Grift most ingenious

Elon Musk vs Henry Ford.

Elon Musk is hailed as a “genius” by some.

And he is – but not in the way they mean it.

Like Henry Ford, Musk took something he didn’t invent that was essentially a curiosity and recast it in a different way. The difference being that when Henry Ford simplified the car by standardizing parts and mass producing them on an assembly line – as opposed to hand-building them, one at a time, as had been prior practice – the result was a much less expensive and far more practical car that almost anyone could afford to buy.

Musk did the opposite.

What Musk did was to rebrand the electric car as something sexy and “new” – even though the electric car concept is older than any Model T.  But he made it seem new – and very sexy – by making it very quick and very sleek, with all the very latest in the way of gadgetry. All of which served to distract from its unaffordability, impracticality and inefficiency.

But the problem remained. How to sell what most people couldn’t afford?

Enter Elon’s real genius.

Unlike Henry Ford, who appealed to the marketplace, Elon Musk appealed to the government. Not merely to subsidize what he was otherwise unable to sell but – far more fundamental – to promote the sell. That is wasn’t merely an indulgence to purchase (or subsidize) an electric car.

It was a kind of moral necessity.

This is the nature of Elon’s “genius” – as contrasted with that of Henry Ford.

I always sorta liked Musk myself; he’s pretty skilled at donning the mantle of gadfly now and then, which is always amusing to me. That said, I see little if anything to argue with in Eric’s assessment here, unlovely though it is.

Stable genius, or straight-up visionary?

Hey, anybody remember the welkin-rattling howl raised when That Ogre Drumpf™ said NATO was an outdated relic of WW2 that should be done away with, or at least ignored?

Nah, me neither.

NATO did, indeed, have a purpose when it was created: To become a military barrier against a land invasion by the USSR into Europe, and slow it enough for the United States to bring its own full military strength into play. And despite all the BS that had nothing to do with the NATO mission, like the Libya excursion or the bombing of Yugoslavia, its primary reason for existence is, and always has been, as a counter to The Russian Enemy.

Therefore, Russia must be an enemy. Otherwise, there is no reason for NATO to continue to exist.

Looked at from this POV, one might even wonder if it isn’t the NATO bureaucracy itself pushing the war with Russia in order to justify its continued existence. Bureaucracies are like cockroaches – almost impossible to kill. And they will fight anybody and go to any length to survive.

Another thing I recall, from the very earliest days of his presidency, is the overture Trump made to Putin in hopes of forging a US-Russia alliance to combat Mooselimb terrorism worldwide, a truly revolutionary proposition which Putin seemed to welcome heartily. Such would have been most salutary partnership had it come to fruition for all sorts of reasons, but instead ended up speedily strangled a-borning by the Shampeachment shitshow, which at the time seemed almost to have been ginned up specifically for the purpose.

Testing four…five…six

So I get on the ol’ iMac here for other purposes entirely, hopefully launch Ecto with no real expectation of success (backstory here), when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a seemingly stable, fully-functional blog-posting window instead of the usual debilitating lockup and crash? If this test post works properly, it’s gonna call for mucho rejoicing here at CF Central HQ, I’ll tell ya that much.

OUCH!

Also: OOF.

GOP Sen. Mitt Romney still has his moments,

He does, does he? Name three. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

but it seems like those moments are becoming a bit less frequent lately. He still deserves an apology from Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for being right about Russia back in 2012, because he absolutely was. But over the weekend, he made a statement for which he should be the one doing the apologizing.

Yesterday, he accused former Hawaii Democratic congresswoman and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard of “parroting false Russian propaganda” and declared that “her treasonous lies may very well cost lives.”

As we pointed out in our post about it, the Russian government apparently appreciates Gabbard’s comments about U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine and has in fact been airing her interview on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Russian state TV. But even taking that into consideration, Romney’s tweet goes way too far.
And, needless to say, Gabbard herself is quite angry about it. So this morning, she took to Twitter to take Mitt Romney to task over it…

Follows, a long and blistering Twitter thread from Gabbard that leaves Mittens a smoking ruin. Sad to say, the Threader unroller seems to have made a deal with the devil, sold for a mess of pottage and hidden behind a paywall, so I can’t do a plain-text excerpt of this glorious and richly deserved burn and assuredly ain’t about to transcribe all that myself. But it’s well worth the click-over, believe me.

