Texas, the One Star State.
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- 2 yr. ago
If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.
Or ... you could ensure something like this doesn't happen again yourselves. It's not our job to police your social media purchases.
Plus, it seems like you were notified and got feedback - just that it happened way more publicly than you wanted. Which again, isn't our problem to deal with.
he's like most of his [Conservative] clients, who "feel like they can't talk politics with people on their street."
There's a difference between "talking politics" and red-faced screaming at people that they're evil and don't deserve to exist, threatening people walking by with assault rifles, hunting down and murdering a jogger, spitting on people wearing masks, etc.
They also want to be somewhere they don't feel judged for their political beliefs [...] they really feel like they're alone, alienated, ostracized,"
See prior comment. They want to be racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, assholes, and they don't want to get any pushback for being racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist assholes.
As for the buildings, maybe we'll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something.
Nope, though I admire your optimism. They'll get repurposed into concentration camps.
The French nobles didn't have private jets waiting to whisk them off to the far side of the planet.
It would even be fine if he was ill, if he was openly communicating with his constituents, arranged for a colleague to vote for him, and had his staff handle routine affairs. It's definitely not ideal, but it's been done before and it can work. But this whole thing about just abandoning your job for months, not talking with anyone, and no one knows where you are or what's going on - no. I don't care who you are or what your family's done, you're gone.
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I love the fact that multiple people actually read my three-comment-long story about crazy shit happening - it made me feel good :)
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Various epilogues:
The FBI confiscated the crystal ball and the Osiris statue, and re-confiscated the stand, for "forensics analysis". But the staff at the Museum had thoroughly cleaned the stand before putting it into storage, the housekeeper took obsessively good care of the crystal ball, and the Osiris statue had been through too many locations under different conditions and entirely too many hands for anything useful to be found. Eventually, after many years of us asking, they returned the items to the Museum.
There had been a reward offered for the successful return of the items - maybe $10k or something? The homeowner tried to claim it, but was turned down. I personally think it should have gone to Al the homeless junk guy: he explicitly saved the statue from the trash, his actions are the ones that triggered the whole recovery process, and he's definitely the one who could have benefitted the most. But no :( Eventually they decided to give the money to Jes, who promptly turned around and donated it back to the Museum.
While the theft shows clear signs of some insider knowledge - that there would likely be no Security response to alarms going off, and that the garage would be open and homeowner away - they never caught the thieves. I personally think the number of people who knew both things would be pretty small, but no one was ever charged.
The FBI did a bunch of press conferences congratulating themselves on their diligent fieldwork and years-long persistence in recovering the objects - completely ignoring that they'd long since given up and that there would have been no discovery at all if Jes hadn't wandered into that junk store. Years later, one of the FBI guys wrote a book and it turned out these were the guys from the FBI's semi-newly-created Art Crimes Unit, and this was one of their first successful "investigations".
And, finally: the artifacts have been lovingly cleaned and returned to their display positions at University Museum. If you visit the Museum today and head to the Rotunda, you can see the Dowager Empress Cixi's crystal ball sitting proudly on it's solid silver stand, while the Osiris statue lives just a few yards away.
Anyway, OP, that's my answer to your question: a stolen, 2500 year old, 60 pound bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. I can guarantee that it will cause much confusion over many years.
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Then one day, Jes Canby (one of our Museum workers) happens to visit a junk store a few blocks off campus - Jes loves junk stores! As she's wandering around looking at stuff, several aisles over, she sees something and thinks to herself, "Hunh. That kinda looks like the Osiris statue that was stolen from the Museum a few years ago." She gets a couple aisles closer and thinks, "Wow, that really does look like the Osiris statue that got stolen!" She goes over to get a closer look and discovers the Museum accession numbers still on the side of the statue. She calls the police.
The police show up. The FBI shows up (again). The shop owner is interrogated: Where did you get this statue?! Why, from Al the homeless junk guy, of course. Al wanders around on trash day and pulls out stuff, and the junk store guy buys it from him. Just last week, he paid Al $25 combined for the Osiris statue and an old side table. Does the FBI want the old side table, too? After much examination and consultation, the FBI does not want the old side table.
