Wednesday ORT: Jesko Disaster, Learing More About Somalia, Autoblog Gobbles

All subscribers welcome

both calipers must have simultaneously failed, right?

Did you all get what you wanted for Christmas? I had an absurdly solid haul given that I’d issued a general Unemployed Red Alert to everyone who might normally expect a gift from me in exchange. The headline item was probably a Casio GMC-B2100ZE 50th Anniversary “CasiOak”, but honorable mention should go to the reader who sent me five Priority Mail boxes full of perfectly preserved and organized Road&Track issues from the late Sixties and early Seventies, in addition to a very nice gift for The Commander. The latter detail is important because DG usually responds to the arrival of bulk magazines or books in the mail with two Malcolm McDowell’s worth of ultraviolence. It was smart of this very smart ACFer to get my son on his side.

Didn’t get what you want for Christmas? A reader is selling his 1290 Super Duke. You should buy it before I get a job, because I would love to have it. Contact me and I’ll put you in touch. I’m also aware of a really nice 2015 Ducati Scrambler; reach out to jon@paddock.club.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve. I doubt I have spent ten of the past fifty-four years out of the house for this particular holiday. When I was a kid my parents lost a brand-new Mercury Monarch to a drunk driver on NYE so that always kind of stuck with me. I’ll be at home with Snobes and the crew, cooking up Cat Tales 2: Eclectic Subaru.

Everything wrong with “the culture” in one moment

If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid social media entirely for at least fifteen years, chances are you’re unaware of the “supercar lyfe” crowd on Instagram, TikTok, and elsewhere. It falls to me, therefore, to fill you in: There are quite a few people out there on “the socials” and YouTube who have made owning a supercar — or five supercars, or fifty — their entire personality. They create endless videos about SPECCING the supercars and TAKING DELIVERY of the supercars and FIRST CARS AND COFFEE with the supercars and so on.

Let me state loud and clear that I have zero respect for people whose only claim to prominence or note is owning something. That goes double, triple, quadruple for people whose “things” are brand-new line-produced products. I never describe myself as a “Radical SR8 owner” although there are only about three hundred of us in the world and you can find more than seventy-five Porsche GTxRS owners for every SR8 owner. I call myself a “club racer” who happens to run a Radical SR8. I spent many years as a guitar collector, but the primary focus of my collection was specific and exhaustive: I owned about 25% of the known existing Electra Anniversary Edition guitars from 1982, with no type duplicates. Also, I used the guitars to play and record some truly awful music!

Most people don’t feel as I do, so the “supercar lyfe” media is actually quite popular, leading to an interesting business model: you rent or borrow a couple of supercars to make content, hoping that eventually YouTube pays you enough to actually buy the cars and make the “hustle” into reality.

That’s not the case for “The Hamilton Collection”, which is the side project of a dude who apparently made millions of dollars drop-shipping Chinese wheels and tuner parts. He used the money to buy generic examples of every “supercar” that doesn’t require any kind of dealer relationship or established history.

This picture shows his collection, which if it were a Leonardo DiCaprio movie would be called “Shitter Island”. You buy the cars in the above screencap hoping you’ll impress a dealer enough to get an inside look at something like a used California T. I’m not trying to be catty; after all, I drive a 2001 Lexus ES300. But this is not a primo collection. It’s also not everything; he claims a Hennessey Venom F5 (HAHAHA), an Apollo IE (who cares), a McLaren Senna (the dealers couldn’t sell ‘em), a Chiron Pur Sang (nice, but definitely available), a Revuelto (showroom poison), and…

two Koenigseggs. The first one was a Regera, their 1500hp hybrid. He bought it second-hand and has made a bunch of videos complaining about it. He also had a deposit in on a Jesko, which is the “track-focused” Koenigsegg. When the delivery of the car didn’t happen according to his desired timeline, he went to the Internet to EXPOSE THE LIES and so on. This annoyed Christian von Koenigsegg enough that “CVK” made a video noting that

a) he didn’t have the final payment on the Jesko from Hamilton;

b) the car was on schedule.

Cue another video BRUTALLY EXPOSING the LIES and showing PROOF that… uh, the proof is a few heavily redacted screencaps.

Despite all his complaining, Mr. Hamilton still took delivery of his Jesko. The first person to drive it was his 15 year old son, which brings me to another point about most modern supercars: they can be easily driven by a 15 year old with little to no experience. I know a fellow who was driving his dad’s Ferrari F40 around Ohio State’s campus at night when he was in his late teens. This was ridiculous, because an F40 will kill you. But the kid was also an Indy Lights driver. So.

Steve Hamilton’s kid is no Indy Lights driver, but these modern cars are

just

so

harmless

Which doesn’t endear them to me. The ideal supercar or superbike or super-whatever is something that it takes both money and skill to operate. My old business partner “Uncle Ron” had an Andial-tuned 930 flatnose. He drove it in the winter. As far as I’m concerned, he earned that car, because a 500hp torsion-bar 911 on Eagle GTs is not an easy vehicle to operate at speed.

Anyway, shortly after Hamilton’s kid drove it up a curb did absolutely nothing to it, the car developed brake fluid leaks and a dashboard Christmas tree. All faithfully documented on video by Hamilton, the camera crew that follows him around as he drives cars with traction control and ABS to strip-mall restaurants, and this absurd-looking big fat “hype man” whose sole job appears to be to agree with Hamilton like Ed McMahon did Johnny Carson.

Meanwhile, Hamilton’s two and a half million YouTube followers are treating this like CvK is Adolf Hitler and Hamilton is Bob Hoover escaping a prison camp and stealing an Fw190 to get back to the Allied side so he can continue the fight. (Yes, that really happened. It was an age of wooden planes, like the Mosquito, and iron men.) The parasocial battle between people willing to die for some random YouTube dropshipper and people willing to die for some random Swedish inheritor who has produced 250 cars has produced thousands upon thousands of comments.

I don’t see how grown men can take this seriously, but if I must choose a side I’ll choose the dude who actually builds and engineers cars.

It’s also deep prole behavior to expect a Koenigsegg to run as reliably, or to be delivered with the same exacting time precision, as a new Camry XLE. I’m no dropshipping millionaire but I’ve commissioned custom bicycles, knives, jewelry, guitars, cars, clothing, shoes, and even a USA-made wristwatch. The minute that you decide you want something besides what’s on a shelf somewhere, you are going to encounter problems of one sort or another. The only absolutely flawless high-dollar custom experience I’ve ever had was with Paul Reed Smith’s Private Stock office. I’m not saying that any custom stuff you order should try to kill you (cough cough Superformance) but you can expect something to go wrong almost every time.

If you can’t take that, then go to the Porsche dealer and take the next GT3RS that rolls off the carrier. If I buy a 1500-horsepower Swedish hypercar of which maybe 20 examples have been made, I would be a fool to think it will be as trouble-free as the 201,211st Accord to roll off the line in Marysville last year.

If I could change the world a bit, I would place more emphasis on creation and art and skill and sprezzatura and other genuinely human qualities. We live in a world where we exaggerate the dangers of everything except unprotected sex with strangers and compulsive online shopping. Is it any wonder that so many of our young people have very few desires other than those two activities?

For the price of a Koenigsegg Jesko, Steven Hamilton could race LMP3. He could become a BASE jumper. He could put a great blues band together and fund fifty great records. There are so many things to do with that kind of money besides just buying something and owning it so you can make limp-dick YouTube videos about people REACTING IN THE PARKING LOT.

Which is why this Steven Hamilton will always be the “lesser Steven Hamilton” to me. The greater one is Ohio BMX legend Steven Hamilton. I gave him his first shot at fame when he was 12 years old, using him as photo model for a BMX Today article about how to clear trail jumps. He would go on to become a true underground sensation. This video, which had a massive influence on riders around the world, is just 2:41 long. It didn’t pay him anything besides a free lunch and some bike parts. But ask yourself: would I rather invent the kind of riding he is doing here, or just be a consumer?

It’s low-class behavior to worry about Somali fraud, dontcha know

Some of you may have memories long enough to recall that Tim Walz was a serious candidate — the serious candidate, probably! — for Vice President of the United States as recently as thirteen months ago. During his hundred-day whirlwind love affair with the American media, everyone was careful to treat him with the softest of kid gloves.¹ No one ever took a look at what was happening in Minnesota under his regime. To do was, to even ask questions, was to be a racist prole.

Ah, but now it turns out that Walz presided over billions of dollars’ in fraud, much of it perpetuated by Somalis living in Minnesota. It’s gotten so bad that even the New York Times had to admit it. Now a 23-year-old YouTuber without a supercar collection, Nick Shirley, has made it his mission to uncover fraud in Minnesota on a smaller scale. He visited a building that ostensibly had 14 Somali healthcare providers, all of which received federal funds. No healthcare was being provided.

