“All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and representation. For if we consider the likenesses which painters make of bodies divine and heavenly, and the different degrees of gratification with which the eye of the spectator receives them, we shall see that we are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to imitate the earth and its mountains, and the rivers, and the woods, and the universe, and the things that are and move therein, and further, that knowing nothing precise about such matters, we do not examine or analyze the painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and deceptive mode of shadowing them forth.” — Critias

“If thou dost not now recognize thine own thought-forms … the lights will daunt thee, the sounds will awe thee, and the rays will terrify thee.” — Tibetan Book of the Dead

h/t @enagurney, with the music video.

I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered.

Tom Bertonneau investigates the myth of Atlantis, and finds himself quite sympathetic to its expositors:

Historians have long since tidied up history and set all the dates.  The professors know what they know.

But do they really know what they know or are they merely being professional such that, like all professionals nowadays, their choler boils over preemptively concerning any idea not fully vetted by the peer-review committee of Soporifica?  Or on the other hand is there not in the imaginations of Messrs. Rudbeck, Spence, Haggard and Hyne, and their kith and kin, something like a profound intuition?

What kind of intuition?

“A great universal civilization in deep prehistory,” Michell called it, the memory of which persisted until the moment when the Enlightenment ceased to countenance anything except itself about midway through the Eighteenth Century.

I commend to you Rune Soup’s Whisky Rants, all of them. He’s like the Moldbug of chaos magic. The one on Atlantis is very interesting and asks some good questions; I’m not really convinced that the Cuban underwater city is quite worth getting excited about yet, but let’s run with it for a minute:

Atlantis has been found. If you admit that fact then the museum is in immediate need of miles and miles of redecorating. And this is just one place. The whole edifice of the western European narrative starts to slip like a clown’s face in the rain. …

There is a fucking city of step pyramids and processional streets stretching thousands of square metres at the bottom of the sea.

There are several of those, but the specific one in question does have something of an unusual story, involving a Soviet defector named Paulina Zelitsky and her Canadian husband, Paul Weinzweig. There hasn’t been a subsequent expedition since the ‘discovery’ was made in 2001, which is unfortunate but given political realities involving Cuba, not necessarily indicative of any kind of cover-up. Zelitsky more or less disappeared, with the exception of this report about her being arrested in Mexico, until about a year ago when her two-volume memoir, of sorts, came out. I haven’t read it, but the description on Amazon says:

Paulina concludes in her arguments that the main strategy of the current Russian Government is to attain global dominion, naturally prioritizing it in the Arctic which is absolutely strategically important for Russia in military and economic terms. The “sabre-rattling” strategy adopted by the current Russian government not just in Arctic but also in the Gulf of Mexico is directed toward military intimidation of their Arctic neighbors in order to maintain full military control and develop Arctic resources without interference from other Arctic neighbors. The nuclear deterrent cycle is about to repeat once again with Russian government rebuilding its previously abandoned military bases in Cuba and once again secretly sending its navy equipped with nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Sounds crazy, right? But just maybe a little prescient, given this news two weeks ago. She’s also taken up internet commenting, posting largely on Ukrainian affairs — she was educated in Odessa — and is clearly quite opposed to Russia’s new self-assertion on the world stage.

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I sure hope Elias Isquith is right about this:

… the Tea Party’s philosophy of government (again, as understood by Salam) has embedded within it an aversion to basic democratic principles that goes far beyond a typical contempt for Washington, politicians and pundits. … He’s describing a childish and essentially anti-political belief that a return to an Articles of Confederation-style U.S. order — in which each state is more of a sovereign unto itself than a member of a larger American whole — will produce 50 mini-nations where everyone basically agrees.

It’s strange to me that someone would object to a pluralistic world in which he could wait months for medical procedures in Bennington while I stock up on assault weapons in Sedona. Call it a patchwork, or an archipelago, whatever you call it we’re dealing with an ambi-ideological concept. Anyway, it must be crushed:

If the basic, irresolvable questions of identity that each generation must answer for itself — What do we value? Whom do we respect? What do we want from each other? What do we demand of ourselves? — are no longer contested, then, really, what’s the point? Just appoint a CEO of State for life, a charismatic technocrat to make sure the trains are running on time, and be done with it.

That isn’t a bad suggestion, but perhaps he doth protest too much. See, it’s not dictatorship he finds so distasteful, it’s that people could peaceably agree to disagree about those questions he says are “irresolvable.” Almost, you know, the opposite of a dictatorship. I asked him on Facebook what he thought about the Hawaiian independence movement, which despite containing the only significant royalist sentiment in America today, is generally supported by the academic left because of its anti-colonial sympathies. I haven’t gotten an answer yet.

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