news, emergency, extreme urgent news this past week that I must tell you about that Taiwanese natives, the Formosans, the Austronesians who live there have been found to have common ancestry with the Filipino Negritos. Now the Negrito libtards when they attack, I think I said in my book they used the word Negrito they got very mad and said I was using a slur because to them it sound like the word Negro but the audience for my show knows that Negrito referred to a kind of pygmy like creature I mean human who live in Andaman Islands in some in the Philippines in Indian Ocean area they do do island hopping and it's quite a maze that the Austronesian people who then from Formosa, modern day Taiwan, these are not the Chinese immigrants to

Taiwan in the 20th century, they are the natives from that island who from there they spread all over Polynesia. Actually the Polynesian race is a mix of them with the Melanesians in varying degrees but it's amazing that they were probably share ancestry with the Negrito, who I think were a human kind, 1.0 spread around the world, and it would not be surprising at all to find their presence in Madagascar, which because on Indian Ocean there are trade, I don't know if they're called trade winds, but there are very favorable winds from the Indonesian islands to Madagascar, which is is how the Indonesians themselves got there, the Austronesians from Indonesia. And I think, however, that there are Negrito remnants all over the world, including in South America, just have not been found yet.

Anyway, this is extreme, urgent news. Less urgent is the fact that Ms. Le Pen, the washerwoman in France, has been found guilty in some invented court case and banned from running in the next French presidential election I think in 2027, which of course she should be allowed to run and this is a clear example of overreach and I would say even desperation on the part of establishment authorities. But let's not forget that the washerwoman Le Pen is not for the idea of remigration. She was against the German right-wing, Austrian right-wing parties, and has largely abandoned migration, immigration as a, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's no longer a priority of her party, instead it's this kind of working class, multiracial populism, let's all band

together against the multinational corporations, which I think in the case of France would be a huge mistake. In other words, the people who run France are being stupid because if they let her become president, which I also don't think she's able ever to win a national election in France, it's one of these things where it will always be contained at 40 percent max, something like that, unfortunately. And that's, well in the American case there's a similar danger. But listen, if she were to win, it would discredit, I believe, right wing, dissident, whatever you want to call it. I hate that word, but right wing position ideas for a long time in France especially because I believe her economic policies are extreme foolish in the case of France, would bring disaster there.

And she's not even has immigration as a priority, but she's believed to have that as priority. So it's the worst of both worlds. You have this retard who has other stupid priorities, but it is immigration restriction cause that would get blamed. So I think maybe blessing in disguise, but obviously the establishment has not good intentions and they will continue to ban any party that's called right-wing or that they see. They did so in Romania also, where I also think that candidate is similar to Le Pen in that if he were to win, would maybe not bring such good times for that country. And so these measures by establishment are very foolish. they should allow accelerate if from their point of view. But look, regardless, it's obviously an assault on idea of democracy, you know, so.

But I think it show more important extreme desperation and emotionalism on part of ruling elites, call them what you will in the West. This Caribbean rhythms, episode 186, You will notice a hesitation and a calmness maybe in my voice. I have to, I can't always have power voice. I have to be calm. I had several harrowing episodes this last week with nicotine overdose and I need to stay calm or I may be put in a mental asylum like my friend Owen, who I'm still trying to come on get him come on my show some and he was in Filipino in Manila University of Manila mental asylum and I don't want to end up like that and then they put me on lithium or whatever I don't know but this this is episode 186 welcome I am afraid of chimpanzee and type I had nightmares recently I'm

telling you running on several nights I don't know if it's from nicotine or magnesium glycinate but have you had recurring nightmares and in this case it was about vaguely humanoid chimpanzee tormenting me with violence and a club and such and like my brain interprets it as a humanoid and even Gibbon like is chimpanzee but Gibbon Gibbon like with the Gibbon being an especially cute ape very playful not as friendly as orangutan but if you search YouTube you You will find video of gibbon messing with and teasing two tiger cubs, grabbing their tails and such. Such playfulness is charming, but the chimpanzee is not a charming animal. It's a violent and bloody ape like the human. And although in my dreams this appears as a dexterous tree climbing and fast acrobat

like the gibbon, it is still extremely menacing, violent and coded as partly having human-like intellect as well. It's unclear if I wear clothes, and it's unclear to me. It's not like a suit, like it's funny if you see a chimpanzee in a suit, but he might have like a loincloth, I don't know, and the head of a grinning chimpanzee tormenting me with violent threats, menacing with club, prodding in my dreams. And I try to use a gun to use harpoon, but it evade me, this kind of dream where nothing you do. night after night, this grinning ape coming at me. It's funny for me to tell you now, but it's not when I'm asleep. I'm not afraid of rape. I have to tell you, Valerian gives you these kind of conflicted dream. I try to use Uzi-type machine gun. I don't know.

Look, I believe man bred with ape numerous times in history, obviously the Neanderthal, and some say that the Neanderthal was covered with fur because obviously adaptation to Northern an ice age condition, you may think, but these reconstructions are never accurate. When they show you what Neanderthal or this kind of human, what they look like, they could very well look like Grendel or an ogre covered with fur and fangs and so on. I think there were other kinds of ogrish humans that are unknown yet, but that crisscrossed with mankind in various, imagine an orgy where there is a mass rape of Ogrish Neanderthal type women by Cro-Magnon homo sapiens. This is a shocking, I mean it poses a, not a civilization, it poses a planetary, I mean

look at this, such holdouts I think still exist in various parts of the world and men like Valuev, if you see this Russian boxer, and Institute Board of Review and Universities do not allow you to single out Valuev and to test him for whatever chimpanzees, they say he has acromegaly, but I believe he's part unusual hominid. I believe the pharaohs were part unusual hominid, which is why they wear this kind headdress. I have to tell you, I'm sorry if there's background noise. I'm actually recording late at night now, and I try to do in soundproof room, but I can't help if Fridge make... I wish conspiracy theories online were more of this type, but they used to be on forums, that the pharaohs had elongated heads because they were not homo sapiens.

I've speculated that certain media personalities have had unholy marriages to grey alien, otherwise they have tasted the meat of grey alien from crashed spacecraft in a kind of satanic communion. And at least such things, I've quoted articles about this, African government officials saying that they have tasted the meat of the grays. This is actual article, you can find it used to be online, but such things are more interesting than the tedious stuff that get recycled now in online endless conspiracy speculation. Can anyone explain why Joe Rogan and Tucker have repeated conspiracy collars as guests? They're running out of material, yes they are. I think on one of these shows, they had a couple of these idiots who just read a list of conspiracies, and that was the content of that show.

Anyway, listen, this is a relaxed show. I will talk later on Somerset Maugham, British author of vivid tropical images of the South Seas. I'll talk some archaeology matters again. That's in the next segment, as for the week's news, there's judicial attack on Trump administration continues and it was great to see them ignore some orders and Stephen Miller in particular has been very good in rhetoric. I hope that the case he is making in public is a preamble that it will be followed up you know and just cross the river, ignore these orders and frankly ignore the Supreme Court as well if it sides with obviously false interpretation of constitution where judges are given control over, you know, how often president is allowed to flush toilet and this.

It's your second semester, Trump, you know that. What happened last time, what's the point of holding back now? They're putting Le Pen and these people in jail like they tried with you, what is there to lose? They're going, they're taking off the gloves, what will happen? You take off the gloves, Congress will impeach you, they will do that anyway if you lose and you have two years now, Congress not impeach you for deport illegals and shutting down left-wing funding spigots, just do it, si se puede, ask Mr. Obama's Hispanic outreach Latina, AstroTurf, rug-munching officials, but may I encourage you, now that tax season National Mass Rape Day, state-supported sodomy day is upon us soon, it is unconscionable

the amount of tax, for example, that I have to pay, not just me, but let's say men and women who have difficult jobs, and if they earn much, they have to pay an ungodly sum to the government, which functions mostly on money printing anyway. So these income taxes are mostly a way to circulate money of high earners and to prevent them from building wealth. And given that you can't arbitrarily lower or eliminate this income tax, because I'd I'd much rather, the income tax is absurd, I'd much rather invest that money in a business or even just donate it to animal care centers instead of the same thing anyway, you're giving it to the human zoo where I have to pay for the beige women to blurt out another five children who then also become dependents on the state.

But given, okay, you cannot stop this, consider Mr. Trump an executive order which you have entirely in your power to get the IRS refused false social security numbers. There are millions and millions of illegals who would have to self deport because so many of their employers here, large employers, meat packing, agricultural, service industry, restaurant industry, businesses are currently submitting fraudulent 1099 and W2 or whatever they're called forms on behalf of illegal employees. And if you're serious, You don't even need so many flashy mass raids or brutality. You can simply cut off the incentives in this quiet way and they will self-deport. But I enjoy the brutality too, but look, you can just quietly cut off this link to economy, which would force illegals to go

and allow local employment situation, similar to develop to what Japan has, where American citizens could then easily find, let's say, temporary jobs. teenagers could find their first jobs easily and such. That was more of a situation of freedom that existed in early 20th century, where you could also ask the Department of Labor, if applicable, to eliminate so many stupid regulations that feminize the economy with credentialism and you need to take this course to get this job. In other words, open up the labor market. The economy, again, which is a big dimension simply of life, open up to manly energies, where you can just, if you have energy, you want money, you can get a job easily as a man, and day-to-day life changes in American society would be very great.

It's a condition of freedom for youth, especially. This could be achieved again. Now, much, of course, prefer letters of mark, and a path to training for fighting cartels and such, and having a path to mercenary life, but parallel to that, you can also have economic sphere, much could be done, whereas right now young people in America don't have that. Quite aside from financial opportunities that they don't have, they don't have freedom of motion, you know, to get this, it's not an open labor market. So many credentials even for simplest jobs and employer arrogance and it's very much an employer's market, not employee market, you can change that. But the IRS executive order, I think, is essential on other matters.

I do think the antagonism toward Europe, on the other hand, is a cop-out and a mistake when you could be facing down China instead. What is point of constant antagonism riled up against Europe from parts of the administration and also encouraged by online people who are intemperate? If you face down China, whether politically or economically, which are the same thing in some way here, you will need allies. China very big. Already their economy on a trajectory, it's hard to stop what they have. You need Russia, Russia at least to be neutral. You don't need them as ally, but at least to be neutral in that. India, Japan will probably be on your side, but it's not enough. You need Russia be neutral, and you need partnership

with Europe. And I'm actually going to write something short about this, about the foolishness of antagonizing Europe politically and economically now, partly in terms of tariffs and such. Now I understand on the other side of argument Europe has its own tariffs on American goods and maybe they can be induced to drop that. But that condition, maybe give them an out with that condition, just putting tariffs on them, I think might be a big mistake. I'll tell you in a moment what I will write about, but it will be short, punchy thing in the right in hopes of maybe reaching people in administration, asking them politely to change course or at least change the rhetoric in respect to Europe, because the current confrontational stance I don't think is helping achieve anything.

Now, a word on writing, by the way, I go on tangent. I recently saw a thread by academic complaining that college students are not functionally literate anymore because they are not reading novels. Well, I've noticed myself, they're not quite literate, but even those that are, and those that are very smart, they would not be excited to read Barbara Kingsolver, or the kind of novels this professor complains about that are not getting attention from his students. They say, oh, they won Pulitzer Prize and such. Yes, okay, but that boring and politicized literature, lived experience literature, which means this or that niche identity gets its attention due. And I didn't even like having Thomas Hardy test of the Dubervilles foisted on me in high school.

