What you got is nothing new. You can’t stop what’s coming. That’s called vanity.

Someone who just read the draft manuscript of The Triumph of Stupidity, which events naturally require me to tweak constantly, sent me a note in the wake of the latest Epstein madness:

How does it feel to write a book pretty damn quickly and still feel like the fire is gaining on you? The Epstein shit is both perfect confirmation of your thesis and so bonkers that it makes things like “analysis” and “critical inquiry” seem trivial. Not really trivial. Radically insufficient. Your prose isn’t understated/Texas plains enough for the comparison to really work, but your descriptions of the scope of the stupidity we’re dealing with (which I don’t disagree with) puts me in mind of Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men. If in future LGM posts you just start telling us about your dreams, I’ll understand. 

This reminded me of the last scene of that film, which is just an astonishing piece of filmmaking (Tommy Lee Jones’s dialogue is verbatim from the novel):

Tess Harper’s contribution here is more subtle but also just fantastic acting.

A friend was writing to me in something like despair yesterday about the WSJ story. Somebody had this story years and years ago, and that somebody or somebodies let a pedophile become president of the United States. How is that possible he was wondering.

This is a hardheaded super accomplished person, but like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, he at the moment feels overmatched by the evil in the world. I know the feeling, but the feeling passes, and the struggle goes on.