Stupid people – Page 61 – Splendid Isolation

Foreign Darwinism

April 5, 2021 Kim du Toit Mocking Furriners

What the title means is what happens when tourists travel to a foreign country and then act stupidly — usually with the excuse “But it isn’t a problem back home!” — and are then astonished when they’re arrested, abused or have similar bad things happen to them. Here’s an excellent example of such stupidity:

Police in Dubai arrested a group of people for public debauchery over a widely-shared video showing naked women posing on a balcony in the city.
Violations of the public decency law in the United Arab Emirates, including for nudity and other ‘lewd behaviour’, carry penalties of up to six months in prison and a 5,000 dirham (£983) fine.
The sharing of pornographic material is also punishable with prison time and a fine of up to 500,000 dirhams under the country’s laws, which are based on Islamic law, or Shariah.

I know, I know; the airwaves and newspapers are going to be full of cries such as “How ancient and barbaric are their laws!” along with excuses such as “They were only having a little fun!”

Yeah, ancient and barbaric they may be, but let us not think for a moment that these silly tarts didn’t know that what they were doing was illegal in the country they were visiting — I’m willing to bet that this was part of the allure of acting like this — and now they’re going to discover exactly what happens to “whores” and the “debauched” in the oh-so-enlightened UAE, with their swanky hotels, huge shopping malls and international airport.

The “Darwinism” I refer to in the title doesn’t mean Darwinism taken to its extreme, of course. That’s what happens in little garden spots such as Southeast Asia, where drug smugglers face the death penalty. By comparison, this is small potatoes:

I would have little problem with this bunch of idiots getting a few light lashes with a cane — a fairly common punishment in those parts for that kind of behavior. I’m not suggesting this particular punishment, of course, but all in all, it could be worse.

Take it from someone who knows: after a while, your ass stops tingling after a caning — and given the choice, I’d gladly take that over six months’ imprisonment in an Arab jail.

Fakes & Phonies

April 2, 2021 Kim du Toit 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.

Explanation

April 1, 2021 Kim du Toit Mocking Furriners

Okay, for all of those people who wondered how that container ship couldn’t manage to follow a straight line down a ruler-straight Suez canal:

…here’s the answer.

Key phrase: Indian crew.

Anyone who’s ever driven or even been driven in India will know whereof I speak.

!!!Science!!! vs. Science

March 30, 2021 Kim du Toit Health

Here’s a lovely article from American Thinker. A sample:

Early on President Trump relayed the good news that a cocktail of Hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Azithromycin showed great promise when given to newly infected patients.
An avalanche of political attacks immediately followed. A myth, preached by Dr. Anthony Fauci, said the cocktail had no effect on the viral infection, that it actually was dangerous. The FDA warned against using the long proven safe drug Hydroxychloroquine. The respected medical journal, The Lancet, published (and later retracted) an article against its use. No debate was allowed. “Medical Science” proclaimed that the cocktail was useless. Authoritarian State Governments banned its use.
Doctors on the frontlines knew otherwise. My doctor specializes in infectious medicine. All nearby doctors go to him when they get sick. From the beginning of the epidemic he worked literally day and night to save lives. Sometimes he failed. Most times he succeeded.
I asked him if he used the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail and if it really worked. He did, and it did. He then surprised me when he used unexpectedly strong language to castigate Fauci and all those who had politicized the epidemic.

The rest of the piece is equally fine.