Category: Crime

Fakes & Phonies

Crime, Fine Art

Lat night I watched an interesting movie on Netflix called Made You Look, about a string of art forgeries sold for unbelievable sums of money from the late 1980s till 2018.

Actually, I have only one quibble with the show, in that it should have been entitled Made You Look Foolish — because not only were art collectors taken in by the fakes, but art authenticators, catalog printers, auction houses and of course, art dealers (who are to the art business what agents and managers are to the music world — i.e. a bunch of venal rogues, thieves and manipulators).

Spoiler alert (although anyone with a brain could see this coming):  when works of art sell for bajillions of dollars, the incentive for forgery increases exponentially.  In the case above, all the forgeries were created by one man — some little old Chinese (quelle surprise ) artist living in Long Island NY — who had a real talent for painting in the style of most of the American abstract artists of the 20th century.  He handed them over to a guy who faked the paintings’ condition (so they’d look as though they were painted in the 1950s, say, instead of 1986).  Then the paintings were given to a shady art dealer with absolutely no history of art dealing (!!!!!) who then told a gullible art dealer in (where else?) Manhattan that the paintings came from an anonymous collector of unknown name and no history (!!!!) — and then the fun ensued, when the dealer purchased a painting by Jackson Pollock for, say, $950,000 (!!!!) who then turned around and sold it to some rich asshole for… $9.1 million (!!!!!!!!).

What astonished me is that this didn’t happen back in the 18th century, when nobody knew nothin’ about art authentication;  no, this happened during a time when a paint’s age (and even the age of the canvas) could be determined by chemical- or spectrographic analysis.  Even when this was done and the forgery exposed, nobody did anything, because there were so many reputations at stake:  those of the collectors, of the art dealers, of the art critics, and so on.  Nobody likes to look a fool, but untold hundreds of people were.

I’m going to make one statement here that was never mentioned in the movie.  Frankly, the abstract style of art is such that I’m amazed that there haven’t been millions of forgeries, all done in middle-school art classes.  Think I’m joking?  Take a look:

(Longtime Readers will know of my utter loathing for Pollock’s art, for all sorts of aesthetic reasons, but the others are no less awful.)

Never mind the sneers you get when you say that your 4-year-old granddaughter could paint a Rothko;  maybe she can, and maybe she can’t — but a 70-year-old Chinese artist of no particular artistic merit could, and did:  fooling all the above pretentious assholes into going into raptures about this kind of dreck, and paying lots of moolah for it.

By the way, I have no problem with people owning copies — even great copies — of masterpieces.  I happen to have a dozen or so scattered around my house myself.  Here are some, for example:  Monet’s Blue House At Zaandam :

…Winslow Homer’s A Wall, Nassau :

…and Childe Hassam’s Lower Fifth Avenue :

The big — giant — difference between me and those rich suckers is that I paid about $80 (eighty) each for my copies (including shipping), and I cheerfully admit that they’re not originals.  (They come from iCanvas.com, by the way, and they’re created by machines using acrylic paints which look so like the original oils that it makes little difference.)

They’re also Impressionist paintings (none of that abstract splashing and daubing for me, no thank you).

I have to tell you that even if I won a huge lottery, there is no way I would ever pay millions for an original, no matter how much I may love the artist.

Especially when the “original” may turn out to be a fake, painted by a little old Chinese guy in Long Island.

Unexpectedly

Crime, Terrorism

Some mook went berserk in a supermarket in Boulder CO a couple days back, killing ten folks including the cop who stopped him.

Police identified the alleged shooter, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, as well as his ten alleged victims.  Sadly, the asshole wasn’t among the deceased.

Of course, Chuck The Schmuck Schumer immediately announced that he would be proposing a boatload of new gun control laws, without ever mentioning which if any his proposed laws would have stopped this particular crime from occurring had they already been in place.

I’m just amazed that this being Colorado, there wasn’t at least one armed citizen on the scene;  but maybe the fact that it happened in Boulder (a.k.a. Hippie Heaven) had something to do with it.

Pecking Order

Crime, Funny Stuff

Now we have yet another way to make criminal acts still worse than the acts themselves:

Misogyny will now be recorded as a hate crime with police asked to identify whether offences are motivated by ‘hostility based on sex’

So it’s not just bad that you kill a woman;  calling her a “filthy bitch” as you stab her to death makes the crime that much more reprehensible.  But it gets better.

Police forces will be asked to record and identify any crimes of violence, including stalking and sexual offences, where the victim believed it to have been motivated by ‘hostility based on their sex’, a Home Office minister said.

Ummmm I thought that stalking, for instance, has always been solely motivated by hostility based on sex — unless he’s following her around to see who she’s bonking now that they’re no longer a couple, maybe?

Damn, it’s confusing.

Okay, let’s see if I’ve got the order of badness right.

Killing a Black person is bad;  killing him while calling him a filthy nigger is terrible, the worst, unforgivable.  (I think we can all agree that thanks to the Burn/Loot/Murder pressure group, that action is pretty much at the top of the Evil Hate List.)

Next, I would imagine that calling someone a fucking Paki / towelhead / Meskin / [insert brown-skinned ethnic group here]  as you shoot them in the face might be next in the pecking order.  (Not included:  Chinks, Japs, Flips, dot-head Indians and other East Asian types, who somehow seem to be excluded from this shitfest — probably because they’re not whining as loudly, and good for them.)

