Wednesday O/R/T: ACFers Win, Lando Loses, Best $249 Watch Ever, The Supremes

All subscribers welcome

my wrist looks like this so my maintenance expenses can look like this: (goatse.jpeg)

I’m pleased to announce that my son has his first media photo credit as of today, in the Newark Advocate. He really enjoys photography, which is about as ironic from my perspective as the plot of Little Johnny Jet. And he’ll have a much higher-profile photo credit in two weeks…

To celebrate this fine country and my valued readers, we will have a new article every day of the “holiday”, from now until Monday. Expect an Ask Jack, a Flashback, an O/T, some analysis on the “Default Friend Hentai” thing, and a new piece of original fiction entitled “Moravec’s Misery”. Naturally you gotta be in the cool kids club, aka ACF Paid Subscribers, to see all of it. Today’s post, however, is for everyone, so let’s go!

Princess George is crowned

joe biden after they put the cardboard in the windows at the voting stations and he goes from 31% to 107% in Atlanta

Every cheap-car endurance racer out there understands exactly how Toto Wolff felt at the moment that Max and Lando had to dive for the pits. We’ve all been there: trundling along and making laps when all of a sudden the car ahead wrecks or has a mechanical and… “GEORGE, YOU CAN WIN THIS! YOU CAN WIN THIS, GEORGE!” And if you have certain of your drivers in the car, you’ll already know what the response is:

“JUST LET ME F**KING DRIVE!”

George Russell had a fair amount of luck, and not just with the collision between the only two cars running ahead of him. Had Oscar Piastri not had a track limits violation, he surely would have been ahead of George at that point in the race. As it was, George needed a Virtual Safety Car to keep Oscar from running him down before the end. Dismissing this win as “lucky”, however, fails to acknowledge that George is consistently beating his “GOAT” teammate on Saturday and frequently beating him on Sunday as well. I’m not sure this will be his only win in 2024. More than any other team in recent history, Mercedes knows how to improve a car over the course of the season — and with Red Bull seemingly stuck in neutral, there’s going to be room at the top. Other observations:

• Sergio Perez was running a net 9th before the crash up front. At what point is RedBull going to be too embarrassed to continue putting him in the second seat? Some reporters blame the situation on Verstappen, who presumably won’t accept a genuinely talented driver in the second car — but that feels inauthentic to me.

• Speaking of slack-acting Red Bullers: Are we seeing a return to form for Danny Ric, or a short-lived flash of approximate equivalence to his non-highly-touted teammate? It almost has to be the latter, IMO.

• Fat Brad Brownell wrote a Jalopnik article titled “Talentless Billionaire Nepo Baby Failson Remains Safely Employed By The Company His Daddy Bought For Him”. While such an article might be masochistically satisfying for Brad, who has been eloquent on the subject of his father’s deliberate absence from his life, it’s not entirely supported by Lance Stroll’s record. Compared to Alonso, he’s 4-7 during GP quali and 2-1 in sprints. Furthermore, as the season goes on, Stroll is increasingly looking like the team’s lead driver. The picture isn’t quite as good in the races, but how disgraceful is it, really, to be out-driven under pressure by a double WDC? Don’t get me wrong: if I wanted to make a million bucks by stealing my best friend’s idea for a car show then driving my fat ass around in a merch van for years until I got paid off as the only partner in said show the next owners refused to hire, I would totally listen to Brad. When it comes to racing, however, you’d get more accurate opinions from ChatGPT.

• Kevin Magnussen remains the closest thing F1 has to a Midwest club racer: when asked to save his tires while trailing Nico Hulkenberg, his response was “F**k that.”

• Is Alpine getting rid of the right Frenchman?

• Just like they did in 2023, Ferrari looks certain to fade back into the third position overall. Maybe fourth. There’s nothing impressive about how the team is operating right now.

ACF readers score big

swerving towards the pit wall like she just won abu dhabi 2021

It was supposed to be open wheel-to-wheel combat between two ACFers at Nelson Ledges last weekend: Dannyp in his ITS/EP-classed FC RX-7, and Danger Girl herself, in the ex-Playboy-Cup Miata known to all and sundry as “Marilyn”. Alas, it was not to be. On Saturday, we had a small incident at home best described as “3-pound kitten falling into the Litter Robot waste compartment”, causing DG to miss the race. Danny took 2nd in a 10-car field, just .48 seconds ahead of Mark Keefer’s STL-class FC RX-7.