And that's a pre-woke 19th century classic, right? But it's very boring and bleak to me. Most English novels are not very good in my opinion. A lot of professors and others who complain about this lack of reading, quite aside from the politicized recent literature, but these are people who majored or got doctorates in English literature, and so they've developed quite niche tastes focused on English literature. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and then the Bloomsbury group people, and James Joyce, if you take the famous names, and I would not call any of these instantly attractive to a first reader of novels, not compared to Russian or French novels. So it's, I think, a mistake to begin with these if you hope to whet the appetite for literature among young people or first readers.

Even Jane Austen, if you were to use, is not, it's kind of bleak, I think, writing, and not to speak of current day highly ideological literature, again, the Pulitzer Prize winners today are entirely that. I would gladly skip all of these, and I did skip them when I was forced to read such things or William Faulkner story, the bear with a sentence for 50 pages. I went back and read some of it later, but as an introduction, it's mostly English literature majors imposing their acquired professional tastes. And that being said, I cannot go so far as some commenters did who in response to this professor claimed that he's outdated because we have entered the post-literate and oral history age. I once again like prehistory, and I've seen other people make this argument

over the years for 10 years now or a little longer. They claim information is now mostly transferred through YouTubes and streams, visual podcast content, audio visual. I have no doubt on the whole that's mostly what's being consumed, but I don't think it's true that information is actually being relevant information that has impact is not being transferred that way. It's still being transferred through writing and probably will forever. People consume it is the right word. They consume audio visual media passively and maybe they put in background for a companionship stimulator, a companionship white noise is what I call it. And even when I listen to some podcasts I like which are very few I will put them on if I'm packing luggage or such things, but your attention is not...

And I'm not a fan of the talky, aimless podcast model. I made this show Caribbean Rhythm in mind, so it has rich content on every episode and is not for people who like podcasts. But even so, I have friends, some are very online frogs, they tell me podcasts and audio, even radio show format like this is just not how they prefer to absorb information. They listen to me maybe sometimes for fun, but they prefer written for understanding something. So I've never stopped writing. And you shouldn't stop writing if you mean to influence discourse or even to clarify your thinking. It's a much more efficient way to transmit information and to think about, well, you should never think about when you write, you should think before, but that's another subject.

But if you look at cultural penetration of alternative writers, let's say, since maybe 2005 or 2000, it's mostly been done through writing, I think actually exclusively. Steve Saylor, as one of the most important journalists in America, has done it since, what, the year 2000 or even before, only writing on his blog, no real audio-visual. Chateau Russie-Artiste, other Manosphere writers, There's massive cultural penetration where people casually use Rossil's words now, alpha, beta, and so on. These were not used before he was writing. I've had words enter language from my... It's a non-traditional book, but also my postings. I've had various words and memes enter general parlance, where some people don't even know that longhouse or other things come from me.

Menaquin on Four and other frogs have had other such words, phrases, concepts enter public discourse, but none of it was through spoken or visual. It was all through written, I'm telling you. And Twitter was a kind of writing platform which used to select for the best kind of La Rochle Foucault style aphorisms, short two-liners. It's an old venerable style that's deceptively simple, but it's very hard to do and require, I think a lot of native talent, a lot of luck may help too, but refining through training can help, but it's an art requiring much native talent, and so now they've put long form on Twitter which I think is a mistake, and to be fair I've made this mistake, I sometimes have overlong posts, but I must tell you they're not good, it's good to stop overlong posts.

My mind basically shut down when I see a super long paragraph on Twitter. Just write an essay if you want that. On Twitter I want quick, and I expect the artistry to go into a quick two-liner like it used to, and he shouldn't have increased the limit so much. So you know, the Amarna Forum friends and others, even if they have not written articles, they have designed also so many of the memes and words that other people use now. It was almost all through writing. There are some like Jiggachad, I think actually Menaquin On 4 was the first to use Jiggachad. And yes, that is an image, but it's the dialogues and the lines that go with that. He at first used Jiggachad as a way to promote scientific atheism actually as a response to the Reddit fedora meme and so on.

But meanwhile, I have to doubt the actual audience, the reach of these supposed streamers, YouTubers, podcasters on the far right or the left, even with many big anonymous accounts now like Garbage Human on Twitter or those like, it's not just Garbage Human, it's Voice of Europe or those kind of account, we call them slop accounts, they seem to be favoured by Elon or the algorithm on X, an algorithm by the way that's making the site largely unusable lately. It promotes only this kind of recycled rage-bait, Reddit-like trash. You could go online just to see beautiful anime thing and other such images and some small posts from insightful accounts or funny account especially like this poster, Kalos, if you find. But for all the supposed views and all the supposed currency in American

society, you don't find neither from these new accounts, that trash, nor from the streamers and face fags and YouTubers. You can't point from this new biome or ecosystem of influencers online, I'm saying, a single meme, a single idea or linguistic innovation or image that has entered public consciousness, public discourse, nothing. It tells me it's all largely fake and ineffective. At most it's derivative, it is a restatement or recycling of things others have said ten years ago, but there's nothing that they've managed to introduce into public discourse. Doesn't matter that you get 40,000 whatever on Twitter from Morocco or Bangladesh. Whereas even an article that I wrote very fast, which I didn't like very much, my article on Milay's revolution in Argentina from last year.

It was translated into several languages just by people who liked it. You can't really ever predict which matter will be hot in the moment. I guess it responded to some need people had to think about Milay and economic liberalization even though I'm actually not proud of the way I wrote it. I wrote it very fast, but the point is even a half effort like that has penetration where it matters if it's written because it puts him towards what others are feeling and so on. Writing just has a different currency than, say, spreading clips and so on. I mean this show mostly as a matter of entertainment for myself. I enjoy talking and entertainment for my audience. But I think real thought may be better in writing. And I wrote Africa series recently.

I need to remind you it's full of unusual historical information. May not be to anybody's, everyone's taste, and it's quite long, but I wanted the facts to be out there against this deluge of nonsense written now, even from conservatives, about Nazi CIA in this, and Dulles, the head of the CIA, was a Nazi, and it always goes back to Nazi deep state conspiracies. This never stopped, you know, but I wanted my article to be partly a counter to that because the activities of CIA in Africa were very obviously incompetent first and leftist second. But anyway, what I want to write now about Europe will not be historical restatement of 20th century matters or historical study. It will be short, punchy, because listen, I've heard all this before in the early 2000s

about Europe and conservative hostility to Europe. The conservatives and neo-cons at the time, the Bill Kristol types were doing the Arabia bit back then. It was all about how Europe is over. It's going to be Muslim. There's nothing in Europe. French cheese eating surrender monkeys, or let's say rename French fries because the French are not supporting the Iraq war. That's what it was at the time. I remember all that. It was stupid and fake back then too. And for better or worse, the economic partnership between America and Europe is still the engine of world economy and I think still the foundation of what remains of American and West European prosperity. If you get rid of that partnership, it's very unclear what will replace it. American investment in West Europe

far exceed what invested in Asia still. And although China indubitably made technological, industrial advances, a lot of high-end industry manufacturing still takes place in Europe, actually maybe more than in America. I'll describe this in some detail in my article, but all the stupid graphs that you see about, oh, there's no innovation in Europe and so on, those play monkey business with the word innovation. They mean an app to send picture of genitalia or whatever. that's not, you know, important things, ASML, the chips company, Airbus are just two of the leaders in industry, Airbus probably premier aerospace industry at moment, there are other major of course non technology businesses, almost the entire luxury market, the high-end car market and many such, but there are high

technology high-end manufacturing in Europe right now and you're not seeing this because again a false propaganda promoted by conservative slop recyclers on Elon's eggs and it's not only from accounts associated with the daily wire and that whole group but also from sometimes strangely synophilic tech people in Silicon Valley, others from supposed far right wing anti-walk accounts and such. But it's the kind of propaganda I've been warning you about for a while where they post old videos from suburbs of Paris about how Europe is over and this and show you very selectively edited things about other European cities which are far safer, far more livable by the way, than American cities. American cities are very dangerous compared to even the most dangerous European city and

have an inner core that is a no-go zone for whites and Asians and so on. The thing is that both Europe and America have serious problems, and this kind of one-upmanship, it can be a good rivalry, but right now it's taking very hostile overtones, and it's cheap when in fact both face the threat of the global south and of China, China as the spearhead of the global south, and I'm sorry to say Mr. Vance seems eager to play to this ignorant audience, and I want to remind him maybe and those around him in a polite way that a statesman steers conversation, does not pander to it, and that nothing is gained actually by pandering to these falsehoods about Europe now. Without Europe's partnership, America almost inevitably sinks behind China. It does not have the manpower to get back.

You can get back all the manufacturing you want, but China has a big head start on it. And all the Silicon Valley dreams about ways to exceed China's labor manpower and all such, I think it's impossible without Europe. But with Europe, America slash Europe has the population base and the economy of scale to challenge China and to have world leadership for foreseeable future. I want again to be diplomatic about this and to try to convince in friendship that this is the wrong way to punish Europe. It's an easy bluster because beating up on Europe, on the French, etc. is old kind conservative neo-con bread and butter, but it helps with nothing. It doesn't have the right in Europe, it doesn't achieve any policy goals there to talk this

way about them, it actually rallies people behind the liberal establishment. The European political bureaucratic class are terrible robots, they're messed up for sure, they have dead eyes, and there is a discontent about them, but again, when you You attack them, you actually help them if you attack them in this way, and it really plays only to daily wire audience at best to do this. Oppose China instead, please. I was glad to see Mr. Rubio pass an order against China for not allowing American diplomats into Tibet today. That was very good. More of that, please. But target governments in the global south that are subverted by China and rally public opinion to that, yes, the South Africa thing for example, that's very good.

But much opportunity for action in Africa, in Latin America and other parts of the world including for adventurous men who want to work for various shell companies that represent private military contractors. If you simply take the boot off their neck, Mr. President Trump, just let them do their thing in the third world, you know, and don't stop them. That's all. Just don't get in their way. But if you want to bully someone, bully China over the Philippines. Don't bully Denmark over Greenland. Or take back the Panama Canal, encourage Argentina in own hemisphere to kick out that dreadful Chinese base, they have I think in Patagonia somewhere, I think province of Neuquen, and consider the problems in Venezuela and so on.

These are far more pressing matters than attacking Europe in the way you are doing now. And then Greenland, I wish to see international borders, international order redrawn just for the sake of shaking things up. So I have no strong opinions about Greenland and maybe under some conditions Denmark would even like to give it or to sell it to you, but it maybe should be done in a faith-saving way, in spirit of friendship, not, oh, we are ridding the world of European Nazi colonialism. What is the going public, and you say the people of Greenland are being mistreated in this, it's a hostile takeover then, and it's a bad spending of political capital that I don't understand what supposed to achieve with that. Let me give you an analogy why I find that what it's like.

