Isn’t it nice to be back into the swing of racing once more? Your humble author is taking the season off, but F1 is very much back on and the three other members of my household will all see their share of green flags this year. In other news, we set another comment record in Sunday’s paid thread. If you’re not a paid member, maybe now’s the time to see why these threads are so popular. Or don’t, see if I care, couldn’t matter less to me, I don’t need your money.1 Off we go.

The lion does not concern himself with direction

There’s still plenty to criticize about the goofy battery-powered aspects of Formula 1 in 2026, but the changes made for the Miami GP go a long way towards addressing the worst parts of the sport’s virtue-signaling powertrain decisions. There’s a lot to discuss so I’ll bullet-point it:

• Alright, so we are back to taking McLaren seriously in general and taking Lando seriously in particular. He’s kind of starting to look like a world champion, actually. Consistent in qualifying and in the actual racing, relatively unflappable, making all possible moves without flopping on the impossible ones. There is every chance he will join Jenson Button in the ranks of British WDCs Who More Or Less Deserved To Win.

• That being said, the finest driver on the grid is still Max Verstappen and he proved it at least three different ways on Sunday. With any other driver, that born-from-ambition spin in the first lap would have caused utter havoc in the field. With Max, it just meant… a change in pit strategy that was only a few slowed-down wet laps from getting him something between a podium and a win. Meanwhile, poor Hadjar appeared to be crying in his car after clipping a barrier. Can you blame him? Being Max Verstappen’s teammate is no different than finding yourself in a hotel room with the late Kobe Bryant. You know what’s going to happen, you don’t have a lot of say in the matter, and the only real question is how much it will hurt.

• There is no greater injustice in Formula 1 at the moment than the impression you would get just from reading the race results… “Ah, Charles beat Lewis in the sprint then lost in the GP!” Well, it’s more like “Charles had a half decent chance to win the GP but his car broke, while Lewis drove touring laps all weekend.” Leclerc is proving to be a master of battery racing, likely because he is exceptionally intelligent and can spare the processing power that some of his competitors cannot.

• Alpine used to be split into “the car guys” and “the engine guys”. Now that Alpine has Mercedes power under Briatore, we can see where to credibly blame fault for some lackluster seasons. Pierre Gasly is 9th in the driver standings and second in the official F1 Power Rankings.

• Liam Lawson, your career is over, please see yourself out before anyone else gets hurt.

• Sainz > Albon and it will only get worse.

• Perez > Bottas, but will that continue? Does anyone care? Watching the F1TV crew try to work up enthusiasm for Cadillac F1 was like watching a stripper smile at a 400-pound customer. Meanwhile, Haas is securely in the midfield using the same powerplant. How long will a tool-and-die maker beat the Mark of Excellence? As long as Gene Haas wants.

• Who in the business is smarter than Toto Wolff? Anyone? He’s put together the best car for at least nine of the last fourteen years and his gamble on having a literal child drive the thing has been the best idea since Ali G invented the Playstation 3. Sir Lewis must be crying in Angela Cullen’s nursing bra over his decision to leave for Ferrari. Not that he could have beaten Princess George like this broccoli-headed moppet is doing, but he probably believes he could have.

• It has perhaps not escaped everyone’s notice that the “Red Bull finally delivers vaguely competitive car” plot line is happening much earlier in 2026 than it did in 2025. There would be something genuinely funny about Max winning his fifth WDC in a car he despises.

A complete unknown, like a rolling stone

I’m not sure why this is getting traction now, but it appears that a while ago Rolling Stone re-ranked Eric Clapton from the #2 Guitarist Of All Time to #35 overall, beind one-trick ponies like (the beloved) Nile Rodgers, outright commie jagoffs like Tom Morello, and journeymen like Tony Iommi. Oh, he’s also behind Jack White and Neil Young, neither of whom play guitar above the novice level. While RS doesn’t exactly say why, they appear to be upset about Clapton’s COVID-vaccine stance. Which is kind of odd, because to gripe nowadays about how Clapton regarded the vaccine is like saying, “I can’t believe anyone voted against the Iraq War.”

Oh, and the magazine mentioned the thing about his kid falling out of a 53rd-floor window in Manhattan. Which, it should be reiterated, was his baby momma’s fault. Clapton wasn’t even there.2

This activist approach rankles even more when you see Tom Morello on the list at all. This moron puts the hammer and sickle on his guitars, paying tribute to an ideology that killed twenty people for every one Hitler put underground. He is literally a mass murder enthusiast who sells merch based on the idea.

Oh well. The music press has always been fake and lame. Never more so than now.

Well qualified

As some of you know, Mini Danger Girl won’t be racing her own cars for much of this year because she’s off to work in the NASCAR game. So we dragged up to Waterford Hills for their first local series race of the year. I am of two minds about Waterford: I enjoy the kart-track, jewel-box nature of the place and I am pleased to be the GTX-class record holder there, but there is so much about Michigan racing culture in general and WH race culture in particular that I despise. There is no track in America that works harder to make visitors feel less welcome. MDG’s mother won’t go there any more, period point blank — so the support crew this weekend was just me and The Commander.

To everyone’s surprise and almost no one’s pleasure, MDG worked the Saturday qualifying session very well and finished as polesitter in a 20-car field with 13 cars in her class. This did not sit well with everyone so she was protested off the top spot on the grounds that the grid workers should have let a local driver go out for the session before her. Then she was restored to the top spot, but other people got moved around. It was all very wacky and this stuff only happens at Waterford. Someone else got ejected from qualifying for passing under yellow, but then they pled ignorance and were put right back. What can you do.

Prior to the race, a few other drivers warned us to expect some immediate aggressive action from the #2 qualified driver. We know and love this fellow, but he takes his Waterford racing very seriously. Like I would take racing my Radical at a full-sized track for adults like, say, Mid-Ohio. “He is going to test you,” everyone said. I advised MDG to keep her foot in it.

Well, after the first two turns this driver squeezed MDG and she refused to yield, which was great. But then they hit a bump on the track and they both went off. The other driver immediately re-entered and finished fourth. MDG waited until it was safe, re-entered 16th, and finished 7th. After the race the other driver and I had a conversation that eventually worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. I’m not naming him because I sympathize with his agitation. It is no fun being a recognized top talent locally and having some rookie-ish woman out-qualify you. It’s never happened to me in a 21-year wheel-to-wheel career, but if it did I would probably be agitated.

For the rest of the weekend MDG was mired in the midfield, playing bump-and-thump with other spec-class drivers. In the end she was the fifth-fastest of 13 cars in class, losing the chance to podium in the final race because the Brazilian driver ahead of her took an exceptionally bad start and she was stuck while the field cruised by. That’s the end of her race season for now.

And that is where we could end the story, except I want to give my son a hard time. We sent him out for “lunch laps” so he could learn both the Spec Racer Ford and the Waterford Hills track. You’re not supposed to do more than “street pace” during the lunch laps. He repeatedly zipped up to full speed and tossed MDG’s car — on her only set of race tires — at corners with hilarious abandon, including this entry to turn 1:

This was his third-ever lap of the track, and third-ever lap in a single-seat race car. “Yeah, when it locked up I realized I needed to release and trail it out,” he offered, by way of non-apology. Over the course of the weekend, we saw six fully qualified Waterford locals head into the gravel, or the wall, in identical situations. The Commander was unruffled. “There is no reason to go off in that situation,” he opined. “You just have to catch the slide.” His utter lack of concern about operating anything without a full suite of avionics is a constant source of joy (and worry) for me.

I don’t really dislike the Waterford people that much. But if I did, I’d buy John a Spec Racer Ford and let him murder the field with complete disdain in his rookie year. If they hate his sister — and they kind of do — they would despise him.

Hey yo, Griff, hold ‘em hostage!

During the discussions on the Sunday thread, one of our commenters said something to effect of

We are held hostage by the lowest 20% of society far more than we are by the top 1%.

Or something to that effect — when you have over 1,000 comments in the Substack system, it basically responds to all queries with a random podcast. If the original poster wants to speak up, he is invited to do so.

I think I’m a bit to the left of most ACF readers in the sense that I don’t have any patience with pure “invisible hand” economics or lolbertarian philosophy. My opinion is that America works best when we have a safe regulatory environment that enables business to flourish. There is a happy medium between “pour mercury into the elementary school groundwater” and “you can’t build anything here, someone saw a snail in a ditch 50 years ago”. Too often, even the smartest of us handle our political discourse in full beard-fallacy mode: “WHAT? YOU WANT TO PREVENT CABLE MONOPOLIES? WHAT’S NEXT, GOVERNMENT ISSUED JUMPSUITS?” or “EVERYTHING ABOVE MY PERSONAL INCOME LEVEL SHOULD BE TAXED AT 96% LIKE FDR DID.”

Similarly, I think we have a bit of a false dichotomy in our conversations sometimes when we talk about “the one percent” or “the EBT crowd” or whatever. As if you need to align yourself with one or the other. And indeed our mass media is very good at fostering this attitude. Ask yourself the following question:

Who are the real welfare cheats?

Some of you will answer “the Somalis who scam us with Learing Centers” and some of you will say “JP Morgan Chase and BlackRock”.

What I want to suggest to you is that the oft-discussed danger or horribleness of the lowest 20% is a direct product of decisions made by the 1%. In particular, what Rob Henderson calls “the luxury beliefs” of the one percent have made living in the lowest twenty percent utter hell.

The mostly commonly cited example is family stability: Divorce and pleasure-seeking has been glorified in our media since “Peyton Place”. The vast majority of what you see on TV or social media today advocates everything from “Eat, Pray, Love” to “serial monogamy”. This media is funded, produced, and approved by the one percent — yet they get married and stay married, regardless of their professed beliefs. Meanwhile, the poor and middle-class people who take those media-provided beliefs seriously get divorced more and more often:

Any idiot knows that broken homes are harder on children and more likely to lead to personal tragedy. Which is why the wealthy don’t have them.

Next example: Jia Tolentino, who is a worthless human being from a family populated almost entirely by worthless human beings, has been advocating “microlooting” in print:

Appearing alongside far-left agitator Hasan Piker for a New York Times podcast, Jia admitted to repeated acts of shoplifting against Whole Foods, before encouraging her readership to go out and commit theft: ‘‘Everyone, try it. See what happens.’’

Jia encouraged people to steal from the Louvre, before effortlessly pivoting to endorse Luigi Mangione’s infamous murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

She described the brutal, cold-blooded killing of a father of two as an ‘‘effective act of political consciousness-raising.’’ She expressed frustration that the Democrats failed to fully capitalise on the murder - she called it ‘‘one of the most egregious missed opportunities that we have seen in recent political history.’’

Tolentino reportedly lives in a $2.5 million Brooklyn home. If she gets caught “microlooting”, it will be treated as a joke. The cop will let her go. If Whole Foods actually has her arrested, they will end up apologizing because the New Yorker can do more harm to them with a single sentence than Tolentino can do with a lifetime’s worth of shoplifting.

There’s nothing that coddled rich people love more than the attitude of slight disrespectability generated by advocating theft or, in the recent case of Ann Arbor, taking down all the Neighborhood Watch signs. Every time I read some criminality-adjacent piece by an Ivy League graduate whose O-ring would be forcibly blown out within their first three hours in a Midwest prison, I think of this:

It’s harmless cosplay for them — but when this permissiveness filters down to people who actually have something to lose, the consequences are real. If my kid steals from a store, he won’t get the Tolentino treatment. Instead, his military career will be over before it starts. If a low-income teenager is caught “microlooting” something that is more valuable than he realizes, he might be sent to something like the “gladiator school” youth corrections facilities in California. At which point he is effectively a dead man walking.

