Wednesday ORT: USGP, Venezuelan Submersibles, Aston Loses Cash, Maple EV Syrup, The State Religion

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i will make you fishers of men, and the bait will be cocaine

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Alright, now it’s a race

Nine long years ago, Fernando Alonso murdered Jonny Herbert on camera by telling him “You are not a champion.” Herbert had won three races in his career, but truthfully no one could imagine him winning the WDC with any situation less easy-button than Villeneuve-in-1997 or Lewis-in-2014-2015-2019-2020. Not every racer has the potential to become a champion, especially when they don’t have the best car or the best situation.

History may record Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri as being nothing more than the whetstone on which Max Verstappen sharpened his craft to perfection. Does anyone really think the RedBull is the best car on the grid? Of course not. Yet here we are with just thirty-four points between Oscar and Max. It’s the kind of margin on which one could sleep soundly if the driver in arrears were Danny Ric or even Sebastian Vettel, but when it’s Max a thirty-four point buffer feels like an imminent disaster. Largely because if Max wins the rest of the races, he has won the championship no matter what happens behind him. Again, this would feel like pure minotaur-level fantasy with any other driver on the grid, but somehow it’s about a 50/50 possibility now. Get ready for McLaren to revamp the Papaya Rules. The only question is: will Lando willingly give up his shot at the crown to make sure Oscar keeps his?

Other notes:

• More awful, pathetic Sir Lewis fangirling from the commentators. If you listened to the race instead of watching it, you would think that Lewis was about to win the thing. In reality, he narrowly pipped Leclerc in the sprint then for most of the race wasn’t even in visual distance of his teammate. With a few more laps, Oscar would have passed him. I understand that the British want Hamilton to do well — but he has not done well and this week he set a new Ferrari record of “most races without a Grand Prix podium.” That’s right — Eddie Irvine and many other nonentities did more in a Ferrari than Sir Lewis. Meanwhile, Leclerc is up there holding second place like it’s a roller derby game.

• Speaking of being more positive than the results deserve… Yuki had two great races this weekend but clearly he is not going to be in the Red Bull next year. He just can’t get the car to do anything. I suppose they can toss Hadjar in for 2026 but let’s face it: no driver in history has looked like anything besides a simp next to a fully matured Verstappen. As an F1 hopeful you’d be better off driving the Sauber.

• The Sainz train continues. Yeah, he had bad luck in the Grand Prix but the Smooth Operator is finally fulfilling my predictions that he would wipe the floor with fellow cat collector Alex Albon.

• Ollie Bearman: the real deal. He races hard. Sometimes too hard. And he is fast. If I had to choose the 2032 WDC right now, it would be him.

• Where is Oscar’s head at, anyway? He’s gone from being the coolest head on the grid to an obvious in-car depressive… and he is still leading!

Maybe we shouldn’t have gone after the Barbary pirates, either

I don’t think it’s good artistic or even business practice to say “Go read this other Substack,” but Cdr Salamander has a brilliant piece on the background, justification, and operation of the “war on drugs” happening right now.

A Drug War Goes Hot

Here’s the key part for those of you whose staunch loyalty to ACF keeps you from clicking out:

So far this century, over 1 million Americans have died from drug overdoses.

As has been true for decades, the primary source for the drugs that feeds America’s habit comes from the south…

Take a moment to think about the last quarter century of the use of the US military to strike everyone across the entire spectrum of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, to President Obama striking American citizens overseas, to the final mistake in Afghanistan against the family of an NGO worker, to a whole spectrum of people from Libya, to Syria, to Yemen…we could go all day.

Most of those people did not have anything to do directly with the deaths of Americans in the homeland. At best, tangentially they were a threat, but we killed them.

The TdA have more American blood and misery on their hands than any Haitian did in the 1990s or any Iraqi did in the late 1990s.

