Wednesday ORT: The Empire Strikes Lando, Squid Story, Targeted Killing

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Enough of you discussed the Jaguar concept in Sunday’s OT that I’m not going to do it as a topic here. My opinion: The car looks like a Chrysler Crossfire that has been given both freedom from any regulatory compliance and a strict mandate to look as much like a shitting dog as possible. The fact that the auto press in general is chorusing their Alleluias in unison over a two-door concept version of a four-door production vehicle… is just par for the course. Pour it out for Jaguar, which is dead. And speaking of dead:

The Touchables

The CEO of United Healthcare, 50-year-old Brian Thompson, was shot twice in front of the Midtown Hilton this morning. Although the two bullets hit him in the back and leg, he did not survive the injuries. NYC Police Commissioner Jim Gordon Jessica Tisch said the shooting “does not appear to be a random act of violence.” Mr. Thompson, who has presided over a broad array of extremely controversial care and spending decisions, some of which are currently being either litigated or investigated by the Department of Justice, received $10.2 million dollars last year in total compensation.

Noted corpo-liberal toady cosplayer combat veteran and working-class hero Governor Tim Walz immediately made a statement expressing sympathies for Thompson’s family, as well for as the business and healthcare communities in Minnesota, 99.99% of whom likely either did not care about or actively supported the shooting.

Your humble author doesn’t believe in the idea of “the people rising”; five will get you ten that Mr. Thompson’s death is because he’d managed to spend, snort, or seduce his way into a personally compromising situation that spiraled beyond his control. And yet… UHC has been the targeted of coordinated, sustained, and highly competent citizen action for some time now, courtesy of a group called the People’s Action Institute. And there’s this:

UnitedHealthcare was also accused of using AI to deny claims for post-acute care services in Medicare Advantage in a lawsuit slated earlier this month, according to Fierce Healthcare.

The proposed class action was filed by families of two senior Medicare Advantage members who died after the insurer allegedly used the NaviHealth platform illegally to reject care, as UHG profits ballooned.

According to the lawsuit, the technology has a '90 percent error rate, and the company relies on patient complacency or lack of knowledge about the systems to keep using it.

'Defendants bank on the patients' impaired conditions, lack of knowledge, and lack of resources to appeal the erroneous AI-powered decisions,' they said in the lawsuit.

This remarkably evil action is so much The Current Year that I don’t think people would swallow it in a fiction short story — yet somehow I don’t doubt a single bit of the above allegations. Taking money that’s supposed to go to patient care and using it to enrich some jerk-rag Silicon Valley VC cloud-resource-waster company? Continuing to use an “AI” product with a 90% error rate because it helps you defraud old, poor, illiterate people? While the dude who signed off on all of it banks $10 million a year and shows off his watch collection in corporate Glamour Shot photos? You know they did all of it.

Unlike many ACF readers, I no longer do business at the C-suite level and frankly the closest I’ve ever come to the real Lizard People world was having a severance package that had to be approved by an entire corporate board. However, my minor exposure to the people who do live in that world has convinced me of just one thing: if the average underemployed 28-year-old truly understood how these people live — and, more importantly, what they think — he’d be doing targeted killings of CEOs on the street in New York City. Was this the first in a tidal wave of violent action taken to hold executives directly accountable for the behaviors that enrich, elevate, and separate them? Probably not. Would I shed a tear were such the case? I’ll have to get back to you on that.

One for the stewards

We’ve had a lot of great races in 2024, and this wasn’t one of them — but even a lousy race in this season is at least exciting. It seems obvious to me that Red Bull used the sprint race to collect data about something, data that was then used to make Max’s car stronger than it has been in months. The most interesting part of the sprint snoozefest was Lando deciding, on his own, to hand the win to Oscar. Like that or loathe it, I think it speaks to Lando’s potential as a genuine team leader in the future. The fact that Pierre Gasly has beaten Lando’s points haul in recent weeks, using the 6th-best car? Let’s not worry about that. Other highlights:

• Franco Colapinto is crashing a lot of cars. This shouldn’t worry anyone. He was better than Albon the minute he showed up. Now he’s trying to be authentically great. You can’t find the limit if you don’t go to the limit. The teams see his data, and I’m sure someone is interested.

• Yuki continues to deliver results despite being somewhere between stymied and actively sabotaged by his team. You cannot convince me that Yuki in the Red Bull wouldn’t be a strong 2nd place in this year’s championship.

• Way too many steward decisions. Taking Max’s pole was ridiculous. Giving Lando a massive penalty for not lifting on a straight with no workers or personnel on track? Maybe five seconds would have been more appropriate. Sir Lewis’s false start penalty? Absolutely justified, and listening to him try to retire the car near the end of the race was, for me, like sipping the finest casket-aged Haterade to ever receive a professional decanting.

• Who doesn’t love seeing Alpine make something good happen? That being said, canceling Ocon’s last race was a spiteful and classless thing to do. He remains the only driver to win under the current livery.