When two Ivy League attorneys firebombed an NYPD car, they got slaps on the wrist while the NYT cried over their missed career opportunities. If I threw a Molotov into a cop car tomorrow, they would lock me up until the end of the third Ocasio-Cortez administration or noted ACFer Sherman McCoy’s wedding day, whichever is later.

Yeah, we might be “held hostage by the 20%”, although that’s more applicable to major cities than, say, in my township; the only observable difference between me and the genuinely poor people in this community is that most of them are driving something nicer than a 2001 Toyota that groans in reverse like Elana Scherr being asked to wash her hands after using the bathroom.3 The question is: Where do the 20% get their ideas for behavior? Who told them to stop getting married? Who told them to steal and misbehave as they like? Who told them it was okay to brawl at the Spirit Airlines counter?

I think that if you trace most socially poisonous ideas back to their source, you will not find that source in the low-opportunity communities. Even in the occasions that the core idea does come from the poor, you’ll find it amplified and glorified in everything from music to movies to Instagram.

In other words, America is like the original “Saw” movie: you’re being held hostage by someone who is taking his direction from someone else.

Well, it worked for Genesis, right?

This past weekend, while MDG was making grown men cry in Spec Racer Ford, the folks at Superlap/THAZE were racing in a very special Nurburgring 24h event that wasn’t real. It was a 24-hour iRace. The Superlap folks on Woodward Avenue had a whole setup for pit changes and everything.

One thing I noticed as I watched them, er, race was the amount of Xiaomi advertising on the imaginary Nurburgring. Turns out they have a banner on the real thing, too:

The merits of the SU7 aside, it’s obvious that Xiaomi intends to obtain credibility in Europe the hard, and expensive way. Now they have a raft of new hires to help them do that:

It’s funny how some variant of this path has been trod by Asian manufacturers for more than sixty years now. Whether it’s “Richie Ginther races for Honda” or “Luc Donckerwolke styles the Genesis G90”, the path to respectability on the world market always runs through hiring some Western window dressing for your Eastern product. Sometimes the results are extraordinary beyond measure. Most of the time they are forgettable.

I do think it’s exceptionally interesting that this time, the positions are operational and customer-oriented as much as they are high-profile and design-centric. You can look at this one of two ways:

0. Xiaomi realizes they need to improve the customer experience more than they need to make the already absurd-fast cars even more so;

1. They looked at the styling of German cars from the past decade and said “Uh, we have nothing to learn from stuff like the BMW XM and Porsche Macan.”

Now before you think this Substack is the kind of bagel company where the man in charge writes a pro-Chinese-cars article to keep his job and therefore keep his mancave separate from his mommy’s, er, wife’s budget, think again. I think the Xiaomi people are fearsomely smart and ambitious. I also think they are tilting at the wrong windmill. We are only one more sea change in European and American leadership away from dispensing with the 1000-horsepower electric car entirely. Either because we are back on the yellow brick road of burning actual fuel, or because the Party will be restricting horsepower in the name of Tom Morello and solidarity.

That’s all, folks. Come back tomorrow and see our newest feature: Shreddin’ For Harambe!

While this wasn’t the very first car show I attended in 2026, it was the most recent. And while the Broughamage was in rather short supply, there was still some neat stuff. Let’s get the coolest car out of the way first: De Tomaso Pantera! As my Uncle Dave says, it’s as much fun to say the name as it is to look at.

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Good morning friends. I’m in the middle of the most fascinating race weekend with Mini Danger Girl — she qualified at the head of a 20-car field yesterday then immediately got shitcanned out of the lead with contact — so I might be a little slow to respond to comments until the afternoon.

Let’s also take a moment to remember Alex Zanardi. I didn’t know …

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Good morning, friends. I’d like to thank the paid subscribers of ACF for supporting the “Haters/Lovers” double Open Thread with nearly nine hundred comments. If you’re not a paid subscriber, you’ll never have a chance to read the LinkedIn comment that I made regarding Jared Rosenholtz — he apparently complained to Meta and had it nuked. No worries, we save screenshots here.

This week we will have two new features for those elite ACFers who hand over literally dozens of dollars to me every year. The first: a review of the infamous Laugo Alien pistol. The second: SHREDDIN’ FOR HARAMBE! You keep asking for it, and now it’s here. I think we will kick it off with The Commander’s one-off Goatrock semi-hollow short scale bass, and let the readers take it from there.

As MC Hammer said, let’s get it started.

If you ever doubted that the media hates America

The inimitable Edward Tomarken opened my eyes to the reality of the world thirty-five years ago when he told me, “Book reviews and criticism are not complementary of the text they consider. Rather, they are competition to it.” As a long-time reader of both the LRB and the NYRB, I couldn’t agree more. When you read a serious book review, or a critical piece, you are being force-fed a view of the work with which the author would probably not completely agree. Why does this matter? Because each reader only has so much time. Book reviews compete with actual books for your time and attention. It’s a crabs-in-the-bucket view of the world, but it’s sadly accurate.

Similarly, as the looting of Heritage America by entities as diverse as PornHub and Vivek Ramaswamy1 continues apace, the crabs in our national bucket are starting to increase their willingness to cannibalize. Why is the media so big on Chinese cars? It’s simple: The Chinese will pay to advertise. My GOD will they pay. Every girlboss in automedia is rubbing her legs together like a cricket2 imagining how much ad revenue they can get from Geely and the Gang Of Four or whatever.

It gets worse. The weaker the manufacturing sector becomes in this country, the more political power the other sectors have by default. Right now it’s still possible for the combination of the UAW, the dealers, and the OEMs to railroad some legislation through our national alimentary tract. Someday that won’t be the case, and that “juice” will flow somewhere else.

What follows is every deliberately misleading, seductive, and advertorial-esque phrase in yesterday’s miserable WSJ piece about Chinese cars:

• “the buzzy Chinese car brands currently blocked from the American market”. Everyone is buzzing about how great they are!

• “the all-electric EX2, a sleek compact” The last “sleek compact” I saw was the Dodge Omni 024, bitch.

• “Great Wall Motors boasts some beefy gas-powered sport-utility vehicles” Wait, I thought that was a bad thing?

• “the affordable sticker prices and whiz-bang Chinese technology… the sleekest Chinese cars are now attracting attention.” Remember back when LIFE magazine said this stuff about American products?

• “It’s no secret that Chinese EVs match up well against their American counterparts.” It’s a secret to anyone who owns a Chinese EV, or has owned one for more than a year.

• “Chinese BYD Song Pro plug-in hybrid… It’s a sleek four-door SUV.” The WSJ is making “sleek” sound like a Millennial neologism. All the chinese cars r so fukin sleek!

• ‘Earlier this decade, Lutz said, he had an epiphany about how advanced Beijing has become when he bought a China-made Buick Envision crossover, which GM exported to the U.S. It rocked him—the fit and finish, the absence of road noise, the “total silkiness and sweet refinement” of the vehicle, he said. “I thought, ‘Boy, if they know how to make Buicks like this in China, they obviously know how to make great cars.’”’ Remember this business about the Envision; we’ll return to it later.

Not even in Dan Neil’s fruitiest phrases have traditional European and American vehicles ever gotten a fluffjob like this in the Wall Street Journal. This is a clear and plain attempt by the media to tilt the table in favor of vehicles that are built without labor protection, environmental protection, and consumer protection — three qualities regarding which American newspapers have long waxed lyrical. China works its employees into suicide, pours mercury into village water supplies, and doesn’t back its products after they leave the showroom — but you’d never know any of that from reading the Wall Street Journal.

This is evil, and should be treated as such.

Yes, we have no summer jobs

In the Sunday threads we talked about my son’s plans for the future, which absolutely do not include entry-level work. Why not? The great Delicious Tacos said it better than I can:

I was sixteen and my mom made me get a job. Again. Learn the value of work. She was right, it’s a lesson I retain decades later: the value of work is less than fucking zero, a negative eating away at your soul and your life. So, thanks.

I got my first job at fourteen. I worked as a dishwasher from 6pm to 2am at a local pizza place. It paid me about eleven bucks a night after taxes. This was useful because the entry fee at my local BMX track was six bucks and it was four bucks to get a meal. But I was always dead tired and grease-sick at those races. After all, I’d slept four hours when everyone else had slept eight. My mother said it taught character. She didn’t expect my brother, who was six years younger, to be taught character. He won his first seven BMX races and rarely lost afterwards; although I was much bigger and stronger for my age than he was, I won fewer than a third of my first thirty starts. I was tired. I was tired all the time.

In quick succession after, I worked at a bike shop, a Rax, a Wendy’s, a grocery store. In the years that followed I did construction site cleanup, I sat in a call center, I reassembled busted pallets full of cat and dog food in a warehouse and wiped the heat-rotted stink of burst cans off the concrete floor. I didn’t earn $100,000 a year until I was twenty-nine years old, at which point I immediately bought three Porsches in a frenzy of economic activity that wouldn’t have shamed a newly-hatched sixteen-year cicada.

Here’s what I learned from working the dozen or so entry-level jobs I had from 1986 to 1995:

• Everyone hates their job and zones out for the whole time they are at work;

• Any idea you have, no matter how useful or intelligent, is not only unwelcome, it is a direct insult to your supervisor, who hates you and thinks you’re gay because he saw a John Milton anthology in your backpack;

• Every person you meet during your job is having the worst day of their lives and they are completely free to take it out on you;

• You will spent your entire life smelling like either a cleaning product or the filth it’s meant to erase;

• Anything you own can be stolen or damaged at any moment;

• The job pays nothing, but that’s okay, because you are worth nothing. You are only worth this job. It’s all the world really wants from you. The rest is just you dreaming, and dreams never come true.

In the years that followed, I accomplished some reasonable things. I was on newsstands across the globe. I made a fair amount of money; I can still remember a day in my late twenties when I woke up wanting a new Yamaha motorcycle and I just called clients to sell work until about seven hours later I’d made ten grand. Two days later I bought the bike for cash. I’ve been on TV, I’ve traveled the world, I’ve signed autographs for multi-millionaires, I am just one degree of separation from Sienna Miller because my tailor is also Jude Law’s tailor. But there is never a day when I fail to wonder if anything I’ve ever done is worthwhile — because I spent years cleaning toilets and sometimes I think that’s the only skill I really have.

Two years ago my son worked at the Velvet Ice Cream counter in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He took it really seriously. The girls liked him because he could carry four ice cream buckets at once and he never let them expend any real effort. It didn’t crush his spirit the way it crushed mine to scrub dishes past midnight. His mother has repeatedly suggested he go work at Subway or McDonald’s, so he can understand the real world. She doesn’t like the fact that he was flying a million-dollar Cirrus Turbo at the age of fifteen, or that he had a TTR90 at the age of eight. “He should learn how to work hard.”

My response to that is simple: I’m not going to ask a young man who can fly a plane and play Jaco Pastorius tunes and lead five hundred Civil Air Patrol cadets and audit college physics courses as a high school junior to scrub toilets at Subway. All that will teach him is that he has toilet-scrubbing potential. And when he finds himself sitting across a boardroom table from a man whose parents never even hinted to him that he should scrub a toilet, he will be at a disadvantage.

Maybe I’ll scrub a couple of toilets in the years to come, physical or metaphorical, to cover his tab. God knows I’ve done it plenty of times already. But the toilet-scrubbing tradition in our family stops with me. Therefore, there will be no summer job. End of discussion.

Where the hell is her husband, anyway?

As the #11 Substack in the “Music” category, it is incumbent upon me to occasionally discuss music. So let’s discuss it — as a societal thermometer.

As previously noted in these pages, the vast majority of American pop stars are half-Asian women, and the vast majority of British pop stars are half-Black women. The leading lights among the latter are Rachel Keen d.b.a. RAYE and Olivia Dean. Their most popular songs, respectively, are “Where Is My Husband?” and “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”. Studio-produced videos below. Side note: these are both outstanding videos, scripted and produced by real talent with very little thought given to budget.

