Wednesday ORT: The Need For Tweed, 300C In The Trenches, Action Affirmative, Can You Beat The $299 Tesla?

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shootin’ out the window of a drop-top brougham

Housekeeping: Several ACFers have requested the creation of a feature that, for lack of a better title, I’d call Shreddin’ For Harambe. It would be the musical equivalent of our existing Drivin’ For Harambe and the OG feature, Ridin’ For Harambe. Would you read it? Would you contribute? Leave you opinion in the comments.

The finest pants you’ll ever buy for $199 $184 $169

the commander can shoot you in the head at 100 meters using a Gold Cup offhand… in Minecraft

My father, a man to whom the wearing of military uniforms and Armani suits came as naturally as his ability to swing a baseball bat at Notre Dame, frequently called me a “soup sandwich” as a kid because I could make any outfit, no matter how nice, look a bit sketchy. Forty years later, nothing’s changed. So when you look at my outfit above, don’t blame Gustin for the slightly imperfect mating between their Harris Tweed trousers and the one-piece shell cordovan belt Nick Horween (of that Horween) made for me a few years ago. Chances are you are not as “soupy” as I am, and therefore you’ll have even better luck with them.

We talk about Gustin a lot here at ACF. Right now they’re doing the final run of their Harris Tweed trousers. I have four pairs of their herringbone tweeds already and I’m a backer for this final run as well. If you’ve never worn proper tweed pants, you’re missing out. Gustin makes them in the United States using authenticated Harris Tweed from the Outer Hebrides. My friend Richard Anderson charges about three thousand pounds to sew pants in the same approximate material.

This link gets you $15 off the $199 price for the final run. It also gives me $15 for my own use, but if you’re a paid subscriber and you drop me a line, I’ll give you that $15 store credit for your next order.

Now let’s get off this topic before “Sherman McCoy” realizes I’m wearing a Brioni tie on that Budd shirt and launches into the sort of moronic, utterly unjustified pro-Zegna tirade which used to be the exclusive province of mercury-addled hatters before it became inexplicably popular with “digital pimps” and other unsavory remoras around the cloaca of our piscine economy.

God had blessed him with a Chrysler 300

From reader GAJ2000 comes a link to an upcoming auction for a 2023 Chrysler 300C 6.4L that is entirely “Baruthian” in color and equipment — except this time, the bullets were fired at the car instead of from the car.

Let’s take a moment to bow our heads in silent respect for the young Atlanta-area baller who chose the 300C over the far more common “Scat” or “Hell” Charger. The interior on my car is so much better than what you get with the Dodge. It seems likely that he got caught up in one of those urban stories so effectively parodied by the “Hoodville” account on Instagram. (Insert references here to: lil’ Aiden, Altimas that smell like tilapia inside, Soundcloud rappers, direct messaging, local trap game, “the trenches”, and so on.)

What will the car fetch? I’m thinking thirty grand, easy. I don’t see the $22,034 of damage, but it is marked as a non-start. The 392 is hard to kill… unless you idle it too much. Could that be part of the story? Only the street knows — and the street, as Carlos Brigante reminded us, is always watching.

An inauguration to remember

Whether you like or hate Donald Trump, you have to admit that he’s carrying 78 years of exuberant living a little bit better than his predecessor did 82 of the same. His impromptu press conference during the signing of executive orders revealed a man in full command of his faculties and able to speak off the cuff on a very wide variety of topics, albeit with the usual Trump-isms of “best”, “most”, “greatest”, and, memorably. “one trillion” repeated again and again between the meat of his remarks.

Much has been made of how the Clinton power base basically submerged and generated a combination of cash, favors, and influence for more than twenty years between Bill’s departure and the billion-dollar boondoggle of Hillary’s turn, and it’s true that such a thing had never happened before in American history, but the return of President Trump to the Oval Office is more astounding; it is, verily, the stuff of Roman or Greek legend. The ironic part is that his opponents empowered him with the full-court press against his last campaign. Had he been re-elected in 2020, he would have been a lame duck with the full power of the press, the media, Congress, the “deep state”, and the Fortune 500 aligned against him.

Now he has an unequivocal mandate from the people and much of American business backing his play. It turns out that losing made him stronger, which is not the kind of lesson you can get at Trump University or on the back of a Trump Steak. The DJT of 2016 who was repeatedly belittled, betrayed, and sidelined by his own people while he looked on in bewilderment is gone — look at how quickly Vivek Ramaswamy was unpersoned after making an unforced error in public.

The business of the “crypto rug” is fairly outrageous, of course, but let’s face it: once you pardon Anthony Fauci, you’re basically saying the gloves are off, and it ain’t like Presidents Obama and Clinton didn’t become nine-figure aristocrats without breaking a few ethical eggs.

