James Abbott The Jade Sphinx

Hmm, 8k followers before the month is over? Anyway, thank you all for being here.

Moonlit Landscape, by James Arthur O'Connor (1792-1841)

Alexandre Cabanel, French. Painting- Paradise Lost. 1867.

UK: Migrants attack police officers — one cop begs, “Don’t beat me! I’m on your side, I’m not racist and pro-Islam!” Do you support ending the woke British government? A. Yes B. No

The Muslim who treats you at the hospital is not a terrorist. The Muslim who teaches your children is not a terrorist. The Muslim who serves you in a shop is not a terrorist. The Muslim who drives your taxi is not a terrorist. The Muslim who lives next door is not a terrorist. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are ordinary people trying to live their lives. Judge people by their actions, not by their religion.

Imagine having $1,000,000,000,000 and using it to fund Nazism and hate instead of trying to actually help the world.

I miss the era when having enormous wealth was seen as profoundly embarrassing and potentially cause for damnation, to the extent that robber barons would attempt to rid themselves of their massive fortunes by building libraries, museums, concert halls, research universities.

in nature if a monkey hoarded 1 trillion bananas the other monkeys would beat that monkey to death and take his bananas

Haven’t watched Shia LaBeouf (40 today) vine-swinging with monkeys in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull in 18 years, and somehow it’s even worse than I remember. It feels like Spielberg had a brain fart, then made us sit through it.

Here is a story about a group of students who fundraised and worked for an entire year to bring Neil de Grasse Tyson to speak at an event: "We were a small college club with around 10 members and on a whim one of our members emailed tyson's agent to see if we could book him. We found out it would cost 40k (it raised to 50k in December of that year where I think it still might be) for his speaking fee plus expenses to have him come to our college for 1 day where he'd host a small lecture, a press meeting, dinner with up to 6 people, and the main lecture and a book signing time permitting. We decided to go for it, and spent a year where our club exclusively worked on bringing him in. When he arrived, myself and others introduced ourselves and our fields of study. He went after first of us in humanities or soft sciences pretty much relentlessly from the get go. We're all used to the philosophy major working at McDonald's joke, but he wasn't trying to be funny, and spent the ride from the airport making repeated comments about the uselessness of our majors. Additionally he spent about 5 minutes trying to show that logic was stupid but he was citing logical rules and Occam's razor. The small lecture was him bragging about how famous he was, and how easy it is to pull yourself out of poverty or etc. The dinner was for leaders of other clubs so helped us raise money. He took the piss out of how one student held her fork, and was impossibly smug when giving advice to physics students. The main event was a terribly boring lecture consisting of fart jokes and fan service; teasing the upcoming TV series he was in and not much else. He spent a quarter of the time reading Sagan's blue dot, which is nice but shouldn't have cost us because it wasn't his material. He left at about 2am, and we were all exhausted because we had spent the day busy setting up and tearing down. The whole affair cost nearly 85k. The additional money being for locations, personnel, air fare, Tyson's hotel, catering, etc. We all decided he was an ass hole. I'd never want to spend 16 hours with a celebrity again." From another member of the same group: "Neil deGrasse Tyson, who came to our university, gave a crappy speech rife with lame fart jokes, was rude and disrespectful with the people who organized the event (there were a couple campus clubs working on it for about a year). He equated one of the group's member's philosophy major as a degree in mental masturbation. We were so pumped to hear a talk about the universe, astrophysics, black holes and dark matter, and instead he gave a speech on debunking lame pop media science misconceptions such as the "supermoon" because the organizing club is known as a skeptic/secular humanist society. He then basically said he did us a favor and that we "owed him one" for that. He delivered a private lecture to our group and members of the campus physics club in which he realized he had said something witty, whipped out hsi iphone, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to come up with the perfect wording for it to post it to his twitter. In the middle of a lecture we spent a year's work and $55k total to organize."

In 1715, a Spanish Treasure Fleet was wrecked on the Florida coast. The loose treasure sparked a race between salvagers and pirates - It also marked the beginning of a new Golden Age of Piracy. This is the story A thread 🧵

Classic books with memorable animals Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Richard Adams, Watership Down C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia Jack London, The Call of the Wild Jack London, White Fang Herman Melville, Moby-Dick George Orwell, Animal Farm Anna Sewell, Black Beauty Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book What would you add? tolle lege

Moonlit Landscape (1849), by Arnold Böcklin

He's literally using his insane wealth right now to fund and amplify the far right in the UK.

This the basic difference. Republicans believe that that if you let the wealthy spend capital it will make Americans prosperous. Democrats believe that the federal government investing in the healthcare & education of our people will make America prosperous & productive.