All of this should be viewed in light of the fact that the admiral in command of this operation is retiring due to legal and ethical concerns about the strikes on inbound drug traffic. He appears to feel, as do many others in the media and elsewhere, that this is a criminal matter, not a military matter, and it should be handled by law enforcement. And you know what? If we were in a high school debate class, I think he would win. But look at this:

Every year in the post-COVID (or post-Biden, or post-C8-Corvette, you choose) era has seen more people die from overdoses than died in the Vietnam War. Scratch that. The fentanyl epidemic is killing people faster than Hitler and Tojo combined.

For a long time, nobody cared about opioid deaths because they primarily affected poor whites, whom everyone including Lindsey Graham freely despises. But fentanyl has changed the game. African-Americans are now most at risk. So this is also now an issue of racial justice. 20,725 Black men and women died from overdoses in 2023. In that same year, 13,350 Black men and women died from gunshot wounds. We talk about gun control night and day in this country. But overdoses are simply ignored.

This is now too big to be a criminal matter. It’s too big for local police departments or even federal law enforcement, which to be honest spends most of its time trying to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer anyway. If we had reason to believe that Taiwan was killing 100,000 people a year via NVIDIA’s famously fault-prone GB100, we would have a B-2 over the chip fab. So why give Venezuela a pass?

I’m not (all that) interested in hearing how this is a supply-side problem. Humans are fragile. Humans in desperate straits, doubly so. You can’t OD on fentanyl, no matter how much you want to, if there isn’t any coming into the country. I would like to own an Alpine A110 and I’m willing to pay for one, but you know what? I can’t have one, because it’s federally prohibited and they seize any A110s that enter the country.

The people arguing that the military can only be involved against an organized foreign power are agitating, whether they know it or not, for complete regime change in Venezuela. Which, I would add, has a lot of oil. If we had George W as the president, there would already be 500 tanks on the ground.

If anyone has sound reasons why the deaths of 100,000 Americans a year do not matter as much as a point of legal nicety with regards to a South American kleptocracy, please bring ‘em forward. Try not to make them “Everything Trump does is bad.” Which, honestly, appears to be the only consistent reason unifying the pro-Venezuelan-”fisherman” cabal.

Never change, Aston Martin

I think the Aston Martin DBX is awful, and when I drove one for the insurance company I tried to make my opinion on that completely plain without getting fired for it, but I do kind of like some of their coupes, which can be aggressively handsome and in any event don’t look like anything else on the road.

Much is being made of the fact that the company is losing money. Quite a bit of money. Well, is that important? Would this state of affairs be improved or worsened by selling more of them? Is this a situation where the cars cost more to manufacture than they can fetch in a showroom, or is the company bleeding cash to fund a whole array of “Gen Z Boss And A Mini” daycare-for-sluts recipients?

The firm expects to lose about $140 million this year. If you look at the roster of who has shares in Aston Martin, you will see a bunch of entities that could eat that loss individually and shrug it off. Mercedes-Benz earned about ninety times that much in profit last year. Nobody would look twice at a company that lost $140 million on EVs. They would call that “stopping the blood flow” or “a positive result, all things considered.”

The value in the brand is obvious to me: it’s how Mercedes-Benz can sell $250,000 gas-powered cars without having to listen to Greta Thunberg. The market for said vehicles will surely improve in the years to come. All Aston Martin really needs is a second reason to buy the cars besides “James Bond”. Any reason would do.

Speaking of losing money on EVs

For the past nine months, Canada’s $5000-per-EV subsidy has been on hold for lack of funding. Guess that’s what happens when you don’t print a reserve currency. Now it has been formally discontinued. This matters more to Canadian customers than the $7500 credits mean to their Stateside counterparts. As long as I can remember, but especially in the last few years, Canadians have experienced a significantly reduced standard of living, and relatively low average income, compared to USians. In a situation like that, every dollar helps.

The fact that Canada can’t find funding to make this pipe-dream stupidity happen is further proof that the EV wave has stalled on arrival. Which is a good thing, even if you like EVs. Arguably it’s good for EVs, because at some point someone will figure out how to make a desirable battery car that isn’t reliant on some governmental scale-thumbing.

