Reminder: New Home

Just a reminder that meaning in history has a new home (with initial caps)--this is where new content will appear. This link will take you directly to the archive of all posts. I wish it could be broken down by year/month, but:

https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/archive?utm_source=menu-dropdown

As you'll see if you go back a bit in the archive, while all prior posts were imported, 1) not all embedded content appears as in the original, and 2) comments were not imported.

If you subscribe to this substack--which you can do for free--new posts will be emailed directly to you as they appear. That may prove more convenient. I have no plans to try to monetize this.

Alternatively, there is an RSS feed available if you use a feed reader:

https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/feed

For me that required a restart of the application to get it working correctly.

 

NEW UPDATE: RSS Feed For Meaning In History

Don't ask me why Substack hides this, but for those--like me--who use RSS readers, this is what you want:

https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/feed

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. While that address will fetch the titles of items, 

1) I can't mark them as read, and 

2) the items don't appear to link to anything--i.e., if I double click on them they don't open in a browser tab/window.

Frustrating.

NEW UPDATE: I just tried the substack feed in my RSS reader (Akregator) this morning and it's working perfectly now. As far as I can tell the restart did the trick.

Comments at Substack

Still learning. At Substack I have to manually enable free commenting on a per-post basis. All the archived posts from here that were imported are default pay-to-comment except for "You're not a dog, Ya'll!" which I just now manually changed to test it. I'll check for an alternative setting, but that's what I'm stuck with for now.

The result is I'll need to get to editing some of the recent posts. A pain. Going forward I can do that as part of writing and publishing a post. 

Later.

My New Home

Regular readers will be aware that I've been looking for a place to write where I won't be unreasonably unpublished with no real recourse. Blogger has been a good home and there are lots of things I like about it. Because it's relatively simple, it has allowed me to just let it run on its own without much managing.

You may have noticed that I only did one brief post today. Besides it's being a slow news day, I've been setting up a new home--with major help from MC:

https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/

My plan for now is to try to do my new writing there. The setup is all new to me, and I don't really understand it fully. It seems that if you subscribe you may get new posts sent by email--or is it just a notification? Not sure.

I'm not planning on trying to monetize anything, so that part stays the same.

One thing that may change--comments. Comments are enabled. As most of you know, I've managed all comments here--meaning, I've enabled all comments individually and in a relatively small number of cases have declined to enable comments. The benefit in that for me has been that it has kept me close to readers who care to comment, since I've read every single comment that has appeared. I'd like to continue in that mode, but right now I don't see how to do that. 

Thanks to MC I've been able to import all the posts here--incredibly, to me, the number is approaching 2800. Unfortunately, as I said above, the archive section at Substack isn't at all user friendly, and for now I don't see any way to change that. Two additional things about the imported posts:

1. We couldn't import comments. So we'll be starting from scratch.

2. Substack has a method for embeds that's different than Blogger's. As a result, if you look at an old post that has a video or a tweet or image embedded, there will be a link, but not embed. You can follow the link, or come over here and look up the original.

Some of you understand Substack better than I do. If you want to make suggestions, feel free--I'll appreciate any help I can get. This will be a work in progress for some time.

Thanks for your support here. I hope to see you at the new place.

 

You're Not A Dog, Ya'll!

Start the day with a laugh:

I took some dog pain killer the other day. The human version. But dogs take it too. It's pretty much the same. But theirs is savory and chewable. Wrong end of the stick? pic.twitter.com/Ywv8NVBI6O

— Alexandros Marinos (@alexandrosM) September 2, 2021

Totally unrelated, but also gave me a good laugh. This knucklehead thought he was gonna change the world by leaking DIOG? He was obviously living in a complete fantasy world. Thought leaking DIOG would lead to a new Church Commission? As if the Church Commission didn't enable the modern Deep (National Security) State as we know it--the one that took out Trump--by establishing the partnership between the Legislative Branch and the Intel agencies:

‘I Helped Destroy People’

Another Sign That The Narrative Is Breaking Down

Today the NYT ran an article, the significance of which is not so much what is said, but the fact that the article appeared in such an ueber-MSM outlet. The article is a call to America to ask the "hard Covid-19 questions." The point is that, two years on, we have yet to really face up to those questions:

The Hard Covid-19 Questions We’re Not Asking

The authors, two public health professors, focus on the issue of how to deal with children's health concerns. Nevertheless, the manner in which the entire article is framed basically throws the doors wide open to discuss just what we've been doing and to re-examine what we should be doing. Make no mistake about it--the authors are not anti-vaxxers, However, one position they stake themselves to is that Zero Covid is not a realistic goal. But that, tacitly, has been the goal up until know, and to that extent this article is a frontal assault on the official narrative--the Covid Regime as we have known it. The editors at the NYT certainly understood that.