I was always afraid that the immigration talk could backfire somewhat because in fact America actually has very tough immigration laws already that just not enforced or that selectively enforced okay and if you are white European or from civilized country like Japanese or sometimes even Canadian a boot will come down on you actually. So you get in big ways in small whether you're inside United States try to get visa or you come in at airport, even as a citizen, and you get gruff guys, ice guys at airports with the manner and look of homan, and they will let in a Muslim family walk by, not look at them a sec, but they will calm down on you if you are of European descent, let's say they come, they grill, question you, search every part of your bags, question what is this.

I've seen it in others too, it's happened to me, and it's because people in general is not just ICE employees, but people are fundamentally cowardly and it's easy to pick on whites and Europeans and to an extent Japanese, it's also for the same reason that studies have shown police far more often shoot by mistake white victims than black ones, because again they're kind of cowardly bullies and it's easier to do that and so actually for although George Floyd and so on, if you are white, you are far more likely to get unfairly abused or shot by police than if you're black, you know, it's for the same reason. We take some spine to calm down on the refuse of the global south who are actually still afforded all kinds of victim sacred cow status, you know, so hopefully that's changing now

Now after this election cycle and they're deporting, I'm seeing they are mega-deporting the beige, don't believe the DNC propaganda about, oh, their deportations were higher under Obama and Biden. You know, they counted turning away people at the border as deportations. I don't think anyone, I don't think I'm exaggerating, I think zero were deported under Biden. He brought in 8 million and now basically the border is closed, 95% drop in entries at the southern border. Trump is very good delivering on that. And you know, the leech suckers who are flooded into America under Biden are being deported. That's good. But I'm telling you, there is residual attitude, I feel, left over. And so in the same way in this case, it's easy. It's not seen as a racist to pick on Europe. And I'm tough.

I'm real tough on them foreigners and I'm going to put the tariffs. But Europe's economy and high manufacturing base is very close integrated with America. So when you put the tariffs, you hurt both and you help China, I think. I mean the tariffs on Europe. Put tariffs on China. Put tariffs on other parts of the world. But maybe reach a deal with Europe and if Europe has foolish tariffs on America, maybe yes, they can be induced, but you will not get pushback from the left or not too much if you push at Europe the way they're doing. You see this, so I find a kind of cowardly thing to do, and the conservative kind of constituency for the Arabia argument, which is complete nonsense, will eat it all up. I mean, I want to remind you something about European statistics.

Some of the worst, so-called worst countries in Europe where the native citizens are at their lowest percentages are places like England or Holland, where you have something like 75 or 73% of the population that is native citizen Dutch or native citizen English. And then when you compare, that's also the number of Jews, By the way, the percentage in Israel, it's about 73%. Of course, of those, the white Jews, the founding stock Jews of Israel are less than half of that and they're heavily mastized with Arabs who say they're Jews like Mizrahi and Yemenites and others. But in Europe, Israel gets called an ethnostate by many friends even, Steve Saylor and my My friend Nicolas Salo and such, but European states have about the same percentage of native citizens.

I mean, the worst ones, the ones with the fewest, with the most migrants and so on, have about the same percentage as Israel. That's also, by the way, the percentage of overseas Chinese stock in Singapore, which is why I've called Singapore a kind of Israel for the overseas Chinese, but that cuts both ways. 73% is not very large. But look, the other point I'm getting at, yes, 73% in Holland, 75% I think in England, but of the remainder, a lot of those immigrants are also from Europe. So I actually, as a boorish, East Bloc, Russia, or whatever, I am peasant, I don't consider East Europeans and Russians to be the same as West Europeans and in fact nobody really in Europe does, there is not this supposed white racial solidarity where they think Polak

or Hungarian or let alone the Russian is the same as a French man, an Austrian or a Dane. Nevertheless, if you do think that way, a large percentage of these immigrants in Holland England and so on, are from East Europe, in Iceland from Lithuania and such, a lot are. So if you look at simply white percentage, it would be more like 85-90% in some of these countries that actually have the lowest percentage of native Dutch citizens, native English citizens, so on. So anyway, I go on many tangents, but I think it's very cheap, unstatesmanlike, and I'm not using this in a moralistic sense, but in the sense of when I say unstatesmanlike I'm saying there's nothing you're really achieving by this hostility to Europe other than you're

acting like an internet influencer, a pander to applause of an uninformed emotional audience. You get emotional gratification and maybe you're setting yourself up to run for office. That's not, you're not a statesman if you do that. But you're not achieving what you want to in regards to Europe or world problems or American interests, if that's what you're after. And much more, you could, if you went about this with some tact, you could get much more and it would not make things difficult for European right wing, which is what you are doing right now. Okay, I will take a break. I decided to have croque madame sandwich. If you like this, maybe it will give me more energy to speak with verb for this show. This ham-cheese-egg-thing crunch with coffee for energy.

And I'm recording this on a Sunday, but I may have to upload wrist of show on a day later. I forgot to eat today, so I must have croque madame. Oh, how brunch yes, I'd be right back Recent study on genetic history of Carthage and it turned out in this study There is no or very little Levantine ancestry in let me read let me read for you the maritime Phoenician civilization from the Levant Transformed the entire Mediterranean during the first millennium BC however the extent of human movement between the Levantine Phoenician homeland and Phoenician Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean has been unclear in the absence of comprehensive ancient DNA studies. We generated genome-wide data for 210 individuals, well, that's not

so many, but okay, 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia, and Ibiza, and an early Iron Age individual from Algeria. Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to people living in Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC, despite abundant archaeological evidence of strong cultural, historic, linguistic and religious links. Instead these inheritors of Levantine Phoenician culture derived most of their ancestry from populations with a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean. Much of the remaining ancestry originated from North Africa, reflecting the growing influence of Carthage.

I don't think so, but okay. However, this was a minority contributor of ancestry in all sample sites, including in Carthage itself. Different Punic sites across the central and western Mediterranean show similar patterns of high genetic diversity. We also detect genetic relationships across the Mediterranean reflecting shared demographic processes shaping populations around the Punic world. Okay, so big news, commercial port emporia, commercial port cities have diverse populations. Big surprise. But I don't think people realize what actually a problem studies like this are for the field of population genetics ancient history study. I have no problems with the results here as such. It's entirely predictable.

But if you actually can't sense the signature of a known established historical phenomenon from genetic studies, that is a problem for people who want to use them as primary guide to understand the past. It isn't only this study, okay, regarding, for example, Roman Empire. There are some studies showing Roman influence in Spain, but especially what you might see is central Mediterranean and East Mediterranean influx into Spain with, chronologically, with the coming of Roman Empire. I'm not sure you can see specifically Roman mix to an extent where you could predict, okay, yes, this is going to be a Roman-speaking region as opposed to Celtic or Germanic or such, which is really the matter at hand because you are trying to reconstruct known historical things from genetic data.

If you can't do that, how can you know not known things, in other words reconstruct prehistory? There is a parallel problem with linguistic reconstruction I may have mentioned long ago. the word for horse, you know the Roman word echos, in the romance languages, well it's not echos, it doesn't go back to that, there are some roots in other words go to that, but the word for horse in all these languages is things like cheval, cabacho, excuse me that is with Argentinian pronunciation, I learned Spanish there, so it would be cambayo or whatever, but kabasho, kal, and so on. If you want to use standard reconstruction methods from the current use of word horse in romance languages, you'd actually get the wrong one in Latin, you wouldn't get echos.

But you would get something, you'd get, I think, domestic mule or workhorse, something like that, I think, but you wouldn't get echos, and that's a famous case of a known reconstruction technique going wrong, not confirming what you already know. And I think many such things are not control tested by new genetic historiography. When you have prehistory by ancient bones, and then you have reconstruction of supposed happening based on genetic study from old bones, but it can't reconstruct known events with any certainty. And in every case they look in the Mediterranean, it's always what you just heard from this study. native Sicilian, it's Aegean. It's a bit odd, you know, let me get to that in a moment. I will not get into the matter of physical reconstructions

of ancient Skeletors where you see images or oh, this is what an ancient Sintashta or whatever Indo-Iranian look like that we found this Skeletor in Styria, you know, 4,000 BC. And this is what actually looked like. And that's almost never true, you know. It's almost always just, you cannot reconstruct soft tissues from the skull, really, and the genetic information can be also unclear. So recently Joseph Lazaridis, this man from Reich Labs, posted a preposterous series of photos from supposedly Mycenae Grave Circle B Skeletors, which they all look like Greek diner owners. Okay, he wants to sell you the so-called Greek pizza, which is pre-made thick dough and that type, and it's a guy named Agamemnon when he owns Greek pizzeria in Boston or New Jersey.

And it's the same thing you see from, I forget name of other account, but they post images of Yamnaya or other ancient, supposedly Aryan peoples, and it always looks like a guy selling you Kashmiri spices. You know, they're all made to look like Indians. I love my Indian friends, but please, this kind of nationalism is pathetic. You can't have, you know, and I suppose Mr Lazaridis posted this the other day, these reconstructions of, this is a royal grave at Mycenae, let's say 1600 B.C. and so, and he posts, and they all look like him, and I think he did it to taunt me, I guess, in the response to my repeated demands that the Greek state actually release information about the bones at these graves, which were never fully tested.

They were, I think, just the empty DNA, the mother's line DNA. I think that's the only information about them. They were never DNA tested completely. We don't have the information about them. It would be of great value, actually, because they're all royal bones of a very early, I I would say the first recognizably Greek-type tombs, them and other Tholos-type tombs in Thessaly and other places like that. Some are also around the Peloponnese, whatever, but this would be of much use. It's clearly a royal grave of very early date. Now that genetic information would be extremely useful for history, but guess what? such information has been released, it's a scandal I think, and this Lazaridis knows that I know because intermediaries, common friends have probed with Nicholas Nassim Taleb

who was another Mediterranean ethnic activist, a friend of Lazaridis, they have probed on my behalf about why the Greek government is hiding these bones and preventing further testing done on them. And it's obvious why they're stopping that and I believe it's actually the Greek government destroyed these bones for self-evident reasons, and it's the same reasons why the Australian state allowed ancient hominid bones found in that continent to be destroyed this last week by Aborigine activists, because testing done on those bones would contradict the myth of Aborigine autochtany. There is very good article also from 2001 by Keith Winschuttle in the New Criterion about the construction of the myth of aborigine autochtony, which I will soon, you can find

it online, but I will post on account after I put this show up. It's the same with Greek Mycenae grave circle bee bones though, and many other such things around the world. It's a scandal and it's escalating because prehistory, whenever there's been important evidence like this as opposed to a mass grave for day laborers from the harbor of Carthage that could have held whoever came to work there from around the Mediterranean. It's completely irrelevant to understanding Carthagin. It's not completely irrelevant, but it will not show you obviously who founded Carthage, which is a known historical fact that it was Phoenicians from the Levant. But these kind of destruction of history escalating, the destruction of bone escalating, because now there is DNA techniques and this

extremely gay thing to destroy this evidence. And I mean that literally, gay, there is no difference, I mean that literally, there is no difference between modern national identities and the gay identity in a fundamental way. Both are brittle creations of the modern world in which a group constantly asks for validation of their group self-esteem from outsiders and constant reaffirmations that they exist. The presence in national myths of bones or facts from prehistory that would contradict their national stories and national self-understanding is seen as an unacceptable assault on their ego. So really ancient artifacts around the world being destroyed for this, the lost general human knowledge and to science from destruction of these ancient hominid bones in Australia

