Hello, everybody.

I had the opportunity today to sit down and talk, play really with Michael Mellis.

And that's always fun.

Michael's a, he's a genuine delight to have a conversation with.

You never know what direction it's going to go in.

Many directions, all of which have a certain coherence.

He's got a great sense of humor and irony and is extremely sharp and unpredictable.

So that's ridiculously fun. And he always has something useful to say. So what did we talk about today?

Well, we talked about the terrible attractiveness of the kind of virtue signaling that other people make sacrifices for.

Motivation for deep evil. Michael has studied totalitarian evil. He was curious about the more mundane forms of pathology.

The sorts of things that motivate not only pedophilia,

but extreme sadistic pedophilia, let's say.

So that always makes for a enjoyable conversation.

We talked about Michael's shifting views with regards to the marginal, let's say, as a creative

anarchist by personality and political inclination.

Michael is prone to presume that the different against the same or the, what would you say, exceptional against the

normal is admirable. But he's also come to recognize that the center can be dissolved

in a manner that's cataclysmic and the diverse and the creative can degenerate into the monstrous and dangerous.

And so we talked about that technically, psychologically, sociologically.

We talked about Camille Pallia, who's a hero of Michael's, the brilliant female literary critic, unpredictable and sparkling,

and Michael's request to me that I broker an invitation, which I could do, I suppose,

with some degree of success probability. And we surveyed the landscape.

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