Wednesday Open Thread: The 5 Worst Sentences In The J-Klo Manifesto, Chlormequat As The American Situation

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of all people, you’d think he would know

A brief vignette: No Scammers At The 8 Sisters

Your humble author found himself yesterday at the 8 Sisters Bakery north of Columbus, Ohio, the products of which are so delightful I only allow myself to visit once every sixty days or so. The sixty-something fellow at the service counter in his faded farming apparel waved me by, because he was on his phone. Once he hung up, I chided him for not just handling it NYC-style and using three percent of his attention to bark his order at the woman behind the counter while reserving the other ninety-seven percent for his distant interlocutor.

“Well, I couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t be decent,” he replied, and not for the first time I felt my Grinch-like heart grow three sizes at living in the township rather than in the city. “Also, some ripoff artist was on the phone. I didn’t recognize the number. Said they were Amazon, Had a lot of information including the last four of my Social Security Number. But,” he noted, after a thoughtful pause, “I don’t imagine that stuff is all that hard to get. So I told them to call me back later. In the the meantime I’ll check my account.”

“Oh gosh,” I said, because as a country gentleman I shouldn’t express myself any more strongly than that, “you should take a look at this,” then I brought up Charlotte Cowles and The Cut on my phone. He made a horse-nickering sound to indicate the seriousness of what he was seeing, then:

“How could someone give $50,000 to a stranger because of a phone call?”

“Well,” I suggested by way of explanation, “she’s an Ivy League graduate who lives in a New York borough.” His eyes narrowed.

“Explains it.” There were two cars in the bakery lot: my beater Accord, and a squeaky-clean Lexus RX. It does pay to farm. And it helps if you’re the sort of fellow who keeps one hand on his wallet at all times.

The spirit of “Glamping Zoolander” never dies at RideApart

There are times when a shared avocation can be a source of pride; fourteen years ago I dated the same woman as Sananda Maitreya, whom you are more likely to know as Terence Trent D’Arby, of “Sign Your Name” renown. As a depressingly hetero-nonflexible man, this Eskimo (are we allowed to say Eskimo still?) situation was as close as I could get to my actual goal of dating Terence Trent D’Arby. Which would have been so awesome and probably would have led to me playing bass on most of his remarkably accomplished 1995 effort, Vibrator, but I’ll have to wait for my next life to experience it.

On the other side of this oddly broad coin: the fact that RideApart’s new head editor, Jonathon Klein, and I both started our motorcycling careers on the first-generation Ninja 600R. This would be like finding out that Jeffrey Dahmer also owns a Sub-Zero CL3650UFD/S; I’m just doing normal and cool (literally) stuff with mine, but what’s that weirdo using his for? God knows why J-Klo bothered to buy an early Ninja, it would have been a vintage motorcycle by the time he was old enough to swing a stubby leg over it. He’s no Starboy, or even the typa dude to outrun an Ohio Highway Patrol Cessna on a ZX-14R then beat the case in court. Klein is the expired Babybel of autowriters: softer than butter and completely devoid of any taste that isn’t suspect. Now this rotten cheese person is running a whole motorcycle website, albeit an inconsequential one.

RideApart does a bit of traffic, mind you, but it’s always been the subject of frank disrespect among the motorcycling cognoscenti because of its origin story. Started by online-marketing impresario Jon Alain Guzik then sold to Motor1, RideApart was where Wes Siler, the wannabe skinny-jeans model and would-be tough guy to whom I have long referred as “Glamping Zoolander”, got his shaky start as a motorcycling journalist. Along the way, Wes nearly died while showing off in the canyons on a (press loaner, I believe) bike. Thankfully, his best friend and fellow editor managed to sling Wes’s body across his bike and ride him at warp speed to the hospital in an effort that was in no way short of heroic.

What happened after that isn’t my story to tell, but it ended up with the hero friend dead broke and nearly dead for real thanks to a surprising (to the friend) lack of health insurance at the company. Wes then had his own similar issues with RideApart and departed to Outside magazine, where you can read endless variations of his patented “I own guns but you shouldn’t, because you’re not a real mountain man like me” articles. It’s best to think of Wes as a sort of Wish.com Teddy Roosevelt — if Teddy had spent a lot less time killing stuff and a lot more time posing for pictures with affordable, overseas-made glamping gear. As an animal-rights activist, I’m not sure I want Wes to own any guns. Happily, I don’t think he’s very good at actually shooting the “game”. Nowadays I’m pretty sure he spends most of his time driving the LandCruiser that his doctor wife bought him — “oh here you go, sweetie, go pretend to be Jack London online in your little fancy station wagon while Mommy finishes paying the bills for the month.”

Compared to Wes Siler, Jonathon Klein is not as ethereally handsome (wait a minute, just how straight am I, anyway?) but he’s a better writer. Which isn’t saying much. His best work to date has been a depressing journey through his inability to get his wife pregnant; the rest of it has been either been sponsored content or convergent-evolution editorial that is indistinguishable from “sponcon”. His most notable accomplishment in the business: blowing up the engine in a Viper. God only knows how you do that. It’s not by running the car properly at speed. Straight goofball territory.