without testing, I think is an outrage on the order of destruction of the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan by Taliban in Afghanistan, and they are both doing it for the same reason, to protect the vanity of a gay self-identity of a group as my religion and this is worthy of sanctions on Australia, and you think I exaggerate, but let me tell you something quick, you have all these self-styled classical liberals who are talking about the woke right or whatever, and their commitment is supposedly to race-blind liberalism. They're all frauds, none of them have the strength of their convictions, none of them mean it. This is the problem, you know, because they say they're liberal, but they constantly make allowances, exceptions

for the retrograde group identity of only selected groups, so it's like selective nationalism, And it's extreme cowardly, whether it's allowing Aborigines to erase mankind's genetic history or whether it's making selective allowances to black vanity to parade George Floyd's holy corpse in public masses while people were not allowed to see dying grandmothers during COVID and many other such things. And it's the lack of consistency among self-styled classical liberal that invalidates, I think, view shows them to be merely a cover for cowardice. Now look, I'm allowed to say this what gets me really worked up, the destruction of old artworks, the destruction of old knowledge. Nietzsche was very much upset when during 1871, the Paris Commune, they were going to

burn down the Louvre. He was, you know, this kind of, it's particularly the way of the religious fanatic, which is an ancient democratic impulse of mankind to erase history. I don't want to get into this now, but look, in my recent Africa history series, I called 20th century post-colonial nationalism a huge disaster, a bigger disaster than 19th century European nationalism, which also wiped out more local traditions than globalism ever did, by the way. But the 20th century variety in the colonies were, for example, Indonesia, which is a completely made-up country, just like the Congo or Zaire or whatever, where a central government was empowered by the UN, America, and Soviet Union to impose itself on countless diverse local tribes and different traditions and cultures, and to wipe many

of them out or to suppress others. And the rich heritage of mankind's ancestry in many cases wiped out forever without evidence because of the democratic self-determination of this constructed group. I don't want to get into this now. It's a longer discussion of what goes on with this and the psychological—I call it democratic psychology, but the psychology behind this is interesting, but it's for another time. But in some of these small cases in Indonesia or wherever, in the Congo, a tribe here and there may have had a clue or two of immense importance. They may have held ancient knowledge gotten from this or that traveler from elsewhere. And now everything erased, damnatio memoria, really the thought is revolting and I'm

not saying any of this for antiquarian conservative reasons but out of love of knowledge that now has been deleted that some even an Indonesian art form like a dance style wiped out by the centralization of that entirely fake gay identity and fake language of Indonesia. It's a huge loss. Anyway, I think I go on tangents. So yes, in the case of the Phoenicians in Carthage, what you have now is a study out of Reich Labs to tell you that what historically is known is actually not at all confirmable by current methods of evidence gathering in field of population, ancient population genetics. In other words, it cannot reconstruct Phoenician spread around the Mediterranean simply from the genetic record gathered by current methods from known Phoenician colonies.

So what this tells me is the following, because on the surface, again, I have no problem with these studies because my model for how ancient history basically happened is that it all took place more or less through something called elite dominance, where language or or other such things are spread by small elite imposing itself on top of much larger static local populations. Often colonization happened the same way in the Greek world where you had a very tiny group compared to the local population, let's say Sicily, South Italy or South France, wherever they went to make colonies of Spain, Iberia. They had a very small group of Greek families, a much larger group of single Greek men who married local women, and the locals in that area ended up genetically overwhelming the

founding population, which you know, right, depending on local conditions, you may not in fact have any genetic signature left by the founders of many of these ancient cultures and states. It could have been too small in number. in other cases where this small minority would have left a large genetic imprint, but not because they moved there as a people with their wives and children in a vast migration. Again in the Greek colonies case, even the number of actual families moving, let's say to a new Greek colony in Sicily or whatever, the number of families and so on, wives from Greece was very small, but in other cases in general where you had models of elite dominance that affected the population genetically at large, it would have been because elite men

would have impregnated many local women and so on. And in both cases what you would have looked for with model in terms of studying bones and such, you have to be very careful, right, because so many things could mislead you. Let me give a hypothetical example how it could mislead you, because when you have dominance introduced and it stirs up, let's say, local balance of ethnic groups, all kinds of things can happen that lead to a false picture if you just have the bones. Let's say a certain people, people X, it's maritime, but they have small dynamic population with what for the time would be advanced naval and military technology, they form various trade and other emporium around the region, like a sea or an ocean. Imagine another planet

if you want. And imagine they do this before there is a relevant historical written record even, so you wouldn't know it. It would be something like definitions, but you wouldn't know because it was not written about. But they could be very politically astute people and they arrive in a certain bay and there are four different tribes living there and this colonizing people figures, well, we are very few, we may have weapons and whatever but we don't want to just force people and be fighting all the time. There are many, they're in awe of us right now because we come on ships with these weapons but they are all to varying degrees submitting to us but we know that will may not last then they have been in low-level conflict we see with each other for centuries, these local tribes.

So to control them, we are too few in numbers. So we're going to designate this hill dweller tribe as our proxy in the region. They're pretty good fighters and they are not too powerful in the region, but we're going to raise them up and rule through them. They cannot challenge us and they'll be happy to rule the others in our name. And since we're basically extreme racists and we only like our women or these other kind of women, we're actually not going to breed with the local population almost at all. After we get set up here, we're going to bring wives maybe from the homeland, but we're going to rule through this hill tribe Y, who we empower suddenly as our proxies, meanwhile the larger tribes, Z, V, and W, whatever, they're going to be made subordinate. Well guess what?

Suddenly tribe Y, which is previously very small, maybe it was unknown, but now it's hot stuff because they're the rulers, so their men are hot stuff, you see. So now tribe Y men will start take wives from others and maybe even doing quasi genocidal thing like denying tribe V, which is agricultural, denying them land, denying them crop rotation opportunity, so then become famine, either intentional or not, so suddenly you could have within two or three generations quite drastic genetic change. Tribe Y spreads in unprecedented ways in that area. Suppose that tribe Y previously had been not only quite small, but also before this practice cremation, but now under our influence, this maritime people, and by adopting our elements

of our religion, it switches from cremation to burial in our style, so suddenly it appears in the record, whereas before you couldn't be testing the bones because they were practicing cremation and they were not breeding with the other tribe, but now suddenly both things explode, you know, so that can get quite confusing, you see, if you just have the bones. I mean, I'm just giving hypothetical, but many things like this can happen in history, and tribe Tribe Y can suddenly appear to modern researchers as basically an entirely new element in genetic record and a dominant one, contemporaneous with the arrival of people X, so you don't really have clear record what's going on, you can be very easily misled.

Again you look at Ugric tribes on the map today, you see all Hungarians and who speaks Ugric languages, all the Kanti and the Manzi do in the Arctic. So clearly, to find the ancient Ugric signature, you should test these three tribes or whatever they have in common might be that, right? Well, it can be very misleading because, guess what, both of them bred with Slavs in the meantime, maybe decisively so. So now you confuse Slavic signal for fundamental Ugric or such, you see. So you see what I'm getting at? can be confused things in the model I gave the tribe Y can be confused for tribe or people X or for something else entirely. And this doesn't cover all such cases, you can imagine many such history, known history,

so complicate that without written record or other clues you might even have unknown diseases get introduced but for whatever reason some local tribe has an opportunistic community and so on. So many things can confound it. The point is that once you accept that social and political change drastically can happen because of a dominant elite and that this can throw off breeding patterns in an area, all bets are off, you suddenly have to be a lot more careful about how things are sourced. Archaeological evidence, hopefully written evidence if you have, local mythological traditions that were passed down, which is to say. I believe very much genetic information can be useful, I understand history, prehistory, but if your model for social political change is off, you can be misled very easily.

So when I pointed out regarding this Phoenician study, okay, but how are the bones collected? Because it's unsurprising that you have genetic diversity in a commercial port city, and that most of the people might not share the founder's genetics. Did you just aggregate all the bones, including, let's say, migrant day laborers who work in harbor in a mass grave. And I said that and people jumped my throat. Oh, there you go again, Bap, talking about elites. Are you coping? Obviously, the genetic record shows no or very little Levantine ancestry. So how dare you talk about elite graves? No such thing exists. Obviously, the people that are North African or Sicilian or such. I want to ask, well, how do you explain then that they were recognized very strongly

as Phoenicians, as Punic civilization, Punic language, Punic customs, not only in Carthage, but in Carthaginian colonies in Sicily when they fought the Greeks. The Greeks saw them the same as the Phoenicians who accompanied the Persians' invasions of mainland Greece, the ones who were from the Levant. The Greeks understood them to be the same people, even to the point where, I believe if you study some Greek authors, there was a belief, I think implicit belief, that the Phoenicians had a plot to exterminate Greek civilization around the Mediterranean, which is probably not true but was seen by some as some kind of coordinated plot. In fact, the invasion of Persia, mainland Greece, was coordinated with major offensives

against the Greece in greater Greece, which is to say southern Italy and Sicily. That part is true. a battle as important as Salamis in mainland Greece took place in Sicily at the same time. It's very hard to dismiss that as coincidence, but by all this I mean to say, widely recognized, known history, Phoenician colonies in Carthage, Sicily, Spain, and so on, they were in fact Phoenician. You can't find the signature though. Hannibal is a Levantine name. Okay, if you go forward and you see the same conflict extended to struggle between Rome and greater Phoenicia, which it obviously was, with Rome taking up the Greek cause. Well, I'm going on many tangents, but maybe to a listener who is not on Twitter, not on X, it will seem strange that what am I even arguing about.

But yes, there is people online attached to the major genetics researchers now or promoting these kind of studies who are making a nonsensical argument that somehow you should not probe to how or why Phoenician civilization existed in Carthage despite the fact that their study shows no significant Levantine or Phoenician genetic presence there. How did it get transmitted then? And the reason these people are so touchy for me to explain to you now is because this study shows very plainly that you can have a very robust civilizational linguistic continuity that does not show up to modern genetic studies from the bones. which I'm telling you is also case in Roman example as others like the Magyars I've mentioned. In other words, it's not clear, you know,

let me put it to you what I'm really getting at is of course the Indo-European case, which Indo-European languages spread in prehistory and their model is that it's spread in remote prehistory and they base it on genetic studies that show a population turnover. And that's their only evidence. They see a population turnover and they say it must be the Indo-Europeans. And although various timelines have been proposed for when the Indo-European language is spread, well, you find one population turnover that may include step component, that's obviously it. That's when it happened and that's then. Well, how do you know? I mean, here's a case where you can't, you know. So if in fact the way Indo-Europeans spread was same way Phoenicians or this other did,

you would not find genetic signature even in bones of the time unless it would be exceedingly difficult to do so. You'd have to look very carefully at which bones you collect and to disambiguate from other contemporary changes that could have happened for sometimes unrelated reasons. And this is why these people, and for example Joseph Lazaridis from Reich Labs, are touchy about Phoenician studies. Whenever they do study around ancient Mediterranean, the bones are pretty much continuous and what you'd expect. By which I mean, if you search North Africa, the bones look broadly North African or Mediterranean. You search Sicily, they look local. If you search anywhere, they look local or broadly Aegean.

