In 1843, well-educated people thought the Millerites were crackpots. In 2020, the consensus of the supposedly well-educated is the equivalent of Millerism.

Roy Scranton is a professor of English at Notre Dame. His discussion of his feelings of guilt over having brought a child into this doomed world appeared in the New York Times.

Anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted. And anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we’re almost certainly going to botch it. To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next five or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient almost all human economic and social production, a task that’s scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very time when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are breaking apart. The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy.

And even if world leaders somehow got their act together, significant and dangerous levels of warming are still inevitable, baked into the system from all the carbon dioxide that has already been dumped. There’s a time lag between carbon dioxide increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. Our lives are lived in that gap. My daughter was born there.

Barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. After that, things will get worse. The middle and later decades of the 21st century — my daughter’s adult life — promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror.

RTWT

The irony here is that he may be right: civilization as we know it may be doomed. But the cause of doom is going to be the ineffable stupidity of the morons who took over our establishment institutions, not the junk science theory of Global Warming Catastrophism.

Andrew Klavan:

“On the left was The New York Times, a former newspaper, which now reads like a cross between Pravda and a cluster of six-year-old girls who have just seen a mouse.”

Vogue’s “Fashion Muse” Lynn Yaeger (see photo below) saw a photograph of First Lady Melania Trump boarding a Houston-bound plane in stiletto heels and made a major thing out of it.

This morning, Mrs. Trump boarded Air Force One wearing a pair of towering pointy-toed snakeskin heels better suited to a shopping afternoon on Madison Avenue or a girls’ luncheon at La Grenouille.

While the nation is riveted by images of thousands of Texans wading with their possessions, their pets, their kids, in chest-high water, desperately seeking refuge; while a government official recommend that those who insist on sheltering in place write their names and social security numbers on their arms, Melania Trump is heading to visit them in footwear that is a challenge to walk in on dry land.

A spokesperson says she has other shoes to change into on the plane—and one sincerely hopes there is a pair of leopard-print Wellies-in-waiting to get her from the tarmac to the limo. But what kind of message does a fly-in visit from a First Lady in sky-high stilettos send to those suffering the enormous hardship, the devastation of this natural disaster?

And why, oh why, can’t this administration get anything, even a pair of shoes, right?

The Washington Post chimed in:

Melania Trump is the kind of woman who travels to a flood-ravaged state in a pair of black snakeskin stilettos. Heels this high are not practical. But Trump is not the kind of woman who has to be practical. Heels this high are not comfortable. Comfort is not the point. Neither hers nor yours.

Trump is the kind of woman who knows that when she walks from the White House to Marine One there will be photographers, and so she will dress accordingly. On this soggy Tuesday morning, she wore her stilettos with a pair of cropped black trousers and an Army-green bomber jacket. Her hair was nicely blown out, and she was wearing a pair of sunglasses though it was overcast and drizzly at the time. As she walked to the chopper, she glanced toward a camera, and the photographer captured her with one hand in her pocket, her weight shifted slightly to one leg. She looked great.

Trump’s fashionable ensemble was defined by its contradictions. She was wearing a working man’s jacket but it was juxtaposed with sexy limousine shoes. The trousers and the top were basic black — utilitarian. The oversize aviator sunglasses were Hollywood. It’s an image that would have been at home in any fashion magazine, which is so often the case with the first lady. …

It was also an image that suggested that Trump is the kind of woman who refuses to pretend that her feet will, at any point, ever be immersed in cold, muddy, bacteria-infested Texas water. She is the kind of woman who may listen empathetically to your pain, but she knows that you know that she is not going to experience it. So why pretend?

Well, sometimes pretense is everything. It’s the reason for the first lady to go to Texas at all: to symbolize care and concern and camaraderie. To remind people that the government isn’t merely doing its job, that the government is engaged with each and every individual. Washington hears its citizens. That’s what the optics are all about. Sitting around a conference table and talking into a speaker phone are not good optics. A politician has to get on the ground in work boots and a windbreaker. Rolled-up sleeves. Galoshes. Baseball caps.

and the New York Times also eagerly joined fashionista firing squad:

Mrs. Trump’s heels… appear to be classic Manolo Blahniks …redolent of a certain clichéd kind of femininity: decorative, impractical, expensive, elitist (all adjectives often associated with the brand “Trump”).

