Dragon stones and lighthouse blocks
This sort of report reinforces my sense that human beings were more advanced earlier in the past than we used to give them credit for. I’d never heard of dragon stones before, but here’s the story:
A new study has illuminated the mysterious “dragon stones” of Armenia—the giant prehistoric monuments called vishaps locally—finally answering a question that has been intriguing researchers for over a century. Standing up to 18 feet high and weighing several tonnes, these carved stones, frequently fish-like or cowhide-shaped, are found irregularly scattered throughout the Armenian Highlands. Long thought to have been part of a forgotten cult, new evidence now suggests that they were used in ancient water-linked rituals and early irrigation practices. …
… [T]he study is the first statistical examination of the monuments, utilizing radiocarbon dating, spatial analysis, and precise measurements. The findings reveal that the stones were deliberately placed near springs, lakes, and prehistoric irrigation channels, suggesting that they were employed as sacred markers in a complex system of water management.
Dating to between 4200 and 4000 BCE, the dragon stones belong to the Chalcolithic era and are comparable to the earliest construction phases of other mega-sites such as Stonehenge. The researchers determined that the stones fall into two different groups. Fish-shaped stones are at higher elevations—at one point over 9,000 feet above sea level—close to natural water sources, while cowhide-shaped examples are more common at mid-altitudes in valleys where water was being used for agriculture. This distribution pattern aligns closely with ancient irrigation zones, supporting theories proposed nearly a century ago.
The process of sourcing, carving, and transporting the stones was enormous.
You can say that again.
Who knows whether this theory about the stones is correct; I certainly don’t, but I find such things fascinating. It’s intriguing to wonder about humans and how they operated back then, because they certainly went to a lot of trouble in a lot of places to haul huge pieces of stone around to no obvious purpose we can discern.
And speaking of huge pieces of stone, I missed this other intriguing news at the time it was announced, which was in July of 2025 [emphasis mine]:
After centuries underwater, 22 huge stone blocks of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, have been recovered from the Mediterranean seabed, a breakthrough in an ambitious digital reconstruction effort.
Restoration is part of the ongoing “PHAROS” project … [which] aims to virtually reassemble the structure using advanced technology.
Among the recently excavated finds are the massive lintels and uprights of the monumental entrance to the lighthouse, its threshold stones, foundation paving slabs, and fragmentary remains of a previously unrecorded pylon. The doorway of the pylon intriguingly blends Egyptian stylistic elements with Greek construction techniques, evidencing the multicultural diversity of Hellenistic Alexandria. …
Each of these blocks, weighing up to 80 tons, will be scanned using detailed photogrammetry and then passed on to volunteer engineers from the Dassault Systèmes Foundation. These specialists will digitally analyze and virtually reposition the blocks as if the fragments were pieces of a vast archaeological puzzle. Their efforts will ultimately result in a virtual twin of the Lighthouse of Alexandria so that researchers and the public will be able to view it in its original glory and understand why it collapsed.
Exciting. I’ve been fascinated by the lighthouse since I first heard about it many many years ago.
“Some men just want to watch the world burn”
That’s a famous line from the movie The Dark Knight:
It’s a description of the pure chaotic nihilistic impulse. I think that tells us something about Antifa, and also certain murderers whose motives we know little about such as the Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock. Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote about him not long after his crime in 2017:
In other words, I believe that Paddock’s basic motive was to kill a lot of people and then kill himself (something I wrote about yesterday). It almost didn’t matter to him who those people would be, as long as there were a lot of them. …
As for why Paddock wanted to become a mass murderer in the first place, I believe that (unless an autopsy locates some organic cause such as a brain tumor in an area that deals with aggression and/or judgment) he was a psychopath like his father before him, and ultimately became an even more violent one. His father was a psychopath of the con man variety; he’s usually been described as a bank robber but that was just one of his many modi operandi … Not all psychopaths are violent by any means, and I think Paddock was a relatively law-abiding one—until he wasn’t.
