A short intermezzo from the peculiar plots, as I just saw this:
A large fire broke out at the Paço de São Cristóvão, which houses the 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, on September 2, 2018, at around 19:30 local time (22:30 UTC September 2). Reaction to the cultural loss was swift, as the museum held over 20 million items — Brazil’s president Michel Temer called the loss of the historical and cultural heritage “incalculable”. The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.
A large fire breaking out last night in Rio de Janeiro, hmm, let’s look at this story…
Shortly after closing on September 2, 2018, a large fire broke out, reaching all three floors of the National Museum building. Firefighters were called at 19:30 local time, arriving quickly at the scene. Despite this, the fire chief reported that the two fire hydrants closest to the museum had no water.
The museum closes at 17:00 (see Google, or the site of the museum). The staff is packing up and leaving, so by 17:30-18:00 it should have started? By the way, the intro says it started at 19:30, later it says the fire department was called at that time. No water, seriously?
There is a lake inside the park (with a statue of Apollo), at just 150 m from the museum entrance…
A spokesman for the fire department told media that the fire crews went inside the burning building, despite there being no people inside, in order to rescue artefacts. Being aided by museum staff, they “were able to remove a lot of things from inside”.
So this museum holding 20,000,000 unique pieces of history, archeology, paleontology and other areas, had no guards? Nobody is watching a building that valuable at night?
Any middle-class apartment building in Rio has a guard on duty, day and night, larger buildings more. But they want us to believe this museum in the center of Rio, in a park just next to the famous Maracanã stadium, the railway and 2 hospitals, had nobody inside? No guard, no fire alarms, no sprinkler system, nothing?
Oh wait…
The four security guards who were on duty at the museum managed to escape; there have been no reports of casualties.
Granted, it’s a huge building, but 4 security guards, with a camera control room and they just escape? What about sprinklers? Are those people not trained to handle a starting fire while calling the firefighters?
A small fire broke out on an empty lot next to my apartment building here, at 9:30 AM last March. Dry season, many dry leaves and a cigarette or piece of glass could easily have sparked it. I took photos of it and checked the data; within 4 minutes there was a fire truck, with water, to extinguish the fire, done in 8 minutes.
But they want us to believe a fire can just rage on for 1.5-2 hours (and/or getting out of control in 1.5 -or 3- hours) in probably the most prestigious cultural building in a country of 200+ million people? No, but seriously?
The fire was out of control by 21:00 (00:00 UTC September 3), with great flames and occasional explosions, being fought by firefighters from four sectors. Dozens of people went to Quinta da Boa Vista to see the fire. A specialized team of firefighters entered the building at 21:15 to try to block areas still not hit by the flames, and to evaluate the extent of the damage. However, by 21:30, the whole building had been engulfed by the fire, including exhibitions that were in the two areas at the front of the main building.
Firefighters of three sectors were fighting the fire by 21:45 [2+ hours after the call?]. Two fire engines with turntable ladders were being used, with two water trucks taking turns to supply water.
A portion of the museum’s collection is housed elsewhere and has not been affected.
Hmm, how big was that portion?
Kátia Bogéa, said that “[i]t’s a national and worldwide tragedy. Everybody can see that this is not a loss for the Brazilian people, but for the whole humanity” and commented that it was “a predictable tragedy, because we’ve known for a long that Brazilian cultural heritage has no budget”.
I guess those budget problems are over now…?
I am not claiming the fire was fake, but the story looks ridiculous…
More photos here.
Note that the façade of the building is a pristine off-white, wouldn’t we expect to see at least some soot or burn marks on the outside (and inside walls)?
Piece of Mindful 
this big museums often or mostly don’t present original artifacts but only copies so there is nothing of real value in it. Therefore they let it burn. They secured the few originals in time. Building was probably in bad shape. A fire gives them insurance money to pay for the necessary repairs they would have paid themselves if there was no fire. The same scam like with 911 or recently with the bridge in Geneva. It is called money laundering. Supported by the system of course.
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I had not thought of Muller’s angle, but it makes sense. What I suspected was that the museum was stripped of anything valuable, the guards sent home, the security system shut down, the water shut off, and then the place was deliberately incinerated. There may or may not be insurance fraud involved … maybe they will turn around now and seek public support for a new building. The picture of the building after the fire shows that it was a thorough burn, meaning that incendiaries were distributed throughout the building to make sure that everything burned. It looks professional.