I keep saying it: yeah, I know, dear Tulsi’s a Shitlibocrat, bassackwards and completely wrong about plenty and to spare. But dammit, I still like the cut of her jib. Unlike any of her fellow Demonrats, she actually does get one right now and then.

2

“‘The brand is so toxic’: Dems fear extinction in rural US”

IE, what your saner, Real American sorts would call “a good start.”

The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, those who remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

Obviously, this is a wee mite hyperbolic, since if it was literally so this next guy would be pissing down his leg from fear at the mere suggestion of being quoted in an interview. Which only means that, even in its state of near-Nirvana, the good folks in northwest Pennsy still have work to do.

“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

*shiver* Okay, I gotta confess: I think I just came, just a little. But you guys know why this is happening, right? Take a wild guess. Just one.

The climate across rural Pennsylvania is symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party heading into the November elections. Beyond losing votes in virtually every election since 2008, Democrats have been effectively ostracized from the overwhelmingly white parts of rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the political landscape.

Yup, you got it: Racism, of course and as always.

With disadvantages like this, you can be sure that the fraud in the next major election there is gonna be absolutely epic.

19

Hold onto your hats, folks

A significant departure—SIGNIFICANT—from our usual Embed-O-Phenia music-vid fare tonight, one which I’m betting a good many if not most (if not ALL) of you guys ain’t gonna much care for. Actually, it’s hardly my usual preference in musical styles either, to be charitable about it. But I was over at a friend’s house a few years back with a cpl-three others of my usual crew of reprobates, criminals, and ne’er do wells, when my boy Travis pulled this one up on the TeeWee and we all just busted a gut laughing at it.

Oh, and apropos of not much, the guy whose house our crew was chillaxin’ at was the domicile of my friend Phillip, who is a black dude. The below vid ain’t his usual musical cup of tea either, contrary to what someone given to making assumptions about the typical relationship between our darker-complected brethren and kinda-sorta rap like this usually is. Phil is a rock and roll/surf/punk-rock drummer, against all odds, and a damned good one at that. So much for stereotypes, eh?

ANYHOO. I’m posting this as a dedication to our friends over at GFZ (I never have figured out how to ascertain who’s posted what over there for some reason; if anybody wants to clue me in, I’m all ears), on account of this recent rip re: Five-Oh, Da Man, Johnny Law, Offisah Friendly, the Po-Po.

Two things can be true at the same time:

One: Without effective policing cities will dissolve into chaos, like in San Francisco and New York City, where mass looting, violent street assaults, and quality of life crimes have rendered those cities into shitholes.

Two: This is an obscenity.  There was absolutely no reason for a cop to attack a dog like that on the dog’s home porch.  That was vicious and unnecessary, and the officer should be punished for that.

This is the sort of shit that turns me against cops.

It’s not just possible but reasonable and  moral imperative to say “the Left’s ‘defund the police’ is bullshit but this here cop needs to be tossed out like the piece of shit that he is.”

Lots of ’em do, which doesn’t in any way disprove or gainsay my oft-repeated insistence that, having known and/or been related to more than a few LEOs myself over my whole damned life, there ARE still good cops around out there. Getting harder and harder to find, maybe. In fact, strike that: CERTAINLY. The white-hat cops I’ve known are all long since retired, and almost all of them swear that there’s no way in hell they’d take the job now, so far sideways have things gone since they worked as lawdogs. According to them, we’ve come a long way from “Protect And Serve,” in precisely the wrong direction. But the good ones haven’t all walked away, although the clot-shot mandate is going to see to it that they’ll be in the minority from here on out. And not just by a little bit, either.

On to the embed, which came to mind immediately when I read the GFZ post not because of the “Kilos in my bag” verse, but for the rousing (a-HENH!) chorus; trust me, it will be more than obvious why. Like I said, brace yourselves for something way, way, WAY out of the usual line here with this one. But I guar-on-tee you I’m gonna watch a little bit of it when I go retrieve the embed code from YewToob, and will laugh like hell when I do. So there. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful.



Good while back I seem to recall reading someplace that, ironically enough, Stitches (a/k/a Phillip Nickolas Katsabanis) has a stepdad who either is or used to be a cop. Don’t know if that’s true or not, and I don’t care enough to go digging around to find out, but I deeply, deeply hope that it’s so. Because, funny as I think the above video is already, that would really put the cherry on top of the sundae for me.

