Thist story about a sunken island being discovered is fascinating, but the corollary theory from the project head strikes me as… unlikely?
Researchers in Spain have uncovered lost islands that sank into the ocean millions of years ago, some of which still have their beaches intact.
“This could be the origin of the Atlantis legend,” Luis Somoza, the head of a project to study volcanic activity off the Canary Islands, told Live Science in an email.
The team found the islands on a seamount, or underwater mountain, which contains three now inactive volcanoes and is about 31 miles (50 kilometers) in diameter. Its base is about 1.4 miles (2.3 km) below the surface of the ocean.
Scientists dubbed the newfound seamount Mount Los Atlantes after Plato’s fabled civilization that the gods plunged into the ocean as a punishment for its citizens’ immorality.
“They were islands in the past and they have sunk, they are still sinking, as the legend of Atlantis tells,” Somoza, a geologist with the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME-CSIC), said in a translated statement.
With all due respect to brother Luis, this sounds like some Graham Hancock bullshit to me. Let’s assume he’s right, and that Plato was indeed inspired by this thing. How would he have even KNOWN about it in the first place? We’ve only discovered it now with 21st century technology. The seamount has probably been submerged for millions of years. The article observes that the seamount might’ve been visible above water during the ice age… but that would’ve been about thousands of years before Plato’s time (to be sure, he does say that whatever happened to Atlantis did so about 9,000 years earlier), and it would’ve required there to be enough humans to have witnessed what happened and to preserve that knowledge (through oral tradition to boot, as Plato also says) for millennia until it reached Plato. I know our remote ancestors were probably a lot smarter than the likes of Hancock, Donnelly, von Daniken et al give them credit for being, but I find this concept awfully hard to accept… sorry Luis, but I’m not buying it.
Oh no, how will the Olympics ever cope if Rob Schneider’s not watching? The answer seems to be: perfectly fine, once it got past the stink of the opening ceremony, which I finally watched highlights of the other day. Let it be said immediately, it looked amazing; for the first time, the ceremony didn’t happen in the stadium but all across the city, and why not cos Paris is the perfect place to do that. (It was pissing with rain throughout, too, which for some reason I haven’t seen anyone mention. Somehow that made it even more impressive.) The athletes sailed up the Seine on boats. Looked tremendous. However, that highlights package was curiously quiet about the ceremony’s most controversial moment…
Many viewers, including Pope Francis and Ayatollah Khamanei, interpreted the scene as a parody mocking Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper (c. 1495). By extension, they claimed that the opening ceremony mocked the Last Supper, the event Christians believe instituted the Eucharist celebration – and Christianity itself. The outrage has been so intense in some quarters that the ceremony organisers have been subject to death threats.
These responses fundamentally misinterpret the scene, which was not supposed to reference the Last Supper at all. The director of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, was principally inspired not by da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but by Le Festin Des Dieux (The Feast of God, c. 1635-1640) a painting by Jan van Bijlert.
This painting depicts the marriage of the characters from ancient Greek mythology, Thetis and Peleus, with the god Dionysus and his satyrs dancing in the foreground. This makes considerably more sense considering Le Festin is housed at the Musée Magninin in Dijon, France. The Last Supper, meanwhile, resides in Milan (quite ironically, as Milan will be the site of the 2026 Winter Olympics).
I’ll add this video from Emma Thorne, which looks at one Christian loon response that we may take as representative of the general Christian loon reaction:
While stupid people were sputtering about a bunch of drag performers destroying their faith, organisational responses varied from the kind of cringy apology from the organisers to this rather more sensible statement from the mayor of Paris:
Anne Hidalgo is not holding back.
When religious and political officials voiced outrage in response to the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the International Olympic Committee chose diplomacy, apologizing to anyone who may have been offended.
Hidalgo, on the other hand, said, “Fuck the reactionaries, fuck this far right, fuck all of those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all,” in an interview with Le Monde published Tuesday, using the expletive in the original English.
Yes, madame mayor was so furious at these chuds she couldn’t even curse them in French!
Anyway, people finally calmed down, and once Imane Khelif entered the picture they could finally get on with hating other, more traditional things like women, and in the meantime the closing ceremony designers kept rewriting the end show to avoid being misconstrued so no one could possibly mistake their intentions…
…which clearly didn’t quite work, though I feel like if they were really trying to do the tarot reference the “Golden Voyager” would’ve been actually upside down… But even during the Games, some people insisted on still finding occult stuff going on:
I said the other day I’d have more from Rob Anderson, and this was what I meant: Simone Biles and her charmingly self-aggrandising “G.O.A.T.” necklace. Cos let’s be honest, if anyone’s got the right to call themselves the Greatest Of All Time, she’s got as good a claim as any after her spectacular showing… but no, this stupid cunt just had to find Satan at work, however tenuously. This is the sort of thing that it’s tempting to assume they’re not actually being serious and it’s just a Poe, but then Rob also issued his proclamation about Andrew Tate a couple of days after this and I realised he meant it. I don’t know whether this or the Tate thing is more detached from reality, but either way brother Rob is not in touch with it.