Gaia, I edited this piece, but did not change a word, nor would I. I did insert the “continue reading” break so that your entire post is not shown in the front page. This helps in two ways … one that people are easily able to skim many articles when they first come here, and two that we know the real readership of any post (people have to click on “continue reading” and the statistics keep track of this.) I rarely look at the stats, but this is a useful function. (The icon for page break is directly under the word “visual” in the edit icons atop the page as you write in WordPress, two horizontal bars with three dashes in between.)
And great catch on this piece … I like this sort of work, as it is off the beaten path and shows that your senses are alert. Kudos. Great to have you on board.
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This fire may be cover for theft. Wait and see if any of the items show up on eBay or auctions.
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Not only theft and money laundering, but the elimination and eventually the complete forgetting of ancient “history”, cultures and peoples. The Controllers and Overlords seem to thoroughly enjoy rewriting history, it seems. Remember the reported “looting” of the museum in Iraq? And ISIS (reportedly, and surely at the behest of their handlers /sponsors) destroying ancient historical sites and artifacts? News reports now tell us “Brazil museum fire destroys 700 ancient Egyptian artifacts”. So, the question is, why and for what purpose are they wanting to especially change the history of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and most of the Middle East? And what was in the Brazilian museum that they simply wanted…or wished to disappear? “‘The anthropological collections were the worst loss.” Among them were the only recordings of people whose nations have disappeared.’
One thing that comes to my mind is The Plan for Greater Israel. There are few if any worthwhile artifacts to “prove” the historicity of a great and powerful biblical Kingdom of Israel, so…they’ll just forge ahead with their plans and make it up as they go. Trump is now being hailed as the modern-day Persian king Cyrus, facilitating the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. (But, perhaps that’s all misdirection. The truth may just simply be the forgetting of traditional cultures. Progress must not be halted!)
P.S. Another fire at the Natural History Museum in New Delhi destroyed it’s entire collection in 2016. Interesting to note that these areas of destroyed history are included in the list of countries being “modernized” by BRICS–the new association of emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Russia, China and S.A. have already been thoroughly modernized via “cultural revolutions”. Now, they will finish the others without the fiery revolutions, just dismantle and destroy cultural traditions piecemeal.
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The drone photo (there are no high buildings to take this shot from, so must be a drone) still puzzles me. All of the roof collapsed, except for the top left corner, where the roof is not even blackened or damaged. Below it is a section where a small part of the roof tiles are damaged a bit.
All the rest is just a pile of rubbish, ash etc., with little recognizable things.
The museum is closed on Mondays (segunda feira; the Portuguese language is not so creative in naming the days), but the fire happened on Sunday night. The photo clearly is taken on the next morning, the sun never lies.
Could they have wheeled out all the important stuff in just 2 hours? I doubt it. Was each and every artifact on display a copy and are the real artifacts safely stored? Possible. A combination of the two; copies displayed with some original ones that were rescued in time before they started this fire would be the most probable scenario I think.
The claim that “20 million pieces were lost” doesn’t make any sense. Even if the museum had such an enormous collection, rivaling the British Museum and the Louvre, it wouldn’t have been on display in the main areas, where you would see about ten thousand artifacts at most.
Most of the collected material in museums is in storage anyway, not shown publicly. That wasn’t lost, that would be in basements or on other locations.
I think a relevant paper to link in this respect is MM’s paper on “Dresden”. Which was “just” the best known of the many bombings of WWII, I know others destroyed a lot of paleontological treasures (according to the peculiar plot that is)…
Also earlier fires allegedly destroyed original fossils:
List of lost, damaged, or destroyed dinosaur specimens
But on the page itself it reads:
LOL!
Was “Dresden” another fake?
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MM thinks Dresden was a fake…I didn’t think so, but who knows at this point? What a mess…great article BTW!
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Brazil is world famous for the variety of pterosaurs found in the Santana Formation of northeastern Brazil. Allegedly, according to the story at least, the museum housed unique fossils of them (I assume they were safely stored somewhere else, as the other precious artefacts).
Reading about the pterosaurs, studied by a French paleontologist called Gerald Grellet-Tinner, I came across this article called The professor, the cop and the student: a tale of sex and deception in San Juan County.
Though it reads like a soap, for a change I think this is true.
In short: professor at university in Washington state has sex with a 19 year old student (so over the age of consent), but little did he know that there is a law in Washington that says “sex between a teacher and a student below the age of 21 is a crime”. So he gets thrown in jail.
The story doesn’t end there, as the detective investigating the case also has sex with that same student, an illegal immigrant who already is a mother at 19 years…
As bizarre as the story may be, I totally see such a thing happening in real life and the way of reporting doesn’t smell like a hoax, as many other stories in the media do.
What are your thoughts?
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