I then quoted from this comment by “FunkyPhD”:
I suspect that the more we learn about Paddock, the more we’ll find out that he was just a sociopathic, black-hearted nihilist, who wanted his suicide to be spectacular. He served no ideology, was checked by no transcendental beliefs, and had no children or parents or friends or family to shame. He was tired of life, which was easy for him, and – like Oswald – bitter that the world failed to exalt him for his genius, and was therefore determined to punish his fellow human creatures for their indifference. He wasn’t in pain, or in despair, or even lashing out for some unforgivable injury or slight. As Dostoyevski so brilliantly showed, when there is no meaning or purpose or duty or responsibility, destruction of the human community is not only permissible, it is also the ultimate act of freedom. Paddock wasn’t sick (if he were sick, he couldn’t have planned this as meticulously as he did), he was, as you say, just evil. But this kind of evil isn’t a symptom of our times. It has always existed …
And yet certain times foster more of it than usual, and we may be living in such times. I’m not saying that all the recent political assassins follow that playbook; in fact, many of them seem to have political motives and complaints, however twisted. But I wonder how much that’s really operating, and how much is just a screen for nihilistic psychopathy – otherwise known as evil.
Dostoevsky was the master of the subject in his book Demons, published in 1871. A summary of its themes can be found here:
According to Ronald Hingley, [the novel Demons] is Dostoevsky’s “greatest onslaught on Nihilism”, and “one of humanity’s most impressive achievements — perhaps even its supreme achievement — in the art of prose fiction.”
Demons is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s. A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin — Verkhovensky’s counterpart in the moral sphere — dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. The idealistic, Western-influenced intellectuals of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father and Nikolai Stavrogin’s childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the “demonic” forces that take possession of the town.
In other words, Verkhovensky is a “useful idiot.”
I read the book in the year 1968 – which, as you can imagine, is one of the reasons it made a big impression on me.
Sorting out the Comey story
How can you tell who’s telling the truth about Comey and who’s lying? In this case, maybe all of them are lying. But Comey is probably telling even less of the truth about the matter than the others:
While [Horowitz] did not find that he disclosed the classified information, Horowitz found that Comey took “the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”
He further added that Comey “set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees …
Comey later admitted that he asked his friend, Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman, to leak information from the documents to the New York Times.
Comey’s close associate, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, stated that Comey instructed him to leak information to the media. Comey denied that repeatedly under oath.
James Baker, FBI general counsel and a close adviser to Comey, also told investigators that he was “under the belief” that he was “ultimately instructed and authorized to [provide information to the Times] by then FBI Director James Comey.”
That sets up a straightforward question: Who is lying?
That’s written by Jonathan Turley, who goes on to add what Comey says about how he trapped General Flynn and had him prosecuted for lying to the FBI. I wrote many posts about that sorry episode, and this prosecution of Comey is poetic justice. Whether actual justice will come of it is another story; I have my doubts, since the trial will be in Virginia. I certainly hope the case against Comey is an extremely strong one, because otherwise the cries of “Revenge lawfare!” will grow even stronger – if such a thing be possible.
Open thread 9/26/2025
Is it time for another government shutdown?
And which party will the people blame if it comes to pass?
This time the usual roles are reversed, and in addition the Republicans say firings will ensue:
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., released a memo earlier this week highlighting past years’ comments by Senate Democrats warning of the pitfalls of a government shutdown.
“House Republicans acted responsibly last week to keep the government open with the clean short-term continuing resolution,” Johnson’s memo said.
“Senate Democrats, who used to warn that shutdowns would hurt seniors, veterans, and working families, are now threatening to force one unless Congress repeals the Working Families Tax Cut, restores taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens, and sends half a billion dollars to leftist news outlets, among other partisan spending demands.”
Democrats claim to be protecting healthcare – but there’s also the issue of government jobs:
“[A]gencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities” that are funded by annual appropriations but are not “consistent with the president’s priorities,” Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a memo to senior administration officials.
The move raised the stakes of a shutdown for Democratic lawmakers, many of whom are advocates for the federal workforce.
Who will blink first? And who will be blamed? To anyone who’s been paying attention to shutdowns for the past umpteen years, it would be hard for Democrats to claim that a shutdown would be good and not bad. But reversals of that kind are certainly not unusual.
Here’s a recent poll by Rasmussen on the subject:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 38% of Likely U.S. voters say that if there is a government shutdown, Democrats in Congress will be most to blame, while 29% think congressional Republicans would deserve the blame and 21% believe most of the blame would belong to President Donald Trump. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure.