If you look at modern Dagestanis as a whole, I mean, there are some small people in modern day Caucasus, but when you look at them, they look continuous with the bones found in ancient Kuraaraxes culture in ancient Caucasus, across with some others also in ancient Caucasus. So it's nothing really that you would not expect. And what I'm getting at is the following that the population base anywhere in the world prior to modern age, for example, of plane travel or mass migration, but prior to the this, the population base of anywhere in the world is largely stable, not much change before let's say age of exploration and slavery and so on, not much change and that you can't really explain ancient political, social, linguistic, cultural changes and so on just from the genetic record usually.

Because again, the people, the locals almost never really changed and that's because as As per my model, but not the one generally accepted by modern historians or genetic researchers who mostly seem to have no concept of it, but my model I'm saying almost all historical change take place through action of small, sometimes very small group, elite dominance model. You can scratch and dig all you want in genetic and sometimes even archaeological record. You won't usually find evidence population turnover. almost never was. And there was no ancient mass migration of people as in the sense normally understood now in historical discussions on Twitter or various blogs or casual conversation. There was no such movement of peoples. There was only conquests, takeovers by small groups

of an otherwise mostly inert static population base. And this doesn't mean genetic studies again are not useful, but they have to be targeted. You study royal graves or such, you compare them to surf graves and so on. But almost always, modern states actually will not allow you access to such, let's say, knockout evidence bones. They will, I think, even rather destroy the bones than allow anyone to study that. Meanwhile, when studies are done, such as this Phoenician colonization Carthage case, the bones are all aggregated in the study because of an ideological commitment to democratic norms on the part of the labs doing this, which I think is a scientific scandal that's unaddressed. And I mean this, I think Reich labs at Harvard, as well as the German and other European labs

doing these kinds of studies, have ideological moral commitments to believe that really what I said now, they wouldn't see a problem with that. They would say any random day laborer in the harbor of Carthage at the time, whatever, has an equal claim to be called part of that state that civilization and to be called that name or that identity as any member of that nation's elite or founding elite, and this highly distorts understanding of how ancient states operated. It actually erases evidence of racial and ethnic stratification and divergent identities, which was the norm for that time. I'm saying that evidence is literally erased in the sense that records, often where such-and-such bone samples are collected and then not recorded for future investigators.

It is a scandal, sometimes you cannot find the provenance of this or that sample they collected and they erase the provenance. So you go to a highly stratified state, then you mix the bones from a royal grave with ten or twenty times the number of bones from a mass grave of slaves, then you present the results as the average admixture of that group and actually there is no group in that sense of the word, it's basically a disingenuous lie, but this is allowed to happen again because of a moral commitment to democratic identity politics. And I encountered this also as a student, I was shocked that in the classics courses sometimes when I pointed out that the study of ancient popular social history was on one

hand it was valuable to understand the daily life of common folk and of what was the daily life of a surf-washer woman like in Athens at 300 B.C. or this, but it's highly inappropriate to extend conclusions from that to the civilization as a whole, which is really only studied today because of the elite of that time, and in a highly stratified situation, the identity of that civilization was embodied only in that very small aristocracy. That's not a moral claim, it's simply a factual sociological claim and whenever I said this I was countered with actually extremely emotional outbursts from supposedly dispassionate academics who chided me with bizarre tangents about how Rome, did you know Rome was founded by

Romulus and Remus gathering brigands and convicts and the ancient Greeks actually were, and you know that's why the Romans won, they were accepting and the Greeks were, and I quote them elitist assholes and we don't need to honor their prejudices in studying their own civilization this claim and this is claim of professor, more than once by the way. And so when you study the life of an average let's say miner or washer woman in Athens mines outside Athens 450 BC or this. The reason they do that is an ideological commitment to democratic ethics, to say that is the real Greece and the people that we know about Greece from and these ancient sources and writings, the aristocracy that actually composed them, that's not more important than this other one.

So it's a kind of democratic rancor that's accepted as normal in what should be actually just a scientific study, objective study of ancient civilizations and the understanding of them is extremely warped when you deny their special hierarchical character and how the social hierarchy actually almost always mapped over to an ethnic or racial hierarchy. Even if it didn't in the beginning, which it almost always did, it ended up that way after many generations because of divergence. So the study of that, it's very important, that stratification, but very difficult also. And you can get other examples from, if you read Robert Drew's book on the end of the Bronze Age now, he points out in ancient Canaan there is no evidence at all of, no archaeological

evidence of any population change or turn or whatever. There's no evidence, in other words, for the exodus from Egypt. There's no evidence of the coming of the Philistines, which some myths were saying they were coming with wagons or whatever over the land or from wherever. There are scholars who believe this and biblical scholars who believe this, and it completely falls. Now, both events obviously happened in some sense in the case of the Philistines. They came from elsewhere. They probably came from the sea. probably came from Crete or Crete via Cyprus and I think what obviously happened in this case and also the one of the exodus, a tiny elite sailed or came over, marched over out of Egypt, maybe even sailed from Egypt and bequeathed its migration and founding myth

on the local population, respective populations. So the locals where the Philistine areas were supposed to be were still locals. You can search there, you will not find, I'm sure, the big Goliath Philistine bones unless you actually find, this is what I'm saying, unless you find that Goliath, you're not going to find the Philistine admixture. It's going to be locals who adopted that founding myth as their own, you know, after some generations they start to identify, we that, we came over from where the Philistines, you know, and You know, they bequeath the religion parts of the language sometimes and sometimes the language and so on. This isn't the only case. There are many other such I could keep mentioning.

Anatolia again in the remote prehistory, I mentioned an episode or two ago, no evidence of any incoming population and that would have been very difficult. The land was already sickly populated. Where would an incoming population be settled? What would it do? And everywhere you look, it's almost always the same model, where you have obvious historically known changes, but they could have only been affected by a conquest of a small elite. And I think this makes sense in multiple ways. Let me explain quickly before I go on break. I'll give you a model for all ancient history now, it's provisional, and I will say now it's very likely wrong, but I'll state it in a very marked, extreme way, which even Even if it's wrong, I'm doing so to show my case as clearly as can be for further refinement.

I think that mankind spread in remote prehistory, let's say after the last ice age, and it spread very slowly in let's say a zoological fashion, not by means of any political decisions. would be small family groups very gradually diffusing, at most loose small clan, slowly spreading over quite long period of time, diffusing mostly along the waterways, rivers especially but also coasts, and the world I think became populated at this early stage in this manner. First by hunter-gatherers, sometime later agriculturalists came in many part and the agriculturalists did displaced the hunter-gatherer at times, but often also just by mixing with them. And I mean to say that after these early population events, there was basically no real change

in base population anywhere until modern age of mass migration technology and so on. This is why whenever you do studies of this or that ancient bones, for example, ancient Mediterranean or such, well guess what, it's always, they look like Sicilian or Aegean, the local bonds, whether it was supposedly Greek or Phoenician or whatever, it doesn't matter, it's really just the locals who show up. And that's because the recorded history you see in antiquity when history actually starts to be written, I mean even before when you see changes though in the Indo-European languages that are assumed, I think all such changes are affected by small, sometimes extremely small and not infrequently small all-male groups, and so I mean to say that the entirety

of history before the very contemporary age takes place through elite dominance model, which by the way genetic researchers mostly have no historical understanding of this to the point that when I used to bring it up on blogs in such a long time ago they got very angry, they chimp at me, how they suggest this and so on, because obviously their only model for historical change is that obviously this was a people, and it's all about peoples picking up and moving from one place to another for unclear reasons, often very fast and across vast distances, for which then they have to invent all kinds of bizarre devices, such as horse travel at times when it obviously didn't exist, or even just nonsensical ideas that an agricultural, for example, or even a pastoral people just decides to move from

one place to another, to do what? If you read Cochrane and Harpending, somewhat nonsense book, Ten Thousand Year Explosion, it has some things I agree with, but they interpret the spread of Indo-European languages in terms of the ability to digest milk. It's almost like a parody of 18th century materialist explanations of history. Oh, the Greeks and Romans spread because of olive oil, right? Or I've met nerds who believe it was, they had special iron technology. It's this kind of smart aleck nerd Reddit kid tendency. Well, listen, the model I named for history now, what I sketched out for you, is not correct, okay? I'll tell you why in a moment, but to keep going with it, aside from there being no real

evidence of population turnover archaeologically or such, and often no genetic noticeable signature either. There are also material limitations you have to consider, which is extreme difficulty of travel over land. I've mentioned, and I'll keep emphasizing though, but it feels like these people who are doing these historical studies now never even so much as casually hiked and have no idea or have driven on dirt roads, maybe never have. Maybe they have no idea how hard it is even for small, experienced groups of men to go over difficult land. It's often impossible, not to speak of taking women and children with you and feeding them for months of travel over difficult terrain, you know. And second of all, I do think the Marxist critics of nationalism are largely correct

in this following sense, I mean, not in the sense usually exaggerated now that group or tribal ethnic identity doesn't exist or it's all, yeah, it is all actually in some way constructed but that too is misunderstood because you can't construct it overnight. But they are right that modern national identity, that the nation or Nazi or ethnic of people sized group as exists in our minds today, a whole nation, that they didn't really have a common consciousness or common political decisionist unity before more or less the modern age, let's say the 1800s or so and after or even well into the 1800s, there are ancient exceptions of course, but they're rare and even they do not happen, I think ever before the Iron Age or before about 1000 BC or so.

So you speak of an ancient people in remote prehistory suddenly deciding to move from one area into another, there is no, it's not possible, okay, they had no political unity to be able to plan or think about such things even, and the notion of a settled agricultural people deciding to pick up families and all and moving across a continent is sheer lunacy. It's never happened. This last thing I said now never happened. Changes and conquests and takeovers and things like that obviously did happen, but I believe all of it was done by very small groups who were quite organized, full of conscious intent. So for example, something that occurred as fast as I think the Aryan or Indo-European expansions did, they did so in the same way that the Mongol conquest did, or the spread

of Spanish and Portuguese to the New World, or of the Normans to parts of Europe. The Norman conquest of South Italy is I think a very good model for understanding Indo-European spread where it was basically mercenaries and adventurers at first in progressing slowly making assays but then calling their friends and quickly taking over the area and often pursuing very concrete financial or material goals locally you know we've heard there is gold in this area we heard that amber here or there is the special metal working region we're going to take it over and we have this new technology you are basically the first warrior class to ever exist, I'm speaking of ancient Indo-Europeans now, we have this special technology nobody

else does, we're going to quickly go there and take it over, it's not like a giant resettlement of an entire people which again did not exist as such at the time, they were clans, they were separate tribes and so forth, but oh no, it's a people, a nation sized group deciding to immigrate across a continent or whatever for an unclear reason. So now I'll stand by this model in this case and other cases of social and political historical change and antiquity, but I will also concede that the story I've told you so far for the whole of how mankind spread is obviously not correct. I overstated it to illustrate something that's forgotten or overlooked, but if you consider the spread of the Bantus across Africa, for example.

Maybe 2,000 or so years ago, Africa was not modern type black, what you think of Kongoid or Bantu. It was mostly a bushman or pygmy area, Khoisan and pygmy continent. But Bantus and Kongoid spread across it with iron technology and such, and they did so over very difficult terrain, obviously, and they were not a people either. There was no like a black Bantu centralized authority or people. It was disorganized small groups, not centralized, and that kind of population change and spread can obviously happen, but if you will note that it's a process that still takes many centuries or even a thousand or more years. It's a kind of zoological diffusion process, and you can see from the material record that it's that type of spread.

