| The camera shows night in the Wild West. A masked man creeps through the shadows of a sleeping town. He looks both ways, then uses a knife to unlatch a door from the outside. He slips into near pitch blackness. He moves confidently in the darkness - he's worked for this bank before, checking on their security from theft. Out comes his lock picking tools - the bank president's office door opens with a quick rake. Cheap lock. Inside, with no windows to betray him, he lights a candle. There in the corner stands the safe. He knows it inside and out, and has been practicing. Five minutes later, the lock is picked, and he loads up the gold, cash, and bonds inside. He puts the candle out, slips back outside, and returns to his room at the lodging house, climbing in through the window. The next morning, with the discovery of missing gold, the town looks like someone kicked over a fire ants nest. It only takes 30 minutes before people start wondering about "bank security expert" who had just been in the bank every day. A crowd heads over the boarding house, growing in size as it goes. "Did you steal our money?", they ask? "ABSOLUTELY NOT," he replies, "I merely used my immense mental powers to out hink several flawed physical security measures, breaking no laws of physics, in such a way that the gold, cash, and bonds previously belong to you are now in my possession, and now belong to me. No theft has taken place, only the movement of certain levers, of which anyone who knew how could move, and the movement of afterwords of certain goods." "So you stole our money!!", the town shouted. "No, no, I just interacted with the universe according to its very own publicly available rules. No theft has occurred!" An old cowhand, covering him with double barrel, spoke up, "Walll, guess he's right. We deserved to lose all that money. He did nothing wrong at all." Everyone left, impressed with his genius. |