Comment of the week month YEAR

Not so much for the content of it, per se, as for a specific turn of…well, just see for yourself.

With old poopy-pants visibly failing and not even Democrats liking Harris, I am sensing an attempt to position herself for the future. “Hey Democrats! I’m rested, I’m ready! Shits and Giggles are obviously not going to cut it for 2024, so what do you say?”

“Shits and Giggles”?!? *snort* I damned near unmoored a floating rib when I first saw that the other day, and I’m still laughing about it now. I am SOOOO stealing that one for further use around this here hogwallow, Hap. Well done, buddy, well done indeed.

3

Money shot!

Wasn’t gonna bother with this one originally, since it’s just not the sort of “news” item I give a crap about ordinarily. But then I read the New York Post’s write-up, which is so wonderful I just can’t help myself. First, you get the archetypical Post grabber-headline.

Woman fires gun at her vagina in cam show crotch shot gone horribly wrong

Heh. You begin to see what I mean right off the bat, I betcher. Right smack in the Post’s wheelhouse, a real gopher ball for those guys. But then, this IS the iconic tabloid that gave us the most famous headline in newspaper history, after all. On to the, umm, juicy bits.

Georgia webcam model Lauren Hunter Daman, 27, redefined “crotch shot” after discharging a firearm into her vagina during an alleged sex stunt gone awry.

“The female had shot herself in the vagina accidentally,” paramedic Brittany Rivers reportedly told responding police officers of the incident, which reportedly occurred on the morning of Nov. 9 at a residence in Thomaston, per a report by the Upson County Sheriff, the Smoking Gun reported.

Later interviews with witnesses revealed that the sex pistol-turned-gunshot victim was apparently alone in her bedroom when the weapon — a 9mm handgun — went off.

Officers were first alerted to firearm fiasco after receiving an “accidental gunshot wound” call from the residence, according to the police report. Upon arriving at the scene, a sheriff’s deputy encountered EMS Rivers, who was holding the unloaded handgun and a spent bullet casing in her hands.

She told the officer that Daman had blasted herself in the netherregions.

Police then conducted interviews with Daman’s three housemates, two of whom were present during the accident, to try and shed light on the alleged boudoir backfire.

Jordan Allen, the reported owner of the firearm, told officers that he was “in the kitchen walking back to the bedroom when he heard the gun go off.” Upon reaching the bedroom, Allen discovered Daman with “a small amount of blood” on her leg, at which point she reportedly informed him “that she shot herself accidentally” and apologized.

Meanwhile, a second witness named Cody Starnes told deputies that his mother Addie Ruth Johnson came into his bedroom and reported that “Daman had been shot.”

Allen revealed to officers how her inadvertent vagino-blasty allegedly transpired.

“Boudoir backfire”? “Inadvertent vagino-blasty”? COME ON, MAN!!! Pure, classic Post-age right there, and no mistake about it.

Now, like most of you miscreants and ne’er do wells out there in CF Land, I wouldn’t give a greasy Biden-shart if every last “newspaper” in America went under and ceased all publishing operations by mid-morning tomorrow—excepting the New York Post. Them, and only them, I would truly hate to see close up shop, and would mourn deeply if they did. The loss of such a wonderful news outlet would be a grievous one indeed, a bona fide catastrophe not just for NYC but for the entire nation. Long may those rascals wave, I say! America needs the Post, now more than ever before.

Fire In The Hole update! Pics of Miss Smokin’ Snatch—the Vented Slotte Girl, Kid Kordite Krotch herself—over at the Daily Mail. I have to admit, she’s rather cute in most of ’em, in that gormless-yet-worldly, slutty-naif way you often come across in the better, more upscale trailer parks. Way more so than I expected she would be, anyhoo.

3

One for Big Country

I’m QUITE sure he knows about this deal already, but just in case it got by him somehow.