Now we come to wimmyns, as noted earlier.  (Killing one of the “protected” species of women — e.g.  a  Black woman — while denigrating her race would elevate the evil standard straight up to Group 1, of course.)  Anything at all that hints at some kind of animus towards a female victim (by a man — women are of course completely blameless in this little game, bless them) is now going to feel The Full Force Of The Law.  (Not quite sure where genital mutilation or honor killings fall in this order — my guess is they’re not included because delivering ad hoc  clitoridectomies seems to be the sole preserve of Black men — a protected species — and honor killings are okay because We Don’t Want To Offend Muslims Lest They Hate Us Even More. )

Jews — once the most protected species because Auschwitz — seem to have fallen down the table.  Killing a rabbi while calling him a filthy Jewboy probably has some cachet, even, among certain Muslim asshole groups e.g.  Al-Qaeda and/or Nation Of Islam.  But a Black man murdering a “Jew bastard” in Hymietown (thank you, Rev. Jesse Jackson) would probably be punished with a light slap on the wrist nowadays, because Jews are asking for it because they have too much money and control the Bilderbergers or some such.  And Jews don’t murder too many people of any group other than Jews, unless they’re Supremely Evil Mossad agents who kill Pore Ayrabs without rhyme or reason (I’m told).

Way at the bottom of the Evil Hate Scale are MPPs — Male Persons of Pallor — because everyone knows that we are the root cause of all the world’s problems e.g. through systemic racism and ingrained misogyny, therefore it’s open season on us and we can be murdered, raped, stalked or beaten up pretty much at will, by any of the above, without too much in the way of consequence.  Insults delivered during the murdering etc. are probably not necessary because, annoyingly, nobody has yet come up with a pejorative nickname that actually causes offense to MPPs — “cracker”, “honky”, “chauvinist pig” and the like are fairly innocuous, and are actually quite cute, really.  Just being a White man per se  is sufficient motive for blameless murder.

Frankly all the above reminds me of something… wait, what is it?

Oh yeah, now I remember.  It’s just like Apartheid South Africa, only with the groups inverted.

Predator

Crime

Here we go again:

A Sarpy County jury on Wednesday found a 38-year-old woman guilty of 11 felony counts in connection with child sexual assault and abuse that occurred at alcohol-fueled sleepovers with pre- and young teens.

It gets better:

Authorities said Greer provided alcohol and marijuana-infused gummy bears to her 11-year-old daughter and her friends at weekend sleepovers in 2017 and 2018.

Wouldn’t be a crime if it was Oregon or California, but it’s Nebraska:

Greer faces a maximum sentence of life in prison next month when she is set to be sentenced.

That said, I’m offering odds on her getting a suspended sentence Because She’s A Woman So Shut Up.

Quite Understandable

Business, Gypsies Tramps & Thieves

Seems as though the British holiday camp chain Pontins is in hot water with the Gummint Over There.

You see, they’ve apparently been using a hmmmm social filter when booking people into their establishments, to whit:

Pontins used a secret blacklist titled ‘undesirable guests’ to ban customers with 40 common Irish surnames in a bid to stop Traveller families booking holidays at its resorts.
Families with surnames including Boyle, Doherty and Gallagher were all barred by the company, with staff told ‘we do not want these guests on our parks’.
Employees also monitored calls and refused customers with Irish accents.

Why oh why do they hate the Irish so?  (I know, I know, but stay with me here.)

Discriminatory practices included the ‘undesirable guests’ list, published on its intranet page, monitoring calls within its contact centre and refusing or cancelling any bookings that were made by people with an Irish accent or surname, and using its Commercial Vehicles policy to exclude Gypsies and Travellers from its holiday parks.

Ah, now all is explained.  You see, when (the mostly-Irish) gypsies descend on a place, several things happen, none of them good:

  • Petty crime increases (pickpocketing, burglary, bagsnatching and car theft, to name but some)
  • Violent crime increases (armed robbery, fights that often turn deadly, and murder)
  • Ordinary law-abiding people see all this and leave, often never to return
  • When these parasites eventually leave, they leave behind scenes like this:

So to the bedwetters and handwringers:  It’s not racism;  it’s self-preservation.

New Day, Same Problem, Different Group

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Gummint, Law and Order, Marxists, Resistance

So let’s take a look at this new warning from the .dotgov.  Here’s the summary:

The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the United States, which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the successful Presidential Inauguration.  Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.

What interests me about this diktat  is not that it’s spurious bullshit (it is), but in terms of this language it could have been equally applicable after Trump was elected President.  Let’s parse the thing, to get the parallels to 2017.

  • “Some ideologically-motivated violent extremists”  — Antifa?  Most definitely.
  • “Objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition” — Anyone remember the Washington D.C. riots during and after Trump’s inauguration?
  • “Other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives” — that would be the completely false Russian “involvement” of 2017.

All these and more could have been good reasons for Trump to invoke this very kind of action, back in early 2017.

But he didn’t.

Yet because a couple hundred idiots invaded the Capitol, walked off with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern and sat behind her desk, now it’s Defcon-3 and BOLOs for “terrorists”?  Just a reminder:  the “insurgents” who broke into the Capitol weren’t carrying weapons, didn’t throw Molotov cocktails around in the streets or public places, didn’t burn and pillage shops and office buildings, and didn’t beat up innocent people in the streets.  Even the ones arrested were released within hours, and if any effort was made to identify and charge the instigators of said riots, I don’t remember it and nothing ever came of it if there was such an effort.

Also, I don’t recall any of the 2021 “ringleaders” actually saying things like Black Lives Matter’s co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who said in 2015 that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists”.

So which group is more likely to want to violently overthrow our republican form of government:  the “Proud Boys” / Trumpist conservatives or BLM / Antifa?

Anyone who suggests the conservatives, I would suggest, is the enemy of the United States and should be the ones targeted by the National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin of January 27, 2021 — because if ever there is a “false narrative”, it’s the one contained in the bulletin’s summary at the top of this post.

It’s an age-old tactic of the Left:  accuse your opponents of doing what you’re doing, or plan to do.