Mrs. Trump, of course, actually emerged from the plane wearing a pair of white sneakers.

The president himself was also criticized by Jezebel for inappropriate flood attire, i.e. khakis. Tom Knighton notes that khakis were fine for hurricane wear when Obama wore them.

All this was started by Lynn Yaeger of Vogue. The same Vogue whose idea of fashion these days is a cover shot by Annie Leibovitz no less of Bradley Manning pretending to be female in a swimsuit.

Milo Yiannopoulos described the Vogue columnist as: “An unspeakable Eldritch horror from the depths of aeons and untouched by mortal creatures.”

Literary Hub republishes the original New York Times reviews of three Ray Chandler mystery novels.

Isaac Anderson, The New York Times, February 12, 1939:

Most of the characters in this story are tough, many of them are nasty and some of them are both. Philip Marlowe, the private detective who is both the narrator and the chief character, is hard: he has to be hard to cope with the slimy racketeers who are preying on the Sternwood family. Nor do the Sternwoods themselves, particularly the two daughters, respond to gentle treatment. Spoiled is much too mild a term to describe these two young women. Marlowe is working for $25 a day and expenses and he earns every cent of it. Indeed, because of his loyalty to his employer, he passes up golden opportunities to make much more. Before the story is done Marlowe just misses being an eyewitness to two murders and by an even narrower margin misses being a victim. The language used in this book is often vile, at times so filthy that the publishers have been compelled to resort to the dash, a device seldom employed in these unsqueamish days. As a study in depravity, the story is excellent, with Marlowe standing out as almost the only fundamentally decent person in it.”

RTWT

Zachary Stone

University of Texas senior and founder of UT Students Against Guns on Campus Zachary Stone, in the New York Times, deploys the classic liberal urban Jewish argument against Americans’ gun ownership rights: “I’m an incompetent idiot and a pussy, but the Constitution and the State of Texas actually allow me to have a gun! Obviously the rest of America is as effeminate, useless, cowardly, and lame as I am.”

[I]t was time to prove our shooting proficiency. We drove to a field with some silhouette targets lined up. “Standard B-27s,” the instructor told us.

“Load five bullets in the magazine!” the instructor shouted. My neighbors easily slipped five bullets into their magazines. I struggled with the Glock I’d rented from the store.

“Ready your weapon!” The others all put their magazines in their guns, pulled back the slides, and aimed. I put the magazine in the gun and then fumbled with the slide. Eventually, I got it. I looked at my neighbors to figure out how to hold the gun.

“Fire!”

I shot. The gun flew back. My neighbors each hit the center, but I missed a foot too high.

“Fire!”

I didn’t realize I’d have to shoot again so soon. I hadn’t taught myself how to aim yet, and I wanted a few seconds to learn from the first shot. I also hadn’t learned how to deal with the recoil. Anxiously, I pointed and shot — a few seconds after my neighbors. I still missed.

That’s when the instructor yelled at me. “You need to line up your sights!” I had no idea what that meant. He explained that for me to aim properly the dot at the front of the gun needed to be inside the post at the back of the gun.

That was remarkably useful information.

“Fire!”

My next shot hit the center “X.”

After five shots, the instructor told us to remove our magazines. I tugged on the magazine. It didn’t move, so I pulled harder. I pulled as hard as I could, nervous to put so much force on a gun — empty or not.

I called out to the instructor. “My magazine’s stuck!”

“Show me. Try to pull it out. That really shouldn’t happen.”

I pulled on the magazine for the instructor. “You need to push the release,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The button.”

I pushed something.

“No. The button,” he said.

That did the trick.

The New York Times today for the first time in 95 years ran an editorial on the front page.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

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Jonah Goldberg was moved to note some of the major news events which failed to provoke an equivalent emotional response.

The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on. But, the “Gun Epidemic” in America? That deserves a front-page editorial.