Trump’s immediate decision to dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s affirmative-action framework has a lot of people absolutely aghast, but ask yourself: has that framework borne any real fruit? We have more than a few “people of color” at ACF. Have they been uplifted by affirmative action? I imagine the best answer to that is “some of them, maybe, sometimes.” Perhaps it’s time to see people as more than a collection of labels — but maybe I just think that because I’m a six foot two German-American, which is another way of saying “the official bad guy”. Gosh, if I were good-looking I’d have the whole package, I’d basically be Rutger Hauer! (He wasn’t German, but he also wasn’t really a robot, and nobody worries about that.)

This is a good time to be a Trump believer, but it’s also a good time to be in “the resistance”. I was talking to a friend of mine last night, a gay white guy in his mid-forties with a decidedly hip bent to his perspective, and we discussed the idea that art and culture can often only flourish when confronted with a conservative majority. The harder the nation swings to the right, the more great creative work you’ll see from left-leaning resisters — just like four years of Biden got us some industrial-strength meme culture on the right. Who will play the role of Reagan-era Dead Kennedys of 2026? They’ll have some grist for the artistic mill, that’s for sure.

I suppose I should say something about the “bishop” who chose to use her speech to defend the need to preserve cheap labor by any means necessary for corporate profits the frightened Mexicans:

I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country. We’re scared now. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.

The most ridiculous thing about the speech, other than the fact that it was delivered by someone whose astounding noncompliance with traditional Christian beliefs, theology, and values would have caused Torquemada to momentarily gawp in disbelief before turning to his array of hand saws with renewed enthusiasm, was arguably that it casts immigrants in this bizarre role where their true value consists largely of how their labors serve to further ease the already-comfy lives of coastal laptop-class whites. I’m not sure that’s a materially better sentiment than “They’re not sending their best.” Would the bishop cheer her replacement by an “undocumented” hardline Eritrean priest who thinks she is an abomination before the Lord? Are immigrants only a valuable part of the country if they’re willing to clean dishes? What if they want to run the place? What if they want you to clean the dishes, while they order the Starbucks and drive the Taycans?

I should also mention that here in my township, all those pathetic and worthless jobs she mentioned with such vigorous disdain are done by… regular citizens. There’s a chicken farm here, and an egg farm too. This notion that we can only have a functioning economy for the wine moms if we poach laborers from Guatemala seems essentially incompatible with both decency and reality.

In the meantime, those citizens who work in less respectable gigs than meatpacking, such as scrum masters and sysadmins, are seeing a resurgence in hiring. It’s an ill wind that blows no nerd good.

Can Akio beat Elon in the $299 Challenge?

A few ACFers were eager to correct my suggestion last week that Tesla is a premier luxury brand, and their arguments frequently included the fact that the Model 3 is now an affordable lease proposition for most people. Since I despise being contradicted for any reason, my first impulse was to point out that cheap leases of entry-level cars basically built the BMW and Mercedes-Benz brands in the United States. We had about a 15-year run where it was cheaper to lease a 330i than it was to finance a Camry. If you think that didn’t account for a major percentage of German-brand sales over that period, you’re wrong.

Let’s assume, however, that my readers are right. They often are. We can still have a reasonable conversation about value. If the cheap Model 3 leases take Tesla off the luxury-brand board, do they establish Elon’s Folly as a legitimate alternative to the Camry and Accord?

Assume for a moment that you have all the conditions necessary for EV-ownership success — let’s say you have solar panels, 220v power already wired, and a perfectly decent used car with just a couple primer-colored body panels to drive when you need to drive more than 300 miles in a stint. Would you choose a Model 3 over a Camry Hybrid? If so, why?

I wouldn’t mind commuting to work in a Model 3, but it occurs to me that Teslas are not brilliant foul-weather cars and when the sun is shining I have a V-Strom to cover the sixty-some miles between me and “the city”, which in this case is the city of Columbus. Is there a case to have one? For me, or for anyone outside Palo Alto? We know what a Camry can do that a Model 3 cannot, namely: refuel anywhere. That being said, there’s a Supercharger between me and Columbus, and I pay literally one-third the kilowatt-hour rate of a Los Angeleno even when my solar panels aren’t doin’ it for free.

(Maybe I’d rather have a Taycan at the approximately 50% depreciation that hits them the minute they leave the comforting confines of a Porker dealer. Should I get the “Turbo”? I’ve always wanted a turbocharged Porsche.)

I think that as an ownership proposition, a Camry Hybrid slaughters the Model 3. As a three-year lease, on the other hand… Let me know what you think.