His smash hit video, however, concerns the “Quality Learing Center”, an empty building that received millions of dollars in federal funding for daycare. It’s not exactly clear to me why the Somali community needs Federally subsidized daycare more than, say, the trailer park in my township, but let’s just chalk that up to “the government hates poor white people in 2025 more than it hated Joe Stalin in 1946.” Shirley’s video showed a dilapidated building that contained no children, just an angry local who didn’t want anyone taking video. The phone number on the sign didn’t work. Even the address was misspelled.

The sheer ridiculousness of it made Shirley’s video go viral, to the point that it attracted the attention of President Trump and Kash Patel. (Yeah, the guy who is switching out the FBI Suburbans for armored BMW X5s.) Then it got even funnier — because the Minnesota Department of Children’s commissioner went on record as saying that the center had “just closed last week”, even as the owners of Quality Learing were hurriedly busing children in for “class” and claiming they had never been anything but operational!

Getting a senior state official to lie on your behalf takes some real pull — but it takes some real stupidity to not immediately contradict the official’s lie in public. “We’re open from 2 to 10 every day”, the owner’s son claimed. That seems odd, for a daycare, unless your entire client base is second-shift strippers or wine moms.

Buoyed by the critical acclaim given to Nick Shirley, several Columbus, Ohio social-media gadflies are investigating the Somali community here. (They should talk to my old pal Rodney, who once put an HK USP 9mm between the upper and lower teeth of a young Somali fellow for the crime of parking in his mother’s favorite spot.) I suspect they will uncover a lot of questionable behavior.

(Amusing side note: The most anti-Somali person I ever knew, besides Rodney, was a Somali Unix engineer whom I met nine years ago. His father was a minister in the Somali government, which is how he got a first-rate education and an American citizenship. This guy hated everyday normal Somalis. “They should have limited the immigration to intelligent Africans… I didn’t come here to be surrounded by the same stupid people who waste my time in Somalia.” When I got my Nvidia gig, I recommended him for it as well. He talked to my hiring manger and declined to apply further. “These people are idiots, and my time is too valuable.” So not only is he smarter than the average Somali, he’s smarter than I am.)

As a former Columbus resident, the idea that there is massive Somali fraud in the city falls into the “water is wet” category of common knowledge. Surely the same has long been true in Minnesota. But — and this is the fascinating part — it is very important to a lot of people that they be seen to not care about it. I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand why. Even if you are pro-African-immigration, wouldn’t you want to put the best foot forward? I mean, Jackie Robinson had to live under a code more strict than that followed by the Templars, just to play baseball in America. Because he was representing many more people than just Jackie Robinson. So if you represent a community that wants to eventually place millions of Somalis in the United States, wouldn’t you want the fruits of that action to be above suspicion?

After looking at 100 or social media posts from friends and acquaintances trying to minimize, redirect, or just flat out deny the allegations of fraud, I’ve come up with the following theory:

0. There is a significant cohort in this country with just two major agenda items: unlimited abortion in the USA, on demand, and unlimited immigration, specifically from the Third World.

1. Anything that threatens either of these goals must be the target of Scientology-style “fair game” resistance.

2. The money being wasted on Somali fraud isn’t wasted. It’s purchasing the allegiance of a massive community that is perfectly willing to vote.

3. Furthermore, everyone at the top of the organizations promoting Point Zero above is so rich that the idea of griping about money-printer-go-brrrrrrt government subsidies is painfully declasse. It’s like standing outside a McDonald’s and complaining to people that your fries weren’t hot. When you do that, people realize you are a broke piece of trash with time on your hands. The same is true for griping about a couple billion dollars being stolen. The Ukraine effort is eating a billion dollars per day, and not getting a single vote! Israel gets billions of dollars every year, and no one can tell you exactly what they do with it, other than turn around and lobby Congress!

4. Therefore, the only people who complain about Somali fraud are “haters” or “losers” who aren’t wealthy and powerful enough for the idea of a missing couple billion bucks to be utterly trivial.

We all know that demonstrating generosity of spirit via potlatch and other irrational-on-the-surface behavior is traditionally admired. If someone asks you for your cloak, give them your shirt as well. If they ask to go a mile with you, go two. And so on. So the idea of just giving Somalis a few billion dollars to waste demonstrates tremendous greatness of spirit. And — even better — it’s not your money! It’s just money that got printed! It’s borrowed against the accounts of grandchildren you won’t ever have!

That being said, you should be careful not to under-report your income or over-report your deductions on your taxes. Because the same state apparatus that has turned a blind eye to this fraud for years will grind you into a suicidal pulp, while the media cheers them on.

