Wednesday ORT: 8 Sec Vette, Dilbert's Dead, Pork Price, Real Bullets, China Fishing

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It’s been a busy week here in “Cat Tales” land — all the custom packing, shipping, and minor swag items for our signed hardcover buyers have been delivered. Now I just need the hardcovers… which have been delayed to January 23. I’ve also managed to sell more than I ordered, so I’m firing up a second bulk order. In the meantime, I have a random Special Offer for my readers: If you’d like me to sign and send an early (pre-typo-correction) copy of the paperback and a couple limited edition stickers to a friend or family member, in an official SNOBES mailer, it’s $20 flat via Paypal, Venmo, check, or Zelle. Contact me: hardcover@cattalesbook.com. Thank you, all of you, for making this very eclectic and incomprehensible book a bit of a minor success.

Now, as Perry Farrell said, here… we… GO!

From the company that brought you “Grand Am Beats 320i In Skidpad Grip”

For just $209,700 plus options, you can run a genuine, any-monkey-could-do-it, Tesla-beating, all-wheel-drive, 8.675-second quarter-mile in the Corvette ZR1X. Even more impressive is the near-as-dammit-160-mph trap speed. I think this is the first general-production combustion engine or hybrid vehicle to beat the Cycle World ZX-14R, which ran 9.2@156.17 with an ECU flash and a Brock’s exhaust.

This is a significant accomplishment, made all the more so because the ZR1X is fully optimized and competent for its actual life of dawdling around a retirement community in-between trips to the Cars and Coffee. You could probably commute to work in it with no more drama than you’d encounter in an everyday C8 Stingray. The value proposition is excellent; you could spend twice as much on the new Lambo hybrid and not go as fast. The selection of colors, interior fabrics, and special equipment is outstanding.

There are really only two criticisms to make. The first is that I’d rather have a Viper ACR-X and an Anthony Joshua punch to the jaw than this or any other C8, because the Viper ACR-X was a driver’s car that rewarded both skill and courage. I don’t want a 4000-pound Corvette. It’s contrary to the established lineage and heritage of the Corvette name. This might be the fastest C8 Corvette, but it’s far from the most desirable; wouldn’t you rather have a Z06 than a ZR1, and wouldn’t you rather have a ZR1 than a ZR1X?

The second criticism is that GM put a lot of money and time into chasing numbers, yet again. I don’t know how their product planning morons looked at the stratospheric C7 Grand Sport resale, which is starting to beat C7 Z06 resale, and said “Clearly no one wants a balanced Corvette with equal attention paid to lap times, daily use, on-track balance, and reasonable wear on consumables.” Surely this budget could have gotten a C8 Club Sport or Grand Sport with 500 horsepower and all the widebody aero. Surely it could have gotten a manual-transmission C8 Stingray. Any of these alternative vehicles would have delivered a lot more units out of Bowling Green than this electric boogaloo.

In their infinite arrogance and taxpayer-supported security, the GM Performance people have decided that it’s more important to beat the supercars than it is to deliver better C8s to volume buyers. No doubt they like the ego boost of being faster than all the Italians and Germans. But here’s the problem: the man or woman on the street still thinks a base 911 Carrera is a better car than a C8 ZR1X, regardless of the numbers. Beating BMW on the skidpad didn’t make the 1987 Grand Am a credible import alternative. Beating Lamborghini on the dragstrip doesn’t mean the ZR1X is going to join the 296 and Temerario on bonus-baby shopping lists.

Prediction: Thirty years from now, you’ll be able to trade a C7 GS 7-speed straight up for one of these.

A cautionary tale of success, with a quixotic ending

Scott Adams has died at the age of 68 from prostate cancer. In his final message to the public, he accepted Jesus Christ as his lord and savior, suggesting that he was mostly motivated by a Pascal’s-Wager-style summing-up of the risks and benefits to doing so. His life was primarily notable for being an exaggerated example of the highs and lows faced by people with exceptional intelligence and little to no social ability.

A former telco engineer in the phone-phreaker era where Bell Labs sometimes seemed like the epicenter of humanity, Adams saw into the dismal corporate future and skewered it to degrees ranging from subtly hilarious to gross satire. He had little respect for: women, minorities, normies, foreigners, executives, salespeople, and all the other remoras of the early tech world.

Before you judge him for his public pronouncements or controversy-courting positions, take a moment to consider the environment that created him. I worked for LiTel in the mid-Nineties and had the pleasure of meeting Stallman et al. shortly after, so I got the barest glimpse of it before it disappeared. The telcos and early tech companies were the last gasp of traditional American male intellectual culture. You were surrounded by brilliant people who understood the basic building blocks of the universe. In an era without Google or smartphones, these men could conceive, design, implement, and program complex solutions without recourse to anything but their own capabilities. There was no room among them for people within two standard deviations of normality. Normies simply couldn’t keep up. They were dead weight.