If you add the “Trump” number to the “Rebublicans” figure, you get 50%. Not sure what a poll like that means, if anything. But I would wager that most people aren’t following this and don’t even know what it’s about.
Breaking story: Comey indicted
Well, well, well – It actually happened:
Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice.
“No one is above the law,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement on X. “Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case.”
This just broke, so I probably will be adding more to it later.
The left will scream “Lawfare-type revenge!” But to me it seems pretty clear these charges are well-grounded.
The new rule: all assassins are MAGA now
Actually, it’s not such a new rule that all assassinations are blamed on the right. If they managed to do it with the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, it can be done to anyone.
The latest in the line is the guy in Dallas who tried to kill ICE agents, failed, killed some detainees instead and then himself, and left very clear messages about what he was intending:
A handwritten note recovered by investigators said, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP [armor piercing] rounds on that roof?’” …
Jahn, who opened fire at a van near the entrance of an ICE field office in Dallas on Wednesday morning, had also conducted multiple searches of the “Charlie Kirk Shot Video” between Sept. 23 and 24, just before the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel said in an X post Thursday. …
He also searched for apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents, and downloaded a document titled “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management,” which the FBI said contains a list of DHS facilities.
He also engraved “anti ICE” on bullets. But the left insists he’s MAGA – as ACE points out – after the left celebrated the murders when they thought the dead people really were ICE agents.
There’s another angle that I think is telling, which is that Jahn apparently ran in gamer circles:
Dallas shooter Joshua Jahn’s gamer pals made ghoulish jokes about his attack on an ICE facility where he killed one person and critically wounded two others — including suggesting he “shoulda hit the range a lil more.”
The eight-member gaming group, formed in 2012 on the online gaming platform Steam, goes by the name “Fug bithces Get Money” with the tagline “we can uze da pew pew or not we are coollllll :-D.”
“[He] shoulda hit the range a lil more,” one member wrote in the gaming group chat on Thursday.
“He missed,” the user exclaimed. …
The 29-year-old gunman played mostly first-person shooting games, logging over 17,405 hours of playing time, totaling approximately two years.
Hours before Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Jahn logged onto Steam to play the first-person shooter games “Team Fortress 2” and “Left 4 Dead 2,” according to his profile created in September 2011.
So he played a shooter video game not long before the actual shooting. Was he a bad shot because he thought that practicing shooting in an online game would transfer over into real life expertise?
The left not only denies killers are on the left and claims they are MAGA (in an “absence of evidence” of any MAGA leaning), and/or blames the right for a “climate of violence” while repetitively calling the right Nazis, but it also blames the killings on guns and uses them to promote more draconian gun control. Any evidence of leftist leanings is dismissed as lies from Trump’s FBI and/or the police, who are the enemy. It’s a closed system of denial, and I doubt it convinces anyone except those already firmly on the left. But that’s a lot of people these days.
Finally, from Karoline Leavitt:
Three months ago, CNN irresponsibly gave free publicity to an app that recklessly shares the location of ICE Agents.
It has now been revealed the leftist lunatic shooter who opened fire on the Dallas ICE Facility was using one of these apps.
The liberal media is complicit in the increased threats and violence against ICE.
We see it every day — they are quick to write a fake story portraying ICE in a negative light, often omitting the real facts of these cases, and they hardly ever write about the vicious criminals that ICE is arresting every day to make our country safer.
Notice that she calls Jahn both a leftist and a lunatic. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Open thread 9/25/2025
Roundup
Once again, a lot of news:
(1) Trump and the UN escalator: Was it accidental or purposeful? Hard to say, but it’s being investigated.
(2) Rumor has it that James Comey is about to be indicted. For what? Not sure yet, but lying to Congress is a good possibility.
(3) Trump seems to be more Ukraine-friendly these days:
“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” …
He added that Russia has been “fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia.”
More at the link.
Everything Trump says is a tactic, so it’s hard to say what this means. But one thing I think it means is that he’s fed up with Putin.
(4) Riots in Italy because the country didn’t join Britain, France, Canada, and Australia in jumping on the “Hey, recognizing Palestine now would be a great idea!” bandwagon.
Shooting at Dallas ICE facility
A shooter on the roof with a rifle, engraved bullets, and there are two dead victims plus one in critical condition. The shooter killed himself. The target was an ICE facility, and the bullets had anti-ICE messages.