EXOTHERMIC TECHNOLOGIES PULSEFIRE LRT FLAMETHROWER, OD GREEN – PF-LRT
$799.99 $599.99

FEATURES:
The patent-pending Pulsefire is the ultimate compact, lightweight, fully handheld flamethrower that sends a blast of fire 25 feet away with the press of a button. Fill it like any other outdoor tool. With the system off, unscrew the cap and pour in gasoline or a gas/diesel mixture. When the battery gets low, take it out and charge it or swap in a spare to keep bringing the heat. The Exothermic Technologies Pulsefire is the safest and most effective way to apply fire at a distance. Includes everything you need to get up and running, besides fuel!

Is there a reason I immediately thought of BCE when I saw Bill’s mention, you ask? Why, yes. Yes, there is. Tried to embed the blasted vidya but it didn’t seem to be an option, so you’ll just have to motor on down to the end of the post to see it. Trust me, the maniacal laughter alone is well worth the wear and tear on your scrolling finger.

2

An effect most felicitous

Be afraid, motherfuckers. Be very, VERY afraid.


I’m squarely in GFZ’s camp.

That was the whole point.

The state had to convict Rittenhouse to protect their unofficial Brownshirt thugs in Antifa.

The people needed him acquitted so that Antifa knew we could defend ourselves from them.

The people won and Antifa is shitting itself.

Good.

The Left wanted us to have to cower in fear of Antifa.

The Rittenhouse verdict defies that.

I hope every time some Antifa thug assaults someone they get blasted.

Seconded, with every fiber of my being. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: every time pAntiFa masks up to throw another of their little shitflings and the festivities DON’T conclude with at least a couple of them lying in the street bleeding out, Team Liberty must regard that as a failure, and ought to work hard to identify and then correct the problem so that it doesn’t happen again.

Laws got to be changed update! Predictably as yesterday’s sunrise, Proggy is now calling for new legislation to shield his semi-sub rosa Einsatzgruppen from the just consequences of their actions. Our friends at GFZ offer an excellent counterproposal.

They will try to change the law against us, we should change it first against them
They want to be sure the next time Antifa rampages through a community, Antifa can beat people with impunity and those who defend themselves against the mob go to prison.

It’s not enough to prevent that.

We need to advance.

I keep saying, the mob should be treated as a collective.

Kyle should not have to prove those three individuals were a threat to him.

He should only have to prove the mob was a threat.

Yes, I absolutely and unequivocally believe that when a mob attacks a person, indiscriminately firing into the mob should be legal and is morally justified.

The defender should not have to be purposeful in selecting specific targets in the mob who pose a threat, the mob as an entity is the threat and all members of the mob are equally culpable and therefore are equally valid targets.

If you really want to stop Antifa, do that.

“I was attacked by a person in the black bloc so I shot everyone in black bloc facing me” should be a perfect defense.

And because I’m a man of principle, I’ll make it explicit, if a bunch of Klansmen showed up at a black man’s house, again, mob rules, every person in a white robe could get shot as a member of the mob.

I propose the “Kill The Whole Mob in Self Defense Act.”

Fucking A. Proactive, practical, proven effective—I’m down with it, a hundred and twenty-four million bazillion percent. Really, what’s not to like? Perfectly simple, perfectly fair, zero margin for error or misinterpretation: Don’t start none, won’t be none, Leftard asswipes. But should you be stupid enough to start some anyhow, rest assured we’ll be more than happy to finish it for you…by finishing YOU.

25

Something to be thankful for

Not just one but TWO (2) proctologically-thorough, hilariously unconstrained fiskings in the inimitable Correia style, the first on L’Affaire Rittenhouse. Towards the close is when the shell is finally cracked to expose the nut of the whole ugly issue.

and may we find a way to get on common ground before more fuses to this powder keg are lit.

-The shit head arguing in favor of fiery riots is upset that the rule of law won out over jury intimidation, and he wants to chide us about “common ground”. We have no ground in common. Your fuckers are the ones who keep lighting the powder kegs, then you get butt hurt when somebody shoots them rather than getting blown up.
 
Basically guys, all the outrage over this trial is because the left is terrified of losing another tool in their toolbox. They love lawless mobs terrorizing you and wrecking your stuff. They love having you too scared of the system to stand up to their dirtbags. So that’s why they are lying their asses off and shedding fake tears for pedophile scum. The jury’s decision didn’t just say Rittenhouse was not guilty, but by extension, it says their useful idiot rioters were guilty, which damages the narrative. And anytime the truth goes against the narrative, the truth gets a bullet to the back of the neck.

The problem the left ran into this time in the court of public opinion was that all of the actual facts of the case were out there for anyone to see. (I really recommend Rekieta Law, who had phenomenal and entertaining coverage with lawyers watching the live stream. I was glued to it for much of the trial). So with the independent media doing the job that regular media won’t, it’s tougher for dishonest fucks like this to spread their lies.

But gullible people still listen to the media and the blue check marks, which was why they were heartbroken on Friday. If you actually believed the narrative nonsense, this case seems like a travesty.

The losing-a-tool notion I’m fully down with, but there’s another angle worth looking at here. I think the thing that wadded their Underoos more excruciatingly tight than anything else is easy-peasy, simple as pie: Teh Sacred Narrative™ was defied, in all sorts of ways, and quite successfully at that. And that, my friends, simply does not fly in Progtardia—not today, not tomorrow, not EVER.

In our second installment, Correia brings the cannonade to bear on a commenter he graciously refers to as “someone I honestly believe means well,” after said someone had accused Larry thusly and to wit:

…When it comes to the left, though, it sometimes feels to me as though you paint with a remarkably broad brush. Speaking as someone who lives in a blue state and who has a fair number of Democrat/Liberal family and friends…’the left’ is not nearly so monolithic as you paint them.

It’s a mistake to imagine all Democrats to be mustache-twirling-evil monsters, IMO. Are there some assholes on the left? Absolutely! But the vast majority are people that I hope you’d get along with just fine if you were chatting across a table with a beer in hand. In my experience, most are genuinely moral people whose greatest flaw is that their idealism is not tempered by realism. And, yes, that flaw can sometimes present in ugly ways…but I like to believe that such conflicts can be better resolved with conversation rather than condemnation.

The assholes on the left might be your enemy, but I don’t think that the entirety of ‘the left’ needs to be.

It worked out for this poor unthinking schlub about how you’d expect.

If the majority of the left aren’t my enemy, the burden of proof is on them, because frankly I haven’t seen jack shit from most of them beyond paying lip service to principles, as the rest of their fellows go about doing whatever horrible thing they feel like, and the ones who claim to be moral sit there silently and let them.

I do paint with a broad brush about the left, because democrats who stand up against leftist insanity are a tiny minority.

Then I get to listen to people like you, who are probably honestly decent people, tell me that you’re not all insane… Great. SHOW ME.

My liberal friends (and yes, I do have a few still, though most tossed me under the bus as soon as there was any societal pressure to do so) will constantly chide me about my words, or my attitude, and go tsk tsk, how rude! But then when people on their side go bat shit fucking insane, they sit there meekly and stand for nothing, because they know the beast they fed will just as easily turn and eat them too.

Besides, as soon as a democrat stands for principle outside of the narrative, they get tossed. Pick any of them in media, punditry, or academia. Any at all. Glenn Greenwald. Tim Pool. Jordan Peterson. Those were all mushy moderates, until they say hey wait, the left is going nuts, and boom, now the left thinks they are the second coming of Satan-Hitler. The party is currently enraged at Sinema and Manchin.

And I’m not alone in this. Most politically alert non-leftists will tell you the same thing. You belong to a cult which will not abide heresy. You want to show us that you aren’t all authoritarian statist trash, DO SOMETHING.

That, basically, is the executive summary. Larry goes on from there to quickly confirm that he was merely clearing his throat, cracking his knuckles, and generally limbering up before getting down to serious business.

Okay. Now for some expounding. Of course not everyone on the left is the same. It’s a big tent. There’s old fashioned liberals, who though they believe in stupid backwards policies, usually tend to have good but naïve intentions. Then there are the progressives, who are basically communist puritans who are actively trying to destroy America. Then there’s the news media, which is just pure Satanic evil. There are also useful idiot NPCs who don’t really have any belief system at all, who just repeat whatever script they are fed that day.

I can say equally insulting things about the right. We’re a big dumb tent too. It ranges from liberty minded people to authoritarians. We even let stupid Mitt Romney in it for some baffling and inexplicable reason. Many in the GOP are trash grifters or NRO cruise ship snobs. However, even though the most loathsome of republicans are corrupt, lazy, shiftless, and stupid, they usually aren’t trying to actively destroy the country.