In that world, the only thing that mattered was being correct. It was heaven on earth.

And then one day we all woke up and everything was gone. Bell Labs, Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC, the early Linux adopters; all replaced by “tech companies” filled with gibbering morons and scrum teams and product owners. Technology became iterative rather than inventive. We are stuck in a two-decade lull of meaninglessness where the whole world has become a React front-end to a NoSQL database hosted on some clown platform. There have been just two inventions of any note in this century: the “smartphone” in general use, and the mis-implementation of LLMs and neural networks as “AI”. Neither of these has done anything but harm the human experience. There are no genuinely new airplanes, no genuinely new cars, no genuinely new anything.

Adams hated this world and couldn’t operate successfully in it. He correctly predicted the Trump 2016 win and didn’t understand why it made him a pariah in polite society. He made money with his Dilbert stuff then used it in the simping pursuit of two younger women, the second of whom appeared to be fairly shameless about milking him for cash. He used his social media platforms to make statements that seemed to him to be incontrovertible, based as they were on fact and figures, then couldn’t comprehend why the media was so eager to crucify him over them.

Occasionally he would just plain embarrass himself, as when he got caught in 2011 using sockpuppet accounts on Metafilter to defend his positions. You can see the logic behind it: these people are stupid enough to believe X, Y, and Z; they’ll be stupid enough to fall for this, too. But he underestimated how much some of his fellow nerds hated him, and how far they would go to make him look bad.

In short, Scott Adams was a prime example of The Very Smart Boy. Capable enough to make millions, awkward enough to not be secure in it. I’m encouraged by his decision to seek faith at the end; when all is said and done, that might be the smartest thing he ever did.

Further notes on a tragedy

Like Kat Rosenfeld, whose nuanced and thoughtful post on the Renee Good killing went live on The Free Press earlier this week, I was particularly affected by the fact that Good’s wife had almost immediately screamed Why did you have real bullets? to the ICE agents surrounding her.

Surely this is just peacocking, playacting, a sort of “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride except make it political conflict—and surely ordinary people, including middle-aged moms with big hearts and progressive values and a little free time on their hands while the kids are at school, should be able to join the party.

This is the world Renee Nicole Good thought she was living in with the woman she loved, in their final moments together on that January morning…. A world where a misdemeanor traffic ticket—the one Good would have received for pulling her car across the roadway, along with a stern warning not to do it again—was pinned to the fridge like a badge of honor, and “drive, baby, drive” became an inside joke instead of the last, worst thing one of the women ever said to the other.

But that world doesn’t exist. It was an illusion, a fantasy; it was all in her head. And in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

This hasn’t stopped her death from being used as political currency by the millions of slacktivists who are painfully anxious to ensure that poultry companies continue to have access to dirt-cheap labor. (Remember my Unbreakable Rule Of Corporate Media: Everything you see is designed to either raise the value of assets or reduce the labor rate, no exceptions.) The narrative has been so ironclad that it took a Twitter goofball calling himself “The Orf Report” to detail how it actually went bad:

And just like that, it all falls into place. Renee Good had her steering wheel cranked because that’s how she had gotten in position to block the street. (We can save for another day whether making deliberate and coordinated plans to block federal law enforcement counts as “good trouble”, especially since Tim McVeigh is not longer available to comment.) She reversed to escape the ICE agents, which swung her nose across to face the officer. She then stepped on the gas, only to have the front wheels spin with all that J35 V6 power. From the ICE agent’s perspective, it must have looked like she was deliberately repositioning the car to run him over.

I would like to think that I wouldn’t headshot someone for trying to run me over¹ but the agent had to have been at least mildly surprised/threatened by the situation. I suspect that had your humble author been driving the Pilot, I’d have caught the round in my chest. Renee Good is sitting low in her Honda, which makes the headshot the only possible shot to take.

Based on this most recent video angle, however, it seems obvious to me that the ICE agent isn’t going to jail or anywhere near it. Which, ironically, does not matter to the cheap-chicken crowd. What they want is to create a situation where no one is willing to work immigration enforcement because the social stigma is too great. You can be assured that this ICE agent will be harassed and doxxed and threatened for years to come, generally by wealthy and secure people whose lives are at least partially dependent on the fact that their communities are protected by federal law enforcement.

It’s the real bullets thing that will bother me for some time to come. Listen, ACFers: many of you have idealistic children, siblings, family members, co-workers. They don’t think of their actions as the union-busting labor must flow; they think they are protecting the American Dream for Somalis and Haitians and so on. Don’t let them get in a situation where they are being faced with real bullets.