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I myself find it interesting to reflect that not one single member of that New York Times editorial board could properly define an assault weapon, nor if challenged justify placing ugly-looking semi-automatic rifles chambered in a slightly modified version of a cartridge introduced in 1950 for the purpose of shooting groundhogs in a special category supposedly more “designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency” than any repeating firearm which appeared on the market later than the Henry Rifle of 1862 or even the Colt Patterson Revolver of 1836.

The really important distinguishing category to which the editorial board of the New York Times belongs is the class of limitlessly self-important, limitless self-entitled holier-than-thous, the category of persons The Godfather referred to as “pezzonovantes” (90 caliber individuals) who get to hand down regulations and edicts, even if they do not actually produce the desired result, because “at least [they] are trying.”

The New York Times Editorial Board is composed entirely of fanatic liberal devotees of the cult of the Leviathan State, and their personal religion demands a symbolic regulatory response, a sacrifice of somebody’s rights, liberties, and property, as a means of addressing any perceived PROBLEM. When something bad happens, you must immediately invoke Nobodaddy, the administrative state, and make that sacrificial gesture. Then, and only then, is “la patrie” no longer “en danger.” It doesn’t matter if the ceremony of Statism has any practical effect. It doesn’t matter if what the priests of Leviathan do is actually counter-productive. The point of all this has nothing to do with reality or practical results. The point is the emotional satisfaction of the assembled congregation of the worshippers of the State through the performance of the proper ceremony.

If we don’t respond to every shooting which makes a major headline by banning something, by passing some brave new law, the urban-based cult of Leviathan will shriek at us in pain until we do.

The editors of the New York Times are shivering with fright this Halloween season, but it is not some knife-wielding serial killer in a hockey mask that frightens them.

It is the specter of an intelligent and able Ivy-League-educated committed conservative.

His campaign has more cash on hand than that of any other Republican in the hunt. If you add “super PAC” money that’s been officially disclosed so far to the tally, he trails only Jeb and Hillary Clinton. …

He’s the patron saint of lost causes, at least if they bring the spotlight his way. In that sense he’s emblematic of the flamboyantly uncompromising comrades in the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, who similarly confuse attention with accomplishment.

All of them, with Cruz as their spiritual leader, have turned petulance into a theory of governing, or rather anti-governing, as they breezily disregard the contradiction of their ravenous lunge to become monarchs of a kingdom that they supposedly want to topple, to gain power over a system that they ostensibly intend to enfeeble.

Cruz doesn’t propose remedies. He performs rants. He’s not interested in collaboration or teamwork. His main use for other politicians, even in his party, is as foils and targets. Paul Ryan got a taste of that over the weekend, when Cruz, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was asked if Ryan was a true conservative and dodged the question, withholding his blessing.

He should be careful about genuineness versus phoniness, given the problems with his own prairie-populist pose.

Cruz’s law degree is from Harvard and he did his undergraduate work at Princeton, where the 250-year-old debating club that he belonged to is called the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. Cruz’s wife is on leave from a job with Goldman Sachs.

Keep that in mind when he rails against the establishment and the elites. And remember that when someone is as broadly and profoundly disliked as Cruz is, it’s usually not because he’s a principled truth teller.

It’s because he’s frightening.

Read the whole smear piece.

Booo!

Via Karen L. Myers and Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, a NYT column defining “The Modern Man” with replies in red ink.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Photoshopped version of: Vasili Pukiriev, Неравный брак [The Unfitting Marriage], 1862

In the course of revelling over the referendum victory of sodomitical matrimony in Ireland, the editorial board of the New York Times proved that the appointment of Caligula’s horse as Roman consul could actually be outdone in modernity.

In a statement conceding defeat, the Iona Institute, the main opposition group, said it would continue to affirm “the importance of biological ties and of motherhood and fatherhood.” The absurdity of that statement speaks for itself.

The alleged absurdity of that statement may be obvious to deranged (and probably sexually perverted) members of a community of fashion in the last stages of decadence, but normal people would describe a reference to “the importance of the biological ties of parenthood” as patently obvious, rather than absurd.

The unlimited arrogance and egomanaical grandiosity of these kinds of people, who routinely demonstrate their own total moral and intellectual unfitness for any positions of influence or responsibility, cries out to heaven for vengeance.

John Podhoretz reacts to an amazing gaffe.

A tweet from Gavin MacInnes via Vanderleun.