Were this a “race and culture” Substack, rather than a music Substack, we could talk quite a bit about how the women in the videos “code” white and the men “code” black, but we will save that for the people to whom it’s really important. I’d rather discuss the lyrics. Relevant excerpts for RAYE:

Baby (whoo-hoo), where the hell is my husband? (Whoo-hoo)
What is taking him so long (whoo-hoo) to find me?
Oh, baby, where the hell is my lover?
Getting down with another? (Whoo-hoo, yeah)
Tell him if you see him, baby, if you see him
Tell him, tell him he should holler

Why is this beautiful man waiting for me to get old?
Why he already testing my patience?
I only fear he’s taking time with other women that ain’t me
While I’ve been reviewing applications

He must need me (he must need me) completely (completely)
How my heart yearns for him…

I'm doing lonely acrobatics, unzipping my dress at 2 a.m.
And I'm tired of living like this…

Tell him I got brown eyes and a growing fear
That if he doesn't find me now, I'm gonna die alone…

I would like a ring, I would like a ring
I would like a diamond ring on my wedding finger
I would like a big and shiny diamond
That I could wave around and talk and talk about it
And when the day is here, forgive me, God, that I could ever doubt it…

When RAYE performed this at the iHeartMusic awards, the camera kept panning to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who were watching and singing along while Taylor pointed to the ring on her finger. I thought it was appropriate, because Taylor Swift is to the average girlboss what Tom Sizemore’s character in “Heat” is to me: a privileged caricature of one’s own suffering.

Our society has told young women to freeze their eggs and give their youthful energy to spreadsheets and bosses rather than to children and family. It tells them that you’re more fulfilled shopping alone at Aritzia and Saks than you could ever be darning socks for your rambunctious quartet of school-aged boys. It encourages them to be an easy lay because being an easy lay keeps restaurants and DoorDash and Netflix and Bausch Health, makers of Wellbutrin XL(tm), in business.

And these women listen, and they do what they’re told, and they make the spreadsheets, and they attend the meetings, and they build the decks… only to unzip their dresses at two a.m. and ask “Where the hell is my husband?” If you’re lucky, you get the Taylor Swift ending: some high-earning simp shows up and has no more concern about your three dozen bodies and ten sextapes in the cloud than “Cars and Bids” does about a salvage title on an aluminum NSX. Then you get to have it all!

Most women will not get the Taylor Swift ending, because they are not Taylor Swift.

Next up we have Ms. Dean. She’s one-tenth the vocalist RAYE is, but that’s like saying that Billie Holiday didn’t have the range of Mariah Carey; not all talent is brash.

I could be the world to you, the missing piece
The extra sentimental kind of chemistry
Some people make it hard, with me, that isn’t the case

‘Cause I make it so easy to fall in love
So, come give me a call, and we’ll fall into us
I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life
Anyone with a heart would agree

I defy you to find a more charming pop song, but it gets oddly dark in a hurry:

I could be fresh air, might be the girl of your dreams (dream, dream, dream, dreams)
There's no need to hide if you're into me
'Cause I'm into you quite intimately
And maybe one night could turn into three
Well, I'm down to see

RAYE is demanding to know where her husband is, but Olivia would settle for a dude who is willing to fuck her three nights in a row before saying goodbye. And who can blame her? It’s a tough world out there. Young men have porn, and video games, and pornographic video games, and their group chats, and the 24/7 Polymarket Kalshi Rainbet casino in their phones.

This is the problem facing young women now: we’ve raised a generation of timid young male screen addicts who won’t cross the street to get laid. Even the most “alpha” of them would rather be in the gym building muscle than getting on top of a chick. Faced with this complete lack of interest, the girls are now doing what Nissan and Kia dealers have been doing for twenty years: they’re advertising easy terms and marketing to the lower demographics. You don’t have to worry about anything! I’m into you! Quite intimately! This is a sure thing!

Then we have a rather hilarious bridge where Olivia and her chorus just sing the word “ME!” over and over again. This is narcissism to an extent that would bewilder Perry Farrell. The last word in the song is also a long hold of a single note: “Meeeeeeeee.”

We talk a lot about male loneliness; this weekend we discussed the fellow who thought ChatGPT would be the best therapist with which to discuss his relationship, probably because he has no real friends outside Rocket League or Call of Duty. But female loneliness is just as strong. I refer you to the greatest quote of all time regarding relationships:

The desire of the man is for the woman

but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man

Our young men have discovered that they can do without the former. OnlyFans, online video games, gambling — those are more than adequate substitutes. But that leaves women out in the cold, begging for the attention of men who are distant, feeble, or both. Where the hell is your husband? Lady, he’s on Rainbet.

In less demand than Olivia Dean, apparently

Erik Starkman is better at headshotting the mooks at General Motors than your humble author could ever be. In his latest post, he draws some damning conclusions:

GM’s board of directors, chaired by CEO Mary Barra, excluded the adverse impact of President Trump’s tariffs when determining her record $29.9 million 2025 compensation, saying the move was intended to incentivize Barra to manage the fallout. Indications suggest Barra’s management of that fallout isn’t as strong as the board apparently believes.

GM Authority reports that Buick Envisions are piling up on dealer lots, with inventory far exceeding demand. There are currently 16,873 Envision units either in stock or in transit across the U.S.

At the current sales pace, that supply would take roughly 330 days to clear—close to a full year of inventory.

The Envision is built in China. It is subject to tariffs and does not qualify for certain U.S. financing incentives available to domestically produced vehicles. In addition, consumers increasingly want hybrids, and the Envision is a gas-powered vehicle.

GM has responded by raising prices. The Envision’s MSRP has increased by $4,500 over the past 15 months, along with a $600 increase in destination charges. GM is an industry leader in using destination charges, which are nonnegotiable, to mask price increases.

These unsold Envisions will be included in earnings. Under standard industry accounting, vehicles are recognized as sales when they are shipped to dealers, not when they are sold to customers. The cost of holding that inventory falls on dealers, who pay floorplan interest each month on vehicles that are not moving.

Let’s talk about how wild it is to retain Mary Barra at all, much less PAY HER THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS TO OVERSEE THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA’S GREATEST INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE!!! This is like writing a check for a million bucks to the cow that kicked over a lantern and started the Chicago Fire. She has earned more than

$300 million

during her tenure. Mark Reuss has earned ninety million bucks during the same timeframe. Imagine paying nearly half a billion dollars to two people who, arguably, have never made a correct decision in their entire lives. These very fine leaders have sodomized the Buick dealers of America with a year’s worth of Chinese junk and counted it as income!

It shouldn’t be legal to sell the Envision here at all. It certainly isn’t moral to do so. It’s immoral to take taxpayer money and use it to build the Chinese capacity that you then use to turn around and close North American plants. Not since GM deliberately made a crappy fighter plane so they could retain factory capacity to bushwhack Ford in 1946 have they so transparently acted in their own interests against those of the country.

Sixteen thousand Envisions on the lots. At a price $4500 above what they used to not fetch. It’s like a comedy skit. Hey, bubba, want a trash Chinese SUV? No? What if… we charged $4500 more?

The best and most ironic part: the Wall Street Journal is, apparently, wrong. The American buyer is not drooling to buy Chinese products, because they have Chinese products right in front of them that they won’t buy. Well, that’s not quite right. The American buyer isn’t Envision-resistant because the Envision is Chinese; they’re resistant because it’s a Buick.

When better Chinese cars are built… Buick won’t build them.

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow!

Corvette nearly beats Civic!

Good news, folks: the new Corvette ZR1X, aka “The ZR1 No One Really Wants”, has set a production-car laptime record of 2:02.22 in the hands of…

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Feel free to discuss the would-be Trump shooter and his manifesto. What fascinates me about this situation is that Vox Day’s mantra …

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No one ever would have predicted it. But with the bonanza of sales from Klockau’s previous acquisitions of Chrysler, Ford and GM, subsequent elimination of all electric models except the Lyriq (Tom, somehow, had a soft spot for them so let them live), and America’s newfound love of large luxury and new wood-sided station wagons (the rear seat, optional ejector seat was terrifically popular, both for dealing with kids and mothers-in-law), there was a surplus of cash.

Aided by fellow Brougham fan and longtime friend Jayson Coombes, they arrived at Tesla HQ in a chauffeured navy blue 2026 Fleetwood Seventy-Five.

They were meeting with Elon at 1 PM. Fleetwoods were now very popular, and when they arrived at LAX there were dozens of them out front in Formal Black. But the blue one had been offloaded from Tom’s customized 747, a GM perk.

“Excellent Smithers!” declared Tom as he stepped out of the Caddy with Jayson. He was holding a gin and tonic with a lime wedge and was sporting a matching lime green golf shirt, off-white slacks and a houndstooth sport coat.

“I’m not Smithers, Tom. Perhaps leave the G&T in the car? You already had two just between the airport and here.” “Ah yes, perhaps a good idea. But remind me to ask Elon for an Old Fashioned when after we break the ice.”

Elon was a bit cool but cordial. But it was a surprise to him. However he had decided he could always use some more vacation time, and after a couple tense weeks, had agreed to the sale. “How’s it going Elon! Have you given any thought to visiting Wisconsin once you get all your free time? It’s the supper club standard of the world you know!”

“Thank you for the suggestion Tom, but I kind of have other plans. However, I do think the employees are enjoying your changing the company cafeteria into an exact replica of The Cellar supper club. You wouldn’t believe how many Brandy Old Fashioneds they’re consuming!”

“Ah, good to know. Anyway, as you likely guessed from my work at Holden and GM, we’ll still be making cars, and they will still be called Teslas. But I’m giving them my own special twist…”

“First off, all Teslas, except for a Model S coupe, sedan and four-door hardtop, will be getting V8s. 500 hp and 500 ft-lb of torque. We’re also going to do a convertible; I’m going to call it the Solaire.

“And all new Teslas will be available with Colonial Yellow, Light Sage Green, Midnight Blue, Solar White and Really Red leather interiors. White, gray and silver will be available, but for $5000 extra.

All the Firemist and Diamond Fire colors, including Terra Cotta and Firethorn, are no charge.”

“Whitewalls, both in wide and pinstripe styles, will be optional. In fact, the techs are right now working on an exact reproduction of the classic Royal Seal gold-and-white tires you used to be able to get on 1990 to 1992 Cadillac Broughams.”

“Naturally, there will be a d’Elegance package with much more traditional styling. One is being built for me as we speak.

“Padded top, ultra plush leather seats, leather dash top, and a monocle holder in the center console.

“They said it should be ready Thursday.”

“The Colonial Yellow versions, with matching interior and opera lamps on the C-pillars, will be the limited Klockau Edition. It comes with a minibar in the back seat with all the necessary spirits and accouterments to make an Old Fashioned, a gin and tonic, and there is an intercom to yell at Smithers if you get low on lime rickeys.”

“It will be available as a convertible, coupe or four door hardtop. Anyway, there’s lots to do. Feel free to keep your office, I’m having a new one with a putting green and wood paneling built in the old gym down the hall. The employees don’t care about it anymore since they’ve discovered the supper club cafeteria. You’ve never seen so many Californians snork up filets and lobster tails.”

“Well it seems you have your plan all mapped out,” Elon replied. “I think I will get out of your hair. Good day!”

As he left the office, Tom turned to Jayson and said, “Excellent Smithers! Another lime rickey!”

“I’m still not Smithers, Tom!” said Jayson. But I think we can head over to the Tesla Supper Club Cafeteria for some surf and turf, I’m sure you can find a drink there too.”

“Excellent!” Tom said as he rubbed his hands together in glee. “Let’s go!”

