patrick.net

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/traditional-justice-tuesday-december

And so, an era ends. It won’t even be a museum. “The Hoover Building,” Kash tweeted, “will be shut down permanently.” The physical closing of one of the ugliest buildings in the Capital is also a metaphor for the closing of an ignominious chapter in FBI history.

But the symbolism runs far deeper than that. The FBI’s new home, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, is actually the anti-Hoover building. In spirit and energy, it is the mirror opposite of the old headquarters.

Completed in 1998, the Reagan building sits neatly on Wilson Plaza, right on Pennsylvania Avenue, and looks like something Washington’s architects accidentally unleashed in a fit of merry optimism after a great afternoon at the track, right before sobering up and reverting back to the grinchlike default of only building gloomy concrete bunkers.

Unlike the Hoover edifice, Reagan’s building features light stone, symmetry, arches, columns, and —brace yourself— windows. Lots of windows. In other words, sunlight can actually enter the building (without a court order).

Inside, Reagan’s place feels more like a Roman forum than a Cold War fallout shelter. There’s a massive and beautiful glass-roofed atrium, wide public corridors, colorful marble floors, and enough open space that you don’t feel like you’re being pushed through the federal government’s small intestine.

To be fair, we don't know who the fuck built this or how. History has been faked and reset so often, we are left with speculation.

Things that cannot be re-created in the present day? Things that seem to have materials and methods that exceed the human resource parameters of the alleged times? It's anybody's guess. We don't know who, how or what did them, or why there are no records to show us how if we wanted to do it again.
Patrick says

Who is “they”?

Patrick says

The same can be said of many of the ancient structures of various people all over the world. Many of them, even in their ruined states, are still standing tall today !

Glock-n-Load says

Who is “they”?

The Freemasons.

But seriously it's a shame few build on the size, scale and aesthetic that they did 600 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_Gothic_cathedrals

GreaterNYCDude says

But seriously it's a shame few build on the size, scale and aesthetic that they did 600 years ago

If you could take the planners of on of those cathedrals and show him the Empire State Building, he would be amazed. He would be especially impressed with the height and the short time it took to build.

GreaterNYCDude says

The Freemasons.

I thought that the Freemasons and Catholics hated each other.

Patrick says

I thought that the Freemasons and Catholics hated each other.

It's a tango. P2 and P3 Freemasons (Black Nobles, Mafia), Knights of Malta etc. are tight with the Church and function in its operations.

Vatican hypocrisy of virtue signaling and condemning with one hand while supporting and utilizing with the other are standard operating procedures. They will condemn or 'dissolve' one thing, which simply crop up somewhere else under a different banner.

Supposedly, Frances decommissioned Knights of Malta (fifth vow lay Jesuit warriors). Yeah, it was just because the brand name became too notorious. They still function just fine without the title.

Patrick says

GreaterNYCDude says

The Freemasons.

I thought that the Freemasons and Catholics hated each other.

It's a one way beef. The Catholic Church considers Freemasonry "irreconcilable" with the Catholic faith. Freemasonry is open to any man who believes in a supreme being and the immortality of the soul; the particulars of his faith are immaterial as Masons do not discuss religion (or politics).

As an active member in both organizations, it gets a bit awkward.

But the fremasons of today and those who built the cathedrals are not one in the same, although they claim a common lineage.

Most Masons are "men of learning" who enjoy discussion on a wide range of topics. We are encouraged to be well rounded and are dedicated to self improvement and building our character.

And most of us have an appreciation for classical art and architecture even if we're not "operative" Masons involved in the actual building trades.

I like the Freemasons. Many of the founders were Masons.

Also, all the wrong people hate them.

Finally, 500-1000 were Dark as Fuck, that's readily provable by the collapse of Commerce, Settlement Patterns, loss of literacy and technical knowledge, Organization, etc. that only slowly recovered, mostly during the "High Middle Ages". 1/3 the population disappeared in the century after the sack of Rome. Near total disappearance of coinage from everyday life; you can find Roman coins all around Hadrian's wall, the very far end of the Roman Empire, Legionaries were making small purchases of bread, beer, and bedtime fun with copper and bronze coins.

When you go from UNwalled cities of over 100k to a buncha little tiny villages on a hill protected by usually a wooden castle (which is why most don't survive, and most of the famous 'castles' of Europe are actually Renaissance and beyond Follies never meant for Defense or were long since converted into prestige centers), chances are, things have deteriorated.

So much was lost that Romano-Britons made shittier, less advanced pottery than the pre-Roman Britons under the Druids. A very ordinary kraton (big wine storage pot) was buried with an 700s era Anglo-Saxon king, the kind of pot a slave or servant could have broken in Roman times without a beating, it had been so common. Shellfish and Tile Roofs for Slaves in Umbria, the central mountains of Italy during Roman times, driven all the way up on maintained roads and regular delivery; no shellfish and thatch roofs for almost everybody after 500 and not again for many, many centuries later.

The Merovingians were all kinds of F'd up, too.

Whenever people say "Dark Ages were great, they made toys" and the toys are from like 1300s Germany. The Dark Ages are 500-1000 and they sucked, but of course things improved towards the end.

Nor is it an "Enlightenment Plot to undermine the Time Period", 1300s writers like Petrarch referred to the time as a "Dark Age" long before the Enlightenment or even the Reformation

There IS a lot of bullshit about burning Classical Literature (99% of which is lost, and that's just the things we know are lost due to references in surviving material, snippets and fragments, and lists of books), but there are some truths about priority changes. There's a lost work by Archimedes about a steam novelty machine that was scratched off and copied over by a saint's life, found with laser analysis of old documents.

There is also bullshit the other way, like Monks "Inventing" wind and water mills known and used not only by the Romans but as far back as the Babylonians, and employed en masse, especially waterworks powered by Romans moving water via aqueduct and tunnel many miles to power overshots running grain mills (Barbegal). We wouldn't see the kind of engineering employed on this kind a scale (like those of the Romans in Gaul or Iberian Silver Mines) until the Victorian Era.

Which, by the way, is confirmed by Ice Core samples (mass smelting of Galena hit a peak, prior to the Modern era, in Roman times)

TL;DR: There was definitely a Dark Age ~500-1000, and Clodivingus was not happy where he was, damnit.

https://t.me/DeepDives/48475