The worst of both sides are the proverbial swamp creatures. And whether you loved Trump or hated him, there’s no denying that there’s a bloated, elitist, co-dependent bureaucrat/academic/pundit class whose primary motivation is getting and keeping more power for themselves.

So of these various competing factions, why do I typically paint the left with a broad brush?

Because you fucking deserve it.

I see the right fight with itself constantly. The right is its own worst enemy in that respect. That’s why there’s always the joke about republicans snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Too many of them are passive wusses who wish to maintain the status quo. Their ultimate achievement is to lose with dignity.

The left however gets shit done, because they always put aside their differences and work toward whatever goal their elite wants. This is effective, but also what makes them despicable.

For this next part I’m not talking about the politicians or the punditry. Those guys pick a narrative, no matter how false it may be, and they fucking PUSH. They run with that narrative until it absolutely collapses, then they make up a new narrative and run with it instead.

No. I’m talking about YOU. Regular people. Voters. The guy next door. The masses on the internet. Just average joes. Democrats. Libs. Whatever you call yourself. Anybody who identifies as being on the left.

When your leaders pick a narrative, you drink that Kool-Aid. Even if it’s shit flavored Kool-Aid, most of you smile and tell us it’s the best fucking Kool-Aid you’ve ever tasted. It’s milk from the teat of a magic cherry flavored Unicorn. Nope. It’s shit. You all know it’s shit. But you go along with the narrative anyway.

When the insane progs among you lie their asses off, I’m talking blatant, easily disproven, painfully ham-fisted, fucking LIES…Do you call them out? Do you say, “hang on guys, that’s a little nuts”. Because if you do, the rest of us sure as fuck don’t ever see it. Pick a topic, any topic. It’s always the same.

When people nominally on your side are saying crazy, vile, violent, wacky shit on the internet…do you jump in? When I go out on Twitter yesterday and I find hundreds of posts from fucking scumbags dancing in blood, how come I didn’t see comments from Caring Liberals condemning them? (hell when some prog wrote that an evil motherfucker running over 50 people was karma and that Wisconsin DESERVED it, and I condemned them for it, Facebook banned me for “bullying and hate speech”. Fucking good. That was my 9th 30 day. One more I think I get a free yogurt.)

Anytime there is a breaking news story, there will be legions of howling leftists, and blue check mark idiots, lying their asses off and saying the most horrific things imaginable. And since they literally own social media, they get an official pass while the uppity on the right get officially squashed. We’ve all seen it. From trending hash tags that mysterious vanish, shadow bans, to ultra-biased fact checkers, to Youtube demonetizing wrong thinkers or even getting rid of the thumbs down button.

Yet as your fellow travelers are saying all this horrid shit, where are you? You’re supposedly sane. You claim to have a voice of moderation, but it must be a whisper because we certainly can’t hear it.

And if THAT lengthy excerpt isn’t enough to persuade you to hie thyself thither and Read of it the All, well, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you. Because it only gets more rollicking, more rowdy, more just plain old-fashioned fun from there, most definitely including his pithy description of social media as “…a constant barrage of Common Internet Shit Gibbons.” What can one possibly say about such incandescent brilliance but: “Heh. Indeed.”

8
1

Big Red found!

Back in March, or that’s when the article appeared, and as you’d expect it’s one hell of a story.

We Found Ford’s Incredible Turbine-Powered Semi-Truck ‘Big Red’ That’s Been Lost for Decades
Several months ago, we set out to catch a ghost. First seen at the 1964 World’s Fair alongside a fun new car called the Mustang, Ford’s “Big Red” was the automaker’s experimental gas turbine semi-truck, a moonshot experiment built to lift American motoring into the jet age. Thirteen feet tall, nearly 100 feet long with its tandem trailers, packed with truly futuristic features and powered by a monster 600-horsepower turbine engine, the fully-functional prototype was a wonder to behold. It wowed fair attendees and captured the imaginations of thousands on a cross-country promotional tour that followed. Then, it was mothballed when turbine technology didn’t add up. It changed hands by chance, people lost interest, and years after the 10-ton fire-breather barreled down America’s highways, it vanished.