Good afternoon friends. We’re short on automotive stuff today so as is always the case I’ll be pinning interesting topic suggestions. I would also like to offer a Trigger Warning: This post contains political discussion. If it ain’t your thing, come back later this week for a guest review of a Toyota Passo. Thank you! Let’s get to it.

They hate us cause they ain’t us

Jeff H comments, on the Harley Street Glide Ultra review:

I find the overall social ideology impetus at ACF to be confusing and contradicting. On one hand, there is a forceful resentment of all the globalist mechanisms that threaten the average American worker.. we lament foreign inputs that dilute American culture... we yearn for the restoration of domestic industry and howl when gutless corporations sell it overseas and rob the agency of the American citizen...

...yet, at the same time, there is a distinct hatred for the average American and the “unsophisticated” lifestyle choices that define them. Everyone jumps on ol’ Sherman for demeaning the American blue collar class, but seemingly because the commentariat here wants to be the first to hate “boomers”, “rednecks”, and “fake bikers” with their “piece of shit” Harleys...

Here’s a little something to chew on: if there is anything left of the “average American”, blue collar, non-college-indoc-.. er, educated class, it’s some guy with a drywall business or a body shop who buys a Street Glide and a toy hauler and takes it to Daytona or Leesburg or Sturgis one week a year. That’s about as “American” as it gets, and like it or not, Harley-Davidson is forever our brand... so it’s interesting how many here really hate that.

I’m obviously grateful for the entire ACF readership but… you fellows sure know how to call me (and each other) out, don’t you? I’ve been thinking about Jeff’s comment for the better part of a day now. How do we address the seeming contradiction of American men who claim to love this country yet are openly dismissive or, or contemptuous of, Drywall Harley Sturgis Grunt Style Man and his Street Glilde?

Every answer I can possibly contemplate is unpleasant, so let me try to roll them all up into a bullet-point list:

• Group-based rivalry and ill-feeling is almost certainly the oldest human trait that isn’t directly related to bodily consumption or emission. It’s been baked into us by evolution because everyone who really trusted strangers on sight was gang-raped then decapitated by strangers all the way back in the Quest For Fire days. Racism and bigotry are the most authentically human of emotions, sad to say.

• It’s normal for people in different socioeconomic classes to dislike or distrust each other. This is massively exacerbated by proximity, both physical and social. The reason ultra-wealthy people in this country are so fond of immigration is simple: they don’t live anywhere near immigrants. The black people who live in Columbus, Ohio, on the other hand, despise Somalis. Similarly, any time you hear someone really getting into a crash-out rant about “hicks” or “white trash” there is a solid chance they either came directly from that class or the one adjacent to it.1 Otherwise, they wouldn’t care as much.

• In much that same way that formal clothing starts with the aristocracy and ends with the staff, which is why doormen in NYC during the Eighties dressed like Louis Quatorze, culture in this country starts with the ultra-wealthy then percolates to the poor through the middle class.

• The defining cultural movement of the past hundred years has been contempt for America. It began with the scions of industrial ultra-nouveau-riche types, who distinguished themselves from their embarrassing parents by cleaving to European tastes, and it has filtered as far down as the people who make $100,000 a year. If you watch the Apple TV show “Your Friends and Neighbors”, which has been widely praised for the accuracy of its costuming and set dressing, you will see that the only American products on the screen are luxury homes and full-sized SUVs. Everything else is European-centric, right down to the recent house party scene where half the men are wearing these repugnant side-quest Zegna shawl collar evening jackets in pastel shades like they just finished doing three rails of coke while vaguely absorbing a Tiesto set from a VIP box in Ibiza.

• Therefore, anything American is low culture, and anything European is high culture. But since the average upper-class American primarily experiences Europe as an occasional vacation, this European sensibility degenerates, in daily use, to mere anti-American ennui. When my friend Matt Farah publicly recommends the loathsome White Fragility by Skeletor-ish Robin DiAngelo, he is making an appropriate anti-American signal for his socioeconomic class. (DiAngelo herself was born poor white trash; she rose from that sector into the Illuminati by writing feel-good tracts on how bad white people are, thus standing on the shoulders of her drowning colleagues to survive.)

• If you have any reasonable amount of education in America, you are at least partially anti-American. You view the country as a problem to be solved, rather than a homeland in which to rejoice. To be pro-American and middle-to-upper-class is therefore a contradiction in terms and so it’s a position only held by the sort of difficult, unpleasant, noncompliant men who pay my bills here at ACF. The younger you are, the more that is the case, because as noted before, the culture percolates over time. My father is upper-middle-class and pro-American-culture because he is 81 years old, as are many of his peers, but their children are almost universally anti-American-culture.

• Your humble author loves America and American labor and American culture but I am still a product of my upbringing. I was raised by schools and media and books and professors to despise this country and everything about it. Based on the First Principles meetings and the many discussions I have had with ACFers, I am far from alone in that particular contradiction.

• So it took me a long time to overcome my baked-in distaste for the sort of people who run a drywall crew and ride a Harley Street Glide CVO to Sturgis. That’s not a random example; I’ve been to Sturgis and part of the reason I went was to meet those people so they would be humanized in my experience and opinion.

• It’s easy for me to see how many of us are passionate about America and this country’s greatness while still being the product of a pro-European cultural upbringing. So our reflex reaction to something like a Harley Street Glide or a lifted F-250 or a “Grunt Style” T-shirt might be oh God, that’s awful. We can no more help this than the average Gen Xer can avoid thinking about the “crying Indian” when he considering throwing out some trash on a public road.

• What my cohort eventually wants, although we have trouble articulating it, is a genuine upscale New American art, product, music, and social culture/scene. We want a kind of “Ayn Rand Valley” thing where everyone is a rugged masculine American fellow who wears an RGM watch and chops his own firewood but also can be brought to tears by a Wyeth painting or a George Strait song. We don’t necessarily ride Harleys; we ride something that is just as American as a Harley but far more upscale, the way Oxxford used to exceed Hart Schaffner Marx even though they were both sewn in American cities. We want an upper-class America that rejoices in being American, rather than one that is ashamed of it.

This cohort of pro-American men who were raised anti-American probably includes you. “Oh, that’s stupid,” you reply. “I wasn’t raised anti-American, I was raised progressive. We just wanted a better America, one where people from every part of the world can come here and publicly disrespect our churches and institutions while pointedly refusing to assimilate. We want an America where religious intolerance and insularity is replaced with humanism, a classless society, and abstract art. The real Americans aren’t people whose grandparents were born here; they’re immigrants who come here to do jobs that our natives won’t do.”

Like I said. You were raised to hate America under the guise of hating America as it is now. That’s like hating Lizzo because she has not yet become a 125-pound white country singer. You would totally approve of that Lizzo, once she shows up.

Newsflash: you hate Lizzo.

There used to be a phrase that was used a lot more often in literature about the upper class than in the actual upper class: “NOKD”. It stands for “Not Our Kind, Dear,” and it refers to the revulsion that prissily-educated people feel when they see genetically similar, but culturally different, people doing culturally different stuff. It’s why the average Ivy League kid loves mumble rap but hates pop country; there is no chance that he will ever be mistaken for a mumble rapper, but only the grace of God saved him from being an ignorant pop country consumer and, most likely, the graduate of a “directional” university at best.

A lot of ACFers are profoundly uncomfortable with stuff like “Harley culture”, because we were taught to have contempt for it. That teaching was bigoted and incorrect, but it still stuck. It’s why it took me fifty-two years to buy an American performance car as a daily driver; even so, some part of me can only accept the 300C because it has so many secondary characteristics of an old W211. It is why some of you will buy Porsches until you die, no matter how good the Corvette or Mustang is. You just can’t see yourself in a Corvette. It would be like having your neighbors drive by as you exit the snake-handling church.

Which is fine. To each his own. But in the interest of finding common cause with the men who were not raised to hate America, try engaging in a spot of self-awareness the next time you turn your nose up at a Harley or a Ram truck or a Grunt Style shirt. Don’t let cultural window dressing prevent you from the common cause. We all want a country that makes things, a country that loves itself, a country that protects its own interests. Let’s do it together.

The Jordan rules

This week’s NASCAR thoughts come from Mini Danger Girl; any faults are probably from my editing.

The announcers made a big deal about tire pressures at Kansas, and it was warranted, because teams were right at the edge of blowing the left rear and several drivers reported heavy vibration and sidewall damage. The race centered on the 11, 5, and 45, with Denny Hamlin leading the most laps and winning Stage 1 but struggling on restarts, while Kyle Larson won Stage 2. Late in the race, Tyler Reddick ran into a fuel pickup issue while chasing Hamlin and switched to the secondary pump to stay in it. Then a late caution caused by Noah Gragson, who was six laps down, pushed the race into overtime. On the restart Hamlin lost control of the race and fell to fourth, while Reddick fought off Larson for the win. All four 23XI cars finished in the top 15, and Reddick now has five wins in the first nine races, which hasn’t been done since Dale in 1987.

Secondary fuel pump? What is this, a Boeing Dreamliner? I’m continually surprised by how secretly fancy the current NASCAR cup cars are. The big questions are, of course: “What is 23XI doing better than everyone else” — and, very pertinently for a team that some speculate was meant to coalesce around Bubba Wallace, “Why is Tyler so much better?”

The Times opens the Overton window, and throws “old people” out of it

Hey, I have an idea. Let’s take jobs, homes, and retirement accounts away from the elderly. What defines elderly? We can come back to that. The important part is that we force them into tiny apartments and transfer their assets to young immigrants — as soon as possible.

What I just said to you is a much less extreme version of what the New York Times just published as an op-ed. Here are some of the highlights:

• “Older Americans… do not deserve the stranglehold over it they currently enjoy through overrepresentation in elections, which produces too many regressive policies and too many seniors in the highest offices.”

• “Older Americans… need incentives to give up accumulated housing, jobs and wealth.”

• “Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration most, even when they need immigrant caregivers most. Likewise, there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet or raise funds for education and other civic purposes.”

• “Seniors dominate elections, especially local and off-cycle ones, with their comparatively high rates of participation.”

• “It is not ageist, either, to begin to save our democracy from gerontocracy. Proposals range from making it easier to cast a ballot — since current requirements routinely hurt younger voters who move around a lot — to institutionalizing mandatory voting. A bigger fix might lower the voting age.”

• “It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain… The most obvious is to reinstitute mandatory retirement in those employment sectors (especially white-collar work) where generational renewal has been obstructed for years.”

• “In housing, besides circumventing the disproportionately high elder participation in town meetings where land-use decisions are made, I advocate a progressive tax on older homeowners to incentivize them to downsize rather than retain. The longer you stay, the more you should have to pay. The funds could allow for new construction and other projects of intergenerational justice”

It’s no secret that ACF is not necessarily a pro-Boomer publication, although Boomers make up a big part of the readership. I’ve written at length about the disproportionate cultural and financial influence held by older people. There’s never been so much wealth and power in older hands as there is now. The average home buyer is almost twice as old as he was in 1970. These are not necessarily good situations.

Make no mistake, however, Samuel Moyn, who looks exactly like you think he does…

isn’t talking about making the Boomers quit their jobs (that they doesn’t have) or sell their retirement homes (that no Millennial wants, because they are 400 miles from any actual city.) This fellow is talking about scrubbing 60-year-olds out of the workforce and out of the ranks of home ownership. Because they are insufficiently pro-immigrant and anti-climate-change. Because they have the nerve to disproportionately vote in elections.

Let me tell you something, Mr. Moyn. The way human society has worked since the dawn of time goes something like this: Young people demand absurd changes in society, and old people keep them from doing it. This is similar to the adversarial system in American courts; the opposition of powers is supposed to deliver a balanced and fair result. Young people want to tear down every fence, but only the old people remember why the fences are there in the first place. If the system works, you tear down obsolescent or ill-considered fences while leaving the good ones up.