It's not something that can be recognized, in my opinion, as historical change, which is actually relatively rapid or understood as a result of human action or intent of some type. Something like the Mongol conquests or conquest of the New World by Spain, Portugal, et cetera, that looks very different from Bantu conquest of Africa. It's not conquest. the kind of Bantu diffusion and that displacement of other, I don't want to say peoples, other biomes in Africa, you know, so otherwise I call it, yes, as you see zoological change. Similarly, I think there was probably prehistoric population overturned in England. There was 90% overturned of gene pool within some centuries of the coming of the bell beakers.

But again unless the genetic studies are I think maybe misleading for some reason, well I don't know. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. But in this case it's not necessary to imagine something absurd like public executions or equivalent of ancient gas chambers practiced by what was certainly in the case of the Bell Beakers decentralized tribes arriving. But I think if there is a local agricultural population that's settled, actually agriculturalism can be quite fragile system as Irish potato famine shows. So simply denying them one crop rotation season or such, that can wipe out entire communities or almost so through famine or type things like this. I'm not saying that a model I sketched is correct in 100 percent

of cases, but I'm saying nevertheless it's still probably the rule in antiquity, whereas Because at the moment, that's not the consensus. I think it's a mistake. I think it leads to gross distortions in understanding the past and also understanding human nature, understanding how political and historical change takes place. By the way, the Bell Beakers were not... If anyone tells you that they spoke an Indo-European language, I'd like to ask them which one they think in 2500 B.C. or 2000 B.C. in the British Isles, because the replacement event, yes, that I mentioned now, the genetic overturning in England was about 2500 B.C. it started, but there was no way that this could be the Celtic language. There's no record of any wheel existing in Britain at that time, for example.

So it may very well be that the people related in some way racially to what was later the Celts or the Indo-Europeans of some other branch, although again I think it's highly speculative, there's no evidence for that, but it couldn't have been the Celts themselves or any known Indo-European language, you see what I'm saying. There was no wheel archaeologically found at that time in England. The Celts probably did not get to the British Isles until well after 1000 BC or so. So I'm going on many tangents, but yes, history takes place back them and in fact takes place now and always will through the action of small, often very small groups. Yes, I will be right back. I've been reading Somerset Maugham, I don't know how to pronounce his name, M-A-U-G-H-A-M, as this kind of Britoid name.

Is that Scottish? Do you say Mogham, Mogham? I don't know. Somerset Maugham, but his nice pleasure, light, pure escapist literature. I have not read his famous book of human bondage. It's a story, a Greek story of one-eyedest love named after a chapter in Spinoza. I haven't read any of his novels yet, but just five of his short stories. And he is English from early first half, 20th century, writes tales of travel, life in the tropics, the south seas, and so on. And that's most of all why I wanted to read him because for a long time I like the material content of lone European man in the tropics. I've tried to do this myself. I see this as a signature experience to understand what means, yes, you know, the fate of the white man in the tropics is pregnant with meaning.

Maybe you don't see in it as much significance as I do, the fate of civilization and such, But it makes for great novels, stories, maybe even movies. For example, The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio is very modern pop, kind of pop take on this. The best part of that movie is the first half, the pure escapist excitement where Leonardo DiCaprio is finding his way in Thailand, travels and such. As it happens, Taki, the Greek tycoon, a writer of articles in high society, Taki Theodorakopoulos, the paleocon with Taki Mag, which, by the way, if you want a good time, just read Scott Laughlin's collected articles at Taki's. Laughlin, I think, still best article writer of today, I think. But unfortunately, he mostly stopped.

He's doing his blog now, which is also very good, Technology Blog by Scott Laughlin. Anyway, Taki, so Taki as it happens this year wrote three articles on Moen, I was not aware of them, a frog in the replies told me this when I posted saying I'm reading Somerset Mogamid, so he says he has articles in Taki magazine and in Chronicles honoring this writer who he considers best of all British writers period actually of any kind. I don't know if I agree. My favorite author in English, Joseph Conrad, who also wrote stories of same region, the adventures of the white man in the South Seas and the tropics. And I find Conrad dealing with the same matters a lot more moving, more profound than Mon, but maybe that's not fair comparison. First of all, I have not read any Mon novels,

just these short stories. Second, because Conrad is arguably not really English, He's a continental, you can think of even as a Russian or French novelist who happens to be writing in an awkward English, which was his third language, and he's not considered a great stylist in English, I think. It often reads like translated English. It's a heavy convoluted style. But Tacky considers Somerset Mowen not only the best British author, but also the best short story writer period of any nation, ranking him above Guy de Maupassant and such, which, again, I'm not sure on this. I still rank Maupassant and Chekhov above Mogham in a short story write, at least from what I've read. But look, this is quibbling. The Mohen stories are vivid, engaging reading.

I'd highly recommend, if you want, nice cinematic read, kind of like, you can read one in a quick afternoon, very easy light style, very unobtrusive style, very much in the background. Let only the content and plot and characters shine on their own. So make for a quick light experience. But I think Moham actually also worked on movie scripts, which is a bit, you know, so I think he had movie maybe in mind when writing these stories. But these stories about white men in Samoa, in South Pacific Tahiti and such, and about love and affairs with native women, of white men with native women very often, and it's all in a kind of sardonic, dark, humor writing. Everyone in story pretty much is defeated almost every time. A frequent theme is a sickly character with lung problem,

tries to escape the North European cold, wet climate for health reasons, and comes to South Pacific, taking a job, a long stay, and then describe what happened after. There are cutting, very negative portrayals of moral prigs. That's a very frequent character in Morgan. As in, for example, his story Rain, a story titled Rain, where the missionaries in this story are a kind of nurse-ratchet type. Missionaries are depicted as both malevolent and delusional. This story, Rain, was made into movies and various theatre productions. It's about the struggle of wills between a vicious, thin-lipped missionary couple, the kind who uses religion and moralism really also as a kind of power trip, and they are in a struggle against an exiled prostitute,

who both the prostitute and them take up lodging in a kind of motel in a port, Pago Pago during incessant tropical rains and there's an epidemic on another island so they are stuck there for some weeks. And it's about what happens with the husband, well, you read it, you see, it's very quick read but it's a story about shortcoming of moral prudishness and hypocrisy. Another very negative portrayal of self-righteous Prigtype is in a dark humor story, Macintosh, about Scottish bureaucrat who goes to Samoa, again, health reasons, takes a government job there, and out of hurt pride and spite, he essentially plans the murder, or allows the murder of the governor of the small island he's stationed on, his immediate bureaucratic superior, who is a kind of paternalistic, corrupt,

but affable Irishman, I think. So again, it's struggle of wills between two stock types. On one hand, a kind of constipated, he's not like in the reign a missionary, but it's same kind of prig, delusional, hypocrite, self-righteous bureaucrat, all high up on, you know, indignation. And then on the other hand, a gruff, vulgar, but fundamentally good-natured boor, who runs the island, at times unjustly, but basically pretty well. And the governor in McIntosh is in some way the male counterpart of the prostitute in Reign. It's the same kind of vulgar, flashy type, but fundamentally not a bad person. The bad people are the moralists in both these stories. In McIntosh, by the end, both characters, the title character, McIntosh, the Scottish

moralist, bureaucrat, and the governor, they're both dead. And what remains is the beautiful but relentlessly indifferent tropical, the nature of the tropics, a kind of fatal beauty that captures you in bosom, kills you, doesn't care about you. So in this sense, you can see Moem as a kind of more British, more sarcastic, less heroic version of Conrad. In both cases, the clash, the spark of the story come from the contrast of European man's desiring and ambition versus not only natives and their customs and native life, but fundamentally the all-encompassing bosom of tropical fatal luxuriousness and violence. And in Conrad's case, it's the European man's heroic struggle for freedom and self-perfection, which is brought into very sharp relief against something very different and primal.

And you see this especially in Lord Jim, the title character's relentless drive for perfection, which leads him to embrace death by the end. And you see it also in Outcast of the Islands in a different way, it's there in Nostromo. Well in Mogham, it's as I say, more humor English, more sardonic humor. I think this style you find also in Woodhouse or the author known as Saki. And you know, Mogham like Saki was, let me use the old word, sexual invert, which Taki much of Mohan's character, he liked to entertain in grand style on French Riviera and so on. His stories were very financially successful and popular during his own lifetime, and for this reason he was much hated by other literary figures of the time. The Bloomsbury Group,

That crowd hated Mohan Soham as he's too popular, he can't be high art because he is too commercially successful and so on. But in many ways he has this kind of stereotypically English gay sarcastic sensibility. Saki was the same and it's very sardonic with focus on not like in Conrad, the European man's heroism and lust for adventure and self-perfection. Here the focus is on the European man's often moralism and self-delusion and his hopeless lust for romance. In stories like Macintosh and Rain, the effect is dark but it's funny. You're left laughing, smirking at least by the end. But in other stories, and in the collection I have by the way, I'll post the edition. It's called The Great Novels and Short Stories of Somerset Maugham.

You can find online and the five short stories included are among I suppose they say his more famous ones. They're McIntosh, Rain, The Pool, Red and the last one is The Fall of Edward Barnard. So in some of them it's quite dark humor exposing the shortcomings of moral self-righteousness and with feel very much you can think of like Flannery O'Connor, those stories are similar at least in moral message I think. But in others like The Pool and especially the story Red, I found these quite melancholy and will leave you, I don't know if it will leave you crying, but it really leaves you forlorn and rather bleak feeling. I still recommend them because it's a kind of semi-beautiful longing sadness and it's worth it, but will leave you somewhat sad. The Pool is one of the bleakest of all.

It's about an awful case of oneitis. I don't call it... It's one thing to call it intense hopeless love, you know, what Romeo had for Juliet. I wouldn't call that oneitis. That's true romance, you know. And yeah, I think many other poets had mews like this, that they had romance, but one night you see that in this main character who is in love with this native woman. He really gets mistreated and his life becomes a complete mess because of it, but he ends up falling in love with a local Polynesian girl. He encounters her first in a kind of magic island setting by a beautiful pool with flowers and he tries then to take her back to Scotland, but she hates it there, and she goes back with her child, abandons him.