(Just going to put this out there: anyone who could sell an 11-second 2+2 for $29,999 in either country is gonna clean up, even if the range is 125 miles or less.)

The state religion

hint: the actual king is represented by the larger face in the picture

Thanks to a reader who sent me this summation from Joe “Primary Colors” Klein’s Night Owl podcast, because I do not listen to podcasts:

…they were making the point that being a liberal is the actual national religion, in that it’s just the default way of being for the state and its people and how we (writ large) situate ourselves in the world.

When I read this, I felt a bit of true enlightenment. Put aside the negative and other connotations of “religion”, and just take the term in the Nicene Creed sense of “We the assembled people believe that…” If you think that the state can take better care of people than the market can — and, I’m slightly ashamed to admit, am occasionally of that opinion — then you’re participating in the state religion. But wait, there’s more.

The left is just the orthodox/fundamentalist version of the religion, too doctrinaire for the masses but [the belief] in its purest form.

If you think that healthcare should be “free”, then you are on that side of the fence. The same goes for the people who think “housing is a human right”. Now for the fun part.

Conservatives are a[n] heretical sect but still tethered to its main precepts.

Exactly! When you see some generic Republican and some generic Democrat arguing about what percentage of funding should go to a certain government program, you are witnessing a sectarian disagreement. The difference between giving the NEA $10 billion and giving them $1 billion is only a difference of degree. Both positions implicitly accept the moral righteousness of funding “art” with public money. The same is true for our various in-Congress arguments on subsidies to Israel or defense spending. No mainstream politician is gonna say “Hey, we don’t really need a Navy.”

Whereas the right is an alien, hostile religion and [is] treated accordingly.

I think what Klein means here by “the right” is the Marjorie Taylor Greene right, or possibly the 4chan right. There is no “the right” like that with actual power in the national discourse. No one whose voice matters is seriously suggesting that we end welfare or aid to Israel or even close the borders to mass migration. But the description heretical is apt.

I’ve been watching the “No Kings” rallies with tremendous interest, and comparing them to how people demonstrated against Bush II, Bush I, and Reagan. While the current protest volume is louder, it’s not fundamentally different. The same rhetoric is in place; we all remember “Bushitler” being a thing, right? Even the poor dumb capitalist tool of mendacity Mittens Romney took a lot of guff like that, and the most “fascist” thing he wanted to do was, uh, the genuinely fascist thing of letting Wall Street determine national policy. He certainly didn’t want to defund NPR or anything culture-war-ish like that.

What I would hope this lens of “state religion” would do would be to bring all of us a little bit closer to some rational discourse. If we could view our differences as merely being those of degree, rather than fundamental and irredeemable ones, then we could negotiate the way Tip O’Neil used to with Reagan back when everyone could be chummy without being pilloried for it on talk radio or “The View”. Instead of viewing our neighbors and friends as weak and distant shadows of Mussolini or Mao, we could live in reality: “Well, you want the government to fully fund sex change for minors, and I want the government to raise the age of consent for that to 18 while also making it a cash-only situation — but we both fundamentally agree that the government can make a decision somewhere in that range without the need for blood in the streets.”

The alert reader will note that sectarian violence is often the bloodiest of all, and indeed the history of Europe is written by it — but it doesn’t have to be that way. It also allows for the idea of finding common ground. To use the oft-circulated phrase, most “liberals” and “conservatives” are “People of the Book”. The “Book” in this case is probably an old 8th-grade civics text, but you get the idea.

Now, some of us like to believe that we are so right-wing we are outside this umbrella, that we would disassemble every institution from the Federal Reserve to the National Weather Service given the chance. But I don’t think that is the actual belief held by 99.9% of us. We simply assert those positions as counterbalance to the equally extreme rhetorical weights of “The Squad” or the late-night talk-show goblins.

So the next time you’re arguing over something with a friend or neighbor, consider asking “What do you believe to be true, in the greater sense, about this issue?” You might be surprised.

See you all later this week — I owe you a long-form on Friday, and I intend for you all to have it!