Wednesday ORT: Blackbird’s Back, Two Views Of MIUSA, Princess Peaks

All subscribers welcome

Good afternoon, friends. So much to talk about today, so let’s get to it. But first…

Commercial message, part one

I spend a lot of my time — too much — fighting the scumbags who are trying to create a 996 Bull Market for the purposes of enriching themselves at the expense of decent but naive automotive enthusiasts. That doesn’t mean that I won’t recommend the right 996 at the right price. I think this one, owned by an ACFer, is a good example. The right year, the right condition, and the right price. You can’t get a lot of Corvette at this money. Even a good 987S is hard to touch. Anyone who buys this should reach out to me and I’ll send you some swag.

Commercial message, part two

This is short notice, for which I apologize, but ACFer John Marks has his Music for Violin and Guitar, with Arturo Delmoni and David Burgess, on sale at the publisher until the end of the night. All formats are 30% off. Check it out; you can also hear the music before you commit to purchase.

The princess strikes back, but Franco hits harder

You would be a fool to think that George Russell can win the 2027 WDC — but after this weekend, it’s less foolish to hold the opinion. The princess was brilliant in qualifying, posting a margin of leadership greater than what generally covers the top eight cars on an average weekend, and he was commanding in the race. Like Jenson Button, another Briton of exceptional ability and exceptional fragility, when George is good he is very good. This George looked less like Kimi’s shoeshine boy and more like the driver who embarrassed Lewis Hamilton in the same car. And he was unflappable after safety periods that absolutely destroyed the margin he had worked so hard to build.

This race also featured the resumption of normal service at Ferrari, with Charles Leclerc comfortably outdriving Hamilton. Things were not normal at Red Bull, as Isaak Hadjar waffled back and forth between supporting-driver mindset and up-and-coming-star mindset during a period where Max Verstappen was at a significant tire disadvantage to him. Once the tires were reversed, of course, Hadjar had no more chance of beating Max than Alex Albon would.

Other notes:

• Franco Colapinto’s incompetent “Hail Mary” at the restart has been the subject of tremendous online controversy, but talk of race bans and “significant action” from Alpine supremo Flavio Briatore seems excessive. He tried something and it didn’t work. That’s racing. In an SCCA event, he would be harshly penalized for destroying a couple of complete cars, but this is professional entertainment and the cars get replaced anyway. Let’s all calm down about this young man; he could be one of the greats.

• Arvid Lindblad’s move on Liam Lawson was just as bad as Colapinto’s — make that worse, as he risked the cars for no obvious upside. I’m surprised the FIA let him keep the points he got from spinning his teammate. To his credit, he immediately found Lawson and apologized. Also to his credit; the points he kept, haha.

• Stroll and Alonso both renewed for 2027; who saw that coming, except anyone with a brain? The latter is too good to let go, and the former is the owner’s son. But they will both need to be patient. Hilariously, the winning F2 car of Invicta (yes, that Invicta, they have more racing championships lately than Richard Mille) was faster on the main straight than the Aston. Everyone say it with me: GP2 engine! GP2 engine!

• Ocon not renewed for 2027; this is the right call. This dude has struggled everywhere he goes and he hits teammates at approximately twice the rate of his points-paying finishes. Hard to believe that he and Gasly were once considered equals. It would be ridiculous for any team to hire him next year. Not with all the new talent coming down the pike.

• Valtteri Bottas’s crash was the Cadillac’s fault, not his own. The engine went through a bizarre shutoff/cutoff sequence that basically robbed him of the ability to stop the car properly. I have to say that I was wrong about what would happen to Cadillac. I thought they would safely and unremarkably trundle around five seconds off the pace. Instead, they are finding new ways for an F1 car to fail on an almost weekly basis. Face it: General Motors doesn’t have the engineering chops required, and Andretti has been stroking along in spec cars for longer than Kimi Antonelli has been alive. Pathetic.

• Max is still the best driver on the grid. It’s not close. He is just inhuman. If you are watching him on the weekends, you are watching the objectively finest driver in human history. It’s neat.

Speaking of the best to ever do it

My son and I have long been on a mission of sorts to see every remaining SR-71 variant. There’s a list out there if you’d like to join us, and we are about 2/3rds of the way through it. About four years ago, we visited Blackbird Aerospace Park at Edwards AFB in California; somewhere in my NAS box there’s a picture of the Commander with the aircraft pictured above.

Don’t bother looking for it, because it is gone. (Edit: Edwards had TWO of them, and the other one went.) NASA took it off display and, if reports can be believed, is getting ready to fly it again. Veteran engineers and crew, some of whom are in their seventies, have been consulted for best practices. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. There is every chance that the fastest air-breathing vehicle in human history is back for more. There’s something sad about the idea that the SR-71 was never really replaced, and there’s something even sadder about the fact that we no longer really understand how to fly it, but put away your collection of blackpills because when the Blackbird gets back in the air, it’s going to be used for the purpose of developing and testing the next generation of high-speed atmospheric craft. That’s the best news of all.

Actually, the best news of all is: they’re gonna need a pilot.

Made in USA, done right

Sorry for the mega-sized graphic, but I wanted you to see all of them. ORIGIN is bringing back the 100% made-in-USA tactical/casual sneaker. It’s been done before, most recently by Woobies, but these will be done right. Join me in reserving yours. I don’t have an affiliate link or anything here. I just want them to succeed. Every time we restart production of a basic staple in the United States, we strengthen the country. I love wearing American-made shoes and I can’t wait to wear these. Why, I might even give my ultra-fashionable quartet of “Golden Goose” sneakers a rest!