And I think it's actually left purposefully unclear in this story whether if it's really his child, especially the second time she says she's pregnant when he goes back to Samoa and he follows her there even though he knows he shouldn't because there's nothing there for him, but he follows her back to Samoa in the hopeless love of her, and then he sinks into local village life, an alcoholic subservience to her and to her relatives. And this story, The Pool, I think actually contains yet another archetypal image of what I call the long house. It isn't just feminism or rule by women, okay, it's because the traditional village village life is shown as actually extremely claustrophobic smothering in much the same

way you see in Chekhov, I've mentioned this story, his peasants, where Russian village life in story peasants, all living on top of one another in favela misery, slum misery, and really a kind of, you see, very concretely how the woman and women actually socially and psychologically dominate and run all so-called traditional village life, even when it's technically patriarchal. So, anyway, this quite sad, unpleasant story about a man's pathetic longing for an image of romance, a taste of another world of romance that he had brief access to and he tries desperately to recapture that high and just sinks into self-destruction. But this, you know, it's harder to, the story read from this collection is maybe not the

bleakest but it's the saddest, the most poignant, because unlike the others and unlike the pool, it contains one of the purest images of young love you can find in any literature. I'm not going to say it's the best image, but it's one of the purest. And then this is extirpated, it's spoiled by the passage of time in old age. It's very sad. a story is about an American sailor, a very beautiful red-headed youth who runs away and ends up on a small island in the South Pacific where he finds a beautiful native girl and they have a kind of paradise, noble savage young love in a tropical simplicity. They need nothing but each other and the beauty of the place is a perfect setting for this magic love affair. But then he goes on a brief trading trip

and he gets gang pressed into service on a European ship and he cannot return to her and she pines for him for years until eventually another European comes to the island, a Swedish intellectual, again this free North Europe for health reasons, and he marries her eventually but she never loves him back and she's always pining for her lost lover. And he builds a European-style house on where the old shack was where this woman had had her paradise love affair. He brings his books and his piano from Europe. I mean, I'm giving the plot away, okay, because actually the story's quite predictable from the beginning. But this man, the Swede, he is entranced by the image of her own past love affair and and by the beauty of the place where he felt was the setting for this magical union, and

he desperately is trying to capture that for himself. He arrives on the island believing he was going to die, he gets a reprieve, a second chance at life, and believes that he will maybe get her to love him and reproduce with him what she had, give him a taste of her previous pure love affair, but it never comes and leaves him embittered. So anyway, it doesn't take away from the poignant effect of this story that it's predictable or that I will tell you what happens. But the story begins when a rickety trading ship tries to pull into the harbor of this island and the captain of this ship is an old, grotesque, vulgar, gruff, very fat, even obese captain. He blotchy, blotchy red skin and so you can tell where this is going.

He cannot even climb the mast of the ship to find entry beyond the coral reef into the harbor of the island, the natural harbor. So the story is really after he manages on the second day to get in and he arrives at the house of this Swedish man. The story is really the conversation of this gross looking ship captain with the Swedish exiled professor who tells him the tale that I just told you, the tale of beautiful love on this island that had always made it enchanted for him when he found his health, but then his unsuccessful attempts to get this forlord native woman to love him back. As you can imagine, this ship captain, now old and obese, is the beautiful youth, Red, who had been abducted from this island, gang pressed into service, and he's now corrupted

by time, he's an alcoholic, obese, having apparently forgotten his youth entirely, and when the woman, now herself old, she comes into the room to wait on them, they don't recognize each other. I mean, the Swede realizes who they both are, but the two lovers separated, you know, by time and so they don't even recognize or acknowledge each other. So disillusioned by all of this, the Swedish professor decides to return to Europe. But you know, it's simple plot, but the description of youthful love affair in this free tropical setting is again maybe not the best or most original depiction of a love affair in literature, but it's very pure and evocative, and the disillusionment that you feel here is genuinely leaves you sad. It's not funny at all. It's an effective story.

I don't know if I would bother to make a movie on it. It's very depressing. How would you make movie? Maybe you can. If you want a gay version of the same story, you can find in Gore Vidal early novella, The City and the Pillar from 1947, which yes, right now gay literature is hackneyed and pushed for political reasons by New York Times, New York Beta Times and such, but Vidal was Admittedly brave to write that story at that time in 1947 when it was still taboo But it's very much the same feel the same story as read by Moem both are very depressing Now in regards to the style of Moem which Taki thinks so highly of I don't think so much of this style It's good. It lets the content shine and so forth and blah blah, but it's too

Unobtrusive in the sense of okay on one hand you have unobtrusive style But then it goes too far and it relies too much on vague formulas stock bland phrases And I think Moen veer too much in this direction. I'll read you some so you get the idea It's from the story rain One of maybe his most famous short story not my favorites though, but here I read for you This is from rain Ewola was on the edge of the city you went down side streets by the harbor in the darkness across a rickety bridge bridge, till you came to a deserted road, all ruts and holes, and then suddenly you came out into the light. There was parking room for motors on each side of the road, and there were saloons, tawdry and bright, each one noisy with its mechanical piano, and there were barber shops and tobacconists.

There was a stir in the air and a sense of expectant gaiety." Look, I just quickly stop. I maybe shouldn't for the sake of you getting the sense of this rhythm of Moen, but you can already see the descriptions are not very tawdry and bright where he refers to the saloons or there was a stir in the air, a sense of expecting gaiety. This is very vague kind of stock, lame description and I don't mean to say this to discourage you from reading him but I can't agree that the style is very cutting or innovative. Anyway I continue to read for you. You turn down a narrow alley either to the right or to the left for the road divided Iwele into two parts and you found yourself in the district, he means a red-light district.

There were rows of little bungalows, trim and neatly painted in green, and the pathway between them was broad and straight. It was laid out like a garden city. In its respectable regularity, its order and spruce-ness, it gave an impression of sardonic horror. For never can the search for love have been so systematized and ordered. The pathways were lit by a rare lamp, but they would have been dark except for the lights that came from the open windows of the bungalows. Men wandered about, looking at the women who sat at their windows, reading or suing, for the most part taking no notice of the passers-by. And like the women, they were of all nationalities. There were Americans, sailors from the ships in port, enlisted men off the gunboats, somberly

drunk, and soldiers from the regiments, white and black, quartered on the island. There were Japanese walking in twos and threes, Hawaiians, Chinese in long robes, and Filipinos in preposterous hats. They were silent and, as it were, oppressed. Desire is sad. It was the most crying scandal of the Pacific, exclaimed Davidson vehemently. The missionaries had been agitating against this for years." Anyway, it goes on like that, and the butt of this story is this very nasty, priggish missionary couple whose activity in the South seas is just shown as a terrible imposition on local healthy pagan culture, which I want to like this. I agree with the sentiments here and Moen's criticism of this kind of religious prick

personality type, but the language, right, especially when he's describing just now the types of men who frequented this red light district, Chinese in long robes, Filipino preposterous hat, somberly drunk sailor and so on. I think this kind of lame or lazy description, it's not vivid, especially if you compare someone like Mishima, who has some of the most colorful writing images in Mishima, who is also in the first half of 20th, well, he's actually second half of 20th century writer, but the images just flame bright and print vivid in your mind eye. To me, that's the standard of good physical description, Mishima. Mogums are, as you see, a bit dull, vague, you see what I mean, and even the description

of this red light district, and I've been in desultory, depressing red light districts, if anything is literary to describe with relish for an audience, to make them enjoy something exotic, it's that, and you can describe them in much more colorful, funny than what I just read for you from Mogum here. But by the way, to go on tangent, because this is what I do when I discuss literature, I don't want to just give you book report. One of Mohan's repeated themes, dear to me, and again I want to like this, it's the vibrant health of let's say nude, tropical pagan culture versus, as he puts it, constricted, systematized, hypocritical, modern, western civilization. And especially in the story Rain, the contrast is very stark.

image especially of religious missionaries, extreme negative, where he almost seemed to follow Nietzsche understanding, they introduced the concept of sin in a cultural, biological context here in the tropics where it seems to have been very inappropriate. Because the natives actually are not filthy, sinful in a male-volunt way, they're just innocent. Nietzsche's idea is that early Christianity was in fact the necessary and welcome salve, a cure for spent-out Mediterranean, exhausted by thousands of years of civilization and finally by the Roman conquest, but when that was, he's saying Christianity was probably appropriate for that at the time, but when it was introduced into innocent, vital, healthy

North Europe, which didn't have those experiences of constricted and corrupting civilization. Its activity was almost entirely negative in North Europe, and it had to introduce disease, it had to introduce spiritual disease, filth and debasement, in order then for the priest to present himself as the salvific cure and doctor to that pain. And Moem's understanding of missionary work in the South Seas among the Polynesians and such is very much an illustration of what I just said now from Nietzsche, which I very much appreciate this, and also it's clear from asides in various of these stories that Moam preserved the English schoolboy understanding. He doesn't delve deeply into it, it's just a couple of asides, I think, in the story

The Pool and some others, but a kind of English schoolboy's understanding of ancient Greece as the Edenic, innocent, vital, healthy period of European men as well, the ancient European counterpart to the Polynesian innocence. So there are subtle hints that, yes, healthy, pagan, Samoan and Polynesian culture on one hand and ancient Greek. That's a cute, charming position to take, even if you disagree. But on this note also, I will add there have been recent criticisms of Margaret Mead. You may have heard Margaret Mead, famous anthropologist in the 1950s and 60s, I think, documenting the supposedly free sexual culture of Polynesia in the South Pacific, and her work was used partly as justification for defense of sexual liberalization in the West, 60s and so on,

but she presents this same contrast of sexual healthy freedom and nudity and so on, versus On the other hand, the repressed, diseased sexuality of the Judeo-Christian West. By the way, I am well aware of the general wrongness of the term Judeo-Christian and the way it's used in some ways, but I think in this case it's correct since both of them share, actually they share it with most of Islam in a different way, but an obsessive concern with control over the sexual instinct and preoccupation with sexual morality and behavior and I would argue if you look at the roots of Judaism and Christianity which were continuous, let's say in the period 100 BC to 300 AD or so, both of them were new proselytizing religions, I don't want to get into this too much, but I think they

are very much that their psychological root at least at that time was in an obsessive fixation on the Roman values and especially Roman, Greco-Roman bodily and sexual practices including things like bathing and athletics and so on, and the desire to affect an overturning or transvaluation of values precisely on that point. And that's a matter for a longer article, maybe. I did discuss this already in my Ned Flanders commentary on a past episode, I think. Anyway, where was I? Yes, Margaret Mead tried to present this image of the South Seas as supposedly an idyllic place of free sexual and healthy, wholesome, whatever. But this has been criticized in the recent decades, especially by conservative commentator. They point out that much of what she wrote

was either a distortion or actually imagined. It was a lie where subsequent interviews with natives in those regions, they allegedly claimed they lied to this silly woman because they made up things to punk her and to pander to her delusions and so on. And that in fact, and here comes the conservative's point, But, in fact, sexual practices in that part of the world were as regulated or conservative as anywhere else. And I think what's happening here, I think in typical conservative intellectual fashion, they take one small truth, which is that Margaret Mead likely made some foolish confusions and probably was tricked or wrong, or they played a joke, the natives played a joke on her on a number of things, but the problem with the typical conservative argument in such cases

is they take one small truth and then they make that for PR reasons look like she was entirely wrong about the whole thing and she was not. Because she was not the only one who noticed this. You can see it, for example, from Mohen's tales but also from many others who lived there. It was a common observation from Westerners who lived or visited there. I think that's why Mead chose that area maybe to, in her own way, make PR anthropology to make her point. Generations of Europeans visited that area of the world just for this purpose, very famously Gauguin, the painter with the paradisiacal images, Life of Nude Women in the South Seas and so on. I think the cover of this edition of Moem has Gauguin painting on it and the fact is

that especially conservative sexual restrictions were introduced but later on by missionaries and some local customs regulating sexuality of course existed in that society traditionally as they do in all societies, but they were very, very different from historical modern Western norms and in fact it was by any definition highly sexually free compared to the Western as many places around the world still are, in Africa and other such, which is why perforates have made the habit of visiting the third world since the time of William Burroughs than before, and the matter is furthermore confused by the fact that often in criticism of sexual repression, the correct posture is to address its specifically modern expression

because historically, even in very religious or traditional societies in Islam or Europe, there actually was the formal and public posture of priests and the Imams and such in the religion on one hand, but then in practice the norms were a lot looser than in the modern world. In traditional Islamic society too, I'm saying if you compare trad Islam to let's say highly puritanical modern Salafism Islam, it is actually this latter, which is a modern phenomenon that has a purist fixation on regulating sexuality according to the letter of the law. But in historical Islamic societies, as also in a different way in historical Christian these total control on such things was quite rare. There was a lot of looking the other way and so on, including, for example, pre-Reformation times in Europe,

a priest often had a wife and she was maybe even pro forma, at most posing as his maid or such, as my maid and her children, you know. And strict enforcement of, for example, that priestly celibacy only came after the Reformation and counter-Reformation. So what I'm saying is this, it's a specifically, I think bourgeois or modern thing, and mean the attempt to very strictly control human sexuality to such a great degree in practice. It's something that comes after the industrial and commercial revolution as a result of, I think mostly middle class bourgeois pressures of nuclear family life, and less so the religion thing is after the fact justification for it. It got mixed up in Europe in the 19th century with a kind of new reaffirmation of piety.