You’d never know that from his boisterous look-at-me-I’m-the-boss introductory editorial, however. It’s an astoundingly egotistical and incoherent piece that defies any attempt to boil it into sense, so let’s just pick the five worst sentences and move on. They’re all bad, but they get worse from #5 to #1.

#5 Worst J-Klo Sentence: “But what’s going to separate us from everyone else is that all of these stories, every article we publish on these pages, will have a single guiding ethos that I hope comes through every single time you open a link: that powersports are inherently cool.” Well, champ, nothing says cool like having a man of action such as yourself on staff. Tell me about all the motorcycle races you’ve won. Hell, tell me that you’ve brought the front wheel up in traffic… on something besides a Grom.

#4 Worst J-Klo Sentence: “To make folks like Janaki, Earl, Enrico, and newcomer Robbie, stars in your eyes, while highlighting stellar freelance talent that makes everyone reading our pages say, ‘Fuck, I wish I had their job.’” I have a great joke I could make about this, and I really want to do it, but I’m afraid it’s too evil and unpleasant even for me, the Designated Villain Of The Industry, to make. Maybe I’ll just email it to him. Hint: Alonzo Harris in “Training Day”, saying “I can’t miss.”

#3 Worst J-Klo Sentence: “Detailed descriptions will be done on Seadoo’s new supercharged jet ski, but nothing will be said as it tries to rip your face off.” Descriptions will be done? Having once raced a jet ski from one island to another for money, I don’t recall being able to say anything during this process. And mine wasn’t even face-ripping supercharged! P.S. I lost by ten feet, more’s the pity.

#2 Worst J-Klo Sentence: “Where the joy of hopping onto, or into, a machine that’s already way cooler than we’ll ever be is the focal point.” What’s the focal point of this sentence, though? To quote Juvenal, who’s gonna edit the editor?

#1 Worst J-Klo Sentence: “Sorry, mothers of the world, you’re out.” To begin with, this is a direct rip from my 2009 OKCupid profile and I want residuals. (Also, I was lying.) To continue: what kind of simping edgelord trash is this? In what world is it “inherently cool” to disrespect moms? Catholic school between Grades 2 and 4? Why not call out the competition? Furthermore, the average new-motorcycle buyer is probably 47 years old. Are they looking for Jonathon Klein to be their ally in the eternal fight against their mothers? Who’s the intended audience here? Norman Bates?

Don’t let any of the above make you think that I don’t like Mr. Klein. Not the case. I’m not sure there’s anything to dislike, really. The enthusiast-writing business unearths this sort of tame vole by the dozens, then sets them to tasks they’re not stout enough to accomplish. Each of them is the same person: unable to see past first-person navel-gazing, indifferent to their readers, scared of their own shadows, passionate only in defense of the safest and most settled orthodoxy, highly interested in never being the tallest poppy in an already-stunted field. That’s why nothing you see online feels like it’s worth reading anymore.

Will Jonasponcon Klein make RideApart any better? I sincerely doubt it. Will he make it worse? Not sure that’s possible.

The whole world, in a single but doubly poisoned Cheerio

Speaking of stunted-growth fields: Ah, this one hurts. Let me tell you something about Baruth households since the Korean War. We don’t eat Kellogg’s, because one of my grandfathers was an executive at General Mills. I won’t say that there’s never been a box of Apple Jacks in the house, because one must be sensible about these things — but if you want cereal at Mid-Ohio, you’d better be prepared to have Cheerios.

Weedkiller has been present in those Cheerios for a long time. It’s not good for you, but it’s tolerable in small amounts for most people and you get a lot more of it drinking beer. Now, however, it’s accompanied in your morning meal by chlormequat, a plant hormone that stunts and changes the growth of staple crops to encourage better yields. It’s also a proven endocrine disruptor that is now appearing in the urine of most Americans. The story of how it got there is also the story of the Uniparty, so it’s worth telling.

The Environmental Working Group lays it out in a short but thorough paragraph or two that I’ll excerpt into free verse:

Environmental Protection Agency regulations
allow the chemical
to be used
on ornamental plants only
not food crops
grown in the U.S.
But its use is permitted
on imported oats and other foods sold here.
Chlormequat was not allowed on oats sold in the U.S. before 2018
when the Trump EPA
gave first-time approval
for some amount of the chemical on imported oats
The same administration
in 2020
increased the allowable level.
In April 2023
in response to a 2019 application
submitted by chlormequat manufacturer Taminco
the Biden EPA proposed
allowing the first-ever use of chlormequat
on
barley
oat
triticale
and wheat
grown in the
U.
S.

So let’s go through all our normal Uniparty behaviors. The first one: Disadvantaging American business. The EPA banned its use on oats grown in the United States — but under President Trump, it was permitted on imported oats. Why? Chlormequat is proven to increase yield. So allowing other countries to sell us those oats while prohibiting American companies from using the same hormone amounts to kneecapping those American companies while still allowing American consumers to eat it!

