case scenarios” rather than “predictions”. The RPP is designed to ensure the energy system can plan and prepare for potential crises.

“These are not predictions of what will happen, but are plausible events that could occur in a reasonable worst case and typically would involve the alignment / occurrence of a number of simultaneous issues to occur to be actualised,” the regulator said.

The report noted that Ireland shares common risks with other EU nations, including extreme weather, natural disasters, malicious cyber attacks, pandemics, solar storms, and supply chain disruptions.

MITIGATION EFFORTS

To manage these risks, the CRU pointed to existing mitigation measures, including the Security of Supply (SoS) Programme and the recently introduced Large Energy User (LEU) connection policy.

The LEU policy specifically targets the power demands of new data centres, which accounted for 22% of Ireland’s total metered electricity in 2024, according to Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures. Under the new rules, these facilities are required to provide 80% of their power from renewable generation to reduce pressure on the national grid.

Further investment is also underway following the CRU’s approval in November of an €18.9 billion capital programme. The five-year plan aims to modernise the existing network and build new infrastructure to meet rising demand.

As an additional safeguard, the Moneypoint power station has been reconfigured as a backup facility. Following the end of coal-fired generation at the site last year, the plant now operates using Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO).

“Moneypoint power station is available as a generator of last resort since the start of July 2025,” the CRU confirmed. The facility will remain in place as an emergency “strategic reserve” until 2029.

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The far-left network that helped put Alex Pretti in harm’s way, then made him a martyr

The skirmish that led to Saturday’s fatal shooting of an agitator by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis and the response that followed were driven by a complex network of far-left organizations with a wide range of causes, a Fox News Digital investigation found.

A coordinated web of encrypted chats, street alerts and tracking of ICE “Abductors” in a sophisticated database reviewed by Fox News Digital shows that agitators were already mobilized at the scene where 37-year-old Alex Pretti was killed minutes before any shots were fired. 

ICE and Border Patrol agents were there to arrest an illegal immigrant criminal, and Pretti and others were there, outside a donut shop, to meet them as part of a strategic pattern of organized interference with law enforcement operations.

Over the following hours, a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States leveraged the tragic fatality into a nationwide protest operation. While grief and outrage over Pretti’s death is genuine, the network’s real-time rapid response, using short sensational video clips and emojis as weapons of propaganda, offers a window into the disciplined logistics, messaging and coordination of far-left warriors fomenting insurgency-like confrontation with authorities.

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Fury as NHS tells midwives to back cousin marriage as ‘only’ 15 per cent have deformed babies

The NHS is teaching midwives the ‘benefits’ of cousin marriage despite it increasing the risk of birth defects, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

New guidance says concerns about the risks of congenital diseases are ‘exaggerated’ and ‘unwarranted’ on the grounds that ’85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children’. The national average rate for unaffected children is 98 per cent.

Admitting there are some ‘risks to child health associated with close relative marriage’, the guidance says these should ‘be balanced against the potential benefits… from this marriage practice’.

And marrying a relative – fairly common in the Pakistani community – can offer ‘economic benefits’ as well as ’emotional and social connections’ and ‘social capital’, the document says.

It adds that staff should not ‘stigmatise’ predominantly South Asian or Muslim patients who have a baby with their cousin, because the practice is ‘perfectly normal’ in some cultures.

Critics have accused the NHS of turning a blind eye to an ‘indefensible cultural practice’. 

Richard Holden, a Tory MP campaigning to ban cousin marriage, said: ‘There are no benefits to marriage between first cousins, only massive downsides for health, welfare, individual rights and the cohesiveness of our society.’

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Insect Loss As an Early Warning of Systemic Biological Failure

n medicine, silence can be more alarming than noise. For example, a patient who abruptly stops voicing discomfort or a monitor that ceases activity may signal system failure rather than resolution. Ecology presents a similar scenario, and currently, the silence is deeply concerning.

Insects are disappearing across vast regions globally. This is not a modest decline or a simple geographic shift, but a rapid vanishing of beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, mosquitoes, bees, and entire functional groups. This phenomenon is not speculative or anecdotal; it is among the most consistently documented biological trends of the past 50 years and remains insufficiently addressed. For context, the total biomass of lost insects is comparable to the combined weight of all commercial aircraft worldwide, representing a profound ecological and economic loss.