• The steward actions kicked the Constructor’s Championship to the final race. It will be interesting to see which way it goes; there’s an argument for betting either way.

• Go home, Checo, you’re cooked.

The story of squids

I keep promising to tell this story, so… Most of you have seen the “kraken logo” appear on ACF and elsewhere, and more than a couple have asked for the backstory. It goes back to 1985, when I was trying to be the fastest 14 Beginner rider at Pataskala Phase IV BMX. There were about two dozen of us bumping and shoving around the track on any given weekend. I was flat broke, relying on minimum-wage labor to pay the $6 entry, I had no friends, and I didn’t know anyone. My parents weren’t even willing to take me to the races; I caught a ride with an older kid who went to my high school. I wasn’t a great rider and I had a lousy start but I had very strong legs plus I was almost six foot three in a sport generally favored by smaller athletes. I learned in a hurry that my best way to win was by playing extremely rough.

In that first year, when the paddock wasn’t certain if I was malicious or just uncoordinated, I picked up the derisive nickname “squid” from the cool kids at the track. I chose to lean in on that. By 1988 everybody knew that I played hardball, and I could win on an occasional basis, but my unpromising career came to a halt when I broke my neck and shattered my right leg during a training ride. Two years later I got the pin taken out of my femur, applied for my pro license, and opened up a mail-order bike shop with the following logo:

Those aren’t squids. I paid some artist kid at Miami $50 for a logo and when he drew a pair of octopodes I didn’t feel like paying him to redo it. Squidco was reasonably successful and we did a lot of fun merch from it, including the “Factory Squid” and “Saltwater Styler” shirts. After two years I closed the shop to focus on graduating from school before my long-suffering father had to come up with a sixth year of tuition.

Around that time, I also wrote a series of quasi-fiction articles for Bicycles Today about a mythical racer named “Squid”: you can find three of them here: (1, 2, 3, ) In 1992 I also had the unalloyed pleasure of permanently ending the pro race career of one of my most vocal early detractors, one of the fellows who had been first to call me a squid; he tried to pass me on the back straight of Pacer Indoor BMX and I put him face-first into a corrugated-steel wall. Talk about showing him; this guy said I was a talentless hack who only got ahead on-track by force rather than talent, and I responded by using a 50-pound weight difference to give him a traumatic brain injury!

Actually, I don’t feel good about that. A decade later Craig and I settled our differences in semi-cordial fashion, but it fit at the time with my self-image of being a perpetual and aggressive underdog against people who are richer, more athletic, handsomer, younger, or just plain luckier than I am. Until my early forties I generally handled such individuals via what the Scientologists call “fair game rules”. Today, of course, I renounce violence and unpleasantness in all its forms.

In 2002 I took my nonprofit Web hosting cooperative private. The domain name squidco.com had already been taken by a San Francisco seafood supplier, so:

Ah, the days when people paid $100 a month for web hosting! No wonder I had three Porsches.

When my son started riding BMX again I resurrected the idea of the squid, using a commercial vector template as a basis for handmade copper and 18k gold head badges for my custom “dirt jump” bikes. I started using the logo on the race cars as well.

I now use the squid logo as a kind of shorthand for “Jack Baruth”; it’s on all the merch we do here at ACF, including the ultra-rare keychain!

So that’s the story, and not unreminiscent in hindsight of how Samuel Johnson described the crippled and bitter, but brilliant and perceptive, Alexander Pope:

[B]eing under the necessity of making a subterraneous passage to a garden on the other side of the road he adorned it with fossile bodies, and dignified it with the title of a grotto: a place of silence and retreat… as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage. It may be frequently remarked of the studious and speculative that they are proud of trifles, and that their amusements seem frivolous and childish; whether it be that men conscious of great reputation think themselves above the reach of censure, and safe in the admission of negligent indulgences, or that mankind expect from elevated genius an uniformity of greatness, and watch its degradation with malicious wonder; like him who having followed with his eye an eagle into the clouds, should lament that she ever descended to a perch.

The squid, therefore, is my ornament from an inconvenience. An insult thrown behind the back of a lonely and awkward child who annoyed his putative betters by occasionally forcing his way into a Wednesday-night victory on a $169 Redline 600c that was too small and too fragile for him. Thirty-nine years later, I’ve been on podiums around the globe, I’ve finished on the top steps in 14 different classes across half-a-dozen sanctions, and my team, Green Baron Motorsports, holds seven divisional or regional championships in addition to eight track records. For the 2024 season I received the honor that has meant the most to me so far in the sport: being voted “Driver Of The Year” by the Ohio Valley Region SCCA.

The squid logos and I have had a lot of joy and success over the years. Pretty soon it will be time for me to put away the race cars and the motorcycles, then think about what’s next in my life. Perhaps my son will gratify me at some point by running the Kraken on the nose of his F-22 or the logbook of his A380 — but no, it would be better for him to have his own logo, his own ideas, his own story. This one is mine, not his, and I’m grateful to have had it. As always, I thank you for reading.