Which, by the way, is hardly what has happened lately. It takes a real demon in a skinsuit to look at the state of the Western world in 2026 and say yeah, you know what, there hasn’t been enough rapid societal and demographic change in the past fifty years. We need more of it, and faster. Ironically, it was the relatively relaxed Boomer attitudes towards many social issues that brought us to a point where the Times can wink-and-nod advocate a bill of attainder against the Boomers and some of their kids. (Make no mistake, however, the America-eviscerating neutron bomb of Hart-Celler was a product of the “Greatest Generation”, as was LBJ’s “Great Society”.)

I think it was irresponsible of the New York Times, ostensibly America’s newspaper of record, to publish something that de facto calls for the firing, un-housing, and un-franchising of people who are just too stick-in-the-mud old to vote for open borders. My God. This is how we get blood in the streets.

Note, as well, that this shitbird was “Professor of European History” for most of his career. Remember what I said about ten minutes ago about people who hate America and venerate Europe? Of course, he doesn’t like Europe enough to let all the traditional Europeans show up here. That would be climactically unjust, or something like that.

There are times, dear readers, that I’m not sure it’s worth staying alive much longer. After all, Lyle Mays is dead and Famke Janssen is old. What’s the point? Tell you what: I’m gonna stay alive just to continue occupying twelve entire acres, running my diesel tractor while I take naps, and voting against every and any thing Samuel Moyn likes. I encourage you to do the same.

The domestic-terrorist equivalent of the Kodak Black meme

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

Even the New Yorker had concerns about the Southern Poverty Law Center, a place that I have always viewed as a way for a couple of dudes to get vastly rich while making race relations vastly worse for everyone else in America. In their 2019 article, the writer noted that

The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars. The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars,

We now know, thanks to a late-acting Justice Department, that the “violent spectacle” of “Unite The Right” was… funded by the SPLC. They paid one of the organizers $270,000 to attend a planning meeting, and to bring certain other people who didn’t have a way to get to said meeting otherwise. Another “neo-Nazi” was paid more than a million dollars to… do neo-Nazi stuff.

In total, the SPLC paid over $3 million to fund and empower ostensible “white supremacists”. It was money well invested, leading as it did to an $82 million windfall from donors.

This is worse than the infamous “Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot” that involved twelve paid informants and two undercover FBI agents who repeatedly revived the plot when the actual white supremacists had given up on it, including a point in time where FBI personnel texted the lead informant to remind him how important it was to get everyone to shut up about COVID-19 and get refocused on killing the governor of Michigan.

The Whitmer thing was a drop in the bucket compared to what the FBI, DEA, and ATF are paying informants in general; over one four-year period, the agencies paid a half-billion dollars to thousands of informants who were then “authorized” to commit more than 22,800 crimes. Especially in the case of the DEA, you get the sense that maybe it’s worth it. A lot of drugs are sold in this country, and they do a lot of harm. I am less certain about the ATF, which paid 1,855 informants in a single year. What were they informing on? That’s like 100 people for every major firearm manufacturer, liquor distiller, and tobacco distributor in the country.

The legitimacy of the targets and the method aside, however, the use of paid informants is a known law enforcement tactic. What the SPLC was doing amounted to something else. They were basically “rainmaking”. There wasn’t enough white supremacy out there to get their donors excited, so they… paid people to be white supremacists. Let’s face it. If the SPLC pays you a million dollars to be a neo-Nazi, are you gonna quit that job? Or are you going to do your level best to advance the neo-Nazi cause, whatever it is? (Reportedly it has something to do with Ram trucks.)

The SPLC has long enjoyed a sort of qualified immunity in everything they do, but the second election of Donald Trump appears to have ended that. I don’t think there is much in the way of a position to take on this matter besides the following: when private organizations pay millions of dollars to encourage race-based hatred and violence, they should be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter if you like those people or not. If I made three million bucks from Substack and started paying people to hold white power rallies, I would be prosecuted. The same should be true of the SPLC. And unless the lizards involved can delay the final reckoning until Gavin Newsom takes office in thirty-three months, it is going to be true.

Seventeen years ago, I permanently crippled my autowriting “career” by telling the reader that

Our passenger laps with Flying Lizard driver Patrick Long only served to confirm what we learned driving the new Panamera Turbo around Road America ourselves: this is the Corvette of luxury…

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Good morning friends. We are late because I spent much of yesterday with a new Harley Street Glide Ultra, which will be reviewed here tomorrow. Thank you, as always, for your patience.

Mobbin’ the canyons, of course

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Another Cadillac? Well yes. As I often say, and it was even a tagline for the marque back in the early ‘80s… “Best of all, it’s a Cadillac.” And today’s example is just one example of all the colors you could get back then.

It’s subtle, but I really like it. Though I have only seen a couple in this color, so am guessing it wasn’t particularly popular that year. Actually I’ve seen two: this one, and my friend in Spokane, Washington, Jason Bagge, AKA The Brougham Whisperer, had one this color a few years back.

And this one’s Taupe hue is nicely set off by the optional Cabriolet roof in white, with white Sierra grain optional leather interior.

Don’t you just want to hop in and join Frank Cannon at a supper club in La Jolla for some surf and turf and cocktails?

1973 Fleetwood Eldorados got both new front and rear styling, with a new 5-mph bumper up front and new ‘cathedral’ taillights out back. Sides were smoother with the removal of the faux rear fender air vent seen on 1971-72s.

The coupe started at $7360, but options could bump that substantially higher. The converible, the only full size front wheel drive luxury converible, had an MSRP of $7681; a Cotillion White one with red leather paced the Indy 500 that year.

42,136 coupes and 9,315 convertibles were built for model year 1973. As for todays example, it was listed at a dealer in South Dakota for five bucks short of 22K. But if the mileage is correct, and the condition suggests it is, both your author and his friend Jayson Coombes—a fellow Cadillac fanatic—believe it is likely worth the ask.

As the ad related, “Mr. Earnest Buchanan bought this car new on 6/30/73 from "Ben Feferman Motor Sales" in South Bend, Indiana and it appears it has had 3 other owners up until 2025. Retained with this car are loads of DOCUMENTS (see the pics) hard to believe what has been kept with this car since new, In addition to those are many years of mechanical receipts that document the miles throughout the years verifying it is indeed a real deal, low mile Eldorado. The condition of the car mechanically and physically also verify this minus years of outside abuse causing some moisture bubbles and fading here and there however this is a solid, dry desirable condition Cadillac.”

One thing I found odd was the blanking plate where a clock would normally reside. I checked with Jayson and he confirmed it WAS an option. Yes. Even on an Eldorado. Crazy.

But it looks great and would be a fun cruiser, now that the weather is finally starting to not suck.

Pretend you’re Big Enos, buckle up, and head to The Cellar for some surf and turf!

Tell ‘em Klockau sent ya!

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. The watch market is supposedly in free-fall, yet the good stuff is still hard to get and prices are soaring. Below we have some of my favorites from Watches and Wonders, some that I think are a missed opportunity, and a couple that I need to wait and think about a bit.

The Hits

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Twelve years and a month ago, I went to see Pat Metheny’s “Unity Group” twice in two nights, noting that “Pat is a far, far better guitar player than he was in 2005, or 1994, or 1977. We don't want to think about that for some reason; we like to think of talented people as kind of springing from the ground, not improving over time as a consequence of dedicated effort. Don't get me wrong. He was obviously brilliant in 1977, but now he's so much faster and has so many more ideas it's like he's a different person.”

Now, in retrospect, it’s obvious: that was the moment where, as the man once said, the wave broke, and rolled back.

First things first: the “Side Eye” format under which Pat has been touring for the past five or six years is trash. I’ll just recap my own comment from 2021:

If Pat wants to turn into some kind of late-stage capitalist Castro fanatic who charges $75 a night to watch him noodle chromatic scales in the company of lazy "young lions" whose ability to play "Sirabhorn" is considerably below that of my twelve-year-old son, it's his call --- but I'm not going to support it with my Biden-era dollar.

Last night’s ticket to Newark, Ohio’s Midland theatre was $108 with all fees. Which is sadly about the same price, really, that $75 was in 2021. That got me, The Commander, and MDG just four rows from the stage. For the record, it was my son’s idea to go see Pat, not mine, and I can’t blame him. He wanted to see Pat play for the same reason I dragged him to Birdland a few years back to see Ron Carter, and for the same reason I’ll probably drag him to see Lee Ritenour in the near future: at some point, these cats will stop playing and if you don’t see them now it might never happen.

This was a better gig than previous “Side Eyes” because there was no music on the bandstand. Everyone knew the tunes. Also, Pat now has four sidemen, not two. I will now rank them in decreasing order of my willingness to feed them into a woodchipper:

Chris Fishman, keys: I’m sure he is a lovely person but I have never heard a keyboard player whose work I enjoyed less. He had a grand piano, two Nords, an ASM Leviasynth, and a Moog, which was annoyingly configured to sound exactly like Metheny’s Roland guitar synth. I feel for the guy because who would want to replace Lyle Mays — but at the same time, I disliked his playing, his soloing, his absurd and tone-deaf approach to synth sound and volume control, and his face, which is far too self-satisfied for someone who struggles to even approach Lyle’s solo work.

Jermaine Paul, bass: Nice sense of timing, enthusiastic solo work, but he struggles with intonation up the neck and his electric bass playing, which was limited to just a few tunes, is not worth emulating or even hearing. He’s a better upright player than Steve Rodby, but that’s like saying he’s better-looking than Wallace Shawn.

Joe Dyson, drums: I think Paul Wertico, who backed Metheny for his “Geffen” years, was a pretty good drummer and Antonio Sanchez, who replaced Wertico, was an inhuman drummer. Joe is closer to Wertico than Sanchez but he is a likable performer. He enjoys what he does. The drums sound alive when he plays them. And he did a good job of filling the spaces that Jermaine Paul kept leaving with his occasionally sleepy lines.

Leonard Patton, vocals: Pat Metheny has spent the last forty-six years convincing brilliant multi-instrumentalists to stand behind him and sing nonsense syllables. Pedro Aznar, Mark Ledford, Richard Bona… and now you can add Leonard Patton to this list. What a joy it was to watch him sing “The First Circle”. He’s not young and he doesn’t have the power of a golden-era Pedro Aznar but man, can he put emotion into a tune. I would be delighted to see him play a gig without Metheny. Fully recommended.

Patton’s performance on the aforementioned “The First Circle” performance was probably the highlight of a show generally marked by disappointments. At fifty-nine, Metheny played guitar with the energy of a teenager. At seventy-one, he does not. He limped onto the stage in a way that made me, a fellow and frequent limper, feel deeply sorry for him. His hand positioning and body language betrays constant pain. He simply can’t play guitar the way he used to and his solo language has lost about 75% of its vocabulary; when he was obviously hurting he would resort to a series of octave climbs that let him stretch his left hand out and play slower. For the first time in the thirty-five years I’ve been watching him play live, he played the electric guitar fingerstyle. Surely this was to reduce right hand pain; Metheny’s characteristic upside-down pick work is probably unpleasant for him to continue.

It has been seventeen years since Pat recorded an album of first-rate original music (Orchestrion, the tour for which marked a personal low point in my morally vacant wife-banging existence) and the new Side Eye tunes do not reverse this trend, they’re simply worthless, they’re aimless noodles with no defined beginning or end. The truth of the matter is that it’s been all downhill since Secret Story, which is now thirty-four years in the past, but dedicated Metheny fans have long endured a tacit bargain with the man in which we agree to spend half the concert listening to free-form tuneless chromatic lines in exchange for seventy-five glorious minutes of “Bright Size Life” or “Have You Heard”.