Though it seems like it’d be pretty tough to hide, Big Red’s been missing since the early 1980s. It’s perhaps one of the most significant pieces of automotive history to drop off the face of the earth. Ford itself had no idea what happened to it. But now, we do—after months of searching, after our initial investigation last fall got us closer than anyone had been in decades, the hunt is finally over. We’ve found Big Red. And we can confirm not only that the truck still exists, but that it’s been painstakingly restored—working turbine and all—to its former glory by its exceedingly private and equally dedicated owner.

You have questions? We’ve got answers. But first, we need to lay out some caveats. After we tracked him down and made contact through an attorney, Big Red’s owner—a man who insisted on remaining anonymous for the sake of privacy—finally agreed to share the story of his prized possession with the world under a few strict conditions. We won’t reveal his identity or the truck’s current location, which we have confirmed. We can, however, tell you just about everything else: why he bought it, how it was restored, and why it’s been kept a secret for 40 years.

In the course of tracking down Big Red, we’ve also come in contact with several key figures who were involved with the truck at one point or another throughout its history, and we’re now able to fill in a lot of gaps in the publicly-known timeline of how it went from being feted at the World’s Fair to a discarded curiosity ripe for the picking. We’ve also found a trove of original Ford documents with technical diagrams, mechanical specs and marketing plans for the mammoth truck, some of which are published here with more coming in a future story soon.

There are still a few grey areas—we don’t yet have every moment of Big Red’s past documented—but The Drive’s effort here represents the first time anyone has nailed down its segmented, mixed-up story in one place. Let’s start right where the trail went cold, about 40 years ago.

Like I said, it’s one hell of a good story if you’re into this sort of thing, and ferchrissake who on earth wouldn’t be? There’s an astonishing local angle too, which I didn’t know about but somehow didn’t. There’s a reason I say I shoulda known, which I shall reveal anon.

As we wrote in our initial investigation, the last public record of the truck showed it was owned by Holman-Moody, Ford’s former factory-sponsored race team, and parked in a Charlotte, North Carolina storage hangar through at least the late 1970s. This is backed up by photographs and numerous eyewitness accounts, plus a brochure where it was actually listed for sale as a surplus item, but what’s never been clear is how Big Red ended up in Holman-Moody’s hands in the first place. Thankfully, Lee Holman is a chatty guy.

Holman is the current owner of H&M and the son of the company’s co-founder John Holman. He took over the business in 1978, so he’s obviously a person of interest in the Big Red timeline. We tried contacting him last fall but never heard back; through another source, we finally managed to get him on the phone to confirm some key details that have never before been published as fact.

This part of the truck’s history is key to how it survived the crusher—the fate of most concept cars—and it’s incredible it happened at all. Completely by chance, Big Red escaped Ford’s grasp for just long enough to get in the right place at the right time to make it into private hands. We initially found this part of the saga hard to believe, but now it’s been confirmed as the truth by Holman.

The part I bolded above is the key bit. See, back in my air-freight delivery days, Holman Moody was a regular stop; I must’ve been in that very storage hangar mentioned above about a gazillion times. There was always some danged neat stuff cached here and there in that cavernous, dilapidated space. Holman Moody used to build engines for NASCAR race teams back in the day, there was this big testing stand out back which they’d bolt a new engine into and ru it in. I was out there a few times when such was going on, and man, you talk about LOUD. Always got my heart racing and the gearhead adrenaline flowing, that did.

Anyways, the article is a must-read for anyone with even a drop of honest-Injun, true-blue American motor oil coursing through their veins. Yes, there are pitchers, including this one of Big Red in her heyday:

The truck of tomorrow, today!

Glorious, no? The real surprise for me was seeing just how small the turbine engine powering Big Red was/is; the thing is much, much more compact than the 4- or 6-banger diesels motorvating big trucks down the highways and byways today.

Like I said, don’t fail to read this one. It’s as Americana as Americana gets, a saga that could only ever happen in America That Was. Big Red was lost, but then found and made new again by determined men who cared enough to take on a difficult job and by-God get it done. One can only pray that, someplace on down the line, the same might be said about America itself.

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1

America’s Stone

So y’all may remember my most recent knife-related post wherein I expounded on my lifelong love affair with edged weapons, as well as the followup wherein I revealed that a CF Lifer had contacted me in response so as to hip me to the new whetstone he had invented and was offering for sale to in-the-know knife lovers everywhere, the AmericaStone. He offered me one for free, which I jumped all over like a fat man at the AYCE buffet despite my having less than no aptitude for sharpening these things. Just so happened, one of my least-favored Benchmade folders had an edge issue in dire need of addressing.