Speaking of the media

You’ve heard me tell this story before, but: About twelve years ago, Porsche asked Road&Track to send someone to Germany so they could drive all the Porsche 911 generations built up to that point “on the limit” in preparation for the arrival of the newest “991” generation.

My boss decided to put the cat among the pigeons and told Porsche I would be representing the magazine. At which point Porsche withdrew the invitation. They were only willing to re-extend the invite under one condition: they got to choose who wrote the article.

R&T agreed, Porsche chose Jason Cammisa, and the resulting article was so flattering I think someone eventually pulled it off the Hearst websites out of pure shame.

Every so often I ask myself, “Have I been too unpleasant about how Porsche manipulates the media? Do I bang the drum too hard? Wouldn’t it be a good time to shut up and focus on something else?” After all, nobody really likes a crusader, and some of the 911 variants really are quite lovely cars, and… wouldn’t it just be easier to go with the flow?

Then I read something like this Autoblog post, which was put in line with the rest of the news articles:

The text is ludicrous:

The updated 911 range set the tone. The new 911 Carrera S arrived as the sharpest version yet, with more power, cleaner responses and a more capable standard chassis. At the top of the range, the latest 911 Turbo S with its T-Hybrid system became the most powerful production 911 so far, using a compact electric assist to add shove and response rather than chasing EV range. Special models like the retro flavored 911 Spirit 70 cabriolet and the 911 GT3 “90 F. A. Porsche” kept the limited edition pipeline full, while a factory backed Manthey Kit pushed the GT3 closer to club-racer territory…

On the SUV side, 2025 was when the electric strategy became real volume product. The first all electric Macan GTS arrived as the fifth Macan EV variant and the most driver focused, addressing criticism that the entry level Macan Electric had become the slowest new Porsche Macan by the brand’s own standards. Above it, the fully electric Cayenne and Cayenne Turbo Electric launched as multi role flagships, mixing big power with long distance comfort and some genuine off road ability…

At the other end of the spectrum, interest in classic metal stayed strong. Air cooled 911s continue to pull serious attention, with cars like a low mile, one owner 1973.5 911T. Put together, 2025 suggested Porsche sees its future as a mix of faster hybrids, more capable EV SUVs and a steady trade in heritage and motorsport credibility to keep the brand halo bright.

It’s clearly an advertorial, but not labeled as such. And I can tell you exactly how it got made. Someone at Autoblog wants to go on a European trip. So they called their Porsche PR rep. Who then said, “You know… we haven’t seen a lot of really great content from you lately.” So the senior editors bullied some poor nerd kid into writing a piece about how Porsche is just that good. If the PR people liked it, then they unlocked a vacation worth $20k or more. If they didn’t… well, there will need to be another positive piece.

Make no mistake: a company’s products and engineers shouldn’t be held accountable for their PR strategy. The Tesla Plaid is fast whether you love Elon or hate him. The virtues of the 911 GTS aren’t dependent on whether you think the PR is ethical. But the more of this stuff I see from Porsche — and I’ve seen it for 16 years at this point — the less I’m inclined to harbor any affection whatsoever for the brand.

As for my pliable former colleague, I’m pleased to announce that he changed his ways, became a consumer advocate, and released a hard-hitting new video challenging Porsche to do better by its customers:

Just kidding. This video licks balls² so hard they had to put a “Paid promotion” warning at the beginning of it. Admittedly, the warning specifically refers to Mobil 1, which used the profits from selling synthetic blend oil in their bottles instead of real synthetic to gin up a media partnership with an established automotive lifestyle luxury brand, but still… this is a Porsche promotional video.

I think it was once possible for me to have a lucrative video career like that, but I have a son and I’d like him to remember me as a man, albeit a flawed, angry, and prideful one, rather than as some feckless, no-racing, no-driving shill ready to polish the highest bidder’s knob until it shines.

End of rant. Happy New Year, ya filthy animals.

1. I think that some people think “kid gloves” are what you use to handle children. They are not. They are gloves made from the soft skin of young goats. #TheMoreYouKnow

2. For the purposes of clarification, since I would never want to denigrate any insurance company, “licks balls” here is a compliment. It’s great to have your balls licked. As Jonny Lieberman’s wife once said to me in a Facebook comment, “If no one has ever put your balls in their mouth, I feel sorry for you.” My response (“They don’t fit in most mouths, and I’m sorry for everyone whose balls ever got into YOUR mouth”) was perhaps ungallant.