The Commander noted, to his annoyance, that when Metheny deigned to play his old tunes he played them “outside” to the point that they were often hard to even recognize. This might be gratifying for the average 70-year-old Metheny fan, examples of which made up the bulk of the audience, but for a 17-year-old musician who is experiencing the ECM and Geffen records now for the first time, it has to be a a real drag to watch Pat fold, spindle, and mutilate “Round Trip/Broadway Blues” into a VG-8-distortion/pick-scratch musical abortion played on… an acoustic with a hidden hex-digital pickup, maybe?

“Well, at least you got to see him live,” I offered. “This has to be the end of his performing career, or nearly so.”

For me, the final straw was the encore. Which was “Are You Going With Me?” and that should normally be the very definition of red meat to Metheny nerds. Out of respect to Lyle, however, or maybe just because it would have been painful for him to play the original guitar part, Metheny covered Lyle’s line on the guitar while Chris Fishman’s useless ass comped at whisper-low levels. Then, when it was time for the Roland guitar solo, Pat played… not a traditional Metheny guitar-synth solo, but more of a Ibanez hollow-body solo on the Roland. We have had forty-seven years of “Are You Going With Me?” being defined by multiple fast runs up the fretboard (like this, if you don’t know what I mean, listen for about 60 seconds) but Pat can’t do that now, he tried it once and barely got it, so he did other stuff.

Which would be like Wes Montgomery not playing octaves or something. Or Eddie Van Halen refusing to tap.

I’m glad my kids got to see Pat play. It wasn’t nearly as shambolic a performance as, say, most of Bob Dylan’s tours since George W. Bush got elected. But I wish I’d been able to take them all the way back to the “We Live Here” tour. To see Pat at the top of his compositional form, with first-rate sidemen and enough energy for three hours of serious work. This wasn’t that. And it really would be too much to expect of a man who is tired and possibly sick, whose primary collaborator is years cold in the grave, whose audience is largely old enough to be either collecting Social Security or desperately anticipating it. But here’s the problem: after Pat, there is no one. There are no young jazz guitarists, no heirs to the fusion throne, no one writing and performing at this level. Norman Brown has already laid off writing new music at the age of 55. Nat Janoff disappeared. Who is left? Cory Wong?

I am glad we went. We will not be going back.

Sorry for having my awful, ugly face at the top of this post. Unlike the average “male” autowriter, I don’t feel that everything needs to be a selfie. In this case, however, the juice is worth the squeeze. I’ve driven 1,084 miles in the past 22 hours and I have a Pat Metheny gig to attend, so this will be a short ORT. Racing content from NASCAR was given to me by MDG, I may add it as a comment below. As always, interesting off-topics will be pinned. I’ll also be doing a “Watches and Wonders” post tomorrow for paid subscribers, so we can all talk about why we won’t be building actual wealth in 2026.

I said we a data center today

I hope you got some Tweed Runners on sale, like I did, because Allbirds has now completed the chrysalis-to-butterfly transition that, it’s now obvious in hindsight, was always destined to happen. The firm has sold its shoe business for $39 million to a company that will probably run it the rest of the way into the ground by selling junk “Allbirds” to Famous Footwear, and it has now pivoted to… being an AI compute resource. It’s raised $50 million on top of the $39 million it got for selling the shoe, and that money will be used for buying “compute”.

The scam/stupidity/cupidity here is breathtaking. To begin with, $89 million in can only get you about 25 NVIDIA GB200 racks. To put this in perspective, when I worked for NVIDIA, on the CoreWeave and other platforms, I generally fixed or “RMA marked” approximately 30-40 GB200 boxes a day. It’s a trivial amount. I could put the entire Allbirds spend in my basement…

…except there is no way in hell Allbirds will actually get the rack systems. The whole CoreWeave/NVIDIA circular money scam has these things back ordered like the Land-Dweller with ice blue dial. My prediction: the $89 million will be spent on executive salaries, then the firm will close. Tale as old as time.

There is something beautiful about the Allbirds story, however. It is so representative of the Modern American Dream, where you just “make deals” and wait for a bigger fool to bail you out of what you’ve done. Allbirds never really wanted to make shoes, although the shoes were good enough in many cases. They wanted to be a tech firm. And now they are.

Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, writes this of William Congreve:

But he treated the muses with ingratitude; for, having long conversed familiarly with the great (meaning the titled nobility — JB), he wished to be considered rather as a man of fashion than of wit; and, when he received a visit from Voltaire, disgusted him by the despicable foppery of desiring to be considered not as an author but a gentleman; to which the Frenchman replied, "that, if he had been only a gentleman, he should not have come to visit him."

Allbirds, as a shoe company you were worth visiting, and indeed I once bought a pair of Wool Runners in your original Soho store. As a tech firm… I wouldn’t bother.

All things considered, it could be worse

From Gemini, with apologies, but it’s correct:

“The following list provides the starting MSRP for each model in the coupe body style, including the mandatory $2,495 Delivery Freight Charge (DFC):

• Stingray: $73,495

• Grand Sport: $88,495

• Grand Sport X (Hybrid AWD): $112,195

• Z06: $121,395

• ZR1: $197,195

• ZR1X: $227,395

• Convertible Models: For most trims, selecting the hardtop convertible body style typically adds $7,000 to the base price. For example, the Grand Sport Convertible starts at $95,495 and the Grand Sport X Convertible at $119,195.

• Trim Levels: Each model (Stingray, Grand Sport, and Grand Sport X) is available in 1LT, 2LT, and 3LT trims, while the high-performance Z models (Z06, ZR1, ZR1X) use the 1LZ, 2LZ, and 3LZ designations.

• Grand Sport Track Performance Package: This specific configuration for the Grand Sport, which includes carbon-fiber aero and carbon-ceramic brakes, is priced at $109,190.”

Once again, I think the Grand Sport is the Corvette to buy. Which makes sense, because since 1996 it’s been the equivalent of the Accord SE. Anyone here remember the Accord SE or SE-i? Basically, at the end of each Accord generation they’d throw the dealers a special edition that had a ton of equipment at a low price. This was to make sure that none of the old Accords stuck around after the new ones arrived. Similarly, with C4, C6, C7, and now C8, Chevrolet builds a great Corvette at a price below the fancy stuff.

The autowriting community, being fearlessly committed to saying the dumbest thing possible in a thundering chorus of mediocre hot-taking, has already landed on the OMG THE GRAND SPORT X IS SUCH A GREAT DEAL narrative. As Katt Williams would say… “No it ain’t, *****” The Grand Sport X is a worthless hybrid two-ton piece of junk. The regular Grand Sport is the one to have. Be thoughtful about spending too much money on the various packages, because the Z06 is a purer and more admirable vehicle. Don’t get too close to a 5.5-liter flat-crankie with your Stingray-motored value vehicle. Thus endeth the lesson.

Speaking of Corvettes, here’s the 427 for cucks

Some of you will recall the greatest C6 Corvette ever, the 427 Convertible This was a Z06 engine in a steel-subframed droptop. Brilliant, brilliant idea — because there was always something a little “off” about the C6 Z06 as a track and street car. I admired the engineering of the vehicle but I never met anyone who really liked driving it and I’m personally aware of two SCCA-event-winning drivers who crashed them on track. The 427, by contrast, let you hear that astounding engine with the wind in your hair. And it cost the same as a hardtop Z06, more or less.

It also looked cool:

This, on the other hand, does not:

There’s a reason that Butzi Porsche gave us a Targa 911 instead of a convertible 911, and it wasn’t just fear of future Euro regulations. With a steel coupe roof, the 911 has always looked purposeful. With a Targa bar, it looks sophisticated, like you’re too cool to go fast. The convertible… looks like a pregnant 1976 Super Beetle.

I have shown this to you and now you will never be able to un-see it. But it’s not just the silhouette. The 911 GT3 sounds awful and has always sounded awful, especially with the non-Mezger engines. Flat-six engines generally sound awful. This has always been a problem with the Boxster — I used to autocross my 550 Edition with the top down for weight distribution and I can vividly remember the thousand times I scrunched my face with displeasure as the thing droned on to the ultimate screech of 7400rpm or whatever — but the Boxster had the advantage of not costing $275,350 plus options and dealer markup.

A Corvette with the top down sounds cool. The only cooler thing is a 4th-generation LS1 Trans Am with the top down, which is like a Miami speedboat for people who have sex exclusively with GED recipients. A GT3 with the top down will sound like a prolonged bout of flatulence mixed with transmission gear noise.

And this “Street Style” package with stupid-ass “hash mark” stripes and retro plaid interior is such a try-hard bit of cringe. ICONS OF COOL. It will only make sense in the hyper-evolved world of intra-Porsche-Club-and-Monticello-days people. It’s kind of like wearing a Daniel Roth Venice Man watch: the five ultra-sophisticated watch nerds in the world who can almost afford one will think of you as a god while the perfect barista girl will be actively worried about being within surprise-bricking distance of you in public.

I can’t wait to see them upside in the mobbin’-canyons with dazed trust-fund kids and IPO beneficiaries scuttling out from beneath them like cockroaches exposed to sudden light.

Nothing to see here (and it’s dangerous to see it)

Autoblog has raised the bar for embarrassingly submissive storytelling with their report on the BYD fire:

Fire Breaks Out at BYD EV Facility—but Batteries Weren’t to Blame

No casualties were reported, and the parking area stored only non-production vehicles.

There’s a longstanding concern around electric vehicles catching fire, and a recent incident at a BYD facility in China underscores those worries. According to CarNewsChina, BYD’s Pingshan facility in Shenzhen experienced a fire on Tuesday, with dense smoke seen rising from a multi-level parking structure.

Fortunately, no casualties were reported in the incident. BYD clarified that the parking area contained only “test and scrapped vehicles,” meaning no customer cars were affected, and that production continued without disruption. Despite the fire, authorities and the Chinese automaker sought to ease public concerns over EV safety, maintaining that the incident was isolated.

Given that improper external construction operations are believed to be the root cause, this incident should not raise significant concerns among BYD owners or prospective buyers. While Chinese automakers remain largely restricted in the U.S., North American neighbors Mexico and Canada have taken different approaches, with the latter allowing an initial quota of up to 49,000 Chinese EVs per year at a lower tariff under a new arrangement.

The incident comes as BYD continues to expand its ultra-fast charging infrastructure, known as Flash Charging. It supports charging rates of up to 1,500 kW, enough to take an EV from 10 to 97 percent in as little as nine minutes. The company aims to grow the network to 20,000 Flash Charging stations by year-end, up from around 5,000 currently.

You kind of have to admire “Rex Sanchez”, which I assume is a porno name, and the rest of the Autoblog team for seamlessly pivoting from “a whole building of Chinese battery crapwagons went up in flames” to “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about” to “Our neighbors are much more sensible on EV imports” all the way to “Flash Charging is a real thing!”

Just for fun, I’ve written a report in a similar style about the 1968 rapes and murders at My Lai, in the style of Rex Sanchez:

There’s a longstanding concern about junior officers lining up innocent civilians and shooting them after gang-raping the women and children. Fortunately, no American officers were harmed in the incident. Lieutenant William Calley clarified that the dead people were “collaborators and VC”, and that the root cause was a series of pre-dug ditches into which it was worrisomely easily to trip and then die.

Given that improper ditch conditions are considered to be the cause, this incident should not raise concerns among Vietnamese civilians. While American soldiers still face significant restrictions on how many women and children they can murder on a daily basis, our Afghan allies will eventually take a very different approach, with an unlimited amount of “bacha bazi” is permitted for the sake of morale.