Come Sunday, Danny was gone for family obligations but DG was back. She started DFL, having not recorded a Saturday time, and worked her way up to 3rd overall, just a few car lengths ahead of Mark Keefer but behind her pal Bill Pintaric who had also dragged his M3 out of the trailer for Sunday only. Danny and Danger Girl aren’t that far apart in pace — about 2.2 seconds a lap in DG’s favor, but Danny is steadily improving — so when we all come back in October for the Halloween race I might have to award a separate trophy to whichever of them manages to finish further up the order.

Over in the Big Bore race class, I made two bad tire decisions in a row. On Saturday we went out on rain tires only to watch the track dry completely by Lap 4. I nursed my Michelins along but still took the overall win. On Sunday I ran the Hankook C72, which on paper is faster than the C52-compound Radical spec tires but in practice is too soft for the relatively heavy SR8. Nevertheless I lapped a (very small) field to take the win, albeit running a full second slower than I did on the C52s last year. Here’s the rear-facing view of the start: you can accuse me of bringing Castle Bravo to a fireworks display, which is fair but we needed the race to evaluate the repairs the team had made to the front end since the NASA race in May.

The cost and effort of running the SR8 is significant enough that it feels like a championship just to have it on the track twice already in 2024. I’ll be running the smaller PR6 through the next 45 days, then bringing the SR8 back for the OVR Autumn Classic, where I’ll hope to set the GTX class record at Mid-O as I’ve done for Nelson Ledges.

No longer a JDM-only proposition

The first time I saw the Mizuno/Casio collaboration G-Shock, it was at Matt Farah’s house. At that point, it was a Japan-market-only product with the “3159” module and the model number GW-S5600-1JF. In 2021, the watch was upgraded to the “3495” module, which has better night lighting, a better world time display, two extra timezones available, and the availability of European/military date order (e.g. “3 July 2024” instead of “July 3 2024”. At that point it became GW-S5600U-1JF. I bought mine from Sakura Japan, and had a trouble-free transaction. You can see it on my wrist in the picture at the topic of this article, taken Sunday morning in the Ledges paddock grid.

Now it’s available directly from Casio in the United States, at the reasonable price of $250. Here’s what makes it great:

• You get a forged titanium back, titanium buckle, titanium side buttons. The watch weighs almost nothing (47 grams, or just over an ounce and a half) as a consequence.

• The carbon fiber in the strap is real, and makes said strap all but indestructible.

Here’s what you might not like: the very JDM-style obnoxious lettering on the strap, and the see-through, wavy-faced, ultra-shiny main case, which cheapens the look somewhat. If you can live with those two aesthetic concerns, this is the most functional watch you’ll ever own. I enjoy wearing it for races and for my 116-mile daily motorcycle commute; when it comes to preventing wrist pain in a high-stress environment, every little bit of weight reduction helps.

If you’re not worried about a USA warranty, the Japanese version can be had at Sakura for just $163. Either way, it’s a bargain.

Finally, a Black man doing something revolutionary

Few things are quite as frustrating as watching social media’s take on any given Supreme Court decision, and the general reaction to three of the most recent decisions among my friends and acquaintances was, more or less, “OMG TRUMP CAN KILL HOMELESS PEOPLE NOW, AND THE EPA HAS TO SHUT DOWN.” Let’s take a moment to be slightly adult about this stuff.

First off, Grant’s Pass v Johnson, where the court ruled, in effect, that it’s not cruel and unusual punishment to enforce anti-camping laws against a city’s homeless population. I suspect this is going to be a very relevant law in the years to come, as both voluntary and involuntary homeless populations soar across the United States. I agree with this decision. Communities should be free to police and protect their own borders. No doubt this freedom has been abused in the past, but that does not invalidate it.

What annoys me about this court case is that the plaintiffs argued from what I think of as the “Mommy And Daddy” rationale, to wit: If Grant’s Pass doesn’t have enough beds available for the homeless, it should be rendered powerless to prohibit open-air camping by homeless people. The responsibility, by default, is on the “Mommy And Daddy” of normal society, not the homeless people.