An open discussion that accepts that Zero Covid is not a realistic policy goal necessarily opens the door to any number of ideas that, until the Israeli study blew the doors open, were considered heretical. That dynamic is changing day by day, and this article could be a significant marker of progress toward questioning everything that's been going on.

Excerpts:

What Is Kevin McCarthy Talking About?

A number of commenters have questioned the efficacy of GOP pushback against the Dem House's request for  telecom records that probably targets GOP representatives in the context of the January 6 Event "insurrection" witchhunt that Pelosi hopes will save her House. Initial reports characterized these requests as congressional subpoenas, but it now appears that they are simply request letters issued by the Dem House. Commenters questioning the efficacy of any GOP pushback assume that the telecom companies will simply and joyfully turn over all records to the Dems, ignoring McCarthy's threats of payback if or when the GOP retakes the House.

Commenter aNanyMouse cites a sentence from The Hill's generally good account, which questions McCarthy's assertion that it's illegal for the telecom companies to comply with these request letters:

"McCarthy did not cite which law prohibits telecommunications companies from complying with the committee’s request."

To understand what's in play here, we need to review some basic matters of criminal and national security investigations.

MAJOR UPDATE: Is This Pelosi's Master Plan For Election 2022?

If so, my bet is that it's headed for a fail. Perhaps even a backfire.

Law prof Jonathan Turley has the story at The Hill:

Democrats' Jan. 6 subpoena-palooza sets dangerous precedent

For "Dems" I think it's entirely fair to read: Pelosi. As Turley details, the Dems are going full witch hunt on the GOP side in the House, issuing an tidal wave of subpoenas for their phone records. Given that the FBI has announced that, woops! there really wasn't any "insurrection", one assumes that the idea behind this tactic is to find in the phone records contacts that might prove embarrassing for GOP members and useful in the campaigns of endangered Dems.

My view is that Americans, for all their foibles and gullibility, have a constitutional aversion to witch hunts. This will NOT distract them from the many manifest failures of the Zhou regime. It just may anger many Americans, who all polling shows have moved past January 6.

Anyway, Turley has some points to make, and they're worthwhile.  This tactic may never get the chance to backfire--it could get quashed in court:

Another Sign The Wheels Are Coming Off?

This article appeared yesterday at the Epoch Times. If a former medical school professor, a current Pfizer board member, and former head of the FDA--that's all one person--is openly saying that natural immunity needs to be included in policy discussions, does that signal that the wheels are coming off the establishment narrative of the Covid Regime? The person in question is Scott Gottlieb, and he specifically cites the recent Israeli study everyone's been talking about:

Pfizer Board Member: ‘Natural Immunity’ Against COVID-19 Needs to Be Included in Policy Discussions

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is also a Pfizer board member, noted that “natural immunity” gained from a prior COVID-19 infection needs to be included in discussions about virus-related policies and mandates.

“The balance of the evidence demonstrates that natural immunity confers a durable protection,” Gottlieb said during an Aug. 30 interview, referring to a landmark new preprint Israeli study that found that prior COVID-19 infection confers more protection against the virus than any of the vaccines. “It’s fair to conclude that.”

Although Gottlieb said he would “be careful” about concluding whether natural immunity provides better protection against transmitting the virus, officials “should start assimilating that into our policy discussions.”

“Natural infection confers robust and durable immunity,” he said, citing the Israeli study and others.

...

Last week, researchers from Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University said that individuals who had recovered from COVID-19 had superior protection against the Delta variant of the CCP virus compared to those who received the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, the most commonly used shot in Israel.

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease, and hospitalization due to the Delta variant,” the study reads, noting that the findings came from the “largest real-world observational study” in the world.

Support from a figure like Gottlieb is important for a reset of the narrative. The feeling is hard to shake--the establishment is on the defensive.