Fortunately the Games general went off well, and for a couple of weeks the good people of France could forget the recent electoral turmoil there from just a few weeks ago when some thought the country might not even have a government to oversee the Olympics… and the Games are now off to Los Angeles in 2028, where I presume there will still be a government then… although which government is obviously still up for grabs. But either way I’m sure someone will still complain about the opening ceremony being too “woke” somehow…
I don’t have much to say here about sports cos it’s not something that interests me that much, but it’s Olympics time so I should make some notes on that, I suppose. Been an interesting couple of weeks, haven’t actually watched much of it (though I have rather enjoyed the cycling events, and HOLY SHIT SIMONE BILES welcome back to the podium after the unfortunate Tokyo withdrawal; I think her several medals pretty comprehensively answered everyone who criticised her over that), but the discourse surrounding it has certainly been interesting, and unfortunately kind of ugly at times… and the cases of female boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were nothing if not that, because the Right will not let women they deem insufficiently “feminine” go unharrassed.
Khelif was a target almost from the start, with a bunch of arseclowns declaring she must be trans cos she (and Lin) allegedly failed some nebulous gender test done by the International Boxing Association, even though the latter never quite explained how or why, and even though Khelif is, frankly, Algerian. Algeria is, to put it lightly, backwards on LGBTQ matters; they’re not going to send a trans athlete to the Olympics, they’re going to send them to jail at best and the morgue at worst. Now, the IBA is a Russian-owned organisation, funded by Gazprom, and the IOC suspended it from overseeing the Olympics a few years ago (which it had done for nearly 100 years in various incarnations) for, frankly, being too corrupt even for the IOC to deal with. The IBA’s real problem with Khelif, evidently, is that at last year’s world championships she beat a Russian boxer who was hitherto undefeated, whereupon the “test” was supposedly administered, Khelif was declared insufficiently “female”, and the Russian woman’s unblemished record was restored.
Khelif went on to win gold the other day, which she’s no doubt satisfied with, but we haven’t heard as much about Lin, and I’d argue that her victory is kind of sweeter:
The second of the two boxers caught up in a gender eligibility row at the Paris Olympics has won gold, 24 hours after the first. The Taiwanese fighter Lin Yu-ting secured a gold medal in convincing fashion by defeating the young Pole, Julia Szeremeta, in the final of the women’s 57kg event. Lin won every round unanimously and was never in trouble, punching the air and embracing her coach after a fight she controlled from the start.
It confirmed the overwhelming supremacy displayed by Lin, who did not drop a round across any of her four fights in Paris. The 28-year-old is a double world champion but had not previously won an Olympic medal. She was beaten in the round of 16 at Tokyo 2020 but proved unassailable here, becoming Taiwan’s second gold winner of the summer. […]
In the ring, Lin made short work of Szeremeta despite her opponent’s attempts to make full use of a springy, mobile, notoriously provocative style. Lin uses her height to sound advantage but moves lightly; she glided around the canvas, controlled the position and tempo of the fight, picked her moments to attack and was unhindered during the first two rounds.
Szeremeta, who had nothing to lose, fought back in the third and went out punching, visibly bruised and bloodied at the end. In an amicable aftermath there was no repeat of the “X” gestures that Karaman and another previous opponent, Svetlana Staneva, had made after defeats by Lin. They had been interpreted in some quarters as a reference to XX chromosomes; Szeremeta, though, took the defeat in good grace and made a heart shape towards her supporters, bowing to all sides and congratulating Lin before departing.
The runner-up was, though, questioned later about the political party she is aligned with. Szeremeta was a candidate for the extreme right party Konfederacja in elections earlier this year, unsuccessfully contesting a local election in Lublin. Konfederacja’s social media activity, largely through reposts on X, has cast doubt over Lin’s eligibility to compete and on Saturday night its feed contained a number of apparent insults towards the winner. Asked whether she would endorse these views, Szeremeta declined to offer a comment.