This morning, a deranged gunman attacked a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Dallas field office from a nearby rooftop. The shooter fired indiscriminately at the ICE building, as well as at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot.
We can confirm, the shell casings were found with anti-ICE messages on them. This was an attack on ICE law enforcement.
This horrific attack occurred amidst the 1000% increase in assaults against @ICEgov. Politicians and media pundits must stop the vile lies and smears designed to demonize and dehumanize ICE law enforcement.
Interesting message. Why do they call him “deranged”? (See my previous post today for a longer discussion of whether such killers are “crazy” or not.) He’s dead now, and I doubt we’ll ever know – except for the fact that completely “normal” people don’t ordinarily do such things unless they think they’re combating great evil and are part of a noble resistance underground, such as in WWII.
That’s where the role of the “vile lies and smears” against ICE come in. However, although apparently the killer was aiming for ICE, his victims were all detainees.
Why all these assassinations?
One answer is: copycats. It’s in the air. I believe the same was true in the JFK, MLK, RFK assassinations. The latter two took place in April and June of 1968, a time of extraordinary upheaval. It was also an era with revolutionaries planting bombs, and featured multiple cop killings.
Of course the killers back then came from different backgrounds and political persuasions, and had different motives. Were they crazy? No. The fact that some – such as Oswald – could be described as somewhat disturbed is irrelevant. They were all sane in the legal sense.
And I believe that is true of most political assassins, such as Robinson (and would-be assassins like Brooks), as well as long-ago assassins like John Wilkes Booth.
On the other hand, would-be assassin Hinckley chose a political target – Reagan – but his motive was not political and he came closer to the definition of “crazy” in that he was trying to impress Jodie Foster and was likely schizophrenic (although his diagnosis was disputed). In fact, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was kept in a mental hospital until 2016. I wonder whether he’d have been found not guilty if his trial had occurred nowadays, however. And I wonder if the fact that Reagan recovered factored into it as well.
Now the left is bound and determined to say all assassins are MAGA until proven otherwise, and that when their bullets are engraved with leftist sayings, they’re just being ironic and cute. Likewise, when they have leftist political histories, the left claims it’s a lie. When all of that falls through, the killers are just random crazy people, as good old Jimmy Kimmel – he’s baaack! – said on his return to TV last night:
This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution and it isn’t — ever — and also selfishly, I am a person who gets a lot of threats, I get many ugly and scary threats against my life my wife, my kids, my coworkers because of what I choose to say, and I know those threats don’t come from the kind of people on the right who I know I love, so that’s what I wanted to say on that subject.
So there we have the “sick person” description, as well as the “I’m actually the victim” and the “both sides” argument. All of which you hear a lot of these days.
Of course Robinson almost certainly is a “sick person.” The internet and the furry gaming community was part of that, a world into which he descended in recent years (did COVID lockdowns also have a role, perhaps?) But that doesn’t mean he’s not also a cold-blooded political assassin of the left, motivated almost certainly by political hatred and propaganda. It doesn’t mean he’s crazy. And it also doesn’t mean that it’s equal on both sides.
What’s more – and this is key – Kimmel also stated: “I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone.” Wrong, and we have the “X” posts to prove it, the ones from the leftists who celebrated the shooting. They were very numerous, and very chilling, and although Robinson wasn’t formally allied with these people in an organization, they nevertheless support him and it’s no stretch at all to say that Robinson represents them.
Words are not violence. But words can spark violence in a receptive mind, and Robinson’s mind had become quite receptive. I have a hunch the reasons were a toxic stew of the following: immersion in an internet world; the idea that Kirk was a “hater” (particularly of trans people) and a “fascist,” things the left has been saying for a long time; and especially the idea that trans people are under physical attack and even victims of a “genocide.”
I noticed that latter assertion – that there’s some sort of genocide going on against trans people – around the time of the Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter’s ascendance. The latter was pushing the “trans genocide” myth in addition to the anti-police myth of widespread killing of unarmed black people by cops. Somewhere I believe I even have an old draft for a post on the subject, which I don’t have time to look for now. Fortunately I don’t need to, because Andy Ngo – a longtime expert on Antifa – has done the work on this:
These assassins are fostered by the left, and it is almost certainly quite intentional.