Raggedy, baggedy

The AmericaStone arrived quickly and in good order, including a handy-dandy belt sheath for portability purposes, all packaged up thusly:

The deal

Aforementioned Benchmade folder included for size-comparison purposes. Plus, it makes for a purtier pitcher overall, IMHO. Anyhoo, after some extended procrastination–another of my lifelong propensities, alas–I finally worked up the confidence to give the thing a try. A mere four swipes down the wrecked blade, and lo! To my total astonishment and boundless delighted, my poor old Benchmade was born anew.

I hastened to run the tried and true paper-slicing check, revealing that said whetstone had indeed restored a damned fine edge to my poor abused folder. Infused by this unanticipated victory with a surfeit of newfound confidence in my heretofore-nonexistent sharpening abilities, I eagerly grabbed my best chef’s knife, badly in need of some serious help edge-wise itself, with the same happy result. Whereupon I took up the resurrected Benchmade once more for the more demanding and precise Shave The Forearm Hair Test, producing an even more astonishing, albeit much less satisfactory result.

YIKES!! Now, just before I had moved on to the forearm-shave test, my previous shouts of glee over having successfully sharpened a dull blade for the first time in my entire life EVAR had brought a few of the neighbors rushing over here to see what might be transpiring across the way, over in that house where those two crazy old ex-rock and roll-star weirdos live. These fine folks stuck around so as to observe the kitchen-knife test on my wispy-fine forearm hairs that had ended up so horribly for me. Their reaction to my accidental self-mutilation was priceless:

And, well, that’s about it. All kidding around aside, gang, the AmericaStone merits Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s highest-level endorsement in all categories: function, practicality, ease of use, value for money, an official Five Thumbs Up for each. If you need a knife sharpened, this little gem is the one you want to be using–no special skills or talent required. I’m living proof of it, despite a little dizziness from all that blood loss…

3

Bee on FIRE!

The Rittenhouse dustup has inspired an awesome burst of genius-level hilarity at the Bee. Some sample headlines, chronologically arranged:

Prosecutor Proves How Deadly AR-15 Is By Accidentally Shooting 7 Jurors

Kyle Rittenhouse Asked To Step Outside And Defend The Courthouse While Verdict Is Being Read

Rioters Flee In Terror As Kyle Rittenhouse Emerges From Courthouse With AR-15

Media Warns Thousands Of Americans Planning To Cross State Lines To Celebrate Thanksgiving

Rittenhouse, Sandmann Agree To Share Joint Custody Of CNN

Prosecutors Find Mail-In Jury Votes At 3AM, Rittenhouse Now Guilty

Last but by no means least, a slightly out-of-order one that requires excerpting to enjoy the full effects.

Rittenhouse Verdict Raises Concerns That It’s No Longer Safe To Beat People To Death With A Skateboard
U.S.—As Americans deal with the aftermath of the Rittenhouse verdict, many are being forced to come to terms with the fact that it’s no longer safe to beat people to death with a skateboard in America.

“I’m devastated. I’m terrified. I don’t even recognize my own country anymore,” said local concerned citizen Gail Piddlesnoot. “How have we gotten to the point in our nation where people can no longer beat someone with a skateboard, or kick someone in the face, or threaten to kill them without risk of being shot? It’s just horrible.”

The American Society of Communist Skateboard Murderers (ASCSM) reports that more and more of their members are dropping out, no longer confident that they can go out at night, burn down cities, and bash in people’s skulls with skateboards unmolested.

“This sets a dangerous precedent,” said Piddlesnoot. “It could be that in a very short time, we will no longer see gangs of marauding skateboard-murdering arsonists roaming our streets at night, and that’s a very sad thought.” 

For Leftards, a thought sad enough to reduce them to hysterics. Which, along with their slavering, unswerving preference that an innocent, entirely admirable teenager be brutally beaten to death by marauding thugs rather than have their own political fanaticism contravened, says all anybody should ever need to know about them—who they are, what they do, and above all else, what the upshot will most assuredly be should we ever be so foolish or inattentive as to allow these fiends to attain the unchecked power over us they so desperately crave.

7

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

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