Though obviously both Khelif and Lin should be pleased with their work, under those circumstances, I feel like Lin should be even happier. For better or worse, however, the real loser could be the sport itself, with the IOC already saying they won’t administer it at the 2028 LA Games after this, so boxing could potentially not happen at the next Games at all. So much for Russia’s national pride, eh…
As promised last week, another batch of late 60s goodness, this time focusing on the psychedelic rock movement, featuring some of the more wilfully out-there examples of same. I’m kind of impressed that Hendrix just hid that track on a single B-side; if he’d stuck that on Axis instead of “If 6 Was 9”, I’d like that album more than I do…
The 13th Floor Elevators, Reverberation (Doubt)
The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows
The Bees, Voices Green and Purple
Art, Supernatural Fairy Tales
The Pretty Things, Defecting Gray
Cream, Tales of Brave Ulysses
The Electric Prunes, Long Day’s Flight
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice
Amazing. Not only is Celine Dion pissed that Dampnut and J. Divans are misusing her music, she’s baffled by them misusing that particular song. And, really, she’s not wrong, it’s a thoroughly wrong song for any political campaign, it’s a big romantic number about an old person looking back at a long-ago love; it’s not something you can really make a political message out of… I mean, “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac is a song about Christine McVie moving on from John McVie (who, hilariously, didn’t realise until years later the song was about him), but Bill Clinton’s campaign back in ’92 correctly recognised it had potential for messaging, which, frankly, “My Heart Will Go On” doesn’t. Oh Trump, you’re surrounded by idiots… but you don’t deserve any better.
Oh dear. There’s been quite some mirth on Twatter about this… unflattering image of Andrew Taint. I mean, goddamn, if you reduce me to my underwear I’m not exactly the biggest picture of manhood either, but I’m also not making a career out of how much of a Manly Man I am in the way Andy is, that’s his entire schtick… and, if this picture is accurate, it looks like he’s been, shall we say, compensating all along. However, some people seem to think there’s even less than meets the eye:
Good fucking grief.
Conspiracy theorists have set their sights on far-right influencer Andrew Tate, accusing him of being transgender.
In a post to Facebook on Tuesday, a user named Rob Anderson shared a close-up photo of Tate wearing what appears to be men’s swimwear before suggesting that no male genitalia were present.
In further remarks, Anderson suggested that anyone who receives any notoriety or attention, like Tate, must be part of a global conspiracy to control the public. […]
When asked by another commenter why Tate was secretly transgender, Anderson claimed that it was all part of an effort to mock God.
“short answer to blaspheme the Father we are made in his image so they reverse and pervert it bc we are made in his image,” he said.
Numerous others argued that Tate’s “V-shaped clavicles” were also proof that he was born female.
Some even went as far as to claim that Tate looked similar to Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan and the religion of Satanism, and therefore must be related.
I suppose my passing resemblance to Heinrich Himmler (if I shave all my hair off and cut my beard back and you look at me from a certain angle) makes me a Nazi by that logic. Fucking transvestigators, man. Some of the most deeply mentally ill people out there right now. And, bizarrely enough, this is also the second time I’ve run up against this Rob Anderson fuckwit in the last few days, but I’ll have more to say on that front in another post. For now, though, I kind of feel like casting aspersions on the size of Tate’s todger rather than declaring he never had one in the first place is more likely to hurt him…
The man who immortalised the phrase “this is democracy manifest” while starring in what has been described as the pre-eminent Australian meme, Jack Karlson, has died aged 82.
Karlson – although there are debates as to whether this was his real name or one of many aliases – was a serial prison escaper and small-time crook who shot to fame in 2009 after a news clip of his arrest at a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in 1991 was uploaded on to the internet.
“What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” Karlson theatrically boomed as his bear-like frame resisted a string of police officers.
Chris Reason, the Channel Seven journalist who reported Karlson’s arrest 33 years ago, paid tribute to Karlson on social media site X, tweeting that “Mr Democracy Manifest has died”.
Karlson died surrounded by family at 6.31pm on Wednesday.
“He walked a full and colourful path and, despite the troubles thrown at him, he lived by his motto – to keep on laughing,” his family said in statement.
Niece Kim Edwards said Karlson spent the last few weeks of his life in hospital, where he “had a few attempts to escape and pulled his cords out a couple of times and asked us many time to sneak in his pipe”.
Edwards said her uncle was “battling many ailments but what got him in the end was [systemic inflammatory response syndrome]”.
“As a final send off, we gave uncle a last taste of red wine through his drip just before it was removed,” she said.
Alas that a succulent Chinese meal evidently wasn’t an option. This news comes not long after I read that a documentary about him was being made; it looks like the director, Heath Davis, got him just in time. Alas again that Jack, or Cecil, or John, or “The Hun” won’t get to see it.
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