Motus Mentis

To you all.

I’ve been working late again, and have had no time this evening for writing. But I do want to take the time to mention to you all that our friend, the blogger Kevin Kim, is here in New York tonight at the hospital bedside of his mother, who is gravely ill with brain cancer. She had come here from the family home in Virginia for consultation and possible surgery, but instead has rapidly declined. I ask you all to turn your thoughts (and, on the off-chance that there are any believers amongst our readership, your prayers) his way; support in any form will surely be appreciated.

Blogger that he is, Kevin has chronicled his mother’s illness since the spring; you can read and offer your own thoughts here.

I know how awful this time is for Kevin and his family; my own mother succumbed to cancer in March of 2006.

Be strong, Kevin. We’re all thinking of you.

It’s been pretty thin gruel over here the past few days — the holidays being what they are, I’ve had scant opportunity for solitary labor. So for tonight I’ll send you along to Mangan’s, where our doughty heathen Dennis confronts once again (as we have also done at length in these pages, at various intervals) the inextinguishable falsehood, so popular amongst conservative theists, that religion is necessary for morality. Here.

Are you a vegetarian? Well, I’m not. Indeed, I so enjoy being a carnivore that it has occurred to me on occasion to bump up to the next level, and eat only animals that are themselves carnivores — which I’ve always imagined would be the nutritional equivalent of smoking “roach weed”.

Anyway, the next time a spindly neurasthenic vegan ectomorph gets in your face with the usual rubbish about how Nature never intended us to eat meat, you can tell him to have a look at this.

The lovely Nina and I were in Philadelphia this weekend, visiting some old friends, and today we took in the Arshile Gorky show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gorky was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, and the show made quite an impression on us (fittingly, I suppose, given that Gorky was a founder of Abstract Impressionism). I was also impressed by an important detail in the curator’s notes.

“Arshile Gorky” was not the artist’s real name: he was born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan in Armenia in about 1902. He had a brief life, and a hard one. Suffering from colon cancer in Connecticut in 1948, abandoned by his wife and children, having lost much of his life’s work in a fire the year before, and having lost, also, the use of his painting arm as a result of a car accident, he hanged himself.

But the central tragedy of the young artist’s life took place in 1915, when he and his mother and sister were swept up in the brutal pogrom against ethnic Armenians in Turkey, and driven on the forced death march to Yerevan. His beloved mother died of starvation in his arms.

I was gratified to note that in the audio tour and other notes, the presenters referred to this horror frankly, and without resort to timorous euphemism, as the Armenian “Genocide”. It was nothing less, modern-day revisionism by the Turks notwithstanding.

A new link on the sidebar today: a blog that focuses on Islam and insurgency in Yemen, where lately the game, as Holmes used to say, has been afoot.

(And yes, I rather liked the name.)

If you drop by here over the next few days and things look completely out of whack, it’s because we are making some adjustments to the site’s WordPress “theme”. As they say on the highway signs, “Temporary Inconvenience — Permanent Improvement.” (As if THAT were true.)

Anyway, thanks for your patience.

In case you didn’t see this on the news: there were some very strange doings high in the sky over Norway this morning (take a peek below the fold). Story here.
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It is a common view that consciousness has something to to with the degree of integration of different areas of the brain. The idea is not only a modern scientific notion: it is also a tenet of various esoteric schools (for example that of G.I. Gurdjieff; see here and here) that higher degrees of consciousness are the result of directed effort to integrate the assorted “parts” of the mind/body system, and that diminished consciousness, and sleep, result from their disconnection.

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I’ve just upgraded my WordPress installation, and am fishing around for a new visual “theme” for this site. (I’ve gotten very tired of the old one.)

So the look of this place may vary for the next few days or weeks until I settle on something. Feel free to comment.

Well, the saga continues at Mangan’s. His old blog having risen from its ashes, Dennis has decided to carry on there, while taking precautions to ensure continuity if he is cold-cocked by Google again.

So: http://mangans.blogspot.com it is.

It appears that our friend Dennis Mangan has run afoul of Google’s guidelines for acceptable content: as of late afternoon yesterday his blog’s homepage has been replaced by the dreaded Blogger Screen of Death.

This happened also to Jeffery Hodges a while back, though in that case it appeared to be some sort of mistake: it was hard to see how anyone, even a Bay Area leftie, would have been offended by Jeffery’s amiable blog, and as it happened a friend of mine at Google was able to get his site restored. In Dennis’s case, however, I think this was probably a deliberate move on Google’s part. Mangan’s had been attracting a lot of attention lately (and, presumably, links and traffic), and Dennis writes frankly on matters of social and scientific controversy. In particular Dennis often discussed the dangerously radioactive subject of “human biodiversity”, a.k.a. “HBD”: the radical notion that there may indeed be systematic genetic differences of various sorts between human populations, that these variations are a suitable and important topic for scientific inquiry, and that there should be no taboos against such research, or against free discussion of what research already exists. (It is worth noting that an article on the subject was also removed, recently, from Wikipedia.)

In addition to his writings on HBD, Dennis also writes, from a conservative viewpoint, about other contentious topics: multiculturalism and the general decline of Western culture; immigration; religion and atheism — and, as a scientist himself, he often writes with caustic tone about the resistance of the scientific “establishment” to the presentation and discussion of heterodox ideas, particularly in the medical and climate sciences.

In other words: Dennis hasn’t got a P.C. bone in his body. He is always civil, always reasonable, and is motivated only by his sincere concern for ailing Western culture, and by a desire to get at the facts, however “inconvenient” they may be — but I have no doubt that as far as many people are concerned he is quite beyond the pale. His site had also become rather a rallying point for like-minded discontents, and I imagine he became conspicuous enough that someone at Google decided to declare him to be in violation of their terms of service.

I can tell you from personal experience that for a dedicated blogger, having one’s website go down is profoundly disconcerting; I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that it feels like a sudden existential amputation. My advice to any of you out there who have blogs on Blogspot: do yourself a favor and get your own site, especially if you have anything pungent or controversial to express. The cost is trivial — I pay $8 a month for hosting, and registering a domain is even cheaper — but most important of all, you own your content, and for now at least, you cannot be silenced. Blogspot is a free service, and as we have seen you run the risk of being taken down at Google’s merest whim, without even a word of warning.

I have no doubt that Dennis will be back; look for updates here.