And where, they ask, might the FBI find Al the homeless junk guy? I dunno, says the store owner, he's homeless. So the FBI starts searching West Philly for Al.
Eventually they find him. Where did you get the statue? they ask. "From the curb in front of some house a couple miles away; sometimes they throw away some nice stuff in that neighborhood." They put him in the car and drive around a whole lot until they eventually find the right house (things look different from a car).
They question the homeowner: Where and how did he get the Osiris statue? "I didn't," he says. "I have a large garage and my family and friends sometimes store things there. I was on vacation in Europe a few years ago, and when I got back, this statue was there. I asked my family and and friends about it and no one knew anything about it.
"I started clearing out my garage a month or so ago, and asked again and no one still knew anything about the statue, so I gave it to my brother-in-law; he wanted it for a lawn ornament. Except his wife thought it was ugly and made him bring it back. I didn't have any use for it, so I put it out with the trash."
Oh? asks the FBI real casually. Did anything else happen to show up around the same time?
A pause while the homeowner thinks. "Oh yeah - there was a crystal ball, too. I gave it to my housekeeper - she's really into all that New Age-y stuff. Where does she live? Oh, somewhere across the river - maybe Trenton, I think?"
So the FBI gets the housekeeper's info and drives across the river to Trenton and knocks on her door. She truly does have a bunch of New Age-y stuff in her place. They ask her about the crystal ball the homeowner gave her.
"Oh yes," she says. "You know, I used to keep it in my bedroom, but the light in there was just too strong - it burned a hole in my arm!"
And where, they ask patiently, is it now?
"Oh, it's right over there." She points. It's on the coffee table; she's using it as a hatstand. [continued]
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Oh. Oh god.
Okay, so bear with me.
Many years ago, some friends and I worked at the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania. At the time of this story, the museum was undergoing a bunch of renovations. The renovation dust would intermittently get kicked up by the ventilation system or would fall in a clump or whatever, and the movement would set of the security alarms. After a couple months of this, Security became somewhat lax in responding to alarms, because every night there were a number of false alarms.
So, one early morning, a student is walking to the university and spots something weird sitting in the middle of the pedestrian walkway on the South Street bridge. As they get closer, it starts to look familiar. They get up close and recognize it as the solid silver stand that usually supports
in the Rotundra of the Museum. This is the first indication that anyone has that the museum was burgled the night before.The police are called, the stand goes through evidence collection, everyone traipses over to the Museum, Security (and the museum administration) is shocked. Everyone starts looking around for whatever else might have been taken. Eventually we conclude that only three items are missing: the Dowager Empress' crystal ball, the solid silver stand the ball usually rests on, and a 2500 year old bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. [The ball is gorgeous: it's like the third largest crystal ball in the world, it's absolutely flawless, and John Wanamaker bought it for like $50,000 back in 1920.]
All three items were taken from either the Rotundra itself or just nearby. This is somewhat confusing, as the Rotundra is all the way toward the back of the Museum, and up a couple staircases. Why wouldn't the thieves grab stuff from a more accessible area instead of crossing almost the entire Museum? Also, the objects are heavy or difficult to carry - why wouldn't they take something smaller, more easily portable, and more valuable - for example, the Tang dynasty horses that are also in the Rotundra and much more valuable?
Even more confusing is why the thieves decided to ditch the stand for the crystal ball. Presumably they were having problems carrying all three items and decided to leave one behind. Did they drop the four-foot tall 60-pound statue of Osiris? No. Did they leave the 50-pound crystal ball which is very round and can be hard to hold safely? No. They decided to leave behind the 20-pound stand, which has lots of easy finger-holds, is made of solid silver, and is easily meltable into easily-sold unidentifiable metal. It's all just ... very weird.
Anyway, the police show up. Because of some University association with the state that I can no longer remember, the FBI shows up. There's lots of chaos. And ... nothing happens. The FBI takes the stand into custody for forensic examination, but they can't find any clues. They keep the stand in custody for a couple years in case "something else turns up" but the case goes cold.
Eventually they return the stand to the Museum. We clean it carefully and, heartbroken, put it into storage. And for a couple more years, nothing happens. [continued]
"I was told there wouldn't be booing."
