Wednesday ORT: Toy-GT Noise, MDG Is Fastest, Ozempic Kills Singles, Morgan!, No T In TPS, Kurono Tokyo Worn

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photography: brandon karsten

Good afternoon, friends. A brief non-sponsored message: If you’re in the Midwest, consider attending Motor Vice this Friday. It’s a great “youngtimer” event without a any insurance company cringe, weird grifter management, or fraudulent PPP loans that were misspent on jumbo-sized ice cream bars and other chunky-boy delights.

I also want to make you all aware of this charming article defending the indefensible:

Why you should consider an Adventure Bike

Andrew is dead right, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. What I do have to do: get the intake and throttle body situation sorted out on my V-Strom, once and for all.

Brief race update: MDG should have won both of her races at Mid-Ohio this weekend. She was certainly the fastest and at one point was leading the field by seven full seconds. Unfortunately there was some significant interference by the same out-of-class driver both days. I don’t know if this driver was desperately unskilled or if he was trying to help out a couple personal friends from his hometown. Either way, I’m deeply disappointed in my fellow SCCA members at the moment. I suppose some people will go a long way to not lose a race to a woman. We’ll return to this topic later.

Beautiful at any size, employed and loved at smaller sizes

One in eight American adults is currently using a GLP-1 drug. One in six has tried it. The recent introduction of FDA-approved pill versions is sure to drastically increase that already robust cohort. If you aren’t needle-shy, there is almost no reason for anyone over the age of 40 to not at least try it. Various studies have shown that Ozempic and its competitors slow the advent of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, reduce the risk of kidney disease, and essentially nuke the chances of going from the “prediabetes” condition to full on Type 2 diabetes. Keep in mind that you don’t have to lose a single pound to get all of the above benefits.

If you are worried about cost, some autist in Europe just figured out how to do it for 22 Euros a month, although I would take a deep breath and update my will before I followed his example.

The arguments against GLP-1 usage generally fall into the two camps of “we don’t know what will happen in the long term” and “it’s CHEATING!” The former isn’t as worrisome as you might think, because these drugs have been in use for a while now. The latter… well, I always appreciate seeing Christian morality pop back up wearing a different hat. We might not have pentitents scourging themselves in the town square any more, but we are overwhelmed with people who post their fitness and nutrition miseries in the expectation that society will call them good and moral for eating salads and doing ultramarathons.

Some people are really angry that you can lose weight without devoting your life to performative fitness. They shouldn’t be. GLP-1s cannot make you fit. They cannot put a pound on your bench press or build a single tenth of an inch in your flexed bicep measurement. In fact, most GLP-1 users lose muscle mass. So if you want to be strong, flexible, and healthy in the long run, you probably need to exercise as if those drugs did not exist.

(Side quest: Why is it that when I spend money on a comprehensive basement gym with a functional trainer and multiple aerobic machines and two squat/bench racks, that isn’t “cheating”, but using a GLP-1 is cheating? Shouldn’t we agree to describe any and all exercise strategies not available to Rocky Balboa during the “Training Montage” as cheating?)

Anyway. The average GLP-1 user isn’t a physical fitness enthusiast. She (statistically it is she) is a normal person trying to lose a little weight while still going dealing with the requirements of normal life. Most users lose enough weight to positively impact their lives. And a new study shows that the benefits for women are almost unbelievable:

The estimates show that GLP-1 weight loss changes outcomes on precisely the margins where visible body weight should affect first impressions. Single women form new partner ships. Among women who are single when they start, the probability of being married or living with a partner rises 18 percentage points overall and 29 percentage points after six or more quarters. The gain builds gradually as weight comes off. Women not employed at baseline also move into work. Their employment rate rises 13 percentage points overall and 27 percentage points after six or more quarters, and their weekly hours rise by nearly ten hours at the longer horizon. Much of the employment gain is movement out of unemployment rather than out of retirement or disability.

Just as interesting: what doesn’t change.

Among women already partnered at initiation, partnership status and separation or divorce are essentially unchanged. Nor do I find evidence of upward job mobility among incumbent workers. Already-employed women do not increase hours, income per household member, or job-to-job moves… Self-rated health does not improve, and life satisfaction, loneliness, and depression are largely flat or move in the wrong direction over the same horizon.

Andrew Tate would probably paraphase this as “When you meet a fat bird, you ain’t got no interest. But when the bird you have gets thin, it dinna matter.”

