To Finish 45th Out Of 60, First You Must Finish
It was six years ago that my Neon last completed a NASA race. In the time since, I’ve raced everything from the 24 Hours of Lemons to Grand-Am Koni Challenge, Continue Reading →
National Review And The Autarky Malarkey
Let’s get this right out in the open: Donald Trump was the only potential Republican candidate for President who had even the slightest chance of beating Hillary Clinton and her Big Blue Media Machine. Without The Donald, the Republicans would have cheerfully kept on being the Washington Generals of American politics, the “loyal opposition” to a one-party State in which the interests of politicians, media elites, and the impossibly wealthy are all aligned to the mutual satisfaction of everybody with a net worth over ten million dollars and/or a severe distaste for traditional Western values. You might not want to believe this; like my brother Bark, you might continue to hold a flickering belief in a “traditional conservative platform” or in Chamberlain-esque appeasers like Marco Rubio. But it is true. The Republican party is effectively derelict, weakly supported for the moment by local gerrymandering and facing execution at the hands of seemingly unstoppable demographic change.
If you need a reminder of why modern conservatism is DOA, however, Kevin Williamson at the National Review will be happy to provide you just that, with the additional bonus of a head-in-hands-worthy lesson in how to become smitten by one’s own kindergarten-level logical fallacies.
(Last) Weekly Roundup: Pump Yo Brakes Edition
No rest for the wicked. After a triple SCCA race weekend in which I managed to land on the podium despite nursing both a few broken ribs and no small number of resentments, I spent all of last week in Europe working on a new story. Some of it was tedious and some of it was thrilling.
Here’s last week’s contributions, plus one we missed earlier.
2018 Volvo S90 T6 AWD Inscription – Swedish Brougham
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve always had a thing for Volvos. My parents always had them when I was a kid. The earliest cars I remember riding in were Mom’s ’73 1800ES and ’77 245DL wagon, and Dad’s ’81 DL two-door sedan. All through the ’80s, Mom had a Volvo wagon and Dad had a Volvo sedan.
Dad’s new 740 Turbo, circa summer 1988.
Probably my favorite was my father’s 1988 740 Turbo Sedan. Fire engine red, tan leather, blackout trim, five-spoke alloys and sunroof. Now that was excellent!
The 940SE at Lake Carroll, late ’90s.
So it may come as no surprise that my first car was a Volvo, and my second, and my third. The first one was my dad’s former company car, a 1991 940SE Turbo.
The Critics Respond (sorta): A Saga of Stolen Content
Last week, I wrote my first TTAC editorial since…well, you know, that one. By all measures, it was well-received—good user engagement, significant readership, and over 2,000 Facebook shares. But there was another article about the Focus RS and dealership issues that ran three hours later which did even better.
Over on OppositeLock, which is the user-content driven Kinja automotive site, user LJ909 wrote a post entitled “The Focus RS has been sitting on dealer lots and dealers can only blame themselves.” Hmm. I mean, it wasn’t exactly the same as my title, “The Focus RS is Dead, and Dealers Are to Blame,” but it was pretty close.
Regardless, LJ’s post blew up, with over 4,000 Facebook shares and nearly 70,000 views—a far cry better than the couple of hundred views his previous posts had gotten. Like this one. And this one.
Hey, wait a sec…didn’t TTAC do posts on those stories too? Why, yes. Yes, they did. And on the same days, too.
Hmmm. Something’s rotten in the state of Kinja.
1979 Cadillac Seville – A Sheer Vision In Colonial Yellow
Note: This was originally going to be the last article I wrote for CC at the end of 2014. I had had enough issues with certain persons and certain personalities that I’d decided to move on. But I left this in the queue as an appropriate swan song for my scribblings there, since I am such a fan of classic domestic luxury cars. Well, lo and behold, a day or so before it was to run, it was de-scheduled. Then deleted. Classy. Fortunately, I’d saved a copy to my own computer. It ran on another site several months later, but as a low traffic site, most likely few people saw it. And now that I’ve thoroughly bored you, here it is, with a couple of tweaks. Enjoy! And Brougham on. -TK
I am a big fan of the Cadillac Seville. Why? It was gorgeous, it was a way to get new customers for Cadillac dealers, while retaining those owners getting a bit tired of their Nimitz-class offerings, and it not only inaugurated the successful Sheer Look, it also did so with that elusive Jaguar way, with grace and pace.
The Seville’s genesis goes back to the early ’70s, when demand for a “smaller Cadillac” caused the GM prestige division to think about a new model. In fact, the earliest styling bucks for the Seville circa 1973 looked remarkably like that of the Hooper-inspired 1980-85 Cadillac Seville.
But fortunately, a leaner, smoother design and, in your author’s opinion, rather timeless design was selected, and was a breath of fresh air in Cadillac dealerships. Here was a cleanly styled flagship (only the Fleetwood limousines cost more) that had fuel injection and manageable size, yet retained all the luxury features that Cadillac owners, a loyal bunch, expected.
Double Weekly Roundup: Master Of The Harmonicaster Edition
There’s a great part in Alexander Pope’s Epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot where he sarcastically thanks the “Great”, meaning the titled aristocracy, for showering riches on the most servile and repugnantly talentless poets out there and, by making pets of them, sparing Pope the hassle of having to read their work. “May dunce by dunce be whistled off my hands!” he snarls, before remarking that the aristocracy chose to ignore the genius of John Gay. To be fair, Gay was offered some preference by the “Great”, but he usually turned it down. His goal was to succeed on his own merits by appealing directly to the public, and in this goal he was eventually successful.
In a nutshell, that’s how I feel about Ronnie Schreiber. He’s one of the strongest writers in the business, a tireless researcher, a polymath with the ability to converse intelligently on any number of subjects, and a true friend. Time and again I’ve seen great opportunities pass him by and go to various congenital liars, con artists, talentless emo hacks, and fat-assed bench racers. All those dunces, whistled off my hands into cushy gigs where they rewrite press releases or make up stories about shit that never happened. Meanwhile, Ronnie perseveres. A while ago, he was the target of a slander and harassment campaign that nearly drove him out of the business and cost him a couple of lucrative outlets. Instead of crying about it, Ronnie sat down and… invented an instrument.
The electronic harmonica isn’t a new idea by a long shot. A working electronic harmonica, however, has been unicorn territory. Until now. This past week, Ronnie debuted the Harmonicaster at Nashville’s Summer NAMM Show. I was there to help out a little and hang around a lot. The music industry’s response to Ronnie’s self-financed, self-designed, self-promoted, and self-marketed invention was little short of staggering. In the space of seventy-two hours, the Nashville crowd realized what the cowards at Hemmings and elsewhere couldn’t figure out in five years — Ronnie is a brilliant, inventive, tireless man. And now he has a patent pending for a genuinely new thing. The young harmonica players love it. They’ll remember Ronnie long after everything his detractors have accomplished vanishes into dust.
Which reminds me — last week’s “Weekly Roundup” did vanish into dust, courtesy of my attempt to stay ahead of my work and travel schedule while dealing with some pretty unpleasant injuries suffered at a skatepark. I’m not quite back on the horse yet, but today’s the day to start catching up.
1978 Buick Regal Sport Coupe – Activate The Turbo Boost
1977 through 1979 were pretty big years for General Motors. During those three model years, a vast diet was undertaken by the majority of their offerings, so that by decade’s end, most of the familiar gunboats you remembered had a much different, much lighter and much more purposeful look.
1976 Buick Electra Park Avenue
It all started with the biggies. The 1977 B-body and C-body full-size cars went from this…
1977 Buick Electra 225
To this. Pretty drastic, wouldn’t you say?
The new cars, while perhaps displaying less Broughamage and curtailing the trend to longer, lower, wider styling, were better handling, better on gas, and in most dimensions had more interior room than the 1976 models. All in all not bad. And the public responded with a healthy appetite for these lean yet satisfying automobiles.
They Doxx Tacos, Don’t They?
The grievance merchants on the American left — you know, the ones who have somehow obtained the power to mysteriously determine the difference between “free speech” and “hate speech” — rarely engage in rhetorical flourishes to justify their choices. Why should they? In a very real sense, wit and humor are almost exclusively the province of the underdog in any given situation. Think back to high school for a moment and ask yourself who the funny people were. Chances are that you won’t recall the captain of the football team or the homecoming queen among them. Rather, it was the locker-stuffed nerds and pipsqueaks who managed to dull the pain with a trenchant observation or tension-relieving joke.