The incident comes as the United States continues to expand the availability of IMR powder, rather than Winchester 231 ball, in the 5.56mm service ammunition used by the M16 rifle. It supports fire rates of up to 25 rounds per second, without the clogging of the gas tube that happened with ball powder in the past. The Lake City plant aims to grow the number of women and children shot with stick powder to 2,500 women and children a year, up from just 504 at My Lai.

How deep is your love, how deep is your love, I really mean to LEAR

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I delivered my Toro Titan lawn mower to an ACF reader north of Minneapolis, then had dinner with another ACFer in the city itself. Strictly speaking, this was a stupid idea, because the cost of running my F-250 almost 1,800 miles while missing a few hours of available contract labor exceeded any value I got — but to me it was far from unjustifiable. I had the privilege of meeting two men whom I tremendously envy for entirely separate reasons. Really, I don’t deserve any of you. Every single ACF reader I’ve met in real life has been a better person than I am. It was also really nice to get two different perspectives on what’s been happening in Minnesota over the past year.

Speaking of… I had about half an hour to kill before delivering the mower so I decided I would visit one tourist attraction in Minneapolis. I thought about going to the amazing “Electric Fetus” record store downtown but I also knew that would only put more red ink on the books from the trip. Which left just one choice:

The Quality Learing Center.

I’ve been thinking about this because California appears to be doing pretty well with their efforts to advance “The Stop Nick Shirley Act” into law. This act will allow rubber-stamp penalties of $4,000 per incident to be assessed against anyone who publishes the images or information of “immigrant support service providers” online. This is absurd. It’s already illegal to harass or incite violence online — well, it depends on the target, but it’s definitely supposed to be illegal. The obvious purpose of the bill is to use compliant judges to bankrupt anyone who tries to expose fraud or shady dealing in the twelve-figure immigrant-scamming industry.

While over a billion dollars in Somali fraud has been discovered by Republican and Democratic administrations, the “Quality Learing Center” showcased by Nick Shirley in his famous video was never formally cited for fraud, it was cited for well over 100 separate violations between 2022 and 2025. If you read the violation reports, as I have done… well, they are terrifying. Or they would be, had a lot of children been in the facility. Because what I mostly see are inspections where there are no kids around but the place is noncompliant about 40 different dangerous ways.

Which would be morally fine, were there no children there. And there’s not much evidence that there were ever a lot of children there. The facility received millions of dollars from the government without delivering much in the way of child care.

I figured I would go myself and just take a look. The first problem was parking an F-250 with a trailer in the immediate vicinity — but I quickly realized that the Somalis around there just park in the street. So I parked my F-250 in the middle of the street behind the block containing the Learing Center and walked the rest of the way. The area is, frankly, scary, and that is coming from someone who has been in some “Mayor of Kingstown”-style facilities during his life. There were obvious drug addicts all over the place. I didn’t see anyone who wasn’t either Somali or Arab in ethnicity. I don’t believe in violence so I left my Ben Tendick trench knife in the truck and just carried the Leatherman Arc I use to open boxes and whatnot.

No more than two minutes into my walk, I bitterly regretted that decision, because there were two dudes in a shoving match and I had to walk by them with as much nonchalance as possible. I couldn’t understand a word they said, obviously. Maybe one of them is really bullish on the Allbirds move. So I gave them plenty of space, because I’m upset about the Allbirds thing, too.

I arrived at the Learing Center, which has no windows and a blacked-out door. It looks like a massage parlor or biker club. As I took photos, some African fellow popped out to address my behavior. Happily, he could see my total commitment to nonviolent discussion so after a few moments evaluating each other he went back inside to get some friends so we could all talk about the new Corvette Grand Sport together. I didn’t have time to do that so I speed-walked away at the maximum pace that didn’t make me look like I was running in terror. On the way around the block I saw an Asian food place that no longer allows visitors. They’ll meet you at a window with your food.

Two right turns and a bit of 4.1-mph striding later and I was almost at my truck. I saw a lovely orange cat sitting in an open tenement window at ground level. I also saw a dude giving his woman hell in front of two kids. The children saw me and cowered up against a wall, presumably because they are Atlantic subscribers and understand that all the violence in America comes from old white men such as myself. For reasons I will never understand, I found myself saying “Tranquilo, tranquilo” to them, like del Toro in “Sicario”. They didn’t understand Spanish, because they were Somali, so I think it just frightened them more. The dad looked up from shoving his woman around and I think he was going to talk to me but then he realized that there was still a lesson to be taught to his broad.

Did I mention that this whole spousal abuse incident was happening in the opened driver’s door of, like, a 2004 Corolla?

I arrived at my F-250 to find a man who was obviously a fan of Toro Titan mowers examining my strap and lock arrangement on the trailer from about a ten foot distance. “Friend,” I told him, “I’m so happy to meet you. Please back away from the mower before you are accidentally injured by my driving, which everyone knows is awful. Why, I once hit a concrete pole with an Alpina B6, at the Thermal Club.” That’s more or less what I said, anyway. He had never heard of the Thermal Club, but he did scatter away when, as I’d feared, my inept backup maneuver almost whacked him with a polished aluminum fender.

All in all, it was top fun, it was like the cantina scene at Mos Eisley Spaceport. I would absolutely go back, any time, with five Blackhawk helicopters, an M249 SAW, and a group of dudes who are much tougher than I am. I hate to sound like a coward but I am a coward, I’m an old man with an aversion to being killed on the street by people who will end up gibbering gleefully over your dead body in a glottal-stop-heavy foreign tongue like the little dinosaurs did to Newman in “Jurassic Park”. Nick Shirley deserves serious credit for confronting these people. I didn’t see anyone who looked like they were going to be easy to talk to.

Bottom line — if the Quality Learing Center wasn’t a small scam in the middle of a much larger and horrifying web of scams designed to embolden and empower an actively hostile foreign menace in the American heartland, it will sure do until the real one comes along.

See you watch nerds tomorrow, when we will talk about that Rolex Datejust.

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In another life I worked for a premium automotive lifestyle brand that liked to do print-magazine features on used/old/vintage/whatever cars. We had a young fellow who would go out and source the vehicles. Sometimes he couldn’t get the car we wanted and so we’d have to change the focus of the article — oh yeah, it turns out the Citation X-11, not the Pa…

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Housekeeping: We are a little short of conventional automotive topics today, so if you know of one worth discussing, I’ll pin you immediately. Alright, my dudes; it is Wednesday. Let’s ride

It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it

Tomorrow night our friend Casey is holding… a Beer Hall Putsch! I’m sure someone told him this was an edgy way to get publicity for his joke of a gubernatorial run, and Casey was too big of an idiot to understand that this is not the right kind of publicity.

I encourage all ACF readers to catch up on my Tales of Casey. In the meantime, spare a thought and/or prayer for Ohio. Our choices for leadership are:

• a scumbag “car guy” grifter who is running as a cosplay patriot;

• a scumbag “billionaire” who, unsurprisingly, made his money by having his mother “study” his “life-saving medicine”, and who once elected will no doubt load the state apparatus with subcontinentals while stealing everything that isn’t bolted to the ground;

• a crazy COVID lady who doesn’t even pretend not to be an authoritarian nightmare.

My choice of the three is the crazy COVID lady. At least she will have to fight the legislature, rather than merely competing with them to strip the cupboard bare for personal gain. The obvious future governor, Jim Tressel, who could have the position as a write-in if he decided to on the morning of the election, has apparently already satisfied his personal greed via other avenues.

Speaking of crazy old white ladies…

The blacker/Hispanic-er/female-er-LGBTQ-er the berry, the sweeter Scotty’s juice

Almost a dozen of you sent me this post in which notorious do-nothing moron advertorialist Scotty Reiss is… uh… looking to “make a connection” with someone who is Black, Hispanic, female, or LGBTQ. The purpose of this connection is unspecified, so just for fun let’s assume it is some sort of trailer-park porno film.

Let’s consider the fact that her post is somewhere between cringe-inducing and flagrantly bigoted, yet she will absolutely get away with it and it will never cost her a dime. That’s the “white privilege” about which we’re always hearing. Spoiler alert: only white women have it. If I went on LinkedIn and called her out, I would be the one suspended.

It’s interesting to see the negative space cut out by Scotty’s race-based requirements: no white men, no Asian men, no… Pacific Islanders? Not that she put a lot of thought into it. She was looking to get some Social Media Brownie Points and everyone knows that shitting on white men is the fast track to that. She might have meant to add Asian. We will never know. The wild part remains: she felt comfortable saying this in public. She doesn’t even say “I’m trying to do a story about the challenges faced by people on the margins.” She just assumes that cutting white dudes out is Always A Good Thing.

Even wilder than that: the fact that she thought a picture of her piggy face scrunched into a loaner helmet would somehow attract positive attention. The self-deception of some people knows no bounds. You know why this Substack isn’t filled with pictures of my face? Because I’m hideous-looking. Scotty Reiss is also hideous. The difference is that no one has told her about this. Or maybe they just didn’t say it loudly enough. She must have had a different kind of elementary school than I had.

While I have daily conversations with two exceptional female race drivers, I can’t say I would encourage either of them to waste a minute with Jabba the Hutt up there. No doubt most other “marginalized” people in the track community will have a similar opinion. Believe it or not, Black people don’t sit around dreaming about the chance to talk to someone like Scotty Reiss. Which no doubt would come as a huge surprise to Scotty Reiss.

There’s a meme out there in the left-leaning community that goes something like “Give me the confidence of an unqualified white man.” That’s a deception. The most unwarrantedly confident people are often white women. Especially old, loud, and fat ones. There was even a TV show about one…

It is an ill wind that blows no one good

Polyethylene had been in a post-Covid slump because of overproduction and ebbing demand, but the Iran war changed that equation almost overnight.

The conflict’s geopolitical ripples have brought a lucrative reversal of fortune to U.S.-based chemical makers, which in recent years have been some of America’s most downtrodden companies. Their share prices have rocketed up, reflecting the advantage they gained after bombs began to fall in the Middle East and Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz.

“In my career of almost 30 years of covering chemicals, I have never, ever seen price hikes this steep and this quick,” said Hassan Ahmed, a partner at Alembic Global Advisors.

Let me get one thing straight for everyone: there is only one company that deserves the name Alembic, and it’s the guys who make Stanley Clarke’s bass.

Paid subscribers will get another Iran War Thunderdome this week, since there’s so much news to cover — but it’s worth taking a moment here to look at the many economic implications of the war, not all of which are negative on this side of the Atlantic. European plastics manufacturers are cutting production rapidly. Why? They can’t get petroleum. Much of the bleating regarding the strategic necessity of the Strait of Hormuz1 really only applies to Europe. The initial refusal of the EU/NATO partners to get involved in this Iran thing gave President Trump carte blanche to structure all future actions in a way that asymmetrically benefits the United States.

Frankly, I was surprised that there even is a European plastics industry. I really thought they were getting it all from China at this point. I suppose someone has to supply the raw materials for Swatches.

I’m not suggesting that any aspect of this war has been “4D chess”. Far from it. But it’s worth noting that Europe stands to lose much more from conflict in the region than the United States does. For the last eighty years, the USA has stood in loco parentis to Europe. We’ve basically been like Tad and Loreen in Girls. We have this kid at Oberlin, experimenting with communism and deviant sex at our expense while we work extra shifts and stave off retirement to make it possible. We give the kid a little allowance, make sure they have a safe place to live. We sort out their disagreements, ensure they don’t have to worry too much about the basics.

Then we sit back and watch this degenerate tramp revel in her moral superiority in between demands for funding.

Listen, I adore going to Europe. It’s a beautiful place, a lot of fun, although less so every year. But it’s a theme park, the same as Disneyworld. When you visit the Reedy Creek Improvement District, you’re looking at a place that only exists because of external subsidies. Europe is like that. They’ve relied on the United States for defense and China for currency-adjusted goodies. It’s been an eight-decade Timothy Leary LSD party on Mom and Dad’s dime. But that wasn’t enough for the Europeans. They also shitcanned their own future for the short-term feels of playing Great White Savior to fifty million demons.

