Firehose #215: Fall Forward

Also: Vote for the thing

In this house barn we celebrate the annual arboreal costume change, and the busy season of work & televised sports it portends. Sure, you could put on your A.I.-generated screen saver of autumn leaves and crackling fires, but ain’t it grander to touch grass and breathe in the real thing?

OK, enough Hudson Valley propaganda; here’s your reminder/link to go vote for The Fifth Column (and, OK, *maybe* The Moynihan Report) for various Signal Awards “Listeners Choice” categories. The Signal Awards were founded in 2022 by the rabble who brought you the Webby Awards way back when. So long ago, in fact, that I first started writing about them in 2000 (including a decently spot-on dotcom-1.0-crash number on “Which Webby nominees will be dead this time next year?”) I see that my 2001 report from the only Webbys I attended included this graf:

After the ceremony, on the sparsely populated smoking balcony, a San Francisco enthusiast who co-founded an actually successful Internet company shook his head and laughed. “Can you believe how bloody provincial that was?” he asked, as a dominatrix dot-com she-cop searched for eager young male programmers to butt-whip.

I can’t stress enough how little this stuff matters, though as Cubs/Red Sox/Astros fans can tell you, as long as your flawed self is in these things, it certainly is much preferable to win.

* Fall’s busy with live events, so your quick reminders, beginning out of chronological order with my now-RSVPable Oct. 31 “American Patriotism at 250” at the University of Austin. No better way to spend Halloween! Promo:

UATX is pleased to welcome Charles Kesler, Matt Welch, and Jedidiah Purdy for a thoughtful and engaging conversation about patriotism in America. Representing a range of political and intellectual perspectives, our panelists will consider what patriotism means in contemporary America and the ideas that continue to shape our understanding of it.

More: Oct. 7 is the sold-out-but-waitlistable 10^th anniversary live show of The Reason Roundtable in NYC. Nov. 6 The Fifth Column will be doing the final presentation at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s sold-out Soapbox 26 conference in Philly. And Nov. 12 we’ll be doing some post-midterms breakdown at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

* Gratified to read the rave reviews of our Members Only #348 One-Hitter with global oil markets guy Marshall Adkins. In fact, let’s do the first of two Comments of the Week, from squarooticus:

While I love the meandering conversations with folks like Sarah Hepola and Chris Christie, in-depth, substantive conversations with experts on issues of the day are so rare in modern media, and critical for reasoning our way out of the populist mess we find ourselves in. There is a latent appetite for this kind of content by people who are fucking exhausted with what passes for public discourse in 2026.

Amen. That’s what these One-Hitters are for. Here’s a clip, talkin’ ‘bout diesel, the Venezuela effect, and how “we’ve never seen this before…the disruption on the refining side”:

Some of our more, ah, excitable listeners expressed a bit o’ fury that this conversation was “cut off.” Nope! As their very name suggests, One-Hitters are designed to be short, nutrient-rich discussions on a single topic. At 40 minutes, Adkins was at the exact median of our recent One-Hitter length — longer than Sarah Isgur, Damon Root, and Rand Paul; shorter than Thor Halvorssen, Peter Moskos, and Michael A. Cohen. We like to add variety to the Fif’ diet! Speaking of which….

* Our publication-day M.O. #347 conversation with Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em co-podcaster Sarah Hepola (veteran of Episode #354) about her well-reviewed new memoir, The Only Thing There Is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves, was pret-tay, pretty polarizing! To which I say … good! Not that we relish negative notices from our paying customers, but rather that we aim to mix things up, topics-wise, including sometimes away from the news and toward the more universal (and divisive!) questions. Anyway, here’s a clip of Hepola cougin’ out:

* Comment of the Week 2 goes to Jessemy:

I cannot stop writing obsessive fan fiction about MM and SH. They had a wild sober night, he joins AA, they conceive a miracle baby at 53 and 53. They have the friendliest divorce ever and raise a child into their 90s. The end.

* The Moynihan Report this week published a great interview with Joby Warrick, author of the new book The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist.

In more stop-the-presses news, Herr Moynihan also published some … writing! Buckets and buckets of the stuff, mostly about the spread of bogus history. A Fif’-relevant chunk:

It can’t be overemphasized just how many “normal” history books, by normal authors and published by normal imprints, are barely fact-checked and deformed by sloppy mistakes, apocryphal quotes, and junk history.