Back when the Left was being stuffed into this country’s lockers, there was all sorts of great humor being written in the support of liberal causes. Today that’s not the case; we’ve exchanged the darkly funny and thoroughly subversive Smothers Brothers for the effete, hysterical, screeching John Oliver. Most progressive humor is a variant on “OMG LOOK AT THAT STUPID HICK.” Yet there is one particular sorta-witty phrase that I’ve recently heard in defense of various left-wing measures: “So what if (insert hivemind directive) isn’t real? What’s the worst that could happen? That we all (insert oversimplified result here) or something?” A frequent example is “So what if global warming isn’t real? What’s the worst that could happen? That we all have clean energy and lowered consumption and less impact to the environment or something?” This sounds very reasonable, of course, and it omits the fact that the “impact” of climate change regulations as a whole tends to be the shifting of economic, political, and military power from the Western World to China and India. Nobody argues against climate-change-related legislation because they hate stable weather and/or a reasonable crop yield. You might as well as “When did you stop beating your wife?”
Another variant: “What’s the worst thing that could happen if we got rid of hate speech and bigoted speech? That everybody would treat everybody else with dignity and respect?” This, too, sounds reasonable — but it conveniently overlooks that fact that one person’s “hate speech” is another person’s “free speech,” or “realtalk”, or even “gallows humor.” It also overlooks the fact that speech and power are directly correlated in any literate society. That’s why our British cousins will put people in jail for revving an Esprit V8 in the presence of immigrants but staunchly defend the right to advocate the violent death of all white men. It’s about power, not speech; my power to destroy your life for saying something that I don’t like while, at the same time, saying anything I want with utter impunity. And the more ridiculous that “anything” is, the more power I have. Never forget that Orwell’s O’Brien could float off the floor, if he wished it. When you make it public policy to jail one group of people for “hate speech” while encouraging it from others, you are effectively floating off the floor of reason.
They were both drunk, but only men can commit crimes.
This explains why we have so many centrist and right-of-center writers who depend on anonymity… and it explains why, as of two days ago, we are effectively short one of those fellows.
Japanese People Aren’t Making Babies. Why?
Please welcome Thomas Kreutzer to Riverside Green!—Bark
It’s the beginning of a new week, which means it must be time for a new article on the sexual habits of the Japanese.
Today’s trending topic, courtesy of the BBC and The Independent, is a recent study that finds 43% of Japanese people aged 18 to 34 have never had a sexual experience. The article goes on say that 64% of people in that age range report that they are not in a relationship and that roughly one in four 50 year old Japanese men, and one in seven 50 year old Japanese women, claim to have never been married. If this trend continues, warns Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the country’s current population of 127 million will, by 2065, decline by nearly 40 million.
To discover the underlying reasons, BBC reporters dug deep and interviewed two people. The male perspective was provided by unmarried 26 year old comedian Ano Matsui who told reporters that men like him are afraid of rejection, find women scary, and prefer to spend time working on their hobbies. “Once,” he said, “I asked a girl out but she said no. That traumatized me.”
CNN Is Gonna Doxx Ya
CNN is not publishing “HanA**holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
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CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
It happened, ironically enough, on Independence Day. When President Trump decided to re-Tweet a home-made GIF that modified some old pro wrestling footage to show him “slamming” CNN, the media erupted in collective, coordinated frenzy about the “danger” this would put CNN into. Never mind that, by definition, the original footage was “kayfabe” footage from a pro-wrestling spectacle and therefore no more real than the cause celebre Trump-as-murdered-Caesar Central Park play. And never mind that CNN itself is in no way above criticism, satire, lampooning, or spoofing. We were all solemnly assured that this was “deadly” targeting of private individuals by someone whose power exceeded theirs to a frightening degree.
When the general public response to the manufactured outrage turned out to be indistinguishable from “eh, who gives a shit,” CNN did what anybody in that situation would do: They used the limitless resources of a multi-billion-dollar corporation to target, find, doxx, threaten, and blackmail the creator of the original image. I mean, that is what anybody would do, right?