The primary thing I take away from it is: Fat women have fewer opportunities in life. Therefore, GLP-1s are an active help to them. It therefore follows that the “body positivity” movement is an active harm to women. When we tell women “You’re beautiful at any size” or “All bodies can be healthy”, we are essentially sabotaging them.

It should not escape your notice that the biggest proponents of “BoPo” are either women who are slightly overweight or women who are not overweight at all and who just consider themselves “allies”. Instagram is filled with 23-year-old women who are showing themselves off in swimsuits despite being 20-50 pounds overweight. I have been extensively studying these images for research purpose and I can report that they rarely have anything to do with the reality for obese women, which is that you can’t wear anything but Wal-Mart pajamas or caftans and also people hate you the minute they see you.

In other words, “body positivity” is an example of women being inhumane to each other for competitive purposes. Men treat each other differently, of course:

Never wanted an automatic-transmission car more, really

For the price of a base 911 Carrera, you can now have a sports car. 335 horsepower, 2600 pounds, 12-second quarter-mile. The Morgan Supersport is now certified for USA sale. I try not to be self-pitying about my current financial situation, but My God — of all the times in my life not to be able to afford a $130k car, why now?

My second problem is that I can’t afford a new $75k car right now, which prevents me from buying the currently-available Z4 M40i stick-shift! I had the pleasure of driving the automatic-transmission variant on-track a few years ago. It is a delightful, communicative, driver-focused automobile that, honestly, is light-years ahead of its turn-of-the-century predecessors, S54 or no S54.

The pragmatic among you will note that a new C8 Stingray will eviscerate both of these cars anywhere a paved road can be found, and you’re right — but the Z4 offers a clutch-pedal, long-hood, effortlessly-chic driving experience, while the Morgan is simply special in a way that nothing from Bowling Green or Spartanburg will ever manage.

Would you be interested in either of these cars? Both of them?

Can America survive without 1,300,000 extra Haitians and Venezuelans?

Maybe it’s a desperate attempt to deflect attention from disastrous foreign policy, or maybe it’s an attempt to lift up the Americans who have the least among us, but either way, it’s potentially about to happen: the Supreme Court has ruled that Temporary Protected Status for immigrants can be revoked by DHS officials. The fact that this was ever up for debate is incomprehensible to me, but then again I’m the kind of literal-minded moron who interpreted the “Temporary” in “Temporary Protected Status” to mean “you are here temporarily” as opposed to “You will only temporarily be denied full citizenship”.

Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, told PBS that

What I’m seeing specifically in Springfield and in Ohio, you talked about a number of Haitians who have come in. You’re seeing in Springfield a city that is coming back. It’s been coming back for the last few years. And, frankly, one of the reasons it’s come back is because of the Haitians who have been there to fill jobs that were simply not being filled at all.

And that’s what the employers will tell you. That’s what the mayor -- the mayor issued another statement yesterday, and he’s consistently said that these Haitians are buying homes, they’re opening businesses, they’re working, and they’re trying to -- some of them raised raise their family there. They’re contributing to the community.

Incidentally, this is a good demonstration of the difference between “right-wing” and “conservative”, for those of you who are on the other side of the fence. Governor DeWine is a conservative. If a factory owner in Springfield wants to pay eight dollars an hour, and only Haitians are willing to work for eight dollars an hour, Governor DeWine is committed to protecting that factory owner’s right to cheap labor.

A true right-wing candidate would say something along the lines of “Pay a fair wage and hire Americans”. And if this sounds to you like something a left-wing person would say… you’re right! If the left-wing person in question is a labor left-winger, as opposed to a cultural left-winger.

In addition to working jobs that Ohioans won’t do (for poverty wages, of course), the Haitians in Springfield are also famous for another economic impact:

For the record, I’m sure that such incidents are isolated.

The debate about TPS exposes another fundamental difference between American viewpoints. Some people think that any “progress” that happens in this country is automatically ensrhined and untouchable. So if you manage to get an extra 1.3 million cheap laborers into the country as “temporary”, that is progress and it cannot be undone. It doesn’t matter that you called the program “temporary”, that’s just for the rubes in the voting booths. The income tax was supposed to be temporary, you know.

It’s not too late for many TPS migrants to change their applications status and try a different way to stay in the country. Those options were always open to them — but in general, the various highly-funded NGOs that shepherd them into the United States told them there was no need to worry, and that “temporary” was just a word. Well, they were right — but this time, it was a word with meaning.

Never wanted an automatic transmission car more, part two

I defy you to get tired of hearing the new Toyota GR GT3 driving around the ‘Ring. This isn’t a “GT3” like Porsche’s GT3 street-car line, which now includes a convertible and has basically become nothing more than the Malibu Beach version of the Celebrity Eurosport. This is a car that you buy to race in FIA’s GT3 class, competing against the Porsche GT3 Cup.

Will the GR be faster than the Porsche? It would probably be drastically faster, were it not for the Balance of Performance rules on which Porsche relies to keep its strong-selling customer race car competitive with inherently superior machinery. A front-mid-engined car will, all else being equal, always have a significant advantage over a rear-engined car.

If I ever become unaccountably wealthy, I’m going to buy one of these and race it in SVRA, where I will lap the field.

There’s all sort of agitation currently happening about the prospects of the roadgoing Toyota GR GT, which will also have about 650 horsepower from a twin-turbo V-8. Will it cost $180,000 or $300,000? Will it be comfortably outpaced by the equivalently priced Porsches (prolly not) and Corvettes (almost certainly)? How much dealer markup will there be? Every car collector with a functioning frontal lobe now regrets not buying an LF-A when they had the chance. (At the time, the auto press mocked the LF-A for not being as quick around a track as a Nissan GT-R, by the way.) Each and every one of those collectors will now be trying to get in line for a GR GT.

Any ACFer who manages to buy one — I’ll meet you anywhere in the country and coach you for free, in exchange for one session behind the wheel. I have not been this excited about a new car since the GenV Viper TA.

Speaking of spectators and Japanese stuff

Six months ago, I talked about the Kurono Tokyo “INSEKI” meteorite-dial watch. At the time, I didn’t feel good about spending $1,850 on an extra watch… but I probably should have tried to buy one, because they’re just showing up in resale inventory now for between four and five thousand dollars. That’s a better return than cryptocurrency in 2026, for sure.

I didn’t make the same mistake when Kurono Tokyo introduced the Malachite dial. By having everything prepared and watching the NIST atomic clock, I was able to secure my watch in the under four seconds on May 28th it took for the global allocation of (reportedly) 250 examples to sell out.

It will likely arrive in November. In the meantime, I was kind of itching to see what these watches were like in person, so I did some horse-trading and bargain shopping. Eventually I found a Chinese guy in NYC who had smuggled an example of the “5th Anniversary Reiwa” out of Japan without the box in order to avoid paying customs. I also agreed to not re-register the watch to me, because doing so would alert Kurono to his watch-flipping ways, rendering him permanently ineligible to buy again. In theory, he was past the six month penalty period, but he didn’t want to test it.

I still haven’t figured out how to properly photograph the Reiwa. It gleams in any light, but that same gleam makes it very hard to capture without reflections of the camera, the window, my own unpleasant face, and so on.

Kurono Tokyo is not a “high horology” brand, and the owner, Hajime Aosaka, is not interested in making the most accurate watch possible. So while I have multiple watches with an error rate of one second a day or less, the Reiwa is very far from that:

This is the watch collector’s equivalent of a dyno sheet from a 1.6-liter Miata. It can be somewhat better-regulated, and I’ll get around to doing that, but it will never be eligible for “master chronometer” or “Grand Seiko spec” or anything like that. I have sixty-year-old high-end Seikos that have one-tenth the error rate of this brand new Miyota 90S5 movement watch.

Yet I do love the Reiwa. I might go a lifetime without seeing another one. Obviously, if you can afford a new Rolex you can more than afford to pay the elevated resale of most Kuronos, but it is not a watch that appeals to most Rolex people. It is physically small, painfully delicate. There is no brashness to it. You’d struggle to identify it at a distance, although the same won’t be true of the Malachite when it arrives.

Oh, and “5th Anniversary Reiwa” has nothing to do with Kurono’s or Aosaka’s history. It was meant to celebrate the fifth year of Emperor Naruhito. This is the sort of weeaboo stuff regarding which no true American should even be aware, much less interested. Oh well. Every man needs at least one hobby that won’t stand public inspection, I suppose, and I’d feel claustrophobic in a fursuit!