I was surprised to see the paint-by-numbers lefty book Separation of Church and Hate, by former Fifth Column guest John Fugelsang, squeaking into the top 50, many months after its initial publication. […]

When leafing through the book, I noticed a quote Fugelsang attributes to Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest who polluted American airwaves in the 1930s, until Japanese imperialism made him irrelevant. Having spent far too much time wading through back issues of his newspaper Social Justice, one gets accustomed to the rhythm and cadence of Coughlin’s venom. And something was off with this:

“In December 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, the celebrity priest declared that Jewish refugees should not be allowed to enter the US, saying in 1938, ‘When we get through with the Jews of America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.’”

Coughlin was an accomplished Jew-hater and Nazi apologist but…he never said this.

* We talked on #577 about the colossal own-goal that was Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) this week. So did Kmele and the Tanglers:

You can watch Schmitt’s awful National Conservatism Conference speech here.

* Kmele this week also participated in a live Hampshire taping of NPR’s The Middle with Jeremy Hobson, on the subject of “What’s at Stake for You in This Election?”

* This week’s Reason Roundtable was on the midterms, the Iran War’s unpopularity, bad economic numbers, and something something A.I.:

* This Date in Fif’ History: How long ago was Oct. 4, 2018? So long ago that one of our regular guests back then was some newspaper gal named … Bari Weiss! Talking here in #115 about … the Brett Kavanaugh hearings! I look forward to your reports in the comments….

Our own private October Fourths include me, in 2020, writing “The Case Against Donald Trump.” The conceit:

Focusing on Trump’s deeds, instead of words, from Inauguration Day until just before the first reported U.S. death from COVID-19 on February 29, is a clarifying, even liberating, exercise. At a time when so much of American discourse is about symbolism instead of policy, adjectives instead of nouns, feelings instead of facts, this approach waves away the toxic political fog and drills down into the bedrock of this presidency. What has the Manhattan real estate developer actually built in Washington; how has that already impacted the lives of his constituents; and what lasting changes are likely if his job performance is ratified by the voting public in November?

Working through those questions will produce different answers for everyone, but here’s a preview of mine: On the broad federal issues I care about most—limiting the size and scope of government, protecting individual liberties, allowing for peaceable exchange between willing partners, and contributing to international peace and human flourishing—Trump has been not just passively suboptimal but actively malign. Rewarding his record will cement bad policy and complete the Republican Party’s transformation into a vehicle for big-government nationalism that’s openly suspicious of free markets and perceived enemies.

On Oct. 4, 2010, Moynihan wrote a blog post about Hugo Chavez’s latest electoral triumph, under the headline “Yeah, This Isn’t Going to End Well.”

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

What would happen if you asked Richard Elfman, director of the fantastically warped midnight movie Forbidden Zone, to make an after-school special? The answer is Shrunken Heads, which initially adheres to the classic trope of following a group of three sweet but awkward boys as they decide it’s time to stand up to a group of local bullies. Young Tommie, Bill, and Freddie seek advice from Mr. Sumatra (played by the great Julius Harris of Live and Let Die fame), the kind old man who runs the newsstand. Mr. Sumatra, you see, is from Haiti, and offers some tactics based on his police experience working in cahoots with the Tonton Macoute. Our heroes make their stand, only to be literally murdered in the street. The end? It is not! Mr. Sumatra collects the trio’s heads, and takes them back to his condominium, where he engages in that voodoo that he do. The boys are soon resurrected and imbued with incredible powers for their forthcoming campaign of revenge. Richard Elfman doesn’t make a lot of movies, but he sure does make ‘em weird. Watch free (with ads) on Tubi; buy the Blu-ray; here’s the trailer:

Sendoff: I apologize in advance to all our Indonesian subscribers for my profound ignorance, but everything I read about the late Guruh Sukarnoputra, who died late last month at age 73, is just hallucinatory. Like: “In the realm of dance and music, his name is as fragrant as the frangipani flower.” And: “He was the youngest son of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno with his third wife, Fatmawati, and the brother of former Indonesian president, Megawati Sukarnoputri. He served as a member of the People’s Representative Council for 30 years and was one of the longest-serving members of the Parliament of Indonesia.” Like, what? Guruh is most famous for his 1977 collaboration Guruh Gipsy, named by Indonesian Rolling Stone as that country’s second best album all time. Though I rather like this nifty little disco-inflected pop number he wrote and I assume produced for the artist Chrisye: