The More! The Villains!

[rain_gryphon]

Someone stole a Mao Tse-Tung poetry scroll worth 3 million dollars, then sold it to a guy for $68. Buyer, assuming (not unreasonably, IMHO) that it was a reproduction, then cut it in half to frame it. First, I'm sure the old Lord High Commie is spinning in his grave that his artifacts are trading for $3M. It would be hard to imagine a more failed legacy.

Secondly, considering that the guy paid $68 for it, cut it in half, and then went right to the police when he heard of the theft, I'm not sure how they can reasonably charge him with handling stolen goods. He plainly didn't know what he had.

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41 YO is a bit old to be entertained by dropping stuff off the highway overpass, even if you're not aiming at anyone.

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Someone was apparently planning to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the incompetent governor of Michigan. Srsly. When it came time to ask for the ransom, I'm sure it would have degenerated into a "Ransom of Red Chief" scenario.

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Comments

[frith]

I seem to recall reading that Chairman Mao lived like a emperor, never bathing and having lots of concubines. I'd suspect that he'd find it only natural that anything he penned would have a high market value.

[rain_gryphon]

Yeah, there's some merit to that. When I was young, I used to have a certain respect for Mao, even though he was our enemy, because I thought he was doing what he sincerely believed to be right, and because I had this very Confucianist notion of the Chinese as an orderly people, who revered scholarship, and they were following him, so...

And that was before I heard about disasters like the time he listened to some flim-flam man who convinced him that it was possible to make high-quality steel in little backyard furnaces; or the one who convinced him to order that all of the seed crops should be planted two feet deep, so that they'd be strengthened by their struggle for sunlight, and China would have record harvests; or the ninny (possibly the same one) who convinced him to exterminate the wild birds, so they wouldn't eat the crops.

In the end, he just wasn't that bright. He had outstanding leadership skills, but no real agenda to use them in service of. And he was apparently too insecure to admit, for instance, that he knew nothing about steelmaking or farming, and seek advice, and it apparently never occurred to him that it might be a good idea to set up limited trial runs before staking lives on some radical scheme. He could've made a good foreman in a factory, but he'd have been the sort you want to keep an eye on, just to be safe.