All bills are coming due now. Germany just told its military-age men that they must secure the draft board’s permission before leaving the country for more than ninety days. That permission is automatically granted… for now. What happens when “Wir schaffen das” involves dealing with the Houthis? I’ll tell you what the native-born men of Germany should say to the women who got them in this mess: Have your new pets handle it; I have video games to play.

Patek should mail one of these to every watch nerd in America

Over the winter I found myself having a conversation with a pretty well-known jeweler and watch collector in downtown Columbus, regarding the Patek Philippe Aquanaut.

“It’s an ugly watch,” he scoffed, “and anyone could get one in the beginning. Now they are three times retail. And for what? For this ugly watch? Why not get a Nautilus? Why not get anything else?” I nodded along because I have long been mystified about Aquanaut mania myself. The retail for a plain steel Aquanaut is $27,257, which is already a lot of money for a basic three-hand watch, but if you could buy one at that price tomorrow you could make $50,000 worth of markup in the afternoon. The rose gold with chocolate strap version, which retails for $53,614, regularly fetches $145,000 in the aftermarket. We are in the grip of Aquanaut mania to an unimaginable extent.

Therefore, when Watchdives offered me an Early Bird price of $109 for their rose gold Aquanaut clone, I was easily able to justify the purchase despite being largely unemployed. I figured it would be fun to wear on a trip somewhere; there is a certain class of airline passenger who will crank his neck into a painful angle just to determine if the ugly fellow in the Gustin T-shirt is really wearing an effing rose gold Aquanaut.

It showed up pretty quickly. I set up the cut-to-fit rubber strap, which almost perfectly replicates the $1800 Patek OEM strap, and wore the watch out to move some race cars. “Ha ha, look at me wearing my fake Patek to operate a ratchet strap,” I chuckled to myself.

I haven’t taken it off since, because the Patek Aquanaut is the most comfortable dress watch in human history. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I now understand why people are paying the price of a new Corvette ZR1 for an unassuming little gold watch. It disappears on the wrist. Yet it is astoundingly legible and usable. If you’re used to telling time with something like an original Speedmaster Moonwatch… this is basically a large print book by comparison. It is readable from any angle. During the day you can easily see the numbers, but it is also loaded with a ridiculous amount of lume for night time use.

Strictly speaking, the Watchdives WD008 isn’t a fake Patek, because Watchdives uses their own logo in place of Patek’s, but that won’t insulate you from the contempt of people who see you wearing a fake Aquanaut. There are several additional differences between the WD008 and a real Patek:

• It’s not rose gold, it is PVD-coated stainless steel.

• The deployant clasp is a beautifully made, but generic, double-latch squeeze latch in the same coated steel. Patek gives you a gorgeous solid 18k gold deployant with the lovely “Calatrava Cross” logo.

• The Watchdives has a solid steel back; the Patek has a sapphire glass display window.

• The Watchdives uses a Seiko VH31 “sweep quartz” movement that moves the hand four times per second. It has two jewels for durability on moving parts. You can buy a VH31 on the open market for about thirty bucks. The Patek uses the 324 S C movement which moves the hand eight times a second, has 29 jewels, a 21-karat gold self-winding rotor, and is Geneva Seal certified. Which means that it has been finished without regard to cost or convenience, and made entirely in the vicinity of Geneva. Some Aquanauts are Patek Seal, meaning they meet higher standards set by Patek themselves.

• The real Aquanaut has more polishing, and to a higher standard.

• It also has real 18k gold hands for hour, minute, and second.

• The Patek Philippe Aquanaut is made in Switzerland of locally sourced parts. The Watchdives is made in China, using a bulk-purchased Seiko movement that could be made in Japan but is not guaranteed to have been made in Japan.

Yes, it has a real-world price a full 1,200 times that of the Watchdives, which is kind of breathtaking to consider, but the Patek Aquanaut makes a strong case for being worth some kind of multiple over the Chinese “tribute”.

The effect of Fakeqanaut ownership on your humble author has been twofold.

0. I’m thinking that if Watchdives made this thing just a bit visibly different from the Patek, just enough that it wasn’t a direct copy, it would stand alone as a really desirable piece for moderate-income watch enjoyers. Just do something to take it from “tribute” to “derivative”. The core VH31 is a pretty accurate movement, although it loves to eat batteries every couple of years. If you can see it as something other than a copy, it’s a legitimate piece in its own right. Or it could be, with some changes.

1. Patek should mail one of these to everyone on the Aquanaut waiting list, because nothing makes you want to enjoy a real Aquanaut like wearing this excellent tribute. I am now quite personally interested in having my own Aquanaut. Don’t get me wrong; when I become unaccountably successful in one of my several doomed business ventures, I will get a Lange World Time before a Patek… but man, I could see buying a rose gold Aquanaut now, and before I never could.

I am sure that eventually this infatuation will wear off and I’ll return to wearing my “real” watches. This one isn’t real, just like some women aren’t “real” under their sportsbras, but — like is often the case in the aforementioned situation — the WD008 is real nice.

BYD sued the Instagram star

Our friends at The Autopian are making hay this week of a random kinda-sorta threat by BYD to sue them over Instagram, followed by BYD using “copyright strike” provisions to remove a post they’d made about the Daniel Craig ad campaign for BYD.

First things first, as J Cole would say: the Daniel Craig ad campaign is deeply embarrassing. If I want to see a short man in a bad suit joylessly endorsing Chinese junk, this is available elsewhere on the Internet, I’m sure. I cannot say enough to disrespect the whole idea of Daniel Craig as Bond. He is awful and always was. James Bond was supposed to be some suave killer with a deeply polished presentation. Daniel Craig looked like a refugee from a Guy Ritchie film. He had all these psychological issues. I ask you, did Sean Connery’s Bond have psychological issues when he was letting women get hit in the head with hammers? Did Roger Moore need Wellbutrin before he seduced Grace Jones and saved the world through the sheer persuasive power of his todger? Of course not.

Craig’s Bond was all upset because some woman he knew turned out to be a lying whore. He had to disappear for years from the workforce as a result. God help us if that happened in real life. You wouldn’t be able to find a club DJ, a Ford mechanic, or a sandwich artist. And he only came back because his mommy, played by Judi Dench in her least charming role ever, told him he had to.

You get the idea. Let’s talk about the “lawsuit” threat. As you might imagine, I’ve been sued before. It never happens over Instagram. It happens via certified and/or registered mail… assuming they don’t care enough to send the sheriff. Even a credible threat of lawsuit, like the one made to me around 2006 by the now-deceased (lol) Dean Rosen of “1g Racing Noble/Superformance”, generally arrives via certified mail. And not from the dude who’s “gonna sue you”. It comes from an attorney whose law firm has co-signed on the issuance and stands ready to prosecute the case.

Everyone on the Internet is always about to sue you for something, the same way they are about to shoot you directly in the heart for offending their narcissistic self-image. In general, unless the entity in question has a demonstrated record of suing and/or shooting in the past, these threats can be 100% ignored. They aren’t even worth repeating. They certainly aren’t worth self-crucifying on the Internet over.

What we should be worried about: BYD using copyright protection to “chill” public criticism. Cory Doctorow is (to my annoyance) right again this week:

The fact that copyright — nominally a system intended to protect creative workers — is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it’s not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators’ bosses — media companies like Viacom — who brandish “starving artists” as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor.

When BYD uses it to remove even the mildest criticism, that is sufficient cause to speak out against BYD in the strongest terms. That’s the problem, not a vague “legal action” IG message. I love Matt and Torchy, but what they are doing here is tantamount to writing “Some dude walked up and set our car on fire — and then he said he was gonna give us a bad Yelp! review, so we wrote an article called ‘Some Dude is Gonna Give Us A Bad Yelp! review’.”

If you ask me, it looks like BYD is the modern General Motors: they make trash and they’ll break their necks trying to suppress legitimate criticism. On the other hand… they never tried to make us watch “The Volt Dance”.

I like old cars. Cars. Not combovers. You know, something with some presence. I like (a few) new cars too, but whenever I’m on the way to work or the store or wherever, I always keep an eye out for anything interesting. Modern cell phones mean most people are carrying a camera anyway, but I still keep an honest-to-God digital camera in the car. You can’t even make calls on it, honest! And sometimes, I see some pretty cool stuff.

I live in the Midwest. So most people may think the cool cars hide out for half of the year. But not always! For instance, just this month I saw 1956 Cadillac Coupe de Ville at a McDonald’s out by the airport. That one nearly caused me to drive off the road, I was so surprised. But today let’s check out this personal-lux cruiser from the ’70s: The Continental Mark IV.

The Mark IV debuted in Autumn ’71 as a replacement for the 1969-71 Continental Mark III. Like its predecessor it was strictly first cabin, based upon the Ford Thunderbird but with more elaborate trim and the trademark Rolls-Royce grille and hidden headlamps.

The Mark III had appeared more distinct than the ’72 Mark IV vis a vis the T-Bird, but it still sold rapidly. Only the ’72 had the classy thin bumpers front and rear. The 5-m.p.h. front bumper was added for 1973, as on all 1973 U.S. cars. By the time the final IVs appeared in showrooms, large battering-ram bumpers had appeared on either end. But then, so had they on everything else!

But oh, how Lincoln made hay while the sun shone. Cadillac usually ate Lincoln’s lunch in the sales charts, but from the debut of the new Mark, it rather consistently outsold the Cadillac Eldorado, though Caddy’s total volume was always much higher. From the initial Mark IVs, as the model years progressed, more and more special editions, colors and trims were added. It started with the Silver Luxury Group in 1973 and was followed by the Gold Luxury Group in 1974. Further Luxury Groups in 1975-76 included Blue Diamond, Gold/Cream, Lipstick/Red, Light Jade/Dark Jade, and several others-all for ‘just a bit more distinction’ as most salesman probably put it.

But the top of the line–and a genius idea for an upper-crust coupe like the Mark–was the Designer Series of 1976. Name brand high-fashion designers chose special color combinations and interiors, resulting in Givenchy, Pucci, Bill Blass and Cartier editions.

And of course the Designer Series had a healthy premium over a ‘plain’ Continental Mark IV. I am sure Lincoln made a healthy profit on each one.

And so it was that I was on my way to the barber a couple of years ago when I saw what looked like a Cartier Mark IV sitting on a side street. Further investigation proved it was so, and fairly presentable, albeit slightly worn.

Some rust, but it was all there, right down to the polished alloy wheels, whitewalls and landau top. The interior photos didn’t come out great due to heavily tinted windows, but the dove gray leather seats were in nice shape as well.

These cars were all about style, and to be seen in one. whether driver or passenger, was more important than parking ease or rear passenger legroom. After all, it was a PERSONAL luxury car. YOU and your spouse/significant other got the cushy seats, and if the Josephs or Williamsons were a little too uncomfortable sitting in the back, well, they could always drive separate and meet you at the supper club.

Yep, they were a nightmare to parallel park, they sucked gas, the trunk was relatively puny for such a long car. But! But it was so brash, so clearly American. Style in spades. No one was going to mistake this for a Monterey or LTD. You had arrived! It’s really only relatively recently that Lincoln has started to get just a little of that swagger back with the new Continental. But in ’76, this was the one. You had arrived, so enjoy it! And flaunt it.

Happy Easter, friends. He is Risen. For the record, here at ACF we support and recognize all faiths besides the purposely ironic; save your “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and “Darwin fish” buffoonery for the other fatties in your polycule. Sarcasm, as the Dowager Countess says, is the lowest form of wit.

A reminder: automotive journalists are rarely automot…

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