And it is mostly this that Nietzsche criticizes it with a look back, extends it to understanding also through this, the initial psychological impulses of Judaism, Christianity, or rather, you can call it Judea, Judaism in general. What is it? Of course, his main concern for Nietzsche is not a pleasure or sexual liberation. His main concern is the way this very ancient and maybe fundamentally human, one aspect of human nature, this psychological orientation, the way it mixed with the debased transmission of Platonism from antiquity that led to a suppression or forgetfulness of eugenic consideration. But I'm veering too far off course. I'm going on tangent too much. That's too far from Somerset Moam now. So I return to Moam. So yes, Tacky's evaluations aside about Maugham's,

I don't think he's a great stylist, but I will read for you now one of my favorite passages from his story, The Fall of Edward Barnard, which I think shows Maugham at his best. There are still some limitations of his style, but this was the most pleasant, my favorite story, the most vivid characters. And while pointing the limitations of the style, still I want to emphasize a great joy reading his stories. I don't want to discourage you from reading him. It's great, light experience, tropical setting alone makes it worth it. He clearly loves the beauty of nature there. It's exotic escapism, and if you need that, it's better than Netflix shit flick special. I like escapist art lately. Not to continue to be an artifact for a moment,

But regarding my last episode of movies, if you watched any of them and you want more of that, if you want pure, dreamy escapism, I continue that I watch Taiwan cinema. I watch this Hu Xiaoshen's famous movie, The Flowers of Shanghai, which is about brothels in 19th century Shanghai and it's about prostitutes and their clients essentially. It's pure escapist, dreamy, slow cinema, almost no plot. It's just visual vignettes about basically the story of heartbreak of a man who is in love with prostitutes and who don't love him back, but is a visually absolutely sumptuous escapist movie of extreme beauty, each shot like a painting. It takes place only inside indoors various opulent Chinese brothel houses, and you want

idyllic contemplation, watch Flowers of Shanghai, but don't expect any kind of traditional dramatic plot line. like an art gallery experience, uncompromising slow cinema, but intensely imagistic beauty. Anyway, now I read for you from The Fall of Edward Barnard, which I think this would make a good movie. It's about a man betrothed to one of the great heresies of a Chicago industrialist family and following what seems to be apparently the stock market crash of maybe 1929, where his family is ruined financially, and he has then to go to the South Seas to Tahiti to work in a merchant house there because it's the only promising job that he can get, and he makes an agreement with her, with his fiancé, that after two years he will come back.

But after two years, his letters become a little bit strange, he makes no mention of coming back. So his childhood friend, who is also in love with the same woman with his fiancé, his His childhood friend goes to Tahiti to look for him, to try to convince him to come back, come back to Chicago, come back to civilization. And Edward Barnard, the man who does not want to come back, has befriended on Tahiti an exile, a kind of Epstein type slash Madoff type character, a man who had been convicted of financial fraud in Chicago and then fled and became expat in Tahiti, he went native. So anyway, here are some pages from this story so you get the image. I found this very pleasant story. I read for you now. Then he led Bateman, this is the friend who went to the South Pacific to try to get his

friend back to Chicago. Then he led Bateman to a long low window. Look at that, he said, with a dramatic gesture. Look well. it's kind of the older escaped con, the made-off character showing it to him. Look at that, with a dramatic gesture. Look well. Below them, coconut trees tumbled down steeply to the lagoon, and the lagoon in the evening light had the color, tender and varied, of a dove's breast. On a creek at a little distance were the clustered huts of a native village, and toward the reef was a canoe, sharply silhouetted, in which were a couple of natives fishing. Then beyond you saw the vast calmness of the Pacific, and twenty miles away, airy and unsubstantial like the fabric of a poet's fancy, the unimaginable beauty of the island which is called Murea.

It was also lovely that Bateman stood abashed. I've never seen anything like it, he said at last. Arnold Jackson," this is the older Epstein, Madoff type, whatever, "'Arnold Jackson stood staring in front of him, and in his eyes was a dreamy softness. His thin, thoughtful face was very grave. Bateman, glancing at it, was once more conscious of its intense spirituality. Beauty, murmured Arnold Jackson, you see beauty face to face. You seldom see beauty face to face. Look at it well, Mr. Hunter. What you see now, you will never see again, since the moment is transitory, but it will be an imperishable memory in your heart. You touch eternity. His voice was deep and resonant. He seemed to breathe forth the purest idealism.

And Bateman had to urge himself to remember that the man who spoke was a criminal and a cruel cheat. But Edward, as soon, excuse me, but Edward, as though he heard the sound, turned around quickly. Edward is the friend who had run away to Tahiti. He's trying to get him back. Here's my daughter, Mr. Hunter. Bateman shook hands with her. She had dark, splendid eyes and a red mouth, strenuous with laughter. But her skin was brown and her curling hair rippling down her shoulders was cold black. She wore but one garment, a mother hovered of pink cotton, her feet were bare, and she was crowned with a wreath of white-scented flowers. She was a lovely creature. She was like a goddess of the Polynesian Spring.

She was a little shy, but not more shy than Bateman, to whom the whole situation was highly embarrassing, and he did not put him at his ease to see this sylph-like thing take a shaker and with a practiced hand mix three cocktails. "'Let us have a kick in them, child,' said Jackson. She poured them out, and smiling delightfully, handed one to each of the men. Bateman flattered himself on his skill in the subtle art of shaking cocktails, and he was not a little astonished on tasting this one to find that it was excellent. Jackson laughed proudly when he saw his guest's involuntary look of appreciation. Not bad, is it? I taught the child myself, and in the old days in Chicago I considered that there wasn't a bartender in the city that could hold a candle to me.

When I had nothing better to do in the penitentiary, I used to amuse myself by thinking out new cocktails, but when you come down to brass tacks there's nothing to beat than a dry martini." Bateman felt as though someone had given him a violent blow on the funny bone and he was conscious that he had turned red and then white. But before he could think of anything to say, a native boy brought in a great bowl of soup and the whole party sat down to dinner. Arnold Jackson's remarks seemed to have aroused in him a train of recollections for he began to talk of his prison days. He talked quite naturally, without malice, as though he were relating his experience at a foreign university. He addressed himself to Bateman, and Bateman was confused and then confounded.

He saw Edward's eyes fixed on him, and there was in them a flicker of amusement. He blushed scarlet, for it struck him that Jackson was making a fool of him. And then, because he felt absurd and knew there was no reason why he should, he grew angry. Arnold Jackson was impudent, there was no other word for it, and his callousness, whether assumed or not, was outrageous. The dinner proceeded. Bateman was asked to eat sundry messes, raw fish, and he knew not what, which only his civility induced him to swallow, but which he was amazed to find very good eating. Then an incident happened, which to Bateman was the most mortifying experience of the evening. There was a little circlet of flowers in front of him, and for the sake of conversation, he hazarded a remark about it.

It's a wreath that Eva made for you, said Jackson, but I guess she was too shy to give it to you. took it up in his hand and made a polite little speech of thanks to the girl. You must put it on, she said, with a smile and a blush. I don't think I'll do that. It's the charming custom of the country, said Arnold Jackson. There was one in front of him and he placed it on his hair. Edward did the same. I guess I'm not dressed for the part, said Bateman uneasily. Would you like a pareo, said Eva quickly. I'll get you one in a minute. No, thank you. I'm quite comfortable as I am. Show him how to put it on, Eva, said Edward. At that moment, Bateman hated his greatest friend. Eva got up from the table and, with much laughter, placed the wreath on his black hair.

"'It suits you very well,' said Mrs. Jackson. "'Doesn't it suit him, Arnold?' Of course it does. Bateman sweated at every pore. "'Isn't it a pity it's dark?' said Eva. "'We could photograph you all three together.' Bateman thanked his stars at once. He felt like that he must look like prodigiously foolish in his blue suit and high collar. Anyway, it keeps going like that. I found this. Do you enjoy this? I found, maybe I didn't read it right, but I found this very funny and pleasant and in some way these images and feelings, by now they've had considerable exposure in subsequent decades. So maybe you find the feeling of freedom of nature and free living and easy living tropics when contrasted to the hypocrisy and repressed stolid conventions of city and civilized life.

Maybe you find that too overdone, maybe you think you're used to it. It's still effective when it's done well in art. It's, I think, timeless contrast archetype, and reading the story of Edward Barnard, I think it's my favorite of Mons, at least from this collection. I could do a good movie on it, but updated, like a Madoff type or Epstein even type escaping to third world location, and a high society man defecting and becoming his protege to get away from contemporary sterile high society so-called, and I think that this done today could be fun, effective stories. And speaking of which, do you notice that in current day art, in movies, whereas attacks on high society and city life used to be like in what I just read for you, used to be a

big theme of many authors, a stock theme, almost all of them parodied high society. Stendhal did this, Balzac did this. It's basically what the modern novel in some way really is. The novel I keep mentioning, Bellamy, is all about that. Balzac and Flaubert are all about that. Parody, not just the bourgeois parody, high society and so on in that time. But in In modern-day movies, the exception may be now of White Lotus, which is a real exception and that's why it's a good series. I haven't seen the new season, but there's almost no self-criticism from people in high society of their own social circles. Why is that? For them, for these people, it seems to be about all solidarity, closing ranks. You see plenty of attacks still on middle class life and so on and they like to attack

religious people and what they see as the religious right and so on, but you don't see so-called relevant upper class or high society, I mean the people, the society of the people who actually create the media, that's what's relevant, there's almost no parody or satire of that world ever presented. The kind of people almost satirically referred to now as high human capital, I mean. But it's just they're so status insecure and psychologically brittle, I think they can tolerate really no satire of their own society as it exists. If they did that, it would invalidate what the modern writer sees himself as, which is really as the spokesman of this rather pathetic group. So nobody from within it almost ever criticizes it.

Whereas you can see, just in what I read for you, a brief scene of Moam, it's actually the self-criticism of social mores of one's own broader social circle, it's the mainstay of all novelistic literary form, you know, especially comic, how can that not be? But what can you expect today from society of status-huffing wankers? Anyway, listen, this has been light episode, I hope you enjoy this light, relaxed show, I will be back in a few days with actually very special surprise guest episode, it may surprise you. And until then, I send power to Trump, power to the eternal America. Until soon, Bap out!