For decades, insects were treated as background noise—annoyances at best, pests at worst. Their abundance was assumed, their resilience taken for granted. We designed agricultural systems, urban environments, chemical interventions, and technological solutions on the unspoken assumption that insects would always be there. They were too numerous to fail.

This assumption has proven incorrect.

The Data Are Not Subtle

One of the most widely cited early warnings came from a long-term German entomological study that tracked flying insect biomass across protected areas over nearly three decades. The result shocked even the investigators: a decline of more than 75% in total flying insect biomass between 1989 and 2016.¹ These were not industrial zones or pesticide-saturated fields. They were nature preserves. However, many regions like Africa and large parts of Asia still lack comprehensive, long-term insect monitoring, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of global insect declines.

Subsequent studies confirmed that this was not an anomaly. A global review published in Biological Conservation concluded that approximately 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, with declines accelerating in recent decades.² Longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, North America, and East Asia tell the same story with local variation but consistent direction.³-⁶

The loss is not limited to rare or specialized species. Common insects—the ones that once filled the air—are disappearing fastest. Entomologists now openly discuss “functional extinction,” a state in which species technically still exist but no longer play their ecological roles in meaningful numbers.⁷

The significance of this issue is often underestimated.

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Radical Anti-ICE Terrorists Are Now Threatening to Burn ICE Agents’ Families Alive

The director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s St. Paul Field Office said law enforcement has no issue with members of the public observing or recording their work, but warned that some protests have crossed from lawful assembly into behavior that interferes with operations and exposes officers and their families to violent threats.

Sam Olson addressed the balance between constitutional rights and officer safety while discussing recent protest activity directed at ICE operations in Minnesota.

Olson framed the issue around the First Amendment, drawing a distinction between peaceful assembly and actions that disrupt law enforcement duties.

“Time we spend here focusing on the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, but if we look to the First Amendment right, I think that the right, it doesn’t read the right to protest, right? It’s the right to peacefully assemble,” Olson said.

Olson said ICE personnel routinely encounter members of the public who observe, record, or speak with officers during enforcement actions, and that such conduct, by itself, is not a problem.

“And when we’re out there, we have no problem with, you know, the public watching what we do, filming what we do, talking to us while we do it,” he said.

According to Olson, the issue arises when individuals move beyond observation and enter operational areas or interfere with officers’ ability to carry out their duties.

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China Purges One of Its Top Military Leaders After He Allegedly Leaked Nuclear Secrets to U.S.

A senior figure at the very top of China’s military has been abruptly removed amid allegations he passed highly sensitive nuclear information to the United States.

Zhang Youxia, long regarded as the operational leader of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), was dismissed on Saturday for a “serious violation of discipline.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, the 75-year-old general is accused of sharing classified details relating to China’s nuclear weapons programme with Washington.

The allegations were reportedly laid out during a closed-door briefing attended by senior PLA officers.

The meeting took place only hours before Beijing publicly confirmed that Zhang was under formal investigation.

Officials at the briefing are said to have accused Zhang not only of leaking state secrets, but also of accepting bribes in exchange for promoting a senior officer to the defence minister.

He was further alleged to have formed “political cliques” within the military, a charge that often signals concerns over loyalty rather than corruption alone.

Evidence presented at the meeting was reportedly supplied by Gu Jun, a former executive at China National Nuclear Corporation, which oversees both civilian and military nuclear programmes.

Gu himself is under investigation as part of a sweeping corruption probe targeting China’s defence and nuclear sectors.

Officials told the briefing that the inquiry into Gu had uncovered a major security breach inside the nuclear establishment, to which Zhang was allegedly connected.

Zhang’s downfall is particularly striking given his status within the PLA.

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Barack Obama Urges More Street Protests, Blames Trump for Minneapolis Shooting

Former President Barack Obama is urging Americans to “support and draw inspiration” from the aggressive, Antifa-style provoke-blame-escalate street campaign in Minnesota against federal law enforcement that has led to the deaths of two Americans.