This despicable pattern, by the way, is the reason that “everything you touch is Chinese”. (That would be everything you touch, dear valued but non-paid subscriber; the elite cadre of ACF inner-circle types and I go USA-made for everything from keyboards to refrigerators, of course.) Time and time again during the past fifty years, the nanny state has made it impossible to build or grown something in the United States, only to turn around and incentivize the production of that same something overseas. Looked at from an environmentalist’s perspective, we are outsourcing our poison to poor foreigners, which is repugnant. Looked at it from a normal American’s perspective, we are deliberately moving jobs and industrial capacity to countries that are our de facto enemies. Either way, it’s ridiculous. If you can’t pour raw CPU-manufacturing effluvium into the Colorado River, you shouldn’t be allowed to buy something that’s made by pouring raw CPU-manufacturing effluvium into the Yangtze. Why isn’t this broadly understood?

In 2020, the Trump EPA went back and cranked the rookie numbers of imported-oat growth hormone. Why? Likely because someone’s palm was greased, or because it feathered someone’s nest. Even ardent fans of The Donald must admit that he had a lot of trouble getting high-quality people to work for him, possibly because to stand within fifty feet of the guy guaranteed that you’d have the legal equivalent of a firehose turned on you and your children. I can easily see the people he actually got to work for him being willing to accept anything from a bribe to outright blackmail, if only so they could pay their defense attorneys after the fact.

At this point, some of you are like “Yeah, dude, I know. Trump’s an enviro-terrorist who would poison all of us.” Ah, but then Biden, in response to a petition from the people who make the stuff, allows it to be present on USA-grown oats and other staple crops. Okay, this is fair from a business perspective, and removes the competitive advantage — but now all of the crops you consume will have this hormone in it.

Which is borne out by urine concentration levels that have nontrivially increased in 2023. Trump fucked over the farmers and allowed us to be poisoned to a smaller and avoidable (with some effort) degree. Biden made it universal. And it seems pretty obvious that there’s absolutely zero case for allowing this in the foods that children eat except for… uh, it’s additionally profitable for Taminco, a former Dutch-and-Chinese-held chemical company that was acquired by Eastman (as in the former Eastman Kodak) a decade ago.

We have Trump voters on ACF, and we have Biden voters, and some of you are all-in for Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, and my brother is ready to knock on a thousand doors for Tulsi Gabbard, assuming that one of those doors is the door to Tulsi’s bedroom. If I encouraged you to, I bet you could all come up with a reason why your guy is so much better than the other guy. Some of those reasons might even be right. If you care at all about owning a firearm or having law and order in the cities, Trump should get your vote. If you’re concerned about the rights of migrants or would-be abortion recipients (meaning the women here, not the babies), I can’t see how you would vote any way but Biden.

No matter which way you vote, however, you’re going to get as much endocrine-disrupting hormone in your cereal as Taminco wants to sell you, because Messrs. Biden and Trump are both all-in. There is no electable candidate who stands against giving this stuff to children, to the elderly — hell, to 52-year-old men who need to stave off the ball-shrinking choice of raw testosterone-in-the-bottle as long as we, I mean they, possibly can, and therefore need to have breakfast without weird plant hormones to attack whatever our much-abused walnuts can crank out on their own.

This is what I mean by “the Uniparty”. I do not mean to diminish the very real reasons you have for supporting a given candidate, but in terms of overall impact it’s like the years where Mercedes-Benz sold the E350 in “Luxury” and “Sport” variants. Yeah, you could tell the difference between them — but 98.5% of the car was identical. That’s what we face in America. And what’s the alternative?

Rather ironically, I think that the long-awaited transition of America to a country where only Democrats can get elected, courtesy of “new Americans” who reliably vote blue via scrawled mail-in ballots, might actually be of some benefit here. It would mean that candidates with genuinely different positions could aggressively “primary” the existing elected Democrats — for a fantasy version of this, consider Season 4 of “The Wire”, where a genuinely thoughtful (if, ahem, energetic) Tommy Carcetti manages to kick Mayor Royce out. In a city where a Republican had even a chance of getting elected, Carcetti would have been slapped into line by the Democratic machine lest he sabotage Royce’s chances against said Republican — but in a true one-party system like Baltimore, he could be a change agent.

For Carcetti, think Tulsi. Or Bernie. Or RFK Jr. None of whom will be allowed to sniff a superdelegate’s socks because it could weaken The Party’s battle against Reichsführer Trümp. In a majority-minority country, however, why not let them take a shot?

The alert reader will note that this has not really happened in California, which is now as effectively one-party as Baltimore. But a boy can dream, can’t he? In the meantime, I’ll say something that would have infuriated my grandfather, right up to the moment that he found out why, at which point he’d have insisted on it: maybe you should keep Cheerios away from your kids.