Updating The Boost Stage

Well, first a brief political update--although, really, it's all politics. And in a very real sense it seems almost pointless. Election 2022 is pointing toward being one of the few most consequential elections in American history, but until that happens most of the real political news is at the grass roots level. As Emerald Robinson recounted recently (How The GOP Committed Suicide Trying to Stop Trump), once Mitch McConnell and the RNC conspired with state GOP organizations to install Zhou in the White House, the stage was set. We're seeing the results of Mitch's perfidy and the only real question is what happens when people get to register their views. The Federalist summarizes the current situation well, and the highly predictable future for the next year: 

Biden’s Presidency Is Already A Total Disaster

The first seven months of Joe Biden’s presidency have been fraught with crises. First it was the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccine rollout. Then it was the border crisis. Then it was the economy.

And now Afghanistan, ...

The administration is stumbling from one disaster to the next, with no end in sight and public opinion plummeting on nearly every major issue. ...

...

The corporate press, keenly aware that things are not going well for this White House, will soon back away from their critical tone on Afghanistan and resume their usual routine of running cover for Biden. In the coming days we’ll almost certainly see outlandish polls showing that, aside from Afghanistan, Biden is doing pretty well, actually, considering all the crises his young administration has had to face.

But don’t buy this line. Biden has not been overtaken by events, he is not a hapless victim of history or coincidence. Every problem his White House has encountered, it has made worse. Every crisis his administration has faced has been of its own making. And as bad as things have been thus far, they are going to get even worse.

There's plenty more at the link, if you need the reminder. Remarkably, the author leaves out the near collapse of NATO, under the pressure of the Zhou regime's fecklessness. But there are just so many disasters you can cover in one article. 

Briefly Noted: Serious Pushback In WA, More

The Federalist carried a very interesting article this morning on a topic that's been out there--more or less waiting in the wings. I'm referring to the issue of mandates for employees to submit to experimental gene therapy injections. We're talking about two different but related issues. One is the issue of private companies issuing such mandates, while the other relates to governments doing so. The article in question has to do with an extremely broad mandate issued by Dem governor of Washington state, Jay Inslee. I've been predicting, based on early indications, that mandates of this sort will arouse opposition--especially now that the Dread Delta has revealed that the mandates could quickly develop into open ended demands with no set time limits. The initial time frame for a boost, for example, was 8 months, which has now decreased to 5 months--but these are all averages. The actual rate of decrease in effectiveness will clearly differ among individuals. Some wags have suggested IV implants so that a constant drip can be administered.

With that in mind, skepticism regarding these medications is increasing--what, people are asking, was the point of the "vaccines" in the first place? In the face of these developments, some Dem rulers on the state and local level have gone ahead with mandates for their employees, and opposition has quickly developed--usually led by unions:

Mass Resistance Arises As Washington Makes It Nearly Impossible To Get Vaccine Exemptions

It’s unlikely Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee expected this level of pushback. In progressive Washington, it’s rare to see such bipartisan ire towards an Inslee policy. How will he respond?

The most controversial element of the mandate is a gotcha question that all employees seeking a religious exemption must answer:

Briefly Noted: Recommended Reads 8/29/21

Yesterday I recommended an article by Paul Gottfried,  The Emerging One-Party State. Today Emerald Robinson has an article at her Substack (H/T Ray So-Cal) that offers a bit of a contrast:

How The GOP Committed Suicide Trying to Stop Trump

America Has Never Been Closer to Uni-Party Rule

As you can see, each perceives our traditional two party system--traditional, but never actually envisioned by the Founders--as in danger of giving way to One Party Rule under the form of two parties. Robinson focuses on the GOP leaders--McConnell and McCarthy--and understandably so. The picture she paints is dark, and that's also understandable. I accept that. Gottfried sees possibilities for moving past the situation we find ourselves in, and I accept that, too. I see hope, especially, in the House, where the Representatives are in closer contact with the People.

See what you think.

Matt Welch today hits on another topic that we covered yesterday in the same post referenced with regard to Paul Gottfried: Christian Schools Vastly Outperforming Public Schools During COVID-19, According to New Survey of Parents.

I won't repeat the data here, but I do recommend Welch's article, which is written specifically from a New York City perspective:

Families Are Fleeing Government-Run Schools

Brooklyn elementary loses one-third of its student population and eight teachers, as the first 2021–22 enrollment numbers straggle in.