Patrice de Bergeracpas

LEE CAMP—So when this story first came out, I thought, “You know, Trump has been stopped from withdrawing troops in the past by ridiculous propaganda that seems to land like a giant turd right after he announces his intentions. Maybe I’ll check what happened in the days preceding this jaw-dropping story.”

So just days after Trump goes against the military industrial complex and against the ruling establishment by announcing he’ll be withdrawing about a third of our troops from Germany, and just weeks after announcing an early withdrawal from Afghanistan, a seemingly mind-blowing story drops about Russia paying the Taliban to kill American troops.

ERIC ZUESSE—In any case: not even America’s allies are fooled any longer about the U.S. Government’s posturings that it is a democracy. And there is extensive history also documenting that Americans are less and less fooled about this. But, because America is not a democracy, this article probably won’t be published in any major media inside America, though it is being submitted to all of them. So, if you’re not seeing it in U.S. media, that’s the reason why.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Generally speaking, humans are confused about the nature of experience and their thoughts and actions are largely governed by unconscious conditioning patterns. Rather than experiencing life as it actually shows up, we tend to experience it through layers of mental narratives about what’s really going on which distort our ability to experience things lucidly.

Becoming conscious of your inner world brings clarity to your internal dynamics in exactly the same way that becoming conscious of your external world brings clarity to world dynamics: you are able to see what’s really happening.

PAUL EDWARDS—After a long, grisly sequence of vicious and legally inexcusable murders by various vile, sociopathic, pseudo-military police forces, the Floyd murder inflamed it again, this time with complex differences.  Unlike the national fury after the murder of Dr. King or the storm of rage over Rodney King’s abuse, this explosion can not be described as a “race riot”.  Though the murder of a black man triggered it, and though his murder is the central theme around which the phenomenon has coalesced, the great majority of active participants have been white.  This is unprecedented.

BRUCE LERRO—It is very important for neoliberalism to presents all classes as relatively equal, when in reality it needs low-wage workers to stay in their place and not think too expansively. Thanks to the work of Basil Bernstein on socio-linguistic codes, we have very clear distinctions between the way working-class students reason as opposed to how the upper-middle class students reason. We can imply this from their different uses of language. What Bernstein found is that upper middle-class students use universalistic meanings for words that can go beyond their jobs. Working-class students use particular meanings that are limited to their work. Unlike the upper-middle class, working-class students use simple and unfinished sentences where their full thought processes are likely to be cut off. Working-class students’ vocabulary is more limited and is more descriptive than analytic. In Piaget’s work, this translates as upper-middle-class teenagers thinking in a formal operational way while working class folks use concrete operations.