Speaking of what they’re charging for Porkers

this is how i’d do it, but i would never do it

Porsche has released their 2026-2027 pricing, and it’s remarkable; the price of a zero-options 911 coupe (with no rear seats!) has gone up a full $40,000 since model year 2020, to a base of $137,850. For once in my life, I’m going to defend the folks from Zuffenhausen here. Back in 1988, a new Carrera Coupe was $40k flat and a Ferrari 328 was $71,900. Today, the 296 GTB is $340,000 base; use the same ratio and you get $190,000 for a 911.

Another way to look at it: an Accord LX sedan was $13,679 in 1988 and $28,395 now. So the Ferrari has gone from 5.25 Accords to 11.9 Accords, which the Porsche has gone from 2.92 Accords to 4.85 Accords, from its 2020 price level of 3.5 Accords.

The irony here is that while a Ferrari 296 still occupies basically the same place in the market that a 328 did — young Saudi prince, bonus baby on the East Coast, Eurotrash inheritor — the base 911’s real position in the market is now handled by the Macan and Cayenne. Forty years ago, you bought a 911 because you wanted to get places in a hurry with some prestige and all-weather utility. The average buyer was a 40-something executive or professional. Those people are all in SUVs now.

Just for fun, I put together a ACF-spec 911 for nearly 190 grand. It has 388 horsepower, which is more than my LS430 has but less than what my 300C offers. I can’t imagine who would buy this car. The modern PORSH PEOPLE would rag on you for not having a GT-whatever. The Corvette guys would gleefully point out that even the $59,999 Kerbeck special C8 has the legs on you. Any woman you “dated” would wonder why she had to crawl into the car when her other sugar daddies let her climb into G-Wagens.

This is a car without a buyer. And you never see them. So maybe the correct answer is: Who cares what it costs?

It’s a bad decade to be a fish

I don’t think we should engage the People’s Republic of China in a war over Taiwan. The idea of sending young American men to die for Jensen Huang’s portfolio is repugnant to me. That being said, I do support some aggressive BTFOing of Chinese fishing fleets. Want to know why? Read CDR Salamander:

The Chinese War on the Planet Goes to Sea

Here’s the critical part:

China now accounted for over 80 percent of fishing in the waters off Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru.

China is ranked as the world’s worst nation in a IUU fishing index. Its fleet, by far the largest in the world, is regularly implicated in overfishing, targeting of endangered shark species, illegal intrusion of jurisdiction, false licensing and catch documentation, and forced labour…

If the many nations just invested 5% of the money they are throwing in the mouth of Vaal for their climate cult into mitigate this irresponsibility on the world stage—the planet’s ecosystem will be helped to the benefit of everyone. Even more so, the local people who make a living by the sea will have their livelihoods and community stability given a chance to survive.

Although your humble author hasn’t voluntarily eaten a seafood item since suffering through one-third of a “sushi caterpillar” on a first date with a lovely young East Coast publisher’s assistant back in 2010 or thereabouts,² I recognize the critical role that the ocean’s reserve of fish has to play in our ecology and the chances for humanity’s survival as a whole.

It seems ever more obvious to me that the Clinton and GW Bush presidencies were how America was permanently crippled. We spent a decade chasing goat farmers with Seal Team Six while simultaneously coddling China into manufacturing and shipping global domination. Now we agitate endlessly about Ukraine and Gaza while the Middle Kingdom continues to, quite literally, eat our lunch.

The solution isn’t to go to war with China. It’s to fix our country and compete properly. That means bringing manufacturing back on-shore, actually hiring our engineering and science graduates instead of sending them to work at Starbucks while we import their replacements, and encouraging a culture of excellence at every level.

That being said, the most interesting thing I’ve read lately about China is that they might be seriously threatened by the United States reasserting dominance over Latin and South America. If that’s true, then it justifies quite a bit of military adventurism in our own corner of the globe. I’d also suggest that any Chinese move on Taiwan should be met with an equal response… against Cuba.

In the meantime, maybe now is the time to try all those seafood dishes for which you’ve been waiting. That saying about “plenty of fish in the sea” might turn to be more metaphorically true than literally true.

1. actually, from personal experience I know that I wouldn’t take the easy headshot there, but that’s a conversation for another time as well.

2. We did not have a second date. She was actively angry that I wouldn’t eat the whole thing and my response, “I don’t generally let women tell me what to do,” seemed a bit caveman-ish to her 26-year-old, pampered sensibilities. Looking back, I regret eating the first third of the caterpillar almost as much as I regret not buying more gold at $260/ounce.