A lot of my left-leaning friends like to Mommy And Daddy their arguments: If you’re not willing to pay for all the costs borne by child-raising, you shouldn’t be anti-abortion! This is a slippery slope that very quickly becomes Unless we give bank robbers free money, we shouldn’t be angry when they rob banks. It’s ridiculous to expect normal citizens to bankroll the people who don’t want to obey the law, whether the law is moral or merely statutory. So it is with this case. It’s ridiculous to say “Hey, taxpayers of Grant’s Pass, you only paid for 600 homeless beds, and we have 650 homeless, so you gotta let the other 50 do whatever they want.” What happens when they pay for 650 beds but there are 700 homeless people? Why is it the responsibility of taxpayers to create whatever facilities homeless people want, wherever they might choose to go?

Next we have Loper Bright v Raimondo. For the past 40 years, the rule on the ground has been: Wherever new law is ambiguous, it can be defined in practice by whatever federal agency has authority in that area. Before that, however, the courts were required to interpret vague federal law, via the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. That, in turn, was a legislative response to arguably excessive behavior on the part of federal agencies during the “New Deal”, where agencies often took weak law and ran rampant with it.

Some of you are worried that this decision pulls the teeth from the ability of agencies like the EPA and ATF to interpret law as they see fit. But the appropriate response here is better and more thoughtful law, not an undocumented expansion of federal power. If you tell your toddler, “Go do something that makes you happy,” only for the toddler to set your neighbor’s house on fire, the fault for that appropriately rests with you. So, too, should Congress be forced to write better and more thorough law, rather than tossing trash over the wall to the agencies who then use it as pretext for various extrajudicial activities. The plaintiff here was being charged $700 a day to have a federal observer on his fishing boat, but there was never any law that provided for such an observer, nor for his compensation. The agency involved simply made the whole thing up. And under the “Chevron deference” of 1984, they were allowed to do so.

I will readily grant that the federal agencies almost always have more expertise in a given field than either the legislators or the judiciary, but

a) they are encouraged to, not banned from, assisting in the creation of new law; and

b) experience does not translate to moral authority or respect for this nation’s founding principles.

In the dissent by the Supreme DEI Team of Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, it was noted that the courts already have enough to do: “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.” This is uncomfortably close, for me, to “OMG I’M SO EXHAUSTED,” which is not something adults should say unless they’ve just dragged a dead body down off Everest.

Last but definitely not least: Trump v. United States. Here, the court is fairly unambiguous:

Criminally prosecuting a President for official conduct undoubtedly poses a far greater threat of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch than simply seeking evidence in his possession. The danger is greater than what led the Court to recognize absolute Presidential immunity from civil damages liability—that the President would be chilled from taking the “bold and unhesitating action” required of an independent Executive

It goes on to distinguish between “official acts” and “unofficial ones”. Nothing in this decision prevents a President from being charged with rape or assault; it only applies to actions executed via normal channels. The court noted that the prosecution of Trump is an historic first. Prior to Trump, there was a sort of detente that prohibited prosecution for official acts. Nobody charged Obama with murder for his deliberate decisions to kill innocent women and children via drone strike, because nobody had bothered to charge George Bush for anything he did in Iraq, and so on. The detente didn’t apply to Trump because both political parties despise him and want him gone.

POLITICO has begun frothing at the mouth over a scenario where Seal Team 6 is used to kill a political opponent. This is juvenile. To begin with, to some degree it’s already happened: don’t we regularly kill “terrorists” without even a fig leaf of legal justification? Here’s a paper arguing that, basically, the State can kill anyone it wants, as long as they pose a weakly defined risk to the State. Beyond that, any order on the part of a President to kill an American citizen would likely be an illegal order — and nobody in the military would have any obligation to follow it.

This reminds me of Jeff Cooper’s acerbic observations on the “license to kill” that figured so prominently in the James Bond mythology: “Anyone who is carrying a weapon as part of their duties already has a license to kill, so long as the killing is lawful.” There is always an immunity of sorts that covers official actions on the part of police, and the usual response to abuse of that immunity is termination from the job. Any President who publicly instigated the killing of a political opponent would be swiftly impeached.

All the Court did here was put in writing something that has long been understood, and which has always held true for any President not named Trump. Any other interpretation would have made it possible for podunk courts around the country to immediately indict any President the minute he got out of office… which is what’s happening now, to Trump, and could easily happen to Joe Biden as well, were he to survive his term.

If you disagree, please feel free to school me in the comments. The usual rules apply: you are permitted or even encouraged to be disrespectful to public figures and to your humble author, but aggressive behavior towards other readers is forbidden. Thank you for your understanding.