Faux "News" spent 40 years
programmingbrainwashing theirrobot armyangry viewers to rage at their legislators on command, for whatever the issue of the minute was. If the fascist propaganda machine could be turned off, saner voices could apply pressure cut accountability.Lol, does Iran know about this peace deal? Is it in the room with us now, or does it go to another school and we wouldn't know them?
She doesn't have the platform.
No one just gives you a platform - you make it. You show up at whatever opportunity can find or make and say your thing - and she's not doing it. Hell, I've heard five times more anti-Trump / anti-regime stuff from Mark Hamill on Twitter/BlueSky than I have from her, and that's like one of the most low-effort things you can do, yet she hasn't made even one anti-whatever tweet a month. Hell, she wouldn't even have to do it herself, she could hire a part-time college student or something.
She's not tweeting, she's not on podcasts advocating for her positions, she's not on opinion shows or editorial pages saying "what's happening is wrong and here's a way to fix it". It's been dead silence from her for a year and a half.
If she's not willing to go out and fight for a job she's wanted for well over a decade, I can't trust her to fight for the things I want.
She could be showing up to or even leading protests and marches, writing editorials and opinion columns, appearing on news channels and podcasts. She could be speaking out, rallying people in opposition. She could've shown up at any of the big protests this past year, posted comments on social media.
I have seen absolutely nothing from her this past year except a couple of tepid comments about maybe running for office again.
I get it: she had a high-profile job, was thrown into a crushing high-stakes election at the last minute, spent a lot of energy campaigning and got her hopes crushed. But she's had a year and a half to get over it, and there's still nothing.
The country needs a leader and a fighter. She's doing neither. Hard pass.
If she wanted to run, she should be out there fighting facism. I'm not interested in voting for someone who's just letting all this shit happen.
I use an app (iOS, Android, Windows, web) by TMSoft called White Noise. I think it was like $2.99. It has a bunch of pre-programmed sounds (waves, chimes, birds, traffic, etc) that you can use. You can also import sounds, change existing sounds (alter pitch, make slower, etc), create your own mixes, etc.
My current "sleep sound" is a mix. The base is pink noise, which nicely muffles many sounds. Since a constant hiss can be annoying on it's own, I topped it with a pitch-lowered heavy rain (the regular pitch was a little annoying). To avoid being woken up by bass noises (lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, delivery trucks), I added in a slowed-down heavy thunderstorm: it has intermittent peals of thunder that rumble on and then fade away; any base noises that I hear, my sleeping mind interprets as a long peal of thunder and doesn't bother waking me up. Underneath all that, I have a very slowed-down heartbeat; my heart will tend to try to match it, prepping me for sleep. And I've added in some very intermittent birdsong and frogs croaking to make it a little more cheerful, and a kitten purring because that's relaxing too so why not?
I tinker with it occasionally, but it really helps me sleep through any disturbances at night.
While [Grok] didn’t develop a MechaHitler DJ personality, it did behave about how you’d expect from an AI model trained primarily on tweets and the opinions of Elon Musk. It apparently hallucinated advertising agreements with “xAI sponsors” and “crypto sponsors,” failed to separate its internal reasoning from its external DJ output, issued an identical weather report every 3 minutes, and got obsessed with UFOs.
Lmao
You remember that old saw about getting a job done: "fast, cheap, and good - pick two". Well fast food used to be cheap, and it used to be fast: I could pull up to Burger King drive-through and drive away with a burger, fries and drink in 5-10 minutes for like $7. It might not have been the best food, but it was tasty enough and filling enough that it was worth it.
A few years ago, I was on a road trip and tried stopping at a McDonald's. It took me 45 minutes to get through the drive-through lane and I was about ready to scream because the layout didn't show the backup until there was no way to get out. Last year, I was on another trip and stopped at Burger King. Got a burger, fries and drink, and it was over $20.
If fast food is no longer fast, no longer cheap, and was never very good, why would I opt for it?
Conveniently, that give billion dollars for "unforseen costs" will nicely cover both the one billion for the ballroom and the 1.8 billion treason payment fund.