Made in USA, done wrong

If you were a WSJ reader, you might be surprised to find out that the “Monopoly” board game has always been made in the USA, and still is. You can buy it for under twenty bucks. But the Journal doesn’t realize this. Which is why they set out to attack American manufacturing using the story of two dipshits who decided to make a fancy version of the board game here.

Meet Jonathan Silva and Kerry Addis of “WS Games”:

Dana Silva, Jonathan and Kerry’s father, and co-founder Michael Doyle launched WS Game in 2000 to design and develop games for Hasbro, the toy company that owns or licenses the rights to hundreds of games. Their first licensed Hasbro products were coffee tables, accent tables and pub tables with built-in versions of Scrabble or Monopoly.

For two decades, Dana Silva spent 80 to 100 days a year in Asia. As the company’s president, he still travels there an average of 30 to 40 days a year.

WS makes fancy versions of standard board games. They have them made in China. The company sells a million games a year here using just 25 employees, because they basically do nothing. Well, at some point these two morons decided that they needed to beat some tariffs by doing an “Americana Monopoly”. Cue the moaning and the suffering as these fortunate children realized that making something is more involved than making a phone call:

In China, WS Game tells factories what it wants, and asks them to make the idea a reality. The U.S. process was reversed. “We figured out what the factories’ capabilities were, then backed into the design,” said Silva.

No one could do the job from start to finish, as is the case in China, where factories are often more sophisticated and often vertically integrated. The team looked at different game formats and cast about for manufacturers that could supply individual components before settling on a hybrid approach that relied on one main manufacturer and several smaller suppliers.

Often, their decisions came down to dollars and cents. Card boxes fell by the wayside because they cost about $5 each in the U.S. versus pennies per box in China.

Hocherman, who oversaw the project, first imagined a luxury game in a wooden box—similar to versions the company has been making in China for years. But it was too expensive, with an estimated cost of at least $65 just for the box. WS Game typically prices games at four to six times production costs to provide a profit for each party in the supply chain.

Emphasis mine.

In the end, “WS Games” had to go to Cartamundi, which makes the standard Monopoly game in the United States while employing hundreds of people, and have them make it. At which point they rang up the WSJ and started whining about how they can’t “run” their “business” by just asking Chinese people to do things for them.

“We figured out what the factories’ capabilities were, then backed into the design.” No shit. Welcome to the real world, bitch; that’s how Honda figures out how wide the Accord can be. It’s how things are made. In China, you got to issue your imperious demands while an infinite horde of actual slaves do your bidding and you pay pennies on the dollar so you can mark it up five to six times! But in America, you have to put in a little effort.

If you’ve been a little confused as to why people like the Democratic Socialists of America have so much support — if you wonder why so many young people don’t give a damn about the benefits of capitalism — if you’ve been unclear as to how populist rhetoric has gained hurricane strength — then, dear reader, I invite you to contemplate the inheritors Jonathan and Kerry. These “business leaders” have become wealthy by exploiting slave labor, exploiting currency imbalances, and exploiting corrupt federal law that makes it cheaper and easier to send work overseas.

These “officers” of what amounts to an importer have never done a day’s worth of work in their lives. All they do is place orders. Anyone could do it. You could do it. “Hey, Chinese Glorious Factory #16,902: build us a nice Monopoly game and make sure everything is wooden instead of plastic.” The only reason they’re doing it and you aren’t is because they inherited the phone number and the distribution network. They are the moral equals of Marlo Stanfield in The Wire except Marlo had the balls to use violence to build his business while Jonathan and Kerry relied on Bill Clinton to do their dirty work for them.

I don’t make a habit of wishing evil on people but if I saw these two jerkoffs dying in a ditch I’d only stop to piss on their bodies. And for the record, these are the people who lecture you about working harder and the virtues of capitalism and so on and so forth. They aren’t capitalists. Rockefeller was a capitalist. JP Morgan was a capitalist. They are merely parasites. Every fancy Chinese wooden board game they sold was one more US-made game that didn’t get bought.

For every Jocko Willink who puts his fortune and his life into making something in America to the highest standards, there are a hundred Kerry-and-Jonathan types. They buy fancy cars. They outbid you for homes. They use slave labor and then they mark up the result by 500 percent so it’s a luxury item.

And the lesson they took — the lesson that the WSJ wants you to take — is that it’s just too hard to make stuff in America. It’s just too hard to call the American factory instead of the Chinese one. My God. Everyone in this whole chain of custody, including the author of this litterbox-filler article, Ruth Simon, who looks exactly like you expect her to look:

show me the life. No, show me the early life.

is a traitor to the United States of America and should be dealt with as such.

Listen, there’s room for free trade among equals. I wouldn’t want to live in a country where I’m not allowed to buy a JLC Geophysic True Second or a Brioni suit or a bottle of Veuve. I don’t even want to prevent trade with China. But I have no patience for people whose sole means of income is doing 500% markup on slave labor games. I’d rather the Chinese makers sell direct to us and cut those scumbags out, like Watchdives or Keychron do.

Mark my words: the arrogance and cupidity of people like the “WG Games” pimps will wind up empowering the worst politicians among us. It gives legitimacy to the horseshoe ends of DSA and Ultra MAGA, if the latter indeed exists outside the imaginations of Brian Stelter. Someone is going to stand on a podium some time soon and say, “Hey, look at how Kerry and Jonathan made their money. They stole it. And you, the People, can steal it back.”

We know how that story ends: they kill everyone who wears glasses. If you’re the praying type, maybe pray that things end differently. As always, thank you for reading. And if you have yet to enable my parasitical writerly behavior by becoming a paid subscriber, you’re gonna miss a great article this week where I compare two of the finest German luxury sedans to ever set rubber to tarmac. So take the money you would spend on a WS Games Suicide Net Edition of “Risk”, and give it to me!