“Every American should support and draw inspiration from the wave of peaceful protests in Minneapolis,” Obama wrote in a statement Sunday.

Obama wrapped his call for nationwide action against the federal government in a tone of regret, and he portrayed the street protests as defensive measures against a tyrannical government:

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

Federal law enforcement and immigration agents have a tough job, but Americans expect them to carry out their duties in a lawful, accountable way, and to work with, rather than against, state and local officials to ensure public safety. That’s not what we’re seeing in Minnesota. In fact, we’re seeing the opposite.

Three paragraphs in, Obama’s tone shifts to emulate the far-left radicals — including Antifa. Those radicals — who are backed by many radical Democrats — are engaging in massive resistance and military-style obstruction of the lawful enforcement of popular federal laws, including both migration laws and laws against welfare fraud.

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The Tech Community’s Efforts to Dethrone OpenAI

OpenAI has made tech waves in the recent years given the prominences of the ChatGPT family of models, and the remanent of LLMs as search engine reindexing algorithms. They were a private research entity that became a titan now competing with the likes of Google. However, their story is less than glamorous.

They started out as a non-profit funded by Musk only to be insanely profit-driven. In fact, they are a cash-burn enterprise, and on top of that there are concerns based off of the localization of AI search results, privacy concerns over social prompt injecting, the suspicious death of whistleblower Suchir Balaji, and questions on whether these LLMs, particularly OpenAI are becoming digitized religions. This all put ChatGPT in the spotlight in a negative sense, and on top of the already burning fire were the Ann Altman allegations. The biggest issue, however, is that OpenAI is extremely centralized and has a business model that is based off of incentivizing data harvesting.

On the other hand, there are researchers like me and the growing cyberpunk community who have been working on AI research for many years. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the localization and privacy concerns that OpenAI has raised. This led me to build AI systems based off of open peering that aims to democratize LLMs and AI applications.

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New York Times Insists ‘No One Knows’ What is Behind ‘Staggering Fall’ in U.S. Murder Rate

The New York Times is dumbfounded as to what could be causing the fall in murder rates across the United States.

The Times was the first to report on the news that the U.S. murder rate had hit a 125-year low after President Donald Trump’s first year back in office.

According to data from the nonpartisan think tank, The Council on Criminal Justice, it is estimated that the homicide rate dropped 21 percent from 2024 to 2025.

“When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents,” the organization said.

”That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record,” they continued.

However, the paper has now claimed that “no one knows for sure” what is causing the massive decline.

While the Times asserted that Trump would try to take credit for the figures because of his tough approach to law and order, it has suggested that the two things are not correlated.

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Michelle Obama Complains That People Best Know Her For Being ‘Barack Obama’s Wife’

Michelle Obama just cannot stop complaining about how hard her life is.

The multi-millionaire former First Lady has lamented that people know her only for being married to Barack Obama.

She made the comments during an appearance on the feminist Call Me Daddy podcast.

Ehe explained:

People would be like, “Well, how do you know what to do in this role?” And to me, it was clear that… you don’t know anything about what I did before I came here.

But I was like, well, I went to Princeton and Harvard. I mean, I practiced law. I was an assistant to the mayor in Chicago.

I ran a nonprofit, a 501c3. I was a vice president for community relations at the University of Chicago Hospitals. I was a dean of students.

All of that just disappeared in the course of this whole election, and you now see me as just Barack Obama’s wife.

That quickly my shoes become the most important thing about me… not unique to me, it can happen to the best of us.

So, I shied away from fashion leading the conversation. But I knew I didn’t completely control it.

So, let’s lean in. Let’s lean in with what we do. Let’s make sure that we have a plan and a strategy in place for how fashion, just like everything we did in the White House, would have meaning and impact.

Obama also urged women to carry on with their careers rather than focus on child rearing.

“You don’t have to get off your career track. And I don’t even recommend it,” she said.

“Because kids grow up fast. And then they’re gone. You’ve sacrificed everything. And you know, when they leave, they leave. They close the door and act like you never sacrificed.”

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